Merantix Capital’s next chapter: €103M early-stage AI fund to transform Europe’s key industries
The new fund will make approximately 40 investments across Europe, investing in pre-idea through pre-seed and seed-stage teams reinventing Europe’s core industries through AI.
Today, we’re announcing the closing of Merantix Capital’s €103 million AI Fund, which will invest in early-stage, AI-native teams across Europe.
The fund marks an important new chapter for Merantix Capital as we double down on our core thesis. Europe’s industries desperately need to be transformed through AI and machine learning. The technology exists and is developing at a breakneck pace. Thankfully, Europe has the talent and expertise to create and scale global AI champions. What we do next with these ingredients is up to us.
Ever since we first founded Merantix a decade ago, we have believed that’s where AI’s true value lies. We see our role as bridging the gap between industry and startups, helping founders with domain expertise to embed deeply and bring AI to life within sectors where we have deep relationships: logistics, manufacturing, energy, finance, healthcare, life sciences, robotics, enterprise, physical AI, and more.
The new fund is split 50-50 between backing founders who work with our team from the initial “pre-idea” stages, validating their ideas through our ecosystem and working closely with our team at the Merantix AI Campus in Berlin. The other half of investments will be made directly on companies at the pre-seed and seed stages. Our investors are based in Berlin and London and investing across Europe.
We’re already actively deploying from the fund, with investments including Droidrun (mobile-native AI agent infrastructure), Arqh (AI logistics optimization), Outpost Bio (AI for human microbiology), and several other stealth ventures across logistics, manufacturing, recruiting, ERP, energy, and fashion tech.
The next evolution of Merantix
In the years since Merantix’s founding, it became increasingly clear to us that capital was just one piece of the puzzle of how to drive AI forward in Europe. Merantix Capital sits within the broader Merantix Group, a broad ecosystem encompassing the Merantix AI Campus in Berlin (80+ resident companies, 300 events per year), the London AI Hub, AI House Davos, and Merantix Momentum, an AI solutions provider leading AI transformations with 70+ AI engineers running 100+ enterprise projects per year.
Our ecosystem underpins our fund, giving our portfolio founders access to a talent network and corporate design partners to generate early traction.
We’re thrilled to work with a stellar group of LPs in the new fund, including Union Investment, Jungheinrich, KPMG Germany, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, alongside leading family offices and institutional investors.
Collaborating with our LPs is often more than an investment, but rather strategic partnerships around AI transformation, including access to early-stage AI companies, selected pilot and partnership opportunities, and integration into our ecosystem.
We’re deeply thankful of the trust from our LPs and portfolio founders, and have never felt more strongly in our belief that Europe’s industrial heritage and world-class research base positions us to produce true AI champions.
What Europe has lacked is the connective tissue between industry and the startups reimagining industries through AI and machine learning. That’s the gap that Merantix aims to fill. We’re excited to keep building.
Read more in Handelsblatt, Gründerszene, and Tech EU.
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knowing you as one of the few European AI-native funds that's been at it since 2016, that's a way to go! this is also an unusual model for €100M-scale funds