Merantix Capital Closes €103M Fund for Early-Stage European AI
▼ Summary
– Merantix Capital closed a €103m fund, over three times its first vehicle, to invest in early-stage AI-native teams across Europe.
– The fund is split evenly: half for founders working from the “pre-idea” stage at the Merantix AI Campus, half for direct pre-seed and seed investments.
– It targets industry-specific AI applications in sectors like logistics, manufacturing, energy, and healthcare, rather than horizontal models.
– The firm plans about 40 investments, with cheques from €1m to €3m, and teams in Berlin and London.
– Limited partners include Union Investment, Jungheinrich, and KPMG Germany, offering strategic partnerships and early-stage AI access.
Merantix Capital has officially closed a €103 million fund targeting early-stage, AI-native startups across Europe, the Berlin-based firm confirmed on June 4. This latest vehicle more than triples the size of its first fund, which co-founders Rasmus Rothe and Adrian Locher raised at roughly €30 million, and expands the firm’s focus from internally built companies to founders launching anywhere on the continent.
What sets this fund apart is its unique structure. The capital is divided into two equal halves. One half supports founders who collaborate with the Merantix team from the “pre-idea” phase, validating concepts through the firm’s ecosystem and building at the Merantix AI Campus in Berlin. The other half goes to direct investments in pre-seed and seed-stage startups.
Merantix plans roughly 40 investments in total, with individual checks ranging from €1 million to €3 million. Investment teams based in Berlin and London will write deals across Europe.
The fund’s thesis is industry-specific rather than horizontal. Merantix is targeting teams applying AI to sectors where Europe holds a natural advantage, including logistics, manufacturing, energy, finance, healthcare, life sciences, robotics, enterprise software, and physical AI.
The founders describe their mission as building “connective tissue” between Europe’s industrial base and the startups working to rebuild those industries with machine learning. That gap is exactly what the fund exists to close.
This approach extends a strategy Merantix has followed since its founding a decade ago: AI’s real value lies less in horizontal models than in embedding the technology inside specific sectors where the firm already has deep relationships.
The fund is already deploying capital. Named investments include Droidrun, which builds mobile-native AI agent infrastructure; Arqh, focused on logistics optimization; and Outpost Bio, which applies AI to human microbiology. Several more portfolio companies remain in stealth, spanning logistics, manufacturing, recruiting, ERP, energy, and fashion technology. The first fund backed studio incubations including revel8, Deltia, Vara, and Cambrium.
The limited partners reflect the industry-facing pitch. Merantix named Union Investment, forklift maker Jungheinrich, KPMG Germany, and two US philanthropies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, alongside family offices and institutional investors. The firm describes several of these relationships as strategic partnerships rather than passive checks, offering LPs access to early-stage AI companies and pilot opportunities inside their own operations.
The fund sits within a larger apparatus. Merantix Capital is one part of the Merantix Group, which also runs the Berlin AI Campus (home to more than 80 resident companies and some 300 events per year), a London AI Hub, AI House Davos, and Merantix Momentum, an enterprise AI services arm with more than 70 engineers.
That ecosystem is what portfolio founders get on top of the money: a talent network and a set of corporate design partners meant to generate early traction. The capital is the headline, but the surrounding platform is the part Merantix is really selling.
(Source: The Next Web)