Lunar Ventures, a Berlin, Germany technical venture capital firm focused on investing in European early-stage DeepTech startups, closed a €40M first fund.
The fund is backed by many of Europe’s institutional fund investors, including Isomer Capital, Multiple Capital, Aldea Ventures, Compagnia di San Paolo and the European Investment Fund. Individual investors include founders from Ethereum and DeepTech founders with successful exits.
The fund invests into companies at the intersection of DeepTech and software, using its own technical expertise to support technical founding teams and help them to make their sci-fi ideas a reality.
Created in 2019 in Berlin, the founding partners are:
- Dr. Elad Verbin, a computer science researcher with experience leading R&D in academia and industry;
- Mick Halsband, a CTO and software architect who has over two decades of experience at startups and Israeli intelligence; and
- Luis Shemtov, a product expert and strategist who previously founded several startups.
They are joined by Principal Alberto Cresto, who has led over 20 DeepTech investments across the US and Europe.
Lunar Ventures is investing up to €1M into early-stage DeepTech startups that are software focused. Its core theme is frontier computer science, looking at everything from democratising machine learning to cryptography, and new cloud infrastructures to next generation databases. It is looking for deeply technical teams working on breakthrough technologies. Lunar is happy to invest in pre-revenue startups working on scalable solutions.
The firm has already invested in 12 startups across Europe, including Zama, deepset, and Molecule.
FinSMEs
14/10/2021