Lunar Ventures has closed its second fund of €50m to invest in pre-seed deeptech startups across Europe and the US.
The Berlin-based firm invests across three main areas: AI infrastructure, including things like governance for teams building machine learning models and tooling for data pipelines, techbio and infrastructure enabling systems to function reliably in the real-world environment.
Examples of such applications include Lodestar, a London-based startup and Lunar portfolio company, which builds autonomous robots capable of surviving extreme conditions in space.
Lunar Ventures says it will write cheques of between €750k and €1m into 25-30 startups, saving 40-60% for follow-ons. It plans to invest 80% of the fund into Europe, with 20% to be invested in “underserved” US companies outside of the San Francisco Bay Area.
General partner Alberto Cresto says there’s a huge opportunity for Lunar to back founders in hubs like New York and Boston early before they eventually move to San Francisco as many startups do.
“I know for a fact that funds in San Francisco don’t look beyond San Francisco, because rightly so, they assume that everyone will come there,” he says.
Lunar’s second fund is backed by LPs including Isomer Capital, the Intesa San Paolo Endowment, Grinnell College Endowment, Exor-owned investment management company Lingotto and tech entrepreneurs including some of the founders of Ethereum that Cresto declined to name.
It’s already made eight investments with the new fund, two of which are companies from the US. They include Berlin-based Bruin, an online platform for data scientists.
Europe’s deeptech opportunity
With uncertainty lingering around US President Trump’s trade policy, Cresto predicts that, in the next five years, Europe will have to build its own “sovereign infrastructure,” particularly in software.
“I think the lack of say, very big software companies in Europe, with this geopolitical climate will prompt an interest in a more local offering. So I expect alternatives to Google and Microsoft to come up,” he says. “I don’t, obviously, expect them to match the size of Microsoft or Google, but I’m sure that there will be a space for a lot of software, particularly around data and AI.”
While there’s big opportunity in Europe, Cresto thinks that the continent needs a dose of realism. Currently, the vacuum of growth capital is so wide that it’s not possible for technical companies to scale in Europe, with many having to go to the US to raise big rounds.
“I think Europe should stop pretending we can have an extremely large outcome here currently,” he says.
With this second fund, Lunar is keen to back founders that have a “clear global goal” with their first customer ideally in the US, and their follow-on round after Lunar invests at pre-seed coming from US investors.
“The opportunity in Europe is fundamentally good. We have incredible technical talents, we have great universities. It’s just the VC landscape — and also on the adoption side, corporates are not necessarily willing to give it a try like in the US,” says Cresto.
“I can imagine Europe becoming a great source of talent, and also a great R&D hub for a very large company that originated in Europe. But I think the large global outcome at least that we aim for will probably be more US-oriented in practice.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/lunar-ventures-raises-50m/
