Vanagon Ventures, a German DeepTech VC firm, has announced the final closing of its €20 million Fund I to back B2B startups from pre-Seed tackling fundamental system-level challenges and creating entirely new categories enabled by AI and DeepTech.
The fund is backed by Allocator One. Further LPs include family offices and HNWIs, senior tech executives from companies such as Apple and Google.
Vanagon writes initial tickets of up to €500k in teams building solutions that advance Europe’s sovereignty and sustainability, with a focus on spatial and AI, quantum computing, robotics and frontier software.
“Most early-stage funds aren’t built for pre-Seed. They talk conviction but wait for proof. We didn’t start Vanagon just to be like an old VC firm. We built Vanagon from the ground up to back relentless founders on their life’s mission from day one,” says Sandro Stark, GP at Vanagon.
In a broader European context, Vanagon Ventures’ Fund I closes against a backdrop of continued early-stage activity in AI and DeepTech across 2025 and early 2026.
In Germany, U2V, a spin-off from Earlybird-X, launched a €60 million fund to support pre-Seed and Seed DeepTech startups emerging from European technical universities. Also in Germany, Munich-based yasp raised €4.2 million to advance its agentic AI compiler, signalling ongoing investor interest in foundational AI tooling. Beyond Germany, Paris-based Arago secured €22.1 million to develop photonic chips aimed at reducing the energy consumption of AI workloads.
On the fund side, Munich-based Ananda Impact Ventures announced a €73 million first close to back European impact and DeepTech startups.
Taken together, these disclosed rounds and fundraises represent roughly €160 million flowing into AI- and DeepTech-adjacent activity during this period, situating Vanagon Ventures’ new fund within a wider trend of European capital increasingly targeting pre-Seed and early-stage technologies that fall outside traditional SaaS scaling models, with Germany featuring prominently among both fund managers and funded companies.
“AI changes everything – also VC investing: the steepest value creation is shifting to the earliest stages, our sweet spot. Yet many VCs shy away from pre-Seed as they still rely on SaaS playbooks that don’t fit the scaling logic of DeepTech and AI-native disruption in B2B,” adds Susanne Fromm, GP at Vanagon.
Vanagon Ventures was founded in 2023 on the conviction that the next generation of highly impactful technology companies will not emerge from traditional SaaS playbooks. Instead, that they will be built by founders with deep domain expertise in ‘old-world’ industries who leverage advanced technologies to re-architect these systems from the ground up.
The fund looks to address a structural gap in the venture market: the lack of dedicated capital and conviction at the pre-Seed stage for AI-native and DeepTech companies that, due to disruption, have massive economic potential but different scaling logics than traditional software companies.
Vanagon Ventures is led by its three General Partners, who combine venture experience with exposure to technology-driven transformation across industries:
- Axel Roitzsch is a serial entrepreneur with full cycle experience.
- Sandro Stark, a former Microsoft strategist, who co-founded a parametric climate insurance.
- Susanne Fromm, an INSEAD MBA alum, has 15 years of corporate innovation, strategy, and tech investment experience.
“DeepTech, long a European strength, now stands as a cornerstone of sovereignty and the driving force behind the next wave of innovation. Half of the world’s top innovation clusters are in Europe and venture capital is the fastest way to turn that innovation into economic power. Going all-in is a no-brainer,” says Axel Roitzsch, GP at Vanagon.
Fund I targets a portfolio of approximately 30 companies and has already invested in several companies, including:
- Holy Technologies, an AI-enabled engineering company that is rethinking how high-performance components are manufactured in Europe.
- ExoMatter, a German Aerospace Center spin-out providing DAX customers with an AI-powered R&D, as covered by EU-Startups in 2024.
- The Landbanking Group, an AI-driven platform enabling companies to measure, manage, and monetize natural capital, laying the groundwork for biodiversity and ecosystem integrity as a new asset class.
Other notable investments include glass-based data storage enabling immutable sustainable archiving, AI visual inspection for zero-defect manufacturing, and AI demand forecasting for the chemical and textile industries.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/01/munichs-vanagon-ventures-secures-e20-million-to-target-europes-pre-seed-deeptech-and-ai-gap/
