U.Ok.-based Amadeus Capital Companions and Austria’s Apex Ventures are pooling their collective enterprise capital (VC) sources for a brand new fund particularly focused at early-stage deep tech startups. 

The duo have raised an preliminary €28 million ($30 million) for the Amadeus Apex Know-how Fund, with plans to shut it out at €80 million ($85 million). The fund has already made its first funding, too, collaborating in a hitherto undisclosed second-closing of German area startup Okapi-Orbits’s seed funding spherical to the tune of $1 million.

The fund’s core funding workforce contains Amadeus’ co-founders Anne Glover and Hermann Hauser, who’re joined by Apex companions Andreas Riegler and Wolfgang Neubert.

Amadeus Apex Know-how Fund: Anne Glover (Amadeus), Andreas Riegler (APEX), Wolfgang Neubert (APEX), Hermann Hauser (Amadeus) Picture Credit: Amadeus Apex Know-how Fund

Early-stage

The objective of the Amadeus Apex Know-how Fund is to speculate between €1-1.5 million in seed and Collection A stage startups with “distinctive and defendable expertise,” and can embrace AI, quantum computing, mobility and outer area, robotics, and different areas of the deep tech sphere. Furthermore, the fund’s core focus will likely be on the so-called DACH area, incorporating Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, although there’s scope to meander into close by markets — although this gained’t embrace the U.Ok.

“The partnership additionally permits for early-stage investments in different European markets exterior the U.Ok., equivalent to Poland, Denmark and the Netherlands, that are on our radar for every little thing from quantum tech to photonics and AI,” Riegler defined to TechCrunch. “We’ve focussed on this area as a result of we acknowledge it as an ideal breeding floor for early-stage deep tech innovation, with high universities and a big developer pool. On the identical time, deep tech funding continues to be low, which presents an enormous alternative for progress.”

Based in 1997, Cambridge, U.Ok.-based Amadeus Capital Companions has made greater than 260 investments over the previous 25 years, with exits to its identify together with community safety firm Forescout which was snapped up by a duo of personal fairness corporations for $1.9 billion in 2020, and self-driving startup FiveAI which was acquired by Bosch final yr. Apex Ventures, in the meantime, has made some 40 investments since its formation in Vienna six years in the past, most lately becoming a member of a €2.7 million funding spherical into German biophotonics startup Refined Laser Methods.

So whereas each VC corporations have completely different histories, they’ve every been investing into the deep tech realm off their volition simply high-quality till now — so why companion up on this new fund?

“We now have collaborated with [Amadeus Capital’s] Hermann Hauser for a few years — he was an investor in our [Apex’s] first fund and an advisory board member of the agency, and we have now a number of joint investments,” Riegler stated. “This subsequently led to a detailed relationship with the Amadeus Capital Companions workforce. The Amadeus workforce needed to increase their early-stage footprint in Europe and turned to Apex Ventures for our native experience, deal movement and syndication expertise.”

And for Apex, a relative newcomer to the VC scene in comparison with Amadeus, it faucets a quarter-century of funding expertise.

“We significantly profit from entry to over 25 years of expertise and a community in deep tech,” Riegler stated.