With an ultimate target of €1bn, Spain’s Mundi Ventures closed on €750m this week for its Kembara Fund for deep tech and climate start-ups.
Deep tech targets the world’s biggest problems, from climate and energy to defence and healthcare. Europe has the talent and the start-ups, but has struggled on the capital side for scaling start-ups. This is what Mundi Ventures’ Kembara Fund aims to address with its focus on Series B and C funding of €15m-€40m, and beyond, for companies based in EU member states.
According to the Kembara team, Europe produces 28pc of global deep tech innovation, but only 3pc of European deep tech companies successfully raise Series B or C rounds. It is that very gap that the Kembara Fund is hoping to bridge using “€1bn dedicated to backing Europe’s deep tech champions at the exact moment when technology is proven and global scale becomes possible”.
In his own words, Kembara partner Yann de Vries says the funding cliff is “deeply personal” to him after his experience with Lilium, which declared insolvency in 2025 having failed to raise adequate investment. Its patents now belong to Archer Aviation.
“A decade ago at Lilium – a leading electric aviation company – we went from a sci-fi idea in a hangar to a NASDAQ-listed company in five years,” de Vries said in a LinkedIn post yesterday.
“I saw first-hand how brutally hard it is for European deep tech teams to raise €50m-€100m rounds and scale globally. That journey is why we built Kembara.”
The European Investment Fund (EIF) is a lead backer of Kembara, announcing in July last year that it would invest €350m in Kembara Fund 1. At the time, the EIC said it was the experience of the Kembara management team and its “differentiated strategy” that were key to receiving the support of the EIF.
“Companies that achieve strategic autonomy in critical technologies – from AI and quantum computing to space systems and clean energy – have the potential to become trillion-dollar global champions,” said de Vries in his post.
“Our ambition is clear: fix Europe’s growth-stage funding gap, where only 3pc of deep tech companies make it to Series B/C today.”
Other Kembara partners include Javier Santiso, Robert Trezona, Pierre Festal and Siraj Khaliq, who de Vries says have a combined experience of 100 years in deep tech, in companies like SpaceX, Palantir, PsiQuantum, OpenAI, Lilium, Ceres Power, Anduril and The Exploration Company.
“We are entrepreneurs united by a shared mission: to build Europe’s leading deep tech platform – one that keeps Europe competitive in the global technology race, tackles the world’s most pressing challenges and delivers outsized returns,” said de Vries. “This is only the beginning…”
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