Merantix Capital

🤖 Whistle Robotics is an industrial robotics company building intelligent, task-specific robots designed for direct deployment onto factory floors. In short, they are making automation accessible to every factory. And they are starting with CNC machine tending. Giovanni Funchal & Peter Butler are two of the best founders I've met and they are now building their founding team. They are repeat founders, successfully exited, previously worked at top companies including CloudNC, Autodesk, Snyk, Citadel, Bloomberg, Synopsys, STMicroelectronics. If you're looking to join a robotics company and want to deploy cobots in real-world settings, this is the one for you. Founding Robotics Engineer (Manipulation) - https://lnkd.in/ecppAAvj Founding Mechanical Engineer - https://lnkd.in/eDusdKux And here is Gio on the shop floor deploying cobots 👇

Almetra, formerly known as Deltia, has raised a €16.3 million Series A round led by blisce/, following Merantix Capital’s lead of the pre-seed round. We are proud to support and be part of Almetra’s journey to build the intelligent layer for manufacturing and accelerate the transformation of industrial shop floors. By bringing intelligence into factory operations, Almetra is helping manufacturers modernise their infrastructure and create smarter, more efficient, and highly productive environments. For more information, check out Tech.eu and EU-Startups. Many congratulations to co-founders Maximilian Fischer and Silviu Homoceanu and the entire Almetra team on this incredible milestone. Here’s to what comes next. Upwards and onwards.

This time in our breakfast series for our June edition, we're exploring an interesting topic of how AI can transform the bio-manufacturing landscape. Don't miss the chance to engage in interesting discussions, meet with top industry leaders, and gain useful insights into how the AI landscape in the sector is evolving. Excited to share that Juan Manuel Garzón Vela (Founder and CEO of CULTZYME), Johannes Maeß (ML PHD and Researcher at BIFOLD - Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data), and our very own Nicole Büttner will be joining on the panel for discussion. Join us on July 2nd from 9:00 to 11:30 at Merantix AI Campus. Don't forget to register, link below: https://luma.com/aswogwft #AI #breakfast #biomanufacturing #future

Some exciting personal news: I'm joining Merantix Capital full-time as a partner. For the past several years I've worn multiple hats at Merantix, primarily as Founder and CEO of Merantix Momentum, working with companies on their AI transformation. Building Momentum has been one of the most rewarding chapters of my career, and I'm enormously proud of the team carrying that work forward. I’ve also served as a founding partner at Merantix Capital, working with our founders-in-residence to validate their ideas and investing in early-stage AI teams across Europe. Now I’ll be dedicating myself full time to backing Europe’s most ambitious AI founders. The timing for this next chapter couldn’t have been better, as today we’re announcing Merantix Capital’s new €103M AI Fund. The fund is our biggest commitment yet to a thesis we've held since founding Merantix a decade ago. Europe's industries need to be transformed through AI. And Europe has the talent, expertise, and industrial base to build the global champions to do it. That’s a mission I felt deeply committed to at Merantix Momentum, and one I’m excited to continue with Merantix Capital. My dual role has given me a clear view of where the opportunity lies, and the gap between Europe’s industrial heritage and the AI-native founders rebuilding it. I’m thrilled to spend my time at this critical intersection. A huge thank you to our LPs for the trust and commitment to our mission, to my fellow Merantix Capital partners Adrian Locher and Rasmus Rothe, and to our entire team across the entire Merantix group.

Today we're announcing the closing of Merantix Capital's €103M AI Fund, which will invest in early-stage, AI-native teams across Europe. It's our biggest commitment yet to a thesis we've held since founding Merantix a decade ago: Europe's industries need to be transformed through AI, and Europe has the talent, expertise, and industrial base to build the global champions to do it. We're excited to keep building together. Read more from Handelsblatt, Tech.eu, and Gründerszene in the comments!

Today we're announcing Merantix Capital's new €103M AI Fund. It's our biggest commitment yet to a thesis we've held since founding Merantix a decade ago: Europe's industries need to be transformed through AI, and Europe has the talent, expertise, and industrial base to build the global champions to do it. The fund will back approximately 40 early-stage teams across Europe, from pre-idea in our venture studio through seed, reinventing core sectors like logistics, manufacturing, energy, finance, healthcare, life sciences, and robotics. Those that know us know that what makes Merantix different is the ecosystem. Merantix Capital sits inside the broader Merantix group, a large platform that includes the Merantix AI Campus in Berlin (80+ resident companies, 300 events/year), the London AI Hub, AI House Davos, and Merantix Momentum (70+ AI engineers running 100+ enterprise projects/year). A very big thanks to our LPs for the trust and commitment to our mission to drive AI transformation forward, our entire team across Merantix, and to our current (and future!) portfolio founders. 

Today we’re announcing the closing of Merantix Capital’s €103M fund to back early stage teams reimagining Europe’s core industries through AI. Europe's industrial heritage and world-class research base position us to produce true AI champions. What we have lacked is the connective tissue between industry and the startups reimagining those industries through AI and machine learning. With this new fund, Merantix Capital is aiming to fill this gap. That’s been Merantix's mission for 10 years as we’ve expanded our group into a broad ecosystem including the Merantix AI Campus, Merantix Momentum, the London AI Hub, and AI House Davos. The new fund will back approximately 40 early-stage AI-native companies, from pre-idea in our venture studio through seed, across logistics, manufacturing, energy, finance, healthcare, life sciences, robotics, enterprise, and physical AI. We think AI's real value will be captured by teams with domain expertise that can embed deeply into workflows and transform the key European industries that so desperately need reinvention. Companies that go all the way into the hardest parts of an industry and rebuild it from the ground up. I’m deeply thankful for the trust of all our Limited Partners in this journey, including Union Investment, Jungheinrich, KPMG Germany, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and leading family offices and institutional investors. We're already deploying from the fund, with investments including Droidrun, Arqh, Outpost Bio, and several stealth ventures. Enormous thank you to our LPs, our team, and all the founders in our portfolio. Let’s keep building together!

Shape the future of energy! Our portfolio company METEORIC™ is rethinking how industrial companies buy energy in Germany. Think AI-native procurement, replacing opaque processes with a transparent, data-driven platform that actually puts the customer in control. They're growing their sales team and looking for two profiles: 1. Sales Development Representative (SDR). You'll be the tip of the spear in outbound, reaching out to the pipeline in a market that's ready for disruption. 2. Growth & Sales Intern. A role for someone who wants to learn what real B2B sales looks like at an early-stage AI startup, directly alongside the CEO Andreas Miguel Conty. Both positions are based in Berlin. If you want to sell something that genuinely saves industrial companies money and you're excited about AI-native workflows, this is your chance. Links to apply in the comments, or reach out directly to Miguel or Yannick

Design partnerships are one of the highest-leverage tools for founders, particularly in the early stages but they are often the most misunderstood. They provide real-world validation, uncover workflow edge cases, accelerate product/market fit, and create early customer champions. The best founders don’t build in isolation, they co-create with customers who have urgent problems, actionable feedback, with a view to become long-term paying users. I’ve put together a founder’s guide on identifying and building design partnerships based on my time working with founders in the Merantix Capital venture studio. My thanks to Maxson J.Y. Tee, Andreas Miguel Conty (METEORIC™) and Tassilo Schmidt (TAIM Systems) for their insights and contributing to this article. If you're ideating on an AI-native case for a specific industry, we'd love to hear from you. Read the guide in the comments section.