Rasmus Rothe’s Post

Berlin-based Merantix Capital announced the closing of its €103 million AI Fund, which will invest in early-stage, AI-native companies across varied sectors, including energy, life sciences, robotics, and physical AI 🇩🇪 🚀 The fund will make approximately 40 investements across European AI, with strategic LPs including Union Investment, Jungheinrich, KPMG Germany, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. “Europe’s industrial heritage and world-class research base positions us to produce true AI champions. What we have lacked is the connective tissue between industry and the stratups reimagining industries through AI and machine learning. Pick your metaphor: We’re building the glue, the connective tissue, or the bridge that Europe needs,” says Dr. Rasmus Rothe, co-founder and GP of Merantix Capital. https://lnkd.in/eWQXDRGv

Early-stage AI investors should be celebrating Sequoia Capital's reported $7B fundraise—not worrying about competition. Why? Because it reinforces several important signals about where we are in the AI cycle: 1️⃣ We're still early. A fund of this size isn't being raised because the opportunity is over. It's being raised because investors believe the biggest value creation is still ahead. There are countless opportunities yet to be built across infrastructure, tooling, applications, vertical AI, and entirely new categories. 2️⃣ Long-term conviction remains strong. Despite market noise, the smartest pools of capital continue to show deep conviction in AI's long-term impact. Capital follows belief, and this is a strong vote of confidence in the future of the ecosystem. 3️⃣ Enterprises are embracing AI—and increasing spend. We're moving beyond experimentation. AI is becoming a core budget line item for enterprises looking to drive productivity, automate workflows, and create competitive advantages. The demand side continues to strengthen. 4️⃣ There won't be just one OpenAI or Anthropic. Every major technology wave creates multiple category-defining companies. AI will be no different. The next generation of foundational model companies, infrastructure providers, and application leaders is still being built. Large funds entering the market shouldn't discourage early-stage investors. If anything, they validate the scale of the opportunity ahead. https://lnkd.in/gP6RMf9h

From my perspective, focusing on pre-seed Enterprise AI, mega-funds of this scale are a massive tailwind rather than a competitive threat. For early-stage investors and builders at the absolute ground floor, this volume of capital signals an incredibly robust downstream runway. Knowing that deep, long-term institutional conviction is waiting to fund expansion as these early platforms mature is highly validating for the entire ecosystem. Viraj's point on enterprise spend moving past pure experimentation is exactly where the opportunity lies. The next wave of category-definers will win by solving complex enterprise workflows with radical simplicity and deep domain relevance. This massive influx of late-stage capital simply proves that the market depth is there to sustain them as they scale.

China AI startup Manifold AI has raised $100 million in pre-Series A funding round.  Manifold AI was launched in 2025 by Wu Wei & Tsinghua University (FIB Lab).  Manifold AI investors include Guoxin Fund, CRHC Fund, InnoVen Capital, BAIC Capital, KHK Fund & Xinen Ventures.  Manifold AI – We are a company exploring next-generation world models,and apply it to AI hardware applications(e.g. Robotics,XR equipment). https://lnkd.in/ge3bTNDU

We're announcing our $𝟮𝟬𝗠 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗱 𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 to secure the growing swarm of AI agents running inside the enterprise. AI agents are moving from experimentation into core enterprise infrastructure faster than the controls protecting them. By 2028, Fortune 500 companies will run more than 150,000 agents each. Only 13% feel ready to manage them. That gap is the problem NeuralTrust was built to close. Our customers include global banks, airlines, telcos, energy companies, healthcare providers, and government agencies, with 92% running revenues above $1B. This round will accelerate three things: deeper integration across our platform, expansion across the European market and beyond, and continued growth of our engineering team. A huge thank you to Alstin Capital who led the round, and to VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banco Sabadell, EA Ventures Plug and Play Tech Center, and Finaves (the venture capital fund of IESE Business School). We are excited to be on this journey with Alexander Meyer-Scharenberg, Laura Keilhofer and Paul Bonacker. Thank you also to the team, advisors, and customers who have been part of the NeuralTrust journey since day one. We're building the security layer that the world's most critical enterprises will run on, from our offices in Barcelona, London, Munich, and New York. Is your security ready for the agentic era?

EA Ventures Plug and Play EMEA Fund portfolio is growing. NeuralTrust closes $20M, that's the largest cybersecurity seed deal in EU history. The company secures AI agents running inside enterprise infrastructure: banks, airlines, telcos, government agencies. The problem is real, the timing is right, and the team is exceptional. Congratulations to Joan Vendrell Farreny, Victor Garcia, and Alejandro Domingo, and the entire NeuralTrust team. This is just the beginning. Plug and Play Tech Center Gani Kassymov João Monteiro Fernandes Luis Llorens Gonzalez Anto Guarin Erik Aubakirov Viktor Sinenko  

NeuralTrust Raises $20M Seed Round to Secure the Growing Swarm of AI Agents in the Enterprise Largest cybersecurity seed financing ever raised by a European company #NEWYORK / #BARCELONA, June 17, 2026 — NeuralTrust, the leading platform for securing and governing AI agents, announced the closing of a $20 million seed funding round. This represents the largest cybersecurity seed round ever raised by a European company. The round was led by Alstin Capital, with participation from #VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banco Sabadell, EA Ventures Plug and Play Tech Center, and Finaves, the venture capital fund of IESE Business School. NeuralTrust is also backed by public funding from the European Innovation Council (#EIC) and Spain’s State Research Agency (#AEI). As enterprises rapidly deploy autonomous AI agents into core infrastructure, security and governance have lagged significantly. By 2028, Fortune 500 companies are projected to run more than 150,000 AI agents each, yet only 13% feel prepared to manage the associated risks. NeuralTrust addresses this critical gap by providing a comprehensive platform for discovering, securing, monitoring, and governing AI agents at enterprise scale. “The explosion of AI agents is outpacing traditional security controls,” said #JoanVendrell, Co-Founder and CEO of NeuralTrust. “This funding enables us to accelerate the development of the essential security layer that enterprises need to adopt agentic AI safely and at scale.” The new capital will be used to: • Expand the engineering team • Deepen product integrations across the NeuralTrust platform • Accelerate go-to-market efforts across Europe and beyond Alexander Meyer-Scharenberg, Partner at Alstin Capital, commented: “AI agents are entering enterprise infrastructure faster than security teams can adapt. NeuralTrust has built a genuine control layer — not just another point solution — that enterprises can operationalize today. We believe this is one of the defining problems in cybersecurity, and NeuralTrust is best positioned to lead it.” #NeuralTrust serves some of the world’s most demanding organizations, including global banks, airlines, telcos, energy companies, healthcare providers, and government agencies. The company operates from offices in Barcelona, London, Munich, and New York. About NeuralTrust #NeuralTrust is the leading platform for AI Agent security and governance. The company empowers enterprises to discover, secure, and scale autonomous AI systems with confidence. Trusted by major organizations across finance, aviation, energy, and public sectors, NeuralTrust delivers runtime protection, compliance, and visibility across the entire AI agent lifecycle. For more information, visit www.neuraltrust.ai.

Merantix Capital closes €103M fund to back European AI startups #Merantix Capital has announced the final close of its €103 million AI Fund, aimed at backing early-stage AI-native startups across Europe. The fund plans to make around 40 investments, targeting sectors such as logistics, manufacturing, energy, #fintech, healthcare, life sciences, robotics, enterprise software, and physical AI. Limited partners include Union Investment, Jungheinrich AG, KPMG Germany, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and several family offices. Founded by Adrian Locher, the fund builds on Merantix Capital’s first vehicle, which backed venture studio companies including revel8, Deltia, Vara, and Cambrium. The new strategy will split capital equally between companies developed with the Merantix team and direct pre-seed and seed investments across Europe. Merantix Capital has already invested in Droidrun, Arqh, and Outpost Bio, alongside several stealth companies in logistics, manufacturing, recruiting, ERP, energy, and fashion technology. The firm operates through a broader AI platform including the Merantix AI Campus in Berlin, London AI Hub, AI House Davos, and Merantix Momentum. The article on Tech.eu in the first comment.

$300 billion in a single quarter. That's not a typo. That's Q1 2026 venture capital. What this means: • AI captured 80% of all global VC funding, roughly $242B in one quarter • Just 4 companies absorbed 65% of the total capital deployed • This one quarter moved ~70% of everything invested across all of 2025 If you're a founder timing a raise, the average deal stat is lying to you. The capital is there. But it's not flowing broadly — it's concentrating fast around a handful of frontier AI platforms. Full breakdown of what this means for your raise strategy in 2026 at the link. #VentureCapital #AI #Startups Full article: https://lnkd.in/eP3KSmAG

8VC's Alex Kolicich does not think AI is a bubble. Read the full interview here: https://lnkd.in/etFJSEmH He thinks it is underhyped. As a founding partner and CIO at 8VC, Kolicich is watching venture capital split into two very different worlds. On one side: massive multi-strategy platforms. On the other: smaller, craft-oriented firms focused on hands-on company building. 8VC is choosing the craft model. The firm invests across frontier technology, but it also builds companies from within. Around 30% of its capital goes toward incubating companies internally when the team sees opportunities that do not yet exist in the market. For Kolicich, the biggest AI bottleneck is no longer the technology itself. It is distribution. That belief is shaping how 8VC evaluates founders, markets, and the future of software. The firm believes software is moving beyond traditional SaaS and shifting from systems of record to systems that actually do the work. As Kolicich puts it: “The business logic lives in the LLM. Humans become supervisors of agents.” In a market increasingly dominated by mega funds, 8VC is betting that the next generation of venture will still be won through judgment, conviction, and company-building craft.