📬 December Newsletter: Celebrating 2025's Milestones ✨

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Quote of the day: "Success is when we help others succeed" — Simon Sinek (Writer)

In March 2026, we launch a new 3-day online VC training. This is a ticketed entry program with very limited spots. Register your interest below to get the details first.

🗓️ When 18-20 March 2026🕒 Time 14:00 - 18:00 CET

For whom? Experienced Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors, Exited Entrepreneurs

2025 has been a year of new funds, record-breaking rounds, transformative exits, and frontier science turning into real companies. 🫆

👉 Across Europe (and beyond), EWVC members have been raising capital, backing world-class founders, and shaping the next decade of climate, health, deep tech, and digital infrastructure. 🦾

Rubio Impact Ventures announced over €70M committed to its third fund, aiming to back ~30 companies tackling the climate crisis and social inequality. The fund is supported by Dutch entrepreneurs and families as well as EIF, Invest-NL, Oost NL, Brabantse Ontwikkelingsmaatschappij, ING Social Impact Investments and NN Social Innovation Fund, with RVO again providing a Seed Capital innovation loan. The fund remains open for 12 more months or until it hits target.

👉 Find more here!

Kibo Ventures surpassed €100M+ in commitments for Fund IV (target €120M, hard cap €150M), backed by a strong mix of long-term LPs and new institutional investors, family offices, and corporates. This brings us to €500M+ in assets under management.

👉 Read more here.

Adara Ventures announced the first close of AV IV, targeting €100M to keep backing early-stage European deep tech in cybersecurity, applied AI, infrastructure, hardware, digital health, and space. Over 130 LPs are onboard — including many founders from Adara’s own portfolio. In parallel, Adara became the first European fund to join the NVIDIA Inception VC Alliance, unlocking privileged access to a global AI startup network.

👉 Find more in these links: AV IV and NVIDIA!

XAnge completed the first close of XAnge 5, a €200M early-stage fund focused on AI, frontier tech, and climate & sustainability. Building on a 20-year presence in France, Germany, and Belgium, XAnge 5 doubles down on the next generation of European category leaders.

👉 More information here!

Course Corrected reached the first close of its second fund at €65M earlier this year. Since the close, the team has remained highly active and has already made five new investments spanning robotics, electrification, and EV themes, underscoring continued LP conviction in Swedish climate venture despite a tougher fundraising backdrop.

👉 Find more about it here!

Volution launched a $100M UK-focused fund to tackle the post-Series A funding gap for UK fintech and SaaS. The fund quickly attracted attention from TechCrunch, Forbes, FT Adviser, Tech.eu, Finextra, Silicon Canals and more, underlining just how critical this capital is for the UK tech ecosystem.

👉 Find more information here!

OneRagtime launched Rhapsody III, its third fund focused on Seed and Series A startups in Europe, particularly AI-augmented platforms and deep tech. With 50+ portfolio companies, 250+ investors, and performance of 27% gross IRR, 2.2x TVPI, 0.5x DPI, the first two Rhapsody funds sit in the top decile of European VC. Diversity is embedded: 25% of the C-suite are women.

This year, Founder & CEO Stéphanie Hospital was also awarded the Légion d’Honneur, recognising her contribution to entrepreneurship and French tech.

👉 Find more here!

Odyssey officially launched in October to back ambitious European founders at the intersection of AI & deep tech, operating out of London and San Francisco.

👉 Find more here!

Climentum Capital reached gender parity at GP level with the addition of Jennifer Dungs, a veteran of Porsche, BMW and InnoEnergy (where she oversaw 40+ hard-tech climate startups). With teams across the Nordics and Germany, Climentum continues to focus on industrial decarbonisation and electrification.

👉 Find all about it here!

Greencode Ventures completed fundraising for Fund I at €70M, already with 12 portfolio companies. The fund focuses on climate, digital and industrial tech, with recent investments such as Cronvall reflecting the strategy.

👉 Find more here!

ALTUM launched Latvia’s 5th generation of VC funds, totalling €104M (including €81M from EU funds and ALTUM), continuing its 20-year role as an anchor investor in early-stage VC across te Baltics.

VC funds fill a critical market gap by spotting ambitious teams and backing innovative, scalable ideas before traditional finance can. With ALTUM as a cornerstone investor, these funds help ensure that talent in Latvia and across the EU has access to early, catalytic capital.

👉 Find more here!

Auxxo achieved the first close of the Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund II at €26M in July, with the European Investment Fund as anchor investor. Final close is expected in summer 2026. Once again, Auxxo is channelling institutional capital into women-led innovation across Europe.

👉 Find more here and here!

Open Ocean’s new fund with a target of €130 million is dedicated to supporting European category-defining software companies, increasing the emphasis on AI-driven data & software with our investment decisions.

👉 Read more here!

Voima Ventures reached a €107M final close for its third fund, investing in 25 Nordic and Baltic deep-tech startups across:

Voima Ventures continues to expand its portfolio of over 38 active companies, bridging the gap between research and commercial success.

👉 Find more here!

The fund is managed by a predominantly female fund management team investing into female-led tech start-ups or into companies offering products and services for women. Simone Brummelhuis, managing partner and fund director said that she and her co-founder Laura Rooseboom’s ambition and ability to reach their hard cap of €50m was testament to the fact that first time funds and funds managed by women could achieve their aims, though it took longer to onboard investors than anticipated.

👉 Read more here!

Momentum Partners closed the first round of its third green-tech fund at ~€36M, backed by EIF and leading Nordic investors, with a target to add another €15–20M by summer 2026.

From earlier funds, they saw two standout portfolio milestones in 2025:

👉 Find more here!

BrightCap’s second fund, BrightCap II, reached €47.5M after several closings since its 2024 launch, with 7 investments across the future of work, health-tech, and fintech/cybersecurity.

👉 Find more here!

WakeUp Capital’s latest close brings its fund size to €35M, with six investments so far in B2B tech-enabled companies in Ireland and Europe — all focused on building a more sustainable and inclusive future with market-rate returns. The team has a strong pipeline and aims to close two more deals before year-end.

👉 Find more here!

Saminvest became an anchor investor in Norrsken Evolve in August 2025. One of three GPs is female, and the fund focuses on the carbon-free economy, the infrastructure of tomorrow, and the future of Europe, with a fund size of €57M.

👉 Find more here!

British Business Bank launched Investor Pathways Capital, a £400M initiative to support new and diverse fund managers building first-time VC funds.

👉 Find more here!

Senovo announced the first closing of Fund IV at €80M, continuing its thesis of backing B2B SaaS and infrastructure. 2025 also brought big portfolio headlines:

👉 Find more here!

2025 was a breakthrough year for EQWOW, which now holds six high-conviction investments in globally scalable LatAm startups across health, education, agriculture, digital inclusion, and climate. The majority are already expanding internationally — strong evidence that Latin America is home to world-class founders competing on a global stage.

👉 Find more here!

Iceland’s state-owned innovation fund, Kría, announced the results of its latest investment initiative, selecting 11 early-stage startups from a pool of 88 applicants. Kría is deploying ~ISK 300M (approx. €2M) into the cohort, requiring at least an equal match from private investors, effectively injecting over ISK 600M into the Icelandic early-stage ecosystem.

The selected companies span diverse sectors, including:

👉 Find more here!

Revaia celebrated a major exit with Hublo, France’s leading healthcare HR platform:

Convinced of further upside, Revaia launched a single-asset continuation vehicle to reinvest in Hublo, already securing over 75% of its allocation in just two months, with final close expected by year-end.

👉 Find more here!

When they started investing with Fund I in 2020, the VC world was buzzing about blockchain. They chose a different path, guided by conviction, not consensus, allocating part of their portfolio to the next wave of technology: AI. Looking back, that focus has proven to be the right call.

This year, FundingBox Deep Tech Fund celebrated their first exit, from an AI-driven insurtech company. What seemed like a niche product for actuaries turned out to have broad market appeal, leading to a competitive acquisition.

The transaction delivered first distributions to our LPs, bringing the fund’s DPI to 0.3, placing them in the top decile of VC fund performance internationally.

They see this milestone not only as validation of their early AI thesis, but also as further proof that emerging managers can generate early liquidity, even in challenging exit markets. As they now look ahead to Fund II, they are observing the market closely, thinking carefully about which opportunities to back next and how to build on these early learnings.

Bending Spoons, a tech company building and scaling global digital products used by millions, has officially become Italy’s first decacorn, reaching a $11 billion valuation following a $710 million round.

The round, combining both primary capital and secondary transactions, was announced just after the acquisition of AOL, marking one of the most significant back-to-back milestones ever seen in the Italian tech ecosystem.

👉 More about it here, here and here.

4impact’s 2025 highlights:

👉 Find all about: Carbon Equity and 4impact!

Three VC portfolio company Pactum AI raised a $54M Series C led by Insight Partners, scaling agentic AI for procurement and validating a category-defining vision.

👉 Find more here!

IQM Quantum Computers raised over €300M in Series B, one of the largest quantum rounds of 2025, and is now a unicorn. Having invested at Seed in 2019 when IQM was a four-person team, our member has seen first-hand how deep research + customer-desired products can scale globally.

👉 Find more here!

Tesi celebrated Finland’s largest scale-up round ever: Oura raised ≈€777M (USD 900M) at a valuation above USD 11B, cementing its status as a global leader in wearable health. Tesi first invested in 2018 and remains a shareholder both directly and via Lifeline’s fund.

👉 Find more here!

Bpifrance Digital Venture is the early-stage tech venture capital arm within Bpifrance, focusing on innovative technology investments. In February 2025, they launched third-generation venture capital fund, Digital Venture 3. This €400 million fund brings our total assets under management to €1.1 billion.

Key 2025 rounds in Bpifrance’s portfolio included:

Positron Ventures continues to double down on the future of food with a mix of strong follow-on support and new high-potential bets.

Greencode Ventures portfolio company FLEXeCHARGE closed a successful round in June, further cementing the fund’s climate and industrial tech thesis.

👉 Find more here!

NIF portfolio company Tekever became a unicorn, exceeded 10,000 operational flight hours in Ukraine, and took part in multiple NATO exercises, demonstrating the impact of dual-use aerospace technology in real-world operations.

👉 Find more here!

Nordscience’s portfolio company Phenaros Pharmaceuticals acquired and merged with DefiniGEN, creating pixlbio, now serving 11 of the top 20 pharma companies and achieving >1000% revenue growth to mid-single-digit millions USD this year.

👉 Find more here!

Planet A had a big year of climate and industrial innovation:

👉 Find the guide here!

WakeUp Capital highlighted portfolio company GRID, which partnered with National Grid in a world-first centralised autonomous aerial inspection capability for electricity infrastructure, a landmark moment for grid resilience and decarbonisation.

👉 Find more here!

BrightCap portfolio company LucidLink received an Emmy for Engineering, Science, and Technology, recognising its cloud-native file storage platform used by teams at Warner Bros., Paramount, Spotify and more to collaborate on massive media files.

👉 Find more here!

Onsight Ventures co-hosted the Hermann Hauser Frontier Lab in Innsbruck for the first time, a week-long program bringing together top deep-tech founders working at the cutting edge of science and entrepreneurship.

👉 Find more here!

Climentum Capital co-led a €14.4M round in Enerin, which is electrifying medium–high-temperature industrial heat (5% of global energy use) with compact 1 MW Stirling heat pumps. First deployments are planned for 2026, with 50,000+ European sites under regulatory pressure to decarbonise.

👉 Find more here!

Climentum Capital also joined a €12.5M Series A in Rail-Flow, an “ERP for rail logistics” used by 500+ customers to automate end-to-end rail freight processes and shift cargo from road to low-carbon rail.

👉 Find more here!

Climentum-backed Novatron Fusion Group AB published its first peer-reviewed paper in Nuclear Fusion, validating its “triple-force” plasma confinement concept and pointing to a potential 1000x improvement in confinement efficiency versus earlier mirror machines, a major step towards commercially viable fusion.

👉 Find more here!

Beyond fund metrics, Stéphanie Hospital’s Légion d’Honneur stands out as a national recognition of her role in building France’s entrepreneurial and tech ecosystem.

👉 Find more here!

Samuel Wendelin steps into the team leadership role from his previous position as Investment Director. He has been with Tesi since 2019, and prior to that, he worked at EY, Summa Capital, and Handelsbanken.

👉 Read more here!

The NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) announced the appointment of Erin Hallock as Partner, reinforcing the Fund’s mission to accelerate the industrial adoption of deep tech and frontier technologies that are critical to the Alliance’s security, resilience, and long-term innovation capacity.

👉 Learn more here!

Smart Society Ventures had a standout year across platform building and thought leadership. They launched Season 2 of The Smart Society Show, featuring guests including Boris Johnson, Catherine McKenna, Greg Jackson (Octopus Energy), Sir Danny Alexander (HSBC Infrastructure Finance & Sustainability), and Shannon Miller (Mainspring Energy).

On the research side, they published Building a Smart Society: Energy, Data Centers, and the Built Environment and The Decarbonization Investment Landscape: Exploring Forces Behind the Hidden $200 Trillion Opportunity, while also expanding their footprint with the launch of Smart Society Ventures in Houston.

👉 Find more here!

In 2025, Sónia Magalhães (Managing Partner at Octanova) served as Executive Director of Startup World Cup Portugal, leading the successful delivery of the first-ever edition of the event in Portugal. Startup World Cup is a global startup competition bringing together founders, investors, and ecosystem leaders, providing international visibility and access to cross-border networks. Following the success in Portugal, the same leadership team has been appointed to lead and organise future editions in Spain and Brazil, supporting the event’s international expansion.

👉 Find all about it here!

TheVentureCity was named one of TIME’s America’s Top Venture Capital Firms 2025, based on fundraising strength, investment activity, and exit performance. The award highlights TheVentureCity’s founder-driven, data-driven approach to building an investing platform “by founders, for founders”.

👉 Find it here!

A new €57M Technology Transfer fund is seeking a Fund Manager, with applications open until 24 March 2026. It’s a rare opportunity to lead a dedicated vehicle at the interface of research and commercialisation, catalysing future-proof ventures from lab to market.

👉 Find more here!

First-of-its-kind study “Mapping Pension Funds’ Attitudes to Venture & Growth in Europe” developed by Venture Connections, European Women in VC and Pensions for Purpose. This report explores why the connection between pension funds and venture capital is weak today. And, most importantly, how to change it.

A huge thank you to our Report Partners: Atlantic Vantage Point (AVP), Eurazeo, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), European Circular Bioeconomy Fund (ECBF), Climate-KIC, EIT Digital, EIT Urban Mobility, perfORM Due Diligence Services and Siemens Energy Ventures for your strong support of our work and the agenda, and thank you to European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research & Innovation for the supportive collaboration!

Report in the news:

Financial Times | Pitchbook | IPE | Institutional Money | Fundview | Agefi | PensionsAge | European Pensions | SustainableViews | Pensions & Investments … and more

Leslie Wolff Golden is Managing Director and Global Head of Capital Formation and Investor Relations at DigitalBridge, where she also leads marketing and communications across the Investment Management platform and serves on the Responsible Investment Committee.

Previously, she was a Managing Director in Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets’ Investor Solutions Group, focused on institutional fundraising and investor/consultant relationships. Earlier, she led Investor Relations at Ridgewood Energy and worked in principal investing and portfolio management. She began her career in investment banking at Lehman Brothers and later held roles at Bankers Trust and Bank of America (NationsBanc Montgomery).

👉 Find more about her here.

London-based Firgun Ventures, co-founded by Zeynep Koruturk, launches with $70m for quantum tech innovation.

👉 Read more here.

In a recent analysis of 2,000+ priced Seed and Series A rounds in the Bay Area + New York, Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson argues the venture market is still “healthy” if you define health as continued opportunity for high-impact, high-growth companies—even amid louder “AI bubble” discourse.

👉 Read more about it here!

As 2025 comes to a close, we thank you for your support and look forward to reconnecting in 2026! 🎉 Wishing you a joyful New Year filled with peace, happiness, and success.

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