Kompas VC Secures €160M to Back the Next Wave of Industrial and Green Tech Founders

Kompas VC has closed its second fund at €160 million. The Copenhagen-based venture firm, which backs early-stage companies building technology for manufacturing, construction, energy, and logistics, now manages roughly €300 million across two fund generations and is betting that the physical economy will produce the next wave of breakout startups even as most of the industry chases artificial intelligence.

Founded in 2021 by Sebastian Peck, Talia Rafaeli, and Andreas Winter-Extra, the firm operates from offices in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, and Copenhagen with an investment mandate spanning Europe, North America, and Israel. The final close added €10 million to the €150 million first close announced in April 2025, with the additional commitment coming from Realdania, one of Denmark’s most prominent philanthropic foundations. Realdania joins existing limited partner VKR Holding, the Danish industrial group behind VELUX and a portfolio of building-component manufacturers tracing its origins to 1941. Together, the two institutional backers bring not just capital but deep operational knowledge of the built environment, sustainable development, and industrial systems, a deliberate alignment with the fund’s thesis.

Few corners of the venture market have moved as aggressively toward AI-native software and rapid-scaling business models as European deep tech. Kompas VC has taken the opposite position, targeting sectors where legacy infrastructure, complex procurement cycles, and regulatory pressure have historically slowed adoption of new technology. Manufacturing and construction alone account for a substantial share of global GDP and an outsized proportion of greenhouse gas emissions, yet they attract a fraction of the startup funding that flows into consumer technology or enterprise software. That structural mismatch between capital allocation and economic importance is the gap the firm aims to exploit.

Peck has been direct about the headwinds. “There was a lot of enthusiasm around these themes back in 2021,” he told TechCrunch. “In 2026, we’re in a very, very different paradigm.” Yet the firm’s focus on tangible output, on producing physical goods, cutting emissions, and managing operational risk, addresses problems that will not disappear with the next funding cycle. Industries responsible for the bulk of global carbon output cannot indefinitely defer modernisation, regardless of where venture sentiment lands in any given year.

With Fund II, Kompas VC plans to back as many as 25 early-stage companies, writing initial cheques between €1 million and €5 million and reserving approximately half the fund for follow-on investments through Series B rounds. Rather than clustering portfolio names in a list, the range of early bets already made from the new fund illustrates the breadth of the thesis. Epoch Biodesign, a London-based company using AI-designed enzymes to recycle nylon and textile waste into virgin-quality polymers, sits at the intersection of synthetic biology and industrial circularity. Backslash operates in cybersecurity for critical infrastructure. Tibo Energy works on decarbonising industrial heat. Earlier bets from Fund I show similar ambition: Material Evolution, a UK producer of low-carbon cement made from industrial waste streams, claims an 85 percent reduction in CO₂ compared with conventional cement. Helios, an Israeli startup originally founded to extract oxygen on the moon, has repurposed its technology to replace carbon with sodium in ironmaking, eliminating direct emissions from one of the world’s heaviest-polluting processes. Any technology that can measurably improve the productivity, resilience, or carbon intensity of a physical industry is in scope.

What ties these companies together is a conviction about where industrial technology actually breaks down. Kompas VC has consistently argued that the central bottleneck is not innovation but adoption. Peck has described the problem as one of “operational friction, from legacy infrastructure to complex buying cycles, that often stalls transformation.” The firm therefore focuses on startups whose products can slot into existing industrial workflows without requiring operators to rebuild from scratch. Industrial AI, agent-based systems, robotics, and technologies that improve the design, operation, and maintenance of physical assets form the core investment verticals.

A cohort of specialist European funds has emerged with overlapping mandates. UVC Partners expanded its fund to €400 million in March 2026 with a deep-tech and industrial focus. World Fund and Extantia Capital have raised significant pools targeting climate and industrial decarbonisation. But where many of these peers pursue larger cheque sizes or later-stage deals, Kompas VC has positioned itself as a first-cheque investor, entering at the seed stage and building concentrated positions in founders working on problems that generalist funds tend to overlook. As Peck told TechCrunch, there remains considerable space for smaller, highly specialised funds to lead on specific themes and founders before larger capital arrives.

Geopolitical fragmentation has sharpened the firm’s regional strategy. Kompas VC views the global economy as increasingly split into three spheres: the United States, Europe, and China, each following divergent regulatory, economic, and political paths. Reshoring of manufacturing capacity has become a policy priority across Western economies, driven by pandemic-era supply chain disruptions and intensified by ongoing trade tensions. Europe, home to one of the world’s largest industrial bases, offers vast addressable markets in grid congestion management, industrial electrification, and building retrofit. Peck has noted that these opportunities carry sufficient scale to generate strong returns even from a purely European play. The firm invests with a stated horizon of ten to fifteen years, a timeframe that spans multiple legislative cycles and accounts for the reality that policy environments shift in ways that shorter-horizon funds cannot absorb.

Climate policy divergence adds further complexity. In Europe, emissions reduction remains central to industrial strategy, reinforced by mechanisms such as the EU Emissions Trading System and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. In the United States, political appetite for climate-focused investment has grown more uncertain, though underlying industrial demand for efficiency and risk mitigation endures. Kompas VC has structured its portfolio to perform across both regulatory environments, backing technologies whose value proposition extends beyond carbon compliance to include measurable gains in productivity and cost reduction.

Beyond deploying capital, the firm is expanding its investment and platform teams to deliver more intensive post-investment support. This includes brokering access to industrial networks, strategic partnerships with corporate buyers, and domain expertise drawn from the team’s collective experience in manufacturing and the built environment. It is an approach that mirrors a broader shift among specialist venture firms competing not on cheque size but on the depth of their operational engagement, an area where generalist megafunds, despite their firepower, often struggle to match the credibility of sector-focused investors.

Whether the strategy delivers venture-scale returns will depend on variables beyond the firm’s control: the pace of regulatory enforcement around emissions, the trajectory of industrial AI adoption, and the stability of European energy markets. No public performance data from Fund I is available to offer early proof points. But with €160 million now deployed against a thesis built on structural industrial demand, Kompas VC has staked out a position that is both contrarian and grounded. In a market crowded with funds chasing the same AI deal flow, the firm is wagering that the physical world, with all its friction, complexity, and carbon, will reward patient, specialised capital.