Early-stage VC Kompas has raised €150m for its second fund to invest in industrial technology across Europe, the US and Israel.
The firm invests across three main areas: decarbonisation, productivity and “resilience”, the latter of which it defines as protecting businesses against global risks from supply chain disruptions to cyberattacks.
As the war in Ukraine continues and US president Donald Trump’s punishing tariffs regime wreaks havoc on the global economy, “resilience is something that everyone is extremely focused on,” Sebastian Peck, partner at Kompas, tells Sifted.
“How do you secure corporate assets? How do you fend off cyber attacks? How do you guard yourself against supply chain disruption? How do you deal with geopolitical dislocations like the trade war we see unfolding at the moment? Companies need to really invest in the ability to anticipate developments and then be able to react to them and manage those risks.”
He adds: “This is an incredibly wide landscape in which we can pick incredibly cool companies, and we see a lot of exciting deals there.”
Kompas says it will write cheques of between €3m and €5m into roughly 25 startups, saving 50% of the fund for follow-on investments.
The anchor LP in the new fund is existing investor VKR Holding owned by Danish family Kann-Rasmussen. Other LPs include corporates and industrial companies which Kompas works with to understand their “innovation pressures”.
The fully-remote firm says it will keep the fund open for another 12 months as it aims to increase its volume to €200m.
The portfolio
Founded in 2021, Kompas’ portfolio includes AI-powered supplier risk management solution Prewave and green chemical company Again, which turns CO2 into acetate and other base chemicals.
Peck says Kompas considers investments in dual use technologies but draws the line at anything “classified as an offensive weapon.”
For example, Peck tells Sifted the firm is looking into a US startup that turns deep-sea water cables into sensitive sensors to detect and track dark, or unregistered, vessels. This could help countries detect foreign vessels seeking to sabotage that infrastructure, he says.
Climate tech is also an important investment area for Kompas. With its last fund, the firm backed UK low carbon cement company Material Evolution and Helios, a US startup replacing coal and hydrogen with sodium to extract iron from ore without releasing CO2.
Some VCs fear Trump’s rollback of support for climate research and other initiatives, and the pressure his administration is exerting on LPs to drop ESG mandates, might affect the supply of growth capital — a large chunk of which comes from US investors — to European climate techs, affecting their ability to scale.
“I have the feeling that there is some level of momentum, especially at the European Investment Bank, to counter some of that dynamic — but at the end of the day, that shortfall from from US investors, who will be naturally more cautious, or potentially even completely move out of that vertical, will be very hard to compensate,” says Peck.
Despite such headwinds, Peck says there are still big opportunities in Europe which has one of the largest industrial bases in the world.
“When you think about addressing grid congestion or the electrification of industrial infrastructure, these things are so vast in scale that even doing just a European play is plenty and will generate fantastic returns.”
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