The pan-European VC firm has held its first close at €70M for Fund III, backed by Germany’s KfW, Spain’s SETT, and a network of family offices, with a mandate to find European companies building on the AI wave.
Samaipata, the pan-European venture capital firm founded in Madrid in 2016, has launched its third fund with a target of €110 million and an explicit focus on AI-native startups at the earliest stages of their development. The firm announced this week that the fund has already held its first close at €70 million.
The investor base for Fund III includes institutional names with significant reach: Germany’s state development bank KfW, Spain’s SETT (the state entity for industrial transformation and digitalisation, often referred to informally as the “SEPI digital”), and a group of prominent Spanish family offices.
The first close represents 64% of the target, a strong initial showing for a firm that has been building its track record since backing companies in the marketplace and platform space.
Samaipata was co-founded by Eduardo Díez-Hochleitner and José del Barrio. Del Barrio was previously the co-founder of La Nevera Roja, a food delivery platform sold to Rocket Internet, one of those backstories that tends to open doors in VC circles.
The firm now manages approximately €250 million in assets and has backed 44 startups across Europe.
From platforms to AI infrastructure
The shift to AI-native is deliberate and marks a meaningful evolution in Samaipata’s thesis. The firm made its name backing digital platforms with network effects, the kind of businesses that become more valuable as they add users.
Fund III extends that logic into a new architectural layer: instead of backing companies that build platforms on top of existing software, Samaipata wants to back companies that are building AI systems from the ground up, designed for a world in which the underlying intelligence is generative.
The fund will invest in 25 to 30 companies, with the capacity to allocate up to €10 million per startup over the course of the relationship. The focus, according to the firm, is on B2B companies that can abstract the complexity of AI deployment for real-world use cases, a framing that covers a lot of ground, from vertical AI applications to enterprise tooling.
Founders in the portfolio will have access to a network of operating partners with backgrounds at companies including Anthropic, Google, Airbnb, Spotify, and N26. That kind of practical expertise at the interface between AI capability and commercial deployment is increasingly what distinguishes the useful VCs from the credentialled ones.
The European angle
Samaipata’s pan-European positioning matters in this context. European AI startups have historically struggled to match the valuations and velocity of their US counterparts, in part because of fragmented regulation and a thinner institutional investor base.
The participation of KfW and SETT signals growing state-level conviction that Europe needs dedicated vehicles for AI investment at the seed and early stage, a view that is hardening across the continent as US and Chinese AI development accelerates.
The fund aims to consolidate a broader investor base over the coming months as it progresses towards its €110 million target. The final close timeline was not disclosed.
