Merantix Capital has closed a €103m fund to invest in early-stage, AI-native teams across Europe, the Berlin firm announced on 4 June. The fund is more than three times the size of its first vehicle, which co-founders Rasmus Rothe and Adrian Locher raised at roughly €30m, and it widens the firm’s remit from companies built in-house to startups founded anywhere on the continent.
The structure is the distinctive part. The fund is split evenly: half its capital goes to founders who work with the Merantix team from the “pre-idea” stage, validating concepts through the firm’s ecosystem and building at the Merantix AI Campus in Berlin, and the other half goes to direct investments in pre-seed and seed-stage companies.
The firm plans around 40 investments in total, with cheques running from about €1m to €3m, and investment teams based in Berlin and London writing across Europe.
The thesis is industry-specific rather than horizontal. Merantix is targeting teams applying AI to the sectors where it says Europe’s strength lies, naming logistics, manufacturing, energy, finance, healthcare, life sciences, robotics, enterprise software, and physical AI.
The framing the founders use is “connective tissue,” the gap between Europe’s industrial base and the startups trying to rebuild those industries with machine learning, which is the gap they say the fund exists to close.
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It is a continuation of the thesis Merantix has run since its founding a decade ago, that AI’s value lies less in horizontal models than in embedding the technology inside specific sectors where a firm already holds deep relationships.
It is already deploying. Named investments include Droidrun, which builds mobile-native AI agent infrastructure, Arqh, focused on logistics optimisation, and Outpost Bio, which applies AI to human microbiology.
Several more portfolio companies remain in stealth, spanning logistics, manufacturing, recruiting, ERP, energy, and fashion technology. The first fund had backed studio incubations including revel8, Deltia, Vara, and Cambrium.
The limited partners reflect the industry-facing pitch. Merantix named Union Investment, the forklift maker Jungheinrich, KPMG Germany, and two US philanthropies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, alongside family offices and institutional investors.
The firm describes several of these relationships as strategic partnerships rather than passive cheques, offering LPs access to early-stage AI companies and pilot opportunities inside their own operations.
The fund sits within a larger apparatus. Merantix Capital is one part of the Merantix Group, which also runs the Berlin AI Campus, home to more than 80 resident companies and some 300 events a year, a London AI Hub, AI House Davos, and Merantix Momentum, an enterprise-AI services arm with more than 70 engineers.
That ecosystem, the firm argues, is what its portfolio founders get on top of the money: a talent network and a set of corporate design partners meant to generate early traction. The capital is the headline; the surrounding platform is the part Merantix is selling.
