Student spinout First Momentum Ventures closes €35M Fund II for deep tech startups

First Momentum Ventures today announces the close of its oversubscribed €35 million Fund II The fund is built by engineers and scientists, specifically designed to support deeply technical founders at the very start of their journey.

While deep tech is booming — now accounting for 44 per cent of all tech investments in Europe — most technical founders still face a familiar challenge: raising capital at the pre-seed stage from investors who understand the science and the scale of what they’re building.

“Most VCs wait for traction. We invest when there’s only a spark in the lab,” said Sebastian Böhmer, Founding Partner at First Momentum.

“Because we speak the same language, we see the potential others miss — and we help shape that spark into a company.”

With a team of engineers, researchers, and operators from MIT, KIT, Max Planck, LMU, and more, First Momentum has grown from a student initiative into one of Europe’s most active early-stage deep tech investors. Over the last seven years, the firm has invested in almost 50 companies, with several already securing allocations from top international VCs such as Khosla Ventures and Insight Partners.

With its new €35M Fund II — an almost 10x increase from its debut in 2018 — First Momentum writes first checks between €200k and €1M and supports more deeply technical teams across Europe, particularly in the areas of New Industrials, Energy, and Compute. 

In industrial tech, this means backing innovations like robotics, automation, industrial AI, and novel materials, reshaping how industrial enterprises operate and transforming supply chains from the ground up. In energy, the firm focuses on enabling the real transition — investing in advanced renewables, grid infrastructure, AI-driven optimization, and energy storage. 

In computing, First Momentum supports the AI era's foundational technologies, including semiconductors, edge computing, distributed systems, quantum computing, and next-generation data storage.

According to Andreas Fischer, Partner at First Momentum Ventures, we’re entering a decade where the biggest opportunities lie in reinventing the physical world — how we produce, move, and power things:

“Compute, energy, and industrial systems are all hitting tipping points at once, and founders with deep technical insight are the ones unlocking that potential. We believe the next European unicorns won’t come from incremental software — they’ll come from rethinking infrastructure, atoms, and electrons. That’s exactly where we invest.”

From day one, First Momentum has invested in creating a community for the next generation of technical founders. Since its start, the team has built a pan-European Venture Scout network embedded in universities, research hubs, and Deep Tech startups. Currently, more than 100 Scouts function as an extended arm to the VC in the local and sector-specific hubs, identifying promising startups early on and supporting First Momentum and its portfolio companies through scientific and industry expertise and stakeholder introductions.

With Fund II, it’s doubling down on these efforts to push forward the European Deep Tech ecosystem:

• The Deep Tech Hardware Napkin guides technical founders on their fundraising journey “from zero to one.”
• The Spinoff Summit, Europe’s platform for early-stage academic entrepreneurship, helps scientists to transfer their research into businesses
• A PhD Fellowship program helps technical talent explore entrepreneurship and VC