Fly Ventures sets its eyes on technical founders with a fresh €80M fund

Fly Ventures, the Berlin-based VC that invests in seed-stage European startups within enterprise and deep tech, has launched its third fund at €80 million. The firm raised its last €53 million fund in 2020.

Aiming at technical founders, the firm claims Fund III was oversubscribed and raised in a single closing. Meanwhile, the small increase in fund size reflects the firm’s desire to operate as a boutique firm.

Matuschka told TechCrunch: “We like doing things that at the time, other people think, what the…  material science and AI?! These days, more people do it, but our game plan is to do these kinds of investments two or three years before anybody else cares.”

Founded by Gabriel Matuschka and Fredrik Bergenlid, Fly Ventures invests €1-4 million in rounds of €2-10 million at the inception stage. 

With Matt Wichrowski, Marie Brayer, Bergenlid, and Matuschka, the firm operates in an equal-GP model of four partners each distributed across Berlin, London, Paris, and Zurich.

“I think the Berlin/London thing specifically is also plus Munich, because from Berlin you can cover Munich. And for the more technical stuff, Munich tends to be a bit stronger. But it was always clear you had to do Germany and the UK. Then I guess over the last four years or so, Paris, on the more technical side, also really accelerated, which is the reason why we also added Marie, who is based in Paris,” said Matuschka.

Bergenlid previously worked at Google on Google Assistant, and Matuschka previously founded travel shopping club TripHunter (acquired by brands4friends, now owned by eBay).

AI has so far accounted for about 45% of Fly’s investments, with vertical applications and industrial tech taking up 35%, and dev tools/infrastructure taking up 20%.

In its portfolio exists clinical trials marketplace Inato, anti-money-laundering startup Salv, and cybersecurity startup GitGuardian.

Another, Wayve, recently raised $1.05B in a Series C round led by SoftBank to progress autonomous driving with self-learning technology. 

It’s also invested in Lakera, a Zurich-based startup that aims to protect enterprises from LLM vulnerabilities, and Orbital Materials, a UK-based company developing foundation models for materials science.