Merantix Capital has closed a €103 million fund to invest in early-stage native AI teams throughout Europethe Berlin company announced on June 4. The fund is more than three times the size of its first vehicle, which co-founders Rasmus Rothe and Adrian Locher raised around €30 million, and expands the company’s reach from companies built in-house to startups founded anywhere on the continent.
The structure is the distinctive part. The fund is divided equally: half of its capital goes to founders working with the Merantix team from the “pre-idea” stage, validating concepts through the company’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 company plans around 40 investments in total, with checks ranging between €1 million and €3 million, 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 in the sectors where it says Europe’s strength lies, naming logistics, manufacturing, energy, finance, healthcare, life sciences, robotics, enterprise software and physical AI.
The framework the founders use is the “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 aims to close.
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It is a continuation of the thesis that Merantix has held since its founding a decade ago, that the value of AI lies less in horizontal models than in integrating the technology within specific sectors where a company already has deep relationships.
It is already being implemented. Investments mentioned include Droidrun, which builds a native AI agent infrastructure for mobile devices, Arqh, focused on logistics optimization, and Outpost Biographythat applies AI to human microbiology.
Several other companies in the portfolio remain secret, spanning logistics, manufacturing, recruiting, ERP, energy and fashion technology. The first fund had supported incubations of studios such as revel8, Deltia, Vara and Cambrium.
Limited partners reflect the discourse facing the industry. Merantix named Union Investment, forklift maker Jungheinrich, KPMG Germany and two US philanthropies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the WK Kellogg Foundation, along with family offices and institutional investors.
The firm describes several of these relationships as strategic partnerships rather than passive controls, offering LPs access to early-stage AI companies and pilot opportunities within their own operations.
The fund is located inside a larger apparatus. Merantix Capital is part of the Merantix Group, which also manages the Berlin AI Campus, home to more than 80 resident companies and around 300 events a year, an AI Center in London, AI House Davos and Merantix Momentum, an AI business services arm with more than 70 engineers.
That ecosystem, the firm argues, is what founders in its portfolio get in addition to money: a network of talent and a set of corporate design partners aimed at generating early traction. The capital is the owner; the surrounding platform is the part that Merantix sells.
