HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds

35°C heat. Cold drinks. 60+ VCs. No agenda needed. 🌞 Last week, the 3rd Munich VC Sundowner brought together the Munich VC scene at Seehaus in the English Garden, hosted by HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds, DeepTech & Climate Fonds (DTCF), and Cipio Partners. The evening was all about making connections and strengthening the relationships that make our industry work. See you at the 4th edition. CC: Nils M., Thomas Lenz, Lena Stache, Timo Bertsch, Jan Kaetker, Petra Rupprecht

🌇 Pitch, play & party: here's what happened at the 2nd Bonn VC & PE Night. More than 100 guests from the VC, private equity, and startup world gathered on the rooftop terrace of cronn in Bonn, overlooking the Rhine, with great food from Savvy Nosh and even better conversations. Five startups took the stage for live pitch interviews hosted by our investment manager Max Bergmann: Winolo, OMMM Operations Management Solutions GmbH, FANtium, Seven Education, and Sunhat, sharing candid stories about their companies, growth plans, and founder journeys. A big thank you to our co-hosts Bonn Open, cronn GmbH, Capnamic, DeepTech & Climate Fonds (DTCF), neoteq ventures, and ECBF VC. Special thanks to Simon Schneider (neoteq) for co-organizing, and to Jobst Eßmeyer and Denise Lindemann (cronn) for their incredible hospitality. We're looking forward to Round 3 in 2027. 🚀

From the schoolyard to a European EdTech champion 🏫   What does it take to turn a school project into a platform used by 20,000+ schools across Europe? And what do those seven hours have to do with it?   We spoke with Daniel Zacharias, CEO & Co-Founder of Seven Education (formerly known as Sdui) about the journey from Koblenz to a European EdTech platform, the strategy behind seven acquisitions across DACH and Spain, and why he believes the education system deserves better than what technology has delivered so far. He also shares what resilience really means when you're building a company for the long run — and what advice he'd give to founders just starting out. A journey HTGF and our Principal Dr. Maurice Kügler have been part of since 2019.   Read the full interview here 👇 https://lnkd.in/eyGb2ige

Europe cannot rebuild the past. But it can build something better. 🏭   Europe's reindustrialisation challenge is not about recreating the factories of the 1980s. It's about building something entirely new: cleaner, more automated, more resilient. And the clock is ticking.   Our Senior Investment Manager Anne Umbach joined New Wave — Europe's leading climate-tech podcast — to discuss one of the defining questions for Europe's future: Can Startups Reindustrialize Europe?   Around the table:  👉🏼 Michel Hunsicker, Head of EDF's investment fund  👉🏼 Anne Umbach, Senior Investment Manager at HTGF for Industrial, Climate & DeepTech  👉🏼 Tom Vroemen, Founder & CEO of Tetmet   What they unpack:   ➡️ What reindustrialisation actually means in practice and on what timeline  ➡️ Why startups need venture customers willing to make bold commitments ➡️ Why Europe's engineering talent and political ambition aren't enough without faster capital and a greater appetite for step changes  ➡️ The real cost of moving too slowly: Europe's most ambitious companies may end up financed and built elsewhere   The key insight: no single actor can do this alone. It takes a three-way alliance between startups, investors, and industrial partners.   🎧 Listen now on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/dFrT_-6f

🧪 Chemistry founders, this one's for you. If you're building in chemistry or chemical energy conversion, here's your chance to pitch in front of the people who matter: investors, corporate VCs, and industry decision-makers who are actively looking for what you're building. Chemistry Pitch Day 2026 📅 25 November | Mülheim / Ruhr | Organized by HTGF & Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion (MPI CEC) Applications are open until 1 November 2026. Submit your company data and a non-confidential pitch deck — our investment teams will review every submission personally. The event is free of charge and held in English. If you've been waiting for the right room to be in, this is it. Apply now. 👇 https://lnkd.in/er_3aXhs

🚢 10,000 products. 4,000 to 5,000 hours of manual customs classification. There's a better way.   traide AI is solving exactly that. The Berlin-based startup's AI platform classifies customs tariff codes in seconds: legally defensible, transparent, and automated.   Since 2024, traide AI and PwC Germany have been rethinking customs together, combining AI technology with deep customs-law expertise. The result? Less risk, stronger compliance, and a customs department that shifts from cost factor to strategic value driver.   We sat down with Leonie Althaus (Co-Founder & CEO, traide AI) and Dr. Michael Tervooren (Partner at PwC Deutschland and Head of the Customs & International Trade team) to talk about how the partnership came about, the future of customs teams, and the launch of traide Export.   For HTGF, a satisfying full circle: traide AI has been a portfolio company since 2022 (Maurice Kügler), and PwC Germany a long-standing fund investor. 🤝   👉 Read the full interview: https://lnkd.in/ds_hRBVw

🩺 Save the Date: Digital Health Pitch Day, 4 November 2026 in Munich — and applications are now open. If you're building the future of digital health and want to present your startup to investors, corporate VCs, and industry decision-makers, this is your stage. The event brings together Twip Impact Ventures, HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds, Plug and Play, and TUM Venture Labs — and runs in partnership with Digital Health Summit on 5 November. Here's what you need to know: → Date: 4 November 2026, Munich → Application deadline: 7 October 2026 → Pitch decks screened by experienced investment teams → Free to attend, English-language event → Apply with your company data and a non-confidential pitch deck Spots are limited. We look forward to your deck. 🔗 Apply here: https://lnkd.in/eqC2jdc8

We're proud to back kausable 🎉 The Heidelberg-based frontier AI lab has raised €12 million in seed funding. The round is led by UVC Partners and Entourage Ventures, with participation from HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds, alongside existing investors and angels. kausable is building something fundamentally different from today's LLMs: a reasoning-first foundation model that derives causal structure at inference time, with no retraining required. Trained exclusively on synthetic data, it works precisely where LLMs structurally fail: predictive maintenance, robotics, medical diagnostics, and other safety-critical, data-scarce environments. Founded in 2025 by three physicists from Heidelberg University, Johannes Haux (CEO), Dr. Benjamin Herdeanu (CTO), and Gregor Ramien (COO), the team has already published research with Columbia University and developed TipPFN, a zero-shot forecasting model for rare, high-impact events. As Hendryk Hosemann, Senior Investment Manager at HTGF, puts it: "kausable is proof that Europe's constraints (safety, regulation, zero tolerance for error) can actually be an advantage in the AI race. They're exactly the conditions that produce the next category of frontier AI models." The new capital will be used to grow the team and advance the frontier model. We're excited to be part of this journey.

💡 Europe's competitiveness will not be secured by individual companies, investments, or pilot projects alone. It takes new forms of collaboration between corporates, family businesses, investors, and technology companies. That is exactly what the CVC & OI Summit Europe 2026 is built for, and HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds is proud to be a co-host. 🗓️ From 2 to 4 September 2026, around 80 top decision-makers will gather at IFA Berlin, hosted by the world's leading consumer and home tech event. The format is a working summit, not a conference: small, moderated working sessions where participants bring their own questions on AI adoption, capital allocation, corporate-startup partnerships, and the path from pilot to core business. HTGF brings to this summit what it has built over 20 years: a perspective shaped by 800+ backed startups and a network of 45+ corporates, family offices, and mid-sized companies as fund investors. We have worked at exactly this interface, between ambitious founding teams and established companies wanting to bring innovation into their core business, since day one. 💬 “The Summit brings together decision-makers from CVC, innovation, and strategy at large global companies to address systemic challenges and align corporate innovation, venture activities, and strategic capital. It’s about honest discussions among decision-makers who genuinely want to drive innovation and development forward,” says Dr. Tanja Emmerling, Partner at HTGF. The summit is invite-only. Applications are open via the link in the comments.