Mundi Ventures just closed €750 million for Kembara Fund I, marking one of Europe's largest deep tech and climate funds to date. The Spain-based firm is tackling what co-founder Yann de Vries calls Europe's "scale-up problem" - the capital drought that kills promising startups between Series B and global expansion. With backing from the European Investment Fund and a potential final close at €1.25 billion, Kembara is betting big that European deep tech doesn't need more ideas - it needs growth capital to compete.
Europe's deep tech ecosystem has a painful pattern: brilliant university spinouts raise early-stage capital, build revolutionary technology, then hit a wall when it's time to scale. Mundi Ventures just put €750 million on the table to break that cycle.
The Spain-based firm announced the first close of Kembara Fund I, its fifth and largest fund focused squarely on Series B and C rounds for deep tech and climate companies. According to regulatory filings in Spain, the fund could stretch to €1.25 billion at final close - a war chest aimed directly at what co-founder Yann de Vries calls Europe's "scale-up problem."
"Europe doesn't have an innovation problem. It doesn't have a startup problem. The problem it has is a scale-up problem," de Vries told TechCrunch. He should know - the former Atomico partner lived through the nightmare scenario as an executive at Lilium, the German electric aircraft startup that ceased operations in 2024 after raising over $1 billion.
That "traumatizing experience" crystallized Kembara's thesis. The fund plans to write initial checks between €15 million and €40 million into roughly 20 companies, with follow-on capacity reaching €100 million per portfolio company. That's more than the entire size of many European funds, though the landscape is shifting - deep tech firm Elaia partnered with Lazard to form with similar check sizes, while is reportedly raising up to €1 billion.
