The world immediately is riven by cultural variations, political divisions, and geopolitical disputes — a difficult setting for any investor trying to find startups that may develop giant sufficient to ship venture-scale returns.
Kompas VC has developed a regionally delicate technique to assist it navigate, and spend money on, this fragmented world. And it’s placing contemporary capital in the direction of this strategy with a brand new €160 million fund ($187.5 million), the agency advised TechCrunch.
“We see the world actually falling into three important spheres of financial exercise, of political exercise — the U.S., Europe, and China,” Sebastian Peck, associate at Kompas VC, advised TechCrunch. “We definitely see immediately that these three domains comply with very, very completely different trajectories.”
Kompas has staked its popularity on backing startups that sort out core industrial competitiveness challenges, from manufacturing and provide chains to important infrastructure and sustainability. These themes haven’t disappeared, however completely different areas emphasize them to various levels.
“There was loads of enthusiasm round these themes again in 2021,” Peck mentioned. “In 2026, we’re in a really, very completely different paradigm. It’s all about AI, it’s all about quick development, very explosive development. Lots of massive subjects that we partially play to but in addition will not be actually a part of what we stand for.”
“Our focus is within the bodily world, something round producing bodily items,” he added, saying that Kompas focuses on startups engaged on decarbonization, productiveness, and threat administration. “We’ve discovered our area of interest.”
That area of interest seems to be fairly broad. Reshoring is en vogue in almost each market, and relying on the startup, these markets usually have greater than sufficient scale for a agency like Kompas.
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Although dwarfed by some enterprise funds today, Kompas’s newly raised second fund ought to give it ample alternative to steer early stage rounds with checks starting from €3 million to €5 million.
As a European fund, Kompas has entry to a spread of founders and startups within the area. However it should weigh how world fragmentation would possibly restrict the potential for some to ship enterprise returns. Peck cites prefab housing for instance. The strategy is broadly utilized in Scandinavian international locations, nevertheless it isn’t as widespread in Germany or the remainder of Europe, not to mention the US.
“It seems like such an intuitive resolution. It’s a product that’s successfully an industrial product. It must be extremely scalable,” he mentioned. Finally, the rationale it doesn’t resonate exterior Scandinavia has extra to do with “cultural conditioning” than the know-how itself, he mentioned. “In that business, if the U.S. isn’t the market you may go to, you could look very, very rigorously at whether or not there’s a big sufficient addressable market.”
The fragmentation extends past housing. For instance, in Europe, sustainability remains to be broadly enticing, in distinction to the U.S., the place the theme doesn’t have the cachet it did a number of years in the past.
Nonetheless, lots can change rapidly, Peck acknowledges. “We’re investing over 10-, 15-year horizons. That’s a couple of legislative durations to bridge, and generally issues swing in sudden instructions.”
The shifting panorama poses a problem, but in addition a possibility for a smaller investor like Kompas. “I believe there’s a fantastic area for extremely targeted, extremely specialised, smaller funds like ours to be the primary check-in and produce sweep up sure themes and sure founders,” Peck mentioned.
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