Plural

Exciting news! ?? Thrilled to share that we’ve raised a fresh €400M fund to continue backing the most ambitious founders on consequential missions to change the world through technology. This new fund signals a strong belief in the quality of founders and companies emerging from Europe by some of the most sophisticated LPs on both sides of the Atlantic. In our first 18 months, we’ve invested in 26 transformative companies across 6 countries, including Denmark, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and US. These exceptional teams are making important progress across a range of sectors, including AI (e.g. Robin AI or Unitary) frontier tech (e.g. Proxima Fusion or VSPARTICLE ), climate & energy (e.g. Field or Isometric)) and health & tech bio (e.g. Sano Genetics or Teton), and we’re honoured that they’ve chosen Plural to join them on their transformative journeys. We’ve now raised €660M in total to back important missions and have a GDP-level impact in Europe, address systemic risks and reduce the opportunity gap worldwide through the companies we back. Thanks to everyone who has been part of the Plural journey so far. We’re just getting started! https://lnkd.in/epxdmQAG

"When a market is changing this much, you have a very dynamic game board so new entrants can come in and the market can be very substantially disrupted." - Ian Hogarth interviewed at Slush by CNBC's Arjun Kharpal The full wide-ranging interview here: https://lnkd.in/ehfER6Yy

“Clean energy to power human ambition.” Proxima CEO Francesco Sciortino joined Plural’s Ian Hogarth and newcleo's Elisabeth Rizzotti onstage at Slush in Helsinki for a conversation on the state of European energy innovation. A few takeaways from the discussion: ? Europe has plenty of competitive advantages in the race to commercial fusion, including the ability to build on decades of publicly funded research and the world’s most advanced stellarator, W7-X at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. With European energy security more pressing than ever, the time to leverage those advantages is now. ? Recent technological advances — and an influx of investor interest — have finally brought #fusionenergy to the brink of reality. We must move with the speed and at the scale required to make fusion a key part of the global climate solution by putting fusion power plants on the grid in the coming decade. The potential market for those power plants is virtually infinite, but it begins here in Europe. ? Public-private partnerships are crucially important for the fusion industry, as is government support — but private fusion companies like Proxima must lead on engineering. That means starting to build, now, to lead Europe into a fusion-powered future. #Slush2024 #DeepTech #CleanEnergy #ClimateTech #Startups

???? Thrilled to share that James Regan, CEO of Oriole Networks, presented today on the Startup Stage at Slush to a packed house!? The theme? Accelerating machine learning in a low-carbon world — a mission at the core of what we do at Oriole Networks.? We’re incredibly proud to be part of this vibrant community and to share our vision for a sustainable, tech-driven future. ??? #Slush2024 #LowCarbonAI #MachineLearning #Sustainability #Startups

Congratulations to our friends at Atomico for creating the first ever documentary about the European tech ecosystem, which features our very own Taavet Hinrikus on his journey building Wise, alongside other legendary entrepreneurs and executives, including Niklas Zennstr?m, Daniel Ek, Reshma Sohoni, Rene Haas, Gillian Tans, Alex Kendall, Pieter Van Der Does, Ingrid Lunden, Bastian Nominacher and Joanna Shields. Watch the full documentary below, or join the special screening tomorrow at?Slush?at 9am on the Founder Stage.?https://lnkd.in/dzPjV5B??

AI has accelerated materials discovery, akin to advances in protein folding and language models, but often struggles to translate predictions to the physical world due to the lack of experimental data. AI at Meta just announced that they took on a new bold domain. They ran ~700 million AI-accelerated simulations, analyzed 20,000 theoretical materials and synthesized ~600 brand new metal alloys with novel properties for catalysis. This exercise bridges the gap between simulations and reality like nothing else, accelerating new materials development by 10-100x. The resulting material set now becomes part of the Open Catalyst library, and can be used to create novel electrocatalysts for carbon capture and other applications to solve our climate crisis. None of this would have been possible without a frontier tech startup from Europe that Meta and University of Toronto relayed on this work. Because it is VSPARTICLE that have created the machines that make software defined materials at scale. When I first met founder Aaike van Vugt, Tobias Pfeiffer and Tobias Coppejans about three years ago, I was blown away by the technology their team in Delft, Netherlands were developing. VSParticle’s technology can break most of the periodic table down to the nano-level particles, mix and match those, and “print” the result physically out. Turning software-defined “dream” of a material into a physical, real thing is magical, and accelerates the discovery of next-generation materials. This breakthrough technology holds significant potential for addressing global challenges such as the climate crisis. VSParticle’s collaboration with Meta's FAIR research team is a huge step for how this vision from a decade ago becomes real. Meta runs a mean AI shop, but without VSParticle's technology it would have taken them years or decades in wet labs to produce actual samples of their theoretical discoveries. This would have made the rapid training loops for their AI infeasible. Decarbonising society requires technology like VSParticle's as we need to manipulate molecules, not just bits. It’s because of companies like VSParticle that I believe that Europe has what it needs to be the exporter of the tech that will change the climate crisis. We have the universities, the entrepreneurs, investors and the policymakers here willing to create and support these kinds of complex deep technologies that will make a difference globally.? ? Congratulations from all of us at Plural to the VSParticle team and here’s to the next million new materials found by AI!

Honored to be included in Capital Magazine’s Top 40 Under 40 list for 2024! The award celebration on Friday included leaders of major industrial groups, economics professors, startup founders, people from all parts of society… an exciting group to exchange thoughts with. There was a good sense of urgency to pull Germany and Europe out of the current sluggish situation. While addressing a much needed reboot, especially in relation to the recent U.S. elections, Simon J?ger (MIT Department of Economics) was asked “have the people heard the shot?” — in other words, do you think that people really understand how precarious our situation is today? — and he could only reply: “I certainly hope so”. So while it’s nice to celebrate an award, the moment is critical — and I’d rather take this as a call to action. Europe needs to develop new disruptive industries. That’s the task ahead for Proxima Fusion. What we're critically missing is not funding (but yes, we need funding) or regulation (yes, we need regulation), but most importantly, outstandingly passionate individuals willing to join the team and find their life's mission in fusion. (our open positions: https://lnkd.in/dTaWuKgV) Stellarators are our best chance to bring #fusion to the grid in time to have an impact on addressing the climate crisis. Proxima’s key milestones ahead — the demonstration of a 20T HTS magnet at scale and a net-energy steady-state stellarator — must be met on time and on budget, to show that we can really do this. Thanks to Capital and Hannah Schw?r for the award — my hope is that this contributes to raising awareness of technology that matters, capable of changing Germany, Europe, and the wider world. https://lnkd.in/dqiexyGP Photo Credit: Peter Oliver Wolff

L'histoire du spatial continue de s'écrire en Européens. De Munich à Mérignac, félicitations à la start-up franco-allemande The Exploration Company qui lève 150 millions d'euros pour construire la première capsule spatiale européenne !

Plural is co-leading, with Balderton Capital, the €150m Series B in The Exploration Company. It is the largest Series B in a European space startup to date, at the measure of one of the largest commercial opportunities of this century and the urgency for Europe to maintain its sovereignty. The TEC team has built a space capsule that can deliver cargo and free-fly in low earth orbit with market-leading pricing, while aggressively working towards re-entry & reusability. It can be used not only for transport but also orbital monitoring, research and eventually even mining. The space industry is set to grow from $630bn in 2023 to $1.8tn in 2035, but SpaceX is currently the only company capable of re-entry in the West, translating to one of the most striking exemples of supply constrained industry with a 2-year backlog for anyone wanting to launch payloads into space. TEC has shown that it can deliver results at a speed that are heretic in this industry in Europe, launching the first version of its capsule in under 3 years, while winning major grants and building strong relationships with commercial space stations. It’s managed this under the leadership of Hélène Huby, a founder with more than a decade of experience working on space technologies for prime contractors like Airbus & Arianespace, combined with a rare level of obsession, grit & drive even by entrepreneurial standards. Over decades, Europe has invested billions of Euros into spacecraft, propulsion and cargo capabilities, producing a world class talent base, becoming the most important strategic partner to the US’s presence in space. We need to revert the last decades of decay & bet on entrepreneurial innovation. In the US it took an Elon Musk to transform the industry, with SpaceX coming out of nowhere to become a $200bn+ company. Now, in Hélène, we have an entrepreneur with the audacity to catalyse our own home-grown industry, secure our future in space and meet a huge commercial need. This new precedent sends a message to European founders working on hard problems that there is strategic capital in the continent to back you.

Congrats to Robin AI led by formidable CEO Richard Robinson on their latest $25m funding round. Robin AI’s landgrab continues and they are now the leading provider of legal AI for business. We at Plural doubled down in this round alongside several of Robin’s customers, including PayPal Ventures. Jeremy Kahn at Fortune captures perfectly the reason they win and expand with customers: “It’s a combination of doing things that the models are currently capable of, but also investing in what is just out of reach today, and then using humans in the loop to bridge the capability gap.” https://lnkd.in/eU6E9SMA