The world immediately is riven by cultural variations, political divisions, and geopolitical disputes — a difficult setting for any investor attempting to find startups that may develop massive 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 recent capital in direction of this method with a brand new €160 million fund ($187.5 million), the agency instructed 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, accomplice at VC Compassinstructed TechCrunch. “We definitely see immediately that these three domains observe very, very completely different trajectories.”
Kompas has staked its repute on backing startups that sort out core industrial competitiveness challenges, from manufacturing and provide chains to essential 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. Plenty of massive subjects that we partially play to but additionally usually are not 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 danger administration. “We’ve discovered our area of interest.”
That area of interest seems to be fairly broad. Reshoring is in vogue in almost each market, and relying on the startup, these markets sometimes have greater than sufficient scale for a agency like Kompas.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Although dwarfed by some enterprise funds as of late, Kompas’s newly raised second fund ought to give it ample alternative to guide early stage rounds with checks starting from €3 million to €5 million.
As a European fund, Kompas has entry to a variety 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 method is broadly utilized in Scandinavian nations, but it surely isn’t as frequent in Germany or the remainder of Europe, not to mention the US.
“It looks like such an intuitive answer. It’s a product that’s successfully an industrial product. It ought to be extremely scalable,” he mentioned. In the end, the rationale it doesn’t resonate outdoors Scandinavia has extra to do with “cultural conditioning” than the expertise itself, he mentioned. “In that trade, if the U.S. isn’t the market you possibly can go to, you’ll want to 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 shortly, Peck acknowledges. “We’re investing over 10-, 15-year horizons. That’s just a few legislative durations to bridge, and generally issues swing in sudden instructions.”
The shifting panorama poses a problem, but additionally a chance for a smaller investor like Kompas. “I feel there’s an amazing house for extremely centered, extremely specialised, smaller funds like ours to be the primary check-in and convey sweep up sure themes and sure founders,” Peck mentioned.
If you buy by means of hyperlinks in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t have an effect on our editorial independence.
