World Fund

World Fund Newsletter #6: From first fund to first public company This quarter delivered a first for us. IQM Quantum Computers listed on the Nasdaq, making World Fund the fastest European VC to bring a company public. Here's what you can explore in our latest newsletter: 📊 Read our latest report: Europe's Power Play maps four power-critical sectors, energy, industry, critical materials, and compute, into a $35 trillion+ investment opportunity by 2030. Covered by Resilience Media, with special thanks to Kaya Partners for their contribution. 🇪🇺 Learn from the summit: Our first flagship summit in Berlin brought together more than 400 LPs, founders, VCs, operators and policymakers including former German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, who argued Europe needs a "third way" where the public sector de-risks infrastructure so private capital can scale it. 🔬 Discover new opportunities: Our latest deep dive, Beyond the Drill, explores how biology can unlock the critical minerals the energy transition needs without opening new mines. Co-authored by Principal Dr. Nadine Geiser with Bidra Innovation Ventures, Nucleus Capital, and Forbion. 🚀 Meet the trailblazers: Barocal is replacing climate-warming refrigerant gases with plastic crystals that cool as well as today's compressors while using far less energy (TechCrunch). We co-led Lithosquare's $25m seed round for AI that makes mineral exploration up to 10x more efficient (Sifted). And Freshflow raised its Series A for AI that cuts fresh food waste by up to 30% per store (The Grocer). 🌍 Get ahead on events: We're heading to TechBBQ, The Drop, Impact Week, and Oslo Innovation Week this autumn. Come say hello! Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter linked in the comments and be the first to hear about new reports, upcoming events, and more. Link in the comments👇

From the race to the Moon to the race for critical raw materials, the industries that will define Europe's next decade were up for debate in Munich this past weekend 🌍 World Fund was on stage across the 1E9 & Festival der Zukunft, and one question ran through every session. Can Europe build and own the technologies of the future, or will it watch from the sidelines? 🌕 Who owns the Moon? Daria Saharova moderated the New Space panel with Chiara Manfletti, Herbert Mangesius, Maximilian Strixner, and Victor Maier. The return to deep space is a question of sovereignty: who builds the launch systems and the industrial champions for independent access to space. 🤖 Who wins the robotics race? Robin Neff took on specialised vertical systems versus general-purpose humanoids with Carlo Stern in a ripple, as robotics heads toward a hundred-billion-dollar market this decade. ⛏️ Can biomining secure Europe's raw materials? Dr.-Ing. Mark Windeknecht also debated in a ripple whether biological methods can help supply the copper, nickel and cobalt Europe needs for batteries and semiconductors, with Cristina Doumitrachko. 🏗️ How do we build the future? Dr.-Ing. Mark Windeknecht also joined the panel on circular materials, AI-powered planning and regenerative design in the built environment, alongside Klaus Klaas Loenhart, Sanne van der Burgh, Dirk Hebel and Werner Frosch. 💶 Scaling Europe's deeptech edge. Daria Saharova joined a VC roundtable on what it takes to move European deeptech from breakthrough to scale, with Hampus Jakobsson, Benedikt von Schoeler, Jonas Sommer and Lena Späth. 🚀 Backing the next founders. World Fund's Sebastian Lindner-Liaw sat alongside Michael Jobst on the judging panel of the 1E9 DeepTech Startup Competition, hearing pitches from the teams building the next generation of European climate and deeptech. Europe has the science, the talent and the founders. Ambition and the capital to match it are what will decide the rest. Thank you to Wolfgang Kerler and the 1E9 & Festival der Zukunft team for asking the right questions and for having us this year!

Full-speed compute progress depends on chips. But chips are now so advanced it’s hard for chipmakers to identify faults. This means more waste, lower yields, higher costs and slower progress. That is why at World Fund we led QuantumDiamonds’ €15m equity round, which has been raised alongside €76M in non-dilutive funding from the European Chips Act. QuantumDiamonds has commercialised a quantum-sensing inspection platform that can find hidden defects in complex 3D chip architectures with nanometre precision, without destroying the chip. Why this matters: 💎 QuantumDiamonds has a unique system based on synthetic diamonds for non-destructive current imaging 💚 Minimising Waste: Traditional testing struggles with complex 3D chip architectures. Quantum sensing closes this gap, reducing lost wafers, excursions, and material scrap. 🌍 Slashing Footprints: Because a defective chip consumes the exact same manufacturing energy as a functional one, boosting yield directly drops the carbon footprint per shipped chip. 📈 QuantumDiamonds is already engaged with 9 of the world’s top 10 semiconductor manufacturers and has deployments live in the US and Taiwan This is exactly the kind of company Europe needs to build: frontier technology, born from deep science, scaling into a strategic global market. Congratulations to Kevin Berghoff, Fleming Bruckmaier and the whole QuantumDiamonds team. Read more via the links in comments 👇 Bayern Kapital, IQ Capital, Earlybird Venture Capital, First Momentum Ventures, UnternehmerTUM for Innovators, Creator Fund, Onsight Ventures

Europe needs more builders. Last Wednesday evening, we hosted “What’s Hot in Climate Tech?” at our Munich office together with +Net Positive and the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM). The room brought together 60+ students, founders, operators and investors for an off-the-record discussion on what is worth building now, where capital is flowing, and what it takes to turn strong technical insight into a fundable company. The conversation moved across energy, industry, critical materials, compute, carbon removal, construction and resilient supply chains. The framing around these markets may change, from sustainability to resilience, abundance, energy independence or industrial competitiveness, but the underlying direction has not. Europe has a generational opportunity to rebuild the systems that underpin its economy. For founders, that creates enormous room to build, but also a clear requirement: start with the customer, understand the market deeply, and build where urgency is real. A big thank you to everyone who joined the discussion: Dr.-Ing. Mark Windeknecht, World Fund Elena Ballesteros, Voyager Ventures Elena Harumi Stark, AENU Lisa Oberaigner, Emidat Steffen Garbe, Phlair Lena Sophia Voß, Furo (formerly Lumera) And thank you to Anna Neumann, Sven-Christian Hörner, +Net Positive and Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM) for bringing together such an engaged and thoughtful room. We left energised by the number of people seriously considering what to build next.

IQM Quantum Computers is moving fast after listing last week! IQM just announced it has acquired selected assets of Quantistry GmbH, a Berlin-based developer of cloud-native, AI-powered chemical and materials simulation. Quantum will realise its power when it moves from lab capability to industrial application, and this move is another step in that direction. As IQM Quantum Computers CEO and co-founder Jan Goetz said, the acquisition “accelerates our software development timeline in a capital-efficient way, and brings in a technical team whose expertise will help us deliver cloud-accessible simulation value to enterprise customers”. Let’s go 🚀

Europe’s next industrial era is already being built. A few weeks ago, we brought together our founders, LPs, partners and friends at the World Fund Annual Summit in Berlin. The theme was Built to Scale because that is the question that matters today. Europe has the science, talent and industrial depth to lead the next generation of transformative companies. Now, the challenge is turning that advantage into companies that scale globally. Tech Funding News joined us on the ground and captured the conversations featuring founders and investors across electrification, critical materials, construction, food systems, protein innovation and European sovereignty. Thank you to everyone who shared their perspective: 🛩️ Ivor van Dartel, CEO and co-founder at VÆRIDION 🍫 Dr. Sara Marquart, CTO and co-founder at Planet A Foods ⛏️ Aymeric Préveral-Etcheverry, co-founder and CEO at Lithosquare 🏠 Emanuel Heisenberg, founder and CEO at ecoworks 🌾 Adnan Oner, founder at Farmless 🌍 Daria Saharova, founding partner at World Fund Their message was clear: Europe is not short on ambition. It is building the companies, infrastructure and value chains that will define the next industrial era. The task now is to help them scale faster, commercialise more effectively and build strategic resilience without losing global ambition. Thank you to Tech Funding News for capturing the energy and conviction in the room. Full article available in the comments below. 👇

As IQM Quantum Computers went public, I spoke with its CEO Jan Goetz about its dual listing in the U.S. and Finland. "We decided to take the best out of both worlds," he told me. https://lnkd.in/d5c734kQ

Breaking news: IQM Quantum Computers officially lists on the Nasdaq! IQM is the most commercially viable quantum firm on the planet, having sold more quantum computers than any other company. It's a highly significant day for World Fund as well. This is our first portfolio company to go public. World Fund led IQM’s €128m Series A2 in 2022 because our thesis was clear then, and is even clearer now: Europe must - and can - build global leaders in frontier tech.  Huge congratulations again to Jan Goetz and the entire IQM team. We are proud to continue supporting you as you scale to new heights.

‘The New Drivers of Climate Tech and Industrial-Scale Growth’ - on-stage in Berlin. Ex-WIRED Editor Greg Williams joined us in Berlin for World Fund Berlin 2026, our annual flagship event, earlier this month. Greg moderated a panel alongside World Fund’s Daria Saharova, Robert Habeck, Philippe Tibi and Juha Vartiainen (IQM Quantum Computers). Thanks for coming, Greg! 🌎 https://lnkd.in/eeDwXkVM

What a day we had at World Fund Berlin 2026 🌍 Thank you again to everyone who joined us at the Delphi-Filmpalast during an action-packed week featuring SuperReturn and SuperVenture. This year’s summit theme was Built to Scale: The New Drivers of Climate Tech and Industrial-Scale Growth. On the day, we kept circling back to one question: as capital shifts toward energy security, sovereignty and rapid deployment, what will it take to build and scale Europe's next strategic companies? A few moments from the keynotes stayed with us: 🎤 Robert Habeck, former German Vice-Chancellor, arguing that Europe now needs a “third way” in which political decision-makers help pave the path for private capital through guarantees and de-risked infrastructure models. 🏛️ Levin Holle, Director-General at the Federal Chancellery, speaking about how this is starting to happen, including the expansion of Germany’s WIN Initiative, and the potential for private pension reform, which would deliver more equity investment for fast-growing companies. If there was one takeaway from Berlin, it was that the path to climate leadership and economic sovereignty increasingly looks like the same path. Until next time 🌍 #WFBerlin2026 Daria Saharova, Danijel Višević, Craig Douglas, Tim Schumacher, Jan Schierle, Dr. Nadine Geiser, Dr.-Ing. Mark Windeknecht, Robin Neff, Ivor van Dartel, Adnan Oner, Dr. Sara Marquart, Daniel Rothmund, Hendrik Abel, Xavier Moya, Aymeric Préveral-Etcheverry, Jean Latapy, Greg Williams, Anna Heim, Akansha Dimri, Juha Vartiainen, Philippe Tibi, Thijn van Doorne, Christian Sarwa