World Fund

Introducing Daria Live, a new series from World Fund. Our Managing Partner Daria Saharova walks and talks with the people building and backing Europe's most important deep tech companies. Episode 1: Daria is joined by Herbert Mangesius, founding partner at Vsquared Ventures, on the morning of IQM Quantum Computers’ Nasdaq listing. In this episode: ⚛️ IQM Quantum Computers's Nasdaq listing, seven years after Vsquared Ventures first invested and nearly five years after World Fund joined the cap table. 🔋 Their shared portfolio, cylib and VÆRIDION, and what it takes to get a European deep tech company listing-ready. 🏭 Why Munich keeps producing global deep tech leaders. Watch episode 1 here.

Make the electrode cheaper and the whole battery gets cheaper🔋 That is what our portco Anaphite is doing. Electrode coating carries a large share of a cell factory's capex and energy. Bristol-based Anaphite has built a dry process that does the same job without solvent and without long drying ovens. Their Dry-Coating Precursor (DCP®) technology turns active material into a uniform powder made for high-speed dry coating. The gains compound: up to 40% cheaper electrodes, up to 90% less energy, and 15% less factory floor space. They have secured £1.2 million from the UK government's DRIVE35 Innovation Fund for Project SAVI, a £2.7 million programme, to scale LFP production to 25kg batches, run 100-metre double-sided electrodes at 25 metres per minute, and put demonstration electrodes in the hands of battery manufacturers. LFP is the chemistry the volume market is moving to, and cheaper electrodes are how European cell manufacturing competes on cost rather than on subsidy. World Fund co-led ANAPHITE's Series A alongside Maniv in 2024. Congrats to Joe Stevenson, Alex Hewitt and the team 👏 More in the comments👇

While I worked for Angela Merkel, I watched Europe lose the solar industry. Wind nearly went the same way. Now this could happen to batteries (did it already?), robotics and compute. 🇸🇪 This week in Malmö I get to dig into all of it with Iris ten Have, PhD, Ethan Sohn, and Julien Fredonie at CVC Bridges, a side event at The Drop. Thanks to the Bridges team for organizing ( Stanish Gunasekaran 💪) 👏 Link to the event in the comments. 👇 World Fund

Europe can now reach orbit from European soil 🚀 Congratulations to the Isar Aerospace team, whose Spectrum rocket reached orbit on only its second test flight, launching from Andøya in northern Norway. For European startups, the constraint has never been only the rocket. Most of the continent's satellites launch from Kourou in French Guiana, thousands of kilometres from the factories that build them. 🛰️ Our portfolio company Space Forge, which uses microgravity to manufacture advanced materials in orbit, shipped its satellite across the Atlantic last year to launch on a SpaceX rocket. "Isar enhances Europe's capabilities, and everything we want to do in orbit," says Daria Saharova, Managing Partner, World Fund. European launch capacity means infrastructure for climate monitoring, connectivity, navigation and security. Five more Spectrum rockets are in production near Munich, and a third flight from Andøya is already booked. Thanks to Siôn Lawrence-Geschwindt and the Impact Loop VC team for having us in the piece. Full article in the comments 👇

Europe's next lithium mine is a battery recycling plant in Bavaria ⚡ Over the summer, our portfolio company cylib took over a battery recycling plant in Wernberg-Köblitz and is bringing it back into operation. 🔋 Up to 10,000 tonnes of end-of-life EV batteries a year 🏭 Discharge, disassembly and mechanical processing on site 📅 Production expected from Q4 2026, full capacity by the end of 2027 The black mass produced in Bavaria feeds cylib's hydrometallurgical plant under construction at CHEMPARK Dormagen, where it becomes lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt and manganese again. As we set out in our Europe's Power Play report, the EU imports nearly 100% of its processed lithium from China, while Europe faces 700,000 tonnes of battery waste by 2035. Recovering over 90% of those materials at home turns a liability into a European resource. The Bavarian site is cylib's first step into collection and pre-processing, placed next to southern Germany's automotive and battery manufacturing cluster. World Fund has backed cylib since 2023, and raw-material self-reliance is a major part of our why. Full announcement from cylib in the comments👇

Europe doesn't have a money problem, it has an allocation problem⚡ That was the through-line of our 6th event of the Climate Tech Meetup series, Financing Scale, which we co-hosted yesterday in Berlin with Tech for Net Zero and the German Energy Agency (dena). Here are some of the key takeaways: 💶 Katharina Beck, Member of the German Bundestag (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), put it plainly: the capital is here, but it is asleep. European pension funds put around 0.1% of their assets into venture capital, US funds put more than ten times that. Germany raised their risk capital quota from 35% to 40% in February 2025, and almost none of that headroom has been used. Her party is planning a "Green WIN" initiative to connect large capital pools with startups and scaleups. 🏗️ Emanuel Heisenberg, Co-founder & CEO, ecoworks, made the case for the state as a customer, not only a funder. ecoworks won important contracts, yet tender rules demanding five years of large balance sheets still lock scaleups out of public procurement. 💥 Tobias Sodoge, Co-founder & CEO, NeoCarbon, described a funding gap from the inside. A co-founder leaves, the market turns, a grant tranche stalls, and nobody wants to be first back in. The sums needed to bridge that are small. The consequences of not bridging it are not. 🎓 Both founders also named university IP terms as a block on spinouts. 📊 Jan Schierle, CFO, World Fund, argued that financing scale is a sequence, not a round. As technology, production and demand are proven, cheaper capital should progressively take over from venture equity. For VCs, that also means engaging early with different types of lenders and capital providers, so that the next layer of capital already knows the portfolio companies before it is needed. Thank you to our moderator, Anne Biedermann from Beyond Returns, to our speakers, and to Tech for Net Zero and the German Energy Agency (dena) for co-hosting. More of this at the next Climate Tech Meetup 🌍

Quantum computing is racing towards devices that will fundamentally change the future of compute, accelerating AI development, as well as climate research. Mark Bergen at Bloomberg Businessweek has published an in-depth profile of World Fund portfolio company IQM Quantum Computers, tracing how the Finnish spinout became one of the few companies building full-stack quantum computers at scale. We backed IQM because we believe quantum can become one of the foundational technologies of the next industrial era. Full piece in the link in comments👇

We are excited to announce that Megan Pini is now Climate Manager at World Fund 🌱 In her new role, Megan will continue to support our impact team, with a focus on climate modelling and impact across the portfolio. Megan holds a Master's degree from the University of Cambridge, where she researched how investors scale climate technologies from research to commercial deployment, alongside her work on ESG and impact at HV. Before that, she held leadership roles at European e-mobility companies, driving commercial growth and market adoption of climate technologies. She's also a Domain Expert at Carbon13, a Fulbright Fellow, and holds a BA in Government from Skidmore College. Congratulations, Megan 👏 We're glad to have you continuing this journey with us!

Scaling hardware in deep tech takes more than good engineering ⚡ It takes capital and policy willing to move at the same speed. That's why we're co-hosting Climate Tech Meetup, Vol. 6: Financing Scale, together with Tech for Net Zero and the German Energy Agency (dena) next week. This edition's topic: European best practices for scaling hardware innovation, discussed by those setting policy, writing checks, and building the technology itself. On stage we will have: 🔹 Katharina Beck, Member of the German Bundestag, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen 🔹 Jan Schierle, CFO at World Fund 🔹 Tobias Sodoge, Co-founder & CEO, NeoCarbon 🔹 Emanuel Heisenberg, Co-founder & CEO, ecoworks 🔹 Anne Biedermann, Wealth Partner for Women & Family Capital, Beyond Returns, as moderator 📅 September 9, 2026, from 2 pm 📍 Future Energy Lab, Berlin If you are a deep tech founder or investor, register at the link in comments👇

Europe's next era of leadership is being built right now, and this September we're at the events where it's happening 🌍 We wrapped TechBBQ in Copenhagen last week, and the World Fund team is heading straight into a packed September, meeting investors, founders, and policymakers building tomorrow’s frontier tech. Here are some of the events where you might meet us. 📍 Paris – Super Climate, 7 September 📍 Paris – IPEM Global, 8-10 September 📍 Berlin – Climate Tech Meetup, Vol. 6: Financing Scale, our own event organised alongside Tech for Net Zero and the German Energy Agency (dena), 9 September 📍 Malmö – The Drop, 15-16 September 📍 Munich – our own event during Oktoberfest, 21 September More on the calendar. The season's only just beginning 🙌