KOMPAS VC

Only 9% of plastic ever produced has been recycled. The technologies we have relied on for decades are unlikely to change that. Here's the problem: recycling plastic is hard because it degrades each time it's processed. Heat it, shred it, melt it, and what comes out the other side is lower quality than what went in. That's why virgin plastic, made from oil, stays the default. But if you could skip all of that and break plastic back down to its original building blocks instead? That's the idea behind enzymatic recycling, a fundamentally different approach that uses engineered proteins to dissolve plastic to a molecular level, recovering the same raw materials used to make new plastic from scratch. Same output as oil. Different source. That's exactly what Epoch Biodesign has built. Their AI-accelerated platform designs novel enzymes for some of the hardest plastics to recycle - nylon, PET, and PVC - going where no recycling technology has gone before. We first backed them at Series A. A year on, our conviction has only grown. So we doubled down. In his latest piece, our Partner Sebastian Peck explains: → Why today's recycling infrastructure keeps hitting the same wall → How Epoch's platform turns plastic waste into a reliable industrial feedstock → And why starting with nylon is exactly the right call We joined their $12M round alongside lululemon, Extantia, Happiness Capital | Certified B Corp, and Volkswagen's venture arm Leitmotif, bringing total capital raised to over $50M. 👀 Continue reading https://lnkd.in/eQS7aWmg Jacob Nathan, Sebastian Peck

The weather is warming up, and so is event season. The team has a busy April ahead. Here’s where you can find us: 🇺🇸 VC Platform Summit (San Diego, 13–16 April) Yoobin Jung and Victoria Burrows are joining the global VC platform community, exchanging how funds can better support founders beyond capital - from network access to commercial traction. 🇪🇸 Energy Tech Summit (Bilbao, 15–16 April) Talia Rafaeli, Sebastian Peck, and Summit Rosenberg will be in Bilbao for one of the key gatherings in energy and industrial decarbonisation — bringing together startups, corporates, utilities, and policymakers. Summit Rosenberg will also serve as a jury member for the Energy Tech Challengers competition across the Future of Materials & Manufacturing, Climate Hardware X, and Super Finals tracks. Portfolio company Tibo Energy Management Software will be present as well, with more to share soon. 🇸🇪 Mashup (Malmö, 15–16 April) Martin Pors Jepsen will be in Malmö engaging with the Nordic ecosystem, staying close to emerging companies and technologies shaping industrial systems. 🇩🇪 HANNOVER MESSE (Hannover, 20–24 April) Ilena Mece and Yoobin Jung are heading to Hannover Messe alongside portfolio company United Manufacturing Hub (UMH) - a key moment to see how industrial AI and automation are moving from pilots into real-world deployment. United Manufacturing Hub (UMH) will be exhibiting in Hall 15, Booth F64 — stop by to meet the team and connect with Yoobin Jung. 🇨🇭 Sustainable Buildings & Construction Summit (Lausanne, 20–22 April) Victoria Burrows will be in Lausanne connecting with stakeholders across the built environment, with a focus on how emerging markets approach construction and infrastructure challenges. 🇨🇭 HackSummit (Lausanne, 22–23 April) Ilena Mece will continue in Lausanne, engaging with founders and investors building at the intersection of climate and industrial systems. 🇳🇴 Mesh Nusfjord (Nusfjord, 22–24 April) Sebastian Peck will join the Nordic startup and investor community in a more intimate setting - where early signals around company building and capital formation often emerge. We’ll also be hosting a side event involving deep-sea fishing. More to come. 🇺🇸 SAFE Summit (Washington, D.C., 27–28 April) Summit Rosenberg will be in D.C. engaging with the policy layer shaping energy systems and industrial resilience. If you’re attending any of these or building in industrial technology, let’s chat. You can find out more about our pipeline of events on our website ⤵️ https://lnkd.in/e7agXFZ7 #events #venturecapital #kompasvc

💥 Clothes that can be “eaten” back into raw materials. It sounds abstract until you look at how little of today’s nylon actually gets recycled at scale. Nylon 6,6 is widely used across apparel and automotive, but most recycling methods fail when materials are mixed, coated, or processed in real-world conditions. That’s the problem Epoch Biodesign is solving. Using enzymatic recycling, Epoch breaks down end-of-life nylon into its original building blocks, enabling virgin-quality material to be produced without relying on new petrochemical inputs. Today, the company announced a $12M strategic round — and we are excited to have invested in Epoch alongside lululemon, Happiness Capital | Certified B Corp, Extantia, Leitmotif and others, bringing total funding to $50M+. More importantly, they are now moving from pilot to demonstration scale - a key step toward commercial production. For physical industries, this is what progress looks like: solutions that work not just in controlled environments, but across the realities of industrial supply chains. That is why we invested in Epoch Biodesign - backing a solution that solves a real industrial problem and aligns with our focus on enabling technologies that drive decarbonisation at scale. Good to see this covered by TechCrunch. 👉 Read the full piece here: https://lnkd.in/gkBH5C_r And thanks to Tim De Chant for the feature. Jacob Nathan Sebastian Peck Nick Gosen

After five years at MIPIM, the conversations has moved from what could be built to what actually gets deployed in the built environment. Execution is now the bottleneck and the reasons lie in how the sector operates. From conversations on the ground with Victoria Burrows and Andreas Winter-Extra last week, a few patterns kept coming up: There is no shortage of solutions. The slowdown happens when these solutions need to be embedded into real operations. Industrial workflows are fragmented, involve multiple stakeholders, and run on tight margins. That makes integration costly, slows decision-making, and keeps many technologies stuck in pilot mode rather than deployed across portfolios. At the same time, technology is now central to strategy, influencing how assets are designed, financed, and upgraded. But this raises the bar for execution. Tools are no longer isolated; they need to integrate across systems, data layers, and teams. The more central they become, the harder they are to implement without disrupting existing operations. Execution is also increasingly constrained by factors outside the asset itself. As real estate converges with infrastructure, projects now depend on power availability, grid access, water, and connectivity. These dependencies introduce external bottlenecks - permitting, coordination, and capital allocation — that slow down even well-defined projects. Capital discipline is adding another layer. With more selective funding and a focus on energy resilience, projects need to prove clear financial returns before being deployed. This shifts timelines, limits experimentation, and filters out solutions that cannot demonstrate immediate economic value — even if they are technically viable. 💡A good way to see all of this in practice is housing. Demand is clear, and many solutions exists - from renovation technologies to new delivery models. But execution requires coordination across fragmented stakeholders, regulatory frameworks, infrastructure constraints, and financing structures. Each layers adds friction, which is why delivery continues to lag despite strong demand. That is exactly where the focus needs to be. As a fund, we back founders building technologies that can be deployed within these constraints and support them with the strategic and commercial context needed to navigate complex industrial environments. Because in physical industries, progress is defined by what gets implemented at scale, not what gets built. 👏 Great to reconnect with so many across the industry last week, and to see continued momentum around collaboration as a driver of change. A special thank you to PropTech Denmark, for your hospitaity, and once again creating meaningful exchanges, inspiring connections and fuelling industry collaboration. Michael Ambjorn Rasmus Juul-Nyholm Tomas Jandorf #mipim2026 #proptechdk

🎤 We are all aware that AI is scaling at software speed. But energy infrastructure still moves at the pace of concrete, permitting, and grid upgrades. That tension sat at the centre of the panel our Partner @Talia Rafaeli joined last week at MWC / 4YFN in Barcelona. “Can New Energy and VC Capital Keep Pace with AI?” One thing became clear through the conversation is that AI and energy are no longer separate discussions. The growth of AI is reshaping how we think about grid capacity, energy reliability, infrastructure investment, and the carbon footprint of the digital economy. For us investors, the question is which parts of this challenge are actually venture-scale. The demand for energy to power AI is enormous, but many of the solutions sit in highly capital-intensive sectors traditionally funded through infrastructure or project finance. What is emerging, however, is a new generation of entrepreneurs building technologies and business models at the intersection of energy, software, and infrastructure - from more efficient data centre architectures to new approaches for deploying energy closer to compute. The main takeaway for us is that adaptability across the ecosystem will be essential. As AI demand accelerates, the companies that succeed will likely be the ones that rethink how compute, energy, and capital come together. The intersection of AI, energy, and climate is quickly becoming one of the most important arenas for industrial innovation. And we are only at the beginning. Pol Valls Soler Anish DeAlexandra Rasch Castillo Daniel R. Hires 🌍

Despite the momentum around deep tech, women remain underrepresented among founders. In Germany, only 18.8% of startup founders are women. In capital-intensive fields like AI, biotech, space, and quantum, the number is even lower. International Women’s Day last week triggered discussions about how venture capital is allocated. But in deep tech, the question is more complex. From our perspective as investors, this is partly a pipeline issue. But more importantly, it reflects how technical risk is evaluated, how networks form, and how capital flows in frontier technologies. 📅 24 March | 09:30–11:00 📍 NLND, Berlin KOMPAS's Ilena Mece will join NLND’s Breakfast Club alongside Maxi Pethö-Schramm, Alina Bassi, Dr. Gesa Miczaika, Katrin Robeck, and Daria Stepanova to tackle these questions. The discussion will cover funding strategies for high-risk technologies and how founders can navigate fundraising in sectors with long development cycles. The morning will also include investor–founder matchmaking across deep tech, AI, biotech, quantum, space, and advanced materials. If you are building in deep tech, this is a good room to be in. Apply here ⤵️ https://lnkd.in/dtYKz6uX Ananda Impact Ventures Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund IBB Ventures AIRMO, HV Capital #deeptech #venturecapital

A pattern we often see with deep tech founders building for industry is that strong technology alone is not enough. What often determines success is the patience and credibility required to bring that technology into real-world systems. In a recent episode of the SuperCritical podcast, our Partner Talia Rafaeli breaks down how these dynamics shape the way we evaluate industrial technologies as investors. For founders building in sectors like manufacturing, supply chains, or the built environment, the challenge is rarely just technical validation. The real work often begins once the technology meets the complexity of industrial environments. New solutions need to integrate with existing infrastructure, align with operational workflows, and demonstrate reliability over time. That often means navigating long deployment cycles, multiple decision-makers, and industries where trust is built through execution. For investors, it also requires a different lens: conviction is built not only on the product, but on the founder’s ability to navigate these realities. Continue listening if you want to hear more about Talia’s perspective on: → what signals matter to us when evaluating deep tech companies addressing critical industries → her perspective on building conviction in sectors where adoption cycles are long and outcomes take time to materialise → examples from her experience working with large industrial organisations on how to engage with emerging technologies without disrupting critical operations 🎧 Listen to the episode here: https://lnkd.in/eaE5xZVb Curious to hear from founders who have successfully scaled technologies in industrial sectors: what was a key factor that helped your technology move from pilot to real adoption? Talia Rafaeli Luigi Di Piazza The Critical Tech #podcast

2014 = 2% → 2024 = 2% The share of venture capital going to women founders has essentially remained unchanged for the last decade. So the real question for the ecosystem is no longer awareness. It is allocation. Research increasingly shows the gap is not explained by performance (or ambition). Instead, structural dynamics inside venture such as pattern matching, network effects, and how failure is interpreted shape who receives more or less capital. And those dynamics compound over time... A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that when male and female founders fail in the same startup, women are 30% less likely to raise funding again. When they do raise, they secure 53% less capital than their male co-founders. The result is a system where outcomes are judged differently and where failure has different consequences. Capital tends to follow historical patterns rather than future potential. But venture capital is a portfolio model where second chances matter ! They determine which founders get the opportunity to build again. At KOMPAS we spend our time with founders building companies in critical industries. The best founders we meet share the same characteristics regardless of ‘gender’: deep domain expertise, unwavering conviction, and the ability to build something that truly matters. So if the venture industry wants better outcomes, the conversation cannot stop at representation. It has to reach capital allocation. #internationalwomensday Curious to hear from founders and investors, how you think the venture ecosystem should think about second chances? ⤵️ comment below. Lisa Smith Elizabeth Gilligan Bat-Chen Herchkovich Ben Simon Anna Alex Talia Rafaeli Ilena Mece Victoria Burrows Yoobin Jung Pauline Jimenez Marette Vorster

We are hiring a Director of Finance to join the team in Copenhagen. Read on to learn more. We are an early-stage venture capital firm with €300m under management and offices across Europe. We back technologies that drive productivity, decarbonisation, and strengthen critical industries. As we continue to grow, we are looking for a finance leader who will oversee fund reporting, portfolio valuation, regulatory compliance, and capital management. The role also serves as a key partner to our investment team and a main point of contact for our Limited Partners. The position is based in Copenhagen and sits at the core of the firm’s operations. We are looking for someone with a strong analytical mindset, experience from a top-tier audit or consulting firm, and several years of experience in asset management or alternative investments. If you are interested in helping build a venture platform supporting the next generation of industrial technologies, we would like to hear from you. ⬇️ Apply below or send your CV and cover letter to careers@kompas.vc https://lnkd.in/ezkK6mhV #hiring