Swiss VC B2venture raised €150m for its fifth fund, the firm’s largest to date, focused on deeptech areas like robotics and manufacturing.
Alongside the new fund, B2venture tells Sifted it is also expanding its presence in Munich as it aims to capitalise on hardware startups coming out of technical universities.
The fund was raised in about a year, partner Jan-Hendrik Bürk tells Sifted, from new LPs including asset manager Flexstone and Swiss pension fund Stiftung Abendrot. B2venture also has a more than 350-strong angel network, some of whom are also LPs in the fund. The €150m will back up to 35 startups at the earliest stages and has already made several investments.
B2venture’s fundraising announcement comes after the firm saw 11 exits in 2025, which was a talking point in courting LPs. “It definitely helped that 2025 was another year of us actually achieving more distributions than deployments,” says Bürk.
The firm is known for its bets on startups like climate tech 1Komma5 and AI translation platform DeepL, which Sifted reported last year could target a 2026 IPO.
LP shakeup and succession talk
One change for B2venture’s new fund: far fewer corporate LPs.
Founding partner Florian Schweitzer believes corporate LPs are “melting away” owing to a difficult economic environment; companies go through cyclical periods of investing, which “trickles down” to CVCs.
“For the first time, a Swiss pension fund has invested in our fund, which, after 25 years of being in the market... is very special,” adds Schweitzer, referring to Stiftung Abendrot. He argues it’s a positive sign for Europe and that more pension funds will see VC as a lucrative asset class and not philanthropy.
One question that’s begun to pop up in LP conversations, the B2venture partners say: succession plans.
European VCs have historically struggled with succession planning, and LPs are increasingly asking investors how they’re thinking about it. Along with the new fund, B2venture is also announcing the departure of partner Jochen Gutbrod, who will now be an angel investor associated with the firm.
“This whole succession topic was definitely something we as a partnership, but also me as part of the younger generation of the partnership, have been asked a lot in quite a dedicated, focused way, which I hadn't seen four or five years ago in the previous fundraise,” says Bürk.
Having been operating for 25 years, B2venture is among the older generation of European VCs. Founding partner Schweitzer says: “It's clear that investing is a people business. We are the assets. And throughout the last years, we have, with the younger generation, conceptualised a model where this economic transfer is possible too, and in such a way that the younger generation doesn't take loads of debts on their shoulders to buy the management company.”
He says B2venture has begun to let the younger generation of investors also invest in funds, and that the firm has a so-called equal partnership, where partners get equal amounts of carry (VCs’ share of the profits from a fund).
Doubling down on Munich and deeptech
The new fund will focus largely on startups building in deeptech areas like supply chain, manufacturing, robotics, drones and biotech.
B2venture has already made several investments in the new fund, including Nautica Technologies, which builds autonomous swarm robots for ship cleaning; Hive Robotics, which is building an operating system for autonomous aerial, ground and sea robots; and Assemblean, a platform helping make manufacturing complex products more cost effective and faster.
While defence isn’t a big focus for the new fund, Bürk says it’s “not excluded”.
Where the firm is doubling down is geographically. Schweitzer says B2venture will increase its presence in Munich: “We have a small office there, but that's going to be much more significant.”
The geographical shift is “linked to more companies coming out of those technical universities, and we very much believe in the alpine belt — with the technical universities going from Munich or even further east in Austria, back to the west via Zurich, with ETH Zurich,” says Schweitzer.
“We do see more and more hardware companies coming out of those universities,” he adds, “which, with the software [and] AI environment, are able to scale much faster.”
