The Karlsruhe-based VC is targeting robotics, autonomous machinery and sovereign infrastructure as Europe's industrial base becomes a launchpad for new technology companies.
The venture team of LEA Partners is striking out on its own, backing founders who advance Europe’s technological sovereignty – with a focus on Physical AI, sovereign infrastructure and the transformation of established industries.
The team led by partners Nils Seele, Alexi Malikotsinas and Martin Trenkle, which built the venture business under the LEA Partners umbrella across two fund generations, now leads LEA Ventures from Karlsruhe.
Regional roots, global ambition
Southwest Germany is home to a dense cluster of automotive and mechanical engineering companies, a strong base of Mittelstand industrial firms, and global corporations such as SAP, Schwarz Group, Bosch and BASF. Add to that leading universities, including the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Heidelberg, Tübingen, Darmstadt and Freiburg.
For founders, this proximity means a direct line to world-class research and engineering talent: KIT alone has produced more than 500 spin-offs over the past ten years.
And yet the region has so far given rise to strikingly few technology companies operating at global scale.
LEA Ventures’ focus extends well beyond Germany’s southwest to the wider industrial heartland of Europe – from Zurich and Vienna to Paris, Milan and Amsterdam – hubs that share the same combination of industrial depth, research excellence and untapped potential.
Founders in these regions often find their first industrial customers right on their doorstep – and they sit close to a wealth of industrial data that AI companies elsewhere can rarely access.
“Southwest Germany has an almost absurd concentration of industrial DNA – and yet far too few globally scaled tech companies come out of this region, at a time when technological sovereignty matters more than ever,” says Nils Seele, Managing Partner of LEA Ventures.
“We have backed companies that started small and today employ hundreds of people with real industrial deployments. The most demanding companies are often overlooked precisely because they don’t fit the usual mould.
Those are exactly the companies we want to find – and to support for as long as it takes for them to compete globally over the long term, rather than remain good Series A stories.”
Since 2017, the team has invested in around 40 companies across three funds, including Aleph Alpha, Black Forest Labs, Flip, Codesphere and Q.ANT. This concentrated approach enables the team to work closely with each founding team. The portfolio has already delivered several successful exits, including sevDesk and understand.ai.
LEA Ventures is prioritising three investment areas:
- Physical AI: Robotics, autonomous machinery and AI-powered industrial systems that combine hardware expertise, proprietary data and integration into manufacturing processes.
- Sovereign infrastructure: European technologies that strengthen control over computing, data and AI models, from new computing architectures to secure software for industry and the public sector. Industrial transformation:
- Software and AI solutions that replace outdated systems, digitise factory operations and help Germany’s Mittelstand and larger manufacturers modernise.