Mahir Sahin, a former senior Google employee who spent almost 20 years at the company, has launched a new €50m (£43.3m) venture fund targeting European deep tech that will be needed to “move beyond current AI limitations”.
London-based Cloudberry Ventures has a stated goal of preventing “IP strip-mining” of European technologies by US investors and major firms.
“US investors are exploiting this by buying up European DeepTech at a 10x discount and flipping the IP to the States,” said Sahin.
“Europe’s innovators need investors who are fluent in science and scale, and that’s what we provide at Cloudberry.”
The company said that the recent success of the UK-based Nscale, an AI hyperscaler which this month secured an investment of £1.5bn, was in part an inspiration for Cloudberry’s ambitions.
The fund will target seed to Series A stage companies with investments between £860,000 and £1.73m.
It will focus on advanced industrial infrastructure in fields such as energy and robotics, compute infrastructure for memory, quantum, photonics and AI and financial infrastructure looking at blockchain tech and digital assets.
“The physical chip was the deep tech big bang for the software era. Now we have reached a point where software and the AI race is hollowing out its own value,” Sahin said.
“If we don’t invest in the deep tech that powers AI — the physical substrate — the whole AI project hits a wall.”