Cloudberry, 2026
“The next trillion-dollar company in Europe will be a computing hardware company. We are here to back the founders who are going to build it.”
Europe converts its share of the world’s semiconductor and photonics innovation — roughly a fifth of it, by the fund’s estimate — into companies it actually keeps. The winning strategy is not “sovereignty” but interdependency: building bottlenecks the rest of the world depends on, the way ASML did. Hardware’s economics get re-rated: IP as the early moat, capex as the late one, and software revealed as the historical exception rather than the rule.
- Specialized growth capital for European semiconductor A and B rounds begins to exist — companies stop having to go to the US or Asia by default
- Chips Act pilot lines operational and used by startups across Europe
- European hardware IP exits continue at substantial pre-revenue valuations
- The fund’s own promise, on the record: sharper, more specific theses six months from filing
The growth-stage wall holds: through 2028, Europe’s best semiconductor companies still relocate or sell early to US and Asian buyers for lack of domestic capital — and the valuation gap between the US and Europe keeps widening.
Open. Six-month follow-up conversation booked.