Jungheinrich-Backed Uplift Ventures Launches €100M Fund to Fix Europe's Deep Tech Funding Cliff

Uplift Ventures has launched a 100 million euro fund aimed squarely at one of the most persistent structural problems in European venture capital: the shortage of capital available to ambitious deep tech companies as they move from late Seed into Series A.

The fund is backed entirely by Jungheinrich, the German intralogistics and forklift manufacturing group with 70 years of industrial history, which founded Uplift Ventures as an independently run venture platform in 2025. Rather than assembling a syndicate of institutional limited partners, as most venture funds of this size typically do, Uplift Ventures is deliberately structured around a single industrial backer, a decision the firm says gives it the patience and focus to support deep tech founders through a stage of company building that has proven especially difficult to finance in Europe.

To lead the new fund, Uplift Ventures has brought on Christian Noske as Founding General Partner, joining an existing leadership team that includes Kerk Wichmann, Christina Hammes, and Maike Steding. Noske brings more than a decade of deep tech investing experience, having led European investments at NGP Capital and previously served as a founding partner at BMW i Ventures and Alliance Ventures. For over ten years, Noske evaluated deep tech founders specifically for corporate investment purposes; at Uplift Ventures, he now makes those investment decisions directly rather than advising on them from within a larger corporate structure.

The fund will target four sectors: physical AI, energy, enterprise AI, and logistics, deploying its full 100 million euros across up to 20 startups and select deep tech funds, primarily across Europe and the United States. Uplift Ventures plans to write checks between 1 million and 5 million euros per deal, and says it will take a flexible approach to each investment, willing to act as lead, co‑lead, or a participating investor depending on what best serves the founders and the structure of a given round, rather than insisting on a single fixed role across every deal.

The problem the fund is designed to address has become increasingly well documented across European venture capital. Deep tech companies moving from late Seed into Series A frequently struggle to find local lead investors willing to write the larger checks that stage requires, forcing many European founders to look abroad, most often to the United States, for the capital needed to scale. That gap becomes even more pronounced after Series A: in Europe, only 54 percent of funding rounds above $15 million are financed by local investors, compared with roughly 80 percent in the United States, according to figures cited by TechFundingNews. That imbalance has already prompted other firms to adapt their strategies, including Vsquared Ventures opening a London office and Kembara Capital raising a 750 million euro growth fund specifically targeting larger, later‑stage investments that fewer European funds have historically been willing or able to make.

Jungheinrich chief executive Dr. Lars Brzoska framed the fund's purpose directly in terms of the parent company's own long‑term strategic interests. "Deep Tech requires patient capital and partners who understand both industrial challenges and entrepreneurial ambition," Brzoska said. "Uplift Ventures invests in the next generation of industrial leaders, making them an important partner for Jungheinrich, firstly with world class financial returns and with immense value for our 2030+ strategy." That framing positions Uplift Ventures not simply as a philanthropic or purely financial vehicle, but as a mechanism through which Jungheinrich can gain early visibility and relationships with the industrial technologies most likely to shape its own sector over the coming years.

Uplift Ventures has already begun building out its portfolio and internal capabilities ahead of this fund's formal launch. The firm built the compliance‑automation startup turnus.ai in‑house, and separately backed U2V, a spin‑off of Earlybird‑X that closed the first tranche of its own 60 million euro fund in December 2025, targeting pre‑seed and seed deep tech spin‑offs from European universities across AI, industrial technologies, and clean tech. That relationship, with Uplift Ventures serving as anchor limited partner for U2V's earlier‑stage fund while running its own later‑stage vehicle, suggests a deliberate strategy of covering multiple points along the deep tech funding pipeline rather than concentrating solely on the Series A stage its new flagship fund is named for.

Whether a fund backed by a single industrial investor can maintain genuine independence and stay focused purely on what serves founders best, rather than gradually orienting its investment decisions toward Jungheinrich's own strategic priorities heading into 2030, remains an open question that will likely only become clear as Uplift Ventures builds out its portfolio over the coming years. For founders navigating Europe's well‑documented Series A financing gap, though, the arrival of a dedicated, sizeable, and flexibly structured local fund adds a meaningful new option to a financing landscape that has too often pushed promising deep tech companies to look outside Europe once they outgrow their earliest rounds of capital.