Energy and industrial technology investments are gaining a powerful new ally in Europe.
Montis VC, a fund based in Warsaw, Poland, just announced it raised €50 million in the first close of its new investment vehicle. The goal is straightforward: find and back the most promising European startups working at the intersection of energy transition, industrial automation, and artificial intelligence. 🚀
And this is no ordinary fund. Behind this raise are heavyweight names like the European Investment Fund (EIF), through the REPowerEU program, and the Polish Development Fund (PFR), which contributed €10 million, along with family offices and private investors spread across Central and Eastern Europe. That gives Montis VC not just capital, but also a network of strategic connections that could be game-changing for the startups that make it into the fund’s portfolio.
The team already has a solid track record in the region, with around €30 million invested in nine companies since 2018, back when they were still operating under the name Montis Capital. Now, with a bigger structure and a more ambitious thesis, Montis VC is targeting between 20 and 25 new investments at pre-seed and seed stages, betting on what it believes will be one of Europe’s largest economic transformations in the coming decades. ⚡
An investment thesis built for the right moment
It’s no coincidence that Montis VC is going all in on energy and industrial technology right now. Europe is at a unique moment where the push for energy independence, accelerated by the geopolitical context of recent years, meets an increasingly mature innovation ecosystem in the Central and Eastern part of the continent. Countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Baltic States have been producing top-tier engineers and scientists for decades, and that talent is starting to translate into tech companies with real potential for global scale. The window of opportunity is wide open, and Montis VC clearly wants to be on the right side of it.
The REPowerEU program, which partially funds this raise through the European Investment Fund, was created specifically to accelerate European energy security and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. Having that kind of institutional partner on a venture capital fund’s cap table isn’t just a matter of prestige. It’s a clear signal of alignment between the fund’s investment thesis and the European Union’s strategic priorities for the years ahead. That makes it easier to access other programs, subsidies, and public contracts that can directly benefit the startups backed by Montis VC.
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The fund’s thesis revolves around what the team describes as the energy and industrial transition, a broad category that includes electrification, industrial automation, new energy infrastructure, and artificial intelligence applied to sectors like manufacturing, power grids, and logistics. This framing reflects a growing pattern among Central and Eastern European venture capital funds, which have increasingly positioned themselves as specialists in hard-tech and deep-tech verticals, while Western European capital tends to concentrate on software and consumer platforms.
On top of that, the combination of artificial intelligence with industrial automation and energy creates an extremely fertile innovation space. We’re talking about solutions that can optimize an entire factory’s energy consumption in real time, predict equipment failures before they happen, or manage electricity distribution networks with an efficiency that simply wouldn’t be possible without advanced algorithms. This is exactly the frontier where Montis VC wants to build its portfolio, and the startups that manage to navigate this intersection well have the potential for massive impact. 💡
The track record behind the new ambition
Before raising the €50 million for the new fund, the Montis Capital team had already built a portfolio that shows the direction they now intend to pursue at a larger scale. Among the companies that received investments from the previous vehicle are Autofixer, an e-commerce platform for automotive parts, Fresh Inset, a tech startup for the agri-food sector, and Micromobility Port, which according to the company has become one of the leading last-mile logistics infrastructure providers in the UK.
These earlier investments reveal a keen eye for companies operating in the real economy, connecting technology to high-volume supply chains and logistics. The leap to a €50 million fund with initial tickets between €500,000 and €2 million is a natural evolution of that profile. And here’s an important detail: half the capital is reserved for follow-on rounds in the most promising portfolio companies, which means Montis VC doesn’t just want to get in early — it also wants to double down when things start going well.
Who’s behind Montis VC
The fund is led by managing partners Łukasz Dziekoski, Wojciech Szwankowski, and Michał Gawęda, the same three who ran the predecessor fund Montis Capital. Recently, the team added Michał Baś, who is described as having worked at the pan-European fund Venture Friends, though this connection has not been independently verified.
The fund’s network of venture partners is also worth noting. Among the names are Taavi Rõivas, former Prime Minister of Estonia who served between 2014 and 2016 and was one of the architects of the country’s digital governance infrastructure, Tomasz Misiak, described as an entrepreneur and Harvard Business School graduate, and Bart Dujczynski, a renewable energy specialist with experience in Western European markets.
This team and advisor composition signals that Montis VC wants to combine deep technical knowledge in energy and industry with hands-on experience from people who have already scaled businesses and public policies in sophisticated markets. For portfolio startups, having access to this kind of network can be just as valuable as the capital itself, especially when it comes to navigating complex regulations and opening doors in international markets.
Wojciech Szwankowski, partner at Montis VC, noted that Europe has exceptional technological potential and a deep talent pool, and that the fund wants to help startups unlock that potential globally by backing projects with the ambition to transform entire economic sectors.
What to expect from Montis VC’s next investments
With a target of 20 to 25 investments, Montis VC is clearly positioned to be one of the most active voices in Central Europe’s venture capital ecosystem in the coming years. The focus on early pre-seed and seed stages means the fund will get into companies early, taking on more risk but also having the chance to capture a larger share of the value created over time. That’s a classic strategy for funds with strong conviction in the thesis they’re pursuing, and the team’s track record since 2018 suggests they know what they’re doing when it comes to picking where to put their money.
The startups most likely to catch Montis VC’s attention are those combining hardware with intelligent software, especially when it results in measurable energy efficiency or automation of industrial processes that previously relied entirely on human labor. Artificial intelligence comes in here as the great enabler, making it possible to create systems that learn, adapt, and continuously improve without needing constant human intervention. Companies that can demonstrate this kind of capability with real data and proven use cases have everything going for them to land on the fund’s radar. 🤖
Another important point is geography. Montis VC operates out of Warsaw and has a clear vision for Central and Eastern Europe’s potential as an innovation hub for industrial technology. This region has more competitive operating costs than Western Europe, a solid base of technical talent, and a robust industrial market that serves as a natural testing ground for new solutions. Startups born in this environment tend to be more capital-efficient and faster at delivering concrete results, which is exactly the profile an early-stage fund wants to find when building a high-impact portfolio.
Next steps and the path to the final close
The first close of €50 million is described by the team as a starting point, not a final number. Łukasz Dziekoski stated that the fund is already in advanced conversations with additional investors and plans to continue increasing its capitalization in the coming months, though he did not specify a target amount for the final close. The fund has already started investing, but no companies from the new portfolio were disclosed alongside the announcement.
The participation of the EIF through REPowerEU and PFR Ventures as anchor investors is consistent with the role these institutions play in the Polish venture capital ecosystem and in the CEE region as a whole. PFR Ventures has backed Montis since the fund’s earlier incarnation, and the EIF has significantly expanded its presence in Central and Eastern Europe in recent years through programs tied to the European Union’s green transition agenda.
Bartłomiej Samsonowicz, Chief Investment Officer at PFR Ventures, pointed out that Montis VC is yet another Polish team that first built its track record using capital backed by European Union funds and is now managing to attract private and institutional investors for its next fund. According to him, stories like this help take the Polish venture capital ecosystem to the next level.
Artificial intelligence as the engine of industrial transformation
If there’s one theme that runs through Montis VC’s entire thesis, it’s artificial intelligence applied to the physical world. We’re living in a moment when language models and generative AI systems dominate the spotlight, but the most transformative application of artificial intelligence in the coming years will likely happen in factories, power grids, energy management systems, and the industrial processes that underpin the real economy. This is an area where technical complexity is enormous, sales cycles are long, and the barrier to entry is high — which creates space for companies that can solve genuinely hard problems with genuinely advanced technology.
AI-enabled industrial automation is no longer a distant promise. Today, systems already exist that can control entire production lines with minimal human oversight, optimize logistics routes in real time based on weather and demand variables, and even predict weeks in advance when a specific piece of equipment will need maintenance. These capabilities are becoming increasingly accessible to mid-sized companies thanks to falling cloud computing costs and advances in open-source AI models, and that opens up a massive market opportunity for startups that know how to package these technologies into sellable, scalable products. That’s exactly the kind of company a fund like Montis VC is looking for. ⚙️
In the energy sector, artificial intelligence is being used to tackle some of the most complex challenges of the energy transition — like balancing grids that need to integrate intermittent sources such as solar and wind, optimizing electric vehicle charging at scale, and intelligently managing large-scale battery storage. Each of these problems is a market in itself, and Europe is at the forefront of many of them thanks to the regulations and climate targets the continent has committed to. For Montis VC, investing in this space now is a bet that AI-enabled industrial technology will be one of the great value creation stories of the next decade in Europe — and the early signs suggest there’s a lot of logic behind that bet. 🌍
With €50 million already secured, an experienced team at the helm, heavyweight institutional partners, and a thesis aligned with the continent’s priorities, Montis VC has the ingredients it needs to establish itself as a benchmark for early-stage investments in European energy and industrial technology. Now, all eyes turn to execution: which startups will receive the first checks and how they’ll turn that capital into solutions that truly move the needle on Europe’s energy and industrial transition.
