The Munich Venture capital investor Earlybird With the Uni-X Fund, the company aims to financially support and accompany very early-stage startups to enable them to build entrepreneurial teams, develop their business plans, and prepare a proof of concept. The fund, which targets pre-seed and early seed investments, particularly spin-offs from the technical and academic environment, has €75 million at its disposal.
Exploiting potential and commercializing technologies
Hendrik Brandis, Co-Founder and Partner of Early bird, explained:
"Basic and cutting-edge research at Europe's universities remains absolutely world-class. Thousands of groundbreaking ideas are developed here every year, but we are still underutilizing this potential. Far too many technologies remain stuck on their way out of universities. Especially given the accelerating pace of innovation in the deeptech sector, we urgently need to commercialize more of these ideas and technologies. To address this challenge, we have now launched Earlybird Uni-X with a dedicated team, complementary to the Earlybird fund family structure."
A network of 45 professors, the so-called “Uni-Xperts,” will serve as investment scouts for the fund and bring promising projects to the fund.
Earlybird brings resources and know-how into play
Achim Kampker, Venture Partner at Uni-X and Professor at the Chair of Production Engineering of E-Mobility Components (PEM) at RWTH Aachen University, says:
"Many European universities have seen very successful spin-offs in recent years. However, far too often our researchers lack the financial resources or the experience gained from investor and startup practice on how to build successful tech companies. This requires not only technological excellence but also a well-assembled team or access to customers for pilot projects. Earlybird has precisely these resources and the know-how. That's why I'm delighted that we can now better harness this potential together with Earlybird." can lift”,
Lack of mindset to commercialize ideas
And Earlybird Uni-X Partner Frédéric du Bois-Reymond added:
"For years, we have been following developments surrounding university spin-offs and the technologies emerging at universities. We regularly observe that far too often, the mindset that these ideas can be commercialized is lacking. The startups then emerge in the US or China. We have to change this if we don't want to be left behind. In order to be as close and early as possible to the development of these ideas, we have built a broad network of partners from science and research. With our new Earlybird Uni-X Fund, we can now scale this concept across Europe and help even more university spin-offs achieve success."
