VC Montis raises €50M to back Europe’s energy and industrial tech startups

The Warsaw-based fund, backed by the European Investment Fund and the Polish Development Fund, plans 20–25 pre-seed and seed investments in companies working on energy transition, industrial automation, and AI.

The team behind Warsaw-based Montis Capital has raised €50 million at first close for a new fund, Montis VC, targeting European startups at the intersection of energy transition, industrial technology, and artificial intelligence.

The fund is backed by the European Investment Fund through the REPowerEU programme, the EU initiative designed to accelerate energy security and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, as well as the Polish Development Fund (PFR), which contributed €10 million, alongside family offices and private investors from across Central and Eastern Europe.

The team has been running Montis Capital since around 2018 out of Warsaw, deploying roughly €30 million into nine companies across industry, technology, and climate sectors.

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That predecessor portfolio includes Autofixer, an e-commerce platform for auto parts; Fresh Inset, an agri-food technology startup; and Micromobility Port, which the company says has become a leading provider of last-mile logistics infrastructure in the UK.

The Montis VC fund is intended to operate at a larger scale, with initial ticket sizes of €0.5 million to €2 million and half the capital reserved for follow-on rounds into the most promising portfolio companies.

The fund targets 20 to 25 investments at the pre-seed and seed stages. Its thesis centres on what the team describes as the “energy and industrial transition”, a broad category that encompasses electrification, industrial automation, new energy infrastructure, and AI applied to sectors like manufacturing, energy grids, and logistics.

The framing reflects a growing pattern among Central and Eastern European venture funds, which have increasingly positioned themselves as specialists in hard-tech and deep-tech verticals as Western European capital has concentrated in software and consumer platforms.

The fund is led by Managing Partners Łukasz Dziekoski, Wojciech Szwankowski, and Michał Gawęda, all of whom ran the predecessor Montis Capital fund. The team was recently joined by Michał Baś, previously described as associated with pan-European fund Venture Friends, though that connection has not been independently verified.

The fund has also assembled a network of venture partners that includes Taavi Rõivas, the former Prime Minister of Estonia who served in that role from 2014 to 2016 and was among the architects of the country’s early digital governance infrastructure; Tomasz Misiak, described as an entrepreneur and Harvard Business School graduate; and Bart Dujczynski, described as a renewable energy specialist with experience in Western European markets. 

“Europe has exceptional technological potential and a deep pool of talent. At Montis VC, we want to help startups unlock that potential globally by supporting projects that have the ambition to transform entire sectors of the economy,” said Wojciech Szwankowski, Partner at Montis VC.

The €50 million first close is described by the team as a starting point rather than a final figure. Dziekoski said the fund is “already in advanced discussions with additional investors” and plans to continue scaling its capitalisation in the coming months, without specifying a target size for the final close. The fund has begun investing, though no portfolio companies have been disclosed alongside the announcement.

The inclusion of the EIF through REPowerEU and PFR Ventures as anchor investors is consistent with the role these institutions play across the Polish and broader CEE venture ecosystem. PFR Ventures has backed Montis Capital since its earlier incarnation, the two have a relationship stretching back to the predecessor fund, and the EIF has expanded its presence in CEE significantly in recent years through programmes tied to the EU’s green transition agenda.

“Montis VC is another team from Poland that first built its track record using capital backed by European Union funds and is now successfully attracting private and institutional investors for its next fund,” said Bartłomiej Samsonowicz, Investment Director at PFR Ventures.

“Stories like this help move the Polish venture ecosystem to the next level.”

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