Montis VC Wants To be The First Call For Founders Building Europe’s Energy And Industrial Future

The Polish VC fund aims to position itself as the partner of choice for founders building the technologies that will define the continent’s next decade.

Europe is rethinking its economic priorities. After a decade dominated by software and consumer tech, focus is shifting toward the foundations of the real economy. Energy, industry, and resilience are no longer secondary themes, they are moving to the centre of the continent’s growth agenda.

Across the continent, governments, corporates, and investors are reassessing what long-term competitiveness depends on. The focus is shifting toward energy security, industrial capacity, resilient supply chains, and technologies that make the real economy more efficient and sustainable.

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At the same time, the startup market has become more selective. Recent Crunchbase data shows that while capital is still active, the number of seed deals in Europe fell sharply, with seed funding rounds down 44% year over year . For ambitious founders, the challenge is no longer just building a great company - it is finding investors with fresh capital, sector conviction and the experience to navigate a tougher market. That is exactly where Montis VC sees its opportunity, with a clear ambition to become the first call for founders building in energy, industry, and AI-driven infrastructure.

New fund with an experienced team

The Warsaw-based fund has recently announced a €50 million first close and is entering the market at a pivotal moment for Europe’s innovation economy. Backed by the European Investment Fund through the REPowerEU programme, the Polish Development Fund, private investors and family offices across Central and Eastern Europe, the fund combines institutional firepower with entrepreneurial networks.

Montis VC team focuses on pre-seed and seed stage technology companies building across three broad areas - energy transition, industrial transformation, and AI as the lever that scales both. Over the next five years, their fund plans to back 20 to 25 companies with initial tickets between €0.5 million and €2 million, with half the fund’s budget reserved for follow-on rounds.

But the fund’s backstory matters here. This is not a debut. The partners behind Montis VC previously ran Montis Capital, where they have invested roughly €30 million since 2019 across nine companies in the Industry 4.0 and life sciences sectors. The track record speaks for itself. Autofixer hit over €30 million in annual revenue within three years, operating across multiple European markets. Micromobility Port became a leading provider of last-mile logistics infrastructure in the UK. Fresh Inset, a technology leader in food shelf-life extension, is now present on five continents with strong positions in the US, EU, and Latin America.

Montis VC builds on that track record, taking it to a new level of scale, ambition, and geographic reach. - Our goal is to deliver above-average returns while backing technologies that genuinely increase economic productivity. We are particularly interested in projects applying AI in sectors such as industry, energy and infrastructure. These are the areas where we see the strongest potential for building global technology companies from Europe. The €50 million first close is only the starting point. - Łukasz Dziekoński, Partner, Montis VC

Fast, flexible, founder-first

The fund’s thesis combines energy transition, industrial transformation, resilience and applied AI. In practice, that means supporting founders solving real operational problems - improving efficiency, modernising infrastructure, strengthening supply chains and bringing software intelligence into sectors that have historically been underserved by venture capital. Rather than forcing those companies into generic startup templates, Montis wants to build alongside them.

Being founder-first is easy to declare, but much harder to prove in practice. For us, it means moving fast, being available when it matters and helping founders solve real growth challenges, whether that is refining strategy, preparing for the next round or opening the right doors internationally. We want to be the kind of partner that creates momentum, not just provides capital.” - Michał Gawęda, Partner, Montis VC

Why now and why CEE?

The macro backdrop behind Montis VC’s thesis is clear. The AI revolution runs on energy, while data centres, industrial automation, electrified logistics and smart grids all depend on infrastructure Europe is now prioritising at scale. Programmes such as REPowerEU reflect a broader shift in strategic thinking: stronger energy systems, greater resilience and renewed industrial competitiveness are becoming core economic priorities. The fact that the EIF chose to allocate REPowerEU capital to Montis VC is a strong signal of where long-term conviction is heading.

At the same time, Central and Eastern Europe continues to outperform expectations in engineering talent, capital efficiency and early-stage innovation, while still offering significant whitespace for specialised early-stage investors. For a pre-seed and seed fund, that creates a compelling opportunity. The €50 million first close is only the beginning, with Montis VC aiming to become the first fund founders in energy, industry and applied AI think of when building Europe’s next generation of category leaders.