- Uplift Ventures is launching a €100 million fund to help European deep tech companies develop from the Seed to the Series A stage.
- Christian Noske, a founding partner at BMW i Ventures, joins Uplift Ventures as a General Partner.
- Jungheinrich is the only investor in the fund. The plan is to invest between €1 million and €5 million in up to 20 companies.
For over a decade, Christian Noske evaluated Deep Tech founders for corporate investment. Now, he makes investment decisions directly.
Noske started Uplift Ventures‘ first €100 million fund to tackle a common problem in Europe: deep tech companies often struggle to find local lead investors when moving from late Seed to Series A.
A single investor instead of a traditional fundraising approach
Uplift Ventures, which is based in Hamburg and Berlin, is not seeking money from several institutional investors. Instead, it is supported only by Jungheinrich, a company with 70 years of experience in intralogistics and forklifts.
“We are a single LP fund, and our LP had strong conviction that this is needed for Europe and Deep Tech, so it’s a bit of a different fundraising story,” Noske tells Tech Funding News.
Having just one investor is unusual for a fund this large. Most similar European deep tech funds, like Kibo Ventures’ €150 million fund and AVP and Earlybird’s €500 million E2D, have a group of institutional and strategic investors. Jungheinrich is supporting the fund as part of its long-term 2030 strategy.
“Deep tech requires patient capital and partners who understand both industrial challenges and entrepreneurial ambition,” said Lars Brzoska, Jungheinrich’s chief executive, in the fund’s launch announcement.
Uplift can lead, co-lead, or join investments, putting €1 million to €5 million into each company, with most investments between €2 million and €3 million. The fund will support up to 20 companies and retain sufficient capital for follow-on investments.
Although the fund mainly targets Europe, it will also invest abroad. “We plan to invest 80% in Europe and 20% in the US. The cross-Atlantic connection is very important to us, and a differentiation in my view as well,” Noske says.
What product-obsessed means to Noske
Uplift’s pitch leans hard on backing “product-obsessed” founders, a phrase vague enough to mean almost anything in a press release. He names three things: “product obsession, communication skills and clarity — how do you explain what you do and how do you convince others to follow — and speed: how fast you go from idea to experimenting, response time, execution drive.”
He wants pitch decks kept simple. “It’s not about one specific thing for me, but rather seeing clearly how it’s thought through holistically.”
The inverse is more revealing. Without naming names, Noske describes the founders who fail this test: ones who pitch themselves as “5% to 20% better than the competition,” who aren’t sure what the customer uses today, or who can’t say who the champion is inside a target account. Not knowing how much customers actually use the product is a red flag in itself.
“Product obsession goes hand-in-hand with customer focus,” he says.
Backing the boring part of the AI boom
Noske’s own path runs through the corporate side of deep tech investing rather than the founder side: a founding partner role at BMW i Ventures, founding Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi’s Alliance Ventures, spending 5 years leading European investments at NGP Capital, and, most recently, serving as a partner.
Along the way, he backed The Exploration Company, ANYbotics, Tekion, Dataloop, and WeRide, and built a side profile as host of the podcast, Deep tech unleashed.
At Uplift, he joins general partners Kerk Wichmann, Christina Hammes, and Maike Steding, plus an investment team — Katharina Schild, Lukas Böttcher, Susan Suzart, and Helge Jelinski — pulled from Cathay Innovation, Speedinvest, Mimic Robotics, and Start Global.
What comes next
Uplift intends to make its first investments from the new fund by the end of 2026, with the team growing in the months ahead.
“I believe 2027 will go deeper into the supply chain of a lot of the hype topics today — data centres are the biggest infrastructure project of humanity measured by money allocated, and this won’t happen if we don’t invent new ways of planning, building, and running all of it,” Noske says.
The amount invested by European deep tech venture capital reached a record $20.3 billion in 2025, accounting for 32% of the total venture capital deployed on the continent, as stated in the 2026 European Deep Tech Report by Lakestar, Walden Catalyst, and Dealroom. Yet, even though Europe generates about 45% of the world’s deep tech startups, it attracts only 17% of global funding in the sector.
The funding gap becomes even more significant after Series A. In Europe, only 54% of funding rounds of over $15 million are financed by local investors, whereas in the United States the figure is 80%. This gap led Vsquared Ventures to open a London office and prompted Kembara’s €750 million growth fund to target larger investments.
It is harder to judge whether a fund backed by a single industrial investor can truly stay focused on founders, or whether Jungheinrich’s strategy for 2030 will influence the choice of those product-obsessed founders.
