News

Matterwave Ventures is expanding its top management with Ines Kolmsee as a new partner

  • Kolmsee has 25 years of C-level responsibility in energy and process industries and will oversee primarily the topics of energy, resource efficiency and Climate Tech at Matterwave
  • Fundraising launched for the new Matterwave Industrial Technologies II Fund with well over 100 million Euro for new investments in Deep Tech technology companies and industrial applications

 

Matterwave Ventures, a Munich-based company that specialises in early-stage venture capital investments in industrial deep tech technologies has strengthened its top management with the addition of Ines Kolmsee. The 52-year-old “Diplom-Ingenieurin” (Graduate Engineer) with a degree in energy- and process engineering and INSEAD graduate brings more than 25 years of experience as executive in industrial companies with a focus on energy and process industries to her new role as partner. Most recently, she was a member of the executive board of the Luxembourg-based stainless steel producer Aperam SA for almost four years; in this position she was responsible for the digital transformation in sales and the supply chain as well as the automation of manufacturing (“Smart Factory”). Prior to that, as Chief Technology Officer, she managed, for example, the integration of renewable energies into the electrical grid at one of Germany’s largest energy suppliers, EWE AG. In her capacity as CEO, she also led the specialty chemicals company SKW Stahl Metallurgie from a restructuring case to a successful stock exchange listing and managed the technological development and international expansion of the group for around ten years. She currently holds several supervisory board mandates at industrial and technology companies in Europe and Canada.

“We are very pleased that Ines Kolmsee has decided to join Matterwave Ventures. She contributes extremely valuable operational and strategic expertise from the executive level of large industrial companies and at the same time, she has strong expertise in the fields of process and energy technology, which are of great relevance to our investment strategy. This will help us to leverage the great potential that we are now offering our investors with the new Matterwave Industrial Technologies II Fund that has just been launched and for which the fundraising is currently underway”, comments Benedikt Kronberger, Partner at Matterwave Ventures.

Extensive expertise in early-stage, future-oriented technologies

Matterwave Ventures emerged at the beginning of 2022 as a rebranding of the btov Industrial Technologies team founded in 2016, which operated for the first few years on the platform of the VC company btov Partners. The team at Matterwave has more than 50 years of accumulated venture capital expertise and has already made successful investments in more than 60 technology companies in the industrial sector. With investments of between one and 10 million Euro, the venture capital firm focuses on companies in the early stages of their development and also provides them with strategic advice for their expansion and further development. In the past four years alone, Matterwave has made investments in 21 companies through the 100 million Euro btov Industrial Technologies Fund and is still actively managing those investments. The focus lies on portfolio companies that use software or hardware innovation to enable industry-defining products and services to shape the future of industrial value creation in Europe. Portfolio companies are located throughout Europe, including France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, the UK and of course the DACH region. Most recently, for instance, Matterwave has made investments in LiveEO, an expert in satellite-based infrastructure monitoring, Tvarit, a company that massively reduces energy and material consumption in production processes with AI algorithms, or Codasip, a provider of software tools for chip development.

New technology fund with a strong focus on sustainability

In consideration of a variety of promising investment options with large growth potential, Matterwave has now started with the fundraising for the Matterwave Industrial Technologies II Fund. The fund volume is planned to be significantly above 100 million Euro. The capital will be invested in about 20 to 25 companies over the next few years. As before, the technological focus is on the one hand on Deep Tech with industrial use cases, e.g. new production technologies such as robotics, 3D printing or the optimisation of the supply chain, on automation topics, sensor technology or enabling technologies such as the use of quantum systems, or new semiconductor and photonics topics. On the other hand, Matterwave Ventures will invest even more in sustainability, resource efficiency, and Climate Tech than it has over the past ten years. In this context, the company has also further developed its sustainability approach. The company’s goal is not only to meet its own ESG responsibility with respect to these issues, but also to incorporate the topic of sustainability as an important criterion in investment decisions and to closely accompany its portfolio companies to understand and manage their respective impact on the world along the sustainable development goals (SDGs). The Matterwave Industrial Technologies II Fund was designed to meet the SFDR (Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation) requirements of Article 8 of the European Union. This regulation requires companies in the financial services sector to disclose transparently how sustainable their products are.