Thursday, 28 March 2024
EV NewsNews

€125 million venture capital fund ready for new mobility investment

Vektor Partners has announced a €125 million pot that is earmarked for innovations in and around “autonomous, shared, electric, and sustainable future” mobility products.

To be focused on businesses in Europe, the US and Israel, the investment fund reasons that $400 billion worth of investments made into the sector over the past decade, of which $100 billion has been invested since 2020 alone, indicate the mega trend’s rise.

Sebastian Bihari, co-founder of Vektor Partners explains: “We are looking at tectonic shifts in the mobility landscape, where we will see new markets being created, and expect about half of the industry to be disrupted. Startups focused on AI, software and data will be at the heart of driving innovation and creating new businesses and products with real use cases and significant economic and environmental value.”

Investments made to date include LiDAR tech startup AEye and together with Nielsen Ventures the fund also led a $17.5 million Series A funding round into NoTraffic – a platform that employs computer vision, machine learning, and cloud integration to bring traffic management into the 21st century and create a platform for IoT services.

Cash aside, the venture capital firm is stumping up expertise for those it proposes to back. The creation of Vektor Partners reunites co-founders Sebastian Bihari and Chris Riley for a third time. Sebastian Bihari, is an industry expert who previously led automotive technology investment banking at a global bank, and Chris Riley, combines decades of creating value for growth businesses with experience as a startup CFO.

Additional partners are Isabel Falkenberg, an ESG expert who serves on the advisory board of the International Automobile Federation, and Valentin Menedetter, a former Palantir Technologies and Speedinvest senior executive with extensive SaaS and venture capital expertise. The team is joined by a growing bench of senior advisors, including automotive industry veteran Bernd Gottschalk in Germany and technology specialist Roger Spitz in California.

Chris Riley, co-founder of Vektor Partners added: “The compounding effect of disruption through electrification, autonomous, connectivity and artificial intelligence results in a multi-decade super-cycle offering incredible opportunities to build new and large high-growth businesses. Vektor Partners is focused on investing in these future technology leaders. There will come a time soon when we look back at the seminal years of the 2020s when the future mobility industry leaders were born, much like we look back today at the time when the likes of Amazon and Google were founded.”

At this week’s Eurobike show in Frankfurt there was an investors lounge for such investment vehicles to arrange tours of the show with a view to driving the new mobility movement.