Hi Vanagon Community,

we are back with some stunning news on Vanagon, our Portfolio companies and from the broader venture ecosystem. Let’s unpack it:

Vanagon made it to the Top 15 Germany of most active VCs in Q1

We are proud to be listed among the Most Active VCs in Germany for Q1 - with much more in our pipe for Q2 already. Together with HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds , the team at startupdetector did the work: they searched the entire German commercial register (Handelsregister) and counted every VC investment made. We built Vanagon to become the most consequential DeepTech Firm in Europe and we‘re just getting started. Super excited to share the Deals still in stealth we did in Q2 soon.

Main ingredients we underwrite at Pre-Seed:

Looking forward to DTM 2026 this week and meeting both familiar and new faces.

Excited about the format, especially seeing more and more interest from the buyer side with the corporate partnerships: Investing in DeepTech innovations could create $1 trillion in enterprise value and up to 1 million jobs in Europe by 2030, paving the way for a sustainable, resilient and economically thriving continent. Yet pre-seed in this category remains messy. We are more than convinced it needs Emerging Funds like ours to back these early teams actively leading rounds, unlocking additional capital, and driving alpha by moving them up the curve through our industry network.

“Europe's largest companies reported 4.84 million carbon credits under CSRD, but not a single company disclosed the project identifiers within CSRD filing needed to verify them. We traced 55% to specific projects through our own research across publicregistries, press releases, and corporate filings. The remaining 45% (2.17 million credits) could not be identified. For most of what we could identify, the quality didn't hold up.” - Adrian Wons, Founder & CEO, Senken

CMBlu Energy, the German deep-tech pioneer behind the lithium-free SolidFlow™ battery, partnered with ExoMatter to break out of the limits of classical literature reviews and existing team knowledge. With ExoMatter’s AI-powered platform, CMBlu’s research team now screens battery materials 5x faster. Within just a few months, the team identified 4 promising new candidates, one of which is already in product-scale testing. Beyond speed, ExoMatter unlocked materials CMBlu would otherwise have missed, integrated a custom property (voltage decomposition capacity) developed directly for CMBlu’s use case, and gave researchers a flexible weighted-scoring system to prioritize cost, capacity, stability, or availability on demand. CMBlu has already strongly expanded its ExoMatter user base and has positioned the platform as a core pillar of its AI-driven R&D strategy going forward.

Now, CMBlu has crossed the €1B+ unicorn threshold with a €50M Series C initial close led by Samsung Ventures — proof that AI-accelerated materials discovery isn’t just faster R&D, it’s a foundation for category-defining companies.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

On top of that, Barbara is nominated as Top 5 finalist of the Female Founder Award 2026 - we cheer for her and cross our fingers!

It’s not just about scale - it’s about the sheer density of ambition and technical depth.

We spent an intense, inspiring day engaging with exceptional founders, researchers, and investors. We were especially proud to stand alongside our portfolio company, Ewigbyte, as they hosted a critical session on a question that is becoming impossible to ignore:

👉 Are we underestimating data storage as a core constraint of the AI age?

The discussion made one thing clear: we are building the AI era on data infrastructure that simply wasn't designed for what's coming. Through system, energy, market, and security lenses, four key realities emerged:

Incremental fixes won't cut it. We are at the dawn of a fundamental architectural shift in how long-term data is stored and preserved.

The ARD documentary "F*ck Deepfakes" featuring Collien Monica Fernandes and Dr. Eckart von Hirschhausen is now available in the ARD Mediathek - and it features Neuramancer.ai a company Vanagon recently invested in. Deepfakes and the sexualized violence that comes with them disproportionately targeting women and children have long been part of everyday life. Even as the headlines fade, the problem doesn't.

Neuramancer is a Bavarian deepfake detection startup that exposes image and video manipulation through multi-stage forensic AI. Even partially altered media is unmasked — transparently, precisely, and in under 20 seconds. When any image or video can be convincingly faked, the shared factual ground that journalism, justice, commerce, and democratic debate depend on starts to dissolve. Reliable, explainable deepfake detection restores a baseline of verifiable truth: it protects voters from manipulated political content, shields citizens from synthetic defamation, defends insurers and businesses against multi-billion-euro fraud losses driven by fabricated visual evidence, and gives journalists, courts, and institutions the evidence they need to act with confidence. Tools like Neuramancer's are part of the infrastructure a healthy information ecosystem and a trustworthy economy now require.

We wish you all a great week and look forward to meet some of you at the DeepTech Momentum in Berlin!

Yours,
Sandro, Susanne and Axel