Tech Funding News was on the ground at the World Fund Annual Summit in Berlin, and the conversations were worth capturing on camera.
The summit, themed ‘Built to Scale,’ took place on 9 June at the Delphi Filmpalast am Zoo, coinciding with SuperVentures week. It brought together World Fund’s portfolio companies, limited partners, and European deep tech founders for a day of keynotes, panels, and a pointed question about whether Europe is moving fast enough to matter at scale.
I was there – not just to report, but to moderate the closing panel of the day. Between sessions, I went further, speaking with a range of founders and investors at the summit to capture what the people building Europe’s next generation of companies actually believe.
The result is a short film that cuts across sectors from electrification and metals to construction technology, food systems, protein innovation, and European sovereignty and lets the people doing the work speak for themselves.
What they said
The voices in the conversation span the full breadth of what the World Fund backs. Ivor van Dartel, chief executive officer and co-founder of VÆRIDION, describes World Fund as visionary precisely because it does science-based due diligence and then stays for the long run: “It’s not a transaction and good luck. It’s a partnership that works over the years.”
On metals and the electrification transition, Aymeric Préveral-Etcheverry, co-founder and CEO of Lithosquare, is direct about the supply chain reality: Europe needs copper, lithium, and rare earths to build out EV and battery infrastructure, and that means finding primary sources, not just recycling. “We are part of this global team trying to make the transition to an electrified system as early and as efficiently as possible.”
Construction technology emerges as an unexpected bright spot. Europe’s earlier start on building decarbonisation, combined with a far larger offsite and serial construction sector than the US, gives the continent a genuine structural advantage.“There is nothing comparable in the US,” notes Emanuel Heisenberg, founder and CEO of ecoworks, adding that the combination of European hardware know-how with AI and quantum computing makes for genuinely synergistic potential.
Quantum and AI, meanwhile, are no longer nascent, at least in the eyes of the founders working in them. “For a very long time, we considered these markets to be nascent. They are much more mature, given the really strong, urgent buyer momentum we see,” says Daria Saharova, founding partner at World Fund.
The sharpest exchange is on what holds Europe back. Regulatory approval timelines that take 5 years in Europe versus 1 year in the US or Canada force deep tech companies to commercialise outside the continent, even when European customers exist and want the product.
“We need to commercialise outside of Europe, even though we have all of these potential customers that are very interested in our product in Europe,” says Adnan Oner, founder of Farmless.
On sovereignty, Aymeric Préveral-Etcheverry draws an important distinction: European sovereignty does not mean isolation. It means ensuring Europe controls specific, strategic parts of the value chain and connects to a more diversified global supply chain, not pulling up the drawbridge.
Food system resilience closes the conversation, with two different approaches, including localising supply chains and creating protein without agricultural land, united by the same underlying logic: dependency is a strategic risk, and Europe has the technology to reduce it.
Why watch it
The longer panel coverage from the World Fund Annual Summit, including TFN‘s moderation of the “From Breakthrough to Sovereignty” session with Lithosquare and Hyperscale Power, is available in full here. TFN has also covered VÆRIDION’s €14M Series A, Lithosquare’s $25M raise led by World Fund, and ecoworks’ €40M round, the third-largest construction tech round in Europe at the time.
A floor-level dispatch from the room where Europe’s deep tech investors and operators are trying to close the gap between scientific leadership and industrial scale.
Watch the full video above.
This article is part of our editorial partnership with World Fund.