reaching the summit

Dear Reader,

As Europe’s innovation landscape accelerates, the Summit Fund continues to back companies shaping the continent’s technological and industrial future. From Klarna’s expansion into next-generation digital payments to Proxima Fusion’s landmark agreement to develop Europe’s first grid-connected fusion power plant, our portfolio reflects Europe’s growing ambition across software, AI, and deep tech.

At the same time, through our early-stage strategy and RAC VII, we’re investing at the very beginning of major shifts: from building the intelligence layer for robotics with Flexion, to redefining industrial automation with FORGIS. Together, these developments highlight a clear theme: Europe is designing and building the future. Read on for the latest updates:

summit fund updates

Turning fusion into infrastructure: Proxima Fusion’s €2B agreement

Proxima Fusion (RAC VII) has signed a landmark Memorandum of Understanding with the Free State of Bavaria, RWE and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics to develop Europe’s first grid-connected commercial fusion power plant based on stellarator technology.

The program totals €2 billion, with 20% contributed by Proxima and the remainder backed through non-dilutive state and federal funding. It sets out a clear roadmap toward fusion electricity on the grid, beginning with the Alpha demonstrator in Garching to validate key technologies and demonstrate net energy gain, followed by the planned Stellaris power plant in Gundremmingen.

In parallel, Proxima has launched the Alpha Alliance, an industrial consortium of more than 30 European companies to accelerate the path to commercial fusion.

Beyond the technology, this is a decisive industrial signal for Europe. The program is expected to create thousands of jobs, strengthen energy sovereignty and translate decades of scientific leadership into real-world deployment.

After a multi-year deep dive into nuclear fusion, we pre-empted Proxima’s seed round in 2023 with the largest check in redalpine’s early-stage fund history. We’re proud to back the team as they work to turn stellarator fusion from breakthrough science into infrastructure. Read more in Financial Times.

summit fund news

 A brief wrap-up of the latest news from our Summit Fund portfolio:

• Klarna (Stockholm) -  The Buy Now Pay Later unicorn is moving deeper into digital assets with the launch of KlarnaUSD, a fully U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin designed for everyday payments and cross-border transactions. Set to go live on mainnet in 2026 and built on Stripe and Paradigm’s Tempo blockchain, the move signals Klarna’s ambition to position itself at the center of next-generation payments as regulatory frameworks like MiCA and the GENIUS Act take shape. Read more on Reuters.

  
  

• Mistral AI (Paris) - Europe’s leading AI start-up has unveiled Mistral Large 3, a powerful new multimodal and multilingual open-weight model, reinforcing Europe’s growing role in shaping the future of AI. Supporting most European languages and selected Asian ones, the release highlights Mistral’s mission to make frontier AI open and accessible, and positions Europe as a credible home for world-class, sovereign AI innovation. Read more in the Financial Times.

• Proxima Fusion (Germany) - Europe’s fusion ecosystem gained major recognition as Proxima Fusion (RAC VII) won the German Mittelstand Prize 2025, an award honoring companies strengthening Germany’s long-term competitiveness. The prize was presented in Berlin in the presence of senior political leaders, including German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, underscoring the strategic importance of fusion energy and Proxima’s role in shaping Europe’s clean-energy future.

new RAC VII investments

                       To underscore its diversified approach and capitalize on early-stage opportunities in the tech world, the Summit Fund invested in our early-stage fund, RAC VII. The fund targets the most promising upcoming software and science startups across Europe. A brief wrap-up of our recent RAC VII investments:

Flexion Robotics

Flexion Robotics (RAC VII) is building the intelligence layer that will unlock the next era of robotics. While humanoid and general-purpose robots have made remarkable progress on the hardware side, autonomy in real-world, unstructured environments remains the core bottleneck. Flexion addresses this challenge by combining reinforcement learning, high-fidelity simulation, and sim-to-real training to create a shared “brain” that allows robots to understand, adapt, and generalize across tasks, environments, and form factors. We’re proud to double down on our conviction by backing Flexion in their $50M Series A, supporting their mission to make scalable robotic autonomy a reality.

Founded by Nikita Rudin, David Hoeller, Julian Nubert, Fabian Tischhauser, and Marco Hutter, the team brings together deep technical expertise from ETH Zurich, NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Tesla, and Amazon, bridging cutting-edge research and real-world deployment.

As Philip Kneis, investor at redalpine, told Crunchbase News: “After looking into the robotics space for years, Flexion stood out because it is focused on the toughest and most defensible part of the stack: building a shared brain for robots.”

For us, this investment reflects a broader conviction: robotics is reaching an inflection point, and the companies defining its intelligence layer will shape the next era of automation. Read more in Crunchbase News. 

FORGIS

Europe’s industrial base has faced a long-standing trade-off between flexibility, scalability, and execution at scale. Enter FORGIS (RAC VII). What sets FORGIS apart is its software-first approach to industrial automation: an Agentic Development Environment that allows factories to configure, code, and test themselves. By abstracting away vendor lock-in and manual integration work, FORGIS turns automation from a bespoke, engineering-heavy process into a programmable, reusable system, unlocking faster deployment, lower costs, and greater resilience across Europe’s manufacturing stack.

We’re proud to lead FORGIS’ $4.5M pre-seed round, backing founders Federico Martelli, Camilla Mazzoleni, and Riccardo Maggioni: a team with deep experience across ETH Zurich, Google Intrinsic, and Bain, uniquely combining academic rigor with hands-on industrial and operational expertise. At a moment when Europe must rebuild its ability to make things, not just design them, FORGIS represents a path to restoring one of the continent’s greatest strengths. Read more on why we invested here.

venture market developments

Venture activity solidified its recovery in Q4 2025, buoyed by the reopening of the IPO window and sustained demand for AI infrastructure. Global volumes held steady against Q3 levels, confirming that the market has transitioned from a correction phase into a more disciplined growth cycle. While capital deployment remains selective, the “flight to quality” has evolved into a “flight to liquidity.” Artificial intelligence remains a central driver of investment activity, particularly within the application layer.

In Europe, venture capital investment is projected to close the quarter at approximately €16.8 billion, bringing the full-year 2025 total to nearly €62 billion. This represents a resilient finish to the year. Deal volume remained concentrated, with roughly 1,400–1,500 transactions completed in Q4. Artificial intelligence continues to be the dominant driver of deal value, projected to account for nearly 40% of all European venture investment by year-end, a trend expected to accelerate well into 2026.

Exit activity delivered the quarter’s most significant momentum, driven by the long-awaited resurgence of IPOs. Following Klarna’s NYSE debut in September, Q4 saw the major IPO of security company Verisure on Nasdaq Stockholm in October. Raising €3.2 billion at a €13.7 billion valuation, Verisure marked Europe’s largest listing in three years. Alongside the reopening of public markets, the secondary landscape has matured into a structural pillar of liquidity. In the DACH region, sponsor-to-sponsor transactions and continuation vehicles drove over 50% of exit value, highlighting the growing importance of alternative realization channels even as broader M&A activity remains disciplined.

Looking ahead to 2026, the ecosystem appears to be settling into a sustainable rhythm defined by discipline. Investors are prioritizing robust business fundamentals and technical depth over rapid expansion. With the IPO environment expected to normalize further in the first half of the year and a steadier macroeconomic backdrop, the market is well positioned for long-term development.

full exposure to european vc

The Summit Fund employs a diversified, multi-stage (seed to pre-IPO), and multi-vintage investment strategy to provide broad exposure to the European venture capital ecosystem through a single, semi-liquid vehicle, with a focus on companies at the intersection of software and science. The approach is anchored in three complementary pillars: 

• Fund-of-Funds investments, providing access to redalpine’s closed-ended early-stage (Seed/Series A) and growth-stage (Series B/Series C) funds 

• Portfolio Superstars, comprising direct investments in the top-performing breakout companies from redalpine’s existing portfolio to capture value through their scale-up phase

• Category Leaders, consisting of selective direct investments in more mature, market-leading companies outside the existing redalpine portfolio. 

  
  

By combining the high-growth potential of early-stage venture exposure with the resilience and liquidity profile of more mature, later-stage assets, the Summit Fund delivers immediate participation in a diversified and compounding portfolio.