welcome to our july newsletter
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
This July, Proxima Fusion closed a landmark €411M round, microagi raised the largest seed ever by a German startup, and we led telli's $15M round to reinvent customer operations with AI voice agents. Read on for these updates and more!
portfolio funding
Proxima Fusion raises €411M, becoming Europe's best-funded fusion company
In 2024, redalpine led Proxima Fusion's (RAC VII) seed round after Harald and Gianmarco built a close relationship with the founding team, convinced that their stellarator approach was the winning formula for commercial fusion.
Today, that conviction is paying off. Proxima has announced a €411M funding round at a €2.4 billion valuation, making it the best-funded fusion company in Europe. The round was led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures, with RWE and Google joining as strategic investors, and we doubled down alongside other existing investors.
The capital will help Proxima build Alpha, their net-energy stellarator demonstrator near Munich, in partnership with the state of Bavaria, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, and RWE. Beyond the round, this is about what fusion means for Europe: energy security, industrial competitiveness, and a continent that exports power instead of importing it. We could not be prouder to have backed this team from seed to Europe's leading fusion company. Read more in Bloomberg.
redalpine backs microagi's $55M seed round to bring robotics into European factories
China installed 295,000 factory robots in 2024. All of Europe: 85,000. That gap compounds over time. Robots at work generate the data that trains better robots, so whoever deploys at scale first builds an edge that gets harder to close every year. The window for Europe to act is now.
That is why we are delighted to back microagi (RAC VIII) in their $55M seed round, the largest ever raised by a German startup, led by Hummingbird Ventures with Northzone, LocalGlobe, and Village Global also participating. microagi's open deployment ecosystem brings robots into European factories, combining compute and models from NVIDIA and Google Cloud with hardware from Unitree, retrained on each factory's own operating data so robots are tailored to the use case from day one and the data stays entirely with the customer.
The company was founded ten months ago by two ex-Formula 1 engineers, Bercan Kilic from Red Bull Racing and Yoan Iliev from Mercedes. Headquartered in Munich with a research site in Zurich, they are building at the heart of the ETH robotics cluster we have long supported. Read more in Business Insider.
redalpine leads telli's $15M seed round to reinvent customer operations
Most B2C companies still run customer operations on the same stack they used twenty years ago: CRMs, call centers, tickets, queues, and manual work behind every interaction. telli is changing this.
telli (RAC VIII) builds AI voice agents that handle customer-facing operations end to end. Their agents already run millions of conversations for companies including Sky, Enpal, and Vaillant Group. At the center is Charlie, an AI coworker that helps teams deploy agents, analyze conversations, and improve performance autonomously.
We recently led telli's $15M seed round, with Mutschler Ventures and existing backers Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator joining. Founders Philipp Baumanns, Finn zur Mühlen, and Seb Hapte-Selassie combine deep operating experience in high-volume customer operations with rare technical depth. Or in our GP Sebastian's words, they are the most technically exceptional and complementary team we have encountered in this space. Voice is just the beginning. Read more here.
portfolio updates
Hilo (RAC IV), building continuous blood pressure monitoring, launched Hilo Core in the US. FDA-cleared, 30+ daily readings, and now available to millions of Americans. We first backed the team in 2018. Read more in Forbes.
Inkitt (RAC III), the data-driven self publishing platform, launched Ironblood, the world's first fully AI-generated streaming service. Three movies live now, 30 per month on the way. Watch at ironblood.com.
Basecamp Research (RAC VII), building the world's largest proprietary dataset of biological diversity, landed inside Anthropic's Claude Science with EDEN, their foundation model for antibiotic design. Any scientist can now design novel antibiotics in Claude. Read more here.
Proxima Fusion (RAC VII), building the next generation of fusion power plants, has been named to lead Bavaria's fusion hub under Germany's new Hightech-Agenda, with up to €9 billion earmarked for fusion research and the explicit goal of building the world's first fusion power plant in Germany. Read more in Handelsblatt.
redalpine in the media
What Berlin's next mayor needs to get right on tech
As a born and bred Berliner, Oliver shared his perspective on what the tech community expects from Berlin's next mayor: the courage to back excellence, prioritize leading research and ambitious universities, and reward performance rather than manage mediocrity. Berlin has had this energy before. Now it needs to recapture it. More in Business Insider.
How Germany engineered Europe’s biggest fusion round
Harald was interviewed by Tech Funding News (TFN) to discuss why we first invested in Proxima Fusion’s seed round and how we view the company’s stellar progression since then. More in TFN.