welcome to our october newsletter
This month, we invested in Enact's $30M pre-seed round to give robots a sense of touch, co-led calliora's $6M pre-seed round to fix hospital economics, cheered on microagi as it reached $100M in annual run rate, welcomed Tristan Schirra as our new MD of the Summit Fund, and got on stage in San Francisco and Istanbul to tell the European story. Read on for all our news and highlights...
funding news
Enact Intelligence raises $30M, the largest pre-seed round in Switzerland
Robots today can see the world, but they can't feel it. That missing sense is why physical AI keeps stalling the moment a task requires real dexterity. Zurich-based Enact (RAC VIII) is changing this by feeding torque and touch data into a foundation model alongside vision and language, so its robots understand the physics of a task, learn efficiently from experience, and perform reliably in the real world.
We have been close to Enact from the very beginning and are delighted to announce our investment in their record-breaking $30M pre-seed round alongside Notion Capital, firstminute capital, and exceptional angels including Arthur Mensch (founder of Mistral) and Yann LeCun (founder of AMI Labs and former Chief AI Scientist at Meta). Founder Manuel Yves Galliker brings full-stack robotics experience from 1X and Physical Intelligence, and chose to build in his (and our) home turf of Zurich instead of Silicon Valley to be close to the ETH robotics cluster, top talent and first industrial customers. Read more in Sifted and Handelsblatt.
redalpine co-leads calliora's $6M pre-seed to transform hospital economics
Two thirds of German hospitals already operate at a loss, and from 2027 insurers can audit 100% of their invoices, up from 15% today. Munich-based calliora (RAC VIII) builds the AI operating layer for hospital economics, flagging gaps in each case before an invoice goes out. They are already cutting the effort per case by more than half in hospitals across five German states. Billing is just the start: the team is extending the platform across the entire patient journey, with the ambition to reshape how hospitals are run in Germany and beyond.
We are proud to co-lead calliora's $6M pre-seed alongside Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments. Founders Frederik Träuble and Jonas Wildberger met during their AI PhDs at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and, as Mira puts it, "know how to earn trust in a hospital". Read why we invested in our blog.
portfolio updates
Better Dairy (RAC VI) is now the world's first supplier of precision-fermented lactopontin and achieved Self-Affirmed GRAS status in the US.
Helical (RAC VIII), building biological foundation models for drug discovery, launched its MCP for Codex together with OpenAI and Nebius, letting researchers run in-silico experiments with biological foundation models from a single prompt.
microagi (RAC VII), bringing robotics into European factories, reached $100M in annual run rate six months after launch, the fastest company ever to get there. We are incredibly proud to have supported the team from seed.
Five portfolio companies named in the Sifted AI 100: Basecamp Research (RAC VII), voize (RAC VI), Flexion Robotics (RAC VII), microagi (RAC VII), and telli (RAC VIII) were recognized among Europe's most promising AI-native startups. Read more in Sifted.
team updates
Tristan will join us in November from Swiss Life Asset Managers, where he headed Fund Management and built the Privado ELTIF from scratch to more than €300M in assets. He will bring that builder energy to venture: at redalpine, he will lead our multi-stage, evergreen Summit Fund, broadening its investor base and taking it to the next level.
In Michael’s words, Tristan pairs “builder mentality and operational rigor”, exactly what the Summit Fund needs for its next chapter. Read more in DAS INVESTMENT.
event highlights
Mira and Marc's takeaways from Tech Week in SF
Our partners Mira and Marc joined Daniel in San Francisco for Tech Week and TechCrunch Disrupt. While there, we co-hosted Germany at the Frontier, a one-day conference connecting German tech talent with Silicon Valley, where Daniel discussed on stage how European founders go from outsiders to outliers in the US.
Between meeting outstanding founders, comparing notes with fellow investors, and learning from the operators shaping what comes next, three things stuck with us:
AI is everywhere: every company, investors included, is rebuilding how it works around AI.
Winners keep winning: capital, talent, and attention flow to the front runners, and they pull away fast.
Transatlantic from day one: Europe's best founders no longer treat the US as a later step.
We left SF convinced that European founders can win globally, and we will keep backing them as they do!
Sebastian on Europe's AI compute gap at Istanbul Ignited by Slush'D
Europe runs on 4% of the world's AI compute, while the US has around three quarters. On stage in Istanbul with Max Niroomand (Lyceum) and Mike Butcher (ex-TechCrunch), Sebastian explained why that is concerning: as more of our economy runs on AI, Europe increasingly depends on servers it does not control. The gap is fixable - Europe has the energy, land, capital and users to build compute at home, provided European companies and governments become the buyers. Otherwise, data centers get built here but still belong to somebody else.
CDTM students visit our London team and portfolio
We welcomed students from the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM), jointly run by TU Munich and LMU Munich, to London. In a cozy pub, Anna, Lezama, and Marco from our investment team were joined by our portfolio founders Maxime Allard (Helical) and Magnus Grünewald (Lyceum) for a lively discussion on building deep tech companies.
where we're going
From 30 - 31 October Sebastian and Florian will attend Sigma Squared Global Summit in Vienna, where Sebastian will sit down with N26 co-founder Maximilian Tayenthal in the fireside chat “Banking on Rebellion: The N26 Story”
On 11 November Rafael will speak at PE Insights Nordics in Stockholm
From 18 -19 November redalpine will be at Slush in Helsinki, co-hosting the MaxAllocation Slush Investor Breakfast
On 25 November, Harald will speak at EPFL Investor Day in Lausanne