Last week in London, LPs, GPs, founders and allocators from 30 countries came together for the Alpha Summit, and Vanagon was honored with an award by Allocator One.
First things first: this one isn't ours alone. It belongs to the founders who trust us, the LPs who back us, and the ecosystem that keeps showing up.
On stage, we were asked about our secret sauce. Our spontaneous answer, "We somehow attract people that then really enjoy hanging out with each other," didn't quite count as an answer. So we thought about it some more. Most of it comes down to the people around us:
🥨 1. Munich, of course
We're lucky to be based in one of Europe's strongest deep tech hubs, with world-class universities, entrepreneurship centers, tech clusters, and an economy full of partners and customers for emerging technologies. We learn as much as we give, whether in founder workshops at UnternehmerTUM or by sharing our office with six other investors, including Vsquared Ventures.
🔗 2. A network built by many hands
None of us started out as a classic investor. Felix Schoppa built up the accelerator at Start2 Group, Sandro spent years in enterprise sales during the AI and Data Center build-out at Microsoft, Axel founded and successfully sold his company to the competition, and Susanne rolled out tech and venture at corporates. Each of those chapters introduced us to people who still help us today, including the INSEAD community.
→ That lets us connect corporates, academia, tech organizations and investors. We always ask both sides first, because nobody likes unsolicited intros.
→ What goes around comes around. So many of the intros, tips and opened doors for our founders came from people in this network.
3. People with the right energy
The founders, investors and ecosystem players we get to work with share a bias for action, and that energy is contagious. Who, if not all of us together, will move the tech transformation in the right direction? That's why we love bringing people together: rooftop lunches, retreats in the Alps like our recent Community Day, and community runs. These only work because you show up.
4. A community that amplifies
We share updates and thoughts through newsletters, calls and posts, covering fund news and societal topics close to our hearts. Every reshare, comment and reply from you carries that further than we ever could alone.
The bottom line
Turns out our spontaneous answer said it all: bring the right people together, let the magic happen – and enjoy it.
We truly love what we do. Working with founders building category definers across nature, materials, robotics, novel compute and resilience – with our LPs and partners – is a privilege. Thank you to Allocator One for the recognition, and to everyone who is part of our ecosystem. This award belongs to all of you.
5 New Investments
A very busy Q3
Despite “summer”, this past quarter has been extremely busy: we closed five new investments, across quantum hardware, quantum software, industrial robotics, agricultural intelligence and physical AI.
We can't reveal more just yet, but stay tuned: we'll be announcing our new portfolio companies soon.
Our portfolio companies won prizes too.
Caery, Ewigbyte, Neuramancer joined the award rain.
From Munich to the Rockies: Ewigbyte Wins Over Colorado's Governor
A pitch win, a trip to Denver and a meeting with the pioneers of data storage.
Our portfolio company Ewigbyte stores digital data in glass, written with ultrashort pulses of light and built to last for centuries. This summer, Colorado Governor Jared Polis visited Munich and personally sat on the jury of a deep tech competition run by the accelerator Start2 Group. Polis is not a typical politician on a jury: he is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Techstars, one of the world's best-known startup accelerators. He grilled the founders on how they would bring their technology to market. Ewigbyte won and secured the trip to Colorado!
The trip
In September, the team flew to Denver for Colorado Startup Week. They soon realised why the fit runs deeper than a pitch prize: Colorado is one of the birthplaces of modern data storage.
Who they met
Prof. Juan Rodriguez, who co-founded the storage company StorageTek in Colorado in 1969 and later Exabyte in Boulder. More than fifty years later, he sat down with Ewigbyte to discuss what comes after the technologies his generation built.
Fred Moore, a 21-year StorageTek veteran and today an independent analyst on the future of data archiving.
Engineers who spent their careers designing storage at Western Digital and Seagate.
Innosphere, a leading Colorado startup incubator. Its CEO Mike Freeman invited the team to an event with the Milken Institute, one of the most influential economic think tanks in the US.
The German American Chamber of Commerce in Colorado, which opened its network to the team.
Why it matters
It is remarkable for industry pioneers to take a young startup this seriously. They engaged deeply, dug into the engineering and offered to stay close. Ewigbyte is now planning its first Denver presence at the Chamber’s new offices and exploring a deeper role in Colorado’s deep-tech ecosystem.
Neuramancer featured in ProSieben - and winning Bavaria.
Bavarian Female Founders Contest winner Anika Gruner on ProSieben, and why deepfake detection is becoming infrastructure for democracy and business.
Neuramancer: Reading the Noise Behind the Deepfake
Only 34% of Germans believe they could reliably spot a deepfake*. They are right to be sceptical. This week, ProSieben's newstime looked at how AI fake videos put democracy under pressure, featuring our portfolio company Neuramancer and its co-founder and CEO Anika Gruner. She recently won the Bavarian final of the Female Founders Contest 2026.
Elections under attack
CeMAS, an NGO monitoring disinformation in Germany, tracked 141 fake videos tied to the recent state elections between late June and late August. They included false claims about 53 candidates, fake newspaper front pages, a cloned SZ website and AI voice deepfakes.
The numbers look big: 36,515 reposts and 18 million views.
The reality is thin: dormant X accounts and repost networks did the seeding, and organic reach was almost zero.
The lesson is that disinformation is now an industrial, professionally run operation.
Why Neuramancer’s detection solution is different
Most detection tools hunt for visual errors, and each new generation of models erases more of them. Neuramancer instead analyzes the statistical artifacts a generative model leaves in a file's residual noise. That technical fingerprint works regardless of whether the image shows a flood, a passport scan or a dented bumper. The result is a heatmap with a traceable explanation rather than a black-box verdict. DER SPIEGEL used this analysis in March 2026 after AI-generated images had entered its Iran coverage.
The technology stems from Anatol Maier's IT security research at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and was brought to market with SPRIND backing. Anika Gruner adds media expertise from BR and Burda, and Martin Sondenheimer adds insurance experience from Munich Re and Allianz.
From newsrooms to claims desks
The World Economic Forum ranks mis- and disinformation among the top short-term global risks. For businesses the risk is concrete: fake claims photos, forged documents and synthetic job candidates. After media, insurance is Neuramancer's first target market. In that market, detection offers proof on demand before a story is published or a claim is paid.
🔗 Watch the ProSieben newstime segment (German) · neuramancer.de
*Bitkom, 2026
The Decision Layer Germany's Health Insurers Have Been Missing
www.telekom.com/de/newsroom/aktuelles/medieninformationen/2026/09/telekom-und-caery-revolutionieren-mit-ki-prozesse-fuer-krankencaery: The Decision Layer Germany's Health Insurers Have Been Missing
AgeTech recognition and a partnership with Deutsche Telekom for our portfolio company caery.
Our portfolio company caery has been named one of the AgeTechX Ones to Watch 2026, selected from 145 nominations by an independent investment committee. At the same time, Deutsche Telekom is partnering with caery to automate claims review, billing and payouts for German health and long-term care insurers, running on Telekom's sovereign T Cloud Public.
Why the market needs this now
German health and care insurers financed around €450 billion in benefits in 2025. According to the Federal Ministry of Health, statutory health and social care insurance faces a funding gap of around €26 billion by 2027. Meanwhile, demographics, staff shortages and new regulation keep adding pressure. The bottleneck is not only money but decision-making capacity: several hundred million benefit cases a year still depend heavily on manual review.
caery's answer: decision and orchestration, not just automation
Many insurers already automate standard processes. caery goes a layer deeper. Its platform translates laws, insurer rules and operational data into transparent, auditable decisions across the entire chain from claims review to billing to payment.
Law-as-Code: Legal and contractual rules become machine-readable and can be updated quickly. This is critical as reforms like the upcoming Pflegeneuordnungsgesetz (PNOG) have to be implemented without adding reform backlog.
Decide before paying: Rule-based decisions up front replace retrospective control. Errors and misuse are caught before money leaves the system.
Orchestration: Clear cases are processed instantly, and complex ones go straight to the right experts.
Plug-in, not rip-and-replace: caery connects to existing core systems via API.
The demand is there. According to a 2026 Lünendonk study cited by Telekom, 87% of statutory health insurers surveyed plan to use AI-supported process automation. caery estimates that broad adoption could free up to €10 billion per year for statutory insurers.
Yours,
Sandro, Susanne & Axel
Axel at The Alpha Awards in London, holding our trophy.
