Universal Quantum and NetBird backer Nauta secures €60M first close for Fund VI

Nauta has opened its sixth fund with a €60 million first close, and €30 million of that came from the British Business Bank. The London- and Barcelona-based firm is now trying to build that into a fund of between €150 million and €200 million in the second half of 2027.

The structure is familiar if you’ve followed Nauta before. Its fifth fund started with €120 million in July 2020 and eventually reached €190 million by November 2021. The fourth fund began at €62 million in September 2015 and finished at €155 million. So this new first close is smaller than the last one, but not wildly out of line with how the firm has raised before.

The investor base is broad. Alongside the British Business Bank, backers include the European Investment Fund, Germany’s KfW Capital, SETT, Merifin Capital and the Institut Català de Finances, plus other institutions and family offices from the UK, Continental Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Nauta says three-quarters of the investors in this first close are returning backers, with the rest joining for the first time.

Nauta invests from pre-seed through Series A in business software and deep tech, with a focus on capital-efficient companies in travel, finance, retail and human resources. A slice of the fund is reserved for Nauta Labs, which backs pre-seed deep tech startups in areas such as high-performance computing, AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, industrial automation, digital health infrastructure and energy frontier technology. The firm says Labs writes cheques of £100,000 to £250,000 per company.

Its portfolio gives the strategy some shape. Universal Quantum, based in Sussex, is working toward the world’s first million-qubit quantum computer and announced a Series A of more than $100 million on October 8, 2026, with Nauta already in the mix. NetBird, founded in Berlin by Mikhail Bragin and Maycon Santos, started as a side project before becoming, in Bragin’s words, a privacy-first alternative to Dropbox that could run at home on a Raspberry Pi. Nauta also led Unravel’s $7 million Series A in April 2025 and Acai Travel’s $4 million seed round, and it was an original investor in Lodgify’s $30 million Series B.

The firm says this fund would take assets under management to nearly €750 million. For a sixth fund, that’s a solid marker of staying power. But the next stretch is the real test: turning a €60 million first close into something much bigger in a market where smaller, narrower funds have been getting plenty of love.