Why Europe’s venture capital LPs are backing industrial AI and resilience tech

Two years, apparently, can change everything in venture capital. That's the blunt takeaway from a guest post penned by Talia Rafaeli of KOMPAS VC, describing what it was like closing the firm's first fund back in 2021 versus gearing up to raise a second one more recently.

Back when KOMPAS closed Fund I, the mood among limited partners was, in the firm's own words, liquid, optimistic, and fast-moving. Capital flowed easily. Confidence was high. It was the kind of environment where fundraising felt less like a slog and more like riding a wave that everyone assumed would keep building.

By the time the team turned its attention to Fund II, that wave had clearly broken. The piece describes the fundraising environment shifting into something markedly different, though the fuller explanation of just how it changed sits behind a paywall. What's left visible, though, is enough to sketch the shape of the argument: European LPs aren't chasing the same kind of bets they were a few years back, and the firm frames its own experience as a lens for understanding a broader pivot toward industrial AI and resilience-focused startups.

That framing matters more than any single funding round. Plenty of outlets report on individual deals, but fewer VCs are willing to put their own fundraising diary on record and say, plainly, this got harder. Whatever the specifics turn out to be once you're past the paywall, the headline signal is clear enough: the easy money era that defined 2021 is not the market anyone is raising into now.