Vanagon Ventures

Marc Weimer-Hablitzel and Lukas Leitner lead the firm as managing and general partners, respectively. Both are directly involved in sourcing and underwriting every deal. The partnership structure is intentionally lean — no external investment committee layers sit between the partners and a final commit decision.

The firm uses the term to describe technologies where IP ownership and manufacturing capability carry strategic value for a region or nation-state, rather than being a pure software play that scales globally from day one. This includes advanced materials, quantum computing, and critical infrastructure software — categories where technical risk is higher but the resulting moat is deeper and less dependent on marketing spend.

The firm invests at pre-seed and seed exclusively. Check sizes top out at €500,000 for lead rounds. There is no growth-stage or Series A allocation. This forces the partnership to commit early, often before revenue, and earn ownership through board-level operational work rather than pro-rata follow-on rights.

The investment zone is the DACH region — Germany, Austria, Switzerland — for core pre-seed positions. The firm also evaluates DeepTech founders in broader European science clusters when the technology maps directly to one of the three infrastructure pillars. There is no publicly disclosed mandate for North America or Asia.

Vanagon Ventures deploys capital exclusively through direct equity investments in operating companies. The firm does not run a fund-of-funds program, does not syndicate club deals alongside external GPs as a standard practice, and has no publicly announced SPV overlay. The model is straightforward lead-check venture investing.

The firm explicitly stays away from consumer internet, mobile apps, marketplaces, and ad-supported software models. Any business where the primary value driver is user acquisition cost rather than patent-protected technical risk falls outside the mandate. The firm's position is that infrastructure-layer companies require a fundamentally different underwriting skillset, and it has no interest in diluting that focus.

WaterTech sits within the nature-infrastructure pillar, which treats natural-resource systems — water distribution, treatment, monitoring — as infrastructure assets requiring hardware and sensor-based DeepTech solutions. This is not a traditional sustainability mandate but rather a view that natural systems will see the same compute-driven efficiency overhaul that industrial systems saw in the previous decade. Vanagon's technical due-diligence process evaluates a water-sensing startup and a factory-automation spinout through the same lens of patent defensibility and deployment capital intensity.