Europe’s First Dedicated Semiconductor VC
Because semiconductor startups deserve a semiconductor VC
Early-stage: €30m fund investing €400k-€1m into pre-seed and seed startups working on semiconductors, photonics or advanced materials.
Europe: We invest mainly in Europe because we have the R&D talent but until now have lacked specialist early-stage semi investors.
Strategic LPs: We are backed by Global Foundries & Radiant Opto-Electronics, and can give founders access to industrial know-how, tech roadmaps and manufacturing networks that no other investor can.
Experience: The team has deep technical and commercial experience and network across the semiconductor supply chain with ASML, Heptagon, Bosch, and ams Osram. With decades of operational experience and network, we help find customers and partners.
Who are we?
🇳🇱 > 🇫🇮 Rene Kromhof, Founding Partner, rene@cloudberry.vc
René brings the operational experience. Before Cloudberry, he served on the leadership team at Heptagon, a global leader in optical sensors. There, he drove exponential growth, scaling the company from a handful of employees into a global powerhouse serving the world’s top consumer electronics OEMs. His tenure culminated in Heptagon’s acquisition by ams AG in 2017. He then began angel investing, where he invested in and exited NILT, amongst others. He began his career in engineering and product management at ASML.
🇫🇮 Veera Pietikäinen, Founding Partner, veera@cloudberry.vc
Veera brings operational and finance support. She has nearly a decade of experience supporting early-stage teams and deep tech companies. She began in accounting and early startup programs, supporting founders in fundraising and business planning. Since 2019, Veera has been involved in the deep tech space across investments, portfolio support, legal and fund administration. She has also advised companies as a fractional CFO, helping shape financial strategy.
🇬🇧 Lawrence Lundy-Bryan, General Partner, lawrence@cloudberry.vc
Lawrence has always considered himself a researcher but now ten years in, he must admit he is a VC. He’s always been early to a market opportunity: crypto in 2015 and Deep Tech in 2020. He believes the greatest opportunity in the next decade is semiconductors. He’s made a couple of relevant investments inc. Rain.ai. He is most interested in photonic memory, compound semi, and edge computing, but really wants to support founders who want to build the future from Europe. He writes speculative fiction at State of the Future.
🇩🇪 Tuomas Hollman, Venture Partner
Tuomas is VP and Head of the Business Area Optics at Bosch Sensortec and is based in Germany. He has 25+ years of experience in the semiconductor industry across technical and business leadership roles. His expertise spans IC design, system engineering, product management and full business unit ownership, including P&L responsibility. Before joining Bosch Sensortec, he held senior roles at Texas Instruments and MaxLinear, and served as CEO of a semiconductor startup that was successfully acquired.
🇨🇭 Lukas Steinmann, Venture Partner
Lukas is based in Zurich and active across Egon Zehnder’s Industrial and Technology and AI practice groups. He is valued by clients for his business acumen and international experience acquired while serving private companies and public multinationals in Europe and Asia. Before joining Egon Zehnder, Lukas was ams Osram AG’s Senior Vice President and Head of its modules and solutions business line, serving major clients in the consumer electronics industry. Earlier he was VP and Head of Strategy & Partnership at Heptagon Advanced Micro Optics Pte Ltd in Singapore.
Why Europe?
Europe has a choice. The continent that pioneered the industrial revolution now risks becoming its footnote. Not from lack of talent or expertise but from failure of will and ambition. We have everything we need to win globally. Let’s do it.
We invest in European prosperity because computing is the bedrock of economic growth. Every major industry runs on semiconductors. Every breakthrough in medicine, energy, transport and communications depends on advances in processing power.
This isn’t a vertical to put a little bit of money towards. Semiconductors are everything. Europe invented much of this technology within living memory. It can lead again if we choose to do so.
The alternative is a continent where the brightest leave because opportunity exists elsewhere, where adversaries exploit weakness, where demographics make every problem harder. Europe can be a place where ambitious people build or a place they leave behind.
We want to see the next trillion dollar company in Europe. We think it will be a computing hardware company. We are here to back the founders who are going to build it.
What do we invest in?
Compute & Electronics
When transistor scaling slows, architecture and system design become the growth engine.
We invest in compute and control platforms that deliver more performance per watt and reshape where and how computation happens – from space, to datacentres, wearables, and medical devices.
Photonics, Connectivity & Sensing
Light is as important an engineering medium as electrons.
We back photonic and mixed electro-optic systems that move, measure and process information: from high-bandwidth communications to imaging, diagnostics and instrumentation in sectors like telecoms, medtech, industrial sensing and space.
Advanced Materials & Tools
New architectures only matter if you can build and measure them at scale.
We invest in advanced materials, equipment, design tools and metrology that extend what fabs and manufacturers can do, turning lab-scale semiconductor and photonic innovations into robust, repeatable production.