Former Google executive launches €50m fund targeting Europe’s deep tech scale-up gap

Cloudberry Ventures says it will back early-stage companies in areas including advanced materials, energy, quantum, photonics and financial infrastructure, as founder Mahir Sahin argues Europe is losing too much of its scientific value overseas

A former Google and Alphabet executive has launched a €50m venture fund aimed at backing European deep tech companies, arguing that the continent continues to underfund its own scientific and engineering talent while overseas investors capture the upside.

Mahir Sahin, pictured, a senior Google executive from 2009 to 2025 and a former lead adviser at Alphabet’s X Factory, said the new fund would be run through his London-based firm Cloudberry Ventures and focus on seed to Series A investments in industrial, financial and compute infrastructure.

Sahin said Europe’s problem was no longer a shortage of talent but a failure to scale. He claimed the region, despite producing 43 per cent of the world’s Nobel laureates, captured only 11 per cent of global funding and two per cent of Big Tech market capitalisation.

“U.S investors are exploiting this by buying up European DeepTech at a 10x discount and flipping the IP to the States,” he said. “Europe can be a place where ambitious people build or a place they leave behind.”

Cloudberry said the fund would write cheques of €1m to €2m and concentrate on three areas: industrial infrastructure, including advanced materials, energy, circularity and autonomous manufacturing; financial infrastructure, including blockchain-enabled settlement, financing and digital assets; and compute infrastructure, including memory, quantum, photonics and edge AI.

Sahin said the pressure to invest in those areas was increasing as current assumptions around artificial intelligence ran up against physical constraints.

“The current AI trajectory is unsustainable – we cannot build an exponential digital future on top of a linear physical supply chain,” he said.

The launch comes as investors continue to debate whether Europe can convert scientific strength into larger technology companies rather than seeing intellectual property and high-growth businesses migrate to the United States.

Sahin pointed to Nscale’s $2bn Series C as an example of what could be achieved in Europe, and said founders needed investors who understood both science and commercial expansion. He said Cloudberry would use operational experience from companies including Google, Samsung, Airbus and HSBC to support portfolio companies expanding into North America and Asia.

The fund’s current portfolio includes Xavveo, a Berlin-based photonics radar start-up in which Cloudberry invested in December 2025.

Ehsanul Islam, Qualcomm vice-president of engineering and vice-president at Cloudberry Ventures, said: “Intelligent robotics, autonomous systems, and coordinated machine fleets are no longer distant possibilities — they are the new foundation of how industry operates and scales. The infrastructure being built today will define the industrial economy for the next several decades.”

Cloudberry said Sahin had previously tested the firm’s investment thesis through Cloudberry Pioneer Investments, which it said generated an 86 per cent gross internal rate of return and a 2.4x multiple on invested capital in 16 months. It cited earlier investments including Keyrails, Hydgen, Syntiant and Quantum Brilliance, the latter currently raising a Series B round.

Mark Bennet, vice-president for knowledge and information partnerships, EMEA at Google and a limited partner in Cloudberry Ventures, said: “Having worked alongside people who’ve scaled technology globally, I know how rare it is to find that combination of deep technical understanding and go-to-market experience. Mahir brings both.”

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_{Main image: Credit, Emilia Radu}