Tech
Mundi Ventures closes on €750M for Kembara, its largest deep tech and climate fund
Europe invests billions into early-stage climate startups, only to watch too many fail at Series B, according to a recent report. But new funds are being raised to fill this gap, and Spain-based Mundi Ventures’ latest fund, Kembara Fund I, is one of them.
After securing a €350 million commitment from the European Investment Fund under the European Tech Champions Initiative in 2024, Mundi Ventures has just completed a €750 million first close for Kembara, its fifth fund and largest to date.
Regulatory filing from Spain reveals that the fund — focused on deep tech — could even stretch its final closing to €1.25 billion. But according to Kembara co-founder and general partner Yann de Vries, getting to €750 million in two years as a first fund in this environment “was not easy.”
Kembara is managed by a specialist team within Mundi Ventures, with offices in Madrid, London, Barcelona and Paris. Mundi Ventures founder Javier Santiso is now also a co-founder and GP of the Kembara fund, which has now disclosed the full list of its senior partners.
Alongside de Vries and Santiso, climate tech VC Robert Trezona and deep tech VC Pierre Festal have also joined as general partners, and former Atomico partner Siraj Khaliq as senior strategic advisor.
Their individual track records helped them raise funds from institutional backers waking up to the need for European growth capital that can turn its many university spinouts into sizable businesses with industrial synergies. But it also gave them a front-row seat into the broader growing pains of European climate and deep tech startups — especially to de Vries.
A seasoned venture capitalist who founded Redpoint eVentures Brazil and later became a partner at Atomico, de Vries had moved to the other side of the table to join German electric aircraft startup Lilium — only for the company to cease operations in 2024 after raising more than $1 billion and going public via a SPAC.
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In de Vries’ view, Lilium went bankrupt because it couldn’t find the growth capital it needed, but this “traumatizing experience” also had a silver lining. “I saw so many amazing teams in Europe that were going through the same journey,” he said. “[Europe] doesn’t have an innovation problem. It doesn’t have a startup problem. The problem it has is a scale-up problem.”
Kembara’s sweet spot will be Series B and C rounds, with plans to write initial checks from €15 million to €40 million into some 20 companies. But the fund’s size leaves room for follow-ons to help portfolio startups scale manufacturing and expand globally, and total investments could go up to €100 million per company.
That’s more than the full size of many European funds, though this may be changing: deep tech VC firm Elaia and asset manager Lazard teamed up to form LEC (Lazard Elaia Capital), whose initial investments will range between €20 million and €60 million per company, while operator-led fund Plural is reportedly raising a new fund of up to €1 billion.
Still, the capital-intensive nature of most climate and deeptech growth-stage companies means that even large VC checks can only go so far. One lesson de Vries learned from Lilium is that raising only in equity is very hard, and even puts companies in a hard spot later on. This inspired Kembara to take a different approach to financing.
“Several of us have lived through this, and what we want to do now is to productize non-dilutive financing for these deep tech founders to help them de-risk their future financing and optimize the capital structure to minimize dilution. And we’re bringing in [limited partners] who […] not only want to invest in the fund, but also want to coinvest in those winners,” de Vries said.
For these LPs, geopolitics also plays a role in wanting to provide growth capital and venture debt to European growth-stage startups. “There’s going to be a lot of support from sovereign wealth funds in Europe, from government, from corporations, to push and drive for building these European champions in deep tech out of Europe,” de Vries predicted.
These geopolitical undertones are also reflected in Kembara’s sector focus, which includes dual use and defense tech to “protect European sovereignty,” according to a press release. However, de Vries pushed back against the idea that Kembara is simply replacing capital that later-stage European outfits could have raised abroad.
“There are lots of gems that are under the radar in Europe, that could be scaling into global champions, and that are not realizing their full potential.” He said Deepmind is a related example, “where they were missing this growth capital and sold too early.” (Google acquired the company for more than $500 million in 2014, but it is now estimated to be worth billions.)
Keeping European companies European has gained urgency in many verticals that overlap with Kembara’s thesis, such as quantum computing, semiconductors and spacetech. But its goal is to foster global champions that cross borders. Coincidentally, Kembara means “to wander” in Malaysian (although the team holds “the humble path to excellence” as an older meaning.)
Beyond the name, Kembara has Malaysian connections. Santiso is also the former CEO for Europe of Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah; and doors could open as many countries examine their exposure to the U.S. “In the second close, we’re going to be looking for global investors, because we want to have global access to markets, but also global access to supply chain,” de Vries said.
Tech
Mirage raises $75M to continue building models for its AI video editing app Captions
Mirage, the maker of video-editing app Captions, has raised $75 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF).
Over the past year, the startup has made significant changes both to its product and corporate identity. The startup rebranded from Captions to Mirage to position itself as an AI lab that produces different models and also caters to industries like advertising and marketing. It has also trained a model specifically for pacing, framing, and attention dynamics in short videos.
The company also switched to a freemium model in January 2025 to better compete with apps like ByteDance’s CapCut and Meta’s Edits, which was released later in the year. It now offers a video-creation suite as well, with some of the features from Captions, that lets companies create and distribute videos in bulk.
Mirage’s co-founder and CEO Gaurav Misra said that the company aims to create more models. However, he didn’t specify what its next set of models would do, only saying that they would be focused on “assembly intelligence” — basically putting together a video using different sources and components.
Speaking about Mirage’s new audio model, which it claims can preserve accents in generated videos, Misra said, “The reason for the audio model was that we noticed that there was a gap in accents because a lot of our users are international. Accents are just very important. There was my own dad’s example. He was trying to use the app, and he would say a word in an Indian accent, and it would always make it sound like he’s talking in an American accent.”
According to data from analytics firm Appfigures, Captions has been downloaded over 3.2 million times in the last 365 days and has brought in $28.4 million in in-app revenue. Misra said the platform has been used to create more than 200 million videos so far, and that it has attracted an international user base, with only 25% of its revenue coming from the U.S.
Currently, Mirage’s marketing suite is available on the web, and Captions largely offers a mobile-first editing suite. The company aims to merge these two platforms to better target small businesses that may be looking to create marketing videos.
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Pranav Singhvi, managing director of General Catalyst’s CVF fund, said Mirage has great product-market fit.
“Mirage’s business equation is extremely figured out. They know exactly how to spend that dollar and generate a very attractive ROI. If you think about the market they’re going after, it’s in a sense an infinite total addressable market. You can start out in the creator world, the influencer world, and then use that as a mechanism to sell to enterprises as well,” Singhvi told TechCrunch.
There are tons of companies building AI video-generation pipelines for marketing. Canva has introduced several tools around marketing creation and tracking, while platforms like D-ID, HeyGen, Webflow, and Avataar have been releasing new models and features.
However, Singhvi seems confident about Mirage’s positioning and unit economics. “Regardless of what the other tools are out there, Mirage is clearly ahead of the pack from a unit economics standpoint. Ultimately, it’s all a reflection of their product,” he said.
Mirage aims to use the fresh capital to fuel growth, and expand in high-growth Asian markets.
Tech
Spotify’s new SongDNA feature maps how your favorite songs are connected
Spotify announced on Tuesday the global rollout of a new feature, SongDNA, that lets listeners more deeply explore their favorite music.
Now available to Premium subscribers on iOS and Android, the feature provides an interactive experience that lets users trace other components of a song beyond the singer, songwriter, or musician. With SongDNA, listeners could explore other connections, like who may have covered that song, plus other information like samples, interpolations, or what other projects the song’s collaborators have also been involved in.
The idea is something of an expansion to the existing “About the Song” feature, allowing Spotify’s customers to learn more about the writers, producers, and collaborators behind their favorite music. This could lead users to see how artists are connected to and influenced by one another’s work. For those in the music industry itself, the feature could help them find new collaborators, producers, engineers, and others they may want to work with.
It also offers those in the background of music production more visibility and credibility than they’ve previously had in the streaming age.
TechCrunch reported in October that Spotify was developing the SongDNA feature as a way to help users discover music through a song’s credits, after references to the feature were spotted in the app’s code by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong. The following month, the company officially confirmed its plans to launch SongDNA in early 2026.
In part, SongDNA has been built on top of data from the online community-built music database WhoSampled, which Spotify acquired last year. The feature also competes with TIDAL’s interactive credits, which similarly focus on the contributors behind the songs you stream.
“By bringing collaborators, samples, and covers together in one place, we’re making it easier for fans to discover new music and see how songs connect and come to life—while giving songwriters, producers, and rightsholders meaningful recognition for the role they play in creating it,” said Jacqueline Ankner, Spotify’s head of Songwriter & Publisher Partnerships, in a statement.
The feature is rolling out now in beta to Premium users globally across iOS and Android devices, with plans for the rollout to be complete sometime in April.
Tech
Snapchat’s new ‘AI Clips’ Lens format turns photos into five-second videos
Snapchat announced on Tuesday that it’s launching AI Clips in Lens Studio, its platform that lets creators design and publish AR and AI effects called Lenses. The new Clips are an AI-powered Lens format that transforms a single photo into a five-second video.
Unlike open-ended text-to-video tools, AI Clips are designed as a closed-prompt experience, where Lens creators design the Lens, and users can tap it to generate a video from their own photos.
For example, a Lens creator could design a Lens that allows users to generate a video of themselves walking down a red carpet using their own photo.
Snapchat says both experienced and new developers can use the new Lens format to turn a single prompt into a published Lens in minutes without the need for external tools.
AI Clips are available to Snapchat users who are subscribed to that platform’s Lens+ offering, which costs $8.99 per month. As its name suggests, Lens+ gives users access to exclusive Lenses and AR experiences, along with the features available as part of the standard Snapchat+ subscription.
“For the first time, developers can build and publish photo-to-video AI directly to Snapchat from the GenAI Suite in Lens Studio,” Snapchat wrote in a blog post. “There’s currently nothing else on the market that combines closed-prompt AI video generation with direct photo input, real distribution, and monetization.”
Lens creators enrolled in Lens+ Payouts, Snapchat’s monetization program that allows developers to earn money from their Lenses, can earn revenue from the AI Clips they create.
Snapchat isn’t the only platform focused on letting users create AI clips from their own photos, as YouTube announced last week that it was rolling out “Reimagine,” a new feature that lets users transform a single frame from an existing YouTube Short into an eight-second clip using their own photo.
The launch of AI Clips comes the same day that Snapchat announced that users created nearly two trillion Snaps, or 63,000 Snaps per second, in 2025.
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