31 August 2026

^{Linnéa Kornehed Falck and Robert Falck (photo: Navisalma)}

 

Europe does not have an innovation problem. It has a scaling problem. That diagnosis has become familiar across European technology policy, but the founders of Swedish autonomous freight company Einride now want to turn it into an investment model.

Robert Falck and Linnéa Kornehed Falck have joined former McKinsey partner and Material Economics co-founder Robert Westerdahl to launch Navisalma, a European venture platform for frontier technology companies.

Navisalma is not presenting itself as a conventional venture capital fund. Its model combines technology expertise, capital, company building, operations and design. The platform aims to help enable at least ten new global technology leaders over the next ten years.

According to Tech.eu, Navisalma intends to deploy around €450 million into European deeptech companies over the next three years, including businesses working in areas such as robotics. That capital has not yet been raised. The firm is reportedly seeking an initial €40 million, most of which is said to have been secured from the founders and other investors. That initial capital would cover operating costs and some seed investments.

Its central proposition is interesting: can the experience of building one difficult industrial technology company become a repeatable system for building others?

 

What is Navisalma’s venture platform?

 

Europe has become increasingly effective at producing deeptech startups in fields such as robotics, energy, quantum technology, advanced materials and artificial intelligence. But these startups struggle when their scientific or engineering breakthrough has to become a product, production system and international business.

Unlike a software startup, an industrial deeptech company may need factories, physical testing, regulatory approval, specialist supply chains and years of engineering before it produces substantial revenue. Its technology may perform impressively in a laboratory while remaining too expensive, unreliable or complicated for commercial deployment. Capital alone cannot repair those weaknesses.

Navisalma intends to work across the company-building process instead of separating investment from execution. It wants to identify technologies capable of changing an industry, translate them into products, accelerate their adoption and operations, develop their brands and build long-term enterprise value.

“The world’s most important technology companies are never defined by technology alone,” said Linnéa Kornehed Falck, a founding partner at Navisalma. “Design is how technology becomes useful, desirable and culturally relevant.”

This emphasis on design is unusual in deeptech investment. Design is often treated as something added after the engineering has been completed: a more attractive interface, a refined product enclosure or a communications exercise before launch.

Navisalma places it much earlier in the process. Design, in this interpretation, determines how customers understand the technology, interact with it and incorporate it into existing operations. For a complex industrial product, poor design can create training costs, slow adoption and leave technically sophisticated systems unused.

Einride demonstrated the commercial power of that approach. Its cabless autonomous vehicle gave a highly visible physical identity to what could otherwise have been presented as a collection of freight software, electric trucks and logistics services. Whether that same combination of engineering and visual clarity can be reproduced across very different technologies is one of the platform’s larger experiments.

 

Combining venture capital with private equity discipline

 

Navisalma also plans to connect two investment traditions that usually enter a company at different stages.

Venture capital accepts high technical risk and backs businesses before their markets are fully established. Private equity generally enters more mature companies and concentrates on operational improvement, financial performance and value creation.

Frontier technology companies need elements of both. They require investors willing to finance uncertain engineering, but they also need early operational discipline because mistakes in manufacturing, procurement or deployment can consume large amounts of capital.

Navisalma says its platform will work alongside existing investors and owners rather than attempt to replace Europe’s capital ecosystem.

“Europe already has an exceptional capital ecosystem,” Westerdahl said. “Our opportunity is not to replace it, but to add another capability.”

The approach resembles a venture studio in its hands-on involvement, but Navisalma’s language suggests a broader and potentially longer-term role. It describes Einride as the place where its experience was accumulated and Abundry, the first company it has backed, as the platform’s first application in energy.

Abundry uses artificial intelligence and decision intelligence to improve the performance of energy systems and unlock more value from existing infrastructure, from a single site to entire regions. The ambition fits Navisalma’s approach: combining technology, product development and operational knowledge to help energy infrastructure produce more from the assets already in place.

 

What Einride taught its founders about scaling deeptech

 

Einride gives Navisalma’s founders credibility that career investors may lack. Since 2016, the company has attempted to redesign road freight around electric vehicles, autonomous driving and AI-powered logistics software. It has deployed technology with large companies across Europe, the US and the Middle East.

It also illustrates why the European deeptech scale-up gap cannot be reduced to a shortage of good ideas.

Building a business around heavy vehicles, charging infrastructure, autonomy and logistics operations requires substantial and continuing investment. Einride encountered periods of financial strain, changed its leadership and ultimately turned to the US public markets for additional capital.

Robert Falck moved from chief executive to executive chairman in May 2025, with former chief financial officer Roozbeh Charli taking over day-to-day leadership. In June 2026, Einride completed a merger with special purpose acquisition company Legato Merger Corp III and began trading on Nasdaq.

The transaction valued Einride at a pre-money equity value of approximately $1.35 billion and included a $113 million private investment in public equity, or PIPE, financing. Its shares rose sharply during their Nasdaq debut, but becoming publicly traded did not remove the economic pressures associated with scaling physical technology.

In the first half of 2026, Einride reported constant-currency revenue of SEK273 million, or about $27 million, an increase of 26% year on year. Reported revenue under International Financial Reporting Standards was SEK263.5 million. Its net loss reached SEK1.12 billion, compared with SEK887 million in the same period a year earlier. 

Those figures do not invalidate Einride’s technology or its commercial progress. They expose the distance between deploying an advanced product and building a financially sustainable industrial company.

Navisalma’s founders have therefore learned their scaling lessons under pressure. They have dealt with hardware, regulation, enterprise sales, infrastructure, international expansion and repeated capital requirements. The strongest argument for their platform is not that Einride followed a smooth formula, but that it did not.

 

Europe is building a stronger deeptech scaling system

 

European policymakers and investors already recognise the scale-up gap. The European Tech Champions Initiative, a fund-of-funds programme run by the European Investment Fund, channels capital into large venture capital and private equity funds that back European technology scale-ups. Its first phase was launched in 2023 with up to €3.9 billion in initial resources.

The European Innovation Council’s STEP Scale Up programme tackles another part of the financing gap. It makes equity investments of between €10 million and €30 million in companies developing strategic digital, deeptech, clean and biotechnology, with the aim of catalysing larger funding rounds.

Private investors are also creating larger and more specialised vehicles. As MTN reported when Kembara announced a €750M first close, Europe increasingly has funds capable of writing the larger cheques needed when deeptech companies move from proving their technology to building factories and entering international markets.

Other initiatives concentrate on the earlier stages of that journey. Elaia’s €134 million DTS3 fund, for example, reflects how Europe’s deeptech machine is becoming institutionalised, connecting scientific research with specialist investors, entrepreneurs and industry partners.

Yet larger funds only address part of the problem. Deeptech companies can also fail because they develop the wrong product, build production too early, underestimate certification, misread procurement cycles or cannot persuade conservative customers to change established industrial processes.

Recent European robotics rounds show what becomes possible when capital and a clearly defined industrial application come together. Swiss construction technology company Gravis Robotics reached unicorn status after raising $200 million to scale physical AI that enables heavy machinery to alter its surroundings autonomously. Scaling such a business requires much more than training an AI model: it involves machinery integration, safety systems, field deployment and customer trust.

Navisalma is betting that closer integration of capital, technology, operations and design can help companies navigate precisely those complications. It also rejects the idea that Europe should reproduce Silicon Valley’s model wholesale.

“We don't need to replicate Silicon Valley,” Robert Falck said. “We need to combine frontier technology with Europe's strengths in engineering, design, industrial excellence and quality to build global leaders.”

The model will still have to accommodate the very different regulatory barriers, production economics and routes to market found across frontier technology. A method developed in electric and autonomous freight cannot simply be copied into energy, robotics or advanced materials. Navisalma’s value may lie in identifying which parts of the Einride experience are transferable and adapting the rest.

It joins a growing number of European initiatives trying to close the gap between technical invention and industrial scale. That ecosystem may be geographically dispersed, but fragmentation is not necessarily only a weakness. As MTN has previously explored, Europe’s network of specialised deeptech clusters can also be an advantage, connecting different concentrations of scientific, engineering and industrial expertise.

Navisalma adds another component: a platform created by people who have already encountered the operational and financial complications of building an international industrial technology company themselves.