How daphni’s €260m Blue fund aims to scale Europe’s science-driven startups
Paris, France — In late January 2026, European venture capital firm daphni closed €260 million for its latest early-stage fund, daphni Blue, dedicated to backing startups rooted in scientific research. The fund targets companies emerging from European laboratories and research institutions, with a focus on translating advances in fields such as biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics into scalable commercial ventures.
The close of daphni Blue comes at a moment when Europe’s deeptech ecosystem is under renewed scrutiny. While the continent produces world-class academic research, it has historically struggled to turn scientific breakthroughs into globally scaled companies. By explicitly positioning science as the core source of competitive advantage, daphni is betting that long-term value in venture capital will increasingly be driven by defensible intellectual property rather than fast-follower software models.
At €260 million, daphni Blue exceeded its original target and reached final close within nine months of its first closing, indicating strong backing from institutional investors despite a challenging fundraising environment for venture capital.
From consumer tech to science-first venture capital
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Paris, daphni is best known for early investments in companies such as Back Market and Swile. Those successes helped establish the firm as a prominent player in European venture capital, but daphni Blue represents a more focused evolution of its strategy rather than a continuation of its earlier consumer-oriented bets.
According to managing partner and co-founder Pierre-Eric Leibovici, the rationale behind Blue is rooted in structural shifts within the technology landscape. As digital tools, software frameworks and even AI models become increasingly accessible, the firm argues that sustainable differentiation will come from companies built on deep scientific expertise and proprietary research.
Rather than treating science as a “vertical,” daphni Blue frames it as a foundational layer — one that underpins technologies across climate, health, materials, data and industrial innovation.
What daphni Blue invests in — and how
daphni Blue is structured as an early-stage fund, writing initial cheques typically ranging from €500,000 to €10 million, with the capacity to follow its strongest portfolio companies up to approximately €20 million over time. The firm expects to invest in 40 to 50 startups during the life of the fund.
The investment focus is explicitly European, with a strong emphasis on companies emerging from universities, public research organisations and corporate R&D environments. In practice, this means backing founding teams that often include scientists or researchers alongside experienced operators, and supporting them through the complex transition from lab-validated results to market-ready products.
This approach addresses a well-documented gap in Europe’s innovation ecosystem: while public funding for research is comparatively strong, early private capital for science-based spin-outs remains more limited and risk-averse than in the United States.
Early portfolio: science across disciplines
At the time of final close, daphni Blue had already invested in nine startups, spanning multiple scientific domains. While the companies differ significantly in application and sector, they share a common origin in research-driven innovation.
Among the first investments is Owlo, a spin-out from the Institut Langevin, developing non-invasive 3D microscopy technology aimed at improving observation in fertility research and pharmaceutical development.
Another portfolio company, Karavela, emerged from INRIA and focuses on building large-scale brain foundation models derived from functional MRI data, with potential applications in neuroscience research and digital health.
The fund has also invested in EverDye, a French deeptech company working on low-impact textile dyeing processes using bio-based chemistry. EverDye was previously featured on MoveTheNeedle.news for its attempt to address one of the fashion industry’s most persistent environmental challenges: the energy- and water-intensive nature of conventional dyeing processes.
Together, these early investments illustrate daphni Blue’s thesis in practice: backing companies where scientific depth is not an add-on, but the core driver of competitive advantage.
Why science-driven venture capital matters now
The close of daphni Blue reflects a broader reassessment of how venture capital value is created. In recent years, fast-scaling digital startups have faced mounting pressure from commoditisation, regulatory scrutiny and rising customer acquisition costs. At the same time, sectors such as climate technology, life sciences and advanced materials increasingly require long development timelines and high technical barriers.
Science-based startups are not immune to these challenges, but they often benefit from stronger intellectual property protection and higher barriers to entry once products reach maturity. For investors, this can translate into more defensible long-term positions — albeit with greater upfront complexity.
From a European perspective, the implications are significant. Institutions such as INRIA, INSERM and Institut Curie generate a steady stream of research with commercial potential, yet only a fraction of that output historically makes it into venture-backed companies. Funds like daphni Blue aim to narrow that gap by aligning capital, expertise and research networks more closely.
ESG and impact alignment
In addition to its financial strategy, daphni has linked part of its carried interest to ESG performance indicators, tying economic incentives to measurable impact outcomes. This structure reflects growing demand from limited partners for accountability on environmental and social criteria, particularly in sectors where technological innovation is closely linked to sustainability and public good.
For startups operating in areas such as climate technology or sustainable materials — including EverDye — this alignment can reinforce long-term objectives without positioning impact as a trade-off against commercial viability.
Positioning within Europe’s deeptech landscape
daphni Blue enters a European venture market where several funds are raising capital around deeptech, climate and hard science themes. What differentiates daphni’s approach is not the size of the fund alone, but its explicit framing of science as the primary source of value creation rather than a supporting feature.
By concentrating on early-stage scientific ventures and committing to follow-on funding, daphni positions itself as a long-term partner for founders navigating the often-fragile transition from research to product, and from prototype to industrialisation.
Whether this model can consistently produce large-scale outcomes remains an open question for the ecosystem as a whole. What is clear, however, is that daphni Blue adds meaningful capacity to Europe’s still-maturing infrastructure for science-driven entrepreneurship.
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