AM Ventures holds first close for 3D printing venture fund

The fund has a target of €100m. The GP said in a statement that the first closing has brought the fund to almost 50% of this target.

The fund is expected to hold a final close in spring 2022, according to the same statement.

Meister Law and Poellath provided legal advice on the fund.

AM Ventures was founded in 2015. It is headquartered in Munich, with an additional office in Busan, South Korea. "Johann and I started AM Ventures more or less as a family office in January 2015, with the Langer family backing us," Arno Held, managing director at AM Ventures, told Unquote. "We were both employees of EOS, which was founded by Hans Langer. So we come from this industry and have seen it develop for a couple of decades."

"Six years ago, we started to collect startups and find out how many there are, how they are developing, where they are being founded, and in which technical categories," Held said. "In 2019, we had 200 startups per year that we were evaluating; we realised that the growth in this area is tremendous. We have an acceptance rate of 1% from the startups we see, and we have not lost a single one."

Held explained how the firm came to decide to launch the fund. "We were at a point where we wanted to crank it up and find more fire power – plus, other connections from outside the industry encouraged us to accelerate it, and we decided in 2019 to start planning, structuring and pitching the fund. But the real launch and activity started this year in January 2021."

Investors
Asset manager KGAL is backing the fund, as well as Langer Group, the investment firm of 3D printing industry expert Hans Langer. The LP base is also composed of a number of entrepreneurs and high-net-worth individuals. "Aside from our two anchor investors, we the managing partners have invested, as well as Schulte Group, and several other entrepreneurs who bring experience in early-stage startups," Held told Unquote.

Investments
The fund will generally deploy equity tickets of €500,000-3m, focusing on seed and growth rounds for companies on a global basis. "There is always a certain flexibility in equity tickets – we are guided by the technology and will adapt to make these investments," said Held. "We will make 20-25 investments and plan to keep 20-30% for follow-on, depending on the targets we find in future. We would not want to allocate more than 10% of the fund in one single ticket."

The new fund will focus solely on 3D printing businesses in the areas of hardware, software, materials and applications.

The firm has backed 15 startups since inception, participating in more than 24 funding rounds, the firm said in a statement. Its previous 3D printing investments include DyeMansion, LightForce Orthodontics and Additive Drives.

Asked about potential exit options for the firm's investments, Held said: "Looking at the current market, I would say IPOs are an exit option, but not the main option. The good thing about 3D printing is there are a lot of big companies out there that have just started looking into this tech, so the obvious scenario is trade sales. We are already in a great position in that we have a portfolio of 15 companies, and we have had good discussion on this already."

People
AM Ventures – Johann Oberhofer, Arno Held (managing partners).
KGAL – Klaus Wolf (chef investment officer).
Langer Group – Hans Langer (founding partner).

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