TDK Ventures

Climate innovation does not scale through capital alone, rather, it scales through deep technical collaboration, industrial deployment, and long-term commitment to helping breakthrough technologies reach the real world. We’re honored to be recognized by Climate50 among the Top 5 Corporate VCs leading the climate transition alongside organizations helping shape the future of energy, infrastructure, and industrial innovation. At TDK Ventures, our focus has always been clear: partnering with ambitious founders building category-defining companies across electrification, energy systems, advanced materials, industrial technologies, mobility, and climate infrastructure. This recognition reflects the entrepreneurs, portfolio companies, TDK teams, and ecosystem partners working together to accelerate technologies that can create lasting impact at global scale. Congratulations to the other firms recognized, including Shell Ventures, Siemens Energy Ventures, Aramco Ventures, and Temasek. The work ahead remains enormous—and so does the opportunity to build.

Europe’s next wave of industrial leadership will be shaped by one question: how quickly can breakthrough technologies move from the lab into real-world deployment? That’s why we’re excited to join Deep Tech Momentum 2026 in Berlin, where founders, investors, corporates, and policymakers will explore the future of deep tech and AI across Europe. 🌱🤝🌍 Nicolas Sauvage will join Péter Fankhauser of ANYbotics for a fireside chat on the future of industrial autonomy and what it takes to scale frontier technologies into trusted operational systems. The conversation will explore what happens when industrial sites evolve from periodic inspection toward continuous operational awareness — with autonomous systems continuously monitoring infrastructure, detecting anomalies early, improving safety, reducing downtime, and helping operators make faster, better decisions. Importantly, the inflection point is not just better robots or better AI. It is the convergence of industrial-grade mobility, sensors, edge computing, autonomy, reliability, and enterprise integration finally reaching deployment scale. We’ll also discuss why Europe may be uniquely positioned in this next era of industrial autonomy — not because it can compete on lowest-cost hardware manufacturing, but because industrial customers ultimately value engineering rigor, reliability, safety, systems integration, and long-term trust. And for the entrepreneurs in the audience, we're especially excited to explore Péter’s journey building ANYbotics from a bold technical vision into one of the world’s leading industrial autonomy companies. The winners in industrial autonomy will not simply build the most impressive robots. They will build the most trusted operational systems. 📍 Deep Tech Momentum 2026 📅 May 20–21, 2026 📍 Berlin 🔗 Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gZQgjhNN

Industrial AI is forcing a difficult question across manufacturing, logistics, infrastructure, and heavy industry: How much autonomy is too much? At the McRock Industrial Software Symposium 2026, TDK Ventures Investment Director Ankur Saxena will join leaders from Caterpillar Ventures, CI Global Asset Management, and samdesk for a timely conversation on the realities behind autonomous systems in industrial environments. The panel, “Humans vs Autonomy: The Tradeoffs No One Wants to Say Out Loud,” will explore the tension between efficiency and oversight as AI systems move deeper into mission-critical operations. For industrial companies, the challenge is understanding: 🔹 where human judgment remains essential 🔹 how accountability changes when systems make decisions independently 🔹 what operational risks emerge at scale 🔹 and which autonomy platforms are solving real industrial problems versus simply riding the hype cycle Looking forward to the discussion in Montreal. 📍 McRock Industrial Software Symposium 2026 📅 May 20, 2026 📍 Montreal Science Centre, Montreal Learn more: https://lnkd.in/g2zmqNSy

The strongest venture platforms are rarely defined by volume alone. They are defined by clarity of philosophy, consistency of execution, and the trust they build with founders over time. At the recently concluded Global Corporate Venturing Summit, TDK Ventures President 🌱🤝🌍 Nicolas Sauvage sat down with Hoolie Tejwani of Coinbase Ventures to explore how one of the world’s most active venture organizations approaches investing, founder relationships, and long-term ecosystem building. Since its founding in 2018, Coinbase Ventures has backed hundreds of companies across crypto infrastructure, developer tooling, DeFi, AI, and the broader onchain economy, often investing early before markets or categories are fully formed. That long-view orientation and ecosystem-first mindset came through clearly in the discussion. Three ideas especially resonated: * backing conviction-driven founders * investing before consensus forms * building relationships long before transactions happen These principles resonate deeply with how we think about exploration, long-horizon partnership, and the evolving role of venture ecosystems. As frontier technologies become more complex and capital-intensive, strong networks, aligned incentives, and patient conviction increasingly shape which companies are able to scale successfully. 📖 Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/exyrm7HF

Autonomous delivery is becoming part of everyday infrastructure. Starship Technologies has expanded its footprint with a new deployment at Tennessee Tech, bringing sidewalk robotics directly into daily campus life. Students, faculty, and staff can now receive meals delivered autonomously across campus, with robots navigating sidewalks, optimizing routes, and improving efficiency over time. What begins as convenience quickly evolves into something more foundational. This is how new mobility layers are built. Each deployment strengthens the system. More routes mapped. More edge cases solved. More real-world validation that autonomous last-mile delivery can operate safely, reliably, and at scale. Congratulations to the Starship team on another meaningful step — make that a roll! — forward. Read more: https://lnkd.in/e99EK3na

Tired of accepting cookies just to read an article, watch a video, or learn about a company? Or spending more time than you should trying to decline them? Most websites ask visitors to make a quiet trade: access for tracking, content for cookies, usefulness for identity. When we rebuilt the TDK Ventures website, we wanted a different standard. Our goal was simple to state and hard to implement: measure usefulness, not identity. We wanted to understand what content was helpful, which pages were working, how fast the site loaded, which videos created engagement, and where the experience could improve. But we did not need to know who a visitor was. We did not need to build user-specific profiles. We did not need to turn curiosity into a surveillance trail. So we built the website around a principle we now call Insight Without Identity. That meant rejecting many default tools, avoiding tracking cookies and visitor-level profiling, and replacing the easy analytics stack with a more intentional privacy-first architecture. It was not the fastest path, but that is often the point. If values never create tradeoffs, they are probably not operating principles yet. For TDK Ventures, Entrepreneurs First should not only describe how we invest or support portfolio companies. It should also describe how we design the first digital interaction someone has with us. A venture firm’s website is often its first handshake with an entrepreneur. That handshake should earn trust. 🌱🤝🌍 Nicolas Sauvage wrote a practical guide on how we built a privacy-first venture website that still delivers performance, searchability, video engagement, analytics, and SEO without tracking visitors. Trust is not a message on a homepage. It is a design choice. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eWQ4RnG6

Some of the most important technologies shaping the future are also the hardest to explain. On May 13 at Web Summit Vancouver, TDK Ventures President 🌱🤝🌍 Nicolas Sauvage will join Business in Vancouver reporter Daisy Xiong and Cary Forest, Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer/Realta Fusion, for a conversation on how deep-tech founders can communicate highly technical innovation with clarity, precision, and relevance. From grid infrastructure to power electronics to next-generation energy systems, many breakthrough technologies operate far below the surface of everyday life. Their impact is enormous, but their value is not always immediately visible. We look forward to joining the conversation in Vancouver and engaging with the entrepreneurs building the future from the ground up. 📍 Web Summit Vancouver 📅 May 13, 2026 🔗 Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gwF2hzBw

Progress in hardware often shows up as fewer visible constraints. metalenz is advancing a new approach to optical sensing that enables secure face authentication to operate seamlessly under OLED displays, removing long-standing limitations in device design. By using polarization-based sensing, the platform strengthens biometric security while integrating directly into the display architecture. This unlocks new flexibility for device makers and expands how authentication can be embedded across smartphones, laptops, and emerging edge devices. The broader shift is at the system level. When sensing, security, and form factor evolve together, entirely new product experiences become possible. At TDK Ventures, we back teams building foundational technologies that redefine how devices are designed and experienced. We are proud to support Metalenz as they continue to push the boundaries of optics and sensing. Read more: https://lnkd.in/ezD5Ech6

It often takes four years for the best investment decisions to look obvious. That idea came through clearly at StrictlyVC San Francisco last week, where founders, investors, and operators gathered for a deeper conversation on where real value is being built across AI and deep tech. As a presenting partner, TDK Ventures was proud to help bring this community together. The discussions focused less on near-term noise and more on the underlying shifts shaping the next decade, spanning infrastructure bottlenecks, evolving compute architectures, and the rise of physical AI moving into real-world deployment. This is already playing out across the portfolio—from Groq advancing high-performance inference, to Agility Robotics and ANYbotics driving real-world deployment of physical AI. On stage, our President 🌱🤝🌍 Nicolas Sauvage shared how conviction is built early—often well before the market aligns—by identifying constraints ahead of time and partnering with founders solving them with technical depth and long-term focus. Ultimately, breakthrough companies emerge by tackling foundational challenges long before they are widely recognized. Thank you to TechCrunch, Connie Loizos, Marina Temkin, CFA, Tim Fernholz, Praveen Neppalli Naga, Amjad Masad, Lior Susan, Campbell Brown, and the entire StrictlyVC community for creating a space where these conversations can happen with clarity and depth. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/esDMHMvd

AI demand is no longer constrained by compute, but by power. SPAN is reframing the problem entirely. In partnership with NVIDIA, SPAN is developing a distributed compute network that transforms underutilized capacity in homes and buildings into scalable AI infrastructure. By combining smart panels, batteries, and high-performance GPUs, this model unlocks a new path forward. Instead of waiting years for centralized data centers to come online, compute can be deployed closer to where energy already exists, dynamically managed, and integrated with the grid in real time. This improves grid utilization, accelerates speed-to-power, and creates new economic value across utilities, hyperscalers, and homeowners. Congratulations to the SPAN team on pushing the boundaries of what distributed energy and compute can become. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gNxq5ewc