BMW i Ventures has a new $300 million fund, and AI is riding shotgun

BMW i Ventures has launched a new $300 million fund with a timely thesis: Artificial intelligence will reshape how the auto industry operates. BMW AG’s independent investment arm wants to be in the driver’s seat.

The fund, announced Wednesday, will invest in early-stage through Series B startups in North America and Europe working on agentic AI and physical AI (a term that includes AI applied to robots and self-driving vehicles) as well as industrial software, advanced materials, manufacturing and supply chain technologies. This third fund brings the company’s total capital under management to $1.1 billion.

The problem, of course, is finding AI startups that aren’t simply riding one of the hottest technology trends in decades.

“We’re always trying to adjust and shift our focus toward new trends, not just for the sake of the trend, but for what will actually define the future,” Markus Berndt, managing partner at BMW i Ventures, said in a recent interview with TechCrunch.

The company’s previous funds reflect Berndt’s thinking. when BMW i projects It launched its first fund in 2016, with self-driving cars and digital technology at the heart of its investment strategy. that it The second box In 2021 I focused on startups working on sustainability and supply chain.

For Berndt and Managing Partner Casper Sage, AI is not only the next big trend, it will be the foundation on which other technologies will be built. Ultimately, these robots will change how software is developed, and how cars are produced.

Some of the biggest opportunities are those that may seem mundane, but have a much greater impact, said Sage, who is based in the company’s Silicon Valley office. One example is Synera, a German company backed by BMW i Ventures that uses AI agents in the design and engineering process, Sage said.

Synera began as an integration software company that helped engineers automate and simplify complex industrial engineering design workflows. The company then built AI agents on top of its platform, which already contained data about materials, sizes and other geometric parameters, Sage explained.

“And what you get out of this is crazy, because you can basically condense a process that takes, say, three weeks of time in which humans interact with each other to make a certain change, and you can condense that down to minutes,” Sage said. “Which is pretty powerful, if you think about it.”

The venture capital firm remains committed to other categories in which it has previously invested, including advanced materials and circular supply chains. Berndt said the fund’s new focus on AI expands rather than replaces the sustainability toolkit.

The company has not made any investments in this third fund yet. But its second fund, which it is in the midst of wrapping up, includes investments in a number of AI-focused startups, including five recent companies that the firm isn’t quite ready to talk about. In total, the company used the second fund to invest in more than 35 investments.