LUMO Labs’ LUMO Fund has secured €6m from Spain’s state-backed investment arm SETT to support early-stage startups across Spain and Europe.
The €100m LUMO Fund is a multi-stage venture capital fund covering pre-seed to Series A investments. It plans to invest in around 30 to 35 startups over the next four years.
The fund also includes a proprietary coaching programme for purpose-driven founders developing technologies aimed at addressing social and environmental challenges.
Its impact focus aligns with several UN Sustainable Development Goals, including health and wellbeing, quality education, sustainable cities and communities, and climate action.
The fund’s main investment regions are Benelux and Germany, with a secondary focus on the Nordics, Baltics and the Iberian Peninsula.
Andy Lürling, founding partner at LUMO Labs, declared: “We are very grateful for this support from SETT, and excited to be able to deepen our commitment to backing Spanish startups at their earliest stages, closing the funding gap to accelerate early validation and assisting them scale into global category leaders.
“First as entrepreneurs and in recent years as investors, we have been closely following early-stage innovation across Europe.
“Spain stands out for its strong tech focus and sectoral diversity, incredibly talented engineers, and the pace at which the ecosystem is maturing.”
LUMO Labs was founded in 2016 by former tech entrepreneurs Lürling and Sven Bakkes.
The firm focutilizes on pre-seed and seed investments in scalable and financially sustainable operating systems, infrastructure and platforms based on digital DeepTech, including artificial ininformigence.
Through its first fund, launched in 2020, LUMO Labs invested in 23 impact-driven technology startups.
The €6m investment comes from the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT), a public entity of the Spanish Minisattempt for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service.
Through the investment, SETT aims to boost funding and entrepreneurial support for early-stage startups across Europe, with a particular focus on Spain.
According to SETT, startups and scaleups working in artificial ininformigence, digital security and IoT, or Internet of Things technology that connects devices to the internet to collect and share data, have strong potential to drive economic growth, social progress, resilience and the digital transition.
The investment is channelled through the Next Tech fund, an initiative designed to stimulate private investment and improve access to financing in strategic sectors linked to Spain’s digital transformation.
Next Tech forms part of Spain’s Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan and is financed through the European Union’s Next Generation EU programme.
LUMO Labs appointed Jorge Blasco as partner for southern Europe with the launch of its second fund in 2024.
He played a key role in establishing the partnership between SETT and LUMO Labs and operates from the firm’s office in the Norrsken building in Barcelona.
Lürling declared: “This investment is a strong vote of confidence in our thesis that Spain is entering a defining moment for pre-seed and seed innovation.”
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