Allianz Invests in EIC Scaleup Europe Fund for Deep Tech

In Short

• Allianz is investing in the European Innovation Council’s Scaleup Europe Fund as a founding investor.
• The capital comes largely from customer pension and insurance assets in Germany and France.
• The fund aims to back European deep tech scaleups with tickets of €100 million or more.

What Happened

Allianz said it has invested in the European Innovation Council (EIC) Scaleup Europe Fund, a multi-billion-euro growth fund meant to finance high-growth European technology companies.

Allianz said the investment is managed through Allianz Investment Management and is mostly sourced from policyholders’ funds at Allianz Lebensversicherung and Allianz Private Krankenversicherung in Germany, plus an additional portion from Allianz France. The European Commission, via the EIC, is a founding investor in the fund.

The Scaleup Europe Fund is targeting a total size of €5 billion. EQT, a Swedish investment firm, has been appointed to manage the fund.

Allianz framed the move as a way to channel customer retirement savings into long-term private market assets. Private market assets are investments that are not traded on public stock exchanges, like private equity and growth capital.

The fund will focus on “deep tech,” which means science and engineering-heavy startups that can take longer to commercialise. Target sectors include artificial intelligence, quantum technology, semiconductors, robotics and autonomous systems, energy tech, space tech, biotech, medical tech, and agricultural tech.

Why It Matters

Europe has a well-known gap between early-stage funding and late-stage growth capital. Many startups can raise seed rounds, but struggle to find large cheques to scale, expand internationally, or build factories and hardware.

By aiming for tickets of €100 million or more, the EIC Scaleup Europe Fund is designed to compete with larger US and Asian growth investors. If it succeeds, it could keep more European companies from relocating to access deeper capital pools.

For insurers like Allianz, the deal also highlights a broader trend. Large pools of pension and insurance money are increasingly being deployed into long-duration growth investments, in search of returns that can match long-term liabilities.