Nauta holds €60M first close for sixth fund, half from British Business Bank

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Nauta, a venture firm with offices in London and Barcelona, has held a first close of €60 million for its sixth fund. Half of that, €30 million, came from the British Business Bank, which is backing Nauta for the fourth time. Other named backers are SETT, the Spanish state's technology investment arm, Merifin Capital and Catalonia's Institut Català de Finances. They are joined by a further group of institutions and family offices drawn from Britain, the rest of Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Nauta says roughly three in four of these investors had put money into its funds before.

The firm is aiming for a final size of €150 million to €200 million during the latter half of 2027, which would lift its managed assets to roughly €750 million. Fund V opened at €120 million in July 2020 and finished at €190 million by the end of 2021, €40 million above target; Fund IV went from €62 million in September 2015 to €155 million. The new first close is therefore half the size of the last one, and half of it comes from a single investor, which makes for a tidy set of halves.

Nauta backs software companies that spend capital sparingly in areas like HR, retail, finance and travel, from pre-seed to Series A. Part of the new fund goes to Nauta Labs, started in 2021, which puts £100,000 to £250,000 into each pre-seed deep tech company it backs, in fields including cybersecurity, energy, high-performance computing, digital health and AI infrastructure, and industrial automation. Its portfolio includes Universal Quantum, which is working on a million-qubit quantum computer and announced a Series A above $100 million on 8 October 2026, co-led by DCVC and Firgun Ventures, and Berlin's NetBird, which Nauta backed at pre-seed and which has since raised a $10 million Series A. The 20-person team has supported over 200 founders across a hundred companies in 20 years and counts more than 25 exits worth close to €3 billion, among them Brandwatch, Holded and Connectbase. Michael Laycock of the British Business Bank said the partnership shows the bank's role in "attracting international investors to the UK."