High-Tech Gründerfonds was established in 2005 as a public-private partnership specifically to close Germany's early-stage funding gap, backed by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, KfW Capital, and more than 45 corporate limited partners including BASF and Bosch. That hybrid structure is genuinely unusual among the firms tracked on this page: HTGF's investment committee blends venture professionals with government and corporate representatives, giving the fund both commercial discipline and an explicit developmental mandate to seed German deep tech, industrial tech, climate tech, and life sciences. Since founding, the fund has financed more than 800 startups and achieved nearly 200 exits, with CureVac's 2020 Nasdaq IPO as its most globally recognized outcome, and now manages more than €1.4 billion following its fourth fund.
CureVac's August 2020 Nasdaq IPO - HTGF backed the mRNA vaccine developer as a seed-stage investor years before it became a household name during the COVID-19 pandemic