Pace Ventures Research
Investment Thesis
Pace Ventures backs founders it calls "Explorers" who are building health-tech and industrial-tech companies. The firm says it is "the most useful investor at the table", with deep relationships across industrial systems and human health, technical understanding, and conviction that does not chase consensus. Its manifesto promises that every company it backs gets two commercial contracts and introductions to more than 50 institutional investors. An investment is framed as a decade-long relationship, and the team stays close to companies through later rounds.
Pace explains its dual focus in a published essay: it argues that planetary health and human health are linked, and that a single firm can cover both. Its open-venture-database profile describes the target as pre-seed and seed climate (energy, materials, manufacturing) and health (neuro, digital, biotech) solutions with a strong technology or scientific component.
Stage Focus
Pre-Seed and Seed. The portfolio page lists 22 companies from 2021 to 2026: 3 pre-seed, 12 seed, 5 Series A, 1 Series B and 1 inactive. The later stages are current stages of companies that have since raised follow-on rounds, not entry stages.
Check Size
The homepage states an initial investment of €500k to €1.5M.
Lead Tendency
Not stated on the site. A third-party database (Excedr) lists the firm as participating without leading in 5 public life-science rounds from February 2022 to March 2026, and another profile describes it as a co-lead or follower. Lead tendency is therefore recorded as unknown.
Recent Activity
The firm was established in 2021 and is actively investing; third-party trackers show its latest announced deal in March 2026. The homepage banner reports that portfolio company Omega (Project Omega), which is rebuilding the nuclear fuel cycle end to end, raised an $80M Series A led by B Capital. Pace's insights page lists 59 articles, including "Why We Invested" notes on Pally, Creasallis, Project Omega, Metri Bio, Cellbyte, Photara, Bitfount, ChemFinity, Prenostics, TernaryTx and Vema.
Portfolio Highlights
Health (11 companies):
- Metri Bio: first-in-class therapeutics for endometrial disease
- TernaryTx: AI-driven molecular glue design
- Creasallis: antibody-based drugs for solid tumors
- Neurable: everyday brain-computer interface technology
- Lumos: environments for healthcare and life-science AI
- Cellbyte: AI agents for pharmaceutical drug launches
- Prenostics: cancer prediction and prevention
- Holobiome: microbiome therapies
- Bitfount: privacy-preserving AI for clinical research
- CelerisTx: proximity-inducing compounds (inactive)
- Virtonomy: digital patient twins for medical-device development
Industrial (11 companies):
- Omega: nuclear fuel cycle
- ChemFinity: reshoring critical metals supply
- Photara: removing critical metals from solar panels
- Aerones: robotic wind turbine maintenance (Series B)
- Vema Hydrogen: engineered mineral hydrogen
- Dunia Innovations: materials discovery
- CO:PROD: hardware for robotics
- Turnover Labs: on-site synthesis of carbon-neutral chemicals
- Clearly: fleet net-zero transition
- FabricNano: enzymes replacing petrochemical products
- Pally: AI assistant that connects inboxes and tools
No exits are listed (the exited count is 0).
Team
- Marius Swart, Managing Partner, based in Berlin
- Luka Nićin, venture capitalist focused on health and bio
- Gabriel Méhaignerie, associate
The site's team page was not reachable (it returned a 404), so the team comes from LinkedIn search snippets and third-party profiles. Titles differ between sources, so Nićin's title is a generic one.
Decision Process
Not published. Pace describes a structured five-step process for assessing seed-stage investments, with an emphasis on transparency, founder alignment and deep dives into team dynamics and product. The decision body is assumed to be a partnership.
Founder Preferences
Technical and scientific founders working on hard problems, such as new therapeutics, materials, energy and robotics hardware. Pace publishes investor-education content for founders on dilution, the "Big Five" term sheet clauses and fundraising.
Geographic Focus
Western Europe and the USA. The portfolio page names five hub cities: Munich, London, Boston, New York and San Francisco. Third-party databases place the firm's headquarters in Berlin, Germany.
Gaps
- Team page and individual bios are not available on the site.
- Fund size, AUM and fund vintage are not published, so AUM is left unset.
- Entry stage per company is not sourced, so stage at investment is omitted for all portfolio entries.
- The portfolio page shows companies' own domains only behind "Visit site" links that the read did not return, except Virtonomy (virtonomy.io); all other domains are left null for the server-side validator to discover.