RunwayVC Reaches €40M First Close for Industrial Fund II

RunwayVC is building its second fund around an asset that does not appear on a cap table: permission to enter live industrial environments. A robot, autonomy layer, sensor system, or industrial software product can look convincing in a demonstration and still be nowhere near the factory, energy system, construction site, or buying committee that decides whether it belongs in the operation.

The Norwegian early-stage venture firm reached a €40M first close for RunwayVC Fund II on August 24, 2026. Aker remains the cornerstone investor, joined by Halliburton, Aker BP, Aker Solutions, KLP, Investinor, Norwegian industrial families, and private technology and finance investors.

RunwayVC plans to invest from pre-seed through Series A across industrial AI and software, robotics, automation, and autonomous systems. The first close matters because the new LP base may give portfolio founders more than capital, but access is still a hypothesis until it becomes safe deployment, repeatable procurement, and customers beyond the initial network.

What Happened

RunwayVC announced the €40M first close after operating its first fund with a single industrial anchor. Aker was the sole LP in Fund I and remains the cornerstone investor in Fund II. The broader vehicle adds Halliburton, Aker BP, Aker Solutions, KLP, and Investinor, alongside industrial families and individual technology and finance investors.

This is a first close, not a final close. RunwayVC has not disclosed a final target, final-close timetable, LP commitment sizes, fees, ownership targets, reserves, or return expectations. The verified record is €40M committed at the first close, with the firm planning about 20 investments over the next 3-5 years.

RunwayVC reports that Fund I made 24 investments and 23 follow-ons and produced 2 exits since 2022. The firm also says Fund I portfolio companies have raised more than NOK 2B from outside investors. Those are company-reported operating metrics rather than audited fund-performance figures, but they help explain why Aker's single-LP experiment attracted a wider group for the next vehicle.

Why Industrial Access Matters

Managing Partner and Co-Founder Tor Bækkelund and Senior Partner and CTO Sagar Chandna are organizing the fund around a stubborn commercial reality. Industrial buyers do not purchase an impressive demonstration. They purchase reliability, safety, integration, support, economic value, and a defensible reason to let new technology touch an operation that already carries consequences.

That makes industrial access different from a warm introduction in ordinary enterprise software. A representative site can expose the conditions a product team ignored, the qualification work a sales deck skipped, and the maintenance burden that only becomes visible after equipment, software, crews, and procedures collide. A prospective customer can also tell a founder whether the product solves an expensive problem or merely photographs well beside one.

DevCuration's coverage of Mesoware's industrial automation platform examined the same distance between technical capability and reliable production outcomes. Industrial buyers purchase uptime and integration, not the elegance of the demonstration that earned the first meeting.

RunwayVC's LP roster places several large industrial organizations closer to that process. Aker, Halliburton, Aker BP, and Aker Solutions operate in environments where automation, robotics, software, and autonomous systems face real demand and unforgiving standards. Their participation may create stronger operating context, technical introductions, and routes into representative environments.

The word may matters. An LP does not owe a portfolio company a pilot, a pilot does not guarantee procurement, and customer access does not remove integration or safety risk. The fund must still prove that proximity improves selection and commercialization without making familiar industrial problems look more investable than the evidence supports.

The First Fund II Investments

RunwayVC identifies Minerva Humanoids and HIVE Autonomy as the first 2 Fund II investments. Minerva is building rugged humanoid robots for hazardous industrial work. HIVE develops autonomy technology for industrial machinery that customers already own.

The pair captures 2 different adoption problems. Minerva must persuade customers that a new machine can perform dangerous work reliably enough to join an existing operation. HIVE must show that new judgment can be trusted inside familiar equipment without turning an installed asset into a new source of operating risk.

Both companies sit inside the broader physical-AI market, where software decisions leave the screen and begin moving machines, materials, and people. That shift creates commercial opportunity, but it also raises the cost of a weak assumption. A model error in a presentation can be corrected. A poor decision inside a live industrial system can interrupt production, damage equipment, or endanger workers.

The capital-and-industrial-partnership combination appearing across autonomy and advanced systems reflects how often financing must arrive beside manufacturing, qualification, supply-chain access, or customer relationships. Capital can lengthen the runway, but industrial partners help determine whether the runway reaches an operating site.

Shifter reported that RunwayVC did not appear in the public investor list for HIVE's separately announced July 2026 financing, while RunwayVC identifies HIVE as a Fund II investment. The public record does not establish that these are the same transaction, so the correct statement is limited to RunwayVC's identification of HIVE as a portfolio investment.

What Fund II Still Has to Prove

RunwayVC plans to invest primarily in Norway and the Nordics, with selected investments elsewhere in Europe and the United States. Reported initial investments are NOK 5M-NOK 10M, with follow-on financing handled separately. That structure can finance early technical and commercial progress, but industrial companies are rarely built by check size alone.

Portfolio founders will have to navigate long sales cycles, field testing, security and safety review, integration work, maintenance requirements, and customer budgets that move according to operating risk rather than startup urgency. The industrial LP network can improve the starting position, but only deployment quality, customer retention, follow-on capital, and sales outside the originating network can establish a repeatable advantage.

Fund II also has a judgment problem worth watching. Industrial proximity can help an investor understand what a customer will buy, yet it can narrow attention toward the problems, geographies, and procurement habits already represented inside the LP base. RunwayVC has to preserve the benefit of specialized access without mistaking the network's familiarity for the market's full opportunity set.

What the First Close Signals

The €40M first close shows how specialist venture firms are expanding their value proposition beyond capital. Deep-tech investors such as Lux Capital have long made technical understanding part of the investment case. Founders in robotics, autonomy, and industrial software also need a route into operations where the technology can be tested against real constraints.

RunwayVC now has more capital, a broader LP base, and 2 early portfolio examples to test that model. The announcement does not prove the thesis. It establishes the conditions under which the thesis can be judged, and the meaningful evidence will come when portfolio companies earn permission to enter live sites, survive the standards waiting there, and win customers who were not already sitting around the fund's table.