Transition Ventures, the London-based early-stage firm led by Unity co-founder David Helgason, has closed a $150m second fund, bringing the platform’s assets under management to over $300m.
Fund II will continue Transition’s thesis that the most consequential companies of the coming decade will sit at the intersection of AI and the physical world: power, robotics, materials, refining, and the hardware-software boundary in general.
Helgason’s pitch, which he has been refining since launching Transition in 2021 after stepping back as Unity’s chief executive in 2014, is that the classic venture playbook of backing software-only incremental improvements has reached the end of its commercial road.
The new wave of generational technology companies, on his framing, will combine deep-tech hardware with AI software in ways that require investors who can credibly evaluate both halves.
Transition’s small team is built around that thesis: alongside Helgason are his brother Ari (formerly of Index Ventures), Kristian Branaes (ex-Atomico), Clara Ricard (ex-Balderton) and David Pacák (ex-Earlybird and Picus Capital).
The team claims to have founded companies cumulatively worth more than $15bn, the firm itself notes the figure rises to roughly $20bn including more recent Unity equity, though the headline figure is anchored on Helgason’s Unity tenure ($2bn+ annual revenue at peak).
The portfolio is the part worth dwelling on. Olix, the Bristol-headquartered photonics computing company developing Optical Tensor Processing Units, is the most visible name.
Originally founded as Flux Computing and rebranded in January, Olix has now raised roughly $220m at a $1bn valuation in a round led by Hummingbird Ventures, with Plural and LocalGlobe also on the cap table.
Founder James Dacombe, a 25-year-old Thiel Fellow, was mentored by Helgason while building his first venture CoMind. Transition came in at the first round.
Applied Atomics, founded by former SpaceX engineers Ben Kellie and Paul Keutelian, is building small modular nuclear plants designed to supply electricity directly to data centres and large industrial users.
Keutelian was previously COO of nuclear microreactor unicorn Radiant; both founders worked on SpaceX launch sites and landing barges before moving into nuclear.
The company uses light-water reactor technology, the proven architecture behind most existing commercial plants, with US Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing timelines potentially as short as 36-48 months for its design class.
Co-located nuclear power for hyperscalers is one of the most-discussed solutions to the AI-data-centre energy bottleneck, and Applied Atomics sits inside that thesis.
Seneca, the wildfire-suppression drone company that launched publicly with $60m last October, can deploy autonomous drones to a fire within 10 minutes of detection.
The round was led by Caffeinated Capital and Convective Capital, with Transition participating at the first venture round; later backers include DCVC, First Round Capital, and Slow Ventures.
The drones carry 100 lbs of suppressant and shoot at 100 PSI; Seneca says it is preparing to roll out its first systems for the 2026 fire season.
Upway, the Paris-based refurbished-e-bike platform, has grown roughly 30 times in revenue since Transition’s 2022 investment and is now the European and US market leader in pre-owned e-bikes.
The company has raised over $125m to date across rounds led by Sequoia, Exor and AP Moller Holding, with the Series C closing at a $400m valuation in late 2025.
A handful of unannounced portfolio companies sit underneath the named ones, including a Paris-based space company founded by ex-SpaceX engineers, a semiconductor-metrology startup spun out of ASML in Eindhoven, and a New York photonics-materials-discovery platform run by senior AI researchers.
The composition reflects what Transition is willing to underwrite: hardware-and-software businesses, often at the deeper end of the technology-readiness scale than most early-stage funds are comfortable with.
The fundraise itself lands at a moment when European venture is visibly squeezed. Transition’s ability to close $150m for a focused deep-tech-and-physical-AI thesis is a useful counter-data-point to the broader European-VC-fundraising slowdown of the past 18 months.
Whether Fund II compounds the Fund I track record is the multi-year question. The portfolio so far suggests Helgason’s team is choosing risk-on rather than fashion-driven categories, which is the harder bet to make but the one with the longer-duration optionality.
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