Sonnen-Insolvenz, Qwello und Rekord-VC-Fonds: Wohin fließt das Kapital? – Luis Hanemann

Sonnen fails as European venture money flows to AI

European capital is rotating toward AI and away from the climate hardware that once drew state backing and corporate buyers. Shell's purchase and resale of Sonnen shows how fragile those bets are once policy support fades, and Hanemann's closing warning is that investors mistake their own present for the market's. Record venture funds do not change the fact that selection stays hard.

Takeaways

• Shell's Sonnen bet ends in insolvency. Sonnen, the home-storage pioneer Shell bought in 2019 and backed with almost half a billion euros more, was sold on about two months ago and then sent into insolvency by its new owner. Hanemann says the US subsidiary is not insolvent.
• Clean tech support fades but technology wins. State support for clean tech is crumbling under Trump and wavers in Germany, but Hanemann argues the technologies keep getting better and cheaper too fast to stop. Very new technologies still win US subsidies because they do not compete with oil and coal.
• Qwello gains as charging infrastructure consolidates. Qwello raised 55m euros to build more charging points and make acquisitions, while Mercedes-Benz sells its German charging business to Elektra. Charging-point growth is flattening as players withdraw, and Hanemann expects charging to end up a public service or a mixed model.
• Record European funds, with AI taking most. Creandum raised almost 700m euros and Headline 400m dollars, and European funds have raised nearly 15bn dollars through Q3. Growth in new European funds tops 70 percent, against roughly three times that in the US, though Hanemann expects two thirds to go to AI.
• Capital abundance does not soften selection. More money does not mean startups get funded. Hanemann says selection stays very hard and most of the growth comes from large rounds that go to relatively few companies. Headline's early bet on Mistral came at a valuation of around 100m euros.
• Investors mistake their present for the market's. At a Headline board meeting someone asked who still booked travel offline. About half did then, only 20 percent do now. Hanemann says tech and investor circles see developments early and overestimate how far the wider market has come.

Europe's AI challengers

• Jan Thomas says Europe should regulate but still aim to compete at the front, and notes the continent has no DeepSeek of its own.
• Kugel Audio claims it is rebuilding ElevenLabs from scratch and that a small team can match it because it started three or four years later. Hanemann believes European startups can attack the US leaders.
• Peak AI and Dreamdata compete with US tools Profound and HockeyStack, and Peak has reached New York. Hanemann sees a new generation of founders who know they must be globally good quickly.