2150 Closes €210m Fund II: Betting on the Tech That Makes Cities Work
In this episode of The Scaling Europe Show , host Seb Johnson speaks with Jacob, co-founder and partner at 2150, following the close of the firm’s second fund: €210m, bringing assets under management to roughly $500m+. Jacob describes Fund II’s raise as slower and more global than the first—taking “a couple of years,” involving plenty of outreach, and ultimately bringing in new backers including US pension funds alongside returning anchors.
The core thesis remains unchanged: urbanization is a decades-long, unavoidable megatrend that creates a huge value pool—and a huge resource burden. Jacob notes that cities already account for the vast majority of global GDP, and by 2050 a much larger share of the world’s population will live in urban areas. The fund’s focus is therefore on the bottlenecks that must be solved to keep cities prosperous without stretching resources or triggering conflict—investing across energy, industrial decarbonisation, advanced manufacturing, mobility, and “urban systems.”
A key theme is how labels shift with politics and capital markets. Jacob argues “climate tech” has become unfashionable in some circles, pushing founders and funds to reframe similar work as energy resilience, sovereignty, critical minerals, or AI-adjacent infrastructure. For 2150, the consistent filter is that sustainability only matters if it’s scalable business: solutions must be better, faster, cheaper—and more sustainable to win.
He also highlights the convergence of two super-cycles: AI and energy. While 2150 won’t fund frontier model builders, Jacob sees major opportunity in downstream applications that bring AI into physical industries. On strategy and portfolio construction, he says the fund remains roughly balanced between deep tech/hardware-enabled plays and software, while being more cautious on ultra-capex-heavy models—especially where economics depend heavily on carbon pricing. Finally, Jacob shares what he looks for in founders: extreme ambition, resilience, and the rare mix of stubbornness on direction with flexibility on the path to get there.
