Bondstone Ventures is the venture capital arm of Bondstone, a Lisbon-based private equity firm founded in 2016 that manages over €1 billion in development value across real estate and investment activities. Launched in 2026, Bondstone Ventures focuses on early-stage deeptech companies in Southern Europe and the broader European market, combining financial expertise with scientific and technical knowledge to support research-driven startups.
Bondstone Ventures targets early-stage startups in deeptech sectors including artificial intelligence, computational biology, and climate-related technologies. The firm is particularly focused on companies with strong scientific foundations, typically emerging from or closely connected to leading universities in science and engineering.
The geographic focus is Southern Europe first, with a broader European reach. Life sciences and climate tech sit alongside AI as the three primary verticals.
Bondstone Ventures launched its first fund, Maxwell Technologies I, with a target size of €50 million, regulated by the Portuguese market regulator CMVM. The fund is designed to back startups at seed and early growth stages, with a focus on advanced technologies that have clear scientific underpinning and a credible path to commercial scalability.
Alongside capital deployment, the fund is establishing formal partnerships with leading science and engineering universities to create a pipeline from academic research to commercial startup formation. The team managing the fund has approximately 20 professionals across private equity, venture capital, and scientific disciplines.
Leadership
Paulo Loureiro is Founder and CEO of Bondstone. He has positioned the venture capital expansion as a natural continuation of Bondstone's broader investment strategy, pointing to the current period of technological acceleration in Europe as creating the right conditions for science-driven companies to emerge. João Pedro Silva is a Partner at Bondstone Ventures and has highlighted the firm's combined expertise in finance and science as a differentiating factor when supporting founders working with complex technologies.
Investment Strategy
Bondstone Ventures writes early-stage checks at seed and early growth, targeting companies with advanced technical foundations. A distinguishing element of the approach is the firm's commitment to building university partnerships, connecting academic innovation to commercial opportunities rather than waiting for startups to fully emerge on their own. The fund deploys across AI, ClimateTech, and life sciences in a diversified portfolio built around research-driven innovation.
Other
Bondstone Ventures is building incentive-aligned partnerships with leading science and engineering universities, establishing collaborative frameworks designed to accelerate the path from scientific validation to company formation. The fund is supervised by the CMVM, giving institutional investors a regulated vehicle to access venture capital in Southern Europe, a region that has historically seen less venture activity than Northern Europe. Bondstone is one of the few operators in Portugal with simultaneous presence in institutional real estate and regulated venture capital, which gives the firm established LP credibility rather than having to build it from scratch. The firm's investment and scientific capabilities are further supported by venture partners who have held leadership roles at global technology companies, including Luis Teixeira. Founders in Spain, Portugal, Italy, or Greece with deeptech projects rooted in academic or scientific research are the most directly relevant profile for this fund.
Portugal
