Another cap­i­tal injec­tion for the Thuringian econ­omy: With the €40 mil­lion “Thüringer Zukun­fts­fonds III” (TZF III), the state is now sup­port­ing inno­v­a­tive start-ups and medium-sized com­pa­nies that want to open up new busi­ness areas, par­tic­u­larly in high-tech sec­tors such as health­care, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, the energy and envi­ron­men­tal econ­omy, the cir­cu­lar econ­omy, social inno­va­tions or dig­i­tal­iza­tion. These are areas with long inno­va­tion and prod­uct devel­op­ment cycles as well as high devel­op­ment costs that are depen­dent on long-term financ­ing instruments.

“In the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, many pri­vate ven­ture cap­i­tal investors are hold­ing back on urgently needed new and fol­low-up invest­ments, mak­ing the already lim­ited access to equity cap­i­tal even more dif­fi­cult, espe­cially for young, inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies,” said Thuringia’s Eco­nom­ics Min­is­ter Wolf­gang Tiefensee. The Min­istry of Eco­nomic Affairs there­fore decided to set up the Thüringer Zukun­fts­fonds III in order to at least par­tially close this financ­ing gap. “The struc­tural change tak­ing place in many areas of the econ­omy can only be mas­tered through inno­v­a­tive solu­tions. The Thüringer Zukun­fts­fonds thus con­tributes to the renewal and sus­tain­abil­ity of the Thuringian econ­omy.”

The Thüringer Zukun­fts­fonds III was launched in Decem­ber and is man­aged by bm|t beteili­gungs­man­age­ment thürin­gen GmbH. “With the TZF III fund, bm|t is ide­ally posi­tioned to con­tinue financ­ing inno­v­a­tive, high-growth Thuringian com­pa­nies in all phases in the com­ing years,” says Kevin Reeder, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of bm|t. The state offers equity invest­ments and silent part­ner­ships as well as sub­or­di­nated loans for com­pa­nies via the Thüringer Zukun­fts­fonds. The intended use of the funds includes oper­at­ing resources as well as invest­ments or acqui­si­tions. The Thüringer Zukun­fts­fonds is funded by the Thüringer Auf­baubank with risk shield­ing from the Free State of Thuringia and the “RegioInnoGrowth” financ­ing instru­ment launched by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment of Ger­many to strengthen the equity of companies

With the “Thüringer Zukun­fts­fonds III”, the state is expand­ing its invest­ment port­fo­lio for the Thuringian econ­omy. bm|t — a sub­sidary of Thüringer Auf­baubank — has raised around 1.3 bil­lion euros for invest­ments in the State of Thürin­gen over the past 20 years via 13 invest­ment funds and thus invested in 209 promis­ing com­pa­nies. Exam­ples of suc­cess­ful invest­ments in recent years include the IPO of InflaRx on the New York tech­nol­ogy exchange NASDAQ and the sale of the video tech­nol­ogy start-up fayteq AG to Facebook.