Kadi-Ingrid Lilles built her way into venture capital through startup community and platform work rather than traditional finance, including curating Startup Digest Estonia, leading tech-transfer for Estonia's first satellite project, and eventually becoming Partner at Iron Wolf Capital after heading the firm's platform side. She's developed a close focus on Baltic deeptech clusters, like Estonia's battery spinouts and Lithuania's photonics-to-spacetech pipeline, and is known for pointing to the Baltic diaspora in the US as an overlooked source of founders.
About their Fund
Iron Wolf Capital is a European deep tech and defence fund built around the Baltic Sea region and Ukraine, with a team deliberately rebuilt to include Estonian, Polish, Latvian, and Swedish members and to open doors for female founders and Belarusian and Ukrainian diaspora entrepreneurs, while its chairman helped open a path for pension-fund money to flow into venture capital, potentially adding €2 billion to the region's funding. Its €100M Fund II is the largest seed-stage deep tech fund in Baltic history, aims to back about 25 companies in areas like AI, robotics, photonics, space, and defence with €0.5M–€5M checks, follows a high-bar, low-volume approach of only 6–8 startups a year, and is one of just two Baltic funds with a dedicated ESG team member.
















.jpeg)







.jpeg)











































































.png)
























































































































.jpeg)









.jpeg)




















































































