Luis Shemtov

Or Shemtov, who goes by Luis, is a co-founder and General Partner of Lunar Ventures, a Berlin-based pre-seed deep-tech venture firm he established in 2017 alongside Dr. Elad Verbin and Mick Halsband. The firm is one of three Israeli expatriate founders' bet on European deep tech; its legal operating entity is Berlin Innovation Ventures GmbH, which is why Shemtov's email sits on the berlininnovation.vc domain. He is variously described as the firm's product/operations-oriented partner among a team weighted toward engineers and scientists.

By his own account, Shemtov's path was technical before it was financial: he describes himself as having started "hacking" as a teenager and working on IT projects out of high school, becoming a self-taught software engineer before moving into business roles. He holds a BA in Psychology & Media from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an MBA from INSEAD. He has said he originally wanted to join a startup as an operator but, unable to find one compelling enough, chose instead to co-found a fund.

At Lunar, Shemtov helped raise a first fund of roughly €40M that backed about 25 companies, and in May 2025 the firm launched a €50M Fund II. He has emphasized a hands-on, relationship-driven approach to investing, explicitly rejecting over-automation: he argues that poor-quality startup data and the power-law nature of venture returns make purely data-driven decision-making ineffective, and that meeting founders in person to understand who they really are remains essential. As a first-time fund manager, he attracted institutional LPs and established VC funds — an unusual feat for a debut vehicle.

• "We back technical founders from day zero. That's it." — Lunar's stated positioning, emphasizing "Hard problems. Real tech. Zero hype."
• Writes first or second checks at pre-seed, backing "moonshot projects at the intersection of deep tech and software," where the edge is genuine technology rather than business-model innovation (he contrasts this with neobanks or subletting platforms).
• Check size ~€750K–€1M; Fund II (€50M) plans to back 25–30 companies at the earliest possible stage.
• Fund II's three focus areas beyond today's AI: (1) teams gathering rare, high-quality data at massive scale; (2) tools accelerating scientific discovery where biology meets computation (techbio); (3) infrastructure letting intelligent/autonomous systems work reliably in the real world.
• Transatlantic thesis: source early-stage European deep-tech talent and de-risk it for top US investors.
• On what makes a good investor: *"VC is journalistic in its nature — you need to listen, learn as quickly as possible, and be elastic in your thinking."*
• On why founders choose partners like Lunar: *"In the past decade, capital flows into DeepTech grew tenfold to $15 billion, yet Founders still prioritise mission-aligned partners who understand the science behind the hype, and are in it for the long haul."*