Dr. Joachim "Joe" Kayser is co-founder and chief counsel at Alliance Critical Materials Infrastructure Fund (ACMIF) and its investment manager ACM Group GmbH i.G. in Berlin. ACMIF is the EU’s first solely private capital fund (targeting 3 billion Euro) dedicated to strategic & critical minerals production and recycling – ensuring and (re-)installing a secure, autonomous and sovereign supply chain for defence, aerospace, and related deep tech industries within the EU and its allied nations. Joe is also a German qualified attorney and heads his boutique law firm and private investment office in Berlin since 2025 after having served as tax and funds partner at Dentons LP in Frankfurt and Berlin. Before this he was for a decade partner at PWC (leading its German alternative investment team) and later withwith Goodwin LLP in Frankfurt where he headed and built up from scratch the German Private Investment Funds team as part of the prominent worldwide Goodwin funds practice.
New ways to finance a sovereign Critical Materials supply chain for the EU`s deep tech industries
The EU´s and its allied nations` deep tech industries (defence, airspace, e-motive, renewable energies, robotics etc.) are highly dependent on Critical Materials. So far the EU Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) only has identified the problem of an increasingly dangerous dependancy on non-allied sources and supply chains for such products but not achieved a solution for the problem. The same is true for various publicly funded efforts within the EU (committed by EIB, EBRD, varios state banks and national raw material funds). The lecture/panel will explore how the use of a purely privately financed vehicle similar to a Private Equity or Infrastructure Fund might be the MISSING LINK for (re-)installing a sovereign and resilient supply chain for the sake of the deep tech industry within the EU and its allied nations. The speaker`s thesis is that such a vehicle could kick-start the process and in combination and collaboration with the existing public financing tools would lead to much faster and more robust achievement of the CRMA`s ultimate goals.
