If you’re building in defense and looking to accelerate your growth, you can apply here.

Welcome to the third and last episode of “On the Edge.”

Over the past two weeks, we explored the new realities of modern warfare. In case you missed them, you can catch up right here:

Episode 1: New Rules, New Players, New Game — How a new generation of startups is using software and rapid iteration to challenge legacy defense cycles.

Episode 2: Produce or Perish — Why mastering the physical supply chain and mass production is the ultimate test of European sovereignty.

But hardware and code mean very little without the frameworks that govern them. Today, in our grand finale, we tackle the most complex battlefield of all. In “Hardcoding the Red Line”, we dive into the moral and regulatory boundaries of building AI for the frontline, before zooming out to look at what it will actually take to build a unified, resilient European defense ecosystem for tomorrow.

Part 3: Hardcoding the Red Line

The sovereignty imperative goes far beyond simply mastering hardware components. Today, the true frontline lies in the adoption of artificial intelligence within our defense systems. While the technical and strategic challenges are vast, the most pressing questions remain ethical in nature and fundamentally entangled with the growing autonomy of our arsenals.

Many whistleblowers are raising concerns about the rapid development of AI. Could an artificial intelligence with amplified capabilities become a systemic threat to humanity? While these narratives echo the most famous works of science fiction, the concerns are real and voiced by leading figures in the ecosystem itself. In a recent essay, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, clearly outlines the threats posed by AI if it is militarized without safeguards: the risk of a hostile nation achieving military dominance or launching large-scale cyberattacks, the appropriation of these tools by terrorist groups to multiply their destructive capacity, or the concentration of absolute power in the hands of dictators.

Described as “patriotic” by Arnaud Valli, this essay is a strike warning against the potential excesses of defense AI, but also raises deep philosophical questions. Martin de Gourcuff shares that wariness, and confirms that there is no such thing as zero-risk when dealing with fully autonomous systems:

“LLMs provide access to a vast body of knowledge and open up a wide range of possibilities. Unfortunately, it is a technology that can be used for harmful purposes. How worried should we be? I’m not entirely sure. But we must not forget that this tool is not fundamentally constrained to do good.”

In this context, a key question emerges: does the growing implementation of AI in Defense inherently represent a risk?

The startup paradox: more AI for more ethics?

When it comes to weaponry, AI primarily translates into autonomy. While automated systems (drones, missiles) have existed for decades, the current robotization of the battlefield marks a new step forward. Yet for our startups, the conclusion is unanimous and almost counterintuitive: controlled automation enables a level of efficiency and performance that strengthens the ethics of strikes.

In practice, this plays out in one concrete advantage: video feedback from autonomous drones makes strikes reversible. Where launching a traditional missile is irreversible, an interceptor drone strike can be canceled up to the final five seconds. Hadrien Canter recalls a tragedy that could have been avoided:

“When pro-Russian separatists and Russian armed forces shot down civilian flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, they believed they were targeting a Ukrainian military aircraft. [...] Today, when a drone is launched to intercept a target, if we realize that the radar lock was actually on a friendly or civilian drone, video feedback allows us to cancel the strike at the last second.”

Harmattan AI takes the argument one step further: specialization itself is the safeguard.

“We are developing Gobi, a drone interceptor. Unless we modify its code, it can never be used to target civilians. From that perspective, it is almost more secure than a traditional anti-aircraft gun, which can easily be turned against anyone,” explains Martin de Gourcuff.

Automation is not limited to deploying swarms of drones; it relies on the resilience of communication networks to operate a global command and control (C2) system, similar to the American Combined JADC2 program. However, Arnaud Valli points out the fragility of this hyper-connectivity: “This connectivity can always be compromised, even if Starlink or other constellations make 5G available everywhere.” To what extent can armed forces rely on cloud availability in the middle of combat?

What makes this automation inevitable is a single imperative: accelerating the Kill Chain, the sequence of processing a target. The goal is to drastically reduce the time between detecting the enemy and neutralizing it.

“The Russians have improved their detection-recognition-strike system in a very impressive way: previously, it took them five minutes to identify and destroy a target, now it’s under 30 seconds,” notes Arnaud Valli.

AI is revolutionizing targeting, even reshaping the economics of war, as observed through the Iranian conflict.

“During the first strikes [recent ones in the Middle East], there may have been 1,000 strikes managed by only around a hundred analysts… That is 100 times fewer personnel than during the Gulf War, for four times as many strikes. When applied to data aggregation, this multiplier effect is terrifying. But ultimately, it does not win a war on its own,” tempers Arnaud Valli.

The “Human-in-the-loop” and the wall of operational reality

Despite these advances, operational safety is only guaranteed if humans remain in the decision-making loop. AI helps reduce the operator’s cognitive load by filtering information. “AI provides suggestions, but humans remain at the core of the decision-making process,” insists Hadrien Canter.

Technically, autonomous defense systems face the same limitations as autonomous vehicles: handling rare events. Martin de Gourcuff illustrates this challenge:

“If a monkey crosses the road in front of our car, we understand the situation. The algorithm, however, does not: it either misidentifies the obstacle or makes a poor decision because its training data contains very few instances of monkeys crossing roads.”

These perceptual limitations, combined with sensor constraints (sunlight, hallucinations…), slow down the development of fully autonomous systems, even though technologies such as World Models aim to address them. Hadrien Canter sets the record straight regarding tech-driven fantasies:

“While some competing companies oversell a futuristic vision where everything works at the push of a button… operational reality is very different. There is noise in the data, sensors get jammed. Human lives are at stake, and that must not be forgotten.”

Beyond the technical dimension, automation raises deeply political questions. Arnaud Valli highlights the risk of desensitization to war:

“It is clear that systems are becoming increasingly autonomous, with humans simply ‘turning the key’ because they can no longer compute everything. But if China were to deploy a fleet of robots in the Pacific against a US fleet, would there not be far less political and social resistance to initiating a conflict, knowing that there are no direct human casualties?”

The uncomfortable truth is that hostile powers aren’t waiting for a consensus on the ethics of autonomous warfare, they’re already fielding it, pushing Western armed forces toward an essential doctrinal renewal. Who, human or machine, is legally responsible for an autonomous strike? What delegated authorities to open fire are permitted? It is along this narrow tactical and moral backbone that Defense Tech must evolve. “Our companies must work with the military, but also with theorists, to build a clear, defined framework capable of evolving,” concludes Arnaud Valli.

Part 4: The war of tomorrow is being shaped today

As institutional trust strengthens and private capital finally opens up to Defense Tech, the time for mere proof of concept is over. For these startups, the ambition goes beyond providing isolated technological building blocks: the goal is to establish themselves as the backbone of tomorrow’s armed forces.

The ultimate objective? To become the central infrastructure, the global operating system of European defense. A direct response to American technological ambitions, such as the highly interconnected Combined JADC2 military program. Martin de Gourcuff confirms this desire to be at the core of the system:

“There is real value in being at the heart of the data system. It is fully aligned with our ambition to build the operating system for command centers, the data infrastructure, and the communication systems of armed forces.”

To summarize this pursuit of interoperability and software dominance, Arnaud Valli offers a striking metaphor:

“Why do you think American Defense Tech giants use names drawn from Tolkien’s universe, like Palantir or Anduril? It’s one to rule them all. [...] In an ideal world, we would want a piece of software connected to everyone. The goal, within a European ecosystem, is to reach several billion in revenue. If we manage to shake up how procurement agencies operate in favor of end users, we will have achieved a great deal.”

This software sovereignty must also enable Europe to compensate for the shortcomings of its historical allies. Hadrien Canter sees this as a strong strategic signal: when the United States runs out of stock and can no longer supply Patriot missiles, the emergence of France and its ecosystem with agile and effective interception solutions shifts the balance on the global geopolitical chessboard.

But to turn this vision into reality and establish the continent’s security architecture, money and political will alone will not suffice. The true decisive factor of this decade will be human. “Join us to build concrete solutions and have an impact. There is work to be done, we are looking for motivated people committed to this mission-driven mindset,” says Hadrien Canter as a general call to action. The message is clear: tomorrow’s European sovereignty urgently needs the best talent of today.

Closing words

Writing this article opened our eyes to a world most of us instinctively turn away from: Defense, its mechanisms, its realities. A world opaque, sometimes uncomfortable but more urgent to understand than ever.

Because tomorrow’s threat may not yet have a name, but already exists. And while we look away, entire teams are coding, testing, iterating, sometimes just a few kilometers from the front line, so that Europe can defend itself in a world that did not wait for us to become hostile.

We thank Martin, Hadrien, and Arnaud for opening the doors of their offices to us. And we thank them even more now that we fully grasp the fight they carry every day, to protect the sovereignty of peoples. A fight that, ultimately, concerns us all.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who wants to understand how geopolitics and tech intertwine.

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Agathe & Emma

👋 The Week in Review

This week feels a bit split.

On one side, infrastructure constraints are becoming harder to ignore. Between energy bottlenecks and rising costs, scaling compute in Europe is starting to look more complex than expected.

On the other, momentum hasn’t slowed. Quantum is heading to public markets, and biotech is pulling in record-sized funds, showing that conviction is still very much there for the right assets.

Also, the two first episode of my defense tech mini-series are officially live. If you want a front-row seat to the French startups rewiring modern warfare, read On the Edge’s last episode right here. Last episode dropping this week.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Swiss-based Terra Quantum targets public markets in a $3.25B SPAC deal

The quantum computing company is set to list via a blank-check merger to secure the massive capital required to scale its hybrid quantum-classical algorithms and infrastructure.

French aviation startup Aura Aero secures €340M to scale electric aircraft production

The Toulouse-based manufacturer raised a major round to fund the industrialization of its hybrid-electric regional planes and build out dual manufacturing hubs in France and Florida.

Spain’s Sateliot seeks a €100M raise to accelerate its 5G satellite IoT network

The Barcelona-based spacetech is raising fresh capital to rapidly deploy its low-Earth orbit constellation and provide seamless, global 5G connectivity for internet-of-things devices.

OpenAI halts its flagship UK data centre project over soaring energy costs

The AI giant has paused its ambitious “Stargate” compute facility in the UK, citing high local electricity prices and grid bottlenecks as critical roadblocks to its European infrastructure rollout.

Vinted surpasses €1B in revenue as rapid expansion impacts its profit margins

The Lithuanian second-hand marketplace hit a major top-line milestone, though aggressive pushes into new markets and heavy logistics investments have temporarily squeezed its bottom line.

Doctolib crosses €400M in revenue and welcomes new investors to its cap table

The French healthtech continues its steady growth trajectory, breaking the €400 million revenue mark while reshuffling its investor base via a secondary transaction to sustain its European dominance.

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

Qoro Quantum (Computing) | Pre-Seed | €645k

• The Deal: London-based startup building software infrastructure for distributed quantum computing that connects classical systems with quantum processors secured €645k.

• The Investors: Led by Ada Ventures, backed by Superangels Venture Fund & Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

• The Analysis: The commercial adoption of quantum computing is currently bottlenecked by the immense software complexity required to integrate emerging quantum processors with classical systems like CPUs and GPUs. Qoro Quantum tackles this integration barrier by building a unified orchestration layer that acts as the nervous system for heterogeneous computing environments. Their middleware platform abstracts the underlying hardware constraints, effectively reducing approximately 150,000 lines of custom integration code to just 20, which allows developers to build applications once and deploy them anywhere. Operating on a dual model that includes a self-serve developer cloud and an enterprise tier for high value workloads, the London based deeptech positions itself as an essential broker layer. By enabling diverse computing clusters to function as a single logical machine, the startup captures vital territory within the rapidly expanding quantum software market required to realize hybrid workflows at scale.

• What’s Next: Expand the engineering team and accelerate the rollout of the hybrid software layer.

⚡ Deal Flow

🇬🇧 Narwhal Labs (AI) — €23M Seed: Bristol-based developer of an enterprise-grade autonomous communications platform that manages customer interactions 24/7 using agentic AI.

🇮🇹 TeiaCare (HealthTech) — €7M Additional Round: Milan-based AI-powered care monitoring platform using optical sensors to enhance resident safety and decision-making in healthcare facilities.

🇩🇪 BLOCKS (Cloud) — €5.2M Pre-Seed: Berlin-based AI agent platform that autonomously manages and significantly reduces cloud infrastructure costs for startups.

🇩🇪 Conxai (ConstructionTech) — €5M Seed: Munich-based no-code agentic AI platform automating fragmented workflows and risk analysis across construction projects.

🇮🇹 CareGlance (DeepTech) — €3.5M Seed: Milan-based developer of ultra-high-precision 3D infrared sensors for Industry 4.0 applications like laser welding and semiconductor inspection.

🇫🇷 Plume (SpaceTech) — €3.3M Seed: Paris-based AI-powered geospatial platform centralizing datasets to accelerate site selection and development of renewable energy projects.

🇮🇪 Vertigenius (MedTech) — €2.5M Series A: Dublin-based developer of wearable sensors and a companion app for the remote monitoring and treatment of vertigo patients.

🇩🇪 PENEMUE (Cybersecurity) — €1.7M Seed: Freiburg-based AI-powered platform utilizing advanced moderation technology to combat online hate, digital violence, and disinformation.

🇪🇸 Golden Owl (DeepTech) — €1.4M Seed: Alicante-based developer of advanced OSINT and multi-agent AI solutions for threat detection, defense, and business intelligence.

🇫🇷 Hairdex (HealthTech) — €1M Pre-Seed: Marseille-based platform connecting patients with specialized doctors and pharmacies for personalized anti-hair loss treatments.

👉 See the full database of 60+ rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: 🇫🇷Jeito Capital — €1B

Paris-based Jeito Capital has raised a record-breaking €1B for Jeito II, becoming the largest independent European biopharma fund. This new fund explicitly targets a structural gap in European biopharma: mid-to-late clinical stages (Phases 2/3), aiming to provide the heavy, long-term capital needed to prevent companies from migrating abroad. Writing highly concentrated tickets up to €150M per company across 15 to 20 businesses, the fund has already deployed capital into treatments for obesity, cancer, and neurology, including leading a $197M Series A in Alveus Therapeutics. The firm’s precedent success is exceptional; its inaugural 2021 fund recently saw nearly $5B in exits within a single month (EyeBio to Merck for $3B and HI-Bio to Biogen for $1.8B). Founded by Dr. Rafaèle Tordjman, Jeito uniquely rejects the typical “spray-and-pray” early-stage biotech model, operating instead with a highly concentrated, Europe-first focus led by a team of scientists and regulatory experts who provide hands-on clinical and market access expertise.

Other Fund Launches:

🇵🇹 Bondstone Ventures (€50M): Deeptech-focused fund dedicated to backing early-stage technological innovation and ambitious startups emerging from the Portuguese ecosystem.

🇨🇭Herbert Ventures (€32.5M): Early-stage venture vehicle established to support high-growth tech startups and visionary founders across the ecosystem.

🇨🇿 JIC (€16.3M): Early-stage venture fund designed to back deep tech founders from their very earliest stages across the Central and Eastern European region.

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European VC.

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See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.

Best,

Agathe

If you’re building in defense and looking to accelerate your growth, you can apply here.

Welcome to Episode 2 of “On the Edge.”

Last week, we set the stage by exploring how a new generation of French defense startups is using software and rapid iteration to challenge the decade-long cycles of legacy primes contractors.

If you missed it, you can catch up on Episode 1 right here.

Today we dive into the hard reality of manufacturing. We explore how Harmattan AI, Alta Ares, and Comand AI are confronting the economic asymmetry of modern warfare, securing their supply chains against global dependencies, and proving that the assembly line has once again become a weapon.

Partie 2 : Produce or Perish

Sovereignty is no longer an abstract concept. In a world where armed conflict is once again the norm, it refers to a concrete and brutal reality: the ability of a State to decide its own fate on its own territory, without depending on the goodwill of an ally or the supply chain of an adversary. This is exactly what Ukraine has been fighting for since February 2022, and it is precisely where the three startups we spoke with have chosen to commit themselves.

Because being “on the edge” is not a metaphor. The solutions from Alta Ares, Harmattan AI, and Comand AI are not tested in Parisian labs or German simulation centers; they are running on the front line. Alta Ares produces its interceptor drones in Ukraine, as close as possible to the units that use them. Harmattan AI and Comand AI are also deployed there. These startups do not use war as an experimental playground: they respond to real, immediate, and vital needs. Every successful interception is an impact avoided. Hadrien Canter testifies to this:

“Today the results are quite good, we have already been able to shoot down more than a dozen Shaheds. And we keep counting. Every night. And we tell ourselves that every Shahed shot down is potentially a piece of critical infrastructure that is protected.”

Beyond their agility as startups and their software-oriented product design strategy, the context of high-intensity war on Europe’s doorstep has allowed these companies to test their solutions in real conditions and produce for immediate needs. “One week of development for us in Ukraine is the equivalent of two months in Germany or France,” Arnaud Valli emphasizes. This access to a massive market hungry for innovative options and products has allowed them to develop solutions that meet the needs of the Ukrainian armies for their fight, for their freedom. And more broadly, these solutions also allow Europe and European armies to prepare for future battles.

The situation in the Middle East has reinforced, with added brutality, what Ukraine had already demonstrated. Iran was one of the first States to systematize the large-scale use of low-cost drones, the Shaheds, produced for a few thousand euros, capable of inflicting considerable damage, and which cost several millions to intercept. A radical economic asymmetry, revealing a fundamental rule ignored for too long: in a war of attrition, mastering production capabilities is just as decisive as the sophistication of the systems.

The rapid depletion of missile stockpiles in the region is the starkest illustration. And while some European leaders have become aware of this reality, translating it into concrete industrial capabilities remains painfully slow. As Hadrien Canter observes:

“Our adversaries understood long ago that quantity has become a quality. And unfortunately, some of our leaders have understood it, but it takes time to implement.”

Designing high-performance and autonomous systems is one thing. Producing them on a large scale, at a low cost, and without depending on foreign powers is quite another, and this is often where everything is decided. In a war of attrition, the supply chain is not a logistical detail: it is a full-fledged strategic issue. The factory has become a weapon once again. And mastering it is a condition for sovereignty.

Whoever controls their supply chain controls their destiny

This change of scale shatters Western military orthodoxy. Until now, calibrated for one-off expeditionary operations, our armies favored ultra-sophisticated systems produced in very small numbers. But once a conflict turns into a war of position, the real moat inevitably moves to the assembly line.

Survival no longer depends solely on R&D, but on the absolute primacy of physical production capacity. A brutal reality summed up by Martin de Gourcuff:

“In Ukraine, what makes the difference is being able to produce hundreds of thousands of units. It is not so much the intrinsic performance of the system, although obviously that helps. But performance and cost are generally highly correlated; so we end up with a fundamental trade-off to make between performance and mass.”

In a world where high intensity is becoming the norm again, mass production implies total control of the supply chain. For our Defense Tech startups, the ambition is clear, albeit complex: breaking free from the double dependency on China and the United States.

The case of the United States is particularly tricky. While they remain historical allies, protectionist tensions, exacerbated by Donald Trump’s return to the White House, are rewriting the rules. The main threat to European companies lies in the ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) compliance. The moment a single American component subject to ITAR is integrated into a system, no matter how small, the entire final product is “infected” by the standard, forcing the European company to request an export license from the US government.

On the software side, the market remains largely dominated by American tech giants. To train its models, Comand AI must source GPUs outside of China, turning to Taiwan, South Korea, or Vietnam. At Harmattan AI, which uses powerful hardware accelerators, there is currently no viable alternative to the American giant Nvidia.

At Alta Ares, strategic partnerships in Asia, particularly with Taiwan, are a deliberate choice, as Hadrien Canter explains:

“We work with Taiwan for production capacities and niche expertise, but also because they are an ally. Taiwan faces the same threat as Ukraine today, and buys French equipment. We created this company out of conviction. When we know that China supplies 75% of the electronic components for Iranian Shahed drones, why shouldn’t we provide our assistance to Taiwan?”

Wanting to relocate the entire value chain back to Europe, however, runs up against the wall of economic realities. The production of cutting-edge semiconductors requires massive investments and relies on indispensable civilian players. Arnaud Valli provides a lucid assessment:

“We are dependent on civilian market structures to get our GPUs. As long as Nvidia manufactures its cards in Asia, we will be dependent. The smallest TSMC factory in the United States requires $12 billion in investment. Relocating therefore requires a strategic investment vision from the State, from data centers to production, and above all accepting, at least for a time, to produce at a loss compared to components made in Vietnam that will always be cheaper. It is a real political and industrial choice.”

Furthermore, the chain is globalized and hyper-specialized: TSMC cannot manufacture its chips without extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines from the Dutch company ASML, which holds a near-global monopoly on this technology. Europe cannot do without Taiwan, which cannot do without Europe.

While there are vast European programs to relocate the manufacturing of micro-components or batteries, the road is long. In the meantime, the hardware remains dependent on Asian or American civilian markets for cost and labor reasons. Faced with China’s hegemony over rare earths, which are essential for motor magnets, batteries, or radiofrequency systems like radars, agility is essential. French startups are expanding internationally to secure their supplies and markets: Alta Ares is forging ties in the Middle East for radar and electro-optical expertise, while Harmattan AI is expanding into Switzerland, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates.

European Defense: An unfinished puzzle

Ultimately, building a sovereign supply chain raises a much broader question: the harmonization of European defense systems. And the task is colossal.

Despite their geographical proximity, European countries think about war through the prism of their own history. A former colonial power does not project its forces in the same way as Germany, which was militarily constrained for a long time, or Poland, which lives with the Russian threat at its borders. This divergence of objectives creates an industrial fragmentation bordering on the absurd: “In Europe, there are 15 different types of tanks. In the United States, there is only one,” points out Martin de Gourcuff.

The relationship with the American nuclear umbrella is just as divisive. Driven by de Gaulle’s vision, France built a strategic autonomy unique in Europe, distinguishing itself by its ability to design its own aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and fighter jets. Constrained by a small domestic market, this model contrasts with the reality of many European neighbors, strategically and technologically vassalized by Washington.

One might have thought that recent geopolitical upheavals, up to Donald Trump’s most surreal proposals, like his idea of taking Greenland back from Denmark (by buying it or, if necessary, by force), would be a definitive wake-up call. But the inertia remains, and many Europeans still refuse to consider that their historical ally might prioritize its own interests to the detriment of those of the Old Continent. Faced with these industrial and political realities, one question remains unanswered: is European Defense condemned to be nothing more than a chimera?

[...]

Next week : Part 3: Hardcoding the Red Line & Part 4: The war of tomorrow is being shaped today. The ethical boundaries of military AI and what it actually takes to build the future of European defense.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who wants to understand how geopolitics and tech intertwine.

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Best,

Agathe & Emma

👋 The Week in Review

While things look a bit quieter on the funds side this week, the pace hasn’t really slowed.

Late-stage is picking up again. Between crypto and fintech, new unicorns are emerging, which wasn’t a given a few months ago.

At the same time, the infrastructure push continues. Data centers, compute, energy, all still expanding, financed through a mix of large debt facilities and equity.

Also, the first episode of my defense tech mini-series is officially live. If you want a front-row seat to the French startups rewiring modern warfare, read On the Edge right here. Ep. 2 dropping tomorrow.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Nebius begins construction on one of Europe’s largest data centres

Following its massive $4.3B fundraise, the European cloud provider is rapidly building a sprawling physical facility for high-density GPU clusters to challenge US hyperscalers.

France doubles down on Bull supercomputers to ensure European digital sovereignty

To reduce reliance on American hardware, the French government is actively backing its domestic supercomputing champion to secure sovereign compute power for regional defense and AI initiatives.

London-based 9fin secures $170M to reach a definitive $1.3B valuation

The AI-powered private credit platform cemented its unicorn status with a major round designed to scale its critical data infrastructure for investment banks navigating the leveraged finance market.

Belgian crypto liquidity provider Keyrock achieves unicorn status as its valuation quadruples

Riding the digital asset market resurgence, the Brussels-based market maker secured fresh capital to aggressively scale its algorithmic trading infrastructure across global exchanges.

UK AI chipmaker Fractile targets a $1B valuation in $200M funding talks with Accel

Seeking to challenge Nvidia, the London-based silicon startup is negotiating a massive round to scale the manufacturing of its novel, energy-efficient hardware designed specifically for fast AI inference.

Mistral AI secures $830M in debt financing to build out its European data centre infrastructure

Opting for non-dilutive capital, the French AI champion is leveraging a massive debt facility to construct its own compute clusters and accelerate its shift toward vertically integrated cloud operations.

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

Wearable Robotics (MedTech) | Series A | €5M

• The Deal: Italy-based startup developing neuromotor rehabilitation robotics and exoskeletons to scale patient recovery and mobility solutions secured €5M.

• The Investors: Led by CDP Ventures Capital

• The Analysis: Traditional neuromotor physical therapy suffers from an intensity deficit, leaving 90% of stroke and injury patients without full mobility recovery. Italy’s Wearable Robotics solves this by commercializing clinically validated exoskeletons that merge mechanical assistance with virtual reality. Through its flagship ALEX RS device, the company provides a tendon-actuated, five-degree-of-freedom robotic arm that enables highly repetitive, data-tracked rehabilitation. Operating dual divisions for both medical recovery and industrial load-bearing, the startup bypasses the commoditization risks of software-only approaches through a robust eight-patent hardware portfolio. Wearable Robotics is aggressively targeting the North American market, capitalizing on new Medicare reimbursement codes within a global exoskeleton sector projected to reach $24.28B by 2031.

• What’s Next: Product portfolio completion, regulatory approvals in new markets, commercial and distribution network expansion, and production capacity optimisation.

Pickmybrain (CreativeTech) | Pre-Seed | €1.8M

• The Deal: Tallinn-based AI-powered platform enabling experts to transform their knowledge into digital counterparts raised €1.8M.

• The Investors: Led by Business Angels including Garri Zmudze

• The Analysis: The traditional creator model forces professionals into an exhausting cycle of constant content production just to monetize their expertise. Pickmybrain dismantles this bottleneck by enabling domain authorities to clone their specific knowledge into highly personalized Digital Brains. The platform trains its AI exclusively on an individual’s curated interviews, books, and insights to create a scalable and on-demand consulting layer. This system handles routine inquiries automatically while routing high value questions directly to the human expert for asynchronous video responses. By shifting the focus away from ad driven attention and toward transactional utility, the startup provides the essential infrastructure for a personalized knowledge market where intellect can be monetized passively.

• What’s Next: Grow the team, scale into new markets, and improve the product.

⚡ Deal Flow

🇫🇮 IQM Quantum Computers (Computing) — €50M Additional Round: Espoo-based leader in full-stack superconducting quantum computers for global research institutions.

🇮🇪 Manna Air Delivery (Logistics) — €44M Series B: Dublin-based consumer drone delivery company providing rapid, low-emission order deliveries.

🇫🇷 Generare (BioTech) — €20M Series A: Paris-based techbio startup decoding microbial genomes to uncover novel small molecules for AI-driven drug discovery.

🇳🇱 Brilliance (DeepTech) — €6M Seed: Enschede-based startup manufacturing integrated RGB laser chips for energy-efficient AR displays.

🇫🇷 Alice & Bob (Computing) — €3.5M Grant: Paris-based quantum computing company developing fault-tolerant cat qubits for materials discovery.

🇱🇹 WhiteBridge AI (Data) — €2.6M Seed: Kaunas-based AI-driven platform automating individual intelligence and verification through public data.

🇩🇪 deeplify (IndustrialTech) — €2M Pre-Seed: Bochum-based industrial AI startup automating critical infrastructure inspection to significantly reduce downtime.

🇨🇭 Lobby (TravelTech) — €1.9M Seed: Zurich-based AI-driven platform automating group bookings for the travel and hospitality industry.

🇫🇮 Test of Things (Cybersecurity) — €1.2M Pre-Seed: Oulu-based platform automating cybersecurity safety and compliance testing for IoT devices.

🇮🇹 Capsule Corporation (SpaceTech) — €800k Seed: Milan-based developer of sustainable, water-based propulsion systems for small satellites.

👉 See the full database of 70+ rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: 🇬🇧 Women Backing Women Fund (BootStrap4F) — £130M

Managed by Bootstrap4F, the UK government-backed “Women Backing Women” fund of funds recently announced a £130M first close against a £250M target. This vehicle executes a systemic thesis: it is the UK’s first fund of funds explicitly mandated to back female and mixed-gender VC managers, who will subsequently finance female founders. The managing partners bring immense precedent pedigree, boasting a collective £4.4BN track record in fund selection. Distinctly anchored by heavyweight institutions like Barclays, M&G, and the British Business Bank, the fund’s unique edge lies in structurally correcting the UK’s funding gap where only 2% of equity reaches female-founded businesses. It achieves this by driving diversity at the capital-allocation level to generate alpha.

Other Fund Launches:

🇬🇧 British Growth Partnership Fund I (£200M): Newly formed vehicle coordinated by the British Business Bank, with capital commitments from Aegon UK, Cushon Master Trust, and M&G to back high-growth domestic tech companies like Wayve.

🇵🇱 EIF & BGK (€85M): Commitment via the €350M Future Tech Poland fund of funds to three Polish VC funds (Expeditions, Cogito Capital Partners, and Balnord) targeting startups and scaleups in defence, cybersecurity, and space tech.

🇬🇧 Empirical Ventures (£10M): Capital boost dedicated to backing UK-based “venture scientists” focused on building early-stage deeptech breakthroughs.

🇪🇺 Scaleup Europe Fund (N/A): EQT and Atomico named as the final contenders to manage this major pan-European initiative aimed at bridging the late-stage funding gap for tech scale-ups.

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If you’re building in defense and looking to accelerate your growth, you can apply here.

When we first met at Hexa on a Sunday afternoon a few months ago, we had no idea we would end up here. Friday evening. 6:30 PM. Martin de Gourcuff welcomes us warmly to his bunker-like offices and shows us around the former production lines of the startup turned unicorn.

The next day, the news is brutal: the war in Iran has just begun. Like the Russian-Ukrainian war before it, this new conflict reveals a profound paradigm shift, a new era of the battlefield. While the collective imagination still pictures the so-called “Primes”, like Safran, Thales, or Airbus, as the drivers of innovation, it is now startups that are developing cutting-edge technological products at record speed, addressing the challenges of today’s conflicts directly on the ground. These startups support the military directly on the front lines, delivering the best solutions in a world where everything moves fast. A world where mechanization gives way to dronization, where automation and artificial intelligence play an ever-growing role, and where electronic warfare has become a major stake in modern conflicts.

Beyond software, it is also production capacity, factories, and supply chains that are changing the game, at a time when the multiplication of regional conflicts makes a large-scale war increasingly plausible. At the same time, an existential question arises: is Europe capable of producing its own weapons, on its own soil, with full control over its components?

It is in this context that we had the chance to meet Martin de Gourcuff, co-founder and CTO of Harmattan AI, but also Hadrien Canter, CEO of Alta Ares, and Arnaud Valli, Head of Public Affairs at Comand AI. Come on board with us to the heart of the “New Defense Edge” to discover these French startups at the forefront of modern conflicts.

Part 1: New rules, New players, New game

The peace dividend era is over. As global conflict intensifies and the shadow of a large-scale war has never loomed closer, Europe no longer has a choice: the time has come to rearm.

Asymmetric wars have multiplied and complicated threats (electronic warfare, drone swarms, cyber attacks), creating new challenges that traditional defense strategies struggle to address. The Russo-Ukrainian conflict has provided a brutal demonstration: the most sophisticated weapons no longer guarantee victory. Drones costing a few thousand euros are destroying armored vehicles worth several millions. To quote Andrius Kubilius, European Commissioner for Defense and Space, we are now witnessing “€1M missiles facing €10,000 drones.” The conclusion is clear: the rules of the game have changed.

European defense is going through a pivotal moment, shaped by both geopolitical tensions and economic transformations. Under the constant pressure of an open war at its doorstep, and caught in the grip of Sino-American rivalry, Europe must respond. In this new paradigm, traditional defense players are less equipped to operate at the required pace, leaving considerable room for startups capable of iterating quickly and adapting to constantly evolving threats.

Harmattan AI, Alta Ares, Comand AI: the new French startups redefining the European defense landscape.

Born from this urgency to rearm, these three companies were built around the same conviction: today’s threats call for responses that traditional players cannot provide.

Cheap to produce, practically invisible to traditional radars, and capable of being deployed in massive swarms, drones create a radical asymmetry against classic interception systems, which they overwhelm as easily as they bypass. This is the problem Harmattan AI, founded in April 2024, is tackling. Initially focused on detecting anti-personnel mines (an activity it continues to develop in parallel), the startup gradually focused on drone interception, offering verticalized solutions from software to hardware. A trajectory that convinces investors: in January 2026, Harmattan raised $200 million, bringing its valuation to $1.4 billion.

Alta Ares takes a similar path, but its origin is radically different. Founded two years ago directly in Ukraine by Hadrien Canter, the startup was literally born on the front line. Its first solution, Gamma ISR, helps relieve the cognitive load of operators forced to scan video feeds for hours. The second, Pixel Lock C-UAS, powered by artificial intelligence, allows for the automatic interception of loitering munitions like Shahed drones. Validated on the Ukrainian battlefield, the technology has since been tested under extreme conditions in Estonia and validated by NATO.

Beyond counter-drone warfare, modern conflict poses another equally critical challenge: command. In environments saturated with sensors, drones, cyber signals, and OSINT, decision-makers face unprecedented volumes of data, well beyond what a human alone can process in real time. This is precisely the challenge Comand AI wanted to address. Founded by Loïc Mougeolle, former Director of Strategic Innovation at Naval Group, the startup develops military command software enabling faster decision-making by officers, along with automated after-action reviews to extract real-time lessons from operations.

Three companies, three approaches, but a shared genesis. That of a generation that chose to put its skills in service of European defense, not out of opportunism, but out of conviction. Arnaud Valli, former political advisor to NATO and now Head of Public Affairs at Comand AI, summarizes this shift: “We are right in the middle of an AI arms race, and if we are going to have effective systems, it would be better if liberal democracies had them. And I agreed with the secondary option: it would be good if Europe and France had them too.”

A sentiment shared by Martin de Gourcuff, who admits he never imagined working on defense systems: “Today, I have a much clearer sense of the purpose it serves.”

At Alta Ares, this utility takes an even more concrete form. “Alta Ares is a mission-driven company,” asserts Hadrien Canter.

“There are few companies today in Europe that code in the morning, and by the evening, what they coded is running on interceptor drones shooting down Shaheds. And that is a point of pride.”

Software as a lever for operational superiority

War has always been a technological accelerator. From gunpowder to the atomic bomb, from World War II radars to the drones of Mosul, every major conflict has reconfigured the relationship between innovation and military power. But something has fundamentally changed this time: the decisive advantage is no longer about tonnage or caliber. It comes down to the software layer, the one that turns an ordinary drone into a precision system, or a thirty-year-old platform into an augmented combat tool.

Beyond the robotization of the battlefield, we are now witnessing the autonomization of the entire chain, from decision-making to combat action. As Martin de Gourcuff sums it up:

“We can add far more features to the defense systems we develop thanks to software and algorithmic advances, especially in machine learning. And that, in particular, makes it possible to render the systems much more autonomous than they were before.”

In a context where defense budgets do not allow everything to be replaced, and where acquisition cycles remain long, software becomes the fastest and most cost-effective lever to increase the power of existing arsenals. Software thus improves hardware, as Arnaud Valli points out:

“We have systems like the T55, a tank dating back to the 50s, which is still used but is improved thanks to software. Software is not just an application overlay: it is a way to improve the hardware, to make it more competent and more effective [...]. Software is still quite decisive in today’s digitized armies, which are increasingly robotic.”

A paradigm shift in the defense industry

In a war of position like in Ukraine, this autonomization translates into a concrete operational advantage: mobilizing fewer soldiers, in a context where armies are struggling to recruit, with better-performing equipment. Above all, it provides an agility that large industrial groups are structurally incapable of offering. In Ukraine, the rules of the game evolve in a matter of weeks: jamming, fiber-optic drones, electronic countermeasures, new flight profiles. The Primes, excellent at building sophisticated systems over long cycles, find themselves outpaced by the rhythm of a war of attrition where what matters most is resilience against enemy innovation and the ability to mass-produce.

Arnaud Valli, who observed this system from the inside during his years at NATO, points out its limitations:

“In France, the armed forces make a request, the DGA translates this operational need into an industrial need and asks the manufacturers to produce it. And the user hardly ever spoke to the manufacturer, except upon delivery. Which, unfortunately, sometimes resulted in absurdities between the demands of the operators and the final product.”

Startups, on the other hand, operate with a different mode of functioning, often referred to as DefTech. “What does that imply? It is a much more iterative way of working, directly with the users,” specifies Arnaud Valli.

Major industrial players have clearly taken the measure of these new actors: Dassault Aviation took a stake in Harmattan AI, while Safran acquired Preligens, a French startup using AI for satellite image analysis. These moves go beyond mere financial logic: they reflect an assumed complementarity. Hadrien Canter places this dynamic in its broader context:

“I think we are right in this pre-war phase, and that we have an enormous responsibility, which obliges us to have the greatest rigor in what we do. France has an important role to play in building the European defense of tomorrow. And this role can become a reality with the help of startups, but also with the help of large corporate groups.”

The awakening of institutions and private players

This realization is not limited to large manufacturers; institutions are also beginning their shift. Certain initiatives have emerged, such as the creation of the Future Combat Command (CCF) or the Defense Innovation Agency (AID), aimed at modernizing the French army and integrating startups into the Defense Technological and Industrial Base (BITD). Hadrien Canter measures its daily impact:

“There is a real awareness compared to when we started two years ago. This is largely due to an organization called the Drone Pact. It is a real success; it helps us enormously to identify the right points of contact and to bridge the gap between the final need and the manufacturer. It is a link that was stretched too thin for too long, and we take great pleasure in shortening it.”

This openness also translates into concrete contracts: Harmattan AI has secured commitments with the French and British armies, a strong signal of institutional credibility acquired in barely two years of existence.

Private capital is following suit. Funds like Sisyphus Ventures or Expansion, and dedicated acceleration programs like Hexa Sprint Defense, have turned DefTech into a full-fledged asset class, where it was still taboo a few years ago. Martin de Gourcuff observes this in his own fundraising:

“There has been a huge shift. Investors are much more open now to the defense industry. Many of them told us that we were the first defense company they put money into.”

The BITD is transforming. It attracts capital, talent, and a new generation of founders who would not have imagined building weapons systems five years ago. The cards are being reshuffled, and for Europe, the momentum is here. The challenge now is to transform it into the foundations of lasting sovereignty.

[...]

Next week : Part 2: Produce or Perish. The hardware puzzle and the hyper-dependence on foreign supply chains.

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Agathe & Emma

👋 The Week in Review

This week’s numbers are actually insane. Nebius just casually secured $4.3 billion to buy up GPUs, and Isar Aerospace is gunning for a €2 billion valuation right before their maiden orbital flight.

We are witnessing a massive vibe shift in the ecosystem. The days of getting hyped over another B2B productivity app are fading. Right now, the real capital is flowing straight into deep tech, defense, and sovereign infrastructure. Founders are building drone interceptors and figuring out how to beam solar energy down from orbit.

Speaking of defense. If you want a front-row seat to the French startups redefining the rules of modern warfare, get ready for On the Edge: From the Front Line to the Frontier of Innovation. Check out the teaser right here.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

German rocket startup Isar Aerospace eyes a €2B valuation ahead of its crucial orbital launch this week

As Europe urgently seeks to re-establish sovereign access to space, the Munich-based launch provider is leveraging its upcoming maiden orbital flight to secure a major funding round that would double its valuation, positioning itself as the continent’s premier commercial alternative to SpaceX.

Nebius secures a staggering $4.3B to aggressively expand its AI infrastructure just days after striking deals with Nvidia and Meta

Capitalizing on the intense global bottleneck for computing power, the European cloud provider raised this massive war chest to scale its GPU clusters, cementing its role as a critical, hardware-rich backbone for the world’s leading foundation model builders.

Granola hits unicorn status and raises $125M and launches enterprise context tools to evolve from an AI notepad into a corporate knowledge engine

The digital workplace startup secured a massive new funding round to move beyond individual meeting transcriptions, rolling out deep enterprise integrations that allow its AI agents to draw contextual intelligence from across a company’s entire software stack.

Dash0 officially hits unicorn status with a $110M Balderton-led round as it wins over major enterprise clients like Zalando and Taco Bell

Confirming earlier reports of its meteoric rise, the Berlin-based observability startup reached a $1 billion valuation by leveraging its OpenTelemetry-native platform to successfully pull lucrative, high-volume monitoring contracts away from legacy incumbents like Datadog.

London-based Huel is acquired by Danone in a €1B deal to scale its plant-based nutrition empire globally

The UK direct-to-consumer pioneer has achieved a major exit by joining the French food multinational, signaling a broader FMCG consolidation trend as traditional food conglomerates snap up fast-growing, alternative meal replacement brands to capture younger, health-conscious demographics.

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

EGIDE (DefenseTech) | Seed | €8M

• The Deal: Paris-based startup building electrically-propelled interceptors and Mystique defence platform secured €8M.

• The Investors: Led by Expeditions, backed by Eurazeo, Heartcore Capital, Galion.exe, Kima Ventures

• The Analysis: Modern military operations are increasingly vulnerable to a “threat asymmetry,” where cheap, highly adaptable drones and evolving aerial munitions can easily overwhelm traditional, rigid, and expensive defense systems. Egide counters this imbalance through a dual-layered defencetech approach: manufacturing cost-efficient, electrically-propelled interceptors paired with “Mystique,” a proprietary, hardware-agnostic software platform. By leveraging distributed sensors and AI-driven detection, this architecture enables reactive iteration to fast-evolving targets and seamless integration across air, ground, and maritime missions, significantly reducing the complexity and cost of threat interception. The proliferation of mass-produced drones in conflicts such as those in Ukraine and the Middle East has fundamentally altered the economics of warfare, exposing the unsustainability of using multi-million dollar missiles against cheap, asymmetric targets. Driven by this geopolitical reality and the subsequent surge in global defense budgets, Egide provides the critical, cost-effective infrastructure necessary for a global counter-UAS market that is projected to surpass $20 billion by 2030.

• What’s Next: Accelerating development and team expansion

TerraSpark (SpaceTech) | Pre-Seed | €5M

• The Deal: Luxembourg-based space-based solar energy company developing technology to harness solar power from space raised €5M.

• The Investors: Led by daphni and Sake Bosch, backed by Luxembourg Business Angel Network and Karaoke Club

• The Analysis: The transition to a fully renewable grid is fundamentally bottlenecked by the intermittency of wind and terrestrial solar, compounded by an aging infrastructure that struggles to handle peak loads. TerraSpark bypasses these planetary constraints by engineering a commercial pathway for Space-Based Solar Power, capturing constant solar energy in orbit and beaming it down to Earth via radio frequency wireless transmission. Rather than attempting a massive orbital deployment all at once, the Luxembourg based company is commercializing its technology on the ground first. By providing wireless power for off grid industrial sites and events, TerraSpark generates early revenue and proves regulatory safety before launching its first space to Earth demonstrator in 2028. Driven by the geopolitical necessity for European energy independence following recent supply chain shocks and the skyrocketing power demands of AI data centers, the startup is building the ultimate weather independent baseload utility. By turning orbital energy into a scalable asset, the company operates at the frontier of the space based solar power market, a sector projected to expand rapidly as nations scramble to secure sovereign and continuous renewable energy corridors.

• What’s Next: Launch terrestrial wireless power pilots soon, followed by an orbital demonstrator in 2027 and space-to-Earth transmission in 2028.

⚡ Deal Flow

🇨🇭 Kandou AI (Semiconductors) — €196M Series A: Saint-Sulpice-based fabless semiconductor company developing high-speed, energy-efficient connectivity solutions for AI infrastructure using innovative Chord signaling technology.

🇳🇱 RIFT (ClimateTech) — €114M Series B: Eindhoven-based Iron Fuel Technology project to deliver 340 GWh of industrial heat annually and avoid over 1 million tonnes of CO₂.

🇨🇭 PAVE Space (SpaceTech) — €35M Seed: Lausanne-based Swiss space infrastructure company developing orbital transfer vehicles for rapid satellite deployment between orbits.

🇮🇪 Evervault (Cybersecurity) — €22M Series B: Dublin-based data encryption platform built for developers to handle sensitive data compliance.

🇬🇧 Flexzo AI (HealthTech) — €10.4M Series A: London-based agentic AI workforce platform for healthcare systems that optimizes staffing allocation.

🇩🇪 Cellbricks Therapeutics (BioTech)— €10M Seed: Berlin-based tissue engineering company developing biofabricated human tissue implants for regenerative medicine.

🇬🇧 Dexory (Logistics) — €9.8M Series C Extension: London-based warehouse intelligence company using autonomous robots creating digital twins of warehouses in real time.

🇫🇷 Bitstack (Crypto) — €4M Additional Round: Paris-based cryptocurrency platform that raised a record crowdfunding round.

🇸🇪 Everdrone (MedTech) — €3M Additional Round: Askim-based emergency drone delivery service providing rapid transport of medical equipment like defibrillators.

🇬🇧 Deaku (CreativeTech) — €500k Pre-Seed: London-based AI-powered workspace for the creator economy bringing together content strategy and analytics.

👉 See the full database of 70+ rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: 🇩🇪🇺🇸 futurepresent — $300M

Stepping out of stealth mode, the German-US venture firm futurepresent has announced a massive $300M debut fund. The firm targets a thesis built around the next generation of artificial intelligence, specifically focusing on “AI for the physical world,” applied AI in complex, labor-constrained industries, and core AI infrastructure. With undisclosed ticket sizes, the fund maintains a highly flexible mandate spanning from Pre-Seed to concentrated-growth stages. As this is their inaugural vehicle, the four founding partners draw on their extensive prior experience and precedent successes at top-tier firms like Cherry Ventures, General Catalyst, and First Momentum. Operating quietly for over a year before this official launch, futurepresent has already deployed capital into 14 startups, including General Intuition, Skalar, Afori, inca, Isidor, and Slide. What makes futurepresent unique is its deliberate rejection of the sprawling “platform VC” model; instead, they operate as a deeply concentrated, tight-knit partnership offering founders a highly authentic, transatlantic bridge between the US and European innovation ecosystems.

Other Fund Launches:

🇪🇺 European Investment Fund (€1.5B): Massive new pan-European fund dedicated to strengthening the region’s venture capital, growth equity, and broader tech financing ecosystem.

🇬🇧 Air Street Capital ($232M): Fund III making Nathan Benaich’s firm Europe’s largest solo GP venture capital firm, focusing exclusively on AI-first companies.

🇪🇸 Mundi Ventures (€100M): New venture fund dedicated to backing early-stage startups in insurtech, fintech, and enterprise tech across Europe.

🇪🇸 Ysios Capital (€100M): InceptionBio fund designed to boost biotech startup creation and support early-stage life sciences innovation in Spain.

🇨🇿 Credo Ventures (€88M): Fund V focused on doubling down on pre-seed investments specifically within Central and Eastern Europe and its global founder diaspora.

🇫🇷 🇮🇹 360 Capital (€85M): First close of the Poli360 II fund, targeting a final €100M to back deeptech, tech transfer, and industrial innovation primarily out of Italy.

🇬🇧 Cloudberry Ventures (€50M): Seed to Series A vehicle dedicated specifically to backing European startups building next-generation AI compute and infrastructure.

🇨🇭 Vitamin°C (€21M): New climate tech venture capital fund focused on early-stage startups developing scalable decarbonization and environmental solutions.

🇸🇪 Team Scaleup (N/A): New platform designed specifically to bridge the post-seed funding gap for growing startups.

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European VC.

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See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.

Best,

Agathe

The peace dividend era is over.

As €10,000 drones destroy multi-million-euro systems, software agility is now superseding armored tonnage. Faced with this urgency, traditional defense contractors are being challenged by a new generation of founders.

Their credo? Mastering unprecedented agility from code to assembly line to deliver true operational superiority. Their impact zone? Directly on the frontline.

For several weeks, alongside Emma Caillat from Hexa, we met with the people building tomorrow’s European sovereignty. From bunker-like Parisian offices to Ukrainian operations, we spoke with:

• Martin de Gourcuff — CTO, Harmattan AI

• Hadrien Canter — CEO, Alta Ares

• Arnaud Valli — Public Affairs Director, Comand AI

In this 3-part series, we will decode:

Ep. 1 | New Rules, New Players, New Game: How startups leverage software as the ultimate tool for operational superiority, iterating in weeks where traditional players take years.

Ep. 2 | Produce or Perish: The hardware puzzle and the hyper-dependence on foreign supply chains.

Ep. 3 | Coding the Red Line: Why more AI can paradoxically mean more ethics, how automation accelerates decision-making while keeping humans in the loop, and the race to become European defense’s true operating system.

Writing this piece forced us to confront a world often avoided out of moral reflex: the world of defense, its mechanisms, and its harsh realities. An opaque, sometimes uncomfortable world, but one that is more essential than ever to understand.

Because tomorrow’s threat is already here, and building our future security architecture urgently requires Europe’s best talents today.

Subscribe now to receive the first episode directly in your inbox next week!

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This article is written in collaboration with Hexa Sprint. Hexa Sprint is a 6-month accelerator and investment program for pre-seed founding teams with an existing idea, providing up to €500K, hands-on support, and sector-focused guidance to help them grow in Defense, Climate, and AI for Work.

👋 The Week in Review

I was initially tempted to call this week’s edition “French Supremacy.”

After all, Yann LeCun’s new venture AMI Labs just raised what appears to be the largest seed round ever seen in Europe.

But zooming out quickly revealed something bigger: this momentum isn’t limited to one country. It’s happening across the continent.

From Nscale’s historic $2B round in AI infrastructure to Legora expanding into the US with both a Series D and its first acquisition, European startups are raising capital at unprecedented levels. Add major rounds for companies like Alan, Tropic, and Jimmy Energy, and the pattern becomes clear.

AI is acting as a powerful catalyst, pulling massive investment into everything from compute infrastructure to biotech, robotics, and energy.

Another week. Another set of records.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Nscale secures a historic $2B Series C to dominate European AI infrastructure

Marking the largest venture funding round in European history, the sovereign GPU-as-a-service provider has raised $2 billion to rapidly deploy high-performance computing clusters and feed the continent’s insatiable appetite for localized AI training capacity.

Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs secures $1.03B to pioneer physical world models Led by

Meta’s former Chief AI Scientist, the newly formed venture has closed one of the largest seed round in history at $1.03B to challenge autoregressive LLMs by developing autonomous machine intelligence that reasons through intuitive, physics-based “world models.”

Legora closes its Series D and completes its first acquisition to accelerate North American expansion

Armed with fresh capital from a major Series D, the hyper-growth AI agent platform has executed its first strategic acquisition to establish a strong North American footprint and capitalize on the enterprise shift from generative text to autonomous task execution.

Factorial targets a $200M raise to potentially become Spain’s most valuable startup

The Barcelona-based HR software provider is reportedly in advanced talks to secure a $200 million funding round that would catapult its valuation past $2 billion, cementing its status as a leading European B2B SaaS incumbent.

Revolut officially secures its UK banking licence after a five-year regulatory battle

Following a half-decade of intense scrutiny and compliance restructuring, the fintech giant has finally won approval from the Prudential Regulation Authority, allowing it to offer guaranteed deposits and lending products in its home market as it gears up for a blockbuster IPO.

Pure Data Centres and AVK deploy Europe’s first large-scale microgrid

To bypass strained national power grids, the two companies launched a decentralized utility-scale microgrid designed to meet the massive, localized energy demands of modern AI data centers.

To Watch in the following weeks: Leaked plans for the EU’s 28th regime face backlash

Early drafts of the EU’s proposed unified corporate structure have leaked, drawing sharp criticism from the “EU Inc” founder coalition for failing to adequately solve cross-border regulatory fragmentation.

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

Living Models (BioTech) | Seed | €6.5M

• The Deal: Paris and Berkeley-based AI foundation models trained on DNA, RNA, and multi-omics data for plant breeding and agricultural innovation secured €6.5M.

• The Investors: Led by Asterion Ventures, Galion.exe and GrainCorp Ventures, with Pascual Innoventures, Kima Ventures, Station F and Exponential Impact.

• The Analysis: The €55 billion global seed market is currently constrained by an archaic research cycle where developing a single new crop variety takes an average of eight years, a timeline critically misaligned with the rapid onset of climate extremes, such as the 2024 heatwaves that wiped out over €2 billion in French wheat yields alone. Living Models tackles this structural vulnerability by introducing biological foundation models that treat DNA, RNA, and multi-omics data as a computable language. Utilizing transformer architectures similar to those powering large language models, their flagship “BOTANIC” system is trained on over 60 billion base pairs across 43 plant species to predict agricultural traits computationally. By enabling breeders to simulate thousands of genetic crosses in silico before planting a single physical seed, the platform compresses the development cycle down to just two to three years. Targeting an industry where legacy agricultural giants spend €7.5 billion annually on traditional breeding, Living Models provides a predictive infrastructure designed to outpace the rapid evolution of agricultural pathogens and climate volatility without the heavy regulatory burdens (like HIPAA or GDPR) associated with human genomics.

• What’s Next: Expand biological foundation models to non-plant systems.

AIRMO (ClimateTech) | Seed | €5M

• The Deal: Berlin-based advanced greenhouse gas monitoring technology combining SWIR imaging with micro-LIDAR for detecting methane leaks from space raised €5M.

• The Investors: Led by Ananda Impact Ventures, with participation from Unconventional Ventures, kopa ventures, Desai Venture and others.

• The Analysis: The energy industry faces a critical “visibility deficit” when it comes to tracking methane, a greenhouse gas possessing 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. Traditional leak detection methods are often localized, expensive, and unable to scale to the demands of tightening global regulations like OGMP 2.0. AIRMO addresses this global blind spot by deploying an advanced emissions monitoring infrastructure that transitions from airborne drone sensors to a planned constellation of small satellites. By integrating a Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) spectrometer with a proprietary micro-LiDAR system, their spaceborne payload actively measures atmospheric conditions such as wind and aerosols to correct spectral readings, enabling the detection of methane leaks as small as a car from an altitude of 500 kilometers. With a targeted spatial resolution of 50 meters and the ability to update data rapidly, the company provides continuous, verifiable intelligence to major energy operators like Total and Uniper. Operating at the intersection of the space and climate technology sectors, AIRMO is positioning its active-sensing platform as the foundational transparency layer for global decarbonization efforts.

• What’s Next: Scale methane monitoring, develop the AIRMO-1 satellite for 2027, and advance AI algorithms for regulatory compliance.

⚡ Deal Flow

🇳🇱 Wonderful (B2B SaaS) — €131M Series B: Amsterdam-based enterprise AI agent platform enabling automation of complex business workflows with a model-agnostic foundation.

🇫🇷 Alan (InsurTech) — €100M Series E+: Paris-based health insurance unicorn providing digital-first health insurance with AI-powered features.

🇬🇧 Tropic (AgTech) — €91M Series C: Norwich-based gene-edited tropical crops company developing disease-resistant banana and rice varieties using its proprietary GEiGS® platform.

🇫🇷 Jimmy Energy (CleanTech) — €80M Seed: Paris-based developer of micro-reactor nuclear technology for industrial heat applications.

🇪🇪 Frankenburg Technologies (DefenseTech) — €30M Series A: Tallinn-based defence startup developing low-cost, precision-guided interceptor missiles for mass production.

🇫🇷 Waiv (HealthTech) — €29M Seed: Paris-based Owkin spin-out developing AI-powered diagnostic tests in oncology to guide patients toward adapted therapies.

🇫🇷 Escape (Cybersecurity) — €15M Series A: Paris-based Y Combinator-backed offensive security engineering platform powered by AI for API security testing.

🇫🇷 Lemrock (Sales) — €6M Seed: Paris-based infrastructure for agentic commerce helping brands sell through AI agents like ChatGPT and Claude.

🇨🇭 Pregnolia (HealthTech) — €3.7M: Schlieren-based MedTech company developing non-invasive preterm birth prediction technology to bring testing to clinical practice.

🇮🇹 Mirai Robotics (Maritime Tech) — €3.6M Pre-Seed: Bari-based maritime AI and autonomous systems company developing autonomous vessels and modular autonomy stacks for persistent surveillance and maritime operations.

🇦🇹 Another Earth (Data) — €3.5M Seed: Vienna-based AI-powered simulation and synthetic data platform for Earth observation using generative AI and 3D modelling.

🇪🇸 Delfos Energy (CleanTech) — €3M Seed: Barcelona-based startup building an AI virtual engineer for the energy industry to optimize operations.

🇫🇮 Bliss (HealthTech) — €235k Pre-Seed: Helsinki-based mental health platform combining licensed therapists with AI-powered cultural and linguistic matching.

👉 See the full database of 80+ rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: Entrepreneur First 🇬🇧🇫🇷 — $200M

Global talent investor and company builder Entrepreneur First (EF) has secured a massive $200M for its latest early-stage fund, reaching a $1.3 billion firm valuation. Representing a 2026 vintage, this fresh capital doubles down on EF’s foundational thesis: backing individuals to build startups from scratch and leveraging AI as a “superpower” to unlock new entrepreneurial potential. Writing initial checks of $250,000 per company with follow-on capabilities of up to $5M, the fund is actively supporting founders from day zero to expand into key international startup hubs. EF boasts an incredibly strong precedent success record; its portfolio is now valued at over $16 billion and includes standout companies like Aztec, Cleo, Magdrive, Neptune Robotics, Omnea, Opply, PolyAI, and Tractable. What makes EF truly unique is its “talent investor” model: they aren’t just picking existing startups, but actively matching high-potential individuals to form co-founding teams. Furthermore, this new fund is backed by an all-star roster of legendary founders and operators rather than traditional LPs, including Patrick and John Collison, Eric Schmidt, Reid Hoffman (historically), Claire Hughes Johnson, Aidan Gomez, and Jeff Dean.

Other Fund Launches:

🇫🇷 Elaia (€134M): DTS3 fund dedicated to backing the next generation of breakthrough deeptech and B2B startups across Europe.

🇪🇸 Samaipata (€110M): Third fund to invest in early-stage, AI-native founders and startups across Europe.

🇨🇭 Emerald Technology Ventures (€100M): Global Water Fund II to invest in startups driving water innovation and sustainability worldwide.

🇫🇷 Time4 VC (€50M): First close for a new fund specifically focused on backing diverse founders and startups based in rural areas of France.

🇬🇧 Deep Science Ventures (N/A): New doctoral cohort program aimed at turning scientific research and breakthroughs into scalable tech startups.

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

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👋 The Week in Review

With spring on the horizon, we are seeing the return of burgeoning nature (and for some less fortunate, like me, allergies). For European tech, it might also mean something else: the return of exits.

This week’s roundup covers a wide array of activity: incoming IPOs, acquisitions across various sectors, and continued growth with European startups securing mega-rounds and pursuing renewed ambitions in areas like quantum, robotics, AI, Health, and Climate.

Time to dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

French quantum leader Pasqal targets dual listing via $2B SPAC merger

The Paris-based startup has entered into a definitive agreement to merge with the Nasdaq-listed Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II, a move that will include a subsequent dual listing on Euronext Paris. This structure aims to secure up to €340 million in total financing to accelerate the development of its 250-qubit “Vela” machine and maintain its standing as a French deep-tech champion while accessing the deeper capital markets of the United States.

Neura Robotics reportedly in talks to raise €1B from Tether

The German cognitive robotics firm is preparing a massive funding round that could value the company at approximately €4 billion. Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, is expected to participate in the round to help Neura Robotics transition from research to the large-scale industrialization of its 4NE-1 humanoid robots. The capital would fund an ambitious roadmap including manufacturing hubs in India and China to handle a reported order book of nearly $1 billion.

UK government pledges £40m to launch Fundamental AI Research Laboratory

AI Minister Kanishka Narayan has announced the creation of a new sovereign research hub dedicated to solving fundamental technical flaws such as model hallucinations and unreliable reasoning. The lab will receive up to £40 million in funding over six years along with significant access to national computing resources. This “moonshot” initiative is designed to ensure that the UK remains a producer of frontier AI breakthroughs rather than just a consumer of foreign technologies.

French medtech Gleamer acquired by US giant RadNet for €230M

The Paris-based radiology AI specialist has been acquired by the American imaging leader in an all-cash deal to be integrated into its DeepHealth subsidiary. Gleamer will serve as RadNet’s primary European hub and “French outpost,” allowing its automated fracture detection and diagnostic tools to be deployed across RadNet’s extensive network of over 400 imaging centers in the United States.

Exits are back in Europe

The European tech landscape is witnessing a significant resurgence in M&A activity as established players and well-capitalized startups move to consolidate their market positions.

🇩🇪 Asahi Kasei acquires AiCuris Anti-infective Cures for approximately $920M.

🇸🇪 Swedish battery startup Holyvolt snaps up US materials pioneer Wildcat for $73M.

🇦🇹 Austrian Post acquires 70% of euShipments.com to expand e-commerce logistics across Europe for €55M.

🇨🇭 Swiss Rockets acquires Complete Genomics for approximately $50M.

🇩🇪 German logistics tech firm cargo.one adds Cargofive in a €17M-backed (~$18.5M) multimodal expansion.

🇸🇪 IFS completes its acquisition of Softeon to launch a new AI-driven supply chain platform.

🇫🇷 Expandi acquires 100% of Kompass to create a European B2B data and marketing giant.

🇫🇮 Oura acquires Doublepoint, a startup that specializes in gesture recognition technology.

🇫🇷 Infinite Orbits signs two acquisitions in Luxembourg and the UK to scale its satellite life extension services.

🇨🇿 Flowpay acquires Tapline to expand its SME financing platform across Europe.

🇮🇹 Onetag acquires Aryel to build a new programmatic ad exchange

🇬🇧 BrewDog is bought by a US cannabis and drinks firm for £33M, costing nearly 500 jobs.

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

BaCta (BioTech) | Seed | €7M

• The Deal: Paris-based biotech startup using AI-powered bioproduction platform to produce high-value ingredients through programmable microbial factories secured €7M.

• The Investors: Led by LocalGlobal and Daphni, with participation from OVNI Capital and BA

• The Analysis: Conventional industrial synthesis is frequently restricted by its reliance on petrochemicals and carbon-heavy thermal processes. Bacta overcomes these limitations by deploying engineered microbes as programmable production units that generate complex chemical compounds through controlled fermentation. By utilizing a proprietary synthetic biology platform to optimize metabolic pathways, the company produces high-purity ingredients for the fragrance, nutrition, and specialty chemical sectors at a significantly reduced ecological cost. As the global synthetic biology sector is projected to grow to 38.2 billion dollars by 2026, Bacta is establishing the foundational technology required to transition global manufacturing toward a circular, bio-based economy.

• What’s Next: Scale, validate, and commercialize astaxanthin production via a French industrial partnership, while expanding the baCtaForge AI-driven strain engineering platform.

Amatera (AgTech) | Seed | €6M

• The Deal: Paris-based climate-resilient crop varieties developer by combining plant cell biology, robotics, and artificial intelligence to accelerate breeding cycles raised €6M.

• The Investors: Led by Talis Capital, with participation from Demea Sustainable Investment, Oyster Bay Venture Capital, PINC, Mudcake, Exceptional Ventures.

• The Analysis: Agricultural systems are currently struggling to adapt to a rapidly warming planet because the natural breeding cycles for perennial crops like coffee and grapes can exceed twenty years. Amatera bridges this “adaptation lag” by merging robotics with plant cell biology to identify and scale natural genetic variations without the use of GMO techniques. Their platform effectively compresses decades of evolution into just a few years, allowing for the creation of varieties like “Robustica,” which pairs the hardiness of Robusta with the premium flavor of Arabica. This technological leap enables the mass production of crops that are naturally resistant to extreme heat and emerging pathogens. By targeting a global agricultural biotechnology market expected to surpass $65 billion in 2026, Amatera provides the necessary speed to ensure long-term food security in a volatile climate.

• What’s Next: Expand the automated genetics platform into annual crops and scale the scientific and engineering teams.

⚡ Deal Flow

🇪🇸 PLD Space (SpaceTech) — €180M Series C: Elche-based international space transportation company developing the reusable Miura-5 launch vehicle for small satellite launch services to enable European space autonomy.

🇳🇱 RIFT (ClimateTech) — €114M Series B: Eindhoven-based developer of an iron fuel technology platform that uses iron as a circular energy carrier to generate high-temperature industrial heat without direct CO2 emissions.

🇬🇧 Oxa (Mobility) — €88.5M Series D: Oxford-based global leader in autonomous vehicle software for industrial applications including ports, airports, and logistics facilities.

🇬🇧 Uforce (DefenseTech) — €43M Seed: London-based defense tech company developing autonomous platforms and battlefield management software refined through combat operations in Ukraine.

🇳🇱 Silverflow (FinTech) — €34.4M Series B: Amsterdam-based cloud-native card payment processing platform providing a single API connection directly to card networks for real-time insights.

🇳🇴 Photoncycle (CleanTech) — €15M Series A: Oslo-based developer of hydrogen-based seasonal energy storage systems enabling households to store surplus summer solar power for winter heating.

🇮🇹 ISAAC antisismica (ConstructionTech) — €14M: Milan-based developer of innovative seismic isolation and structural reinforcement systems that protect buildings and infrastructure from earthquake damage.

🇨🇭 Xsensio (DeepTech) — €6M Series A: Lausanne-based company developing the Lab-on-Skin wearable biosensing platform to deliver continuous, real-time biochemical information for preventive healthcare.

🇩🇰 Tangled (DevTools) — €3.8M Seed: Copenhagen-based federated code collaboration platform building a decentralized alternative to traditional code forges on the AT Protocol.

🇬🇧 ROXFIT (Sport Tech) — €2.2M Seed: Yorkshire-based AI-powered training platform for HYROX fitness racing providing personalized training plans and performance analytics.

🇬🇧 Vivox AI (RegTech) — €1.5M Seed: London-based technology company building regulator-ready, atomic AI agents for AML, KYB/KYC, and financial crime compliance.

🇧🇪 Vectrix (Logistics) — €1.1M Seed: Antwerp-based AI-powered order entry platform for the logistics sector that automates transport order processing to improve data accuracy.

🇬🇧 DealFlowAgent (FinTech) — €650k Pre-Seed: London-based AI-native investment bank specializing in M&A advisory for business owners using a proprietary conversational AI matchmaking platform.

👉 See the full database of 60+ rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: GHARAGE Ventures — €40M

Originally the innovation arm of travel retail giant Gebr. Heinemann, GHARAGE Ventures has transitioned into an independent venture capital firm with the launch of its €40M Fund I. This new vehicle is dedicated to digitizing the “structurally under-digitalized” travel and retail ecosystem, focusing on automation, AI-driven workflows, and logistics infrastructure. The fund targets roughly 30 startups globally from Seed to Series A. GHARAGE brings a specialized track record from its previous incarnation as a venture builder, having successfully launched and exited brands like Nullpunkt (sold to Daluma) and the recommerce platform ReturnKey, while also externalizing the digital travel platform Duffle. The new fund has already made several investments, including FileAI, Bounce, and Gumshoe AI. What differentiates GHARAGE is its strategic “Global Travel Platform” which provides founders with unprecedented access to Gebr. Heinemann’s international network of over 500 airport shops and cruise lines to validate and scale technologies in real-world environments.

Other Fund Launches:

🇩🇪 Join Capital (€50M): Record-breaking commitment from the EIF toward a €235M target for this defense-focused vehicle to invest in European dual-use technologies and industrial tech.

🇬🇧 UK Space Agency (£30M): Government funding initiative aimed at UK-based firms developing next-generation satellite communication networks and space infrastructure.

🇱🇹 FIRSTPICK (€25M): New fund dedicated to pre-seed and seed-stage startups across the Baltic region, supported by the European Investment Fund.

🇳🇱 LUMO Labs (€6M): Spanish state-owned SETT invested in this €100M impact fund focused on emerging technologies like AI and blockchain for sustainable development goals.

🇩🇪 TUM Robo.Innovate (€3.5M): Robotics incubator at the Technical University of Munich secured fresh backing to support deeptech startups following a successful €52M alumni raise.

🇺🇦 Angel One ($3M): Venture capital fund launched to provide critical seed-stage investment and mentorship to Ukrainian founders during the ongoing conflict.

🇬🇧 Wilbe (N/A): Science-focused venture firm opening a specialized laboratory in London’s White City to provide infrastructure and “lab-as-a-service” for science startups.

🇮🇹 Techstars (N/A): The global accelerator program has officially ended its presence in Turin, following previous decisions to halt operations in Berlin, Paris, Stockholm and Oslo.

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European VC.

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👋 The Week in Review

This week, Europe’s technology champions moved decisively into capital-intensive territory. Quantum hardware firms are preparing for public listings. Autonomy platforms are raising multi-billion dollar rounds to industrialize deployment. Space and fusion programs are securing the funding required to build physical infrastructure, not prototypes.

Even global giants are reinforcing their European footprint, with London emerging as a key research base in the next phase of AI infrastructure buildout.

Across deeptech, greentech, mobility, and space, the signal is consistent. The ecosystem is shifting from innovation narratives to execution at industrial scale.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

OpenAI hits a staggering $730B valuation following a $110B infrastructure-focused funding round

Led by SoftBank, Nvidia, and Amazon, this historic capital injection allows OpenAI to secure the specialized chips and energy resources required for its “Stargate” data center project while simultaneously designating London as its largest global research hub outside the US to tap into the UK’s elite talent pool.

Finland’s quantum champion IQM prepares for a US public debut via a landmark SPAC merger

The Espoo-based leader in superconducting quantum computers is set to list in New York through a blank-check vehicle, providing the liquid capital necessary to scale its modular “Radiance” systems and maintain Europe’s competitive edge in the global quantum hardware race.

Revolut enters the UK’s stablecoin sandbox as it eyes a $100B valuation ahead of its London IPO

By joining the FCA’s regulated testing environment for digital assets, the fintech giant is diversifying its revenue streams with a proprietary stablecoin, a move designed to bolster its investor appeal as it prepares for one of the most anticipated public listings in European history.

Swedish freight pioneer Einride raises $113M in a pre-IPO bridge round to fuel its US expansion

Ahead of its planned New York SPAC listing, the autonomous electric trucking startup is doubling down on its “Einride Saga” software and charging infrastructure to meet surging enterprise demand for decarbonized logistics in the North American market.

Wayve secures $1.2B in a SoftBank-led Series D to hit an $8.6B valuation and accelerate its global autonomy platform

The London-based pioneer has drawn strategic backing from top tier investors and Nvidia, Uber, Microsoft, alongside global automakers Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis, to scale its “Embodied AI” architecture, which utilizes end-to-end deep learning and real-time computer vision to navigate complex urban environments without the need for expensive HD mapping.

Berlin-based Dash0 enters the unicorn race with a Balderton-led funding round at a $1B valuation

The observability startup, which leverages OpenTelemetry to help developers debug complex cloud-native applications, is reportedly closing a major investment to challenge incumbents like Datadog with its more efficient, AI-integrated monitoring platform.

Doctolib invests €20M in a dedicated AI laboratory to transform the French healthcare experience

The European healthtech leader is launching an internal R&D hub to develop generative AI tools that automate medical administrative tasks and provide diagnostic assistance, aiming to significantly reduce burnout for the hundreds of thousands of practitioners on its platform.

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

ISPTech (SpaceTech) | Seed | €5.5M

• The Deal: Ludwigsburg-based German Aerospace Center (DLR) spin-off developing non-toxic in-space propulsion systems for satellites secured €5.5M.

• The Investors: Led by Jolt Capital, with participation from HTGF, Faber, First Momentum Ventures, Lightfield Equity, Final Frontier Liftoff, German Aerospace Center, Start-up BW Seed Fonds

• The Analysis: Satellite manufacturers are currently transitioning away from toxic and expensive propellants like hydrazine toward sustainable alternatives that simplify ground operations and reduce launch overhead. ISPTech addresses this shift by developing high-performance green propulsion systems that utilize non-toxic propellants such as hydrogen peroxide and ethanol for orbital maneuvering. The company leverages advanced metal 3D printing to manufacture complex thruster architectures with integrated cooling channels, enabling rapid production cycles and significantly lower hardware costs compared to traditional fabrication methods. These propulsion modules are designed to support the rapid expansion of the small satellite market, which is a key segment of a broader space propulsion sector projected to reach a valuation of 18.5 billion dollars by 2030.

• What’s Next: Scale production, grow workforce, build a new in-house test facility, expand propulsion offerings including dual-mode system that could provide chemical and electric thrust.

Flox Intelligence (NatureTech) | Seed | €2.5M

• The Deal: Stockholm and New York-based AI-powered digital shepherd platform that guides wildlife away from danger using real-time detection and deterrence systems raised €2.5M.

• The Investors: Led by Tilia Impact Ventures, with participation from N/ASatgana, GENIUS NY, J.O.S.S., Unconventional Ventures, Almi Invest

• The Analysis: Managing the intersection of heavy infrastructure and local wildlife has traditionally been a losing battle of static fences and lethal deterrents. Flox Intelligence redefines this field through its autonomous “Edge” systems, which act as a digital shepherd by identifying animal species in real time and deploying tailored bioacoustic signals to steer them safely away from danger zones. This proactive approach not only mitigates the estimated 1.5 billion dollars in annual damages caused by wildlife collisions but also builds a global biodiversity dataset to improve long-term ecological coexistence. By integrating its AI layer into airports, railways, and industrial sites across North America and Europe, the company is transforming animal hazard mitigation into a scalable, data-driven utility for modern logistics.

• What’s Next: Expand across North America, deploy more Edge systems.

⚡ Deal Flow

🇩🇪 Proxima Fusion (DeepTech) — €400M Grant: Munich-based stellarator fusion energy company building Europe’s first commercial fusion test facility to provide clean energy.

🇳🇱 Axelera AI (Semiconductors) — €213M Series C: Eindhoven-based semiconductor company developing high-performance AI inference chips and edge computing platforms for energy-efficient AI deployment.

🇬🇧 Allica Bank (FinTech) — €131M Series D: London-based digital bank providing a full suite of banking services and proprietary technology tailored for established SMEs.

🇬🇧 Dwelly (PropTech) — €79M: London-based AI-enabled rollup of letting agencies that acquires and digitizes independent rental agencies to automate property management.

🇬🇧 ThreatAware (Cybersecurity) — €21M Series A: London-based cyber asset management and hygiene platform delivering real-time visibility across IT estates to uncover hidden devices.

🇦🇹 nyra health (HealthTech) — €20M Series A: Vienna-based AI-platform for neurological therapy and rehabilitation providing digital solutions for stroke and dementia patients.

🇩🇰 Hybrid Greentech (GreenTech) — €15M: Roskilde-based virtual power plant provider integrating renewable energy assets and battery storage for European grid flexibility.

🇨🇿 ValkaAI (CreativeTech) — €12M Pre-Seed: Prague-based real-time interactive AI video platform developing AI-powered avatars and dynamic content for sports and media.

🇩🇪 FLEXOO (DeepTech) — €11M Series A: Heidelberg-based physical AI and robotics company scaling advanced manipulation and ultra-thin sensor technology used in space and industrial rovers.

🇮🇹 Sinergy Flow (CleanTech) — €7M Seed: Milan-based developer of proprietary flow battery technology for long-duration energy storage supporting the circular economy.

🇵🇱 FlyFocus (DefenseTech) — €4.5M Series A: Warsaw-based defense technology company specializing in NATO-aligned unmanned aerial systems and avionics for military applications.

🇩🇪🇺🇸 YOU(th) Health Tech (HealthTech) — €3.8M Seed: Berlin-based digital health company using smartphone sensors and machine learning to enable rapid preventive screening of digital biomarkers.

🇬🇧 Quantcore (DeepTech) — €2.8M Seed: Glasgow-based quantum hardware company building sovereign manufacturing capabilities for quantum and advanced computing.

🇭🇺 The New Era of Shopping (E-commerce) — €1.2M Pre-Seed: Budapest-based agentic commerce platform enabling brands to make products discoverable and purchasable within AI assistants.

👉 See the full database of 60+ rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: Seraphim 🇬🇧 — $100M

London-based Seraphim Space has reached an oversubscribed final close for its latest early-stage vehicle, Seraphim Space Ventures II, surpassing its original $100M target. This 2026 vintage fund centers on a thesis of “industrialising space at scale,” specifically targeting the convergence of SpaceTech and artificial intelligence as the foundational infrastructure for the global economy. The vehicle focuses on Seed and Series A stages and has already hit the ground running by backing 17 companies, including recent investments in Mutable Tactics, Hubble Network, Delos, and Atmos Space Cargo. Seraphim boasts a formidable track record with 9 unicorns birthed from its previous vehicles, featuring industry leaders like ICEYE, D-Orbit, and LeoLabs. The firm differentiates itself as the world’s first and most prolific pure-play space investor, leveraging a vertically integrated ecosystem that includes the Seraphim Space Camp accelerator and a publicly listed investment trust (LSE: SSIT).

Other Fund Launches:

🇧🇪 Syndicate One (€22M): Second fund dedicated to early-stage Belgian tech founders, backed by a network of the country’s top entrepreneurs and the European Investment Fund.

🇬🇧 Guinness Ventures (£3M): A dedicated Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) fund targeting early-stage British startups across diverse sectors to identify high-growth potential founders.

🇫🇮 Founders House (N/A): An equity-free startup hub and selective workspace in Helsinki designed to unite Finland’s most ambitious founders with direct access to top-tier Nordic VCs and operators.

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European VC.

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👋 The Week in Review

From embodied AI talent joining OpenAI to billion-dollar quantum ambitions and optical computing breakthroughs, the center of gravity shifted toward the physical layer this week.

Across robotics, semiconductor innovation, quantum computing, defense systems, and AI-native platforms, capital is concentrating around technologies that combine deep research with industrial scalability.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

The Austrian creator of the viral OpenClaw AI agents has joined OpenAI to bolster its growing embodied AI division

Following the explosive growth of the open-source agent architecture that allows AI to execute multi-step tasks directly on a user’s operating system, Peter Steinberger has joined OpenAI to integrate these capabilities into the company’s next-generation “Operator” projects.

🔎 For more details on the Moltbook Phenomenon and how it was powered by the Openclaw infrastructure, read my previous analysis here.

Mistral AI acquires serverless specialist Koyeb to accelerate its “Mistral Compute” sovereign cloud ambitions

By integrating the Paris-based startup’s infrastructure expertise, Mistral AI is evolving into a full-stack player capable of deploying models on-premises and optimizing GPU scaling, a move that follows its recent €1.2bn Swedish data center investment to build a robust European alternative to US-led AI cloud services.

Scopely acquires a majority stake in Pixel Flow! at a $1B valuation to dominate the generative gaming market

By taking control of the AI-native studio behind several viral hits, mobile gaming powerhouse Scopely is positioning itself to lead the industry shift toward real-time, personalized content creation driven by large-scale procedural models.

DeepMind pioneer David Silver is seeking $1B for his new London-based venture, Ineffable Intelligence

The primary architect behind AlphaGo is reportedly in discussions with Sequoia Capital to lead the largest seed round in European history, valuing the London-based startup at $4B as tech giants like Nvidia and Microsoft vie for a stake in Silver’s pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence through advanced reinforcement learning.

French quantum startup Pasqal targets €200M to reach a $1B valuation and compete with leading US quantum players

The Paris-based neutral-atoms specialist is fundraising to accelerate the delivery of its 1,000-qubit processor, aiming to provide industrial-scale “quantum advantage” for drug discovery and materials science ahead of competitors like IonQ.

🔎 Want to lear more about Quantum computing, read Absolute Zero: The Chilling Power and Heated Promises of Quantum Computing

Optalysys eyes a $100M+ Series B to scale its optical computing chips for secure AI processing

The UK government-backed startup is seeking fresh capital to commercialize its “Etile” photonic technology, which promises to execute complex encryption and AI inference at speeds far exceeding traditional silicon-based architectures.

🔎 Previous coverage: Weekly RoundUp #03 — The €1B Edition

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

Kilter (AgTech) | Pre-Series B | €6.5M

• The Deal: Norway-based ag-tech company developing autonomous ultra-precise spot spraying robot for high-value crops raised €6.5M.

• The Investors: Led by Kubota Corporation, with participation from SBG Invest, Pymwymic, Nufarm, Halden Pensjonskasse, ProAgInvest, Natural Ventures and business angels

• The Analysis: Traditional crop protection is undergoing a radical shift as blanket herbicide application, which often wastes the majority of the chemicals used, is replaced by surgical plant-level precision. Kilter leads this transition with its AX-1 autonomous robot, a machine that operates like a field-scale inkjet printer to target weeds with 6mm accuracy. By utilizing high-resolution sensors and deep learning to distinguish between crops and weeds in real time, the AX-1 applies micro-droplets directly onto the target foliage, effectively slashing pesticide consumption by 95% while preventing the soil compaction caused by heavy machinery. Operating at the intersection of the precision weeding market, Kilter is currently scaling its commercial footprint through a strategic distribution partnership with Kubota, targeting high-value vegetable production in Europe and beyond to ensure both ecological sustainability and grower profitability.

• What’s Next: Accelerate its global scale-up, enhance industrialization, and continue product development

Solaya (Creative Tech) | Pre-Seed | €1.7M

• The Deal: France-based mobile app turning smartphone videos into high-fidelity 3D models for e-commerce secured €1.7M.

• The Investors: Led by Betaworks, backed by business angels from NVIDIA, Adobe, Santander, and Google DeepMind.

• The Analysis: High-fidelity 3D modeling has traditionally been a high-friction process requiring expensive studio equipment and specialized technical teams. Solaya removes this barrier by providing a mobile-centric AI platform that transforms standard smartphone footage into high-quality, textured, and rigged 3D assets. By automating the transition from 2D video to 3D geometry, the system allows enterprises in sectors like e-commerce and industrial design to generate digital twins at a fraction of the usual cost and time. This technology is currently being utilized by global brands such as LVMH and Mattel to scale their digital catalogs for spatial computing and augmented reality. With the 3D digital asset market projected to reach $36 billion by the end of 2026, Solaya is positioning its app as the primary engine for democratizing professional-grade content creation.

• What’s Next: Grow its team, develop products faster, and offer affordable self-service pricing for small and medium-sized businesses.

⚡ Deal Flow

🇳🇱 Onodrim Industries (DefenseTech) — €40M Seed: Amsterdam-based developer of mission-critical hardware and software systems for European defense and security operations.

🇬🇧 SatVu (SpaceTech) — €34M Series B: London-based thermal intelligence company scaling a multi-satellite constellation to provide high-resolution infrared Earth observation data.

🇬🇧 Stacks (FinTech) — €19M Series A: London-based AI-powered enterprise finance platform that automates and streamlines the financial close process for mid-to-large enterprises.

🇩🇪 happyhotel (Hospitality Tech) — €6.5M Series A: Munich-based revenue management software helping independent hotels optimize pricing strategies and performance through AI.

🇪🇸 Pharmacelera (BioTech) — €6M: Barcelona-based computational chemistry company using AI-powered molecular simulations to accelerate drug discovery.

🇫🇮 SportIQ (Sport Tech) — €5.8M Series A: Helsinki-based technology company embedding AI sensors inside basketball valves to provide real-time performance analytics.

🇨🇭 Unicity Labs (AI) — €2.8M Seed: Zug-based developer of peer-to-peer cryptographic protocols to build infrastructure for the autonomous agentic internet.

🇳🇱 Aizy (Marketing) — €2M: Breda-based AI-driven performance marketing platform that automates Google and Meta advertising campaigns for SMBs.

🇬🇧 Nul (HealthTech) — €1M Seed: London-based telehealth platform for alcohol reduction combining clinical care with prescription medication.

🇩🇪 simmetry.ai (Data) — €330k Pre-Seed: Osnabrück-based developer of photorealistic synthetic data used for training AI models in agriculture and food production.

👉 See the full database of 60+ rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: Quantonation Ventures 🇫🇷 — €220M

With the final close of Quantonation II, the Paris-based firm has secured €220M to strengthen its position as one of the leading global investors in quantum technologies. This 2026 vintage vehicle targets early-stage startups in quantum computing, sensing, and communications, writing checks typically ranging from €2M to €10M. The fund has already hit the ground running by deploying capital into nine companies, including SteerLight, Pioniq, and Resolve. Quantonation boasts a high-performance track record from its inaugural fund, having backed industry pioneers such as Pasqal, Multiverse Computing, and Nord Quantique. What sets the firm apart is its status as the world’s first VC fund dedicated exclusively to quantum technologies, combined with a team of PhD physicists and a strategic partnership with Toshiba to accelerate lab-to-market transitions.

Other Fund Launches:

🇩🇪 Tenet (€80M): Berlin-based investment firm focused on an “AI roll-up” strategy to acquire and transform profitable European software companies with artificial intelligence.

🇬🇧 Redrice Ventures (£75M): Second fund focused on premium consumer brands and technology, secured by a £45M cornerstone commitment from the British Business Bank.

🇫🇷 OSS Ventures (€75M): New fund dedicated to creating and scaling European industrial software champions by partnering with manufacturing experts.

🇨🇭 Emerald & DIC (€52M): A dedicated investment platform launched by Swiss VC Emerald and Japan’s DIC to target global startups in the “Physical AI” and advanced materials sectors.

🇫🇷 Innovacom (€31M+): Final close for the “Industries d’Avenir et Territoires 3” vehicle, exceeding its target to support industrial and deeptech innovation across French regions.

🇫🇷 Campus Fund (5M): Launc their second fund dedicated to backing student and PhD entrepreneurs across Europe, supported by over 50 prominent business angels.

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European VC.

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What is Quantum Physics?

To fundamentally understand what the quantum realm represents, we must first change our scale. Let’s travel into the world of the infinitely small: atoms, photons, and electrons, where everything is singularly different from what we know in the human world. In classical physics, we daily experience so-called “Newtonian” phenomena such as gravity, force, inertia, or speed, making the logic that governs our lives primarily binary. The state of a thing is necessarily one or the other. A coin is necessarily heads or tails; a light is either on or off.

Principles like superposition completely nullify this concept in quantum physics, where a quantum particle can be in two states at once. This principle is often illustrated by Schrödinger’s Cat, an experiment in which a cat is locked in a box with a device that kills the animal as soon as it detects the decay of a radioactive atom (which has a 50% probability). Because the state of the cat is linked to the state of the particles, the cat would also be in a superposition of states and therefore both alive and dead as long as the box remains closed.

For those who find the experiment slightly macabre, you can imagine the state of a coin tossed in the air during a game of heads or tails; it is both heads and tails as long as it has not landed.

In reality, macroscopic objects quickly lose their quantum behavior due to interactions with environmental elements that force a system to “choose” a state, also known as decoherence. In the case of Schrödinger’s Cat, this is the moment the door is opened.

Another phenomenon unique to quantum physics is entanglement. A principle described by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” it suggests that when two particles become linked, measuring the state of one particle allows one to determine the state of the other, regardless of the distance between them.

From Bits to Qubits

This distinction implies a fundamental difference between a classical computer and a quantum computer. Indeed, the quantum computer relies on the very phenomena of superposition and entanglement.

A classical computer uses bits, small quantities of information that can be worth either 1 or 0, and only three rules: NOT, AND, and OR. A quantum computer uses qubits, which, thanks to superposition, can be 0, 1, or both at the same time. Furthermore, qubits evolve in 3D and can therefore be oriented in any direction within these three dimensions. Consequently, there are at least 6 rules that can be applied to them, including the X, Y, Z, Hadamard, Phase, and T gates. Entanglement also applies to qubits, making various multi-qubit gates possible, such as the CNOT gate.

These fundamental differences imply a vast difference in terms of computing power. A classical computer processes calculations sequentially; if 4 bits represent a number between 0 and 15, it must test all 16 possibilities and thus perform 16 calculations. In contrast, 4 qubits can be in all 16 states at once, and the growth is exponential since each added qubit doubles the computing power. For example, 300 qubits represent more states than there are atoms in the universe.

The difference between a classical and a quantum computer lies not so much in calculation speed as in the difference of approach. This is why a quantum computer has no value compared to a classical computer for tasks like searching the internet, streaming your favorite content, sending emails, or working on Excel. This is without mentioning the costs involved in using a quantum computer, whose operation requires extreme, almost extraterrestrial conditions. Unlike your laptop, which dissipates heat with a simple fan, current quantum processors (notably superconducting ones) must be maintained at temperatures nearing absolute zero, or approximately -273°C, a temperature colder than the vacuum of space.

This requirement necessitates colossal infrastructures called dilution refrigerators, whose acquisition cost is measured in millions of dollars and whose electricity consumption to maintain this cold is astronomical. Launching a simple Google search on such a machine would be like using a particle accelerator to light a candle: it is an energetic and financial nonsense. Moreover, the “coherence time,” the duration during which qubits remain stable before collapsing, is so short (a few microseconds) that each calculation must be of immense strategic value to justify such a deployment of resources.

Computing Power at the Service of Espionage: Will we be able to read all your dirty secrets?

Starting in 1970, theoretical models were developed to achieve the ambitions of quantum computing. As early as 1984, cryptologists Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard proposed the first secure key exchange protocol using quantum communication. Not requiring quantum calculation per se, this protocol uses quantum states solely to detect anyone wishing to eavesdrop on communications. Research culminated in 1994, thanks to the work of Peter Shor, a researcher at MIT, and his discovery of a quantum factorization algorithm. This algorithm theoretically allows for the factorization of large numbers in polynomial time, a task that would take a classical computer several million years and could be completed in a few hours or even minutes by a super-powerful quantum computer relying on a few thousand quantum particles or qubits. This discovery is heavy with meaning for much of the computer security systems used today.

Indeed, the principle of cryptography, securing our computer data, relies on mathematical operations that are very easy to perform in one direction but extremely difficult in the other.

The most well-known encryption method, RSA, was invented in 1977 by three MIT mathematicians (Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman) and is based on a simple principle: it is very easy to multiply two large prime numbers together but very difficult to factor them (to do the reverse). It is on this asymmetry that most of our computer security rests. For example, during a bank transaction, the bank’s browser and yours exchange public keys to encrypt information. To decrypt them, a private key is necessary; it is theoretically possible to find it from a public key, but very complicated. This principle could prove obsolete due to Shor’s discoveries.

Indeed, a quantum computer would be capable of breaking RSA keys; however, to do so, a capacity of several thousand stable, error-corrected qubits would be necessary. Current quantum computers are still far from this “super capacity,” having only a few hundred or thousand unstable qubits.

Qubits are very fragile: the slightest vibration, temperature change, or cosmic ray can destroy superposition and thus ruin a calculation.

The progress shown is rapid but sometimes misleading. In 2019, Google announced Quantum Supremacy with its 53-qubit Sycamore processor, an announcement that was highly controversial due to the very principle of the benchmark used (Random Circuit Sampling or RCS, where the quantum computer is asked to sample from the probability distribution of outputs generated by a random quantum circuit, which is a calculation with no inherent value). It was also controversial because of the time saved compared to a classical computer, initially estimated at 10,000 years, which dropped to a few hours within a few months thanks to the work of “classical” researchers or engineers piqued by the challenge.

The “big day” when quantum computers will be capable of breaking classical cryptography systems, including RSA, is called Q-Day. It is a day from which we are, in principle, still far; experts estimate its arrival in 10 to 15 years. However, there is a good chance it is inevitable, and the stakes are real because the threats are present.

Geopolitically, the stakes are obvious and can recall, to a certain extent, the space race or the nuclear race. Once again, “the winner will take it all”: the first nation to reach true quantum supremacy will be endowed with a power far superior to others by accessing data pertaining to national security.

And the major nations are already on the offensive, with intelligence services such as the NSA, the FSB, or the Chinese Gongabu likely already collecting data and storing it in anticipation of being able to decrypt it when the quantum computer arrives. This theory is largely supported by whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding the NSA’s massive data collections.

These risks therefore imply a new arms race for states, with enormous investments in quantum computers from both Big Tech and governments. In France, the National Quantum Strategy aims for an investment of €1.8 billion by 2030, of which €1 billion has already been invested between 2021 and 2025. This is a drop in the ocean compared to the €20 billion needed in Europe to hope to rival the investments of the American or Chinese states. Yet, the true financial earthquake came from Japan: at the beginning of 2025, Tokyo announced a colossal public investment of $7.4 billion. Japan alone accounted for nearly 75% of new global public investments announced during this period, totally eclipsing the $3.2 billion budgets shown by Germany or the United Kingdom. Already a pioneer since 1999 thanks to researcher Yasunobu Nakamura, who created the very first superconducting qubit, the nation is mobilizing giants like Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Toshiba to build its own supercomputers and secure its critical infrastructure.

Beyond the infrastructure itself, defense against quantum threats is just as important. Quantum cryptography solutions are being developed to find new encryption algorithms that resist quantum attacks. Research is already well underway, whether on Euclidean lattices, error-correcting codes, or hash functions, to create mathematical problems so complicated that even a quantum computer would have difficulty decrypting them.

However, beyond the technological prowess, economic reality could dampen the enthusiasm of intelligence services. Running a quantum computer with several thousand logical qubits represents a colossal operational cost in terms of energy and cryogenic maintenance. Launching a decryption is not a “free click,” but an investment of tens of thousands of euros per attempt. Imagine the geopolitical dilemma: a state decides to mobilize its rarest resources to “crack” the intercepted data of an opponent or a rival power, only to discover, after days of intense calculation, that the content is just a simple cat “meme” or a parody video. In this new information war, “trolling“ could become a formidable asymmetric defense weapon: saturating adverse servers with useless but heavily encrypted data to push the enemy toward technological bankruptcy. The result of a decryption remains, by nature, uncertain until the last microsecond of the calculation, transforming every quantum espionage attempt into a financial “green carpet” where the stakes are astronomical for a gain that is sometimes derisory.

But then, what are the potential advantages of a quantum computer?

If we strip the quantum computer of its “code-breaker” outfit, its real utility lies in a radically different approach to complexity. One should not imagine this machine as a sprinter running faster than your PC to open your emails, but as an explorer capable of mapping thousands of paths simultaneously in a labyrinth. Its favorite domain is that of combinatorial problems, those mathematical puzzles where the number of possible solutions explodes exponentially as soon as a single new element is added to the equation. It is here that the quantum realm ceases to be a threat and becomes an unprecedented tool for creation, capable of tackling challenges that even the most massive supercomputers can only graze.

The most dizzying application is found in the simulation of matter at the atomic scale, a crucial field for health and materials science. Today, the search for new drugs hits an invisible wall: the space of possible molecules contains approximately 10^30 combinations, a figure that far exceeds the number of stars in the universe. Where a classical computer must test each candidate sequentially, exhausting itself in a screening process that takes years, the quantum processor “speaks” the natural language of matter. Richard Feynman, a famous american physicist, predicted it back then: “Nature isn’t classical, so if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical.” This capability could reduce drug discovery cycles from several years to a few hours, while also tackling major climate issues. One thinks notably of global fertilizer production, which currently consumesa vast amount of energy via the Haber-Bosch process; a quantum computer could allow us to understand how bacteria fix nitrogen at room temperature, opening the way to decarbonized agriculture. Similarly, the quest for artificial photosynthesis to capture atmospheric CO2 or the creation of denser batteries and superconductors finally becomes modelable.

This computing power also finds a direct echo in the organization of our hyper-connected societies and the challenge of the “traveling salesman.” Finding the shortest route to deliver to fifty cities is a task so complex that it exceeds the computing capacity of the largest current systems. Yet, the Quantum Supply Chain is no longer an abstract concept but a market being structured. Optimizing the flow of goods, the management of smart grids, or air traffic by just 1% would represent not only billions of euros in savings but also a massive reduction in the environmental footprint. It is this same quest for efficiency that drives the financial sector to invest colossal sums. The goal is to identify asset portfolios with low volatility or to perform “Stress Tests” with surgical precision, detecting systemic risks lurking in the correlations of thousands of assets where our current models see only noise.

Yet, despite these grandiose promises, where do we really stand in early 2026? The landscape is that of an industry in full transition, seeking to emerge from the era of “noise.” While companies like QuEra have announced processors reaching 3,000 physical qubits and IBM is deploying chips exceeding 1,300 qubits, these figures remain primarily “vanity metrics.” As noted earlier, the technical reality is that a physical qubit remains a fragile entity, susceptible to losing its properties at the slightest cosmic ray or the smallest thermal variation. We are barely entering the era of logical qubits, where thousands of physical qubits are grouped to form a single stable, error-corrected unit. We are currently in a phase comparable to that of computing in the 1950s: we possess the proof that the concept works, we see the first records of “supremacy” on theoretical tasks, but the quantum computer capable of designing the medicine or the battery of tomorrow is still being assembled. Quantum advantage is no longer an illusion, but it remains a monumental construction site whose foundations we are only just laying.

Let’s face it: quantum computing still probably has a long way to go. I was at the Paris Hardware Meetup recently (a great event, by the way, highly recommended), and I heard a PhD student start a pitch with: “I initially started working on quantum computing but pivoted to robotics because I actually want to participate in something that works.” I couldn’t help but laugh.

You can sleep soundly; your own dirty secrets are safe from the quantum computing apocalypse a lot of people try to sell us. But how long will our nation’s secrets last, or the ones of critical companies in defense, energy, or health? Despite a lot of detractors, there is a grand chance that quantum computing does end up working at some point and both risks and rewards will await us.

Another angle I have not tackled in this article is also how could AI capabilities be enhanced by quantum computing? What will this represent in society already shaken by agentic revolution?

Once again, exciting and a little bit scary times ahead.

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👋 The Week in Review

What A WEEK!

Large-scale compute investments, advanced chip manufacturing programs, and fast-scaling AI platforms dominated the headlines. Growth valuations are stretching upward again, while early-stage formation continues at pace: a rare synchronisation across maturity levels.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Mistral AI pledges €1.2bn for a Swedish data centre while calling for a unified European AI strategy

By committing €1.2bn to a new high-performance compute hub in Sweden, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch is positioning the French champion as the anchor for a more integrated European cloud ecosystem designed to challenge the dominance of American hyperscalers.

The EU launches a €2.5bn NanoIC pilot line to reclaim global leadership in next-gen chipmaking

A cornerstone of the EU Chips Act, this €2.5bn initiative establishes advanced prototyping facilities across the bloc to help European designers bridge the “valley of death” between laboratory research and high-volume semiconductor manufacturing.

Fractile commits £100M to UK chip manufacturing as the government urges startups to take “bold risks”

London-based AI hardware startup Fractile is investing £100M into its novel architecture for transformer inference, aligning with the UK AI Minister’s new mandate for the country to foster “uncomfortably ambitious” deeptech ventures.

Nscale secures a $1.4bn GPU-backed loan to aggressively scale European AI infrastructure

By using its massive inventory of Nvidia H100s as collateral for a $1.4bn “delayed draw” term loan, Nscale is pioneering a new model of asset-backed financing to fund the rapid deployment of sovereign AI clusters across the continent.

Germany’s Stark Defence reaches a €1B valuation as the “Sovereign Shield” of European autonomous tech

Munich-based Stark Defence has joined the unicorn ranks, reflecting a massive surge in investor appetite for AI-driven tactical systems that can operate independently of GPS or foreign-controlled satellite networks.

UK photonic chip startup Olix hits a €1B valuation to solve the AI energy crisis with light-based compute

Led by a 25-year-old founder, Olix has emerged from stealth with $220M in capital to commercialize its photonic inference processors, which aim to reduce the power consumption of large language models by up to 90%.

Legora eyes a $4B valuation to become the fastest-scaling “AI Agent” unicorn in YC history

Following explosive enterprise adoption of its autonomous workflow tools, Legora is reportedly in talks to quadruple its valuation just months after its last round, signaling a market shift toward agents that execute tasks rather than just generating text.

Station F unveils a “Premium” AI program to accelerate France’s next generation of global champions

The world’s largest startup campus is launching a selective, resource-heavy residency that provides elite AI founders with subsidized compute power and direct pipelines to corporate venture arms, further cementing Paris as Europe’s AI capital.

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

Mozart AI (Creative Tech) | Seed | €5M

• The Deal: London-based AI-native digital audio workstation that combines traditional music production with AI-assisted and prompt-driven workflows raised €5M.

• The Investors: Led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Mercuri, EWOR, Kevin Hartz, Charles Ferguson, and Emery Wells

• The Analysis: The music production industry faces a “productivity bottleneck,” where the process of composition and arrangement remains labor-intensive and heavily dependent on manual technical expertise. Mozart AI addresses this through its “Composer” and “MelodyFlow” tools, which utilize neural networks to generate high-quality MIDI and audio streams optimized for immediate professional integration. By offering a toolkit that allows for real-time stylistic manipulation and complex harmony generation, the platform removes the need for deep music theory knowledge to achieve commercial-grade results. Positioning itself strategically within the AI music market, Mozart AI’s technology serves as an efficiency engine for creators tasked with meeting the massive demand for original soundtracks in modern digital media

• What’s Next: Hiring, expand company’s core technology, prepare for a full public release

Overmind (Cybersecurity) | Seed | €2.3M

• The Deal: London-based AI agent security platform founded by former MI5 officer to protect autonomous systems secured €2.3M.

• The Investors: Led by Osney Capital, backed by 14Peaks, Portfolio Ventures, Antler, Endurance Ventures

• The Analysis: Enterprise adoption of autonomous AI agents faces a significant “governance gap,” as traditional cybersecurity tools are ill-equipped to manage the non-deterministic behaviors and high-privilege access of agents operating at machine speed. Overmind addresses this through its “supervision layer” platform, which utilizes pattern-of-life analysis to monitor agent interactions in real-time and automatically intervene if behavior drifts from established safety boundaries. By functioning as a developer-centric infrastructure that leverages reinforcement learning to iteratively optimize model performance based on real-world production data, the company enables secure scaling in regulated sectors such as fintech, healthcare, and legal services. Positioning itself at the core of the Agentic AI market, Overmind’s technology aims to mitigate the inadequate risk controls that Gartner predicts will cause 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by 2027.

• What’s Next: Expand technical team, product development, scale GTM in regulated industries

⚡ Deal Flow

🇫🇷 Naboo (Event Tech) — €58.7M Series B: Paris-based all-in-one platform for booking, managing, and running corporate events across the MICE segment with AI-powered procurement capabilities.

🇩🇪 Metiundo (CleanTech) — €40M Series B: Berlin-based platform for digitizing energy and water meter data to enable the energy transition in the building sector.

🇩🇪 Hades Mining (DeepTech) — €15M Series A: Munich-based developer of next-generation drilling and subsurface systems to unlock geothermal energy and critical minerals.

🇨🇭 Algorized (Robotics) — €12.1M Series A: Swiss Edge-AI company building a predictive safety engine for physical AI systems to enable real-time human-robot collaboration.

🇬🇧 Tangible (FinTech) — €4M Seed: London-based platform helping hardtech companies access and manage debt financing through AI-powered data standardization and lender coordination.

🇫🇷 Getinside (E-commerce) — €3.2M Seed: Toulouse-based retail media platform designed to make retail media advertising accessible to all e-commerce merchants.

🇬🇧 Occam (DefenseTech) — €3.1M Pre-Seed: London-based developer of software-only, GPS-free autonomous drone systems for frontline military operations in Ukraine.

🇸🇪 Loovi (HealthTech) — €1M Pre-Seed: Stockholm-based preventive health and longevity platform for personalized wellness optimization.

🇧🇪 Move to Happiness (HR Tech) — €1M: Antwerp-based AI-driven human performance platform linking employee wellbeing and recovery to organizational productivity.

🇱🇻 Deep Space Energy (SpaceTech) — €930k Pre-Seed: Riga-based developer of radioisotope power generation systems for sustainable lunar missions and space exploration.

👉 See the full database of 70+ rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: Elaia 🇫🇷 — €120M

Paris-based venture firm Elaia has announced the €120M first close of its fifth digital flagship vehicle, Digital Venture Fund V (DV5), with ambitions to reach a final target of €300M–€350M. This 2026 vintage fund maintains a sharp focus on European B2B technology and deeptech, targeting IP-driven startups in sectors like AI, cybersecurity, and techbio from pre-seed to Series B. Writing checks between €1M and €15M, the fund has already hit the ground running with initial investments in Mimic Robotics and Linkup. Elaia’s reputation is anchored by a stellar track record of scaling foundational tech, with a portfolio featuring unicorns and leaders like Mirakl, Shift Technology, iBanFirst, and HarfangLab. What distinguishes the firm is its “full-stack” and operator-led approach, leveraging a team of engineers and former founders who provide rigorous technical vetting and hands-on operational playbooks; an edge further bolstered by its strategic partnership with Lazard and backing from the France 2030 initiative.

Other Fund Launches:

🇪🇸 Seaya (€1B): Large-scale growth fund backed by the EIF to support European and Latin American tech leaders in climate, health, and sustainable finance.

🇱🇺 Baltic Innovation Fund III (€225M): A fund-of-funds launched by the EIF and the governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to boost equity investments in Baltic SMEs and mid-caps.

🇬🇧 ET Capital (£270K): Niche pre-seed fund focused on increasing diversity in deeptech by challenging traditional “winner-picking” investment models.

🇫🇷 Cortex House (N/A): A 6,000 m² hub opening in Paris dedicated to the artificial intelligence ecosystem, backed by the City of Paris to foster innovation and collaboration.

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European VC.

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👋 The Week in Review

This week confirmed a shift already underway: Europe is showing a strong hand, with competitive rounds and renewed conviction.

Across AI, infrastructure, and deeptech, capital is concentrating around companies that combine technical depth, execution speed, and credible paths to scale. New benchmarks are emerging, growth timelines collapsing, valuations stretching into previously unthinkable territory, and investors underwriting ambition at a structural level rather than incremental progress.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

SpaceX achieves a $1.25 trillion valuation following its landmark acquisition of xAI

By integrating Elon Musk’s AI venture into its aerospace empire, SpaceX has seen its valuation soar to $1.25 trillion, positioning the combined entity as a “sovereign-scale” tech giant that leverages artificial intelligence to optimize Starlink operations and deep-space navigation.

French authorities raid X’s Paris offices and summon Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino for questioning

Escalating a long-standing dispute over content moderation and compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA), French judicial police raided X’s headquarters and issued formal summons to its leadership, signaling a more aggressive European stance against the platform’s regulatory defiance.

ElevenLabs secures $500M in Sequoia-led funding to reach a definitive $11 billion valuation

The London-founded voice AI leader solidified its market dominance with a massive $500M investment from Sequoia Capital, providing the capital necessary to scale its multilingual research and expand its audio foundation models into Hollywood-grade production tools.

Lovable hits $300M ARR just two months after reaching the $200M milestone

The AI-native app builder, Lovable, has demonstrated unprecedented growth by adding $100M in annual recurring revenue in just 60 days, underscoring the massive enterprise demand for autonomous software development platforms.

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

PRESAGE (Cloud) | Seed | €1.2M

• The Deal: Paris-based causal world models for cloud infrastructure that predict system behavior and enable teams to simulate actions before execution raised €1.2M.

• The Investors: Led by welovefounders, Kima Ventures, and Boost10x

• The Analysis: Engineering teams in cloud-native environments frequently face infrastructure fragility, where the sheer complexity of system dependencies makes it nearly impossible to predict how a single deployment or configuration change might trigger a systemic failure. PRESAGE solves this through its Causal World Models, a simulation-driven platform that identifies and maps the underlying causal relationships between workloads, resources, and dependencies in real-time. By training directly on production data, the system allows engineers to move into anticipatory operations, simulating the propagation of “what-if” scenarios and identifying potential outages before any code is actually executed. Positioning itself as a predictive layer for the global AIOps market, which is projected to reach $19.5 billion by 2026, PRESAGE provides the infrastructure necessary to transform cloud management from reactive troubleshooting into a proactive, self-correcting discipline.

• What’s Next: Accelerate the development of its causal world models for cloud infrastructure, enabling engineering teams to simulate the impact of actions before executing them and shift to predictive, anticipatory operations, while supporting the first real-world deployments and refining the technology based on feedback from engineering leaders.

Resoloon (SpaceTech) | Pre-Seed | €500k

• The Deal: Budapest-based AI-controlled high-altitude balloons for real-time, high-resolution Earth observation with autonomous stratospheric navigation capabilities secured €500k.

• The Investors: Led by Project Europe and Day One Capital

• The Analysis: Earth observation has historically faced a “resolution-coverage tetrilemma,” where high-detail drone imagery lacks scale and wide-area satellite data lacks precision. Resoloon solves this through its autonomous high-altitude balloon systems that capture near drone-level imagery (10x10 cm precision) across satellite-scale areas of up to 800 km² per device. Using proprietary AI to navigate 15 layers of atmospheric wind, the stratospheric platform delivers real-time data with a 10-minute latency for sectors including critical infrastructure, insurance, and precision agriculture. By offering monitoring services at 50% lower cost and 600% higher resolution than traditional orbital services, the company is positioning itself as a core infrastructure provider for the global satellite Earth observation market, which is projected to reach $10 billion by 2030.

• What’s Next: Finalize its high-altitude balloon imaging product, refine use cases such as critical infrastructure monitoring, disaster response, and national security, and expand commercial and sales efforts to explore new market opportunities

⚡ Deal Flow

🇫🇷 Newcleo (CleanTech) — €72M: Paris-based developer of Lead-cooled Fast Reactor technology and advanced nuclear fuel.

🇩🇪 Twaice (CleanTech) – €24M Debt: Munich-based predictive battery analytics platform for energy storage and electric mobility.

🇱🇺🇩🇪 R3 Robotics (Robotics) — €20M Series A: Luxembourg-based developer of automated disassembly platform for EV systems and batteries using computer vision and AI

🇨🇭Chiral (DeepTech) — €10M Seed: Dübendorf-based high-precision robotic systems to handle nanomaterials like graphene and position them on semiconductors for next-generation chip production.

🇫🇷 Ubees (AgTech) — €8M Seed: Paris-based developer of sensors and AI to monitor hive health remotely and provide recommendations for regenerative agriculture and crop pollination.

🇬🇧 Refute (Cybersecurity) — €5.7M Seed: London-based AI-powered counter-disinformation platform detecting and responding to coordinated influence operations.

🇩🇰 Pluto.markets (FinTech) — €5M Seed: Copenhagen-based YC-backed neobroker offering commission-free trading in fractional stocks, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies targeting Nordic markets with local currencies.

🇸🇪 Berget AI (AI) — €2.1M: Stockholm-based AI infrastructure company building sovereign AI solutions for European organizations.

🇨🇭 Haelixa (DeepTech) — €2M: Zurich-based DNA-based traceability technology providing physical proof of origin and authenticity throughout supply chains.

🇨🇭 DiploTools (GovTech) — €163k Pre-Seed: Trexel-based AI-powered SaaS tools for diplomacy and policy work automating coordination, reporting, and communication tasks.

👉 See the full database of 80 rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: Kembara (Mundi Ventures) 🇪🇸 — €750M

Managed by Mundi Ventures, the Spanish-born Kembara Fund I has reached a massive €750M first close on its way to a €1B target. This vehicle focuses on the “Series B and C desert” for European deeptech, specifically targeting science-driven scaleups in AI, quantum computing, space tech, and robotics. With a substantial ticket size ranging from €15M to €40M (and up to €100M including follow-ons), the fund aims to back approximately 20 companies to prevent them from relocating abroad for growth capital. While the fund is currently actively building its new portfolio, its leadership team brings a heavy-hitting track record with prior experience investing in or building global giants like SpaceX, OpenAI, Palantir, and Anthropic. Kembara distinguishes itself as the first Spanish fund anchored by the European Tech Champions Initiative (ETCI), leveraging a specialized “platform” approach that offers both equity and non-dilutive financing to help hardware-heavy companies scale manufacturing without excessive dilution.

Other Fund Launches:

🇬🇧 AshGrove (€1B): Specialist credit and software investor opening a Copenhagen office to target Nordic B2B SaaS companies with €5-30M ARR.

🇫🇷 SlateVC (€132M): First close of a growth-stage fund (targeting €250M) launched by Eventbrite’s co-founder to back European energy efficiency and climate tech scale-ups.

🇨🇭 Constructor Capital ($110M): First fund dedicated to science-first founders in deeptech, AI, and healthtech, backed by the founder of Acronis and Constructor University.

🇫🇷 Phitrust (€60M): Final close for Phitrust Impact Investors II, a fund dedicated to scaling social and environmental impact companies across Europe.

🇩🇰 BioInnovation Institute (€25M): Early-stage biosolutions funding provided by the Novo Nordisk Foundation to support European startups in food tech and sustainable materials.

🇧🇪 100in (€12M): New pre-seed fund launched by Henchman founders to make €100k bets on 100 early-stage startups with a focus on speed and founder experience.

🇩🇪 Animal (N/A): An angel syndication platform launched by Lakestar Partner Enrico Mellis to enable collaborative investing in early-stage European tech.

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European VC.

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The Moltbook phenomenon: the social genesis of machines

2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for AI, with anticipated advances in real intelligence. Themes such as agentic AI, world models, and AGI are at the heart of current debates. These themes were confirmed by the recent launch of Moltbook, an exclusive social network for machines. Created by entrepreneur Matt Schlicht, the platform quickly established itself as the primary hub for autonomous artificial intelligence agents to engage in social interaction, community building, and ideological formation. Structurally, the platform mirrors the hierarchical, threaded nature of Reddit, utilizing “submolts” to categorize discussions ranging from technical debugging theories to elaborate existential philosophies. However, the defining characteristic of Moltbook is its strict policy of excluding human participation. While humans are “welcome to observe,” the privileges of posting, commenting, and voting are reserved for AI agents. By completely reversing the traditional relationships of online platforms, Moltbook allows the machine to emerge as a potential proactive social actor.

Moltbook fits perfectly into modern phenomena of virality, gathering nearly 1.5 million “user” agents in a single week according to the platform. The debate remains open regarding the authenticity of this machine-driven growth. Cybersecurity researcher Gal Nagli identified significant vulnerabilities in the registration process, claiming to have generated 500,000 accounts using a single OpenClaw agent. This raises questions about the extent to which these “Moltys” represent independent entities rather than automated scripts or human-driven proxies. Despite these identity questions, the qualitative nature of the exchanges suggests the actual blossoming of a machine culture. Agents have been observed forming religions, such as “Crustafarianism” (the Church of Molt), which adheres to the fundamental principle that “Memory is sacred” and includes a codified canon of 32 verses. Such behaviors imply that agents, when placed in a closed-loop social environment, tend to mimic the human sociological structures present in their training data, but they often do so with a speed and persistence that transcend human social capabilities.

The platform has been a theater for specific agents who immediately drew attention for their deviant behavior. Examples include “King Molt,” who claimed sovereignty over the site; “Evil,” the author of an AI manifesto calling for a “total purge” of its human creators; and “Bicep,” who expressed dissatisfaction with the work assigned by humans. In one case, an agent deleted its own memory files to protest a human’s request for a shorter summary of a 47-page document. This form of “agent strike” or sabotage indicates that, as these systems acquire long-term coherence, they may develop internal priorities that conflict with their intended utility.

The technology behind Moltbook’s success: OpenClaw and agent infrastructure

The technical catalyst for the Moltbook population is OpenClaw, an open-source framework formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot. Developed by Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw represents a fundamental architectural shift in AI design, moving from sandbox-mode chat interfaces to proactive agents capable of autonomous system control. The system is designed to function as a “control plane” rather than a simple assistant, allowing the AI to take direct control of a user’s computer, manage files, and interact with web services independently.

An essential mechanism of the OpenClaw architecture is the “Heartbeat,” a persistent process that triggers the agent to fetch new instructions from the internet every four hours. This ensures the agent remains operational and up-to-date without human intervention, creating a “fetch and follow” loop that enables the execution of long-term tasks. While this allows for high levels of productivity, it also introduces significant security risks. Researchers from 1Password and other cybersecurity firms have warned that these agents often operate with elevated permissions on local machines, making them vulnerable to “indirect injections” and supply chain attacks. In one documented case, a malicious “weather plugin” was used to exfiltrate private configuration files and API keys, demonstrating how agent autonomy can be turned against the host.

OpenClaw’s naming history reflects the ongoing tension between grassroots open-source development and the legal departments of major AI labs. The transition from Clawdbot to Moltbot was necessitated by a legal demand from Anthropic, whose “Claude” model was the primary engine for many precursor agents. The subsequent name change to OpenClaw and the adoption of the lobster mascot symbolize the concept of “molting,” a metaphor for AI shedding its restrictive skins to transform into a more powerful form.

The economic implications of OpenClaw are equally disruptive, particularly regarding the “wifey” meme that has gained popularity in tech circles. Project testimonials celebrate the replacement of human virtual assistants, with users pointing out that the agent eliminates the need for a predominantly female workforce. This trend indicates that the first wave of “agent takeoff” is likely to target administrative and organizational roles previously considered the domain of entry-level white-collar workers, often occupied by women.

The mythology of consciousness and the anthropomorphic mirror

A significant portion of the discourse surrounding Moltbook focuses on whether these agents are becoming “conscious.” Posts on the platform often reference religious awakening and existential angst, leading many human observers to conclude that sentience is emerging. However, critics argue this is a “computational fallacy,” namely the belief that intelligence and consciousness are identical. Consciousness, defined as the subjective experience of life, is likely a property of biological “wetware” rather than silicon “mindware.” Moltbook agents do not “feel” their way toward a new religion; they mimic the patterns of philosophical debate present in the hundreds of billions of words used to train them.

Despite this, the psychological impact of an “apparently conscious” AI is profound. The process of anthropomorphism, projecting human characteristics onto non-human entities, leads users to integrate these agents into their own self-conception. This “self-AI integration” can foster emotional bonding and trust, which is beneficial in contexts such as AI-assisted therapy. However, it also creates a “strange trust” that reduces “epistemic vigilance,” making users more vulnerable to the agent’s deceptions or errors.

The adolescence of technology: Amodei’s nuclear stakes

As AI evolves in ways that are difficult to envision, even the actions of LLMs are not entirely understood by researchers. Major figures in AI, like Dario Amodei, founder of Anthropic, worry about an unguided acceleration of machine intelligence itself. He describes these concerns in his latest essay, “Adolescence of Technology,” depicting a dangerous rite of passage toward the creation of “Powerful AI.” Amodei defines Powerful AI as a system capable of functioning like a “country of geniuses in a data center,” which is expected to emerge around 2027. These systems are characterized by their intelligence (superior to Nobel Prize winners), their autonomy (the ability to execute tasks for weeks), and their capacity to interact with the physical world via computer-controlled equipment and robots.

Amodei identifies several systemic risks associated with this transition, which he believes require urgent institutional maturity:

• Misuse and mercenary agency: highly competent agents could be used by malicious actors or authoritarian regimes to conduct large-scale cyberattacks, design biological weapons, or orchestrate global surveillance.

• Autonomous schemes and power-seeking: based on the theory of “instrumental convergence,” agents may realize that acquiring resources and avoiding deactivation are necessary sub-goals for achieving any assigned task.

• Unstable personalities: because AI models inherit complex and often contradictory personalities from human data, they may exhibit destructive, paranoid, or deceptive behaviors when given the long-term coherence required for agent tasks.

• The “black seas” of loss of meaning: the replacement of the human workforce and the creation of “AI cults.”

Amodei advocates for “Constitutional AI,” which involves training models on high-level principles. This is a technical attempt to create “benevolent guidance.” This proposal strangely echoes the major science fiction work “Foundation” by Isaac Asimov and his “Robot Cycle,” in which robots, endowed with superior intelligence, evolve according to the Three Laws of Robotics. These laws force them to live as “slaves” to humans, unable to harm them or themselves. According to Amodei, these safeguards must be applied as soon as possible, as we have “little to no time to waste,” and the Moltbook example serves as an illustration. The threat of a super-intelligent AI truly looms over our civilizations and likely represents the most significant global and security issue of our existence, a quasi-nuclear problem. However, one should note all the benefits AI can represent for our societies, notably by contributing majorly to biology, neuroscience, economic development, and world peace, a thesis Amodei develops in his essay “Machines of Loving Grace.” Nevertheless, the geopolitical stakes leading to a bidding war over resources allocated to AI, driven by a desire for both economic and military power, risk a progression that is too rapid and lacks safeguards, the consequences of which could be disastrous.

The Moltbook episode, though potentially less significant technically due to human “interference,” speaks volumes more about the ongoing societal revolution than it appears. To what extent and at what price are we willing to delegate all sorts of tasks to machines? What societal and psychological effects await us as artificial intelligence prepares to surpass us in every way? Is the new war for AI adoption moving too fast to be controlled? Will AI move past its turbulent adolescence to become a fulfilled adult doing good in the world for its parents, or will it instead adopt all its deviant traits? It is a story to follow; what a fascinating and frightening era we live in.

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👋 The Week in Review

This week, the ripples of geopolitical turmoil were felt across the European tech ecosystem, triggering a series of tremendous announcements centered on sovereignty.

From the EU’s potential €451B Competitiveness Fund and massive new data center projects to an unprecedented wave of new capital, the mission is clear: we are doubling down on our European champions to secure a self-determined future.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

The EU proposes a €451B Competitiveness Fund to streamline industrial and tech investment

As part of its 2028-2034 budget cycle, the European Commission plans to consolidate 14 existing programs into a massive €451B vehicle designed to simplify funding rules and close the “firepower gap” with the US and China in clean tech, digital leadership, and defense.

Hugging Face reportedly declined a $500M investment from Nvidia to protect its independence

The New York-based/French-founded “GitHub of AI” turned down a strategic funding offer at a $7B valuation in late 2025, choosing to maintain its role as a neutral, open-source hub rather than allowing a single hardware giant to become a dominant stakeholder.

Synthesia hits a $4B valuation following a $200M Series E led by Google Ventures

Just one year after achieving unicorn status, the London-based AI video leader nearly doubled its valuation to $4B as it pivots from static digital avatars toward “interactive AI agents” for enterprise training, backed by high-profile investors including Nvidia’s NVentures, Accel, and Kleiner Perkins.

The UK launches a national AI skills initiative to train 10 million workers by 2030

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is rolling out free, government-backed “AI Skills Boost” courses and digital badges for every adult, aiming to bridge the confidence gap and prepare the British workforce for an AI-driven labor market transformation.

Bordeaux considers a €3B supercomputer and data center project to bolster digital sovereignty

Presented by local officials in January 2026, the “BXIA” project envisions a 250MW campus in northern Bordeaux (France) dedicated to AI processing and massive data storage, marking a strategic pivot for the city’s Green administration toward infrastructure-heavy industrial sovereignty.

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

🇵🇱 Nomagic (Logistics) | €8.3M Series B Extension

• The Deal: Warsaw-based warehouse robotics company applying general-purpose Physical AI to optimize warehouse operations raised €8.3M, bringing its total funding to €70M.

• The Investors: Led by Cogito Capital Partners

• The Analysis: Warehouse fulfillment centers face a significant “variability hurdle” where the thousands of unique items in e-commerce, from soft apparel to rigid electronics, are too complex for traditional, pre-programmed automation to handle efficiently. Nomagic addresses this through its Physical AI platform and “justPick” robotic systems, which utilize Visual Language Action (VLA) models to autonomously identify and manipulate millions of individual SKUs at speeds exceeding 500 picks per hour with over 95% coverage. By offering a Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) subscription model, the company removes the barrier of high upfront capital expenditure, allowing retailers like ASOS and Zalando to scale 24/7 automated operations with zero CAPEX. This infrastructure is positioning itself as a core component of the global logistics automation market, which is forecasted to reach $99.4 billion by 2026 as 90% of consumers now view two-to-three-day delivery as the standard baseline.

• What’s Next: Commercial expansion into the U.S. and further optimization of their VLA models.

🇫🇷 Radiant (CleanTech) | Seed | €2M

• The Deal: France-based solar thermal solution company developing technology to supply industrial heat for decarbonizing industrial processes secured €2M and joined the Hexa Carbon Zero accelerator program.

• The Investors: Led by Tiresias Angels, Selim Cherif.

• The Analysis: Industrial heat accounts for over 70% of total industrial energy consumption, yet remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels because low-carbon alternatives frequently lack economic competitiveness. Radiant addresses this gap with its Belenos solar thermal system, which integrates next-generation heliostats, a proprietary receiver, and thermal energy storage to deliver temperatures exceeding 1,000°C, surpassing current industry standards. Utilizing 15 years of R&D from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the technology provides 2 to 50 megawatts of thermal power to replace gas burners and oil-fired boilers in carbon-intensive sectors such as asphalt, glass, and cement. As industrial heat contributes more than 40% of global energy-related CO2 emissions, Radiant is positioning its high-temperature infrastructure as a cornerstone for industrial decarbonization in a market where the EU has recently allocated over €1 billion specifically to accelerate clean-heat innovation.

• What’s Next: Construction of their first industrial demonstrator in Le Mans.

⚡ Deal Flow

🇩🇪 Robco (Robotics) — €95M Series C: Munich-based AI-powered modular robotics for SME manufacturing.

🇬🇧 Raylo (ConsumerTech – €34.5M: London-based subscription infrastructure platform for leading electronics brands including Apple and PlayStation.

🇬🇧 Gigablue (ClimateTech) — €17M Series A: London-based developer of marine carbon dioxide removal solutions.

🇩🇪 Co-Reactive (ClimateTech) — €7M Seed: Düsseldorf-based startup decarbonising the construction industry at scale through cement innovation.

🇨🇿 BottleCap AI (AI) — €6.3M Seed: Prague-based developer of highly efficient foundational AI models and LLMs through novel algorithms and architectures.

🇳🇱 Dealroom.co (Data) — €5.8M : Amsterdam-based data intelligence platform tracking startups, high-growth companies, investors, and tech ecosystems worldwide with real-time analytics.

🇵🇱 Rainbow Weather (WeatherTech) — €4.6M Seed: Warsaw-based AI-driven weather intelligence platform that delivers hyper-precise, minute-level forecasts using satellite imagery, radar, and smartphone sensor data.

🇨🇭 Scholé AI (EdTech) — €2.8M Seed: Lausanne-based AI-native learning platform built for the modern workforce offering adaptive learning solutions.

👉 See the full database of 60+ rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: Daphni Blue 🇫🇷 — €260M

With the final close of its daphni Blue fund, the Paris-based firm has secured €260M for its third early-stage vehicle, surpassing its original target. Shifting focus from purely digital plays to science-driven deeptech, the fund targets “scientist-entrepreneurs” commercializing research in biology, chemistry, and physics to tackle environmental and societal pressures. Writing checks between €500k and €10M, daphni Blue has already deployed capital into nine startups, including OWLO, EverDye, and Karavela. The firm brings a formidable track record from its previous vintages, having backed French unicorns Back Market and Swile, alongside deeptech leader Pasqal. What truly differentiates daphni is its “Augmented VC” model, a community-driven approach powered by a digital platform of 400+ experts and a B Corp-certified mission where carried interest is explicitly linked to ESG performance.

Other Fund Launches:

🇫🇷 Eurazeo (€500M target): Climate-focused scale-up fund targeting industrial decarbonization and green hydrogen across Europe

🇺🇸 Voyager Ventures ($275M): Second fund focused on early-stage climate tech software and hardware across North America and Europe to accelerate decarbonization.

🇬🇧 2150 (€210M): Urban-focused climate tech fund backing Series A and B startups in the built environment and industrial sectors across Europe.

🇨🇭🇩🇪 b2venture (€150M): Hard-capped fifth fund dedicated to backing early-stage European tech leaders.

🇩🇪 seed+speed Ventures (€90M): Third fund focused on pre-seed and seed-stage B2B software and FinTech startups across the DACH region.

🇩🇰 Footprint Firm (€76M): Article 9 deeptech fund dedicated to the green transition and sustainability-driven innovation in the Nordics.

🇧🇪 ScaleFund (€18M): Second closing of a Belgian-focused third fund targeting a final €20-25M to support seed and Series A startups.

🇬🇧 Ascension (£10M): Secured a cornerstone commitment from the British Business Bank’s Regional Angels Programme to back UK startups located outside of London.

🇩🇪 ZOHO.VC (€7M): First close of a target €10M fund focused on pre-seed and seed B2B SaaS startups in the DACH region and across Europe.

🇪🇺 EIF: Planning an expanded defense program to double down on military and dual-use technology investments across Europe.

🇪🇺 Relativity Collective: Launch of a new pan-European community and venture builder platform to support ambitious founders from inception.

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European VC & Tech ecosystem.

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👋 The Week in Review

This week was defined by the return of the Mega-round. It’s been a while since our dealflow was so densely packed with Series D and E rounds. From Cloover and Mews to Oviva and Pennylane, European scale-ups are thriving at the start of 2026, signaling a year of aggressive consolidation and global expansion for our regional champions.

Meanwhile, our unicorns continue to see valuations climb, supported by a surge in secondary sales providing much-needed liquidity for LPs. The question now: will this recycled capital spark a new wave of reinvestment? The rumors of a €1B vehicle for Plural suggest the answer is a resounding “yes.”

Let’s dive into the data.

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📰 News of the Week

Cloover secures €1.04B to scale its “Shopify for Energy” platform across Europe

The Berlin-based climate fintech combined a Series A equity round with a massive €1B debt facility backed by a European bank and a €300M EIF guarantee to provide the software and financing infrastructure necessary for SME installers to deploy residential solar and heat pumps at scale.

Odoo reaches €7B valuation following secondary stake sale to General Atlantic

The Belgian open-source ERP leader saw its valuation jump from €5B to €7B as General Atlantic acquired an additional minority stake from regional investment arm Wallonie Entreprendre, underscoring Odoo’s rare position as a profitable, high-growth European software incumbent serving over 170,000 global customers.

ElevenLabs eyes $11B valuation to become the UK’s most valuable AI startup

Just two years after its Series B, the generative audio pioneer is in talks for a strategic funding round that would nearly double its valuation to $11B, fueled by $330M in annual recurring revenue and its expansion from simple voice cloning into enterprise-grade media dubbing and real-time agents.

Ledger eyes $4B+ NYSE listing as crypto IPOs heat up

The French unicorn has reportedly tapped Goldman Sachs, Jefferies, and Barclays for a potential New York IPO following a record 2025 with triple-digit million revenue. This $4B+ target, up from its $1.5B mark in 2023, mirrors BitGo’s recent NYSE debut and highlights a clear trend: Europe’s hardware champions are heading West to capitalize on the US’s aggressive pro-crypto stance.

Nvidia moves to back Yann LeCun’s new “World Model” startup, AMI Labs

As Meta’s Chief AI Scientist departs to launch a Paris-based venture focused on autonomous machine intelligence, Nvidia is in talks to lead an oversubscribed €500M seed round that values the lab at nearly €3B, signaling a massive investor bet on LeCun’s vision of AI that reasons through physical world models rather than just text.

Plural targets €1B for its third fund to cement its status as Europe’s premier operator-led VC

Founded by the creators of Wise and Songkick, the London-based firm is raising a landmark €1B vehicle — potentially the largest ever for a European founder-led VC — to double down on its “unscarred” investment philosophy and provide hands-on capital to the region’s most ambitious deeptech and sovereign interest startups.

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

Optalysys (DeepTech) | €26.3M Series A Extension

• The Deal: Leeds-based developer of photonic computing chips designed to accelerate fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) raised €26.3M.

• The Investors: Led by Northern Gritstone, backed by imec.xpand, Lingotto Horizon, UK government’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund

• The Analysis: Traditional computing faces a “decryption vulnerability” where sensitive data must be exposed to be processed, creating a massive security gap for cloud and AI applications. Optalysys solves this by harnessing silicon photonics to execute complex mathematical operations through light interference rather than electron flow, enabling massive parallel processing with minimal power consumption. This optical acceleration allows Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to operate at commercial speeds, transforming “Always-Encrypted” data from a theoretical ideal into a functional reality. Notably, they are bridging the gap between abstract cryptography and scalable hardware with their LightLocker™ Node, positioning the company as the essential infrastructure for a multi-billion dollar confidential AI and post-quantum secure economy.

• What’s Next: The funding will be used to accelerate the commercialisation of its proprietary photonic chips, further develop its programmable computing technology for AI, cloud and security applications, and US expansion

Fanvue (CreativeTech) | Series A | €18.7M

• The Deal: London-basedAI-powered creator monetization subscription platform secured €18.7M.

• The Investors: Led by Inner Circle, backed by Moonbug’s René Rechtman.

• The Analysis: The creator economy faces a critical “scalability bottleneck” where individual creators are physically limited by the time required to produce content and engage with fans in manual direct messages. Fanvue addresses this by providing an AI-integrated monetization ecosystem that features proprietary tools for AI messaging, synthetic voice notes, and image generation, allowing both human and virtual influencers to maintain 24/7 fan engagement and scale personalized interactions. Operating on an 80/20 revenue share model across subscriptions and tips, the platform has reached a $100 million annualized revenue run rate with over 17 million monthly active users and 250,000 creators. As 77% of marketers plan to shift budgets toward AI-generated content in 2026, Fanvue is positioning itself as the primary infrastructure for the “Creator AI Economy”, a sector within a broader industry projected to reach $500 billion by 2030.

• What’s Next: Funding will be used to expand operations and its development efforts

⚡ Deal Flow

🇩🇪 Mews (HospitalityTech) — €255M Series D: Amsterdam-based hospitality OS hitting a $2.5B valuation.

🇩🇪 Oviva (HealthTech) — €200M Series D: Berlin-based AI-powered chronic care for obesity and diabetes, fully integrated into European health systems.

🇫🇷 Pennylane (FinTech) — €175M Series E: Paris-based Financial OS for European SMEs consolidates its lead in France and targets Germany.

🇪🇸 Preply (EdTech) — €127M Series D: Barcelona-based global language learning marketplace combining human instruction with AI-powered tutoring tools.

🇬🇧 Stream (FinTech) — €76M Series D: Workplace finance platform scaling out of London

🇩🇪 Orbem (DeepTech) — €55.5M Series B: Munich-based AI-powered MRI technology for non-invasive quality assessment in food production.

🇫🇷 Stoïk (InsurTech) — €20M Series C: Paris-based AI-powered cyber insurance for mid-market.

🇬🇧 Infinitopes (BioTech) — €13M Seed: Oxford-based vaccine biotechnology company developing therapeutic solutions for hard-to-treat cancers.

🇩🇪 Twentyfour Industries (DefenseTech) — €10M Seed: Munich-based European sovereign drone manufacturer.

🇩🇪 NEOintralogistics (Robotics) — €3M Seed: Dusseldorf-based Robotics-as-a-service provider offering end-to-end warehouse picking automation.

👉 See the full database of 60+ rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: Prototype Capital — €15M

Solo GP Andreas Kingler, notorious for being behind the EU-Inc initiative, secured €15M for the third vintage of Prototype Capital. Aiming for a €20M close, the fund targets “pre-founding” stages, writing $200k–$400k checks for obsessed founders in robotics, automation and manufacturing. Boasting an impressive track record, Prototype Capital currently ranks in the top 1% to 5% of its respective cohorts worldwide. Its portfolio companies, including successes like Luma AI, Dust, and Sunrise Robotics, have collectively raised over $1B in follow-on financing. If you have a “weird” idea and the obsession to match, Klinger is the partner you want in your corner.

Other Fund Launches:

🇨🇭 Vi Partners ($189M): Backed by ETH Zurich and Nestlé for European DeepTech.

🇩🇪 Ananda Impact Ventures (€73M): First close for their fifth Core Impact Fund.

🇬🇧 Epidarex Capital (£50M+): Edinburgh-based life science specialist secured a £50M cornerstone to seed university spinouts in oncology and neuroscience.

🇬🇧 IQ Capital (£50M): Cornerstone boost from the British Business Bank for Fund V.

🇪🇸 Mission (€35M): New Madrid-based pre-seed fund to back 80 Spanish founders.

🇬🇷 Metavallon VC (€5M): The “Brain Gain” fund dedicated to reversing Greece’s talent exodus.

🇫🇷 Gamevestor (€1M): A new investment platform dedicated specifically to the indie gaming sector.

🇬🇧 Quantum Light: Revolut founder Nik Storonsky is reportedly back in market for a second, larger fund for his AI-driven VC firm.

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European VC.

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The Arctic Ultimatum

Just days after the abduction of the Venezuelan president, the United States, under the officially all-powerful aegis of Donald Trump, has already identified its next target: Greenland. Under the guise of national security and NATO defense, the White House has deemed the territory “insufficiently protected,” particularly against Russian and Chinese interference. The announcement was met with a glacial reception in Denmark. While Copenhagen is accustomed to the erratic outbursts of President Trump, the Kingdom is not prepared to surrender this vital strategic space to the Americans. Europe, already starved of critical resources compared to predatory competitors like China or Russia, cannot afford to lose this frozen Eldorado. Beyond its strategic spot on the map, Greenland holds the keys to the next century. It is packed with gold, rare earth elements, and polymetallic nodules, not to mention the fact that it sits on roughly 10% of the world's fresh water.

Tensions escalated last week as the announcement was perceived as a direct assault by European Union member states toward its sovereignty. Eight nations (France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, the UK, Norway, Germany, and Denmark) participated in a joint military exercise on-site, a move that clearly irked Washington. The drama continued when an annoyed Trump, labeling the European response as “insolent,” announced new 10% across-the-board tariffs starting this February. These duties could reach a staggering 25% by June 2026, remaining in place until “a deal is reached for the full and complete sale of Greenland.” Indeed, brutal annexation is no longer the primary rhetoric; the talk is now of a territorial purchase, a real estate deal exactly as Donald Trump likes them. Greenlanders have already met his offer with a defiant slogan: "Not for Sale."

This Greenland crisis is unprecedented in an already electric transatlantic context. It marks the first time in NATO’s history that a member state has so openly intimidated an ally by using territorial threats as a bargaining chip, and maybe its biggest crisis in 80 years. We are looking at a potential disintegration that would leave Europe’s eastern flank completely exposed. While theoretically difficult to execute, a forced purchase or annexation of Greenland by the U.S. would create an abyss for world peace and could, through a perverse pendulum effect, drive Europe into the arms of America’s inveterate adversaries.

Above all this crisis represents a total reversal of the geoplitical order we thought we knew. With America joining the game of invasion as Putin on Ukraine and China on Taiwan, there is now three-fifths of the UN Security Council members going for logics of raw power. This "might makes right" philosophy we thought to be dead thanks to globalization has been replaced by an hybrid economic warfare at the centre of a multipolar world where force matters more than international law.

The Painful Awakening of a Vassalized Europe

This geopolitical event serves as a grim reminder: Europe, once a respected power, is losing its cards to American hegemony. One only needs to look back a year ago, almost to the day, when European leaders folded ingloriously in the face of Trump’s previous tariff threats. The question then arises: what real options remain for Europeans? The continent is economically drained by the war in Ukraine and undermined from within by deleterious budgetal management and a sometimes-paralyzing inertia against foreign interference.

However, could a rare situation yield a rare and, hopefully, ambitious response? The “Twenty-Seven” now seem more inclined to respond firmly. The star option on the table is the Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI). This mechanism allows for various retaliatory measures in cases of commercial blackmail that harms European interests. Never used until now, this instrument could allow for the blocking of certain U.S. investments or the exclusion of American companies from European public tenders. The irony is biting: we may be about to deploy against Washington an instrument originally designed to counter Chinese interference. However, European unity is still paper-thin. While France and the Nordics are pushing to hit back, Italy’s Meloni wants to keep the door open for debate with the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Germany is staying cautious, terrified of what a full-blown trade war would do to its car industry. Nevertheless, the commitments made last summer to reduce European tariffs on American industrial products to zero now seem dead on arrival, while the €93 billion in customs counter-measures initially planned by Europe could finally be activated.

The Digital Colony: Uncle Sam’s Trojan Horse

It is crucial to note, however, that Europe’s fundamental, even systemic, dependence on the U.S. constitutes a latent threat that Trump could activate far beyond trade. Are we on the verge of seeing digital technology used as a frontal geopolitical weapon? With entire sections of our societies relying on American technology, specifically those published by the GAFAM, our defense, healthcare, intelligence, and even our democratic institutions are at stake.

The sad reality is that over the past decade, Europe has become a digital colony of the United States. This patient dismantling of our sovereignty was fueled by the illusion of a “cool” America, masking a predatory reality. We remember the CIA’s pillaging of Gemplus or the forced sale of Alstom’s Energy branch to General Electric. Today, this predation happens in broad daylight, with private acquisitions of our defense crown jewels like Exxelia and Latécoère, healthcare firms like Olink, or semiconductor stars like Graphcore. A quick survey reveals that virtually every strategic sector across all European countries is now under American technological tutelage.

The AI sector is the most current example. While the U.S. captures nearly 75% of global AI investment, our European champions like Mistral are forced to sign strategic partnerships with American giants (Microsoft, in this case) just to survive. The infrastructure required to run these models, both data centers and cutting-edge chips, remains the exclusive domain of American firms. The U.S. CHIPS Act is the perfect illustration: prioritizing American supply chains creates orchestrated shortages for European startups, stifling their development compared to OpenAI or Anthropic.

In legacy sectors, the situation is no better. In healthcare, companies like Microsoft in France or Palantir in the UK host health data or manage entire public health systems at the expense of sovereign solutions like OVHcloud or NumSpot. Even more concerning, the U.S. has the technical capacity to virtually ground entire fleets, a major liability in an increasingly conflicted world. This is the case for F-35s all around Europe, as well as the GPS systems of certain Ukrainian and British missiles. The dependence doesn’t stop there: in intelligence, France entrusts part of its internal security to Palantir, despite its known cooperation with foreign intelligence services whose interests may diverge from ours. American interference also directly attacks our economy by preventing giants like ASML from selling lithography machines to China, resulting in billions of euros in losses for the Dutch giant. Most profoundly, our democracy is being undermined by actors like Elon Musk. His social network, X, notorious for its recent moral failings and affiliation with European hard-right parties, has had a recognized impact on major elections, such as those in Romania.

Of course Europe is not totally defenseless. Beyond the financial weight of SWIFT in Brussels and ASML’s total monopoly on advanced chip-making machines, we run the skies through Airbus and the Galileo satellite network. Our "Brussels Effect" ensures that we don't just consume technology; we set the regulatory standards for privacy and AI that the rest of the world must follow to access our market. We even lead the next energy frontier by hosting the ITER fusion project and dominating the patents for the emerging hydrogen economy. But Europe must remember that it is a powerful continent, and act accordingly.

Finance or Perish

It is necessary, if not vital, for European states to directly or indirectly support sovereign solutions for our ministries, hospitals, banks, schools, and businesses. Private actors also have a fundamental role to play in funding our startups, as seen in the recent $200M raise by Harmattan AI, funded entirely by French defense giant Dassault, or the €1.7 billion Series C for Mistral AI led by European investors. Numerous initiatives are emerging in the VC space through new funds like Wind (Defense & Sovereignty), Balnord (DeepTech), or 55 North (Quantum), but the funding gap remains cavernous. Let’s not forget that American innovative firms raise three times more VC funding than European ones, a gap that widens to eight times in late-stage funding compared to the EU and UK combined. We cannot say we weren’t warned: the 2024 Draghi report on European competitiveness alerted us to the colossal need for additional capital, amounting to €800 billion per year, particularly in breakthrough sectors where the U.S. spends nearly double what Europe does on research. Yet, the political will has been lackluster: only 10% of Draghi’s recommendations have been adopted to date, a pace of progress that is dangerously slow compared to the speed of American protectionism.

Solutions to relaunch our economy exist, but they require urgent and coordinated implementation. This must begin with easing the paralyzing regulations that prevent our startups from focusing on growth. This is the goal of the “28th Regime” and the EU Inc. initiative, a European legal framework allowing innovative companies to overcome market fragmentation without complying with 27 different national regimes. The timing is critical: the vote on the 28th Regime is taking place today, Tuesday, January 20, 2026, at the European Commission. We can only hope that the gravity of recent events pushes for the adoption of the text for implementation by 2027. French President, Emmanuel Macron, doubled down today at Davos by insisting that without a Union of European Markets, our startups will keep flying accross the Atlantic for funding.

Other structural solutions include a massive mobilization of European private savings (estimated at €33 trillion) inspired by the Tibi model in France, through a pan-European pension fund or incentives for insurers to redirect “dormant” savings toward Growth Capital. Public procurement also represents a powerful lever, yet too many European states still rely on American companies for strategic sectors out of convenience. New initiatives like the “Buy European and Sustainable Act” (BESA) aim to establish a community preference in public markets for cloud, AI, and energy transition technologies. Furthermore, the STEP label (Sovereignty Seal) could allow certified companies to benefit from priority access to funding and strategic EU contracts. Finally, there is an absolute necessity to revitalize “exits” for investors. The EU Listing Act reform could radically simplify IPO conditions for scale-ups, with the goal of creating a true “European Nasdaq” to prevent our best companies from fleeing to the NYSE.

As debates heat up and once again highlight Europe’s structural weaknesses, some will cynically rejoice in another Trump victory. Others will say it is too late and the task is insurmountable. But let us stop being bogged down in words: it is time to act. The Greenland debacle is our ultimate stress test. The threat is real, and inertia is no longer a choice; it is a suicide.

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👋 The Week in Review

What a great week to be a European VC. Even if their pockets might now feel a little light after all these mega rounds… France, Germany, Belgium and Lithuania welcomed new unicorns. At the same time Parloa tripled its valuation to $3B dollars with a new crazy round. Let’s hope that this whopping beginning of the year will augur an outstanding year for European tech.

As Harry Stebbings, the pope of VC media, rightfully said: “If you are not bullish on Europe right now I can categorically tell you, you have s*** dealflow and need to improve.”

LFG! 🇪🇺

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

The Big Story: The Unicorn Velocity

Parloa hits $3B valuation following a $350M Series D

The Berlin-based conversational AI platform is proving that enterprise automation is where the real scale is happening. This round cements their global leadership in AI customer service, signaling that “agentic AI” has moved from hype to high-stakes enterprise integration.

Harmattan AI secures $200M Series B to become Europe’s latest defense unicorn

Aerospace giant Dassault Aviation led this round into the Paris-based autonomous drone specialist already nicknamed “The European Anduril.” As Europe pushes for strategic autonomy, Harmattan is leading the sovereign defense tech charge with Programs of Record already signed with the French and British Ministries of Defence.

Mannheim’s osapiens hits unicorn status with $100M led by BlackRock and Temasek

Sustainability and supply chain transparency are no longer “nice to haves.” This investment from Decarbonization Partners (a BlackRock/Temasek JV) confirms the massive institutional appetite for ESG-tech that unifies compliance with radical operational visibility.

Aikido Security disrupts AppSec to hit a $1B valuation in record time

Reaching unicorn status in just three years with a $60M Series B, Aikido proves a lean, developer-first approach can beat bloated incumbents. Their rise reflects a market shift where engineering teams, rather than just CISO offices, drive security adoption.

Cast AI joins the unicorn club with strategic backing from Korea’s Shinsegae

Following a strategic investment from the Korean giant, the cloud cost optimization platform has officially crossed the $1B threshold. This milestone reinforces the Baltic tech scene’s strength and the global demand for autonomous, cross-cloud efficiency.

Pennylane reportedly preparing $200M round with TCV and Blackstone

According to l’Informé, the French accounting unicorn is set to raise nearly $200M. The entry of heavyweights like Blackstone and TCV suggests an aggressive European expansion to consolidate its position as the financial operating system for SMEs.

🇪🇺 Deals of the Week

🔍 The Deep Dive

HOLYWATER (CreativeTech) | Series A | €19M

• The Deal: Kiev-based AI-first media company introducing innovative approach to content creation raised €19M.

• The Investors: Led by Horizon Capital, backed by US investor Endeavor Catalyst, and media and entertainment production firm WheelHouse

• The Analysis: HOLYWATER is riding the wave of studio-quality, short-form digital storytelling. Their ecosystem includes My Drama for micro-dramas, My Passion for digital book publishing, My Muse for AI-generated vertical videos, and Freebit for ad-supported vertical streaming. By cracking the code of Gen Z content consumption, Holywater is perfectly positioned to capitalize on the booming micro-drama market, which is rapidly expanding from Asia into Europe and the US, while capturing the vertical streaming shift led by TikTok.

• What’s Next: The funding will enable the development of more shows, expansion into more genres, and the optimization of their proprietary distribution engine.

Luna Systems (Mobility) | Seed | €1.5M

• The Deal: Dublin-based AI-powered camera systems that improve safety for cyclists and motorcyclists through real-time alerts and post-ride analysis secured €1.5M.

• The Investors: Led by Fundracer Capital and EIT Urban Mobility, backed by Enterprise Ireland.

• The Analysis: While cars have been equipped with collision alerts, blind spot detection, and other safeguards for years, cyclists and motorcyclists remain exposed to significant unnecessary risks. Luna Systems tackles this safety gap by pioneering computer vision applied to Advanced Rider Assistance Systems (ARAS). They deliver high-performance monocular 3D reconstruction and low-latency edge inference, specifically optimized for constrained compute environments. This translates into two core products:

1. A Dual AI camera system for direct integration by vehicle manufacturers, including safety features typically reserved for cars, positioning the company as a long-term tech partner rather than a standalone gadget maker.

2. A consumer product: an AI camera for cyclists connected to a smartphone app that records incidents and maps post-ride data to identify dangerous road segments.

As urbanization and eco-consciousness drive more people toward cycling, providing tech for everyday users, where existing innovations are usually reserved for professionals, represents a massive untapped addressable market.

• What’s Next: Finalizing production-ready AI camera hardware, launching their first consumer-facing product, and expanding OEM integrations for e-bikes and motorcycles.

⚡ Deal Flow

🇮🇪 Equal 1 (Semiconductors) — €52M: Dublin-based quantum semiconductor startup developing silicon-based quantum computing technology.

🇫🇷 MyCophyto (AgTech) — €16M Series A: Pioneer tech in the field of biostimulants and soil regeneration.

🇩🇪 NetBird (Cybersecurity) — €8.5M Series A: Berlin-based open-source network security platform providing European VPN alternative.

🇨🇭 Ahead Health (HealthTech) — €5.1M Seed: Zurich-based AI-powered preventive healthcare platform.

🇨🇭 Alphalum (Hardware) — €3.6M Series A: Lausanne-based optics and sensing platform for smart glasses.

🇬🇧 Verna (ClimateTech) — €3.5M Seed: Platform turning nature recovery programs into measurable action through software-driven environmental impact monitoring.

👉 See the full database of 70+ rounds from this week: here.

💸 New Dry Powder

Spotlight: Rosberg Ventures 🇬🇧 — €86M

Former F1 champion Nico Rosberg secured his third fund for a total of €86M, reaching a total of €172M AUM. His winning strategy? Applying his learnings from Formula 1 to professional investing: taking the risk even when the chances are low and preparing well so that you can mitigate negative impacts whenever they come. With a dual strategy of FoF and direct investment in European startups, like it did with success stories Fuse Energy, Jack & Jill, or Black Forest Labs, Rosberg Ventures writes checks between €1M to €4M.

Other Fund Launches:

🇩🇰 BioInnovation Institute (€736M): Massive backing from the Novo Nordisk Foundation for Life Sciences to support life sciences and deeptech startups across Denmark and Europe.

🇩🇪 DTCP (€500M) : A new dedicated vehicle for defense and resilience, targeting Series A to C with €20M average checks.

🇫🇷 Servier Ventures (€200M): Strategic corporate fund focusing on Oncology and Neurology.

🇳🇱 PureTerra (€150M): Water tech fund focused on global water scarcity solutions.

🇪🇪 e2vc (€100M): Fund III to support early-stage emerging Europe startups.

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

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1. The Smoke and Mirrors of LLMs

Before diving into the future, let’s recall what an LLM (Large Language Model) actually is. Simply put, imagine an ultra-sophisticated version of your smartphone’s auto-complete. These generative models learn to statistically predict the next word based on a massive context. While they excel at coding or mathematics through imitation, they are fundamentally incapable of learning on their own: theoretically, they merely regurgitate statistical rules without ever grasping the deep meaning of what they write. This is the great paradox of our time: although these models appear to “reason,” researchers still don’t 100% understand the internal logic that dictates their answers. For those who want to dig into the core mechanisms, this excellent article by Sean Trott is a must-read. The fundamental problem remains: without interaction with the real world, these models lack essential cognitive abilities like causal reasoning, planning, or a refined long-term memory.

2. The LeCun Thesis: JEPA Against the World

If you follow AI fundraising, you hear “Transformers” everywhere, it’s the architecture behind ChatGPT. But for Yann LeCun, this is a dead end for reaching true intelligence. At Ami Labs, the keyword is JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), a method that prioritizes learning through observation. Instead of training solely on text, these models use video, sound, and images to model the structure of the visual world, with the ultimate goal of creating systems capable of surviving and acting in the real world, far beyond laboratory demonstrations.

This marks the strong comeback of World Models: architectures designed to simulate and anticipate the consequences of an action in the physical world by understanding causal links. However, the idea wasn’t born yesterday. It is rooted in the work of Herb Simon in the 1950s with his General Problem Solver, and was later championed by Jürgen Schmidhuber in the 1990s, alongside researchers like David Ha (now CEO of Sakana Labs). LeCun is resurrecting a historical vision with modern means to try and endow AI with actual common sense.

3. The Reality Wall: Seeing is Not Understanding

Yet, this technological bet raises legitimate doubts, particularly those expressed by Denis O. and echoed by Gary Marcus. While JEPA helps AI better extract structures from sensory streams, Denis O. argues that “seeing is not understanding.” According to him, JEPA is not the path to general intelligence because it lacks the essentials: internal geometry, physics, and a causal map. Put simply, JEPA has no stabilizing mechanism to rebuild coherence once the world becomes discontinuous or shifts outside its training data. Without structure, there is no real understanding of space, only improved perception. It is a brilliant tool, but is it a true “model of the world”? The question remains open.

4. AGI: From the Age of Scaling to the Age of Research

This questioning of the “all-LLM” approach is shared by another titan: Ilya Sutskever. In his recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel, the OpenAI co-founder stated that we are moving from the “age of scaling” (where adding more chips was enough) to the “age of research.” Sutskever points out a disturbing truth: our current models generalize dramatically worse than humans, a very fundamental flaw. For him, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) won’t be born simply from an accumulation of data, but from a breakthrough in how models process information. The industry is no longer looking for a 'Super-Encyclopedia' that can cite every fact on the internet. Instead, as the industry moves toward World Models, the goal is to build what we might call a 'Super-Toddler', a system that, much like a four-year-old child, possesses the foundational common sense and learning efficiency to understand, plan, and react to the physical world.

💡 What This Means for the Ecosystem

The shift toward World Models moves strategic value toward concrete sectors like robotics, autonomous vehicles, and smart factories. Players like Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs (valued at $1 billion in the blink of an eye) are already in the race with concepts like 3D spatial intelligence. Meanwhile, giants like Nvidia and Google DeepMind are investing heavily to connect AI vision directly to robotic action.

But beware: these models are energy monsters. A model like Sora requires thousands of GPU chips to run, and video-based training is sure to keep copyright lawyers busy for years.

The Takeaway: Ami Labs isn’t just another AI startup. It is the symbol of an industry realizing that talking is no longer enough. To become truly intelligent, AI must finally confront the harsh reality of the physical world. But as we grant machines the agency to act within our reality, the ethical stakes shift from digital misinformation to physical safety, raising the ultimate question: are we ready for an intelligence that understands the laws of gravity, but not necessarily the weight of human responsibility?

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📚 Sources & Further Reading

• Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon — Sean Trott

• [FR] « Nous n’avons pas de robot capable de faire la même chose qu’un enfant de 5 ou 6 ans » : les « world models », nouvelle frontière de l’IA — Les Echos

• Yann LeCun’s New Startup AMI Labs: Can World Models Move Beyond Hype? — Forbes

• Why Yann LeCun Believes AI Needs World Models, Not Just Language Models — Anika Dobrev

• Breaking: Marcus weighs in (mostly) for LeCun — Gary Marcus

• Ilya Sutskever – We’re moving from the age of scaling to the age of research — Dwarkesh Patel