Mind The Gap

Mind The Gap #W29

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 06:32:05 GMT

📅 July 14 – 18, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins
📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Helsing raised $1.8B at an $18B valuation from international backers. Neko Health took $700M at $7B to bring full-body scanning clinics to New York. Uber agreed to buy Delivery Hero for €13B, creating the world’s largest food delivery platform outside China. And microagi, a Munich robotics startup founded by former Formula 1 engineers ten months ago, closed Germany’s largest-ever seed round at $55M.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Helsing closes Europe’s largest defence tech round ever

The Munich AI company raised $1.8B in Series E at an $18B valuation, oversubscribed, with Dragoneer, Lightspeed, ICONIQ, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, JPMorganChase, and General Catalyst in the cap table. The investor list is almost entirely American, which is its own kind of signal. Co-chairmen Daniel Ek and Tom Enders remain unchanged. Helsing builds AI software and autonomous systems for European armed forces, and is now priced like infrastructure.

SAP buys Prior Labs for over €1B

The German software giant acquired the Freiburg-based foundation model startup just 18 months after its launch, committing over €1B over four years. Prior Labs keeps its brand, research agenda, and open-source commitments. The team built a foundation model for tabular data, structurally important for enterprise software and squarely in SAP’s core market. A rare case of a European corporate paying up for European AI research instead of watching it leave.

EQT's €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund in talks to lead Mistral's Series D

Swedish investment firm EQT is reportedly in talks to lead or co-lead Mistral's Series D via the €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund in what would mark the EU-backed fund's first investment. The Scaleup Europe Fund is designed to back European tech scaleups from Series B through to pre-IPO across AI, deep tech, robotics and clean energy.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

SWISSto12 | $70M Series C | Switzerland | SpaceTech | undisclosed

microagi | $55M Seed | Germany | Robotics | Hummingbird

Valarian | $50M Series A | United Kingdom | Sovereign AI Infrastructure | NEA

Syntetica | $30M Series A | France | DeepTech | Bpifrance Ecotechnologies 2

Monumental | €27M Series B | Netherlands | Construction Robotics | Khosla Ventures

Reformed | $22M Series A | United Kingdom | FoodTech | Iris Ventures

Applied Computing | $20M Series A | United Kingdom | AI | KBR

Project Q | €15M Series A | Germany | Defence Tech | Expeditions

🚪 Exits

Delivery Hero | Acquired by Uber | €13B | Germany | Food Delivery

Prior Labs | Acquired by SAP | €1B+ | Germany | AI

Rail Europe | Acquired by Omio Group | France | TravelTech

FlexPowerHub | Acquired by Volue | Austria | EnergyTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

NextGO Epi | DeepTech / Semiconductors | Pre-Seed | €2M | Vireo Ventures

NextGO Epi spun out of the Leibniz Institute for Crystal Growth in 2025, founded by three PhDs who between them have spent over a decade working on gallium oxide. The company is the only European producer of industrial-grade gallium oxide epitaxial wafers at up to 4 inches in diameter. Research labs across Europe work with the material, but nobody else is making it commercially at this specification. Gallium oxide handles up to 6x higher voltage density than silicon carbide, is 10x more power-efficient, and costs up to 75% less to produce. The wafer is the layer everything in power semiconductors is built on. The company is already shipping to customers in Europe, North America, and Asia, which is unusual for a pre-seed hardware startup. Former Aixtron COO Jochen Linck is on board as operating partner. Vireo Ventures led the round.

💸 New Dry Powder

CriteriaCaixa | €300M by 2030 | Spain | Iberian biotech and deeptech

Acurio Ventures | €115M | Europe | Secondary stakes in European VC funds

Buenavista Buyout Innvierte III | €75M | Spain | Majority stakes in Spanish companies

Norrsken Evolve | €62M | Europe | Pre-seed climate, health, and education

Soho Square Partnership Capital Fund II | £50M cornerstone | United Kingdom | Established UK small and mid-sized businesses

SFC Capital | €11M commitment | United Kingdom | UK regional early stage

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Agathe

Mind The Gap #W28

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 06:36:06 GMT

📅 July 7 – 11, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins
📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Skello raised €200M and somehow ended up with the founders owning more of the company than before. Lovable is in talks at a valuation that would double in six months to reach $13.2B. Kraken Technology builds uncrewed naval vessels and just became a unicorn. These three companies have almost nothing in common except that they are all European and all raising serious capital.

📰 News of the Week

Kraken Technology Group raises $175M Series B, becomes Europe’s newest maritime defence unicorn

The Fareham-based maker of uncrewed surface vessels crossed a $1B valuation backed by DTCP, the NATO Innovation Fund, Rheinmetall, and the British Business Bank. Customers include the UK MoD, NATO, and USSOCOM. Founder Mal Crease spent 20 years setting world speed records in offshore powerboat racing before pivoting into naval autonomy in 2020.

Nscale lands a $900M revolving credit facility for AI data centres

The London hyperscaler secured the facility from a syndicate of 12 banks including J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America, to build data centre capacity across the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Third debt deal in five months after a $1.4B GPU-backed loan in February and $790M for its Norway campus in May. Total capital raised passes $6.3B.

Lovable in talks to raise $300M at a $13.2B valuation

The Stockholm vibe-coding platform, founded in 2024 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, is reportedly in talks for a round that would double its December 2025 valuation of $6.6B in under six months. The company hit $500M in ARR in June, with users including Workday, Asana, and Nvidia. Menlo Ventures, a backer since the Series B, is expected to lead.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Lendable | $670M ABS | United Kingdom | FinTech | Goldman Sachs

Skello | €200M | France | HRTech | Bridgepoint Development Capital V, Partech, XAnge

Gradium | $100M Seed | France | Voice AI | FirstMark Capital, Eurazeo, Nvidia, DST Global

QuantumDiamonds | €91M | Germany | Semiconductors | €15M equity led by World Fund + €76M EU Chips Act grant

BIZAY | €48.7M | Portugal | E-commerce | Indico Capital Partners

Thought Machine | $30M | United Kingdom | FinTech | Tier-1 bank

Alchemab Therapeutics | €29.3M Series A | United Kingdom | Biotech | British Business Bank

🚪 Exits

Myricx Bio | Acquired by Novartis | up to $1.5B | United Kingdom | Biotech

Conjura | Acquired by Wayflyer | Ireland | Data Analytics

Cloudsweep | Acquired by Tekever | Portugal | AI

Encodian | Acquired by Circeus | United Kingdom | Document Automation

Efteor / Télôs Watch | Acquired by Vam Investments | Switzerland | Watchmaking

Xink | Acquired by Omnidocs Denmark | Software

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Gyre Energy | CleanTech | Pre-Seed | $1.3M | Speedinvest

Cooling is roughly a fifth of global electricity demand, and it is growing faster than the grid can absorb. Gyre pairs physics-based AI with thermal energy storage to shift cooling load to cheaper, greener hours, so equipment runs less when power costs most. In its first published deployment the platform cut electricity costs by 38% and daily energy use by 35%, with a payback under 18 months. The company is now deploying inside a 140,000 square foot site run by one of the world’s largest cold chain operators. The same infrastructure that cools warehouses points naturally toward data centres next, which is probably where the real market sits.

💸 New Dry Powder

Warren becomes Rift Capital
The Paris-based secondary provider is rebranding. Same thesis, same team: AI, Infrastructure, Robotics, Fintech, Computing, Space and Defence. The new name reflects a sharper positioning around access to pre-IPO companies in categories where the window to invest is narrow by definition.

EIFO | €476M | Denmark / Europe | European energy independence and green transition infrastructure

Expeditions Fund II | €197M | Poland - UK | European defence tech | BAE Systems, Keysight

Primo Space 2 | €120M | Italy | Space and dual-use

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

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Agathe

Mind The Gap #W27

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 06:06:12 GMT

📅 June 29 – July 03, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Two IPOs, a $1.2B drone round, and a $1.97B antitrust win against Google. Bending Spoons opened at $18B on Nasdaq and popped 40% by close. Quantum Systems, whose Vector drones ran 19,000 missions in Ukraine last year, more than doubled its valuation to $8B and is now openly talking about merging with Stark. And Klarna extracted two billion dollars from Google through a Stockholm court.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Quantum Systems raises $1.2B Series D at an $8B valuation

The Munich drone maker doubled its valuation with a Series D co-led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus, and Advent, with Bond, Fidelity, Wellington, Balderton, and HV Capital also participating. Florian Seibel is now openly talking about acquisitions and a possible merger with Stark. This is Europe’s largest private defence-tech financing on record.

Bending Spoons lists on Nasdaq at $18B, pops 40% on day one

The Milan-based serial acquirer of Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite opened on Nasdaq on July 1 at an $18B valuation and closed up 40%. CEO Luca Ferrari says the company will keep buying underperforming software assets using AI to extract margin.

Klarna wins a $1.97B antitrust case against Google

A Stockholm court ruled that Google gave its own comparison shopping service preferential treatment over Klarna’s PriceRunner subsidiary and ordered roughly $1.97B in damages. A European company extracting two billion dollars from Google via a court sets a precedent the rest of the sector will watch closely.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

InSoil | €120M Credit facility| Lithuania | AgriFinTech | Pollen Street, EIF

Openchip | €115M | Spain | Semiconductors | SETT

Andercore | €30M revolving credit facility | Germany | IndustrialTech | UniCredit, KfW Venture Tech Growth Financing

Theo | €25M Series A | Germany | Real Estate | Insight Partners, BlackRock (debt)

Gaussion | €24.5M | United Kingdom | DeepTech | BGF, AlbionVC

StirlingX | $20M Series A | United Kingdom | Defence Tech | Ventura Capital, RCM Private Markets Master Fund

Telum Therapeutics | €18M Series A | Spain | BioTech | AMR Action Fund, Inveready

Alva Industries | €16M | Norway | DeepTech | Nysnø Climate Investments

🚪 Exits

Bending Spoons | Nasdaq IPO | $18B opening valuation, +40% by close | Italy | Software

Acasi | Acquired by Qonto | France | Accounting Software

European Astrotech | Acquired by The Exploration Company | Europe | SpaceTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

BRYM | NeuroTech | Pre-Seed | €650K | Lotus One Investment, Antler

BRYM builds wearable EEG headbands that turn focus into a trainable skill. The pitch is straightforward: attention spans are collapsing, and the productivity cost is measurable. The company started in automotive manufacturing, where operator errors have real safety consequences, and reported a 46% reduction in errors in early pilots. The longer-term ambition is to make EEG-based cognitive training as accessible as a gym membership, with a subscription model riding on proprietary hardware the round is funding. At €650K this is genuinely pre-product-at-scale, and EEG consumer hardware has a long history of promising demos that never reach mass adoption. But the founding team at BRYM has been thoughtful about where to land first: enterprise, where willingness to pay is higher and the productivity ROI is concrete. Stockholm-based, led by Charlie Ohlén and Nils Hagberg.

💸 New Dry Powder

Tapestry VC Fund III | €70M | United Kingdom | European repeat founders, Series A and B

Orbit Capital | €107M | Europe | Venture debt for CEE scale-ups

Osney Capital Fund I | Osney Capital | €69M | United Kingdom | UK cybersecurity seed, pre-seed to seed

Climentum Capital | €60M (first close) | Nordics | Climate hardtech, seed and Series A

Ruya Ventures | $50M | Europe | Deeptech, solo GP

P101 / Prana Ventures | €100M | Italy | Seed and early stage, expanded with Prana Ventures integration

Omnea / Firedrop | Omnea + Firedrop | United Kingdom | Fund backing employees as future founders

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Agathe

Mind The Gap #W26

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:36:24 GMT

📅 June 22 – 26, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Stark just turned two years old and raised €500M at a €3.5B valuation. Bending Spoons is heading for Nasdaq at a possible $19B price tag. And a Dutch firm closed the largest private equity buyout fundraise the country has ever seen, betting €5.25B that boring software beats trendy software when AI hits the market.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Main Capital Partners closes €5.25B dual fundraise, the largest PE buyout raise in Dutch history
Main Capital IX and Main Foundation III hit their hard caps of €4B and €1.25B respectively, more than doubling their predecessor funds. The firm’s pitch to LPs: AI is not a threat to enterprise software, it is a buying opportunity, backed by a sub-0.5% loss rate over 23 years and 38 exits at a 4.7x average gross return.

Bending Spoons targets up to $19B valuation in US IPO
The Milan-based serial acquirer of Vimeo, WeTransfer, Evernote, AOL, and Eventbrite is seeking to raise $1.62B on the Nasdaq, with trading expected to begin in early July under the ticker BSP. Net income flipped from a $112M loss to $27.5M in profit in the most recent quarter.

Stark raises €500M at a €3.5B valuation
The Berlin-based autonomous drone maker, founded just two years ago, closed a round led by Sequoia and Founders Fund. Peter Thiel’s continued conviction in European defence tech keeps showing up in the biggest rounds of the category.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Bionyra Pharma | €143M Series A | France | Biotech | Jeito Capital, Sofinnova Partners

TRIMTECH Therapeutics | €41M Seed | United Kingdom | Biotech | JJDC, BGF

Leyden Labs | €40M | Netherlands | Biotech | EIC, Invest-NL

Isometric | €34M Series A | United Kingdom | Climate Tech | AVP

Tsuga | €30M | France | AI | Singular

Prosper AI | $30M Series A | Spain | HealthTech | a16z

Tissium | €30M Series D2 | France | MedTech | US investors, EIB

Astral Systems | €26M | United Kingdom | DeepTech | Mercia Ventures

🚪 Exits

Vibe.co | Acquired by Walmart | $1.4B | France | AdTech

Sanmirna Therapeutics | Acquired by Thalia Therapeutics | Netherlands | Biotech

Aldea | Acquired by LiveKid | undisclosed | Poland | EdTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Acodyne | DeepTech / Unmanned Cargo Aircraft | €2.5M | Pre-Seed | Gungnir Capital, PSV Hafnium

Helicopters dominate two expensive, dangerous logistics niches: military resupply in contested areas, and offshore servicing where a missing part can halt production at hundreds of thousands of euros a day. Acodyne’s E100 is an electric eVTOL that takes off vertically, then flies fixed-wing at 450 km/h, double a typical helicopter’s cruise speed, carrying 100 to 500kg over up to 500km. Staying cargo-only sidesteps the certification burden that has stalled most of the eVTOL sector for years. Gungnir Capital, which also backed Kelluu, moved in after third-party validation of the engineering, and Acodyne already has named pilot routes, including Greenland field trials in spring 2027 and an offshore corridor in Denmark. First flight tests are scheduled before the end of 2026.

💸 New Dry Powder

Seedcamp | $320M across two funds | United Kingdom | $220M for Seedcamp VII (pre-seed/seed, up to $1.3M first checks), $100M for Select II (growth-stage follow-on); pivoting toward physical AI, robotics, and deeptech

CapMan Infra | €750M target, first close | Finland | Nordic Infrastructure III, energy and utilities, transportation, digital infrastructure

Norrsken Launcher | €80M | Sweden | Second fund, first institutional LP, European impact startups

Nucleo Ventures | €34M | Romania | Startups and SMEs across Romania and CEE

Thank you for reading.

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

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Agathe

Mind The Gap #W25

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:03:52 GMT

📅 June 15 – 19, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

If there is one week where sovereignty has been the word, it’s this one. The US restricting access to Anthropic’s most powerful models for Europeans should hopefully wake up anyone still convinced Europe doesn’t need its own frontier models, and more broadly, its own answers across every critical sector. France did answer hard this week, with fresh capital behind Tibi and a defence push that includes a €32M Series A for battlefield intelligence startup Comand AI, plus the launch of a new €500M defence fund from an Earlybird and AVP collaboration. Let’s hope this latest wake-up call keeps producing real action in the weeks ahead, not just headlines.

To read more on Comand AI:

📰 News of the Week

The US locks Europe out of Anthropic’s most powerful models
A directive from the US government suspended access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, inside or outside the US. For European AI builders who had leaned on frontier US models, it’s a blunt reminder of how exposed that dependency is, and it’s part of why the sovereignty conversation isn’t going away.

France adds €13B to Tibi, the model other countries are starting to copy
France raised €13 billion in new institutional capital for the third phase of Tibi, with half earmarked for deeptech. State-linked companies including SNCF and Naval Group are now joining as investors. A serious bet on keeping French scale-ups funded domestically.

CuspAI reportedly closing in on a $2.6B valuation with Jeff Bezos backing
The UK materials-discovery startup would more than quadruple its valuation from $100M raised in September last year.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Solar Foods | €77.8M Grant + R&D loan | Finland | FoodTech | Business Finland

Conduct | €51M Series A | United Kingdom | Enterprise AI | Index Ventures

Comand AI | €32M Series A | France | Defence Tech | Blossom Capital

Undo | €31M Series B | United Kingdom | DevTools | Elsewhere Partners

Festina Finance | €25M | Denmark | FinTech | Birchway Capital

NeuralTrust | $20M Seed | Spain | Cybersecurity | Alstin Capital

Orbio | €18M Series A | Spain | HR Tech | Dawn Capital

Vivici | €12.5M | Netherlands | FoodTech | European Innovation Council

Flagright | $12.5M Series A | UK - US | RegTech | Infinity Ventures

Cortea | €12M Seed | Germany | AuditTech | Dawn Capital

Rocapine | €11.2M Series A | France | ConsumerTech | Educapital

Cargofy | $11M Series A | Ukraine | Logistics | u.ventures, Toloka.vc, Movens Capital

Causa Prima | $10M Pre-Seed | Sweden | FinTech | Creandum

🚪 Exits

Expatica | Acquired by Wise | Netherlands | Media

PayCaptain | Acquired by The Citation Group | United Kingdom | Payroll Tech

Mixhalo | Acquired by DeepL | United States | Audio Streaming

🔍 My Personal Favorite

OneSoil | AgriTech | €1M | existing investors

OneSoil is a Belarusian-founded, Switzerland-based startup that built one of the most widely used free satellite-monitoring apps for farmers, tracking crop health and field conditions from space without the enterprise sales motion most agtech companies rely on. This round is small, just €1M from existing backers including Yury Melnichek, but it’s a reminder that not every defensible business needs a nine-figure round to matter. Free distribution at scale, where millions of farmers already check field NDVI maps the way people check the weather, is its own kind of moat, one that’s much harder to buy than to build.

💸 New Dry Powder

E2D, Earlybird + AVP | €500M | Germany / France | European defence and dual-use growth fund, ~€25M tickets into ~20 companies, first close June 30

BAE Systems → Lakestar & Expeditions | €50M | United Kingdom | LP investment into two European defence-tech VC funds via the Launchpad programme

BRAVE FRANCE | €20M | France / Ukraine | Joint grant programme for missile, drone, and air defence systems, grants up to €1M, first call September

FPE Capital Fund IV | €46M (first close) | United Kingdom | Growth equity, cornerstone investment from British Business Bank

Wave Ventures Fund III | €10M | Finland | Angel and pre-seed, Nordics and Baltics, run entirely by investors under 25

EXANTE Gecko Fund | €1M | United Kingdom | Grants for critical open-source infrastructure in financial technology

Thank you for reading.
Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

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See you next Monday.

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W24

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:08:53 GMT

📅 June 08 – 12, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Three billion-euro rounds in one week, across robots, satellites, and battlefield interceptors. NEURA and ICEYE alone account for €2.4B of that. Alta Ares, two years old and already deploying in three active conflict zones, raised €50M to scale interceptors that cost a fraction of the missiles they replace. Meanwhile Morpho closed one of DeFi’s largest rounds ever, Mistral is heading for a €20B valuation, and Bending Spoons filed for a US IPO.

Read more about Alta Ares on this previous article :

📰 News of the Week

Mistral in talks to raise €3B at €20B valuation

Reports this week put Mistral in conversations to close a round at nearly double its last known valuation of €11.7B. If it closes, this would be one of the largest European AI fundraises on record.

Bending Spoons files for US IPO

Italy’s app portfolio company behind Evernote, WeTransfer, and Splice filed for a US listing. Another European exit choosing New York over home markets.

ICEYE raises €1B at a €10B+ valuation

Led by General Atlantic, the Finnish SAR satellite company is now one of Europe’s most valuable private defence and space assets. Customers span governments and militaries across NATO-aligned nations.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

THEKER | €73M Series A | Spain | Industrial AI Robotics | CRV, Samsung, LVMH, Cathay Innovation

Alta Ares | €50M Series A | France | Defence Tech | Air Street Capital, Cherry Ventures, OTB Ventures, Harpoon Ventures

CameraMatics | €49M | Ireland | Fleet AI | Blume Equity, Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, Goodbody Capital Partners

Rem3dy Health | €16M | United Kingdom | HealthTech | Suntory, Estrella Galicia, Apollo Hospitals, UPSA

NewOrbit | €16M Series A | United Kingdom | SpaceTech | Voyager Ventures

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Aavuus | SpaceTech | Pre-Seed | undisclosed | Maki.vc

LEO is getting crowded fast and the tracking infrastructure has not kept up. Objects between 1 and 10 cm are the critical blind spot: too small for commercial radar to routinely detect, large enough to disable a satellite on impact. Aavuus builds a global network of ground-based laser ranging stations that measure object positions with centimetre-level precision, closing a gap that current systems cannot address. The company spun out of the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute, which means the core technology is proven at the institutional level and Aavuus is commercialising it rather than inventing it from scratch. With tens of thousands of additional satellites heading to LEO over the next decade and debris removal still largely unsolved, the timing is structural.

🚪 Exits

Gladia | Acquired by OVHcloud | undisclosed | France | Voice AI

Pricing Hub | Acquired by Akeneo | undisclosed | France | Pricing Intelligence

additiv | Acquired by Temenos | undisclosed | Switzerland | Wealth Management SaaS

GoHenry | Acquired by Barclays | undisclosed | United Kingdom | Consumer FinTech

PatentMaker | Acquired by DeepIP | undisclosed | Germany | LegalTech

💸 New Dry Powder

Pitchdrive Fund IV | €60M | Europe | AI-native early-stage European founders

Generation Tech Partners | €50M | Germany | AI roll-up strategy, German SME acquisitions

Creator Fund I | $56M | United Kingdom | Scientific founders at pre-seed

Angel Invest Fund III | €40M | Europe | Angel to Seed

Varangians | €10M | Sweden | DefenceTech, Ukraine-focused

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

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Agathe

Mind The Gap #W23

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:31:29 GMT

📅 June 01 – 05, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Two nine-figure quantum rounds in one week. Anthropic filing for IPO at $61.5B while offering EU regulators access to its most powerful cybersecurity model. Brussels proposing to reserve AI and cloud contracts for European providers. Kpler taking $1B from Sixth Street. A Dutch startup growing wood from tree stem cells in bioreactors. Not every week has a throughline, but this one does: European tech is being taken seriously, by capital markets, by institutions, and by the scientists who keep building things nobody expected to work.

📰 News of the Week

Anthropic files for IPO and offers EU access to Mythos

The Claude maker has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement with the SEC. On the same day, Anthropic offered EU regulators access to Mythos, its most advanced AI cybersecurity model, previously restricted to Microsoft, JPMorgan, and the UK government. A dual move that reads as both financial preparation and geopolitical positioning.

Oxford Quantum Circuits raises £260M, Europe’s largest private quantum round ever

The UK company builds superconducting quantum computers deployed across the US, Japan, and Spain for customers in finance, defence, and security. Led by Bullhound Capital, with the British Business Bank and J.P. Morgan among the backers. Oversubscribed.

EU unveils tech sovereignty package

The European Commission proposed a package covering four areas: semiconductors (Chips Act 2.0), cloud and AI infrastructure, open source, and the digitalisation of the energy sector. The most consequential policy move for European enterprise tech since GDPR.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Oxford Quantum Circuits | €300M Series C | United Kingdom | Quantum Computing | Bullhound Capital, British Business Bank, J.P. Morgan

Twinco Capital | €165M | Spain | FinTech | €15M Series B led by FMO + €150M securitisation facility

Quobly | €115M | France | Quantum Computing | STMicroelectronics, Air Liquide

Innovafeed | €51M | France | AgriTech | Creadev, QIA, Temasek, ADM, ABC Impact

Apoha | $36M Seed | United Kingdom | DeepTech | Singular

Semble | €35M Series C | United Kingdom | HealthTech | Revaia

ICEYE | €28M R&D grant | Finland | SpaceTech | Finnish government

Gigaton | $26M Series A | United Kingdom | IndustrialTech | Plural

Encosa | €25M Seed | Germany | CleanTech | Realyze Ventures

Fuse Energy | €25M Series B extension | United Kingdom | EnergyTech | 20VC; Collaborative Fund

Tilt | $26M | United Kingdom | Live-Video Commerce | Vinted Ventures

Invisix | €20M Seed | Netherlands | Semiconductors | Hitachi Ventures, Transition Ventures, imec.xpand, Doosan

Innovorder | €20M | France | Restaurant Tech | UL Invest

🚪 Exits

Contentful | Acquired by Salesforce | undisclosed | Germany | CMS / SaaS

Vendr | Acquired by Vertice | undisclosed | United Kingdom | SaaS Procurement / AI

Wecan Group | Majority stake acquired by SEALSQ | €5.4M | Switzerland | Post-Quantum Financial Security

Moca Traveltech | Acquired by Entravel Group | undisclosed | Spain | TravelTech

Katalogo.ai | Acquired by CommerceClarity | undisclosed | Europe | E-commerce AI

🔍 My Personal Favorite

New Dawn Bio | BioTech / Cultured Wood | Pre-Seed | €2.1M

Humans have been cutting rectangular boards from round tree trunks for millennia, wasting a significant portion of every log in the process. New Dawn Bio grows wood directly from tree stem cells in bioreactors, producing pre-shaped timber without logging or sawing waste. The technology produces wood up to 10,000 times faster than conventional forestry and could reduce customers’ cost of goods by up to 80%. The company has demonstrated cultured wood across six different tree species and is based out of Wageningen, one of the world’s leading agricultural research ecosystems. Founded in 2024 by Tom Clement and Kianti Figler, both systems biologists. With 5.3 million hectares of tropical forest lost every year and the global timber market valued at nearly $1 trillion, the structural opportunity is real even if the technology is still early. CapitalT led, with Norrsken Evolve and Ontdekkers Group participating.

💸 New Dry Powder

Merantix Capital AI Fund | Merantix Capital | €103M | Germany | Early-stage European AI across logistics, healthcare, robotics, and manufacturing

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Agathe

Mind The Gap #W22

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:08:26 GMT

📅 May 25 – 29, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech - daily European tech news, see you there.

Europe’s tech scene appears to be spending more time asking who owns the compute, the energy, and the infrastructure.

From defence to AI, some of this week’s biggest stories point in the same direction: strategic technologies are no longer a niche corner of venture capital. They’re increasingly becoming the main event.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Oura launches Ring 5 and moves closer to IPO

The Finnish company unveiled Ring 5, its smallest smart ring yet at 40% lighter than its predecessor, as it advances its confidential NYSE filing. Samsung already has a ring. Apple is rumoured to be building one. Oura is racing to the public markets before the category gets crowded.

Stark seeks €300M at €2.5B valuation

The German defence unicorn is raising fresh capital with Peter Thiel reportedly doubling down on his position. Stark builds autonomous drone systems and is one of the most visible bets on Europe’s accelerating drone arms race.

Mistral signs industrial AI deals with BMW and Airbus

On its third anniversary, the French AI scaleup launched “Mistral for Industrial Engineering” and signed partnerships with BMW and Airbus. The move targets design, engineering, and manufacturing and puts Mistral directly up against US incumbents on European industrial territory.

Anthropic raises $65B at a $965B valuation and opens its sixth European office

Claude maker closed one of the largest private funding rounds in tech history, led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia, with run-rate revenue crossing $47B earlier this month. It also opened a Milan office, its sixth European city in under a year. At $965B, Anthropic now eclipses OpenAI as the most valuable private AI company in the world.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Focused Energy | $240M | Germany | EnergyTech | RWE

Inherent | $50M | United Kingdom | Deeptech | Index Ventures

Lucis | $20M | France | Health AI | Singular

MokN | $15M | France | Cybersecurity | GV

🚪 Exits

In3 | Acquired by TrueLayer | Netherlands | FinTech

Bosque Foods | Acquired by InfiniteRoots | Spain | FoodTech

Visiopharm | Acquired by Grundium | Denmark | HealthTech

Uptmz | Acquired by Aizy | Denmark | MarketingTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Stellar Alpina | Switzerland |SpaceTech | Pre-Seed | €3.8M

Getting a satellite into orbit is the easy part now. Moving it once it’s there, raising orbits, avoiding collisions, extending operational life, is where the economics quietly break down. Current in-space propulsion is fuel-heavy, which means more mass at launch, higher costs, and shorter useful lifespans. Rotating detonation engines fix this by replacing subsonic combustion with supersonic detonation, extracting significantly more thrust per unit of propellant. If the efficiency gains hold at scale, the economics of in-orbit transfer and constellation management change meaningfully. The four ARIS alumni who founded Stellar Alpina built Europe’s first student RDRE in 2024 and completed eight detonative hotfires just 82 days after incorporating. RDRE is hard to control beyond lab conditions and performance at altitude remains to be proved, but few teams arrive at pre-seed with this many hours on the hardware. Founderful led, LP&E participated.

💸 New Dry Powder

byFounders Fund III | €130M | Denmark | Pre-seed and seed, €500K to €4M tickets, 8-15 investments per year, New Nordics and beyond

Longwall Venture Partners Fund II | £100M | United Kingdom | Deep tech spinouts

Marvelous Scito Fund | Marvelous / Joachim Herz Foundation | €20M | Germany | Advanced materials, waste valorisation, robotics

Transition Ventures | $150M | Europe | Deeptech / frontier tech

Goalhanger Ventures | undisclosed | United Kingdom | Creator-led media businesses

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

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See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.

Best,

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W21

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 25 May 2026 07:08:48 GMT

📅 May 18– 22, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

Oura files for NYSE. EQT takes the wheel on a €5B EU fund. Cohere goes back to Germany for seconds. Viktor hits $15M ARR in 10 weeks. Fresha quietly becomes a unicorn via KKR. Two French AI startups raise $40M on the same day. And somewhere in Geneva, a team from EPFL is building a foundation model of the human cortex.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Oura files confidentially for NYSE IPO

The Finnish health wearables company has submitted paperwork to the SEC, with no share count or price range disclosed. Valued at $11B in October 2025 after doubling revenue in consecutive years, it is heading toward one of the most credible healthtech exits the continent has produced in this cycle.

EQT wins mandate to manage the EU’s €5B Scaleup Europe Superfund

The Swedish private equity giant will oversee the EU’s largest state-backed tech fund, with over 100 companies already in its pipeline. EQT is pushing to extend eligibility to UK-based startups, which would mark a significant post-Brexit policy shift.

Cohere acquires its second German AI startup in a month

Weeks after the Aleph Alpha merger, Cohere acquired Berlin-based Reliant AI, a healthcare AI startup whose customers include GSK, Ipsen, and Kyowa Kirin. Cohere is using European M&A to build vertical AI capabilities fast, with each deal framed as an AI sovereignty play.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Fresha | $80M | United Kingdom | Wellness | KKR Next Generation Technology Growth

REPS | $23.6M | Austria | CleanTech | undisclosed

🚪 Exits

Oura | Confidential NYSE filing |Finland | Health / Wearables

Emmi AI | Acquired by Mistral | Austria | AI

Reliant AI | Acquired by Cohere | Germany | Healthcare AI

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Neurosoft Bioelectronics | MedTech / Brain-Computer Interfaces | Seed | $7.5M

Neurosoft builds soft, stretchable brain-computer interfaces that sit on the surface of the cortex without penetrating brain tissue, a meaningful departure from the implant-and-puncture approach that has defined the BCI field since the beginning. The platform has already been tested in 10 patients across clinical trials at UTHealth Houston and UMC Utrecht for epilepsy surgery guidance. The real play here is a cortical foundation model: the company is using data from its clinical devices to train a model of the human cortex, the same logic that underpins large language models but applied to neural recordings. Spun out of EPFL, the team holds 25+ patents. Skybound Venture Capital led the round, which was oversubscribed and brings total funding to over $20M.

💸 New Dry Powder

Lauxera Growth II | Lauxera Capital Partners | €520M | France / USA | European healthtech growth equity, €20-50M tickets, 12-15 portfolio companies targeting US expansion

Earlybird + AVP Defence Fund | Earlybird / AVP | €500M | Germany / France | Defence Tech

Mouro Capital Fund III | Mouro Capital | $400M | Europe | FinTech / AI Infrastructure

Ispania Growth Fund | COFIDES / QIA | €300M | Spain | Green and digital transition

Skybound Venture Capital | Skybound | $38M | Europe | Deep Tech, early stage

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

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See you next Monday.

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W20

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:21:15 GMT

📅 May 11– 15, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

From AI biotech and infrastructure to fintech, defence, and semiconductors, capital kept flowing into increasingly large and strategic bets. Hard to ignore the fact that every company in this week’s top 15 raised above €20M.

The UK dominated the headlines once again, pulling capital from US funds, sovereign investors, global banks, and major tech players all at the same time.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Isomorphic Labs raises $2.1B Series B

The London-based AI drug design company spun out of Google DeepMind closed the largest AI biotech round on record. Led by Thrive Capital, with Alphabet, GV, Temasek, MGX, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund joining the cap table. No drug has entered human trials yet. Demis Hassabis has committed to dosing the first patient before the end of 2026. Capital from the US, UK, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore all in one round.

n8n doubles valuation to $5.2B via SAP deal

Berlin-based workflow automation startup n8n received a strategic investment from SAP that pushed its valuation from $2.5B to $5.2B in under a year. The two companies also signed a multi-year deal embedding n8n into Joule Studio, SAP’s enterprise AI agent builder.

Charli XCX invests in Nothing

London-based consumer hardware company Nothing named Charli XCX its first Global Brand Ambassador and newest shareholder, off the back of its $200M Series C at a $1.3B valuation. She joins The Weeknd and Swedish House Mafia on the cap table. Carl Pei says she is helping shape what they build next, not just fronting campaigns.

Wise lists in the US with $2.5B in annual revenue

The UK fintech is heading to US markets after reaching $2.5B in annual revenue. Another European exit going to New York rather than London.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Nscale | €670M | United Kingdom | AI Infrastructure | ABN AMRO, DNB, Eksfin, Nordea, SEB

Paymentology | $175M | United Kingdom | FinTech | Apis Partners, Aspirity Partners

UroMems | $60M | France | MedTech | Ajax Health

Rowden | £25M | United Kingdom | Defence Tech | UK National Wealth Fund

Iceotope | $26M | United Kingdom | AI Infrastructure | Two Seas Capital, Barclays Climate Ventures

Webidoo | €21M | Italy | AI / SMB Automation | Azimut Group (IXC3)

🚪 Exits

Banked | Acquired by National Australia Bank | United Kingdom | FinTech

DC Company (Konbini, Le Gorafi, Herstory, C’est Qui La Boss) | Acquired by Alexandre Yazdi (Voodoo CEO) | France | Digital Media

Glocalzone | Acquired by MovitOn | Turkey | Logistics

Graphcore | $450M+ from SoftBank | United Kingdom | Semiconductors |

Ripetizioni.it | Acquired by Superprof | Italy | EdTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Twin Prime | Defence / AI | Pre-Seed | $10M

Twin Prime is building foundation models trained on multi-sensor fusion data: radar, EO/IR, signals intelligence, rather than repurposing commercial vision or language models for defence. That distinction matters both operationally and in procurement conversations. The founding team mixes ML research depth with defence-sector experience, which is what NATO-aligned buyers actually want to see. European defence ministries are under growing pressure to reduce dependence on US-sourced AI systems, and that is opening a procurement window at the model layer.

💸 New Dry Powder

Lansdowne Partners VC Fund I | €129M first close, target €172M | United Kingdom | UK university IP spinouts across healthcare data, quantum, advanced materials, semiconductors, and defence | British Business Bank, Aviva Investors, Lloyds Banking Group

BII AI Lab €7M | Denmark | AI for life sciences startups | Danish Industry Foundation

Eighteen48 Partners Fund I | €175M first close, target €350M | United Kingdom | Mid-market tech buyouts in Europe

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

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If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European Tech.

See you next Monday.

Best,

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W19

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:11:49 GMT

📅 May 04 – 10, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

Quantum & Defense week. Four quantum computing rounds landed in the same seven days, which is either a coincidence or a signal that European deep tech investors have made their bets on where the next compute paradigm starts. Helsing moving toward an $18B valuation is the other number worth sitting with. Defence AI is no longer a niche category. It is becoming one of the most generously priced sectors in European private markets, and the institutional conviction behind it is accelerating.

📰 News of the Week

Helsing set for $18B valuation in new funding round

The German AI defence company is reportedly raising at approximately $18B, placing it among Europe’s most valuable private tech companies. The institutional repricing of AI-driven defence assets shows no sign of slowing.

ICEYE targets €250M raise at €2.4B+ valuation

The Finnish satellite imaging company is in talks to raise €250M according to Bloomberg, with defence contracts pushing its valuation above €2.4B. Another data point on how dual-use and space infrastructure are being repriced in 2026.

SAP acquires Prior Labs for €1B+ commitment

SAP signed a definitive agreement to acquire Freiburg-based Prior Labs, the pioneer of Tabular Foundation Models, and committed more than €1B over four years to scale it into a European frontier AI lab. Prior Labs retains its brand, team, and open-source commitments.

Doctolib acquires Medicus Health and commits £100M+ to the UK market

The French healthtech unicorn bought UK primary care software startup Medicus Health, pledging over £100M in investment and 150 new hires. It puts Doctolib in direct competition with the Optum and TPP duopoly that has long controlled UK primary care infrastructure.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

LegalPlace | €70M | France | LegalTech | Move Capital, XAnge, Eurazeo

Skeleton Technologies | €33M | Estonia | AI Infrastructure | Axon Partners, Taiwania Capital

SWEBAL | €30M | Sweden | Defence | BA

Qutwo | €25M | Finland | AI / Quantum | €325M EV | BA

Ethos | $22M | United Kingdom | HR Tech | a16z

Lithosquare | €21.3M | France | Critical Minerals | World Fund, Kindred Capital

EnteroBiotix | £19M | United Kingdom | BioTech| Thairm Bio, Scottish National Investment Bank

OpenTrade | $17M | United Kingdom | Crypto | Mercury Fund, Notion Capital

Reel | €15M | Denmark | EnergyTech | Future Energy Ventures

🚪 Exits

Medicus Health | Acquired by Doctolib | United Kingdom | HealthTech

Legalstart | Acquired by LegalPlace | France | LegalTech

Moonfish AI | Acquired by Batch | France | Marketing Tech

VeloLife | Acquired by Laka | United Kingdom | InsurTech / Micromobility

QHarbor | Acquired by Quantum Machines | Netherlands | Quantum Computing

Prior Labs | Acquired by SAP | €1B+ commitment | Germany | AI

Moove Connected Mobility | Acquired by Netradyne | Europe | Mobility

Getaround Europe | Merged with GoMore | Europe | Mobility

Sastrify | Acquired by Deel | Germany | Software Procurement

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Moonlight AI | HealthTech / AI Diagnostics | Seed | €2.8M

Moonlight AI targets a specific bottleneck in oncology: extracting genomic biomarker information from standard blood and cytology slides, a modality that is widespread and low-cost but conventionally unable to yield molecular-level insight without separate genetic assays. The approach applies AI image analysis to existing imaging workflows to infer genomic features, positioning it as a non-destructive overlay on current lab practice rather than a replacement modality. This matters technically because it reduces dependency on expensive next-generation sequencing or immunohistochemistry panels for initial biomarker screening, compressing both time-to-result and cost per patient. The syndicate includes MEDIN Fund and VP Venture Partners, investors with sector-specific diligence capacity. The visual-to-genomic inference layer in cancer diagnostics is structurally underserved, and the approach has defensible IP potential if training data and model architecture remain proprietary.

💸 New Dry Powder

Front Ventures | €5M | Ukraine | Defence Tech, Ukraine-focused

Araya Sie Fund | £7.5M (first close) | United Kingdom | Women-led startups, seed stage, up to 40 portfolio companies

Thank you for reading.

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.

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Best,

Agathe

Mind The Gap #16

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:47:23 GMT

📅 April 20 – 24, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

Aleph Alpha is going to Canada. Cohere picks up one of the most talked-about sovereign AI assets in Europe, and nobody should be shocked in hindsight. Without government customers sustaining you at scale, building a competitive foundation model company outside the US is a brutal equation. What matters more is what the rest of the week looked like: clean compute, depot electrification, quantum chip testing infrastructure, and synthetic fuels all drew serious capital. The structural themes are holding. The sovereign AI conversation, on the other hand, just got a lot harder to have.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Aleph Alpha to be acquired by Cohere

Cohere agreed to acquire Germany’s Aleph Alpha, one of the few European foundation model companies explicitly positioned as a sovereign AI alternative to US providers. The deal consolidates two non-US LLM players without keeping the asset in European hands. A tough signal for anyone still arguing Europe can build at the frontier without state-scale anchor customers.

Revolut targets $200B valuation for IPO

The most watched fintech exit in European VC history keeps inching closer to the market.

EU and Ukraine launch €160M defence innovation programme

The EU and Ukraine established a €160M programme combining a €140M EU guarantee and €20M in grants to fund defence innovation startups and projects.

Palantir in talks with UK Met Police on AI-driven investigation tools

Palantir Technologies is in discussions with the Metropolitan Police to deploy AI analysis tools in criminal investigations. One of the most significant law enforcement AI deals in the UK to date, if it closes.

France’s Health Data Hub selects Scaleway to replace Microsoft

The French government chose Scaleway, an Iliad subsidiary, to host national health research data covering millions of citizens, ending a years-long controversy over US hyperscaler access to one of the most sensitive public datasets in Europe. A clean win for European cloud infrastructure.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Verda | €100M | Finland | Cloud | Lifeline Ventures

Cloudsmith | €61.5M Series C | United Kingdom | DevOps | TVC

BLP Digital | $50M | Switzerland | ERP Automation | Goldman Sachs Alternatives

UNIVITY | €27M | France | SpaceTech | Bpifrance, Expansion, Blast Club

ATMOS Space Cargo | €25.7M Series A | Germany | SpaceTech | Baldnord, Expansion

Rivan | £25M | United Kingdom | CleanTech | IQ Capital, Plural

Planetary | €23M | Switzerland | BioTech | Radikal Capital, Oetker Ventures

Decade Energy | €22M | France | CleanTech | Eiffel Investment Group, SET Ventures

OrangeQS | €15M Seed | Netherlands | Quantum | EIC Fund

ScreenPoint Medical | €13.6M | Netherlands | MedTech | Insight Partners, Siemens Healthineers

Exergy3 | €11.4M | United Kingdom | CleanTech | Axeleo Capital, Bayern Kapital

Smart Robotics | €10M Series A | Netherlands | Robotics | Rotterdamse Havendraken, Innovation Industries, Ernij Next

Incapto | €10M Series B | Spain | FoodTech | McWin Capital Partners, Cardumen, Lever VC

Fasal Bio | €7M | Croatia | Sustainable Materials | BlackPeak Capital

🚪 Exits

Aleph Alpha | Acquired by Cohere | undisclosed | Germany | Foundation Models

Quarkslab | Acquired by Airbus | undisclosed | France | Cybersecurity

Gett | Acquired by Lyft | $55M | United Kingdom | Mobility

Fragment | Acquired by Sierra | undisclosed | France | AI / Customer Service

Qura | Acquired by Legora | undisclosed | Sweden | LegalTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Cerca Magnetics | MedTech / Quantum Sensing | Seed | €4.3M

Cerca Magnetics builds wearable brain imaging systems using optically pumped magnetometers, a quantum sensing modality that runs at room temperature. Conventional MEG systems require cryogenic cooling, cost several million euros, need magnetically shielded rooms, and cannot be worn. That combination rules out paediatric use cases and movement disorder research entirely. OPM-based wearable helmets conform to head geometry, enable measurements during natural movement, and improve signal-to-noise ratios for motor and epilepsy research. The €4.3M seed provides runway into a market where neurological diagnostics are chronically underinvested at the hardware level. Proprietary sensor fabrication and calibration algorithms compound defensibility over time. Worth watching early.

💸 New Dry Powder

Kurma Partners | €215M | France | Biotech, Healthcare | early to growth

Passion Capital | €46M | United Kingdom | AI, FinTech, Enterprise Risk | Seed

DFF Ventures | €70M | Netherlands | Vertical AI, Software for physical industries | Pre-seed

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.

Did a friend forward this to you? Subscribe and get Mind The Gap in your inbox every Monday.

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See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.

Best,

Agathe

Ep. 3 | On the Edge: From the Front Line to the Frontier of Innovation, Meet the French Startups Building Tomorrow’s Defense

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:03:39 GMT

This article was written in partnership with Hexa. Hexa recently launched a new accelerator, Hexa Sprint, which is currently supporting defense startups through its program.

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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Best,

Agathe & Emma

Mind The Gap #15

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:48:46 GMT

📅 April 06 – 10, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

👋 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.

Did a friend forward this to you? Subscribe and get Mind The Gap in your inbox every Monday.

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See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.

Best,

Agathe

Ep. 2 | On the Edge: From the Front Line to the Frontier of Innovation, Meet the French Startups Building Tomorrow’s Defense

Agathe Thiery — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:14:01 GMT

This article was written in partnership with Hexa. Hexa recently launched a new accelerator, Hexa Sprint, which is currently supporting defense startups through its program.

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?

[...]

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Agathe & Emma

Mind The Gap #14

Agathe Thiery — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:06:55 GMT

📅 March 30 – 03, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

👋 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.

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 Tech ecosystem.

Share Mind The Gap

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See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.

Best,

Agathe

Ep. 1 | On the Edge: From the Front Line to the Frontier of Innovation, Meet the French Startups Building Tomorrow’s Defense

Agathe Thiery — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:02:16 GMT

This article was written in partnership with Hexa. Hexa recently launched a new accelerator, Hexa Sprint, which is currently supporting defense startups through its program.

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.

[...]

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Mind The Gap #13

Agathe Thiery — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:57:45 GMT

📅 March 23 – 27, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

👋 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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Agathe

[Coming Soon] On the Edge: From the Front Line to the Frontier of Innovation, the French Startups building the future of defense

Agathe Thiery — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:02:09 GMT

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.

Mind The Gap #10

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:29:20 GMT

📅 March 09 – 13, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

👋 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.

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

Did a friend forward this to you? Subscribe and get Mind The Gap in your inbox every Monday.

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See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.

Best,

Agathe

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