Mind The Gap #W25
European Tech & VC: weekly signal over noise. News, deals, funds, & exits.
📅 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.
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See you next Monday.
Agathe