Mind The Gap #W26

European Tech & VC: weekly signal over noise. News, deals, funds, & exits.

Jun 29, 2026

📅 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.

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See you next Monday.

Agathe

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