Mind The Gap #W29
European Tech & VC: weekly signal over noise. News, deals, funds, & exits.
📅 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
Helsing | $1.8B Series E | Germany | DefenceTech | $18B EV | Dragoneer, Lightspeed, General Catalyst, [...]
Neko Health | €612.7M Series C | Sweden | HealthTech | ~$7B EV | Lightspeed, O.G. Venture Partners
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
Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.
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See you next Monday.
Agathe