Weekly RoundUp #05 — Orbital Shift
An orbital shift in European tech: higher conviction, faster scaling, and bolder ambition.
📅 February 02 – 06, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins
👋 The Week in Review
This week confirmed a shift already underway: Europe is showing a strong hand, with competitive rounds and renewed conviction.
Across AI, infrastructure, and deeptech, capital is concentrating around companies that combine technical depth, execution speed, and credible paths to scale. New benchmarks are emerging, growth timelines collapsing, valuations stretching into previously unthinkable territory, and investors underwriting ambition at a structural level rather than incremental progress.
Let’s dive into the data.
📰 News of the Week
SpaceX achieves a $1.25 trillion valuation following its landmark acquisition of xAI
By integrating Elon Musk’s AI venture into its aerospace empire, SpaceX has seen its valuation soar to $1.25 trillion, positioning the combined entity as a “sovereign-scale” tech giant that leverages artificial intelligence to optimize Starlink operations and deep-space navigation.
French authorities raid X’s Paris offices and summon Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino for questioning
Escalating a long-standing dispute over content moderation and compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA), French judicial police raided X’s headquarters and issued formal summons to its leadership, signaling a more aggressive European stance against the platform’s regulatory defiance.
ElevenLabs secures $500M in Sequoia-led funding to reach a definitive $11 billion valuation
The London-founded voice AI leader solidified its market dominance with a massive $500M investment from Sequoia Capital, providing the capital necessary to scale its multilingual research and expand its audio foundation models into Hollywood-grade production tools.
Lovable hits $300M ARR just two months after reaching the $200M milestone
The AI-native app builder, Lovable, has demonstrated unprecedented growth by adding $100M in annual recurring revenue in just 60 days, underscoring the massive enterprise demand for autonomous software development platforms.
🇪🇺 Deals of the Week
🔍 The Deep Dive
PRESAGE (Cloud) | Seed | €1.2M
The Deal: Paris-based causal world models for cloud infrastructure that predict system behavior and enable teams to simulate actions before execution raised €1.2M.
The Investors: Led by welovefounders, Kima Ventures, and Boost10x
The Analysis: Engineering teams in cloud-native environments frequently face infrastructure fragility, where the sheer complexity of system dependencies makes it nearly impossible to predict how a single deployment or configuration change might trigger a systemic failure. PRESAGE solves this through its Causal World Models, a simulation-driven platform that identifies and maps the underlying causal relationships between workloads, resources, and dependencies in real-time. By training directly on production data, the system allows engineers to move into anticipatory operations, simulating the propagation of “what-if” scenarios and identifying potential outages before any code is actually executed. Positioning itself as a predictive layer for the global AIOps market, which is projected to reach $19.5 billion by 2026, PRESAGE provides the infrastructure necessary to transform cloud management from reactive troubleshooting into a proactive, self-correcting discipline.
What’s Next: Accelerate the development of its causal world models for cloud infrastructure, enabling engineering teams to simulate the impact of actions before executing them and shift to predictive, anticipatory operations, while supporting the first real-world deployments and refining the technology based on feedback from engineering leaders.
Resoloon (SpaceTech) | Pre-Seed | €500k
The Deal: Budapest-based AI-controlled high-altitude balloons for real-time, high-resolution Earth observation with autonomous stratospheric navigation capabilities secured €500k.
The Investors: Led by Project Europe and Day One Capital
The Analysis: Earth observation has historically faced a “resolution-coverage tetrilemma,” where high-detail drone imagery lacks scale and wide-area satellite data lacks precision. Resoloon solves this through its autonomous high-altitude balloon systems that capture near drone-level imagery (10x10 cm precision) across satellite-scale areas of up to 800 km² per device. Using proprietary AI to navigate 15 layers of atmospheric wind, the stratospheric platform delivers real-time data with a 10-minute latency for sectors including critical infrastructure, insurance, and precision agriculture. By offering monitoring services at 50% lower cost and 600% higher resolution than traditional orbital services, the company is positioning itself as a core infrastructure provider for the global satellite Earth observation market, which is projected to reach $10 billion by 2030.
What’s Next: Finalize its high-altitude balloon imaging product, refine use cases such as critical infrastructure monitoring, disaster response, and national security, and expand commercial and sales efforts to explore new market opportunities
⚡ Deal Flow
🇫🇷 Newcleo (CleanTech) — €72M: Paris-based developer of Lead-cooled Fast Reactor technology and advanced nuclear fuel.
🇩🇪 Twaice (CleanTech) – €24M Debt: Munich-based predictive battery analytics platform for energy storage and electric mobility.
🇱🇺🇩🇪 R3 Robotics (Robotics) — €20M Series A: Luxembourg-based developer of automated disassembly platform for EV systems and batteries using computer vision and AI
🇨🇭Chiral (DeepTech) — €10M Seed: Dübendorf-based high-precision robotic systems to handle nanomaterials like graphene and position them on semiconductors for next-generation chip production.
🇫🇷 Ubees (AgTech) — €8M Seed: Paris-based developer of sensors and AI to monitor hive health remotely and provide recommendations for regenerative agriculture and crop pollination.
🇬🇧 Refute (Cybersecurity) — €5.7M Seed: London-based AI-powered counter-disinformation platform detecting and responding to coordinated influence operations.
🇩🇰 Pluto.markets (FinTech) — €5M Seed: Copenhagen-based YC-backed neobroker offering commission-free trading in fractional stocks, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies targeting Nordic markets with local currencies.
🇸🇪 Berget AI (AI) — €2.1M: Stockholm-based AI infrastructure company building sovereign AI solutions for European organizations.
🇨🇭 Haelixa (DeepTech) — €2M: Zurich-based DNA-based traceability technology providing physical proof of origin and authenticity throughout supply chains.
🇨🇭 DiploTools (GovTech) — €163k Pre-Seed: Trexel-based AI-powered SaaS tools for diplomacy and policy work automating coordination, reporting, and communication tasks.
👉 See the full database of 80 rounds from this week: here.
💸 New Dry Powder
Spotlight: Kembara (Mundi Ventures) 🇪🇸 — €750M
Managed by Mundi Ventures, the Spanish-born Kembara Fund I has reached a massive €750M first close on its way to a €1B target. This vehicle focuses on the “Series B and C desert” for European deeptech, specifically targeting science-driven scaleups in AI, quantum computing, space tech, and robotics. With a substantial ticket size ranging from €15M to €40M (and up to €100M including follow-ons), the fund aims to back approximately 20 companies to prevent them from relocating abroad for growth capital. While the fund is currently actively building its new portfolio, its leadership team brings a heavy-hitting track record with prior experience investing in or building global giants like SpaceX, OpenAI, Palantir, and Anthropic. Kembara distinguishes itself as the first Spanish fund anchored by the European Tech Champions Initiative (ETCI), leveraging a specialized “platform” approach that offers both equity and non-dilutive financing to help hardware-heavy companies scale manufacturing without excessive dilution.
Other Fund Launches:
🇬🇧 AshGrove (€1B): Specialist credit and software investor opening a Copenhagen office to target Nordic B2B SaaS companies with €5-30M ARR.
🇫🇷 SlateVC (€132M): First close of a growth-stage fund (targeting €250M) launched by Eventbrite’s co-founder to back European energy efficiency and climate tech scale-ups.
🇨🇭 Constructor Capital ($110M): First fund dedicated to science-first founders in deeptech, AI, and healthtech, backed by the founder of Acronis and Constructor University.
🇫🇷 Phitrust (€60M): Final close for Phitrust Impact Investors II, a fund dedicated to scaling social and environmental impact companies across Europe.
🇩🇰 BioInnovation Institute (€25M): Early-stage biosolutions funding provided by the Novo Nordisk Foundation to support European startups in food tech and sustainable materials.
🇧🇪 100in (€12M): New pre-seed fund launched by Henchman founders to make €100k bets on 100 early-stage startups with a focus on speed and founder experience.
🇩🇪 Animal (N/A): An angel syndication platform launched by Lakestar Partner Enrico Mellis to enable collaborative investing in early-stage European tech.
Thank you for reading !
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See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.
Best,
Agathe