Weekly RoundUp #10 — Record Breakers
French pride & Broken Records.
📅 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.
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See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.
Best,
Agathe