Weekly RoundUp Week #13 — Space, Defense & A $4.3B Bag
Software is cute, but have you tried building a rocket? Europe is officially entering its hard tech era.
📅 March 23 – 27, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins
👋 The Week in Review
This week’s numbers are actually insane. Nebius just casually secured $4.3 billion to buy up GPUs, and Isar Aerospace is gunning for a €2 billion valuation right before their maiden orbital flight.
We are witnessing a massive vibe shift in the ecosystem. The days of getting hyped over another B2B productivity app are fading. Right now, the real capital is flowing straight into deep tech, defense, and sovereign infrastructure. Founders are building drone interceptors and figuring out how to beam solar energy down from orbit.
Speaking of defense. If you want a front-row seat to the French startups redefining the rules of modern warfare, get ready for On the Edge: From the Front Line to the Frontier of Innovation. Check out the teaser right here.
Let’s dive into the data.
📰 News of the Week
German rocket startup Isar Aerospace eyes a €2B valuation ahead of its crucial orbital launch this week
As Europe urgently seeks to re-establish sovereign access to space, the Munich-based launch provider is leveraging its upcoming maiden orbital flight to secure a major funding round that would double its valuation, positioning itself as the continent’s premier commercial alternative to SpaceX.
Nebius secures a staggering $4.3B to aggressively expand its AI infrastructure just days after striking deals with Nvidia and Meta
Capitalizing on the intense global bottleneck for computing power, the European cloud provider raised this massive war chest to scale its GPU clusters, cementing its role as a critical, hardware-rich backbone for the world’s leading foundation model builders.
Granola hits unicorn status and raises $125M and launches enterprise context tools to evolve from an AI notepad into a corporate knowledge engine
The digital workplace startup secured a massive new funding round to move beyond individual meeting transcriptions, rolling out deep enterprise integrations that allow its AI agents to draw contextual intelligence from across a company’s entire software stack.
Dash0 officially hits unicorn status with a $110M Balderton-led round as it wins over major enterprise clients like Zalando and Taco Bell
Confirming earlier reports of its meteoric rise, the Berlin-based observability startup reached a $1 billion valuation by leveraging its OpenTelemetry-native platform to successfully pull lucrative, high-volume monitoring contracts away from legacy incumbents like Datadog.
London-based Huel is acquired by Danone in a €1B deal to scale its plant-based nutrition empire globally
The UK direct-to-consumer pioneer has achieved a major exit by joining the French food multinational, signaling a broader FMCG consolidation trend as traditional food conglomerates snap up fast-growing, alternative meal replacement brands to capture younger, health-conscious demographics.
🇪🇺 Deals of the Week
🔍 The Deep Dive
EGIDE (DefenseTech) | Seed | €8M
The Deal: Paris-based startup building electrically-propelled interceptors and Mystique defence platform secured €8M.
The Investors: Led by Expeditions, backed by Eurazeo, Heartcore Capital, Galion.exe, Kima Ventures
The Analysis: Modern military operations are increasingly vulnerable to a “threat asymmetry,” where cheap, highly adaptable drones and evolving aerial munitions can easily overwhelm traditional, rigid, and expensive defense systems. Egide counters this imbalance through a dual-layered defencetech approach: manufacturing cost-efficient, electrically-propelled interceptors paired with “Mystique,” a proprietary, hardware-agnostic software platform. By leveraging distributed sensors and AI-driven detection, this architecture enables reactive iteration to fast-evolving targets and seamless integration across air, ground, and maritime missions, significantly reducing the complexity and cost of threat interception. The proliferation of mass-produced drones in conflicts such as those in Ukraine and the Middle East has fundamentally altered the economics of warfare, exposing the unsustainability of using multi-million dollar missiles against cheap, asymmetric targets. Driven by this geopolitical reality and the subsequent surge in global defense budgets, Egide provides the critical, cost-effective infrastructure necessary for a global counter-UAS market that is projected to surpass $20 billion by 2030.
What’s Next: Accelerating development and team expansion
TerraSpark (SpaceTech) | Pre-Seed | €5M
The Deal: Luxembourg-based space-based solar energy company developing technology to harness solar power from space raised €5M.
The Investors: Led by daphni and Sake Bosch, backed by Luxembourg Business Angel Network and Karaoke Club
The Analysis: The transition to a fully renewable grid is fundamentally bottlenecked by the intermittency of wind and terrestrial solar, compounded by an aging infrastructure that struggles to handle peak loads. TerraSpark bypasses these planetary constraints by engineering a commercial pathway for Space-Based Solar Power, capturing constant solar energy in orbit and beaming it down to Earth via radio frequency wireless transmission. Rather than attempting a massive orbital deployment all at once, the Luxembourg based company is commercializing its technology on the ground first. By providing wireless power for off grid industrial sites and events, TerraSpark generates early revenue and proves regulatory safety before launching its first space to Earth demonstrator in 2028. Driven by the geopolitical necessity for European energy independence following recent supply chain shocks and the skyrocketing power demands of AI data centers, the startup is building the ultimate weather independent baseload utility. By turning orbital energy into a scalable asset, the company operates at the frontier of the space based solar power market, a sector projected to expand rapidly as nations scramble to secure sovereign and continuous renewable energy corridors.
What’s Next: Launch terrestrial wireless power pilots soon, followed by an orbital demonstrator in 2027 and space-to-Earth transmission in 2028.
⚡ Deal Flow
🇨🇭 Kandou AI (Semiconductors) — €196M Series A: Saint-Sulpice-based fabless semiconductor company developing high-speed, energy-efficient connectivity solutions for AI infrastructure using innovative Chord signaling technology.
🇳🇱 RIFT (ClimateTech) — €114M Series B: Eindhoven-based Iron Fuel Technology project to deliver 340 GWh of industrial heat annually and avoid over 1 million tonnes of CO₂.
🇨🇭 PAVE Space (SpaceTech) — €35M Seed: Lausanne-based Swiss space infrastructure company developing orbital transfer vehicles for rapid satellite deployment between orbits.
🇮🇪 Evervault (Cybersecurity) — €22M Series B: Dublin-based data encryption platform built for developers to handle sensitive data compliance.
🇬🇧 Flexzo AI (HealthTech) — €10.4M Series A: London-based agentic AI workforce platform for healthcare systems that optimizes staffing allocation.
🇩🇪 Cellbricks Therapeutics (BioTech)— €10M Seed: Berlin-based tissue engineering company developing biofabricated human tissue implants for regenerative medicine.
🇬🇧 Dexory (Logistics) — €9.8M Series C Extension: London-based warehouse intelligence company using autonomous robots creating digital twins of warehouses in real time.
🇫🇷 Bitstack (Crypto) — €4M Additional Round: Paris-based cryptocurrency platform that raised a record crowdfunding round.
🇸🇪 Everdrone (MedTech) — €3M Additional Round: Askim-based emergency drone delivery service providing rapid transport of medical equipment like defibrillators.
🇬🇧 Deaku (CreativeTech) — €500k Pre-Seed: London-based AI-powered workspace for the creator economy bringing together content strategy and analytics.
👉 See the full database of 70+ rounds from this week: here.
💸 New Dry Powder
Spotlight: 🇩🇪🇺🇸 futurepresent — $300M
Stepping out of stealth mode, the German-US venture firm futurepresent has announced a massive $300M debut fund. The firm targets a thesis built around the next generation of artificial intelligence, specifically focusing on “AI for the physical world,” applied AI in complex, labor-constrained industries, and core AI infrastructure. With undisclosed ticket sizes, the fund maintains a highly flexible mandate spanning from Pre-Seed to concentrated-growth stages. As this is their inaugural vehicle, the four founding partners draw on their extensive prior experience and precedent successes at top-tier firms like Cherry Ventures, General Catalyst, and First Momentum. Operating quietly for over a year before this official launch, futurepresent has already deployed capital into 14 startups, including General Intuition, Skalar, Afori, inca, Isidor, and Slide. What makes futurepresent unique is its deliberate rejection of the sprawling “platform VC” model; instead, they operate as a deeply concentrated, tight-knit partnership offering founders a highly authentic, transatlantic bridge between the US and European innovation ecosystems.
Other Fund Launches:
🇪🇺 European Investment Fund (€1.5B): Massive new pan-European fund dedicated to strengthening the region’s venture capital, growth equity, and broader tech financing ecosystem.
🇬🇧 Air Street Capital ($232M): Fund III making Nathan Benaich’s firm Europe’s largest solo GP venture capital firm, focusing exclusively on AI-first companies.
🇪🇸 Mundi Ventures (€100M): New venture fund dedicated to backing early-stage startups in insurtech, fintech, and enterprise tech across Europe.
🇪🇸 Ysios Capital (€100M): InceptionBio fund designed to boost biotech startup creation and support early-stage life sciences innovation in Spain.
🇨🇿 Credo Ventures (€88M): Fund V focused on doubling down on pre-seed investments specifically within Central and Eastern Europe and its global founder diaspora.
🇫🇷 🇮🇹 360 Capital (€85M): First close of the Poli360 II fund, targeting a final €100M to back deeptech, tech transfer, and industrial innovation primarily out of Italy.
🇬🇧 Cloudberry Ventures (€50M): Seed to Series A vehicle dedicated specifically to backing European startups building next-generation AI compute and infrastructure.
🇨🇭 Vitamin°C (€21M): New climate tech venture capital fund focused on early-stage startups developing scalable decarbonization and environmental solutions.
🇸🇪 Team Scaleup (N/A): New platform designed specifically to bridge the post-seed funding gap for growing startups.
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Best,
Agathe