For the past few months, we’ve been busy covering the news, fundraises, and reports coming out of Europe. But over time, it became clear to us that Europe does not need another outlet built around fundraising news and press releases.

So we decided to change direction. Europe, above all, lacks a media culture capable of treating companies, talent, and technological ambition with the seriousness they deserve. We do not celebrate our builders enough and we do not make stars out of our champions.

Our approach will be to help change that by bringing the deepest researched and optimistic insights into the greatness, intelligence, and ambition shaping European venture.

This ultimate European accelerator list is our first article in the Resources & Data Maps series, created to bring the most actionable support to founders and other ecosystem contributors. Upcoming versions will include financial models, investor lists, and so much more.

The Venturist

The read for European venture insiders.

By Roko Karanusic

Without further ado, let’s get right into it.

What the database contains

The database contains a manually curated list of the European accelerators, starting from the huge, established brands like Seedcamp or Startup Wise Guys, all the way to niche regional accelerators trying to inspire the first generation of founders in their areas. It’s important to notice that there are many awesome — at worst, and legendary, at best —brands which we have been very tempted to include in this list, had they not been “only” startup and community hubs, or even incubators.

We aimed to keep the list exclusively occupied with the active accelerators, meaning you’ll find certain startup and entrepreneurship hubs mentioned in the database only if they had at least one accelerator-like programme active in their current batch. This also means that big brands with multiple franchises — such as Techstars or Plug&Play — were mentioned only once, and not repetitively for each city they have bases in, making this list even more detailed.

The database contains verified:

• Accelerator Name

• Website URL and LinkedIn URL

• Short Description

• City and Country

• Typical Check Size and Support System

• Space Focus

• Notable Investments (not for all entries)

What The Numbers Say

Countries

• The list is expectedly led by Germany and UK with 18 and 15 accelerators, respectively

• Spain and the Netherlands follow closely with 11 and 10, respectively

• Romania surprisingly punches above its weight, with 8 accelerators

• Poland expectedly leads CEE with 5 pure accelerators

• Ukraine leads in defence-tech based accelerators

Investment Models

• 58 accelerators have a straightforward model with taking equity. The most common percentages mentioned are between 6% and 10%.

• Many accelerators (33%) do not disclose a standard term, indicating that deals are often tailored or depends on the startup's stage.

• A significant portion (~28%) are zero-equity programs, often providing grants or acting as university/government-backed incubators.

• 16 programs use a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) or Convertible Loans to delay valuation. Common in high-growth tech hubs like London and Berlin.

Subscribe now

Why You Should Care

The path from idea to company is brutal. Finding the right first customers, smoothing out the product, raising early capital, hiring fast enough, doing sales, GTM, all while the most talented people in the opposing team are trying to crush you. In a process as such, every bit of help counts.

Accelerators, at their best, do three things at once. They:

1. provide early capital when it is hardest to get

2. provide structure when everything is still messy

3. and provide access to networks that would otherwise take founders years to build on their own.

The good ones do not just hand out small cheques. They help founders avoid obvious mistakes, move faster, and become legible to investors, customers, and later-stage partners.

That matters because some of Europe’s most important companies passed through accelerator programmes at a stage when they were still fragile, unknown, and far from inevitable. The right programme will not create greatness out of nothing, but it can materially improve a startup’s odds of surviving long enough for greatness to emerge.

2 European Giants That Emerged Through Accelerators’ Programmes

1. Revolut (Seedcamp, 2015)

Seedcamp wrote Revolut’s first cheque in February 2015, when the company was Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko working out of Level39, a fintech incubator in Canary Wharf. The product was a prepaid card that let you spend abroad at interbank exchange rates. That was it. Seedcamp’s Sia Houchangnia backed them because the problem was one her own team experienced constantly while travelling across Europe to meet founders.

Months later, Balderton Capital saw Storonsky present at a Seedcamp Week event and decided to lead a £1.5 million round at an £8 million valuation. Balderton’s internal note at the time read that the app had only launched that week, but described the founders as exceptionally smart with deep FX domain expertise.

That Seedcamp presentation was the introduction. Today Revolut is valued at $75 billion, and Balderton’s original £1.5 million investment became one of the best-returning bets in European VC history. Storonsky himself has said that Seedcamp was instrumental in helping Revolut grow from a small-time startup into a global banking alternative.

2. Glovo (Conector, 2015)

Oscar Pierre was 23, fresh from Georgia Tech, and had already failed at two startups when he entered the Conector accelerator programme in Barcelona. Sacha Michaud, a seasoned tech entrepreneur who was also in Barcelona's small innovation scene, first saw Pierre when he was presenting at the accelerator.

Michaud has described the moment simply: within about five minutes of meeting Pierre, he knew he wanted to work with him. After that pitch at Conector, Pierre and Michaud raised €140,000, mostly from small private investors, and launched Glovo in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia. The first version of the app had two buttons. You typed what you wanted, and someone on the back end figured out how to get it to you. They had no marketing budget, so growth was purely organic.

Glovo got acquired by Delivery Hero for €2.3bn in July 2022.

Before we drop the list, check out our debut article in the Angles series:

The Airtable Database

You can access the full database for free by clicking here.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Didn’t you read the Financial Times this morning?

Sir Desmond Glazebrook: Never do.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Well, you’re a banker. Surely you read the Financial Times?

Sir Desmond Glazebrook: Can’t understand it. Full of economic theory.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Why do you buy it?

Sir Desmond Glazebrook: Oh, you know, it’s part of the uniform. Took me thirty years to understand Keynes’ economics. Then when I’d just cottoned on, everyone started getting hooked on these new monetarist ideas, you know, “I Want To Be Free” by Milton Shulman.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Milton Friedman.

Sir Desmond Glazebrook: Why are they all called Milton? Anyway, I’ve only got as far as Milton Keynes.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Maynard Keynes.

Sir Desmond Glazebrook: I’m sure there’s a Milton Keynes.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes, there is, but it’s...

[Humphrey gives up]

as chronicled in “Yes, Minister”, Series 2, Episode 6: "The Quality of Life":

TL;DR

John Maynard Keynes learned the hard way that markets do not reward objective truth as neatly as economists like to think. Prices move not just on facts, but on how people think other people will react to those facts. His “beauty contest” analogy captures the logic well: success comes not from picking what is best, but from picking what others will choose. Venture capital works the same way, often even more so than public markets. VCs may praise contrarianism, but most allocate based on lagging indicators: social proof, visible traction, brand-name co-investors, and categories the market already understands. That is not necessarily because they lack imagination, but because VC is shaped by incentives. The game is not only about returns, but also reputation and fundraising. In that structure, lagging indicators become rational: they help investors coordinate, reduce career risk, satisfy LPs, and mobilise networks. Venture may celebrate originality in theory, but in practice it often rewards what is already legible.

⏱️ 16:31 Est. Reading Time

The Beauty Contest of 1936

For a good while, one had thought that if the facts were clear, if the bigger (macro) picture was understood, and if one excelled at reading the forces shaping the economy better than anyone else, then good investing should follow. And if one was equipped for that kind of investing, it was him. The one in question is John Maynard Keynes, one of the great economic minds of his age, who then was managing an endowment fund for King’s College in Cambridge. Yet, the markets did not award brilliance in the way he expected. In his early years as an investor, his results were respectable at best. From 1924 until 1932, he only slightly outperformed a quite weak UK stock market, a particularity that made the lesson so severe. He undoubtedly had the intellect, information, and a command of macroeconomics that almost nobody on earth could match, and still the markets refused to behave.

So, he realised then, markets were not simply mechanisms for processing only facts, but also machines for processing human behaviour. Prices did not move because reality had been properly understood. They moved because people, in all their fear, greed, excitement, doubt, and imitation, decided to buy or sell. It was the conviction of the masses from the each side of the trade that carried the true force, not the “truth”. A phenomena he coined the term “animal spirits” for; by which he meant the emotional and psychological energy that drives human action, especially under uncertainty. Investors, prone to all the human vices, do not move in straight lines from facts to price.

Subscribe now

Once Keynes comprehended this, his investing changed. After 1932, he moved away from trying to read the world mainly through grand macroeconomic conclusions and became far more interested in individual assets, in value, and above all in how other people were likely to judge value. He no longer treated the market as a machine that should eventually subjugate itself to the facts, but as a social game in which expectations about expectations matter more than the reality itself. His record after that point improved dramatically.

To explain this logic metaphorically, Keynes described the old newspaper beauty contests in which readers were asked to choose the prettiest faces from a large group of photographs. The winner was not the person who picked the faces they personally found the most beautiful. The winner was the one whose choices best matched the choices of the crowd. So, to invest well, you are not simply asking what an asset is worth (or what it could be worth), but you are also asking what others think it is worth (or what it could be worth), and how that chain of perception will turn into action.1

The same analogy appears, even more clearly, in venture capital and other private markets. Despite venture capitalists being, undoubtedly, better informed and more skilled at allocating resources than the broad masses, they still need to pick the face they think others will choose, not the one they personally found the prettiest. Read: they are not in the game of funding companies with the strongest fundamentals, but the companies most likely to raise the next round, because that is what determines their markup and returns.

Even more so, you could argue that in public markets — where prices eventually do converge to fundamentals due to continuous price discovery, short selling, liquidity, and other factors — the beauty contest is somewhat temporary, while in venture there is no such corrective mechanism. Rounds are infrequent, there’s no shorting, valuations are set by a few negotiators in opaque negotiations, and that “price” is quite literally just whatever the last investor agreed to pay.

By now, one might conclude either that venture capitalists have failed to understand this, or that the industry is populated by semi-independent actors simply deferring to collective consensus. Both conclusions miss the point. Most VCs allocate based on lagging indicators not because they lack the ability to identify leading ones, but because the incentive architecture of venture capital makes backward-looking allocation the individually rational strategy across multiple reinforcing dimensions. The purpose of this article, however, is not to argue that independent thinkers in venture have the wrong strategy (probably the opposite), but to explain why most VCs are simply not structured to behave like them.

Table of Contents

1. Lagging Indicators

2. Consensus Bets Reduce Reputational Risk

3. Network Effects & Coordination Games

4. FOMO & Information Asymmetry

5. Waiting as a Strategy When Downside Is Convex

1. Lagging Indicators

Ever since Peter Thiel’s Zero to One was published in 2014, the venture world has been fascinated by contrarianism: the strategy of investing against prevailing market consensus, betting on unpopular or overlooked ideas that hold the potential for massive, non-linear returns.

It was a direct challenge to the dominant venture habit of pattern-matching, which is inherently backward-looking. Thiel’s point, one I fully agree with, was simple: there is no new Airbnb. There is no new Uber. Those companies did not become iconic by resembling what came before them, but by building something genuinely new.

And yet, despite paying tribute to originality in theory, venture still tends to reason through analogy. You hear it all the time: “This is Uber for X.” “This market looks like SaaS in 2012.” “She reminds me of a young [successful founder].” Every such judgment is, by definition, a comparison to something that has already happened. Pattern-matching can identify companies that resemble past winners. What it cannot reliably identify are the truly novel ones, which is where the outsized, infamous power-law returns tend to come from.

That is why some of the best seed investors are often thesis-driven rather than purely pattern-driven. They start with a structural shift, technical, regulatory, cultural, or behavioral, and then look for founders building into that shift before it becomes obvious. That is a leading-indicator framework. It tries to identify where the world is moving, rather than merely recognise what has already worked. In venture, by contrast, lagging indicators are the signals that appear only after a startup has already been partially de-risked by market validation, customer traction, institutional attention, or early adoption. If investors rely too heavily on those signals, they should, in theory, arrive too late to the real source of alpha.

So why, then, do most VCs still rely on lagging indicators?

2. Consensus Bets Reduce Reputational Risk

Despite what people often assume, venture capitalists arguably have one of the hardest tasks out there: they are paid to make judgments about a future that does not yet exist. But their job is not to predict the future in the abstract. Their job is to manage other people’s capital responsibly and generate credible returns over the life of a fund.

A VC then, as the agent, ends up optimizing for what the LP, as principal, can actually observe and evaluate:

• recognisable co-investors

• clean step-ups

• visible market validation

• exposure to categories the broader market already understands (i.e. consensus)

These are legible signals. They may not capture the deepest truth about a company, but they make an investment easier to explain, easier to defend, and easier to present as progress. The principal-agent structure of VC makes lagging indicators the rational choice for many individual partners. It creates asymmetric career risk: losing money on a consensus deal is survivable; losing money on an unconventional one is much harder to justify. Venture, after all, is now a highly institutionalised asset class. Once investing frameworks spread across the industry, sameness followed naturally. Everyone began looking at deals through roughly the same lens, tracking the same trends from the same data sources and platforms, and consuming the same intellectual diet. The result is predictable: people start thinking alike, and eventually investing alike.

And yet, despite data being increasingly commoditised and differentiated conviction mattering more than ever, relationship-based investing still works in hot markets, at least in the short term. Keynes’s logic applies here too. If enough credible investors believe others will continue to believe, the cycle sustains itself. Firms validate one another through participation, mark one another up across rounds, and if strong exits eventually materialise, the process can still be defended as sound stewardship of LP capital. In colder markets, however, it becomes a drag on performance, because venture is no longer rewarded for staying close to consensus, but for being right before consensus arrives. That is especially visible today outside the most crowded parts of software and the B2B AI application layer, where true conviction is needed to fund the technology of tomorrow (robotic, precision manufacturing, etc.).

But even when a VC knows that leading indicators matter more than lagging ones, the cost of acting on that knowledge is high. It requires speed, deep networks, serious technical diligence, and the conviction to take meaningful ownership before the market has made the company legible. Which brings us to the next major reason VCs largely follow lagging indicators.

3. Network Effects & Coordination Games

George Soros, much like Keynes before him, arrived at a similar conclusion: in reflexive systems2, beliefs shape prices. That runs directly against the standard economic models, such as the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which assume that prices merely reflect objective fundamentals and tend toward equilibrium. Soros, however, went a step further. He argued that beliefs do not just shape prices; prices then go on to shape fundamentals.

If, for example, investors believe a sector is growing, they buy in, driving prices up. Those higher valuations may allow companies to borrow more cheaply or issue new stock, which they use to fund further expansion. This “confirms” the initial bullish perception, attracting more buyers. What began as a perception starts to create the conditions that make the perception look true. The initial belief is reinforced by the consequences it produces, until the loop eventually breaks.

Subscribe now

The same logic applies even more powerfully in private markets. A strong financing round is not just a reflection of quality; it can quite literally create quality. It gives a company more resources, more credibility, more hiring power, more customer trust, and more strategic room to execute. In that sense, belief shapes price, price shapes fundamentals, and the act of raising a strong round can make the company better at becoming what investors already hoped it was.

Most financing decisions are therefore made under strategic complementarity: your payoff improves if other credible investors also invest. If a respected founder, angel, or lead enters the deal, it is not only rational but efficient to infer that they have likely done serious work and diligence already. In these coordination games, “truth” matters less than common knowledge. What matters is not just whether something is good, but whether everyone knows that everyone else can see that it is good. A lagging indicator (or a consensus) is therefore valuable because it is publicly observable, so everyone can coordinate on it. Private leading indicators may be more insightful, but they do not help coordination if no one else can observe them.

Venture is also a repeated game. Sometimes a firm leads, prices the round, and takes the first reputational risk. Other times it follows, co-invests, or is pulled in through prior relationships. Those roles are not fixed; they change across cycles, and the network of firms depends on that constant rotation. From the outside, this can resemble simple crowding into the same deals. But much of what looks like imitation is really structure. Capital formation in venture is relational, and firms often move the way they do because the system rewards coordination as much as conviction. And beneath all of it sits venture’s deepest fear: not the error of commission, backing the wrong company, but the error of omission, missing the one that mattered.

4. FOMO & Information Asymmetry

Harry Stebbings recently shared that there are two particular deals he still loses sleep over years later:

• ElevenLabs, where he passed on the chance to invest $250k in the Series A at a $100M post-money valuation. Three years later, ElevenLabs is already worth around $11B.

• Deel, where he passed on the chance to invest $250k in the $12M seed round. Deel is now valued at $19B, costing Stebbings roughly $400M in potential gains and around $115M in personal carry.

Why does he after all these years still lose sleep over investment that he didn’t make and not all the deals that he invested in that failed?

Because venture is an asymmetric discipline. Its logic is unforgiving: missing a huge winner is far worse than backing an ordinary loser. A failed investment is part of the business. Missing the next Google, Uber, or Stripe can define how a fund, and sometimes a career, is remembered. In venture, what matters is not how often you are right, but whether you are present when the rare outlier appears. The game is driven by home runs. That is why following consensus can be a rational strategy. In any category cycle, whether AI, crypto, or climate, the entire market does not need to independently arrive at the same conclusion. It is often enough for a small number of high-status firms to move first with conviction3. Once they do, the rest of the market begins to reorganize around that signal, often without explicitly admitting that this is what is happening.

Leave a comment

This is the logic of an information cascade. Each investor has some private signal, but they also observe the actions of others. When early movers act decisively, later investors infer that those firms must have seen something meaningful. Their own weaker or less certain signals then start to matter less. The observed behavior of credible early actors becomes the signal, as well as the fear of inadequacy of one’s own signal or analysis:

“Is there something that they know that I do not?”

Once the cascade begins, dissent becomes costly and often futile. In other words, it is rational to assume information asymmetry. This is yet again reinforced by venture’s power-law structure. The same firms repeatedly sit close to the most valuable companies. Over time, that track record itself becomes a source of authority. It would be naive to assume those firms have suddenly forgotten how to do their job. Other investors rationally assign weight to their behavior, and that weight helps propagate the cycle. The best leading indicators in early stage companes are rarely clean, public, or easily measurable. They are tacit, contextual, and often only visible to people with deep domain expertise or genuine proximity to the frontier. Most generalist funds lack both, so they default to public validation and the actions of investors assumed to know more than they do.

5. Waiting as a Strategy When Downside Is Convex

Private companies are staying private longer than ever. The path from founding to exit, whether through IPO or acquisition, now often stretches well beyond a decade. That changes the economics of timing in venture. For comparison, Amazon went public after roughly two years and Google after about five. Microsoft went public in 1986 at a valuation of around $350 million, or roughly $1 billion in today’s dollars. Today, its market capitalization is around $3 trillion. That means a majority of Microsoft’s value creation happened in public markets, not private ones4.

The implication is uncomfortable for venture capital. Early private investors in companies like Microsoft still did extremely well, but public-market investors who simply bought at the IPO and held on captured returns that, in some cases, rival or exceed the legendary outcomes of top venture deals. Accel’s Facebook investment, for example, is often cited as roughly a 1,000x outcome. Balderton’s early investment in Revolut has been estimated even higher on paper. But the broader point remains: when companies stay private longer, and when a large part of value creation is delayed or uncertain, the case for paying up later becomes more rational one would think at first.

This is where waiting starts to look less like hesitation and more like strategy. In real-options terms, many funds have the ability to invest later at a higher price but with far less uncertainty. Early entry means lower cost, but also far higher variance. Late entry means paying more, but for a company with a greater chance of survival, clearer product-market fit, stronger signals, and a more legible path forward. For funds with enough brand and access to enter those later rounds, that can be the better trade. In venture, being early and wrong means tying up capital in a company that may never raise again, may force a write-down, and may leave you defending a decision that the market never validated. Being later and right usually hurts far less. You pay more, but you buy a much higher probability that the company will survive, attract the next round, and keep compounding.

…And

VC is a game with three payoffs: (1) returns, (2) reputation, and (3) fundraising. Lagging indicators become the equilibrium strategy because they enable coordination, reduce reputational downside in a repeated game, provide auditable signals for principals, and increase positive externalities by mobilizing the network.

That does not necessarily make them optimal for finding the best companies earliest. It makes them rational within the structure most VCs actually operate in. The point is not that investors fail to understand leading indicators, but that the system often rewards what is legible, defensible, and easy for others to coordinate around.

As always, we're keeping tabs on what actually matters across 🇪🇺 European tech, as well as relevant global tech news. If something broke the news this week and it's worth your time, it's probably below. Scroll on for the deals, reads, and reports you'll want on your radar.

In This Edition:

• Wayve raises a huge Series D round

• European quantum computing startup going public

• Europe gets its own AI semiconductor player

• OpenAI raises the biggest ever private company round

• 20VC: TSIC ranked Europe’s best micro-fund

• European mobility sector funding drops 27% YoY

⏱️ 2:57 Est. Reading Time

💥 Main Events Past Week

Wayve raises $1.5B Series D at $8.6B valuation

The London-based autonomous driving company closed a $1.2B round led by Eclipse, Balderton, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with Microsoft, NVIDIA, Uber, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis also participating. Uber committed additional milestone-based capital tied to robotaxi deployments across 10+ markets, starting in London in 2026. Consumer vehicles with Wayve’s AI Driver follow from 2027. The company claims to be the first AV developer to drive zero-shot in over 500 cities across Europe, North America, and Japan without city-specific tuning.

Axelera AI raises $250M+ to scale edge AI inference

The Eindhoven-based AI semiconductor company closed a round led by Innovation Industries, with BlackRock and SiteGround Capital joining as new investors alongside existing backers including Samsung Catalyst Fund, EIC Fund, CDP Venture Capital, and Bitfury. Total capital raised since founding in 2021 now exceeds $450M. Axelera has shipped to 500+ customers across defense, manufacturing, retail, and robotics, with its Metis and Europa platforms built around energy-efficient inference at the edge rather than in centralized data centers.

IQM plans to go public via SPAC at $1.8B valuation

The Finnish quantum computing company, spun out of Aalto University and VTT in 2018, announced a SPAC merger with Nasdaq-listed Real Asset Acquisition Corp., with plans to also list on a Nordic exchange. IQM reported $35M in 2025 revenue and $100M+ in bookings, and will hold $450M+ in cash post-close. The company has raised $569M to date, including a $320M Series B last September. It joins Infleqtion and Xanadu in a wave of quantum companies choosing the SPAC route to U.S. markets.

📰 Other News

• Allica Bank becomes Europe’s newest unicorn with $155m Series D [See here]

• Monzo former CEO TS Anil appointed board vice-chair [See here]

• EU Commission to delay high risk AI guidance [See here]

• OpenAI announces $110bn round, the largest one ever for a private tech company [See here]

• French research actors call on Europe to unite around competitiveness [See here]

• Deutsche Telekom Launches €200M Deep Tech Fund to Back Europe’s Next Wave of Innovation [See here]

• 37% of Berlin’s VC-backed startups reach Series A [See here]

• Checkout.com’s EBITDA says 2025 full-year is profitable [See here]

👇🏼 Read some of our previous weekly reports to stay in the loop with 🇪🇺 European tech news:

Subscribe now

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇩🇪 VoiceLine — €10M | Enterprise voice AI for frontline teams.

• 🇪🇪 Frankenburg Technologies — €30M | Missile-defence startup building affordable, mass-manufacturable interceptors.

• 🇳🇱 Axelera AI — $250M | AI inference chipmaker.

• 🇬🇧 Power Protocol — $15.4M | Blockchain gaming infrastructure ecosystem.

• 🇫🇷 Verley — €32M | Next-generation functional whey ingredients (Series A).

• 🇬🇧 Allica Bank — $155M | Challenger business bank; funding expected to make it a unicorn.

• 🇩🇪 Secfix — $12M | End-to-end security compliance platform (Series A).

• 🇬🇧 Wayve — $1.2B | Embodied AI for autonomous driving.

• 🇬🇧 BeyondMath — $18.5M | Foundational physics AI model.

• 🇬🇧 Thema — $6.2M | Mapping market expansion opportunities for private equity.

• 🇬🇧 SolveAI — $50M | Platform that lets employees build enterprise software.

• 🇬🇧 Kinfolk — $7M | AI-native HR workforce operations platform.

• 🇩🇪 Oska Health — €11M | AI-driven hybrid care expansion.

• 🇩🇪 ISPTech — €5.5M | In-orbit mobility / propulsion (seed).

Venture Funds

🇧🇪 Syndicate One — €22M | Closed second fund to back Belgian tech founders.

M&A 🤝

• 🇬🇧 Radiant ↔️ Ori Industries — merged | Sovereign AI cloud at utility scale.

🔍 Reads & Reports

20VC: TSIC ranked Europe’s best micro-fund

20VC published “The State of European Micro-Funds,” ranking 80+ funds under €25M. Tiny Supercomputer topped the list (n8n, Synthesia, Wayve), followed by Prototype and Kima Ventures. Median fund size sits at €19.5M with €300k median check sizes. 63% of these funds were created after 2022, and 50%+ have yet to generate a meaningful exit.

European mobility VC drops to $4.8B in 2025, down 27% year-on-year

Dealroom and Via iD’s state-of-the-industry report shows European mobility VC is now $10B below its 2021 peak, with late-stage megarounds seeing the steepest decline. The sector has produced 82 unicorns and thoroughbreds and 578 colts, but still ranks among Europe’s top five most-funded industries — for now, with security growing fast enough to potentially overtake it in 2026.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

Share

As always, we're keeping tabs on what actually matters across 🇪🇺 European tech, as well as relevant global tech news. If something broke the news this week and it's worth your time, it's probably below. Scroll on for the deals, reads, and reports you'll want on your radar.

In This Edition:

• EIC backs 61 startups with €467M

• Biggest seed raise in European history

• Klarna drops 68% since September IPO

• European climate tech faces $13.5bn Series B gap

• OpenClaw founder joins OpenAI

• Mistral’s first acquisition

• Cybersecurity VC surges 47% to $13.97bn

• & more

⏱️ 3:33 Est. Reading Time

💥 Main Events Past Week

EIC Accelerator selects 61 startups for €467M in latest funding round

The European Innovation Council selected 61 startups and SMEs from 121 finalists for €467M in funding, with 85% receiving blended grants and equity. Companies span 17 EU countries led by Germany, Spain, France, and Sweden, with 28% having women in CEO, CTO, or CSO roles. An additional 60 applicants received Seal of Excellence for alternative EU funding access.

Ineffable Intelligence raising $1B at $4bn valuation before product launch

Ineffable Intelligence, a London-based AI startup founded by former Google DeepMind principal scientist David Silver, is reportedly raising $1bn at a $4bn valuation with Sequoia leading. Founded last November without a product, the company plans to build on Silver’s reinforcement learning work from DeepMind, including AlphaGo and AlphaZero. Alphabet, Nvidia, and Microsoft are reportedly considering investing.

Will be by far the largest seed round in European history.

Klarna stock drops 68% from IPO as loan provisions surge

Klarna shares fell 27% after reporting a $273M net loss for 2025 and $250M in Q4 credit loss provisions (up 60% YoY). Stock has declined 68% since September’s $15B IPO, cutting market value to $5.3B. Q4 revenues hit $1.1B (up 38%), with 118M active users generating $107 per banking customer versus $30 for average BNPL users. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski attributed rising provisions to the company’s push into longer-term financing products.

📰 Other News

• OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI [See below]

• Mistral AI buys Koyeb in first acquisition to back its cloud ambitions [See here]

• Legora set to triple valuation to $6bn with latest funding [See here]

• Bending Spoons offers €1.5 million in tech scholarships through new Fellowship [See here]

• Drone startup Stark reaches unicorn valuation following German armed forces deal [See here]

• Lagarde reported to consider early exit from ECB [See here]

• FT ranking: Europe’s leading start-up hubs 2026 [See here]

👇🏼 Read some of our previous weekly reports to stay in the loop with 🇪🇺 European tech news:

Subscribe now

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇬🇧 SatVu - £30M | Thermal-intelligence satellites; accelerating multi-satellite constellation.

• 🇬🇧 SurrealDB - $23M | Database for AI agent “memory”; launched SurrealDB 3.0.

• 🇱🇹 Copla - €6M | Regtech infrastructure for EU regulatory compliance (Series A).

• 🇦🇹 Flinn - $20M | AI tools for product lifecycle management in medtech + pharma.

• 🇩🇪 Plato - $14.5M | AI operating system for wholesale distributors.

• 🇸🇪 Agaton - $10M | Agentic AI for sales teams using voice analysis.

• 🇩🇪 happyhotel - €6.5M | AI hotel revenue management (Series A).

• 🇮🇪 Wayflyer - $250M in credit facility

Venture Funds

🇬🇧 British Business Bank - up to £45M | Investment into a VC fund targeting consumer brand startups.

🇫🇷 Quantonation Ventures - €220M | Closed quantum-tech VC fund (backed by Toshiba).

M&A 🤝

• 🇦🇹 Mondra ↔ inoqo — merged | Product intelligence platform for the food sector.

• 🇪🇺 Firecell ↔ Accelleran — merged (backed by €7.9M) | Simplifying private 5G networks.

🔍 Reads & Reports

World Fund report: European climate tech faces $13.5bn Series B funding gap

European climate tech companies face a $13.5bn Series B funding gap versus the US between 2020-2024, according to a World Fund report analyzing Dealroom and CleanTech Group data. European Series B rounds averaged $35.2m versus $45.5m in the US (20% lower), with only 15% of European climate techs graduating from Seed to Series B compared to 25% in the US.

Europe needs an additional $2.4bn annually to match US graduation rates. Just 30% of European VC fundraising comes from private institutional sources versus 72% in the US, with EIF accounting for 31% of European VC versus 4% in the US.

FIRSTPICK releases 2025 Baltic startup funding report tracking 741 early-stage rounds

FIRSTPICK and Practica Capital (with Change Ventures for 2019-2024) released their annual Baltic startup funding report based on original transaction-level data from 741 pre-seed and seed rounds, representing 62% of all early-stage deals in the region over the past six years. The report covers startups headquartered in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, including teams building primarily in the region regardless of HQ location.

Vestbee: Global cybersecurity VC hits $13.97bn in 2025, up 47% YoY

Global cybersecurity VC totaled $13.97bn in 2025 (up 47%), Europe €2.7bn. Google acquired Wiz for $32bn, Palo Alto bought CyberArk for $25bn. Largest rounds: Saviynt $700M, Cyera $900M combined.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

Share

As always, we're keeping tabs on what actually matters across 🇪🇺 European tech, as well as relevant global tech news. If something broke the news this week and it's worth your time, it's probably below. Scroll on for the deals, reads, and reports you'll want on your radar.

In This Edition:

Mistral’s revenue soars 20x to $400M

Station F unites AI giants for startups

Nscale raises $1.4bn GPU-backed debt

PitchBook: AI drives 35.5% of European deals

Dutch scaleups turn to US capital

⏱️ 3:43 Est. Reading Time

💥 Main Events Past Week

Mistral’s revenues increase 20x YoY

French AI startup Mistral’s annualized revenue (previous monthly sales multiplied by 12) hit $400M, up 20-fold from $20M a year ago, as European businesses seek alternatives to US tech. The company raised €1.7bn in September led by ASML and announced €1.2bn to build AI data centers in Sweden.

Station F launches F/ai program uniting major AI companies to back European startups

Station F launched F/ai, a program bringing together Microsoft, Meta, Mistral, Google, AWS, OpenAI, Anthropic, and VCs including Sequoia, General Catalyst, and 20VC to support AI startups. The program kicked off January 13th with 20 AI-native startups selected via recommendation-only process, targeting companies with paths to €1M revenue within six months.

Nscale secures $1.4bn GPU-backed debt to finance European cluster deployments

Nscale signed a $1.4bn delayed draw term loan led by PIMCO, Blue Owl, and LuminArx to finance GPU cluster deployments across Norway, Portugal, Iceland, and the UK. The debt raise follows the company’s $1.1bn Series B in late 2025 (the biggest Series B in European history) and $433M Pre-Series C SAFE, with Goldman Sachs acting as sole placement agent.

Von der Leyen: “If 27 states won't agree on Capital Market Union, I will move ahead with 9 states.”

📰 Other News

• Budapest-based robotics startup Allonic has raised a record $7.2m pre-seed round, the biggest even pre-seed round Hungary [See here]

• French AI startup Mistral announced it will invest 1.2 billion euros ($1.43 billion) into digital infrastructure in Sweden [See here]

• Alibaba enters physical AI race with open-source robot model RynnBrain [See here]

• The European Commission has sent a Statement of Objections to Meta, setting out its preliminary view that Meta breached EU antitrust rules [See here]

👇🏼 Read some of our previous weekly reports to stay in the loop with 🇪🇺 European tech news:

Subscribe now

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇫🇷 Naboo — $70M | AI-powered events procurement (Series B led by Lightspeed).

• 🇩🇪 Andercore — $40M | AI-based industrial trade platform (Series B).

• 🇬🇧 Mozart AI — $6M | AI tools for music creation (seed).

• 🇬🇧 Reflow — $15M+ | Operational visibility platform for enterprises (seed).

• 🇩🇪 Circle Health — €9M | Preventive health platform using AI (seed; equity + debt).

• 🇸🇪 Lassie — $75M | Prevention-focused pet insurance scaling across Europe (Series C).

• 🇬🇧 Bracket — $7M | Treasury intelligence (FX/treasury/cash management) for mid-market businesses.

• 🇫🇷 Lifeaz — €13M | Expanding access to life-saving interventions (AED/CPR ecosystem).

• 🇬🇧 Nscale — $1.4B | Large-scale funding round (AI/data-centre infrastructure).

• 🇫🇷 Eutelsat — €975M | Financing round (satellite operator expansion).

• 🇬🇧 Olix — $220M | Photonic AI inference chips aiming to compete on faster/cheaper inference vs Nvidia; valuation just over $1B.

Venture Funds

🇫🇷 Elaia — €120M | First close of Digital Venture Fund V (DV5).

M&A 🤝

• 🇬🇧 Reward — $230M | Acquired (buyer: Rezolve Ai).

• 🇬🇧 Admiral Group → Flock — £80M | Acquired London commercial fleet insurtech Flock (subject to regulatory approval).

🔍 Reads & Reports

PitchBook: European VC hits €66.2bn in 2025, but AI accounts for 35.5% of all deals

European VC deal value grew 5.1% to €66.2bn in 2025 despite deal count dropping 20.6%, driven by larger rounds concentrated in AI. AI now represents 35.5% of European deal value at €23.5bn, up from 28.1% in 2024. Without AI, the underlying European VC market declined 5.7% YoY. Fundraising hit a record low at €12bn across 148 funds, down from €23.5bn in 2024, while exits reached €67.8bn buoyed by Klarna and eToro IPOs totaling €16.2bn.

Techleap: Dutch scaleups increasingly dependent on US capital as European participation drops

Techleap’s State of Dutch Tech 2026 report shows US involvement in breakout rounds (€50-100M) tripled to 40% in 2025 while European participation fell to 21%. Despite having Europe’s highest AI talent density at 10.9 professionals per 10,000 inhabitants, only 21.2% of Dutch AI companies reach scaleup status compared to 80.9% in the US. The ecosystem employs 135,000 people locally and needs 300,000 additional tech specialists by 2030.

KPMG: Europe’s top 6 VC deals in Q4 span 6 countries, highlighting ecosystem diversity

Europe’s Q4 megadeals showcased geographic breadth with the top 6 rounds spread across 6 jurisdictions: UK’s Revolut ($3bn), Finland’s Oura ($907.7M), France’s Brevo ($578M), Netherlands’ Picnic ($498.1M), Germany’s Tubulis ($360.9M), and Greece’s Spotawheel ($348M). The Nordic region hit a nine-quarter investment high, while AI companies shifted focus from infrastructure to application layer solutions, attracting significant capital alongside growing defense tech investment.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

Share

As always, we're keeping tabs on what actually matters across 🇪🇺 European tech, as well as relevant global tech news. If something broke the news this week and it's worth your time, it's probably below. Scroll on for the deals, reads, and reports you'll want on your radar.

In This Edition:

ElevenLabs raises $500M, eyes IPO

SpaceX acquires xAI for $250bn

Mundi closes €750M for Kembara Fund

Fundraising now demands traction over MVPs

US unicorns staying private longer

⏱️ 2:47 Reading Time

💥 Main Events Past Week

ElevenLabs raises $500M Series D at $11bn valuation, building towards IPO

ElevenLabs raised $500M in a Series D led by Sequoia, valuing the AI voice generator at $11bn. The valuation triples from its January 2025 Series C when it raised $180M at $3.3bn, bringing total raised to $781M across five rounds. CEO Mati Staniszewski says the company is building towards an IPO after closing 2025 with over $330M in ARR.

SpaceX acquires xAI for $250bn, values combined entity at $1.25tn

SpaceX acquired xAI for $250bn, valuing the combined company at $1.25tn. The deal boosts SpaceX’s valuation to $1tn from its recent $800bn secondary sale, while xAI’s $230bn valuation is based on its recent $20bn funding round. Shares in the merged entity are priced at $527, with xAI shares converting to SpaceX stock at roughly 7:1.

Mundi Ventures closes €750M for Kembara Fund I, targets European Series B gap

Spain-based Mundi Ventures closed €750M for Kembara Fund I, its fifth and largest fund targeting deep tech and climate Series B and C rounds. The fund could reach €1.25bn at final close and plans initial checks of €15M to €40M across 20 companies, with follow-ons up to €100M per company.

📰 Other News

• BottleCap AI, a startup Harry Stebbings claimed has “the largest upside in his investing career”, has raised a $7.5m seed led by 20VC as well as europe's top founders [See here]

• BAE Systems launches incubator to commercialise defence tech [See here]

• A16Z VC to founders: “You shouldn’t stress over insane ARR numbers!” [See here]

• Europe must keep control of key technologies, says EU commissioner [See here]

• Macron responds to X going crazy over his €30M AI investment announcement: “France ranked first among countries attracting foreign investment to build data centers”

👇🏼 Read some of our previous weekly reports to stay in the loop with 🇪🇺 European tech news:

Subscribe now

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇪🇸 Biorce — $52M | AI platform for clinical trial design + execution.

• 🇬🇧 Incard — £10M | Financial platform for high-growth digital companies (Series A).

• 🇬🇧 Polaron — $8M | AI materials-science intelligence.

• 🇬🇧 Veremark — $26M | Background screening / HR platform expansion.

• 🇫🇷 UBEES — €8M | Regenerative pollination / beekeeping for agriculture expansion.

• 🇫🇷 MyC — €10M | Digitises medical operations for complex worksites.

• 🇪🇸 BCAS — €30M (debt) | Flexible student financing.

• 🇵🇱 ElevenLabs — $500M | AI audio generation (Series D).

• 🇩🇰 Pluto.markets — $6M | Markets/investing product backed by notable founders.

• 🇫🇷/🇱🇺 R3 Robotics — €20M | Automating EV battery/EV dismantling at scale.

• 🇬🇧 Lawhive — $60M | Consumer legaltech; expanding toward the US.

• 🇩🇪 Gardia — €8.5M | Mobile emergency system for seniors (Series A).

• 🇬🇧 Bound — $24.5M | FX hedging / automated FX risk management (Series A).

Venture Funds

🇨🇭 Constructor Capital — $110M | Closed Fund I (science-first founders).

M&A 🤝

• 🇸🇪 Soundtrack → Tunify + Ambie — undisclosed | Acquired two music-for-business players to scale locally with global reach.

🔍 Reads & Reports

Fundraising in 2026 requires traction over MVPs

The old playbook of raising $1M+ on rough MVPs with vanity valuations might be dead. Investors now want systematic, data-driven operations proving capital efficiency and actual traction.

US unicorns staying private at unprecedented scale, creating liquidity gap

Almost 800 US unicorns founded in 2020-2025 remain private one year after reaching unicorn status, compared to 332 from 2010-2019. By year three, 575 unicorns from the recent cohort are still private, nearly triple the 206 from the previous decade.

Only 11 unicorns founded in 1999-2009 remained private at the three-year mark. The shift happens because of abundant private capital, desire to avoid public market scrutiny, frozen IPO markets, and contractual terms from higher post-money valuations, creating capital recycling issues as trillions remain locked in private portfolios.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

Share

As always, we're keeping tabs on what actually matters across 🇪🇺 European tech, as well as relevant global tech news. If something broke the news this week and it's worth your time, it's probably below. Scroll on for the deals, reads, and reports you'll want on your radar.

In This Edition:

Five new European unicorns in January

ASML forecasts record-revenue year

Revolut founder corrects UK residency filing

European VC hits $85B despite deal drought UK tops European business environment rankings

Europe hits third-strongest year by capital but second-lowest deal count in a decade

⏱️ 3:57 Reading Time

💥 Main Events Past Week

Five (!) new European unicorns emerge in January 2026

January brought five new European unicorns: Belgium’s Aikido Security ($1B), Lithuania-rooted Cast AI ($1b+), French defense tech Harmattan AI ($1.4B), German ESG firm Osapiens ($1.1B), and Ukrainian edtech Preply ($1.2B).

Revolut founder corrects residency filing back to UK

Nikolay Storonsky’s family office corrected corporate filings to show UK residency after an October filing listing him as UAE resident alarmed regulators reviewing Revolut’s banking licence. The £10bn fintech has been stuck in provisional banking licence limbo for 18 months despite applying five years ago.

ASML forecasts €34bn-€39bn in 2026 sales driven by AI demand

Dutch chipmaker ASML expects sales up to €39bn in 2026 after Q4 orders doubled analyst forecasts to €13.2bn. The company is cutting 1,700 jobs (4% of staff) while customers prepare for AI-driven capacity expansion.

📰 Other News

• Revolut deploys ElevenLabs AI voice agents, cutting support resolution time by 8x across 31+ languages [See here]

• New AI agents social media draws attention as things get… weird [See here]

• Meet the new Slush CEO [See here]

• VC firm 2150 raises €210M fund to solve cities’ climate challenges [See here]

• Nvidia and Alphabet VC arms back AI startup Synthesia at $4 billion valuation [See here]

• Europe’s investors at Davos say capital is available but fragmentation slows scale-up [See here]

• Nik Storonsky’s Quantum Light fund targets $500M [See here]

• Germany captured a larger share of Europe’s venture capital than the UK in 2025 for the first time in history [See here]

👇🏼 Read some of our previous weekly reports to stay in the loop with 🇪🇺 European tech news:

Subscribe now

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Orbital — $60M | AI platform automating real estate legal workflows.

• 🇬🇧 Synthesia — $200M | AI video generation; valuation doubled to ~$4B.

• 🇵🇱 Rainbow Weather — $5.5M | Real-time environmental/weather intelligence (hyperlocal nowcasting).

• 🇬🇧 Vennre — $9.6M | Private-market platform expanding across MENA.

• 🇩🇰 Lunar — €46M | Challenger bank funding to grow business users.

• 🇸🇪 Brickanta — $8M | Agentic AI for construction planning.

• 🇬🇧 Evaro — $25M | Digital healthcare services for consumer brands.

• 🇩🇪 Co-reactive — €6.5M | CO₂-negative materials tech (seed).

• 🇬🇧 Modern Milkman — £10M | Sustainable doorstep grocery delivery.

• 🇸🇪 Funnel — $80M (debt) | Debt facility to scale the marketing intelligence platform.

• 🇩🇪 RobCo — $100M | Factory automation robots (“physical AI”); US expansion.

• 🇬🇧 Sokin — £70M (debt) | Funding to support major expansion.

Venture Funds

🇩🇰 2150 — €210M | Closed Fund II (assets lifted to ~€500M).

🇩🇰 The Footprint Firm — €76M | Closed Article 9 deeptech Fund I for the green transition.

🇪🇺 b2venture — €150M | Closed Fund V (hard cap).

🇩🇪 seed+speed Ventures — €90M | Closed Fund III.

🇫🇷 daphni — €260M | Closed “daphni Blue” (science-driven European investments).

M&A 🤝

• 🇪🇪 Scoro → Envoice — undisclosed | Project cost visibility via AI-driven expense/bill management.

• 🇩🇪 finanzen.net Group → Vickii — undisclosed | AI investing platform acquired by finanzen.net group.

• 🇩🇪 Sword Health → Kaia Health — $285M | Acquisition.

🔍 Reads & Reports

3 European countries in Top 10 countries on quality of business environment

StartupBlink’s inaugural index ranks 125 countries on business environment for startups. US scored perfectly at #1, followed by Singapore, UK, Switzerland, and UAE. Notably, China, Israel, France, South Korea, and India—all top 20 in ecosystem performance—missed the IBEI top 20, revealing a gap between startup output and underlying business conditions.

The UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands rank 1st, 4th, and 7th, respectively.

KPMG Venture Pulse Europe Q4 2025

European VC hit $85.3B across 8,626 deals in 2025—third-strongest year by capital but second-lowest deal count in a decade. Q4 saw $20.7B across 1,651 deals. Capital concentrated in fewer, larger rounds: Revolut ($3B), Oura ($907M—largest healthtech raise ever), Brevo ($578M). UK led with $6.8B, followed by Germany, France, Israel. Investor focus shifted to AI application layer (Black Forest Labs $300M, Synthesia $200M) and defense tech amid geopolitical tensions. Geographic diversity strong—top 6 megadeals spread across 6 countries.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

Share

As always, we're keeping tabs on what actually matters across 🇪🇺 European tech, as well as relevant global tech news. If something broke the news this week and it's worth your time, it's probably below. Scroll on for the deals, reads, and reports you'll want on your radar.

In This Edition:

European Commission launches EU Inc. for 48-hour pan-European company registration

European Parliament votes to cut 80% dependence on US tech infrastructure

Cloover secures huge financing round

ElevenLabs crosses $330M ARR

European VC funding up 9% to $58B as AI overtakes fintech

⏱️ 3:49 Reading Time

💥 Main Events Past Week

European Commission launches EU Inc., the “28th regime” for startups

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced at Davos the creation of EU Inc., an optional pan-European legal entity allowing 48-hour online company registration across any member state. The initiative, kicked off by Andreas Klinger and backed by 22,000+ signatories, introduces a unified EU legal structure with central digital registry, standardized investment docs, and Europe-wide stock options.

The “28th regime” sits alongside national structures, aiming to match US/China incorporation ease while avoiding the maze of 27 separate country registrations.

European Parliament votes to reduce 80% dependence on US tech

The European Parliament passed a tech sovereignty report 471-68, directing the Commission to reduce reliance on foreign providers across semiconductors, cloud, software, and AI. The EU currently depends on non-EU countries for over 80% of digital infrastructure, with US cloud giants controlling 70% of the European market. The report calls for developing a “Eurostack” of European public digital infrastructure, though analysts warn the transformation will require over a decade.

Cloover secures $1.2B financing for distributed energy platform

Berlin-based Cloover raised $22 million Series A led by MMC Ventures alongside a $1.2 billion debt facility backed by a €300 million EIF guarantee. The AI-powered platform embeds financing into installer workflows for solar, batteries, heat pumps, and EV charging across Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Cloover grew revenues 8x in 2025 to approach $100 million and targets $500 million in 2026.

📰 Other News

• ElevenLabs crosses $330M ARR, reaching each $100M milestone in progressively shorter periods (20, 10, then 5 months) [See here]

• Andreas Klinger raises €15m for European robotics, automation and AI [See here]

• Europe’s Bazooka Could Hit US Tech [See here]

• European Commission seeks input on venture capital reform [See here]

• Anthropic CEO Says AI Chip Sales to China Like Selling Nukes to North Korea [See here]

• Europe can still win with AI. The key is focusing on physical AI [See here]

• The 10 Best Startup Events In Europe 2026 [See here]

• Nvidia in talks to back Yann LeCun’s new AI startup [See here]

👇🏼 Read some of our previous weekly reports to stay in the loop with 🇪🇺 European tech news:

Subscribe now

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇩🇪 Sinpex — €10M | AI-powered KYB/KYC lifecycle + KYB automation.

• 🇫🇷 Pennylane — $200M | Accounting software platform.

• 🇩🇪 Orbem — €55.5M | AI-powered MRI tech scaling (Series B).

• 🇫🇷 Stoïk — €20M | Cyber risk / cyber insurance platform (Series C).

• 🇩🇪 GeneralMind — $12M | “AI autopilot” for operational workflows.

• 🇪🇸 Fracttal — $35M | AI-driven maintenance for asset-intensive industries.

• 🇩🇪 Cloover — $1.2B+ | AI operating system for energy independence.

• 🇺🇦 Preply — $150M | Language learning marketplace (Series D), $1.2B valuation.

• 🇨🇭 SWISSto12 — €73M | ESA backing to accelerate HummingSat platform.

• 🇬🇧 Optalysys — £23M | Photonic computing (Series A).

• 🇭🇺 ABZ Innovation — €7M | Autonomous heavy-lift drones.

• 🇬🇧 TeamFeePay — £9M | Sports tech payments; European expansion.

• 🇫🇮 Agileday — €6.4M | AI solutions for professional services.

• 🇳🇱 Mews — $300M | Hospitality management software (Series D).

• 🇬🇧 Kraken Technologies — £25M | British Business Bank takes a £25M stake (government-backed investment).

Venture Funds

🇪🇸 Ananda Impact Ventures — €73M | First close of 5th Core Impact Fund.

🇩🇪 Vanagon Ventures — €20M | Closed Fund I (deeptech).

🇨🇭 Vi Partners — €161M | First close of new venture fund.

🇬🇷 Metavallon VC — €5M | Launched “Brain Gain” fund to reverse Greece’s tech talent exodus.

M&A 🤝

• 🇧🇪 Tourmanagement BV → Beatswitch — undisclosed | Live music software acquisition.

• 🇬🇧 ClearScore → Acre Platforms — undisclosed | Acquired London mortgage platform.

🔍 Reads & Reports

Anthropic publishes real AI usage data showing software work dominates

Anthropic released data showing 24% of AI use concentrates in just 10 tasks, with coding comprising 35-45% of all usage. Hard college-level work sees 12x time savings versus 9x for simple tasks, though API success drops below 50% after 3.5 hours of continuous work. User prompting skill correlates 0.92 with output quality, and US state-level adoption gaps could equalize within 2-5 years.

European VC funding up 9% to $58B in 2025 as AI overtakes fintech

European venture funding grew 9% to $58 billion in 2025, with AI emerging as the region’s leading sector for the first time at $17.5 billion—up from just $10 billion in 2024—overtaking financial services.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

Share

As always, we're keeping tabs on what actually matters across 🇪🇺 European tech, as well as relevant global tech news. If something broke the news this week and it's worth your time, it's probably below. Scroll on for the deals, reads, and reports you'll want on your radar.

In This Edition:

Merge Labs raises $252M led by OpenAI for non-invasive brain interfaces

Parloa triples to $3B valuation in 8 months on $350M Series D

osapiens hits unicorn status on $100M sustainability compliance raise

DTCP launches €500M defense fund, Europe’s largest private security VC initiative

McKinsey: Europe’s sovereign AI opportunity worth €480B by 2030

UK venture capital rebounds 35% to $23.6B in 2025

⏱️ 4:47 Reading Time

💥 Main Events Past Week

Neuralink rival Merge Labs raises $252M led by OpenAI

Sam Altman’s brain-computer interface startup Merge Labs raised $252M in a round led by OpenAI, where Altman serves as CEO, with backing from Bain Capital and Valve founder Gabe Newell. Unlike Neuralink’s surgical implants, Merge is pursuing non-invasive brain-interface technology and starting with healthcare applications before expanding to consumer use.

Berlin’s Parloa triples valuation to $3B in 8 months on $350M Series D

Berlin-based customer service AI startup Parloa raised $350M Series D led by General Catalyst, tripling its valuation to $3B just eight months after reaching $1B unicorn status. The company generates over $50M ARR serving enterprise customers including Allianz, Booking.com, and SAP, competing against Sierra ($10B valuation) and Decagon (reportedly raising at $4B+) in the race to automate the 17M-agent global contact center market.

German osapiens reaches unicorn status on $100M Series C

German enterprise software firm osapiens raised $100M Series C led by Decarbonization Partners, reaching unicorn status. Founded in 2019, the company’s cloud-based platform integrates 25+ software solutions helping companies manage supply chains and comply with sustainability regulations including EUDR, CSRD, and CSDDD, serving 2,400+ customers globally with 550+ employees across Europe and the US.

📰 Other News

• DTCP launches €500M defense tech fund, Europe's largest private VC initiative for security technologies

• European Commission commits €307M under Horizon Europe to fund trustworthy AI, quantum technologies, and next-gen AI agents

• Mistral AI CEO says being non-American is competitive advantage in Europe

• Wikipedia signs AI content partnerships with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI

• Almost 10 VC funds were born out of Speedinvest

• Novo Nordisk Foundation commits €736M to Copenhagen's BioInnovation Institute

👇🏼 Read some of our previous weekly reports to stay in the loop with 🇪🇺 European tech news:

Subscribe now

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇪🇸 Zepo Intelligence — $15M | Human-centric security to protect workspaces from AI risks.

• 🇫🇮 Avenue Biosciences — $5.7M | High-throughput protein engineering.

• 🇳🇱 Klearly — €12M | Payments platform for restaurants, bars, and clubs.

• 🇨🇭 Ahead Health — $6M | Building an AI-powered health system in Europe.

• 🇩🇪 NetBird — $10M | Open-source VPN alternative / network security platform.

• 🇬🇧 Nuclera — $87M | Series C extension to accelerate antibody engineering.

• 🇬🇧 Haiqu — $11M | Quantum software seed round (UK/Ukraine/US footprint).

• 🇩🇪 osapiens — $100M | Sustainability software; raise pushes it to unicorn status.

• 🇧🇪 Aikido — $60M | AppSec/cybersecurity Series B at $1B valuation.

• 🇩🇪 Parloa — $350M | AI voice agents for call centres; valuation ~$3B.

• 🇺🇦 HOLYWATER — $22M | Mobile “microdrama” content expansion.

• 🇫🇷 Harmattan AI — $200M | Autonomous defence systems; unicorn status and struck a deal with a French aerospace group.

Venture Funds

• 🇩🇪 Rosberg Ventures — $100M | Closed Fund III.

• 🇩🇰 BioInnovation Institute (Novo Nordisk Foundation) — €736M | Allocation to scale life sciences + deeptech innovation.

• 🇩🇪 DTCP — €20M per deal | New defence/security & dual-use investment vehicle.

M&A 🤝

• 🇬🇧 Haydale → SaveMoneyCutCarbon — up to £24M | Bought the decarbonisation platform (all-share deal).

• 🇺🇦 Choice31 → IAMPM — undisclosed | Acquired the IAMPM online school.

• 🇪🇸 Helsing → Keybotic — undisclosed | Acquired Barcelona robotics startup Keybotic (robotic inspection/infra protection).

• 🇨🇭 YKONE → FAB STUDIO — undisclosed | Acquired Zurich-based creative/social agency FAB STUDIO to build YKONE Zurich.

• 🇮🇪 Haemonetics → Vivasure Medical — €100M upfront + up to €85M earnout | Acquired Galway medtech (vessel closure).

🔍 Reads & Reports

McKinsey: Europe’s sovereign AI opportunity worth €480B by 2030

Europe could add €480 billion to annual GDP by 2030 through sovereign AI capabilities, but only if it moves fast. The US invested $300 billion in AI from 2020-2024 versus Europe’s $62 billion, leaving the continent dependent on foreign providers in cloud and foundation models despite strength in industrial applications.

Mike Maples Jr: I still think about passing on Airbnb

Dealroom/HSBC: UK venture capital hits $23.6B in 2025 comeback

UK venture funding jumped 35% to $23.6 billion in 2025, marking the third-strongest year on record behind the 2021-2022 peak. Fintech drove the recovery with 36 megarounds above $100 million, led by Revolut’s $2 billion raise. The UK’s innovation economy now stands at $1.3 trillion—seven times larger than a decade ago—with 58% of that value created by companies founded since 2010. Fintech accounts for 32% of ecosystem value, health 13%, and deep tech 20%.

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇪🇸 Zepo Intelligence — $15M | Human-centric security to protect workspaces from AI risks.

• 🇫🇮 Avenue Biosciences — $5.7M | High-throughput protein engineering.

• 🇳🇱 Klearly — €12M | Payments platform for restaurants, bars, and clubs.

• 🇨🇭 Ahead Health — $6M | Building an AI-powered health system in Europe.

• 🇩🇪 NetBird — $10M | Open-source VPN alternative / network security platform.

• 🇬🇧 Nuclera — $87M | Series C extension to accelerate antibody engineering.

• 🇬🇧 Haiqu — $11M | Quantum software seed round (UK/Ukraine/US footprint).

• 🇩🇪 osapiens — $100M | Sustainability software; raise pushes it to unicorn status.

• 🇧🇪 Aikido — $60M | AppSec/cybersecurity Series B at $1B valuation.

• 🇩🇪 Parloa — $350M | AI voice agents for call centres; valuation ~$3B.

• 🇺🇦 HOLYWATER — $22M | Mobile “microdrama” content expansion.

• 🇫🇷 Harmattan AI — $200M | Autonomous defence systems; unicorn status and struck a deal with a French aerospace group.

Venture Funds

• 🇩🇪 Rosberg Ventures — $100M | Closed Fund III.

• 🇩🇰 BioInnovation Institute (Novo Nordisk Foundation) — €736M | Allocation to scale life sciences + deeptech innovation.

• 🇩🇪 DTCP — €20M per deal | New defence/security & dual-use investment vehicle.

M&A 🤝

• 🇬🇧 Haydale → SaveMoneyCutCarbon — up to £24M | Bought the decarbonisation platform (all-share deal).

• 🇺🇦 Choice31 → IAMPM — undisclosed | Acquired the IAMPM online school.

• 🇪🇸 Helsing → Keybotic — undisclosed | Acquired Barcelona robotics startup Keybotic (robotic inspection/infra protection).

• 🇨🇭 YKONE → FAB STUDIO — undisclosed | Acquired Zurich-based creative/social agency FAB STUDIO to build YKONE Zurich.

• 🇮🇪 Haemonetics → Vivasure Medical — €100M upfront + up to €85M earnout | Acquired Galway medtech (vessel closure).

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

Share

In This Edition:

Andreessen Horowitz raises $15B representing 18% of all US venture capital in 2025

60+ European economists push digital euro to reduce US payment system dependence

Google, Meta, Netflix avoid binding EU regulations under Digital Networks Act

Europe attracts 9x less VC per worker than US despite infrastructure advantages

Major rounds: Swap (🇬🇧 $100M), FineHeart (🇫🇷 €83M), Amgen acquires Dark Blue for $840M

⏱️ 3:50 Reading Time

💥 Main Events Past Week

Andreessen Horowitz raises $15B across six funds, representing staggering 18% of US VC dollars

Andreessen Horowitz raised $15B across six funds including American Dynamism ($1.176B), Apps ($1.7B), and Growth ($6.75B), representing 18% of all US venture capital in 2025. Ben Horowitz framed the fundraise around maintaining American technological leadership in AI and crypto against Chinese competition, with investments targeting biology, health, defense, and education.

Digital euro dubbed the solution to US control of global money

Over 60 European economists, are urging EU lawmakers to support the digital euro project, arguing it’s essential to protect European sovereignty and reduce dependence on US payment systems. The proposal faces opposition from Europe’s banking industry, which warns the digital euro could undermine private sector payment initiatives and offer little consumer benefit.

Big tech escapes binding regulations under EU's Digital Networks Act

Google, Meta, Netflix, Microsoft, and Amazon will avoid binding regulations under the EU's Digital Networks Act despite telecoms lobbying for stricter rules. The DNA, to be presented January 20, will subject big tech only to voluntary cooperation rather than mandatory obligations, while standardizing spectrum licensing and allowing governments to extend the 2030 fiber infrastructure deadline.

📰 Other News

• Europe's data center bond market heats up with at least five issuers planning €3-5B in asset-backed securities

• Zilch acquires Lithuania's Fjord Bank to gain European banking licence

• US imposes visa restrictions on EU tech officials as transatlantic digital regulation dispute escalates

• Does Google's $32B Wiz acquisition threaten European cloud sovereignty?

• European energy storage startups raise €2.14B with mechanical solutions taking largest share at €696.7m

• Revolut among the top European candidates to IPO in 2026. See the list here.

• Pitchbook’s 5 predictions for European VC in 2026

👇🏼 Read some of our previous weekly reports to stay in the loop with 🇪🇺 European tech news:

Subscribe now

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇬🇧 Swap — $100M | E-commerce operating system streamlining logistics operations.

• 🇬🇧 Biographica — £7M | AI platform accelerating crop-trait discovery for faster agricultural breeding.

• 🇩🇪 CertHub — €6.2M | Automated AI solution simplifying medtech compliance and certification paperwork.

• 🇳🇱 ViCentra — $13M | Kaleido insulin patch pump expanding manufacturing capacity and developing next-generation systems.

• 🇫🇷 BrightHeart — €11M | AI-powered prenatal ultrasound screening technology.

• 🇪🇸 Lookiero Outfittery Group — €17M | Online personal shopping platform investing in AI-driven style personalization.

• 🇪🇸 Tucuvi — $20M | Voice AI assistant (LOLA) handling clinical phone calls and patient follow-ups automatically.

• 🇳🇱 ShanX Medtech — €24M | Fast diagnostic testing for antibiotic-resistant infections.

• 🇬🇧 Engitix — €21M | Cancer and fibrosis treatments targeting extracellular matrix (Series A extension).

• 🇫🇷 FineHeart — €83M | FlowMaker implantable device treating advanced heart failure.

• 🇮🇸 Alvotech — €100M (debt) | 2-year financing supporting operational liquidity and biosimilar drug development pipeline.

M&A Deals

• 🇬🇧 Accenture → Faculty | Acquisition announced

• 🇺🇸🇬🇧 Amgen → Dark Blue Therapeutics — up to $840M (~€718M) | AML oncology pipeline add-on.

🔍 Reads & Reports

Europe attracts 9x less VC per worker than US despite robust infrastructure

Josemaria Siota: Europe attracts 9x less venture capital per worker than the US despite having EIB, EIF, and InvestEU. The new European Innovation Council report identifies two gaps: growth finance, where startups struggle to access expansion rounds above €50m, and innovation finance, where short investment horizons constrain late-stage deep-tech capital. The report proposes pan-European fund-of-funds and blended finance to crowd in private capital.

Clifford Chance predicts strong 2026 M&A activity influenced by regulatory intervention and national priorities

Clifford Chance expects European regulators to approve large ‘4-to-3’ consolidation deals that previously faced competition barriers, while US regional bank merger approvals have been cut from 12-18 months to under nine months.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

Share

In This Edition:

Octopus Energy spins off AI unit Kraken Technologies at $8.65B valuation after $1B fundraise

European stocks hit all-time highs led by Dutch semiconductor company

FT warns AI bubble mirrors 1929 but central banks will prevent depression

Robeauté raises $28M for brain surgery microrobots targeting 2026 human trials

European university spinouts collectively valued at $398B across 76 unicorns

⏱️ 2:55 Reading Time

💥 Main Events Past Week

Octopus Energy spins off Kraken at $8.65B valuation

British energy company Octopus Energy is spinning off its AI unit Kraken Technologies at an $8.65 billion valuation after raising $1 billion led by D1 Capital Partners. Kraken serves over 70 million utility accounts globally with $500 million in contracted annual revenue—quadrupling in three years—and will operate independently under CEO Amir Orad by mid-2026, with Octopus retaining a 13.7% stake.

European markets hit record highs in first trading session of 2026

European AI and semiconductor stocks surged at the start of 2026, tracking Asian gains after Samsung's CEO expressed bullish sentiment on high-bandwidth memory chips. Dutch companies led with BE Semiconductor up 9.7%, ASM up 6.3%, and ASML up 3.7%, while STMicroelectronics rose 3.25%.

TechCrunch: European VC data lags optimism despite recovery signals

“European VC enthusiasm doesn’t match reality”: deal volume flatlined at €62B since 2023 while US surpassed prior years, and fundraising hit decade-low at €8.3B. Recovery signals include US investor participation rebounding from 19% low, Klarna’s IPO, Lovable and Mistral securing massive US-led rounds, and EQT doubling European investment to $250B over five years.

📰 Other News

• Robeauté raises $28M for brain surgery microrobots, targeting human trials by 2026

• 2025 sees 15 mega-rounds exceed $2B with OpenAI’s $40B topping list dominated by AI companies

• Top European 2026 IPO candidates

• EIC launches Scaleup Europe Fund seeking fund manager for multi-billion late-stage vehicle

• Top 10 European VCs in 2026

• European university spinouts valued at $398B as 76 companies reach unicorn status

• EIF commits €1.25B to ETCI 2.0 after backing 35 companies and 9 unicorns

👇🏼 Read some of our previous weekly reports to stay in the loop with 🇪🇺 European tech news:

Subscribe now

🔍 Reads & Reports

FT: AI bubble shows 1929 crash warning signs

The Financial Times warns that AI euphoria mirrors the Roaring Twenties with hyperscalers spending $600 billion on infrastructure while consumers spend just $12 billion annually on AI services, creating a mathematically untenable capital structure that will burst like the railway boom where technology survived but investors didn't. However, unlike 1929, any crash won't trigger a Great Depression as central bankers will provide market safety nets and the US will remain the global borrower of last resort.

Google recaps 60 major AI announcements from 2025

Google dropped 60 AI updates in 2025, from Gemini 2.0 evolving to Gemini 3.0 by year-end to AI Mode completely changing how Search works. The standout moves: computer-use capabilities that let Gemini actually control interfaces, the Pixel 10 launch, and their new Ironwood TPU built specifically for AI inference. Nano Banana, their image editing model, proved popular enough that Google expanded it across Search, NotebookLM, and Photos.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

Share

🥂 This is the last edition of 2025! In 2026 we’re planning new formats, articles, interviews, community, and so much more! If you have any suggestions, reply to this e-mail, we always read the responses.

In This Edition:

Nvidia pays $20B for Groq talent and tech, avoids acquisition

US bars Thierry Breton and four NGO leaders under speech censorship policy

Anna’s Archive scrapes 86M Spotify tracks for “preservation”

European AI funding captures 31% of total VC at €8.9B

European fintech raises €18-20B across 1,200 deals

Gartner: AI becomes core enterprise infrastructure in 2026

Karpathy: 2025 crystallizes LLMs as distinct computing paradigm

⏱️ 3:54 Reading Time

💥 Main Events Past Week

Nvidia strikes $20B Groq deal to dominate AI inference market

• Nvidia structured a $20 billion non-exclusive licensing agreement with Groq that includes hiring founder Jonathan Ross (creator of Google’s TPU), president Sunny Madra, and key engineering talent while avoiding outright acquisition to sidestep antitrust scrutiny

• The deal represents nearly 3x Groq’s $6.9 billion September valuation and marks Nvidia’s largest transaction, using its $60 billion cash position to neutralize a competitor in AI inference chips where Groq’s language processing units offered low-latency alternatives to Nvidia’s GPUs

• Groq continues operating independently under CFO Simon Edwards as CEO, with analysts calling the structure “keeping the fiction of competition alive”

Anna’s Archive scrapes 86 million Spotify songs for “preservation archive”

• Pirate activist group Anna’s Archive scraped metadata for 99.9% of Spotify’s 256 million tracks and archived 86 million music files (99.6% of all listens) totaling 300 terabytes, planning to release through torrents

• Only metadata has been released so far, not actual music files, with the group stating their mission to “preserve humanity’s knowledge and culture doesn’t distinguish among media types”

• Spotify disabled the user accounts involved in the scraping and implemented new safeguards, saying it “stood with the artist community against piracy” and is working with industry partners to protect creators

US bars five Europeans accused of pressuring tech firms on content moderation

• State Department barred five Europeans under a May visa policy targeting foreigners deemed responsible for censoring protected US speech, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling them “radical” activists running “weaponized” NGOs

• The five include Imran Ahmed (Centre for Countering Digital Hate CEO), Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg (HateAid leaders), Clare Melford (Global Disinformation Index), and former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, who oversaw the EU’s Digital Services Act

• Most Europeans enter via Visa Waiver Program without traditional visas but need online DHS applications, where these five have likely been flagged, with Breton responding that all 27 EU members voted for the Digital Services Act in 2022

📰 Other News

• EIB provides €50 million to Comau for robotics and automation R&D at Turin and Bari facilities.

• European AI funding hit €8.9 billion in 2025 to capture 31% of total VC funding.

• European fintech raised €18-20 billion across 1,200 deals in 2025, with mega-rounds accounting for 55% of total funding.

• Mosa Meat raises €15 million as competitor Meatable shuts down, achieving 99.999% cost reduction from its €250,000 first burger.

• OpenAI’s compute margins reached 70% in October 2025, doubling from 35% in January 2024.

Leave a comment

🔍 Reads & Reports

Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2026

Gartner’s 2026 trends confirm AI as core enterprise infrastructure, spanning AI-native development, supercomputing platforms, confidential computing, multiagent systems, domain-specific models, physical AI, preemptive cybersecurity, digital provenance, AI security platforms, and geopatriation where regulation and sovereignty drive workload decisions.

a16z Big Ideas 2026: Part 1

a16z predicts 2026 will see agent-native infrastructure replacing human-speed systems, vertical AI evolving to multiplayer collaboration, systems of record losing primacy to autonomous execution layers, designing for machine legibility over human interfaces, and hyper-personalization across education, health, and media as products shift from mass-produced to individually tailored.

Andrej Karpathy’s 2025 LLM Year in Review

Karpathy frames 2025 as the year LLMs crystallized into a distinct computing paradigm. RLVR training against verifiable tasks like math puzzles redirected compute from pretraining while producing jagged, non-human intelligence that undermines benchmark reliability. The application layer thickened—Cursor orchestrates models into domain tools, Claude Code operates locally on user machines as the first convincing agent, and vibe coding normalized natural language programming for ephemeral software creation. Early multimodal systems like Gemini Nano Banana hint at LLM GUI beyond text interfaces, though the industry has barely tapped current capabilities.

Subscribe now

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

In This Edition:

Lovable triples valuation to $6.6B five months after Series A

Yann LeCun leaves Meta, seeks €500M at €3B valuation for AMI Labs

Nvidia acquires Slurm developer SchedMD, releases Nemotron 3 models

QuantumDiamonds invests €150M+ for Munich quantum chip facility

Commission pilots fast-track EIC funding process

⏱️ 4:19 Reading Time

📰 What Happened This Week

Lovable raises $330M at $6.6B valuation

Stockholm-based Lovable raised $330 million at a $6.6 billion valuation, tripling its worth five months after its $1.8 billion Series A in July. The vibe-coding startup hit $100 million ARR within eight months of launching in 2024, then doubled to $200 million ARR four months later. CapitalG and Menlo Ventures led the Series B, with Khosla Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Databricks Ventures participating. CEO Anton Osika rejected investor pressure to move to Silicon Valley, though the company faced scrutiny in November for not paying VAT taxes.

Commission tests fast-track EIC funding process

The European Commission is piloting a new approach to accelerate EIC funding access, giving programme managers authority to invite promising projects for immediate assessment without the standard application process.

Nvidia acquires Slurm developer SchedMD, releases Nemotron 3 models

Nvidia acquired SchedMD, the developer of Slurm workload management system used for high-performance computing and AI, with plans to keep it open source and vendor-neutral. The chipmaker also released the Nemotron 3 family of open AI models for building AI agents, including Nano for targeted tasks, Super for multi-agent applications, and Ultra for complex tasks.

QuantumDiamonds invests over €150M for Munich chip inspection facility

QuantumDiamonds will invest over €150 million to build a quantum-based chip metrology production facility in Munich, with expected support under the European Chips Act. The TU Munich spin-off develops Quantum Diamond Microscopy systems that detect chip defects missed by conventional techniques, with Q1 2026 installations planned in the US and Taiwan. The company chose Germany over Phoenix, Arizona.

Meta’s Yann LeCun targets €3B valuation for AI startup before launch

Yann LeCun is in early talks to raise €500 million for Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs at a €3 billion valuation ahead of its January launch. The Meta chief AI scientist, leaving after 12 years, has tapped Nabla founder Alexandre LeBrun as CEO. AMI Labs will develop world models—AI systems that understand the physical world for robotics and transport applications. Meta is not investing but will partner with AMI Labs to access and commercialize the technology.

Subscribe now

🔍 Reads & Reports

ASML CEO details High NA transition as Nvidia pushes beyond Moore’s Law

ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said the company is working with chipmakers to finalize High NA EUV machines for high-volume manufacturing in 2027-2028, as Nvidia demands chips that increase transistor counts 16x every two years versus traditional 2x under Moore’s Law.

The Dutch company expects revenue to rise 15% this year to €32.5 billion with profit up 27% to €9.6 billion, holding 100% market share in advanced lithography equipment. Intel received the first High NA machine in 2023 and is preparing for mass production, while closest rival SMEE in China lags 10-15 years behind technologically. ASML has already begun research on next-generation Hyper NA technology for deployment next decade.

a16z outlines 15 AI ideas for 2026 as focus shifts to execution

brings a report from over 50 a16z partners contributed to the firm’s annual list of AI ideas for 2026, marking a shift from copilots to systems that replace entire workflows. Recurring themes include (1) agent-native infrastructure becoming standard, (2) execution mattering more than interfaces, and (3) small teams gaining disproportionate leverage through AI orchestration.

Key predictions span prompt-free applications that act proactively, systems of record losing ground to execution layers, ChatGPT emerging as an AI app store, and multi-agent orchestration reshaping Fortune 500 companies.

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇩🇪 Trade Republic → Confirmed decacorn status following a secondary share sale, reaching a €12.5B valuation (no new primary capital raised).

• 🇬🇧 Lovable → Raised $330M Series B at a $6.6B valuation

• 🇮🇹 Exein → Raised an additional €100M to expand its embedded cybersecurity platform.

• 🇨🇭 Neural Concept → Raised $100M Series C to scale AI-native engineering.

• 🇳🇱 Destinus → Secured a €50M financing facility to expand autonomous flight production.

• 🇬🇧 PolyAI → Raised $86M Series D to scale its AI assistant tech.

• 🇫🇷 Lucis → Raised $8.5M Seed to expand preventive healthcare testing across Europe.

• 🇵🇱 Jutro Medical → Extended Series A to €36M to scale AI-enabled primary care services.

• 🇬🇧 Ankar → Raised $20M Series A to build defensible IP innovation platform.

🤝 M&A

🇨🇭 HomeBuddy → Acquired for $190M in a Swiss–US cross-border deal.

🇬🇧 Monzo → Acquired digital mortgage broker Habito

🇫🇮 Bought → Acquired luxury rental platform Robes Rental

🇩🇪 Quantum Systems → Acquired FERNRIDE to expand its defence autonomy technology stack.

Investors

• 🇩🇪 Picus Capital → Closed a €150M preferred equity vehicle

• 🇪🇸 COFIDES → Committed up to €10M into the Creas Impacto II fund.

• 🇬🇧 MD One Ventures & Randox → Launched a joint security and biotech accelerator

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

In This Edition:

UK deep tech reaches $406B combined value

UK and Germany attract $4.3B in defense tech since 2022

EIB Group sets €100B financing target with €4.5B for defense

Hiro Capital adds Nick Clegg and Yann LeCun for new fund

Expedition Growth Capital closes €323M Fund III

TUM researchers propose European AI strategy blueprint

⏱️ 4:54 Reading Time

📰 What Happened This Week

UK and Germany lead European defense tech boom

UK and Germany have become Europe’s defense hubs, attracting $4.3 billion into defense startups since early 2022—four times the previous four years. Germany’s Helsing hit €12 billion valuation and Quantum Systems reached €3 billion, while UK’s PhysicsX raised $155 million. Germany’s role as major Ukraine aid donor gives startups battlefield feedback. Challenges remain: slow procurement, clearance bottlenecks, and shortages of security-cleared talent.

Forbes unveils 2025 Midas List Europe

Forbes published its 2025 Midas List Europe ranking the top 25 venture capital investors in Europe and the Middle East. Danny Rimer of Index Ventures took the top spot. The list shows geographic diversification beyond London, with new additions including Romanian Dan Lupu of Earlybird and Germany’s Florian Heinemann of Trade Republic.

The list counts investments in private companies that have raised funding at a valuation of $200 million or more, or that have gone public or been acquired for at least $100 million, within the past five years. Extra weight is given to realized and more recent returns.

EIB Group targets €100 billion financing in 2026

The European Investment Bank Group renewed its €100 billion financing target for 2026, including €4.5 billion for security and defense (5% of total EU financing). The EIB Group expanded its European Tech Champions Initiative with ETCI 2.0, committing €1.25 billion to support both mega funds and mid-sized funds. Since launching in 2023, ETCI has backed nine tech unicorns.

The European Investment Fund will contribute €15.3 billion of the total €100 billion target. The Boards approved €7.5 billion in new project financing this week for social infrastructure, climate action and global partnerships. The EIB Group signed nearly €89 billion in new financing across over 900 projects in 2024.

Hiro Capital adds Clegg, LeCun for new scaleup fund

London-based Hiro Capital launched Hiro III, a multi-stage fund targeting Europe’s scaleup gap with cheques of €5 million to €50 million. Former UK deputy PM and Meta executive Nick Clegg joined as general partner, while Meta’s outgoing chief AI scientist Yann LeCun joined the advisory board. The fund aims to raise over $500 million for investments in spatial AI, robotics, immersive computing and defense across UK and Europe. Founded in 2018 by Luke Alvarez, Ian Livingstone, and Cherry Freeman, Hiro Capital previously invested in gaming and metaverse companies in UK, Europe and North America.

Expedition Growth Capital closes €323M Fund III

London-based Expedition Growth Capital raised €323 million for Fund III, focused on bootstrapped European software companies. The oversubscribed fund closed in four months with over half of commitments from US investors. Typical investments range from €8.6 million to €21.5 million. The firm supports companies scaling from €4.3 million ARR toward €43 million ARR with hands-on support in go-to-market expansion, strategic hires, and operational excellence.

Subscribe now

🔍 Reads & Reports

TUM researchers publish European AI strategy blueprint

Technical University of Munich researchers published a policy paper (back in February) on arXiv proposing a European AI strategy. Europe’s AI venture capital investment is eight times less than the US and 50% of China’s, while semiconductor production sits under 10% globally. Proposals include scaling capacity via EU Chips Act and EuroHPC, establishing a DARPA-style European AI Coordination Council for regulatory sandboxes, and deploying tax credits and matching funds.

Royal Academy of Engineering publishes UK deep tech report

The Royal Academy of Engineering’s 2025 State of UK Deep Tech report shows UK privately-held deep tech startups hold a combined enterprise value of $155 billion, reaching $406 billion when including exits and public listings.

UK ranks third globally for deep tech VC at $4.7 billion, with deep tech representing 31% of all UK VC funding. The UK has created 53 thoroughbreds (unicorns or $500M+ revenue companies) from a pipeline of 2,400 VC-backed startups. Defence tech received a boost as the 2025 Defence Industrial Strategy allocates 10% of equipment budgets to novel technology, though the UK holds only a small share of global defence tech startups.

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇩🇪 Quantum Systems → Raised €180M Series C extension, lifting valuation beyond €3B.

• 🇫🇷 Spark Cleantech → Raised €30M Series A to decarbonise heavy industry.

• 🇨🇭 Assaia → Raised $26.6M Series B to scale AI-driven airport operations.

• 🇨🇭 Gravis Robotics → Raised $23M to scale autonomous earthmoving technology.

• 🇧🇪 Qargo → Raised $33M Series B to expand AI-driven transport management.

• 🇬🇧 Yonda Tax → Raised £11M to simplify global tax compliance for scaling firms.

• 🇮🇹 Equixly → Raised €10M Series A to tackle API security with agentic AI.

• 🇫🇷 Evertrust → Raised €10M to expand digital trust infrastructure across Europe.

• 🇬🇧 Hello Vet → Raised £15M to scale next-gen veterinary care.

• 🇬🇧 yuv → Raised $12M to scale sustainable smart hair-colour technology.

• 🇬🇧 Matta → Raised $14M to develop “sentient factory” industrial AI.

• 🇧🇪 Trendtracker → Raised $7M Series A to scale AI strategic intelligence.

• 🇫🇮 Gosta Labs → Raised €7.5M Seed to scale its oncology AI operating system.

• 🇳🇱 Wakuli → Raised €5M Series A to scale sustainable coffee sourcing.

• 🇬🇧 Track Titan → Raised $5M Seed for AI-powered motorsport analytics.

🤝 M&A

🇷🇴 Tekpon → Acquired TNW to accelerate SaaS marketplace expansion.

🇳🇱 Mollie → Acquired GoCardless in a €1.05bn payments mega-deal.

Investors

• 🇧🇪 KBC Start it Fund → Launched a €100M fund supporting startups from idea to IPO

• 🇪🇺 U2V (University2Ventures) → Launched a €60M fund for university spin-offs

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

In This Edition:

Brevo becomes unicorn with €500M round

Bending Spoons acquires Eventbrite for €430M

Mistral releases 10 open-source models

n8n CEO commits to German IPO

Europe lags Global South in AI adoption

US AI M&A hits $157B vs Europe’s $8B

⏱️ 4:11 Reading Time

📰 What Happened This Week

French CRM Brevo becomes unicorn with €500M round

Paris-based Brevo raised €500 million led by General Atlantic and Oakley Capital, achieving unicorn status. Management and employees became the largest shareholders at 26%, while Partech fully exited. The customer engagement platform will surpass €200 million in ARR in 2025 with double-digit EBITDA margins, serving over 600,000 customers including eBay, H&M, and Carrefour.

Brevo targets €1 billion in revenue by 2030, with acquisitions expected to contribute 45% of that target. The company has completed 11 acquisitions since its 2012 founding as Sendinblue.

Italian tech firm Bending Spoons acquires Eventbrite for €430M

Milan-based Bending Spoons is acquiring event platform Eventbrite for €430 million ($500 million) in cash, paying $4.50 per share at an 82% premium. The deal, expected to close in H1 2026, will take the US-listed company private after it reported flat revenue at $325 million in 2024.

Eventbrite joins Bending Spoons’ portfolio alongside Vimeo (acquired for €1.1 billion), Evernote, WeTransfer, and AOL (pending). Bending Spoons raised over €500 million in debt in 2025 to accelerate its acquisition strategy.

French AI startup Mistral releases Mistral 3 family of open models

Mistral AI released the Mistral 3 family of 10 open-source models under Apache 2.0 license, including flagship Mistral Large 3 with 41 billion active parameters (675 billion total) and nine smaller Ministral 3 models (3B, 8B, 14B parameters).

Trained on 3,000 NVIDIA H200 GPUs, Large 3 ranks #2 among open-source non-reasoning models on LMArena. Ministral 3 runs on a single GPU for edge devices including laptops, drones, and robots.

Berlin’s n8n CEO commits to European IPO despite investor pressure

Berlin-based AI workflow automation platform n8n raised $180 million at a $2.5 billion valuation in October, bringing total funding to $240 million. CEO Jan Oberhauser told Tech.eu he wants a German listing and refused investor requests to flip to Delaware incorporation, even turning down Y Combinator over the requirement.

The open-source platform serves 700,000 developers and enterprise customers including Vodafone, Microsoft, and Mistral, with ARR above $40 million.

Subscribe now

🔍 Reads & Reports

OECD: Europe lags Global South in AI adoption

An OECD survey of 14,000 people across 14 countries found Europe significantly trails the Global South in AI adoption, with 66% of Indian respondents using generative AI regularly compared to just 19% in Germany. The Netherlands leads Europe at 25% adoption, while Germany ranks lowest.

Over 70% of French and German respondents reported no AI job training, compared to 60% of respondents in India, Brazil, and South Africa planning to pursue AI training. Europeans were also less likely to believe AI will impact their careers, with nearly a third of Dutch respondents saying it will have no effect at all.

White & Case: US AI M&A dwarfs Europe despite similar drivers

As of November 27, the US recorded 466 AI deals worth $157.3 billion in 2025 versus Europe’s 230 deals worth $8.1 billion. Top US transactions included OpenAI’s $40 billion SoftBank-led raise and Meta’s $14.8 billion Scale AI investment.

Europe’s largest was ASML’s $2 billion investment in France’s Mistral AI. Government backing includes $500 billion from the US Trump administration and €200 billion from the EU’s InvestAI. Europe holds a 30% per-capita advantage in AI talent over the US but faces stricter regulation under the EU AI Act.

Takeaways from Atomico’s State of European Tech 2025

JME.vc partner highlighted key findings from last week’s Atomico report: The tech economy is now a $4 trillion asset class, but Europe spreads capital thin instead of backing giants.

Founder creation is at all-time highs with the bottleneck in scaling rather than starting, while repeat founders increasingly leave for US structures. Europe faces a $200 billion late-stage gap but finally has global contenders beyond “European X” clones, as Brussels rewrites rules with EU-INC.

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇩🇪 Black Forest Labs → Raised $300M Series B and joined the EU unicorn club at a valuation above $3B.

• 🇬🇧 Sokin → Cross-border payment fintech lands $50M funding round

• 🇨🇿 Duvo → Raised $15M to deploy AI retail workforce

• 🇫🇷 Bitstack → Raised $15M Series A for Bitcoin savings app

• 🇬🇧 BuiltAI → Raised $6M for AI analytics in commercial real estate

• 🇮🇹 Pack → Raised €5.8M Series A to expand HR tech

• 🇳🇱 Orq.ai → Raised €5M Seed to close the AI production gap

• 🇵🇹 Spotlite → Raised €3.5M Seed for satellite infrastructure monitorin

• 🇧🇪 Donna → Raised $4.8M for AI field-sales automation

• 🇫🇷 Minitap → Raised $4.1M Seed to speed mobile app development

• 🇧🇪 AILOS Robotics → Raised €3.5M for robot gearbox manufacturing

• 🇩🇪 Marble Imaging → Raised €5.3M for ultra-high-resolution Earth imaging

• 🇨🇭 Saporo → Raised €7M Series A to scale identity security

🤝 M&A

🇬🇧 Shiftmove → Acquired Ocean from Orange Business to expand fleet-tech footprint
🇬🇧 Wayve → Acquired Quality Match, a German data-labeling startup
🇮🇹 Bending Spoons → Acquiring Eventbrite in a $500M all-cash deal

Investors

• 🇵🇹 Índico Capital Partners → Launched €125M Fund focused on early-stage European tech.

• 🇬🇧 6 Degrees Capital → Closed €154M fund backing enterprise software and AI.

• 🇫🇷 Clover → Raised €30M to become a specialised investor in work and education tech.

• 🇬🇧 Solo GP Fund Baobab→ Launched $15M by early ElevenLabs and Revolut investor.

• 🇩🇪 Future Energy Ventures (FEV) → Secured €205M to power next-generation energy innovation.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

In This Edition:

Revolut reaches $75B valuation

Lagarde: Europe missing AI wave

EIB launches €500M space fund

Germany readies second €1B fund-of-funds

Switzerland dominates European spinout efficiency

European PE surges 105% in Q3

⏱️ 4:05 Reading Time

📰 What Happened This Week

Revolut hits $75B valuation in secondary share sale

Revolut completed a secondary share sale at a $75 billion valuation, up from $45 billion fifteen months ago. The round was led by Coatue, Greenoaks, Dragoneer, and Fidelity, with Nvidia’s NVentures, Andreessen Horowitz, Franklin Templeton, and T. Rowe Price also participating. The fintech posted $4 billion in 2024 revenue (up 72% year-over-year) and $1.4 billion in profit before tax, serving over 65 million users across 39 countries. This marks Revolut’s fifth employee share sale.

ECB’s Lagarde warns Europe risks missing AI wave

ECB President Christine Lagarde told the BratislavAI Forum in Bratislava that Europe risks falling behind on AI adoption despite global corporate investment reaching $252 billion over the past year. Lagarde said Europe has “already missed the opportunity to be a first mover in AI” but can still become a strong second mover by focusing on rapid deployment rather than trying to create leading AI models.

She identified barriers including high energy costs, fragmented regulations, and lack of integrated capital markets, warning that delays could jeopardize Europe’s future competitiveness against the US and China.

Dutch fintech POM acquires Denmark’s FarPay

Dutch fintech POM acquired Denmark’s FarPay with backing from Vortex Capital Partners, combining POM’s receivables management with FarPay’s invoicing automation. Both companies were founded in 2014. FarPay will operate as an independent brand within POM Group with all employees retained.

EIB launches €500M Space TechEU financing programme

The European Investment Bank launched Space TechEU, its first dedicated financing programme for Europe’s space sector, announced at the European Space Agency’s Council of Ministers meeting in Bremen. The programme includes €500 million in EIB financing expected to mobilise €1.4 billion in total investment through commercial bank partnerships.

Germany plans second €1B fund-of-funds after deploying 80% of first

Germany is planning a second €1 billion fund-of-funds after its Growth Fund Germany deployed more than 80% of its capital two years after its 2023 final close. The first fund invested €825 million into 41 VC firms that have collectively backed 360 startups, with 54% allocated to growth funds, 35% to early-stage funds, and 11% to generalists.

Subscribe now

🔍 Reads & Reports

European Spinouts Report 2025: Switzerland leads in spinout efficiency

Switzerland ranks first in Europe for spinout value per capita and per STEM graduate, scoring 100 on the per capita index versus 33 for the runner-up, while placing third in absolute combined enterprise value at $44.6 billion behind the UK and Germany. ETH Zurich (#3) and EPFL (#4) rank among Europe’s top five universities for spinout value creation, with ETH Zurich holding the #1 position in both robotics and climate tech. Spinouts now account for 40% of new deep tech and life sciences startups in Europe since 2019, an 80% increase compared to 2010-2018. Switzerland directs 60% of all VC funding to deep tech, the highest share globally, surpassing Israel (49%), Sweden (44%), and the US (43%).

Deloitte: European defense VC faces concentration and scaling challenges

Deloitte reports that VC has flowed into European defense at levels not seen since the Cold War’s final decade, but capital concentration remains problematic as drones, ISR platforms, and command-and-control software absorb disproportionate attention while energetics, electronic warfare, advanced materials, and logistics remain neglected.

Europe faces a “valley of death” between early-stage funding and Series B production capital, with ESG frameworks penalizing defense exposure and regulatory fragmentation limiting deals. The most common exit path is strategic acquisition by primes rather than IPOs, with recent examples including BAE’s purchase of Malloy Aeronautics and Helsing’s acquisition of over half a dozen mature companies.

Ropes & Gray: European PE sees 105% jump in deal value in Q3 2025

European PE completed 1,107 deals totaling €121 billion in Q3 2025, down 3% in count but up 105% in value versus Q2, with the top five deals accounting for €50 billion. Cross-border activity with the US spiked as deal value increased 952% versus Q2, driven by Keurig’s €19.7 billion acquisition of JDE Peets. Global fundraising saw 202 funds raise €437 billion, down 30% in fund count but up 2% in value, signaling larger, more concentrated funds. Three IPOs occurred in Q3, with data centers, sustainability infrastructure, and secondaries highlighted as key deal drivers.

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇩🇪 Quantum Systems → Raised €180M Series C extension to scale dual-use aerial intelligence and lift valuation above €3B.

• 🇬🇧 Model ML → Raised $75M to scale its AI automation platform for financial services.

• 🇨🇭 Cerrion → Raised $18M to expand AI video agents preventing industrial downtime.

• 🇨🇭 Gravis Robotics → Raised $23M to scale autonomous earthmoving robots.

• 🇬🇧 StirlingX → Extended Seed to $11M to expand drone operations and intelligence systems.

• 🇵🇱 Juo → Raised €4M to expand its physical-product subscription platform.

• 🇩🇪 NutriUnited → Secured €8.5M Seed to support family-owned food producers.

• 🇫🇮 Gosta Labs → Raised €7.5M Seed to scale its AI OS for oncology.

• 🇪🇪 PowerUP Energy Technologies → Raised €10M Series A to grow hydrogen energy systems.

• 🇩🇰 Nordic Salt Cycle → Raised €3.5M to scale molten-salt mineral recovery.

• 🇮🇪 InvenireX → Raised £2M (€2.3M) to commercialise its disease-detection biotech.

🤝 M&A

🇬🇧 BKN301 → Expanded Series B and acquired UK fintech Planky to strengthen AI-first banking.

Investors

• 🇵🇹 Índico Capital Partners → Launched €125M Fund focused on early-stage European tech.

• 🇬🇧 6 Degrees Capital → Closed €154M fund backing enterprise software and AI.

• 🇫🇷 Clover → Raised €30M to become a specialised investor in work and education tech.

• 🇬🇧 Solo GP Fund Baobab→ Launched $15M by early ElevenLabs and Revolut investor.

• 🇩🇪 Future Energy Ventures (FEV) → Secured €205M to power next-generation energy innovation.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re bringing the best deals to our partner VCs by building Europe’s finest venture network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

In This Edition:

13,000 at Slush, €4T represented

Big Tech delays EU AI rules

Europe’s largest defense-tech fund closes

70% of founders call Europe restrictive

Europe faces $132B AI funding gap

M&A becomes essential tool for European startups

📰 What Happened This Week

Slush 2025 draws 13,000 participants representing €4 trillion in startup-directed funds

Helsinki’s Slush 2025 attracted 13,000 participants including 6,000+ startup founders and fund managers representing over €4 trillion in funds directed to startups. Over 80% of participants came from European countries.

Lovable CEO Anton Osika opened the event, noting his company now sees 100,000 new projects built daily with 5 million people using Lovable-built apps. “Everyone kept telling me that to be successful I had to move to Silicon Valley. I resisted that and we kept the company in Stockholm, bringing talent from the US to work for us.”

Slush has become a founder factory: 15% of former Slush employees founded their own startups. Each international visitor spends an average €946 during the event, generating significant revenue for Finland’s economy. The Slush 100 competition offers funding directly from European VCs including General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures.

EU delays high-risk AI rules to 2027 after Big Tech pressure

The European Commission’s “Digital Omnibus” package delays stricter AI rules in high-risk areas to December 2027 from August 2026. Affected areas include AI use in biometric identification, job applications, exams, health services, creditworthiness, and law enforcement.

The package also allows Google, Meta, and OpenAI to use Europeans’ personal data to train AI models under revised GDPR provisions, and simplifies cookie consent rules.

Keen Venture Partners closes Europe’s largest defense-tech VC fund at €150M+

Amsterdam-based Keen Venture Partners announced the first close of its European defense and security fund at over €150 million, making it the largest defense-tech VC fund in Europe.

Major backers include the European Investment Fund (€40 million), Dutch pension fund PME (€40 million), TNO, ABN AMRO, and LIOF. The fund plans to invest €1-€10 million in over 25 companies focusing on cybersecurity, autonomous systems, deterrence technologies, and space capabilities.

Context: EU defense spending hit €343 billion in 2024 (1.9% of GDP), projected to reach 2.1% in 2025. Other European defense funds include Rockaway Ventures’ €55 million second fund and Presto Tech Horizons targeting €150 million.

Subscribe now

🔍 Reads & Reports

Atomico’s State of European Tech 2025

Atomico’s 280-page report projects European tech investment will reach $44 billion in 2025, with deeptech now capturing 36% of VC funding compared to 19% in 2021. Defense tech raised a record $1.6 billion this year, up 55% year-over-year, while France’s Mistral closed a €1.73 billion round.

The report identifies structural problems: 70% of founders find Europe’s operating environment too restrictive, European pension funds allocate 0.01% to VC versus 0.03% in the US, and 18% of European founders now incorporate in the US (up from 10% in 2016).

The capital gap is stark—Europe raised $14 billion for AI against $146 billion in the US. European Commission initiatives like the 28th Regime aim to address market fragmentation, but implementation is still uncertain (with it might ending up as a directive instead!) given past regulatory outcomes with GDPR and the AI Act.

IMF on Europe’s AI Productivity Gains

IMF research projects Europe will achieve 1.1% cumulative productivity growth over five years from AI adoption alone, with gains varying by country—Norway could reach 5% in an optimistic scenario while Romania stays below 2%. Higher-income European countries stand to benefit more because their economies have greater exposure to white-collar services where AI can automate tasks, and higher wages create stronger incentives to adopt labor-saving technology.

The IMF argues long-term gains could be substantially larger if AI accelerates R&D and creates new industries, though this requires policy action. The organization recommends deepening the EU single market to reduce cross-border barriers, strengthening Capital Markets Union to channel more venture capital to AI ventures. Without these reforms, even the modest near-term productivity gains could be lost.

European startups abandon “buying growth” stigma as M&A becomes efficiency play

European founders historically avoided acquisition-led expansion, wary of being perceived as “buying growth.” That stigma has faded. The logic is now mechanical: (1) acquire competitors to reduce pricing pressure; (2) buy product capability to shorten development cycles; (3) absorb regional operators to skip market entry from zero, and (4) purchase teams to avoid recruitment.

JP Morgan: M&A Dominates EMEA Startup Exits

Mergers and acquisitions account for over 85% of venture-backed exits across Europe over the past five years, with US-based acquirers leading deal flow. Both corporate and venture-backed buyers are increasingly active in the EMEA market as private equity begins rotating portfolio companies.

“LLMs are like as refrigeration. And the Coca-Cola has yet to be built”

“The people who invented refrigeration made some money, but most of the money was made by Coca-Cola, who used refrigeration to build an empire.”

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇳🇱 Picnic → Raised €430M to scale its online grocery platform.

• 🇩🇰 Flatpay → Raised $170M and reached unicorn status

• 🇬🇧 Artios → Raised $115M Series D to accelerate cancer therapies.

• 🇩🇪 voize → Raised $50M Series A to bring AI to frontline nursing.

• 🇫🇷 Deblock → Secured €30M Series A to expand on-chain banking in Europe.

• 🇫🇷 GetVocal → Raised $26M to scale AI customer-support agents.

• 🇬🇧 BOB → Secured $25M to accelerate Bitcoin DeFi expansion.

• 🇷🇴 Condukt → Raised $10M to modernise compliance for financial services.

• 🇨🇭 Albatross → Raised €10.5M to expand real-time product-discovery AI.

• 🇩🇪 Peec AI → Raised $21M Series A to help brands win in AI search.

• 🇩🇪 Mirantus Health → Raised €5.5M to scale faster eye-screening diagnostics.

• 🇫🇷 NcodiN → Raised €16M to advance deeptech semiconductor innovation.

🤝 M&A

🇬🇧 Curve → Acquired by Lloyds to integrate multi-card fintech into banking services.

🇩🇪 Integral → Acquired cleverlohn while securing fresh funding for its AI accounting and payroll platform.

Investors

• 🇫🇮 EIT Urban Mobility → Launched a new €44M fund for mobility innovation.

• 🇬🇧 RCA → Closed its Design & Innovation S/EIS fund

• 🇪🇺 Sofinnova Partners → Secured €650M to back breakthroughs in biopharma and medtech.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re building Europe’s finest scouting network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

In This Edition:

Brussels trades privacy for AI competitiveness

Lovable nears 8M users, traffic down 40%

Denmark backs TechBBQ with €800k

EU finalizes €5bn Scale-Up Fund

Europeans are obsessed with Americans. Americans don’t care

VC investor predicts 40-50% fund consolidation

📰 What Happened This Week

Brussels trades privacy for AI competitiveness

The European Commission’s leaked “Digital Omnibus” package, set for November 19 release, would weaken core GDPR protections to accelerate AI development. The proposal allows companies to process personal data—including sensitive health and political information—for AI training under vague “legitimate interest” exceptions, while shifting cookie consent from opt-in to opt-out.

Privacy advocates like Max Schrems call it a “poorly drafted quick shot” that bypasses proper lawmaking procedures, with opposition from France, Austria, Estonia, and Slovenia, though Germany surprisingly backs the changes.

Lovable nears 8M users while questions about vibe coding sustainability linger

Stockholm’s Lovable hit 8 million users in its first year, tripling from July’s 2.3 million, with 100,000 products built daily on the platform. The $1.8 billion-valued AI coding startup hit $100 million ARR in June, but Barclays data showed traffic down 40% by September, raising questions about whether the vibe coding boom has staying power beyond the initial hype cycle.

Denmark backs TechBBQ with €800k grant

TechBBQ received a €800k grant from Denmark’s Business Development Board, the second this year, as part of a larger 122M DKK investment round. The 2025 summit drew 10,000 participants including 3,500 startups and 1,700 investors, with the funding aimed at strengthening Denmark’s startup ecosystem and maintaining Copenhagen’s position as a major European entrepreneurship hub.

EU finalizing €5bn Scale-Up Fund for AI, quantum, and semiconductors

The European Union is setting up a €5bn Scale-Up Europe Fund targeting late-stage rounds above €100m in strategic tech sectors. The fund already secured €3bn in commitments plus €1bn from the European Innovation Council, with Denmark’s EIFO, Spain’s Criteria Caixa, and Novo Nordisk Foundation in talks to join. The European Commission eventually wants to expand it to €25bn, though Speedinvest’s Andreas Schwarzenbrunner called even €5bn “a good first step, but still tiny compared to what’s happening globally.”

Subscribe now

🔍 Reads & Reports

Europeans obsess over America, but Americans don’t think about Europe at all

Index Ventures published Winning in the US, a data-driven guide for European and Israeli companies entering America, based on studying hundreds of VC-backed expansions and interviews with 40+ founders including Nikolay Storonsky, Ilkka Paananen, and Daniel Ek.

The breakthrough: there’s no single path. Success depends on matching your archetype to your strategy. Get it wrong, and you might burn millions without getting where you’re heading.

The four archetypes:

Telescope - Marketing-led, US is large but not dominant market. Gaming companies (King, Supercell, Voodoo) can scale globally from Helsinki or Paris via app stores and performance marketing. Most teams just stay in Europe.

Magnet - Sales-driven, US is vast majority of market. Enterprise software and cybersecurity companies must move founders to US. CEO needs presence to close deals and clients that would actually use the product.

Pendulum - Truly balanced. US becomes ~half the business, but Europe remains important. Spotify and Celonis built significant teams on both continents. Founders literally split time 50/50.

Anchor - Europe remains dominant geography and largest market. US grows but stays smaller portion. This is common for fintech: Adyen, Revolut. Industries where you can build €100B+ company in Europe alone.

Index partner Martin Mignot’s key observation: Europeans obsess about American politics and markets. Americans barely think about Europe at all. This indifference means founders start from absolute zero—unknown and irrelevant until proven otherwise.

We need to talk about Venture Capital

argues the industry will bifurcate into massive platforms and specialist boutiques, with the middle basically disappearing by 2035.

Venture barely beats public markets (European funds averaged 12.87% IRR vs S&P’s 10.48%), but 80% of European funds returned <10% IRR. Average time to 1x DPI is eight years, with real returns closer to 13 years. LPs question locking money in such illiquid assets.

The economics are as follows: 2,831 early-stage funds in Europe chase 13 unicorns per year—1:217 odds. Over five years, that’s 1:43 chance versus the 1:25 power law VCs claim. Just 30 firms raised 75% of all 2024 capital; 9 took 50%.

Software startups need less capital: AI increased output per employee, lowering headcount, a direct proxy for the amount of fundraise needed. Tools are available for everything, from incorporation to payroll reduced barriers. “Seed-strapping” and “minimum viable venture” have normalized as founders pursue profitability faster.

The prediction: mega-platforms like a16z raising $10B+ vehicles will function as hedge funds skimming management fees and influencing policy. Specialists will win through sector expertise and taste. Funds trapped at $200M-$1B—too big for boutique economics, too small for platform scale—face extinction.

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇬🇧 Zilch → Raised $175M in equity and debt

• 🇩🇪 FMC → Raised €100M to launch a new class of AI-era memory chips.

• 🇨🇭 Delvitech → Raised $40M Series B to scale AI-powered inspection

• 🇨🇭 Acurast → Raised $11M to launch a smartphone-powered compute network.

• 🇮🇹 CommerceClarity → Completed €2.7M to power agentic e-commerce

• 🇫🇮 Cronvall → Secured €3.9M to digitise industrial procurement

• 🇩🇰 Arkyn → Raised €4M to grow its enterprise software suite.

• 🇩🇰 Skycore Semiconductors → Raised €5M to advance next-gen AI data-centre chips.

• 🇱🇹 Self.co → Raised €2.56M to expand molecular allergy testing.

• 🇫🇮 CHAOS → Attracted €2M to scale its real estate data intelligence platform.

• 🇩🇪 CERPRO → Secured ~€2M Pre-seed to modernise industrial quality assurance.

• 🇫🇷 Zaiffer → Launched with €2M backing from Zama and PyratzLabs to bring confidential computing to DeFi.

• 🇮🇸 Euler → Closed €2M Seed to scale AI-driven software for 3D printing.

• 🇬🇧 FALKIN → Secured $2M to protect bank customers from AI-driven scams.

🤝 M&A

🇧🇪 DataCamp → Acquired Dubai-based Optima to strengthen its AI education engine.

Investors

• 🇬🇧 Backed VC → Closed $100M Fund III.

• 🇫🇮 Vendep Capital → Raised €80M for its fourth fund.

• 🇩🇪 Oyster Bay → Closed €100M Fund II focused on food & biotech.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re building Europe’s finest scouting network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

In This Edition:

100+ founders launch €80M United Founders

Spotawheel raises €300M for car subscriptions

Anthropic opens Paris and Munich offices

EIF invests €20M in TIN Capital cybersecurity

EU allocates €1.4B for 2026 EIC programme

McKinsey: 88% use AI, 80% see no impact

📰 What Happened This Week

100+ European founders launch €80M United Founders fund for deeptech

Over 100 founders and operators from 26 countries launched United Founders, a Pre-Seed and Seed fund targeting deeptech and emerging tech. The fund writes checks up to €1 million for hardware, dual-use innovation, and medtech.

Founded by Vít Horký (Brand Embassy, acquired by Nice in 2019) and Jakub Havrlant (Rockaway Capital), early investments include Israeli automation startup Wonderful and German healthtech Every Health.

Greek used car startup Spotawheel raises €300M for European subscription expansion

Athens-based Spotawheel raised €300 million in equity and debt financing, including a senior secured credit facility from Pollen Street Capital. Founded in 2016, the company operates a subscription model for used cars as an alternative to ownership.

The platform uses data analytics to identify vehicles and offers warranties up to five years. Capital will scale its subscription fleet across Europe and develop new fintech offerings for car access.

Anthropic opens Paris and Munich offices as EMEA becomes fastest-growing region

Anthropic is opening offices in Paris and Munich, expanding its European footprint alongside existing hubs in London, Dublin, and Zurich. EMEA has become the company’s fastest-growing region, with run-rate revenue up 9x year-over-year. Large business accounts exceeding $100,000 in run-rate revenue grew 10x over the past year.

The company tripled its EMEA headcount in the past year. New leadership includes Thomas Remy as Head of EMEA South (based in Paris) and Pip White as Head of EMEA North (London). A Head of DACH & CEE will be announced to oversee Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, and Czech Republic.

EIF invests €20M in TIN Capital’s cybersecurity fund as final close exceeds €80M

The European Investment Fund invested €20 million in TIN Capital’s European Cyber Tech Fund V under the InvestEU programme. With participation from Invest-NL and other investors, the fund reached a final close exceeding €80 million.

The fund targets Series A and B rounds in European cybersecurity scale-ups, with recent investments including companies securing software supply chains, cloud infrastructure, and advancing privacy-tech.

EU allocates €1.4B for 2026 European Innovation Council deep tech programme

The European Commission adopted the 2026 EIC work programme, allocating €1.4 billion for deep tech entrepreneurs. Key improvements: EIC Accelerator proposals reduced from 50 to 20 pages, evaluations every 2 months instead of 6.

The programme pilots Advanced Innovation Challenges inspired by the US ARPA model. The Commission is also preparing the Scaleup Europe Fund for late-stage growth capital. The EIC Fund has made €1.4 billion in direct investments across 300+ startups, leveraging 3.5x in co-investments.

Subscribe now

🔍 Reads & Reports

McKinsey: 88% of organizations use AI, but most remain in pilot phases

McKinsey’s 2025 Global Survey on AI finds 88% of organizations report regular AI use in at least one business function, up from 78% a year ago. However, approximately one-third have begun to scale their AI programs—the majority remain in experimenting or piloting stages.

Despite widespread adoption, over 80% report no tangible enterprise-level EBIT impact from gen AI. Only 1% of executives describe rollouts as “mature.” Less than 20% track KPIs for gen AI solutions—the practice most correlated with bottom-line impact.

What makes a strategy great? by James Cohen

A great strategy is not just a plan or a vision—it is a decisive, clear explanation of “how we will win” in a competitive and complex environment. The article by Jason Cohen outlines key qualities that distinguish truly effective strategy from mere planning, wishful thinking, or generic goals.

A bad strategy, on the other hand, is overly complex, vague, non-confrontational, indecisive, generic, linear in risk/reward, or obsessed with short-term challenges rather than shaping the long-term future. It fails to address what truly matters, is not memorable, and does not create unique competitive advantage.​

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇬🇷 Spotawheel → €300M (equity + debt) used-car platform

• 🇫🇷 Upway → $60M Series C refurbished e-bikes

• 🇩🇪 octonomy → $20M seed agentic AI workflows

• 🇳🇱 Source.ag → $17.5M Series B AI for CEA

• 🇩🇪 The Icon League → €15M Series A five-a-side league/media

• 🇫🇷 Tsuga → $10M seed AI-era observability

• 🇬🇧 Fit Collective → £3M fashion fit/returns

• 🇫🇷 Freeda → €3.4M AI for construction plans

• 🇩🇪 Maesn → €2.3M unified API platform

• 🇳🇱 Struck → €2M seed building compliance AI

• 🇪🇪 Leil → €1.5M storage infra software

• 🇨🇭 Motley → $1.5M pre-seed AI business reporting

• 🇨🇭 BTRY → $5.7M seed ultra-thin solid-state cells

• 🇬🇧 Cambridge Photon Technology → £1.56M solar efficiency materials

• 🇪🇸 Kabilio → €4M AI accounting/tax

• 🇬🇧 GitLaw → $3M pre-seed AI legal companion for businesses;

🤝 M&A

🇬🇧 Homemove acquires Home.co.uk → combines AI moving tools with market data

Investors

• 🇪🇺 Aspirity Partners debut fund → €875M (B2B tech)

• 🇵🇹 Armilar Fund IV → €120M first close

• 🇵🇱🇩🇪🇱🇺 Balnord — €70M frontier & dual-use fund; offices in Gdańsk, Berlin, Luxembourg

• 🇪🇺 United Founders — new pre-seed/seed VC for deeptech & emerging tech

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re building Europe’s finest scouting network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.

In This Edition:

Bending Spoons raises again + acquires AOL

Monzo CEO steps down

New big investments from Germany and the Netherlands

Spray and pray proves to be superior to focused portfolios?

📰 What Happened This Week

Italy’s Bending Spoons raises $710M at $11B valuation

Milan-based Bending Spoons raised $710 million at an $11 billion pre-money valuation, led by accounts advised T. Rowe Price. The company also secured a $2.8 billion debt package. Valuation jumped from $2.55 billion in February 2024—a 4.3x increase in under a year.

Bending Spoons operates a fascinating PE-style rollup model: acquire struggling tech brands, overhaul technology, optimize monetization, and hold forever. Portfolio includes WeTransfer, Evernote, Vimeo (pending), AOL (announced day before raise), Meetup, and StreamYard.

Combined reach: 300 million monthly active users, 10 million paying customers including most Fortune 500 companies. Capital funds further acquisitions and AI development. The company is viewed as a potential US IPO candidate.

Germany launches €18B High-Tech Agenda targeting six key technologies

Germany unveiled an €18 billion strategy to achieve leadership in AI, quantum technologies, microelectronics, biotechnology, nuclear fusion, and climate-neutral transport by 2029. Chancellor Friedrich Merz framed it as existential: preventing the US and China from “determining the technological future on their own.”

The approach is milestone-driven rather than grant-based. For startups, the plan doubles the WIN Initiative to €25 billion for VC investment and proposes a state-backed Germany Fund. Government commits as “anchor customer” for deep tech commercialization.

Monzo CEO TS Anil steps down after five years

TS Anil is leaving the top role he took from cofounder Tom Blomfield in 2020. Monzo now counts more than 13 million customers and £16.6 billion in deposits.

He will be succeeded by Diana Layfield, a former Google executive who spent nearly a decade at the company. Leadership change comes as Monzo prepares for a potential IPO.

Reports suggest a listing could value Monzo at up to £6 billion, though some analysts question that figure. The handover is framed as planned succession to keep momentum.

Netherlands launches ChipNL Competence Centre to boost semiconductor sector

The ChipNL Competence Centre launched in Eindhoven to strengthen Dutch semiconductor innovation. Partners include Brainport Development, ChipTech Twente, imec the Netherlands, TNO, and Eindhoven University of Technology. Funding comes from the European Union and Netherlands Enterprise Agency.

The Centre provides access to European pilot lines for testing chip solutions, implements talent programs, and offers financing support. Focus areas: semiconductor manufacturing equipment, chip design for automotive and medical technology, heterogeneous integration for AI and 5G systems, and photonics and quantum technology.

Subscribe now

🔍 Reads & Reports

European tech sector outperforms expectations

European tech earnings beat expectations in Q3, with the MSCI Europe Technology index delivering 16% EPS growth—well above pre-season expectations of 4.2%. Tech outperformed all sectors including communication services, industrials, and financials.

AI investment is driving the outperformance. ASML saw orders for sophisticated chipmaking machines jump as AI infrastructure spending accelerated. Dutch rival BE Semiconductor also reported a surge in orders and profit, buoyed by AI-related demand from Asia.

Despite supply chain disruption and US-China tensions, AI is positioned as a “significant tailwind” for 2026 and beyond, with analysts revising estimates higher. Nokia and Ericsson beat expectations driven by AI and cloud clients.

Diversified seed portfolios beat concentrated bets in Equidam simulations

A modeled $50 million seed fund generates higher fund-level MOIC (multiple on invested capital) when it spreads $40 million across 100 checks of $0.4 million rather than 20 checks of $2 million. The diversified portfolio posts a mean MOIC of 2.6x and a median of 2.5x, compared with 2.1x and 1.9x for the concentrated approach. Capital preservation is also more reliable. The probability of returning at least 1x is 99.7% for diversification versus 81.9% for concentration.

The setup assumes post-dilution ownership of 2.46% for the diversified portfolio and 10% for the concentrated one. Outcomes are simulated using a discrete power-law exit mix often cited in VC studies. The metric is MOIC at the fund level with initial checks only.

The edge for concentration appears only in the extreme right tail. Top 5% outcomes are slightly higher for concentrated funds. For most managers, the model implies that wider portfolios deliver more consistent results.

💶 Where Funds Went (Or Will Go)

Startups

• 🇸🇪 Cellcolabs $12M -> industrial-scale MSC production

• 🇪🇸 Adaptam Therapeutics €3M -> cancer immunotherapies

• 🇬🇧 Steven.com eight‑figure round -> creator platform by Steven Bartlett at €365M valuation, London

• 🇸🇪 Grasp $7M Series A -> AI to automate IB/consulting tasks

• 🇩🇰 Formalize €30M Series B -> compliance solutions across Europe

• 🇧🇪 AmphiStar €2.5M (SPRIND) -> circular biosurfactants

• 🇵🇱🇺🇸 SalesPatriot $5M -> defence procurement modernisation + EU expansion

• 🇳🇱 Dott $70M Series B extension -> e‑bike expansion (round now $150M total)

• 🇫🇷 Primaa €7M -> AI software for histology/cancer pathology

• 🇫🇷 FAKTUS €56M -> neobank for construction SMEs (9M equity, up to 47M debt)

• 🇸🇪 Legora $150M Series C -> legaltech platform

• 🇩🇪 Q.ANT undisclosed add‑on (total funding $80M) -> photonic quantum tech

• 🇧🇬 EnduroSat $104M -> advanced small satellites

• 🇫🇷 Altrove $10M -> AI‑designed alternatives to critical materials

• 🇮🇹 Bending Spoons $710M -> growth capital following AOL deal

• 🇫🇮 Nokia $1B strategic investment -> AI partnership with Nvidia

🤝 M&A

🇸🇪 Nordic Capital → 🇬🇧 BMLL → acquisition alongside management; Optiver remains minority shareholder

🇩🇰 Evertrace → 🇩🇪 Morphais → acqui-hire for VC sourcing AI

🇮🇹 Bending Spoons → 🇺🇸 AOL → revival/scale play by acquisitive software group

🇳🇱 Main Capital → 🇫🇷 Shippingbo → growth investment to accelerate next phase

Investors

🇺🇸 Sequoia Capital launched two early‑stage funds with European focus

🇳🇱 Builders → €3M top‑up → venture studio to launch next‑gen AI companies

💼 Open Roles

Expansion → Visiting Analyst in Paris, France. Apply here.

Pléiade Venture → Investment Manager in Paris, France. Apply here.

OneRagtime → Analyst in Paris, France. Apply here.

Curiosity VC → VC Principal in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Apply here.

Norrsken Launcher → Investment Analyst in Stockholm, Sweden. Apply here.

👋 That’s a wrap for this week.
If you’ve got a round, role, or resource others should see, reply to this or ping us at hello@patrons.vc or send me a message on LinkedIn. We’re building Europe’s finest scouting network at Patrons. If you have a good deal flow, want to expand yours, or want to reach the right investors, send us a message!

If you found this useful, send it to a founder or friend who’d appreciate it.