VC Angle Weekly Briefing #29: Brevo Hits Unicorn Status, Europe Trails in AI Adoption, Bending Spoons Buys Eventbrite
VC Angle Weekly Update #29
Hey - welcome to the twenty-ninth edition of VC Angle Weekly Updates! As always, we're keeping tabs on what actually matters across 🇪🇺 European tech. If something broke the news this week and it's worth your time, it's probably below. Scroll on for the deals, roles, reads, and events you'll want on your radar.
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
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.
🔍 Reads & Reports
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.
JME.vc partner Ivan Landabaso 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.
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Good old sendinblue is now a unicorn! Who would have thought!