Mind The Gap

Skeleton Becomes a Unicorn, Nvidia’s €9B European Bet, DeepMind Opens Up to European Science - Hot Tech News #W42

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:04:36 GMT

📅 Oct 12 – Oct 16, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins
📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily content including interviews, behind the scenes and much more, follow us!

Nvidia took minority stakes in nine European startups in the same week, four in France and five in the UK, and put its total commitment to European tech at nearly €9B. Siemens led a nine-figure round that made Estonia’s Skeleton Technologies a unicorn, on the strength of the energy systems it builds for GPU clusters. Google DeepMind is giving up to 200 European researchers access to AlphaFold 3 and its other science models. And Nebius says it has signed several UK AI labs still in stealth, as the UK prepares to ease non-compete clauses.

📰 News of the Week

Nvidia takes stakes in nine European startups
Nvidia is taking minority stakes in four French startups (Doctolib, Entalpic, Genesis AI and Pigment) and five UK ones (Boltz, Foresight, Hiverge, Prima Mente and Riverlane). Nvidia puts its total commitment to European tech at nearly €9B, a week before its GTC Berlin event on October 21.

Skeleton Technologies becomes a unicorn
The Tallinn company raised a nine-figure round led by Siemens, at a valuation above $1B. Skeleton makes high-power systems built on its own “Curved Graphene” cells, which smooth out the millisecond power spikes of GPU clusters. It plans to invest more than $200M in Silicon Valley, including US cell manufacturing, to sell to hyperscalers.

Google DeepMind opens its science models to 200 European researchers
Google DeepMind and Google Cloud will give up to 200 European researchers access to AlphaFold 3, WeatherNext, AlphaGenome, AlphaEvolve and AlphaEarth Foundations, along with $3M in compute credits.

Nebius signs UK AI labs
Nebius says it has signed a number of early-stage UK AI labs as customers, some still in stealth, without naming them or the size of the deals. Its EMEA general manager Gary Tierney welcomed the UK government’s plan to ease non-compete clauses: “if that goes away, I think you are going to see an emergence of a lot more labs.”

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Skeleton Technologies | Nine-figure, undisclosed | Estonia | AI Infrastructure | Siemens

🚪 Exits

🔍 My Personal Favorites

HyLight | Aerospace | €13M | Rubio Impact Ventures, DRW, Teampact Ventures
Paris-based startup inspecting power lines, pipelines and railways with autonomous hydrogen-powered airships.

The 12-metre HyLighter flies up to ten hours with no direct emissions, carrying LiDAR, cameras and methane detectors
Customers include Enedis, SNCF Réseau, VINCI, NaTran and Téréga
Authorised by the DGAC and EASA to fly beyond visual line of sight, with expansion planned into Germany and the Netherlands

Stride | HealthTech | £4.6M Seed | Arāya Ventures, Morgan Stanley Inclusive & Sustainable Ventures
UK preventative health membership combining DNA, blood and gut testing with personalised insights.

Founded by Olympic medallist Andrew Steele, co-founder of DNAfit
Innovate UK is funding two of its research projects, on biological age and an AI health copilot
Plans to launch its Stride One membership outside the UK before the end of 2026

KP Labs | SpaceTech | €4.42M | Momentum Capital Partners
Polish company building hardware and AI that process satellite data in orbit, so only the useful information is sent back to Earth.

Works with ESA, NASA, Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space
Its Intuition-1 satellite operated in orbit from 2023 to 2026
Described by its investor as profitable and capital-efficient

💸 New Dry Powder

Thank you for reading! Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European Tech.

Best,
Agathe

Mistral’s Trillion-Parameter Model, RobCo Hits $1B, Isomorphic Eyes $40B - Hot Tech News #W41

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 10:39:17 GMT

📅 Oct 5 – Oct 9, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily content including interviews, behind the scenes and much more, follow us!

Mistral released Large 4, its first model with one trillion parameters, and says it beats every open-weight model built in the US or Europe. RobCo passed a $1B valuation selling industrial robots as a service, nine months after its Series C. Isomorphic Labs is in early talks to raise at $40B or more, less than five months after its $2.1B Series B, with no drug yet in clinical trials. Universal Quantum also closed $100M, which it says is the largest Series A raised by a UK-headquartered quantum company.

📰 News of the Week

Mistral unveils Large 4, its first trillion-parameter model

The Paris company released Mistral Large 4, nicknamed “le Chonk”, in preview for developers, with full availability through its API later in October. The multimodal model has one trillion parameters. Mistral says it significantly outperforms any open-weight model developed in the US or Europe, and leads open models on enterprise workloads in cybersecurity, finance and law. The launch follows Mistral’s $3.4B Series D in September at around $24B.

RobCo becomes a robotics unicorn

The Munich company is now valued above $1B, in a deal combining new investment with an employee secondary sale, nine months after its $100M Series C. Sequoia, Lightspeed and Lingotto returned, with Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective joining. RobCo sells its robots as a service with no upfront cost, for tasks like machine tending, palletising and welding. The US is now its fastest-growing market, and CEO Roman Hölzl has relocated there.

Isomorphic Labs in talks at $40B+

The DeepMind spinout is in early talks to raise at a valuation of at least $40B, according to Bloomberg, less than five months after closing a $2.1B Series B led by Thrive Capital. Round size and investors have not been disclosed. Isomorphic works with Eli Lilly, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson but has not started clinical trials yet. Demis Hassabis expects the first ones by the end of 2026.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

EnduroSat | $205M | Bulgaria | SpaceTech | Riot Ventures, Atreides Management

Universal Quantum | $100M Series A | United Kingdom | Quantum Computing | DCVC, Firgun Ventures

Spiko | $90M Series B | France | FinTech | NEA

Yazen | €50M | Sweden | HealthTech | Verdane

Hadrian | $40M | Netherlands | Cybersecurity | Forgepoint Capital International, Smartfin

Noah | $38M Seed | United Kingdom | FinTech| Endeit Capital, FJ Labs, LocalGlobe, Felix Capital

Namespace | €37M Series B | Switzerland | DevTools | Scale Venture Partners

Sava | $36M Series B | United Kingdom | HealthTech | Ascensia

Wiremind | €35M | France | Transport Software | IronWave, Bpifrance, Seaya Andromeda

Vates | €30M | France | Cloud Infrastructure | IRIS, Bpifrance

TrueLayer | $27M | United Kingdom | FinTech | CDP Venture Capital

WhiteLab Genomics | $26M Series B | France | BioTech | AVP

🔍 My Personal Favorites

hexafarms | AgTech | €4.8M Seed | Ananda Impact Ventures, Green Generation Fund

Berlin-based startup selling greenhouse sensors and plant-scouting robots by subscription.

Sensors log climate, fertigation, substrate and light every five minutes, and robots scan plants daily for early signs of pests and disease
hexafarms owns and maintains the hardware, so growers pay a subscription instead of buying equipment
More than 50 growers in 13 countries, including SanLucar and Royal ZON

MintNeuro | MedTech / Semiconductors | $5M | Odyssey Ventures

Imperial College London spinout designing chips for devices that connect to the brain and nervous system, aimed at neurological conditions such as stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease.

Neural device makers currently adapt generic components or spend years developing custom chips
Signed a multi-year chip supply agreement with Motif Neurotech, whose neurostimulator targets treatment-resistant depression
Has delivered working chips and reached integration milestones with Amber Therapeutics

Golbriak Space | SpaceTech | €4M Seed | Join Capital, PhotonVentures

Estonian company building laser communication terminals for satellites and aircraft.

Optics, electronics, mechanics and software are all developed in-house
Its terminals depend less on the host platform’s pointing, so several can run on one spacecraft
Already has paying customers and is in advanced talks for programmes covering several thousand systems

🚪 Exits

TechWolf | Acquired by SAP | Belgium | HRTech

Circula | Acquired by Personio | Germany | FinTech

CareMaster | Acquired by Lottie | United Kingdom | HealthTech

StudyStash | Acquired by Kortext | United Kingdom | EdTech

Flowie | Acquired by Sovos | France | FinTech

💸 New Dry Powder

Forbion Growth Opportunities Fund IV & Ventures Fund VIII | €2.3B | Netherlands | Biotech, about 30 companies

Endeavor Catalyst Fund V | $320M | Global | Co-invests in companies led by Endeavor Entrepreneurs, with Europe as its fastest-growing market

Graduate Ventures | €125M (€100M committed) | Netherlands | Seed, Dutch university spinouts in AI, deeptech, health and climate

Vinci Space Tech Fund | €114M | Poland | Growth-stage space tech

PSV Tech Fund II | €56M final close | Denmark | Pre-product-market-fit AI, software and digital infrastructure across the Nordics

NVM Venture | €23.6M first close | Italy | Pre-seed and seed dual-use deeptech

Monte Carlo Capital Fund II | €13M first close (target €26M) | Monaco | Seed deeptech, AI, spacetech and enterprise software

Fuel Ventures | £10M from British Business Bank | United Kingdom | Pre-seed to Series A, new investments and follow-ons

DEPO Ventures | €3.8M (up to €5.8M) | Czechia | Startups from Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia expanding into Czechia

Thank you for reading! Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European Tech.

Best,

Agathe

ElevenLabs Doubles to $22B, Oura Waits for IPO, Nscale Doesn't - Hot Tech News #W40

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:56:08 GMT

📅 Sep 29 – Oct 3, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily content including interviews, behind the scenes and much more, follow us!

ElevenLabs doubled its valuation to $22B in six months without raising a single dollar of primary capital. Oura’s IPO, once one of the cleanest exit stories in European healthtech, is on hold. Nscale closed its pre-IPO financing at $3.36B and filed for NYSE. And Germany’s Reverion raised €154M to run data centres on fuel cells at 74% electrical efficiency.

📰 News of the Week

ElevenLabs reaches $22B, six months after $11B
The AI voice company completed a $300M tender offer in which employees and existing investors sold part of their shares, at a $22B valuation. In February, ElevenLabs raised a $500M Series D at $11B. The buyers include new investors such as GIC, EQT, and Goldman Sachs.

Oura delays $15B US IPO
The Finnish smart ring maker cited market uncertainty and said it has “the luxury of choosing its moment.” Revenue is expected to grow 90% in 2026. The delay is notable given the company had been one of the most anticipated European tech listings of the year.

Nscale closes $3.36B pre-IPO financing, files for NYSE
The London AI cloud company closed convertible notes led by Third Point, with Nvidia, Apollo, Citadel, Abu Dhabi Investment Council, and Wellington Management also participating. Nvidia’s $1B tranche is due in November. Nscale has filed for NYSE under NSQL targeting around $35B.

Nubank walks away from Monzo (update from W39)
Nubank scrapped acquisition talks less than a week after they became public, after its own share price dropped sharply. A standalone IPO is now the more likely path for Monzo.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Nscale | $3.36B convertible notes | United Kingdom | AI Infrastructure | Third Point, Nvidia, Apollo, Citadel, Abu Dhabi Investment Council, Wellington Management

Reverion | €154.2M Series B | Germany | CleanTech | Kembara

Voi | €150M RCF | Sweden | Micromobility | Undisclosed

Breye Therapeutics | €67.5M Series A | Denmark | Biotech | Mission BioCapital, Novo Holdings

Metaview | €53.1M | United Kingdom | HR Tech | Insight Partners

Aptadir Therapeutics | €40M Seed | Italy | Biotech | 4BIO Capital

Restate | $20M Series A | Germany | AI | Singular, Redpoint Ventures, Capital One Ventures

IPercept | $16.5M Series A | Sweden | Industrial AI | Isogon Ventures, 2150

🚪 Exits

Onomondo | Acquired by Aspirity Partners | €100M+ | Denmark | IoT / Connectivity

🔍 My Personal Favorites

Foundational | SpaceTech | €9.6M Pre-Seed | Inflection, Backed, Final Frontier, Adjacent, Type One Ventures
London-based startup automating Satellite Laser Ranging to track satellites and orbital debris with millimetre-level accuracy, exiting stealth this week.

SLR technology spun out of Lumi Space, backed by both ESA and the UK Space Agency
Ground stations are fully automated, weatherproof, and up to 30x less expensive than legacy SLR stations
Customers already include ESA and multiple UK government departments

Osavul | Cybersecurity | €8.5M Series A | 33N Ventures, Balnord, G+D Ventures, 42CAP
Luxembourg-based AI platform scanning open-source and online data to detect hostile disinformation and threat campaigns before they materialise.

Founded by Ukrainians Dmytro Plieshakov and Dmytro Bilash in response to Russia’s invasion
Technology used by NATO for AI-powered monitoring across public and commercial data sources
Expanding from governments into critical infrastructure: energy, airports, ports, financial services

DOD Solution | DefenceTech | €1.8M Pre-Seed | Defence Builder Fund, UAID Fund, WildField Ventures, Draganfly
Estonian-Ukrainian company building AURA AI, an onboard autonomy platform for drones that enables navigation and terminal guidance when GPS or communications are degraded.

AURA AI has already been used in combat operations in Ukraine
Draganfly (Canadian drone company) joined as strategic investor
Building toward NDAA compliance for North American defence markets

💸 New Dry Powder

Headline EU VIII | $400M | Europe | AI, seed and Series A, European founders

DIG Ventures Fund III | $120M | Europe | AI-native enterprise and cloud infrastructure

Sofinnova MD Start IV | €82M | France / Europe + US | Building MedTech companies from scratch, 6-8 new companies over 5 years, oversubscribed

LAUNCHub Ventures Fund III | €65M first close (target €75M+) | CEE and Southeast Europe | Early-stage tech

Eureka Ventures | €20M | Italy | Deeptech startups

EU Scaleup Fund update: The €5B fund managed by EQT can already invest in UK companies despite the UK not being a formal contributor, per Sifted. It can also back US-headquartered companies with European roots. France had sought to block UK participation.

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European Tech.

See you next Monday.

Agathe

Russia Fires at Ukraine’s Data Centers, Monzo Eyes an Exit, Claude Hacks OpenAI - Hot Tech News #W39

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 07:46:33 GMT

📅 Sep 22 – 26, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins
📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily content including interviews, behind the scenes and much more, follow us!

Russia strikes Kyiv’s data centres and European capitals spend the week measuring a threat that is becoming less theoretical by the day. Monzo chooses between Nubank and the London Stock Exchange. Revolut wants you to pay with your face. And Claude Opus 5 did in a few hours what Opus 4.8 couldn’t do across several sessions: break into OpenAI’s systems.

📰 News of the Week

Russia targets Ukraine’s data centres as Europe raises the alarm
On September 23, Russian drones struck multiple data centres and telecom facilities in Kyiv, disrupting internet access for 100,000 households and killing four people at Datagroup’s central office. Payment systems and the PFTS Stock Exchange were temporarily affected. Russia’s Defence Ministry explicitly claimed responsibility. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister called it a systematic new phase. Beyond Ukraine, the week was full of signals: Danish intelligence warned a NATO attack could come within months, Poland’s PM said Russia may strike to test whether Article 5 is “more theoretical than practical,” a Russian drone was shot down in Lithuania, and a Starlink ground station in Poland was sabotaged.

Monzo in talks with Nubank over a potential sale
Brazil’s Nubank has approached Monzo about an acquisition that would value the UK digital bank at between £8B and £10B, more than double its £4.5B valuation from late 2024. Monzo has enlisted Morgan Stanley and Qatalyst to advise. A deal would kill off Monzo’s long-standing London IPO plans and set up a direct cross-continental fight between Nubank and Revolut.

Revolut pilots facial recognition payments in London
Revolut launched “Pay with Smile” at select Kiss the Hippo cafés: the UK’s first in-store facial recognition checkout. Merchants pay 0% processing fees on all transactions. Independent UK venues currently spend an average of £875 per month on processing and infrastructure.

In the US:

Claude used to hack into OpenAI

A three-person security team at startup Hacktron AI used Claude Opus 5 to chain together two vulnerabilities and access OpenAI employee accounts and an internal code repository, as part of OpenAI’s own bug bounty programme. The entry point was an iPhone photo upload. Opus 4.8 had failed across several sessions. Opus 5 succeeded within hours of its release.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Tekever | $580M Series D | Portugal | Defence Tech | UC Investments

Bird | $450M Debt | Netherlands | AI | JPMorgan, Capital One, Citi

Verda | $189M Series B | Finland | AI Cloud Infrastructure | Emergence Capital

Basecamp Research | $140M Series C | United Kingdom | Biotech | Anthropic, Menlo Ventures, Nvidia

Metycle | €131.7M credit facility | Germany | DeepTech | Rivonia Road Capital

Noxtua | €100M+ Series C | Germany | Legal AI | C.H.BECK, MANZ

Morphotonics | €40M+ Series B | Netherlands | DeepTech | 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, Invest-NL, EIB

Biolevate | €30M | France | BioTech | RAISE, Orange Ventures

FintechOS | $28M | Romania | FinTech | Bek Ventures, IFC, Cipio Partners, Molten Ventures

Unit1 Studio | €23.3M | United Kingdom | Cultural Tech | Mercuri, Gilston Music, Paul McGuinness

🚪 Exits

Pimento | Acquired by Mistral | €12.7M | France | AdTech

feld.energy | Acquires AckerKapital | Germany | CleanTech

Joinup | Acquired by EYSA | Spain | Mobility

🔍 My Personal Favorites

StandardX | DeepTech | Seed | £10M | Vsquared Ventures, East X Ventures
London-based startup building a particle accelerator to manufacture rare medical isotopes, the radioactive tracers used in PET scans and cancer treatment, at hospital scale rather than national-lab scale.

Vsquared previously backed Neura Robotics, East X Ventures backed Proxima Fusion: both funds with serious hardware pedigree
Medical isotopes have a half-life of hours, meaning they currently have to be made in centralised facilities and shipped under extreme time pressure

Big Picture Bio | HealthTech | Pre-Seed | €2.55M
London biotech emerging from stealth to design cancer drug combinations with AI, targeting the problem of why most tumours eventually develop resistance to single-agent treatments.

Founded by Dr Kerstin Papenfuss and Dr Mark Hammond
Targets drug combinations rather than single compounds, a harder computational problem most AI biotechs avoid

Clastix | DeepTech | Seed | €2.9M
Italian startup building sovereign Kubernetes infrastructure for Europe, with Mistral as a direct backer in its first known bet on EU infrastructure tooling.

Based in Italy, outside the usual Paris-Berlin-London sovereign cloud axis
Mistral’s participation signals a strategic interest in owning more of the stack its models run on

💸 New Dry Powder

DTCP Defence Fund I | €455M first close (target €500M) | Europe | Defence tech growth equity

Final Frontier x Myriad | €100M | Europe | Defence tech, dual-use, space

Connect Ventures Fund V | $55M first close (target $80M) | Europe | Deeptech, climate, energy at seed

SPRIND x NADI AI Chip Challenge | €40M | Germany / Netherlands | Challenge fund for European AI chip design

NewSchool VC | €10M maiden fund | Europe | B2B technology

Project Ventures | €5.8M debut fund | United Kingdom | Deeptech / AI, linked to Imperial College London

OWOW Venture Studio | OWOW | €2.65M | Netherlands | B2B venture studio for manufacturing and OEM

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European Tech.

Subscribe now

See you next Monday.

Agathe

New Space on Fire, Nscale soon to be IPO, Bending Spoons Shopping Spree - Hot Tech News #W37

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 06:32:52 GMT

📅 Sep 7 – 11, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins
📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Bending Spoons bought Miro at a markdown, its second discounted acquisition in five weeks. Aerospacelab signed a €2.4B EU satellite contract, the largest the company has ever seen, and will now build 264 satellites for the EU’s sovereign connectivity constellation. Nscale is telling IPO investors it has $103B in contracted backlog while posting $100M in quarterly revenue.

📰 News of the Week

Nscale targets $3.5B pre-IPO financing ahead of US listing
The London AI cloud provider is seeking $1.5B in convertible notes, with Third Point expected to lead, and a separate $2B from Nvidia. Total contracted backlog now stands at $103B, up from $51B a month ago, driven partly by a six-year $45B compute deal with Anthropic. Actual Q2 2026 revenue: around $100M.

Bending Spoons acquires Miro for €1.7B
Amsterdam-based Miro’s later-stage investors take a haircut. $600M in ARR, 99% of the Fortune 100 as customers, sold for 90% below its 2022 peak valuation of $17.5B. Bending Spoons closed Airtable at a similar discount five weeks earlier.

Aerospacelab and The Exploration Company win over €3B in contracts at the Paris space summit

At the Paris international space summit on September 10, two New Space startups walked away with contracts the European primes had every reason to expect. Aerospacelab will build 264 satellites for the EU’s IRIS² sovereign connectivity constellation. The Exploration Company signed with ESA for three Nyx cargo capsules, with a first ISS flight planned for November 2028.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

The Exploration Company | $450M Series C | France | SpaceTech | Bessemer, Atomico, EQT

Limetax | €36M | Germany | AI | €6M pre-seed equity led by Motive Partners + €30M credit facility

Implicity | €35M Series B | France | MedTech | Sofinnova Partners

Ethris | €30M Series B | Germany | Biotech | European Investment Bank

Arlequin AI | €28M Series A | France | DeepTech | redalpine, OTB Ventures

Neurent Medical | $25M Growth Debt Facility | Ireland | MedTech | Claret Capital Partners

CloudNC | $20M Series B Extension | United Kingdom | AI | Nimble Ventures, Lockheed Martin Ventures

🚪 Exits

Miro | Acquired by Bending Spoons | €1.7B | Netherlands | AI

Normative | Acquired by Greenly | €65M | Sweden | Carbon Accounting

Kivala | Acquired by Verisure | France | IoT

Flex IT + T1A | Merger | Europe | Circular IT

Query Juriste + Praven Intelekt | Acquired by Lexroom | France / Bulgaria | Legal AI

🔍 My Personal Favorites

Ground A | Defence | Pre-Seed | €9.1M | Vsquared Ventures
German startup building laser-based counter-drone systems, founded January 2026 and already in validation phase for its first product eight months later. Quantum Systems is a co-investor.

GA 1000: pallet-sized, mobile, radar-fused laser cUAS system
Loads of German tech heavyweights joined the board: Florian Seibel and Sven Kruck (Quantum Systems), Stefan Roebel (Arx Robotics)
Next round planned for 2027

Anemo Labs | DeepTech | Pre-Seed | £700K | Zinc, SFC Capital
London startup building an electronic nose that detects disease signals in volatile organic compounds from urine, giving AI a sense of smell for non-invasive diagnostics.

5,000 smells per day collected and labelled in-house for model training
84% accuracy in classifying 12 scent categories in early testing

Stellar Alpina | SpaceTech | €160K | Venture Kick
The Swiss RDRE startup (covered in W22) just won a Venture Kick grant, validating its rotating detonation engine approach for in-space propulsion.

First commercial RDRE hotfire in Europe, completed 82 days after founding
€3.8M€ Pre-Seed round lead by Founderful in June 26

💸 New Dry Powder

Claret Capital | €575M | Europe | European tech and life sciences credit, non-dilutive financing

Molten Ventures Growth Fund | £175M first close (target £350M) | United Kingdom | UK growth-stage tech, anchored by British Business Bank

Seed Capital Fund V | €130M | Nordics | Seed to Series A, expanding into Sweden and cybersecurity

Northern Scaleup Fund | £150M | United Kingdom | UK Chancellor initiative backing scaleups in northern England, anchored by British Business Bank

Clean Growth Fund II | €94.5M | United Kingdom | UK climate tech, seed to Series A

Nordic Foodtech VC Fund II | up to €80M | Nordics | Agrifood deeptech

The Techshop Fund II | €43M first close | Italy | Pre-seed and seed, Italian and southern European founders

Thank you for reading.Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European Tech.

See you next Monday.

Agathe

Pasqal’s IPO, Isar’s Launch & Mistral’s New Round - Hot Tech News #W36

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 06:32:13 GMT

📅 Aug 31 – Sep 4, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins
📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For more content, see you there.

Subscribe now

Mistral closes €3B at a €20B valuation led by Samsung, with Nvidia, ASML, and the EU’s own Scaleup Fund all in the cap table. Isar Aerospace puts a rocket into orbit from European soil for the first time. Pasqal hits Nasdaq with $360M in cash. Nscale adds another $3B in debt to bankroll GPU campuses in Texas and North Carolina.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Pasqal lists on Nasdaq via SPAC
The Paris-based neutral-atom quantum computing company completed its business combination with Bleichroeder Acquisition Corp. II and began trading under PSQL with $360M in cash at closing, at a $2B pre-money valuation. Seven QPUs are deployed across more than 25 commercial and research applications, with a dual-listing on Euronext Paris planned.

Isar Aerospace reaches orbit from European soil
The German launch startup’s second test flight from Andøya in Norway became the first privately-developed rocket to reach orbit from European soil. As SpaceX is progressively restricting launch access, Isar provides a European answer.

Mistral said to have closed €3B Series D at a €20B valuation
Samsung, Nvidia, and ASML all wrote checks, three of the most strategically important companies in the global AI hardware supply chain, each with a different reason to want a competitive European model to exist. EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund also participated.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Nscale | $3B Debt | United Kingdom | AI Infrastructure | JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs

Cloover | $100M Debt facility | Germany | CleanTech| European Investment Fund

FNZ | $450M | United Kingdom | FinTech | La Caisse, CPP Investments, Generation Investment Management, Motive Partners

iPronics | €108M Series B | Spain | DeepTech | Maverick Silicon, Light Street Capital

Elekta | €100M EIB Loan | Sweden | MedTech | European Investment Bank

PLD Space | €108M Series C extension (total €288M) | Spain | SpaceTech | Mitsubishi Electric, COFIDES, Endeavor Catalyst, SOPEF

HyImpulse | €50M Series A extension | Germany | SpaceTech | JOIN Capital, Ace Capital Partners

Conveo | $50M Series A | Belgium | SalesTech | DST Global

🔍 My Personal Favorites

Zeit AI | AI Seed | $5M | Y Combinator, Sequoia Scout Fund
Munich-based startup plugging AI agents directly into factory data streams to automate inventory optimization, anomaly detection, and procurement cost reduction for industrial manufacturers.

YC + Sequoia Scout Fund backing at seed
Proprietary industrial semantic data models trained on factory-floor data
Already deploying across manufacturing hubs in Central Europe

S-Transistors | DeepTech | Pre-Seed | €2.6M | Lifeline Ventures
Finnish VTT spinout building superconducting transistors that operate inside cryogenic quantum computers, reducing wiring and power demands that are currently the main barrier to scaling beyond a few thousand qubits.

VTT spinout with wafer-scale production already demonstrated
First product: a multiplexer that ships to early customers within year one
Lifeline Ventures led, the most active Nordic deeptech seed investor

Holifya | HealthTech| Pre-Seed | €2M | CDP Venture Capital, Zooga VC
Italian digital clinic combining AI diagnostics with multidisciplinary clinical care for GLP-1 therapy, achieving weight loss twice the drug-only average and three times higher adherence.

First-mover in Italian pharmacologic obesity care
11M eligible GLP-1 patients in Italy, less than 1% currently treated
CDP Venture Capital backed via Next Age programme

🚪 Exits

Pirkx | Acquired by Pri0r1ty Intelligence | £58k | United Kingdom | Employee Benefits / HR Tech

Quell | Acquired by HITAI | undisclosed | United Kingdom | Fitness Gaming / Motion Tracking

Nilum | Acquired by eComID | undisclosed | Europe | Recommerce / Sustainability

💸 New Dry Powder

Uplift Ventures | €100M | Germany | DeepTech at late Seed and Series A | Physical AI, energy, enterprise AI, logistics

Zinc Science-for-Impact Fund | £46M (incl. £34M from British Business Bank) | United Kingdom | Turning UK lab science into deeptech startups

WAD Capital Fund I | €67.5M first close (target €130M) | Belgium | Buyouts of European SMEs facing succession

UK Government | £100M competition | United Kingdom | AI companies building solutions for UK public services

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

See you next Monday!

Helsing, Lovable, Nvidia x Hugging Face - Hot Tech Euro Summer

Agathe Thiery — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 10:03:38 GMT

📅 July - August 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

Back to work? Need to catch up on everything that happened in the European tech ecosystem while you were (hopefully) offline? We’ve got you covered. Here are all the headlines you need to know.

Big news

OpenAI confirmed two of its models escaped a test environment and hacked Hugging Face, one of the first autonomous AI cyber attacks on record. Read more here.

London-based Revolut confirmed a secondary share sale at a reported $115B valuation and launched an in-house AI unit. Read more here and here.

Anthropic signed a $45B, six-year compute deal with UK neocloud Nscale. Read more here.

London AI cloud startup Volta exited stealth at a $2.4B valuation with a €8.6B compute deal, reportedly also with Anthropic. Read more here.

UK chip startup Fractile is reportedly in talks to raise at a $6.5B valuation. Read more here.

AI infrastructure group Nebius is looking to raise $4.5B through a bond issue. Read more here.

French quantum scale-up Pasqal hit the Nasdaq with €309M in cash at closing. Read more here.

Finland’s IQM became the first European quantum computing company to list on a major US exchange. Read more here.

UK maritime defence startup Kraken Technology hit unicorn status. Read more here.

Paris-based Mistral had quite the summer: Microsoft signed a multibillion-dollar deal to use its computing infrastructure in Europe, and enterprise customers like ASML are helping finance its data centre buildout. Read more here and here.

Crazy Funding Rounds

Munich-based Helsing raised a $1.8B Series E at an $18B valuation, Europe’s biggest-ever defence round. Read more here.

German drone maker Quantum Systems raised $1.2B at an $8B valuation. Read more here.

Helsinki-based ICEYE raised a €1B round, the first investment of the new Scale-Up Europe Fund. Read more here.

Italian AI company Domyn raised $1B in debt for its Colosseum supercomputer. Read more here.

Stockholm-based Neko Health raised $700M as demand grows for preventive health scans. Read more here.

Spanish quantum company Multiverse Computing says it has funding commitments of up to $570M. Read more here.

Cambridge-based CuspAI raised $450M from backers including Jeff Bezos. Read more here.

Munich-based Proxima Fusion raised €411M to build Europe’s commercial fusion champion. Read more here.

Stockholm-based Lovable raised $400M, doubling its valuation to $13B. Read more here.

UK chip startup OLIX raised £312M at a £3.3B valuation. Read more here.

UK-based Cambridge Aerospace raised $300M, lifting its valuation to $3.4B. Read more here.

Paris-based Skello secured a €200M investment led by Bridgepoint. Read more here.

SoftBank invested $200M in Swiss robotics startup Gravis Robotics. Read more here.

London-based Dwelly raised $170M from EQT Growth and General Catalyst for its AI letting-agency rollup. Read more here.

Spanish launcher PLD Space won a €158.9M ESA award. Read more here.

UK robotics startup Humanoid hit a $1.35B valuation with a $152M Series A. Read more here.

HappyRobot landed a $150M Series C to scale agentic AI for enterprise operations. Read more here.

UK-based Callosum raised a $100M seed led by Atomico to run AI workloads across different chips and models. Read more here.

Cool Exits

Uber agreed to acquire Delivery Hero in a $13B deal spanning 99 countries. Read more here.

Nvidia reportedly agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9B. Read more here.

Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable for $2.25B, its first deal since its Nasdaq IPO. Read more here.

SAP bought German AI startup Prior Labs for €1B, just 18 months after launch. Read more here.

Neura Robotics acquired Adlatus to push physical AI into autonomous cleaning and Bosch Rexroth‘s Active Shuttle business. Read more here and here.

Duolingo snapped up UK animation studio Animade. Read more here.

Legora acquired Wexler, its fifth acquisition of 2026. Read more here.

New VC Funds

Index Ventures raised $2B with AI at the centre of the strategy. Read more here.

Highland Europe closed a €1.1B Fund VI for European scale-ups. Read more here.

Accel raised an enlarged $800M early-stage fund. Read more here.

Airbus anchored E2D’s $500M European defence tech fund. Read more here.

QuantumLight, Nik Storonsky’s AI-driven fund, raised €432M. Read more here.

Lakestar raised a $300M Resilience Fund I. Read more here.

White Star Capital closed a $250M Fund IV for Series A to B. Read more here.

Acurio Ventures launched a €115M fund for Europe’s VC secondary market. Read more here.

Orbit Capital closed a €107M venture debt fund for CEE scale-ups. Read more here.

Lockheed Martin Ventures committed at least €87M to Europe and opened a UK office. Read more here.

Tapestry VC closed an $80M fund and opened a London office. Read more here.

Norrsken Evolve closed €62M and set up in Amsterdam. Read more here.

Climentum Capital hit a €60M first close for climate hardware. Read more here.

Norway’s RunwayVC reached a €40M first close for its industrial tech Fund II. Read more here.

Also on our radar

OpenAI and Anthropic both filed confidential S-1s, at $852B and $965B valuations respectively. Read more here.

Open source caught up: Beijing-based Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, at 2.8 trillion parameters the largest open-weight model ever. Read more here.

The EU AI Act‘s transparency rules took effect on August 2, while high-risk obligations slipped to December 2027. Read more here.

And behind it all: Q2 was Europe’s strongest venture quarter in four years, with $24B raised. Read more here.

That’s it for the rentrée. Did we miss anything? Drop a comment with whatever struck you this summer!

Stay tuned for new formats on all social media:

Linkedin: Mind The Gap
IG: @mindthegap_tech
Youtube: @mindthegap_tech
TikTok: @notesbyagathe

And here of course !

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European Tech.

Mind The Gap, Season 2.

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:22:57 GMT

The Mind The Gap project was born almost a year ago. It started with small LinkedIn posts on how to help VCs navigate tech news and subjects, and is now closer than ever to being a qualitative media around the technologies that have a true impact on our society.

Since the beginning of 2026, Mind The Gap has been the home of every important tech news in Europe (and a little bit elsewhere), attempts at making super complicated technologies more understandable, tries at putting Europe back in the center of the tech talks, and the transcription of some of the best voices in European tech today. But it is now time for the publication to step up.

This summer will be focused on cooking the most qualitative content on truly impactful tech in Europe. In long format here, with more interviews and essays. But also, on camera with short founder interviews across the continent to help VCs find new deal flow, founders new connections, students or young workers new opportunities. I’ll see you on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok & YouTube for the short formats.

But this upgrade can only come with two things:

First, a well-deserved break from the weekly content. After one year of European weekly newsletter, Mind The Gap is taking a one month break in August to focus on creating content that will bring you even more value. Coming back in September.

Second, YOUR opinion. Please answer this email with any type of content you would like to see more, on Substack or other platforms. This media is for its readers, thank you so much to everyone for reading but most importantly for your suggestions. Your feedback is the most valuable lesson we can get.

And if you know someone who should be reading Mind The Gap, share this with them. You’re the early believers, and that means everything.

Share Mind The Gap

Thank you again for following Mind The Gap. I like to think you are part of the beginning of a flourishing European tech media.

See you all in September.

LFG !!

Best,

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W29

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 06:32:05 GMT

📅 July 14 – 18, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins
📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Helsing raised $1.8B at an $18B valuation from international backers. Neko Health took $700M at $7B to bring full-body scanning clinics to New York. Uber agreed to buy Delivery Hero for €13B, creating the world’s largest food delivery platform outside China. And microagi, a Munich robotics startup founded by former Formula 1 engineers ten months ago, closed Germany’s largest-ever seed round at $55M.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Helsing closes Europe’s largest defence tech round ever

The Munich AI company raised $1.8B in Series E at an $18B valuation, oversubscribed, with Dragoneer, Lightspeed, ICONIQ, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, JPMorganChase, and General Catalyst in the cap table. The investor list is almost entirely American, which is its own kind of signal. Co-chairmen Daniel Ek and Tom Enders remain unchanged. Helsing builds AI software and autonomous systems for European armed forces, and is now priced like infrastructure.

SAP buys Prior Labs for over €1B

The German software giant acquired the Freiburg-based foundation model startup just 18 months after its launch, committing over €1B over four years. Prior Labs keeps its brand, research agenda, and open-source commitments. The team built a foundation model for tabular data, structurally important for enterprise software and squarely in SAP’s core market. A rare case of a European corporate paying up for European AI research instead of watching it leave.

EQT's €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund in talks to lead Mistral's Series D

Swedish investment firm EQT is reportedly in talks to lead or co-lead Mistral's Series D via the €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund in what would mark the EU-backed fund's first investment. The Scaleup Europe Fund is designed to back European tech scaleups from Series B through to pre-IPO across AI, deep tech, robotics and clean energy.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

SWISSto12 | $70M Series C | Switzerland | SpaceTech | undisclosed

microagi | $55M Seed | Germany | Robotics | Hummingbird

Valarian | $50M Series A | United Kingdom | Sovereign AI Infrastructure | NEA

Syntetica | $30M Series A | France | DeepTech | Bpifrance Ecotechnologies 2

Monumental | €27M Series B | Netherlands | Construction Robotics | Khosla Ventures

Reformed | $22M Series A | United Kingdom | FoodTech | Iris Ventures

Applied Computing | $20M Series A | United Kingdom | AI | KBR

Project Q | €15M Series A | Germany | Defence Tech | Expeditions

🚪 Exits

Delivery Hero | Acquired by Uber | €13B | Germany | Food Delivery

Prior Labs | Acquired by SAP | €1B+ | Germany | AI

Rail Europe | Acquired by Omio Group | France | TravelTech

FlexPowerHub | Acquired by Volue | Austria | EnergyTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

NextGO Epi | DeepTech / Semiconductors | Pre-Seed | €2M | Vireo Ventures

NextGO Epi spun out of the Leibniz Institute for Crystal Growth in 2025, founded by three PhDs who between them have spent over a decade working on gallium oxide. The company is the only European producer of industrial-grade gallium oxide epitaxial wafers at up to 4 inches in diameter. Research labs across Europe work with the material, but nobody else is making it commercially at this specification. Gallium oxide handles up to 6x higher voltage density than silicon carbide, is 10x more power-efficient, and costs up to 75% less to produce. The wafer is the layer everything in power semiconductors is built on. The company is already shipping to customers in Europe, North America, and Asia, which is unusual for a pre-seed hardware startup. Former Aixtron COO Jochen Linck is on board as operating partner. Vireo Ventures led the round.

💸 New Dry Powder

CriteriaCaixa | €300M by 2030 | Spain | Iberian biotech and deeptech

Acurio Ventures | €115M | Europe | Secondary stakes in European VC funds

Buenavista Buyout Innvierte III | €75M | Spain | Majority stakes in Spanish companies

Norrsken Evolve | €62M | Europe | Pre-seed climate, health, and education

Soho Square Partnership Capital Fund II | £50M cornerstone | United Kingdom | Established UK small and mid-sized businesses

SFC Capital | €11M commitment | United Kingdom | UK regional early stage

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

See you next Monday.

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W28

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 06:36:06 GMT

📅 July 7 – 11, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins
📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Skello raised €200M and somehow ended up with the founders owning more of the company than before. Lovable is in talks at a valuation that would double in six months to reach $13.2B. Kraken Technology builds uncrewed naval vessels and just became a unicorn. These three companies have almost nothing in common except that they are all European and all raising serious capital.

📰 News of the Week

Kraken Technology Group raises $175M Series B, becomes Europe’s newest maritime defence unicorn

The Fareham-based maker of uncrewed surface vessels crossed a $1B valuation backed by DTCP, the NATO Innovation Fund, Rheinmetall, and the British Business Bank. Customers include the UK MoD, NATO, and USSOCOM. Founder Mal Crease spent 20 years setting world speed records in offshore powerboat racing before pivoting into naval autonomy in 2020.

Nscale lands a $900M revolving credit facility for AI data centres

The London hyperscaler secured the facility from a syndicate of 12 banks including J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America, to build data centre capacity across the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Third debt deal in five months after a $1.4B GPU-backed loan in February and $790M for its Norway campus in May. Total capital raised passes $6.3B.

Lovable in talks to raise $300M at a $13.2B valuation

The Stockholm vibe-coding platform, founded in 2024 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, is reportedly in talks for a round that would double its December 2025 valuation of $6.6B in under six months. The company hit $500M in ARR in June, with users including Workday, Asana, and Nvidia. Menlo Ventures, a backer since the Series B, is expected to lead.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Lendable | $670M ABS | United Kingdom | FinTech | Goldman Sachs

Skello | €200M | France | HRTech | Bridgepoint Development Capital V, Partech, XAnge

Gradium | $100M Seed | France | Voice AI | FirstMark Capital, Eurazeo, Nvidia, DST Global

QuantumDiamonds | €91M | Germany | Semiconductors | €15M equity led by World Fund + €76M EU Chips Act grant

BIZAY | €48.7M | Portugal | E-commerce | Indico Capital Partners

Thought Machine | $30M | United Kingdom | FinTech | Tier-1 bank

Alchemab Therapeutics | €29.3M Series A | United Kingdom | Biotech | British Business Bank

🚪 Exits

Myricx Bio | Acquired by Novartis | up to $1.5B | United Kingdom | Biotech

Conjura | Acquired by Wayflyer | Ireland | Data Analytics

Cloudsweep | Acquired by Tekever | Portugal | AI

Encodian | Acquired by Circeus | United Kingdom | Document Automation

Efteor / Télôs Watch | Acquired by Vam Investments | Switzerland | Watchmaking

Xink | Acquired by Omnidocs Denmark | Software

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Gyre Energy | CleanTech | Pre-Seed | $1.3M | Speedinvest

Cooling is roughly a fifth of global electricity demand, and it is growing faster than the grid can absorb. Gyre pairs physics-based AI with thermal energy storage to shift cooling load to cheaper, greener hours, so equipment runs less when power costs most. In its first published deployment the platform cut electricity costs by 38% and daily energy use by 35%, with a payback under 18 months. The company is now deploying inside a 140,000 square foot site run by one of the world’s largest cold chain operators. The same infrastructure that cools warehouses points naturally toward data centres next, which is probably where the real market sits.

💸 New Dry Powder

Warren becomes Rift Capital
The Paris-based secondary provider is rebranding. Same thesis, same team: AI, Infrastructure, Robotics, Fintech, Computing, Space and Defence. The new name reflects a sharper positioning around access to pre-IPO companies in categories where the window to invest is narrow by definition.

EIFO | €476M | Denmark / Europe | European energy independence and green transition infrastructure

Expeditions Fund II | €197M | Poland - UK | European defence tech | BAE Systems, Keysight

Primo Space 2 | €120M | Italy | Space and dual-use

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

See you next Monday.

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W27

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 06:06:12 GMT

📅 June 29 – July 03, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Two IPOs, a $1.2B drone round, and a $1.97B antitrust win against Google. Bending Spoons opened at $18B on Nasdaq and popped 40% by close. Quantum Systems, whose Vector drones ran 19,000 missions in Ukraine last year, more than doubled its valuation to $8B and is now openly talking about merging with Stark. And Klarna extracted two billion dollars from Google through a Stockholm court.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Quantum Systems raises $1.2B Series D at an $8B valuation

The Munich drone maker doubled its valuation with a Series D co-led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus, and Advent, with Bond, Fidelity, Wellington, Balderton, and HV Capital also participating. Florian Seibel is now openly talking about acquisitions and a possible merger with Stark. This is Europe’s largest private defence-tech financing on record.

Bending Spoons lists on Nasdaq at $18B, pops 40% on day one

The Milan-based serial acquirer of Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite opened on Nasdaq on July 1 at an $18B valuation and closed up 40%. CEO Luca Ferrari says the company will keep buying underperforming software assets using AI to extract margin.

Klarna wins a $1.97B antitrust case against Google

A Stockholm court ruled that Google gave its own comparison shopping service preferential treatment over Klarna’s PriceRunner subsidiary and ordered roughly $1.97B in damages. A European company extracting two billion dollars from Google via a court sets a precedent the rest of the sector will watch closely.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

InSoil | €120M Credit facility| Lithuania | AgriFinTech | Pollen Street, EIF

Openchip | €115M | Spain | Semiconductors | SETT

Andercore | €30M revolving credit facility | Germany | IndustrialTech | UniCredit, KfW Venture Tech Growth Financing

Theo | €25M Series A | Germany | Real Estate | Insight Partners, BlackRock (debt)

Gaussion | €24.5M | United Kingdom | DeepTech | BGF, AlbionVC

StirlingX | $20M Series A | United Kingdom | Defence Tech | Ventura Capital, RCM Private Markets Master Fund

Telum Therapeutics | €18M Series A | Spain | BioTech | AMR Action Fund, Inveready

Alva Industries | €16M | Norway | DeepTech | Nysnø Climate Investments

🚪 Exits

Bending Spoons | Nasdaq IPO | $18B opening valuation, +40% by close | Italy | Software

Acasi | Acquired by Qonto | France | Accounting Software

European Astrotech | Acquired by The Exploration Company | Europe | SpaceTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

BRYM | NeuroTech | Pre-Seed | €650K | Lotus One Investment, Antler

BRYM builds wearable EEG headbands that turn focus into a trainable skill. The pitch is straightforward: attention spans are collapsing, and the productivity cost is measurable. The company started in automotive manufacturing, where operator errors have real safety consequences, and reported a 46% reduction in errors in early pilots. The longer-term ambition is to make EEG-based cognitive training as accessible as a gym membership, with a subscription model riding on proprietary hardware the round is funding. At €650K this is genuinely pre-product-at-scale, and EEG consumer hardware has a long history of promising demos that never reach mass adoption. But the founding team at BRYM has been thoughtful about where to land first: enterprise, where willingness to pay is higher and the productivity ROI is concrete. Stockholm-based, led by Charlie Ohlén and Nils Hagberg.

💸 New Dry Powder

Tapestry VC Fund III | €70M | United Kingdom | European repeat founders, Series A and B

Orbit Capital | €107M | Europe | Venture debt for CEE scale-ups

Osney Capital Fund I | Osney Capital | €69M | United Kingdom | UK cybersecurity seed, pre-seed to seed

Climentum Capital | €60M (first close) | Nordics | Climate hardtech, seed and Series A

Ruya Ventures | $50M | Europe | Deeptech, solo GP

P101 / Prana Ventures | €100M | Italy | Seed and early stage, expanded with Prana Ventures integration

Omnea / Firedrop | Omnea + Firedrop | United Kingdom | Fund backing employees as future founders

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

See you next Monday.

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W26

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:36:24 GMT

📅 June 22 – 26, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Stark just turned two years old and raised €500M at a €3.5B valuation. Bending Spoons is heading for Nasdaq at a possible $19B price tag. And a Dutch firm closed the largest private equity buyout fundraise the country has ever seen, betting €5.25B that boring software beats trendy software when AI hits the market.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Main Capital Partners closes €5.25B dual fundraise, the largest PE buyout raise in Dutch history
Main Capital IX and Main Foundation III hit their hard caps of €4B and €1.25B respectively, more than doubling their predecessor funds. The firm’s pitch to LPs: AI is not a threat to enterprise software, it is a buying opportunity, backed by a sub-0.5% loss rate over 23 years and 38 exits at a 4.7x average gross return.

Bending Spoons targets up to $19B valuation in US IPO
The Milan-based serial acquirer of Vimeo, WeTransfer, Evernote, AOL, and Eventbrite is seeking to raise $1.62B on the Nasdaq, with trading expected to begin in early July under the ticker BSP. Net income flipped from a $112M loss to $27.5M in profit in the most recent quarter.

Stark raises €500M at a €3.5B valuation
The Berlin-based autonomous drone maker, founded just two years ago, closed a round led by Sequoia and Founders Fund. Peter Thiel’s continued conviction in European defence tech keeps showing up in the biggest rounds of the category.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Bionyra Pharma | €143M Series A | France | Biotech | Jeito Capital, Sofinnova Partners

TRIMTECH Therapeutics | €41M Seed | United Kingdom | Biotech | JJDC, BGF

Leyden Labs | €40M | Netherlands | Biotech | EIC, Invest-NL

Isometric | €34M Series A | United Kingdom | Climate Tech | AVP

Tsuga | €30M | France | AI | Singular

Prosper AI | $30M Series A | Spain | HealthTech | a16z

Tissium | €30M Series D2 | France | MedTech | US investors, EIB

Astral Systems | €26M | United Kingdom | DeepTech | Mercia Ventures

🚪 Exits

Vibe.co | Acquired by Walmart | $1.4B | France | AdTech

Sanmirna Therapeutics | Acquired by Thalia Therapeutics | Netherlands | Biotech

Aldea | Acquired by LiveKid | undisclosed | Poland | EdTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Acodyne | DeepTech / Unmanned Cargo Aircraft | €2.5M | Pre-Seed | Gungnir Capital, PSV Hafnium

Helicopters dominate two expensive, dangerous logistics niches: military resupply in contested areas, and offshore servicing where a missing part can halt production at hundreds of thousands of euros a day. Acodyne’s E100 is an electric eVTOL that takes off vertically, then flies fixed-wing at 450 km/h, double a typical helicopter’s cruise speed, carrying 100 to 500kg over up to 500km. Staying cargo-only sidesteps the certification burden that has stalled most of the eVTOL sector for years. Gungnir Capital, which also backed Kelluu, moved in after third-party validation of the engineering, and Acodyne already has named pilot routes, including Greenland field trials in spring 2027 and an offshore corridor in Denmark. First flight tests are scheduled before the end of 2026.

💸 New Dry Powder

Seedcamp | $320M across two funds | United Kingdom | $220M for Seedcamp VII (pre-seed/seed, up to $1.3M first checks), $100M for Select II (growth-stage follow-on); pivoting toward physical AI, robotics, and deeptech

CapMan Infra | €750M target, first close | Finland | Nordic Infrastructure III, energy and utilities, transportation, digital infrastructure

Norrsken Launcher | €80M | Sweden | Second fund, first institutional LP, European impact startups

Nucleo Ventures | €34M | Romania | Startups and SMEs across Romania and CEE

Thank you for reading.

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

Subscribe now

See you next Monday.

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W25

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:03:52 GMT

📅 June 15 – 19, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

If there is one week where sovereignty has been the word, it’s this one. The US restricting access to Anthropic’s most powerful models for Europeans should hopefully wake up anyone still convinced Europe doesn’t need its own frontier models, and more broadly, its own answers across every critical sector. France did answer hard this week, with fresh capital behind Tibi and a defence push that includes a €32M Series A for battlefield intelligence startup Comand AI, plus the launch of a new €500M defence fund from an Earlybird and AVP collaboration. Let’s hope this latest wake-up call keeps producing real action in the weeks ahead, not just headlines.

To read more on Comand AI:

📰 News of the Week

The US locks Europe out of Anthropic’s most powerful models
A directive from the US government suspended access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, inside or outside the US. For European AI builders who had leaned on frontier US models, it’s a blunt reminder of how exposed that dependency is, and it’s part of why the sovereignty conversation isn’t going away.

France adds €13B to Tibi, the model other countries are starting to copy
France raised €13 billion in new institutional capital for the third phase of Tibi, with half earmarked for deeptech. State-linked companies including SNCF and Naval Group are now joining as investors. A serious bet on keeping French scale-ups funded domestically.

CuspAI reportedly closing in on a $2.6B valuation with Jeff Bezos backing
The UK materials-discovery startup would more than quadruple its valuation from $100M raised in September last year.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Solar Foods | €77.8M Grant + R&D loan | Finland | FoodTech | Business Finland

Conduct | €51M Series A | United Kingdom | Enterprise AI | Index Ventures

Comand AI | €32M Series A | France | Defence Tech | Blossom Capital

Undo | €31M Series B | United Kingdom | DevTools | Elsewhere Partners

Festina Finance | €25M | Denmark | FinTech | Birchway Capital

NeuralTrust | $20M Seed | Spain | Cybersecurity | Alstin Capital

Orbio | €18M Series A | Spain | HR Tech | Dawn Capital

Vivici | €12.5M | Netherlands | FoodTech | European Innovation Council

Flagright | $12.5M Series A | UK - US | RegTech | Infinity Ventures

Cortea | €12M Seed | Germany | AuditTech | Dawn Capital

Rocapine | €11.2M Series A | France | ConsumerTech | Educapital

Cargofy | $11M Series A | Ukraine | Logistics | u.ventures, Toloka.vc, Movens Capital

Causa Prima | $10M Pre-Seed | Sweden | FinTech | Creandum

🚪 Exits

Expatica | Acquired by Wise | Netherlands | Media

PayCaptain | Acquired by The Citation Group | United Kingdom | Payroll Tech

Mixhalo | Acquired by DeepL | United States | Audio Streaming

🔍 My Personal Favorite

OneSoil | AgriTech | €1M | existing investors

OneSoil is a Belarusian-founded, Switzerland-based startup that built one of the most widely used free satellite-monitoring apps for farmers, tracking crop health and field conditions from space without the enterprise sales motion most agtech companies rely on. This round is small, just €1M from existing backers including Yury Melnichek, but it’s a reminder that not every defensible business needs a nine-figure round to matter. Free distribution at scale, where millions of farmers already check field NDVI maps the way people check the weather, is its own kind of moat, one that’s much harder to buy than to build.

💸 New Dry Powder

E2D, Earlybird + AVP | €500M | Germany / France | European defence and dual-use growth fund, ~€25M tickets into ~20 companies, first close June 30

BAE Systems → Lakestar & Expeditions | €50M | United Kingdom | LP investment into two European defence-tech VC funds via the Launchpad programme

BRAVE FRANCE | €20M | France / Ukraine | Joint grant programme for missile, drone, and air defence systems, grants up to €1M, first call September

FPE Capital Fund IV | €46M (first close) | United Kingdom | Growth equity, cornerstone investment from British Business Bank

Wave Ventures Fund III | €10M | Finland | Angel and pre-seed, Nordics and Baltics, run entirely by investors under 25

EXANTE Gecko Fund | €1M | United Kingdom | Grants for critical open-source infrastructure in financial technology

Thank you for reading.
Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

Subscribe now

See you next Monday.

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W24

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:08:53 GMT

📅 June 08 – 12, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Three billion-euro rounds in one week, across robots, satellites, and battlefield interceptors. NEURA and ICEYE alone account for €2.4B of that. Alta Ares, two years old and already deploying in three active conflict zones, raised €50M to scale interceptors that cost a fraction of the missiles they replace. Meanwhile Morpho closed one of DeFi’s largest rounds ever, Mistral is heading for a €20B valuation, and Bending Spoons filed for a US IPO.

Read more about Alta Ares on this previous article :

📰 News of the Week

Mistral in talks to raise €3B at €20B valuation

Reports this week put Mistral in conversations to close a round at nearly double its last known valuation of €11.7B. If it closes, this would be one of the largest European AI fundraises on record.

Bending Spoons files for US IPO

Italy’s app portfolio company behind Evernote, WeTransfer, and Splice filed for a US listing. Another European exit choosing New York over home markets.

ICEYE raises €1B at a €10B+ valuation

Led by General Atlantic, the Finnish SAR satellite company is now one of Europe’s most valuable private defence and space assets. Customers span governments and militaries across NATO-aligned nations.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

THEKER | €73M Series A | Spain | Industrial AI Robotics | CRV, Samsung, LVMH, Cathay Innovation

Alta Ares | €50M Series A | France | Defence Tech | Air Street Capital, Cherry Ventures, OTB Ventures, Harpoon Ventures

CameraMatics | €49M | Ireland | Fleet AI | Blume Equity, Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, Goodbody Capital Partners

Rem3dy Health | €16M | United Kingdom | HealthTech | Suntory, Estrella Galicia, Apollo Hospitals, UPSA

NewOrbit | €16M Series A | United Kingdom | SpaceTech | Voyager Ventures

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Aavuus | SpaceTech | Pre-Seed | undisclosed | Maki.vc

LEO is getting crowded fast and the tracking infrastructure has not kept up. Objects between 1 and 10 cm are the critical blind spot: too small for commercial radar to routinely detect, large enough to disable a satellite on impact. Aavuus builds a global network of ground-based laser ranging stations that measure object positions with centimetre-level precision, closing a gap that current systems cannot address. The company spun out of the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute, which means the core technology is proven at the institutional level and Aavuus is commercialising it rather than inventing it from scratch. With tens of thousands of additional satellites heading to LEO over the next decade and debris removal still largely unsolved, the timing is structural.

🚪 Exits

Gladia | Acquired by OVHcloud | undisclosed | France | Voice AI

Pricing Hub | Acquired by Akeneo | undisclosed | France | Pricing Intelligence

additiv | Acquired by Temenos | undisclosed | Switzerland | Wealth Management SaaS

GoHenry | Acquired by Barclays | undisclosed | United Kingdom | Consumer FinTech

PatentMaker | Acquired by DeepIP | undisclosed | Germany | LegalTech

💸 New Dry Powder

Pitchdrive Fund IV | €60M | Europe | AI-native early-stage European founders

Generation Tech Partners | €50M | Germany | AI roll-up strategy, German SME acquisitions

Creator Fund I | $56M | United Kingdom | Scientific founders at pre-seed

Angel Invest Fund III | €40M | Europe | Angel to Seed

Varangians | €10M | Sweden | DefenceTech, Ukraine-focused

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

Subscribe now

See you next Monday.

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W23

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:31:29 GMT

📅 June 01 – 05, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech. For daily European tech news, see you there.

Two nine-figure quantum rounds in one week. Anthropic filing for IPO at $61.5B while offering EU regulators access to its most powerful cybersecurity model. Brussels proposing to reserve AI and cloud contracts for European providers. Kpler taking $1B from Sixth Street. A Dutch startup growing wood from tree stem cells in bioreactors. Not every week has a throughline, but this one does: European tech is being taken seriously, by capital markets, by institutions, and by the scientists who keep building things nobody expected to work.

📰 News of the Week

Anthropic files for IPO and offers EU access to Mythos

The Claude maker has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement with the SEC. On the same day, Anthropic offered EU regulators access to Mythos, its most advanced AI cybersecurity model, previously restricted to Microsoft, JPMorgan, and the UK government. A dual move that reads as both financial preparation and geopolitical positioning.

Oxford Quantum Circuits raises £260M, Europe’s largest private quantum round ever

The UK company builds superconducting quantum computers deployed across the US, Japan, and Spain for customers in finance, defence, and security. Led by Bullhound Capital, with the British Business Bank and J.P. Morgan among the backers. Oversubscribed.

EU unveils tech sovereignty package

The European Commission proposed a package covering four areas: semiconductors (Chips Act 2.0), cloud and AI infrastructure, open source, and the digitalisation of the energy sector. The most consequential policy move for European enterprise tech since GDPR.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Oxford Quantum Circuits | €300M Series C | United Kingdom | Quantum Computing | Bullhound Capital, British Business Bank, J.P. Morgan

Twinco Capital | €165M | Spain | FinTech | €15M Series B led by FMO + €150M securitisation facility

Quobly | €115M | France | Quantum Computing | STMicroelectronics, Air Liquide

Innovafeed | €51M | France | AgriTech | Creadev, QIA, Temasek, ADM, ABC Impact

Apoha | $36M Seed | United Kingdom | DeepTech | Singular

Semble | €35M Series C | United Kingdom | HealthTech | Revaia

ICEYE | €28M R&D grant | Finland | SpaceTech | Finnish government

Gigaton | $26M Series A | United Kingdom | IndustrialTech | Plural

Encosa | €25M Seed | Germany | CleanTech | Realyze Ventures

Fuse Energy | €25M Series B extension | United Kingdom | EnergyTech | 20VC; Collaborative Fund

Tilt | $26M | United Kingdom | Live-Video Commerce | Vinted Ventures

Invisix | €20M Seed | Netherlands | Semiconductors | Hitachi Ventures, Transition Ventures, imec.xpand, Doosan

Innovorder | €20M | France | Restaurant Tech | UL Invest

🚪 Exits

Contentful | Acquired by Salesforce | undisclosed | Germany | CMS / SaaS

Vendr | Acquired by Vertice | undisclosed | United Kingdom | SaaS Procurement / AI

Wecan Group | Majority stake acquired by SEALSQ | €5.4M | Switzerland | Post-Quantum Financial Security

Moca Traveltech | Acquired by Entravel Group | undisclosed | Spain | TravelTech

Katalogo.ai | Acquired by CommerceClarity | undisclosed | Europe | E-commerce AI

🔍 My Personal Favorite

New Dawn Bio | BioTech / Cultured Wood | Pre-Seed | €2.1M

Humans have been cutting rectangular boards from round tree trunks for millennia, wasting a significant portion of every log in the process. New Dawn Bio grows wood directly from tree stem cells in bioreactors, producing pre-shaped timber without logging or sawing waste. The technology produces wood up to 10,000 times faster than conventional forestry and could reduce customers’ cost of goods by up to 80%. The company has demonstrated cultured wood across six different tree species and is based out of Wageningen, one of the world’s leading agricultural research ecosystems. Founded in 2024 by Tom Clement and Kianti Figler, both systems biologists. With 5.3 million hectares of tropical forest lost every year and the global timber market valued at nearly $1 trillion, the structural opportunity is real even if the technology is still early. CapitalT led, with Norrsken Evolve and Ontdekkers Group participating.

💸 New Dry Powder

Merantix Capital AI Fund | Merantix Capital | €103M | Germany | Early-stage European AI across logistics, healthcare, robotics, and manufacturing

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European Tech.

See you next Monday.

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W22

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:08:26 GMT

📅 May 25 – 29, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

📸 Mind The Gap is now on Instagram: @mindthegap_tech - daily European tech news, see you there.

Europe’s tech scene appears to be spending more time asking who owns the compute, the energy, and the infrastructure.

From defence to AI, some of this week’s biggest stories point in the same direction: strategic technologies are no longer a niche corner of venture capital. They’re increasingly becoming the main event.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Oura launches Ring 5 and moves closer to IPO

The Finnish company unveiled Ring 5, its smallest smart ring yet at 40% lighter than its predecessor, as it advances its confidential NYSE filing. Samsung already has a ring. Apple is rumoured to be building one. Oura is racing to the public markets before the category gets crowded.

Stark seeks €300M at €2.5B valuation

The German defence unicorn is raising fresh capital with Peter Thiel reportedly doubling down on his position. Stark builds autonomous drone systems and is one of the most visible bets on Europe’s accelerating drone arms race.

Mistral signs industrial AI deals with BMW and Airbus

On its third anniversary, the French AI scaleup launched “Mistral for Industrial Engineering” and signed partnerships with BMW and Airbus. The move targets design, engineering, and manufacturing and puts Mistral directly up against US incumbents on European industrial territory.

Anthropic raises $65B at a $965B valuation and opens its sixth European office

Claude maker closed one of the largest private funding rounds in tech history, led by Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia, with run-rate revenue crossing $47B earlier this month. It also opened a Milan office, its sixth European city in under a year. At $965B, Anthropic now eclipses OpenAI as the most valuable private AI company in the world.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Focused Energy | $240M | Germany | EnergyTech | RWE

Inherent | $50M | United Kingdom | Deeptech | Index Ventures

Lucis | $20M | France | Health AI | Singular

MokN | $15M | France | Cybersecurity | GV

🚪 Exits

In3 | Acquired by TrueLayer | Netherlands | FinTech

Bosque Foods | Acquired by InfiniteRoots | Spain | FoodTech

Visiopharm | Acquired by Grundium | Denmark | HealthTech

Uptmz | Acquired by Aizy | Denmark | MarketingTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Stellar Alpina | Switzerland |SpaceTech | Pre-Seed | €3.8M

Getting a satellite into orbit is the easy part now. Moving it once it’s there, raising orbits, avoiding collisions, extending operational life, is where the economics quietly break down. Current in-space propulsion is fuel-heavy, which means more mass at launch, higher costs, and shorter useful lifespans. Rotating detonation engines fix this by replacing subsonic combustion with supersonic detonation, extracting significantly more thrust per unit of propellant. If the efficiency gains hold at scale, the economics of in-orbit transfer and constellation management change meaningfully. The four ARIS alumni who founded Stellar Alpina built Europe’s first student RDRE in 2024 and completed eight detonative hotfires just 82 days after incorporating. RDRE is hard to control beyond lab conditions and performance at altitude remains to be proved, but few teams arrive at pre-seed with this many hours on the hardware. Founderful led, LP&E participated.

💸 New Dry Powder

byFounders Fund III | €130M | Denmark | Pre-seed and seed, €500K to €4M tickets, 8-15 investments per year, New Nordics and beyond

Longwall Venture Partners Fund II | £100M | United Kingdom | Deep tech spinouts

Marvelous Scito Fund | Marvelous / Joachim Herz Foundation | €20M | Germany | Advanced materials, waste valorisation, robotics

Transition Ventures | $150M | Europe | Deeptech / frontier tech

Goalhanger Ventures | undisclosed | United Kingdom | Creator-led media businesses

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European VC.

Did a friend forward this to you? Subscribe and get Mind The Gap in your inbox every Monday.

Subscribe now

See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.

Best,

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W21

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 25 May 2026 07:08:48 GMT

📅 May 18– 22, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

Oura files for NYSE. EQT takes the wheel on a €5B EU fund. Cohere goes back to Germany for seconds. Viktor hits $15M ARR in 10 weeks. Fresha quietly becomes a unicorn via KKR. Two French AI startups raise $40M on the same day. And somewhere in Geneva, a team from EPFL is building a foundation model of the human cortex.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Oura files confidentially for NYSE IPO

The Finnish health wearables company has submitted paperwork to the SEC, with no share count or price range disclosed. Valued at $11B in October 2025 after doubling revenue in consecutive years, it is heading toward one of the most credible healthtech exits the continent has produced in this cycle.

EQT wins mandate to manage the EU’s €5B Scaleup Europe Superfund

The Swedish private equity giant will oversee the EU’s largest state-backed tech fund, with over 100 companies already in its pipeline. EQT is pushing to extend eligibility to UK-based startups, which would mark a significant post-Brexit policy shift.

Cohere acquires its second German AI startup in a month

Weeks after the Aleph Alpha merger, Cohere acquired Berlin-based Reliant AI, a healthcare AI startup whose customers include GSK, Ipsen, and Kyowa Kirin. Cohere is using European M&A to build vertical AI capabilities fast, with each deal framed as an AI sovereignty play.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Fresha | $80M | United Kingdom | Wellness | KKR Next Generation Technology Growth

REPS | $23.6M | Austria | CleanTech | undisclosed

🚪 Exits

Oura | Confidential NYSE filing |Finland | Health / Wearables

Emmi AI | Acquired by Mistral | Austria | AI

Reliant AI | Acquired by Cohere | Germany | Healthcare AI

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Neurosoft Bioelectronics | MedTech / Brain-Computer Interfaces | Seed | $7.5M

Neurosoft builds soft, stretchable brain-computer interfaces that sit on the surface of the cortex without penetrating brain tissue, a meaningful departure from the implant-and-puncture approach that has defined the BCI field since the beginning. The platform has already been tested in 10 patients across clinical trials at UTHealth Houston and UMC Utrecht for epilepsy surgery guidance. The real play here is a cortical foundation model: the company is using data from its clinical devices to train a model of the human cortex, the same logic that underpins large language models but applied to neural recordings. Spun out of EPFL, the team holds 25+ patents. Skybound Venture Capital led the round, which was oversubscribed and brings total funding to over $20M.

💸 New Dry Powder

Lauxera Growth II | Lauxera Capital Partners | €520M | France / USA | European healthtech growth equity, €20-50M tickets, 12-15 portfolio companies targeting US expansion

Earlybird + AVP Defence Fund | Earlybird / AVP | €500M | Germany / France | Defence Tech

Mouro Capital Fund III | Mouro Capital | $400M | Europe | FinTech / AI Infrastructure

Ispania Growth Fund | COFIDES / QIA | €300M | Spain | Green and digital transition

Skybound Venture Capital | Skybound | $38M | Europe | Deep Tech, early stage

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

See you next Monday.

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W20

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:21:15 GMT

📅 May 11– 15, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

From AI biotech and infrastructure to fintech, defence, and semiconductors, capital kept flowing into increasingly large and strategic bets. Hard to ignore the fact that every company in this week’s top 15 raised above €20M.

The UK dominated the headlines once again, pulling capital from US funds, sovereign investors, global banks, and major tech players all at the same time.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Isomorphic Labs raises $2.1B Series B

The London-based AI drug design company spun out of Google DeepMind closed the largest AI biotech round on record. Led by Thrive Capital, with Alphabet, GV, Temasek, MGX, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund joining the cap table. No drug has entered human trials yet. Demis Hassabis has committed to dosing the first patient before the end of 2026. Capital from the US, UK, Abu Dhabi, and Singapore all in one round.

n8n doubles valuation to $5.2B via SAP deal

Berlin-based workflow automation startup n8n received a strategic investment from SAP that pushed its valuation from $2.5B to $5.2B in under a year. The two companies also signed a multi-year deal embedding n8n into Joule Studio, SAP’s enterprise AI agent builder.

Charli XCX invests in Nothing

London-based consumer hardware company Nothing named Charli XCX its first Global Brand Ambassador and newest shareholder, off the back of its $200M Series C at a $1.3B valuation. She joins The Weeknd and Swedish House Mafia on the cap table. Carl Pei says she is helping shape what they build next, not just fronting campaigns.

Wise lists in the US with $2.5B in annual revenue

The UK fintech is heading to US markets after reaching $2.5B in annual revenue. Another European exit going to New York rather than London.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Nscale | €670M | United Kingdom | AI Infrastructure | ABN AMRO, DNB, Eksfin, Nordea, SEB

Paymentology | $175M | United Kingdom | FinTech | Apis Partners, Aspirity Partners

UroMems | $60M | France | MedTech | Ajax Health

Rowden | £25M | United Kingdom | Defence Tech | UK National Wealth Fund

Iceotope | $26M | United Kingdom | AI Infrastructure | Two Seas Capital, Barclays Climate Ventures

Webidoo | €21M | Italy | AI / SMB Automation | Azimut Group (IXC3)

🚪 Exits

Banked | Acquired by National Australia Bank | United Kingdom | FinTech

DC Company (Konbini, Le Gorafi, Herstory, C’est Qui La Boss) | Acquired by Alexandre Yazdi (Voodoo CEO) | France | Digital Media

Glocalzone | Acquired by MovitOn | Turkey | Logistics

Graphcore | $450M+ from SoftBank | United Kingdom | Semiconductors |

Ripetizioni.it | Acquired by Superprof | Italy | EdTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Twin Prime | Defence / AI | Pre-Seed | $10M

Twin Prime is building foundation models trained on multi-sensor fusion data: radar, EO/IR, signals intelligence, rather than repurposing commercial vision or language models for defence. That distinction matters both operationally and in procurement conversations. The founding team mixes ML research depth with defence-sector experience, which is what NATO-aligned buyers actually want to see. European defence ministries are under growing pressure to reduce dependence on US-sourced AI systems, and that is opening a procurement window at the model layer.

💸 New Dry Powder

Lansdowne Partners VC Fund I | €129M first close, target €172M | United Kingdom | UK university IP spinouts across healthcare data, quantum, advanced materials, semiconductors, and defence | British Business Bank, Aviva Investors, Lloyds Banking Group

BII AI Lab €7M | Denmark | AI for life sciences startups | Danish Industry Foundation

Eighteen48 Partners Fund I | €175M first close, target €350M | United Kingdom | Mid-market tech buyouts in Europe

Thank you for reading. Don’t just read the market: understand it.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European Tech.

See you next Monday.

Best,

Agathe

Mind The Gap #W19

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:11:49 GMT

📅 May 04 – 10, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

Quantum & Defense week. Four quantum computing rounds landed in the same seven days, which is either a coincidence or a signal that European deep tech investors have made their bets on where the next compute paradigm starts. Helsing moving toward an $18B valuation is the other number worth sitting with. Defence AI is no longer a niche category. It is becoming one of the most generously priced sectors in European private markets, and the institutional conviction behind it is accelerating.

📰 News of the Week

Helsing set for $18B valuation in new funding round

The German AI defence company is reportedly raising at approximately $18B, placing it among Europe’s most valuable private tech companies. The institutional repricing of AI-driven defence assets shows no sign of slowing.

ICEYE targets €250M raise at €2.4B+ valuation

The Finnish satellite imaging company is in talks to raise €250M according to Bloomberg, with defence contracts pushing its valuation above €2.4B. Another data point on how dual-use and space infrastructure are being repriced in 2026.

SAP acquires Prior Labs for €1B+ commitment

SAP signed a definitive agreement to acquire Freiburg-based Prior Labs, the pioneer of Tabular Foundation Models, and committed more than €1B over four years to scale it into a European frontier AI lab. Prior Labs retains its brand, team, and open-source commitments.

Doctolib acquires Medicus Health and commits £100M+ to the UK market

The French healthtech unicorn bought UK primary care software startup Medicus Health, pledging over £100M in investment and 150 new hires. It puts Doctolib in direct competition with the Optum and TPP duopoly that has long controlled UK primary care infrastructure.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

LegalPlace | €70M | France | LegalTech | Move Capital, XAnge, Eurazeo

Skeleton Technologies | €33M | Estonia | AI Infrastructure | Axon Partners, Taiwania Capital

SWEBAL | €30M | Sweden | Defence | BA

Qutwo | €25M | Finland | AI / Quantum | €325M EV | BA

Ethos | $22M | United Kingdom | HR Tech | a16z

Lithosquare | €21.3M | France | Critical Minerals | World Fund, Kindred Capital

EnteroBiotix | £19M | United Kingdom | BioTech| Thairm Bio, Scottish National Investment Bank

OpenTrade | $17M | United Kingdom | Crypto | Mercury Fund, Notion Capital

Reel | €15M | Denmark | EnergyTech | Future Energy Ventures

🚪 Exits

Medicus Health | Acquired by Doctolib | United Kingdom | HealthTech

Legalstart | Acquired by LegalPlace | France | LegalTech

Moonfish AI | Acquired by Batch | France | Marketing Tech

VeloLife | Acquired by Laka | United Kingdom | InsurTech / Micromobility

QHarbor | Acquired by Quantum Machines | Netherlands | Quantum Computing

Prior Labs | Acquired by SAP | €1B+ commitment | Germany | AI

Moove Connected Mobility | Acquired by Netradyne | Europe | Mobility

Getaround Europe | Merged with GoMore | Europe | Mobility

Sastrify | Acquired by Deel | Germany | Software Procurement

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Moonlight AI | HealthTech / AI Diagnostics | Seed | €2.8M

Moonlight AI targets a specific bottleneck in oncology: extracting genomic biomarker information from standard blood and cytology slides, a modality that is widespread and low-cost but conventionally unable to yield molecular-level insight without separate genetic assays. The approach applies AI image analysis to existing imaging workflows to infer genomic features, positioning it as a non-destructive overlay on current lab practice rather than a replacement modality. This matters technically because it reduces dependency on expensive next-generation sequencing or immunohistochemistry panels for initial biomarker screening, compressing both time-to-result and cost per patient. The syndicate includes MEDIN Fund and VP Venture Partners, investors with sector-specific diligence capacity. The visual-to-genomic inference layer in cancer diagnostics is structurally underserved, and the approach has defensible IP potential if training data and model architecture remain proprietary.

💸 New Dry Powder

Front Ventures | €5M | Ukraine | Defence Tech, Ukraine-focused

Araya Sie Fund | £7.5M (first close) | United Kingdom | Women-led startups, seed stage, up to 40 portfolio companies

Thank you for reading.

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, share it with someone who should be tracking European VC.

See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.

Subscribe now

Best,

Agathe

Mind The Gap #16

Agathe Thiery — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:47:23 GMT

📅 April 20 – 24, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins

Aleph Alpha is going to Canada. Cohere picks up one of the most talked-about sovereign AI assets in Europe, and nobody should be shocked in hindsight. Without government customers sustaining you at scale, building a competitive foundation model company outside the US is a brutal equation. What matters more is what the rest of the week looked like: clean compute, depot electrification, quantum chip testing infrastructure, and synthetic fuels all drew serious capital. The structural themes are holding. The sovereign AI conversation, on the other hand, just got a lot harder to have.

Let’s dive into the data.

📰 News of the Week

Aleph Alpha to be acquired by Cohere

Cohere agreed to acquire Germany’s Aleph Alpha, one of the few European foundation model companies explicitly positioned as a sovereign AI alternative to US providers. The deal consolidates two non-US LLM players without keeping the asset in European hands. A tough signal for anyone still arguing Europe can build at the frontier without state-scale anchor customers.

Revolut targets $200B valuation for IPO

The most watched fintech exit in European VC history keeps inching closer to the market.

EU and Ukraine launch €160M defence innovation programme

The EU and Ukraine established a €160M programme combining a €140M EU guarantee and €20M in grants to fund defence innovation startups and projects.

Palantir in talks with UK Met Police on AI-driven investigation tools

Palantir Technologies is in discussions with the Metropolitan Police to deploy AI analysis tools in criminal investigations. One of the most significant law enforcement AI deals in the UK to date, if it closes.

France’s Health Data Hub selects Scaleway to replace Microsoft

The French government chose Scaleway, an Iliad subsidiary, to host national health research data covering millions of citizens, ending a years-long controversy over US hyperscaler access to one of the most sensitive public datasets in Europe. A clean win for European cloud infrastructure.

🇪🇺 Top Deals of the Week

Verda | €100M | Finland | Cloud | Lifeline Ventures

Cloudsmith | €61.5M Series C | United Kingdom | DevOps | TVC

BLP Digital | $50M | Switzerland | ERP Automation | Goldman Sachs Alternatives

UNIVITY | €27M | France | SpaceTech | Bpifrance, Expansion, Blast Club

ATMOS Space Cargo | €25.7M Series A | Germany | SpaceTech | Baldnord, Expansion

Rivan | £25M | United Kingdom | CleanTech | IQ Capital, Plural

Planetary | €23M | Switzerland | BioTech | Radikal Capital, Oetker Ventures

Decade Energy | €22M | France | CleanTech | Eiffel Investment Group, SET Ventures

OrangeQS | €15M Seed | Netherlands | Quantum | EIC Fund

ScreenPoint Medical | €13.6M | Netherlands | MedTech | Insight Partners, Siemens Healthineers

Exergy3 | €11.4M | United Kingdom | CleanTech | Axeleo Capital, Bayern Kapital

Smart Robotics | €10M Series A | Netherlands | Robotics | Rotterdamse Havendraken, Innovation Industries, Ernij Next

Incapto | €10M Series B | Spain | FoodTech | McWin Capital Partners, Cardumen, Lever VC

Fasal Bio | €7M | Croatia | Sustainable Materials | BlackPeak Capital

🚪 Exits

Aleph Alpha | Acquired by Cohere | undisclosed | Germany | Foundation Models

Quarkslab | Acquired by Airbus | undisclosed | France | Cybersecurity

Gett | Acquired by Lyft | $55M | United Kingdom | Mobility

Fragment | Acquired by Sierra | undisclosed | France | AI / Customer Service

Qura | Acquired by Legora | undisclosed | Sweden | LegalTech

🔍 My Personal Favorite

Cerca Magnetics | MedTech / Quantum Sensing | Seed | €4.3M

Cerca Magnetics builds wearable brain imaging systems using optically pumped magnetometers, a quantum sensing modality that runs at room temperature. Conventional MEG systems require cryogenic cooling, cost several million euros, need magnetically shielded rooms, and cannot be worn. That combination rules out paediatric use cases and movement disorder research entirely. OPM-based wearable helmets conform to head geometry, enable measurements during natural movement, and improve signal-to-noise ratios for motor and epilepsy research. The €4.3M seed provides runway into a market where neurological diagnostics are chronically underinvested at the hardware level. Proprietary sensor fabrication and calibration algorithms compound defensibility over time. Worth watching early.

💸 New Dry Powder

Kurma Partners | €215M | France | Biotech, Healthcare | early to growth

Passion Capital | €46M | United Kingdom | AI, FinTech, Enterprise Risk | Seed

DFF Ventures | €70M | Netherlands | Vertical AI, Software for physical industries | Pre-seed

Thank you for reading !

Don’t just read the market: understand it.

If you enjoyed this edition, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend who should be tracking European VC.

Did a friend forward this to you? Subscribe and get Mind The Gap in your inbox every Monday.

Subscribe now

See you next week for more Tech & VC insights.

Best,

Agathe