📅 Sep 22 – 26, 2026 | Read time: 5 mins
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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.
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See you next Monday.
Agathe