🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
Revolut had a big week as it announced a $75bn valuation while Lovable was in the news for not paying VAT. Plus a bunch of new funds were announced.
Read on.
On a personal note my X is starting to see good traction - if that’s of interest please follow along here.
I’m now booking in newsletter sponsors for 2026 - reach out on LinkedIn if you’re interested.
💰 BIG ROUNDS
German drone maker Quantum Systems extended its initial €160m Series C (which was in May this year) to €340m, led by Balderton Capital. This tripled its valuation in a matter of months. Read more here.
UK-based Model ML, the AI automation platform for financial services, raised a $75m Series A led by FT Partners. Read more here.
Dutch Overstory, which provides AI-powered vegetation intelligence, raised a $43m Series B led by Blume Equity. Read more here.
Swiss Gravis Robotics raised $23m co-led by IQ Capital and Zacua Ventures. Read more here.
Swiss Cerrion, the AI video agent platform that detects and resolves production line issues in real time, raised an $18m Series A led by Creandum. Read more here.
UK-based Procure AI raised $13m in seed funding led by Headline. Read more here.
UK-based StirlingX, a drone operations and data intelligence company, extended its seed round to $11m led by the RCM Private Markets Fund. Read more here.
💸 SMALLER BUT INTERESTING ROUNDS
Norway-based Noteless raised €3.5m to tackle doctor burnout through AI-assisted workflows and documentation tools. Read more here.
UK-based Monq secured $3m for its AI-powered procurement-negotiation platform. Read more here.
Dutch Yasu, an AI startup building autonomous agents to prevent cloud waste, raised €850,000k led by Akka. Read more here.
🇪🇺 THE SCALING EUROPE SHOW
This week I published the following interviews:
Joel Hambly: Founding Partner at Onstage as they announced their $10m fund. Check it out here.
Leonardo Ubbiali: Cofounder and CEO at Visum Labs who is building AI for enterprises. Check it out here.
Carles Reina: Early investor at Revolut and head of GTM at ElevenLabs announcing his new $15m solo-GP fund. Check it out here.
Aidan Cramer: CEO of AIApply on how they seed-strapped to 1m users. Check it out here.
Charles Maddock: Cofounder and CEO at Strawberry - the AI browser taking on OpenAI and Perplexity. Check it out here.
📰 STARTUP NEWS
Lovable
A week after celebrating its first birthday and surpassing $200m in ARR, the company was accused of not paying VAT in Sweden.
The company admitted fault and said it would be paying everything it owes shortly.
Many were quick to point to this as an example of European over-regulation and bureaucracy, while Anton himself disagreed.
Revolut
The company announced hitting a valuation of $75bn as part of a Secondary Sale led by Coatue, Greenoaks, Dragoneer, and Fidelity. Investors including Nvidia’s NVentures, and Andreessen Horowitz also participated.
Revolut did not state how much it raised in the share sale, but it did say it allowed employees to cash out in the deal, marking the fifth time the company has run an employee secondary sale.
At this valuation over 200 employees have shares worth over $1m and 20 employees have shares worth over $20m.
Interestingly, there was no mention of the Primary Round that the company is supposedly raising (rumoured to be $2bn+).
The company also revealed that its acquiring 1 million users every 17 days.
Read more here.
Legora
Analysis completed this week revealed that Legora, the Swedish AI tool for lawyers, is the fastest YC company to become a unicorn ever.
It was founded in 2023, went to YC in 2024 and became a unicorn earlier this year (13 months later).
The company is building AI automation tools for lawyers and has already signed some of the world's most prestigious firms.
After YC the company came back to Stockholm where it has been building ever since.
💶 FUND NEWS
Carles Reina, early investor into Revolut and Eleven Labs, launch his $15m solo-GP fund. I interviewed him here.
London and Antwerp-based 6 Degrees Capital (6DC) closed a €154m fund, with the fund backing enterprise software, AI and fintech startups at seed and Series A stages. Read more here.
German Future Energy Ventures announced the closing of its €205m second fund, along with a dedicated capital fund for Italy of €30. Read more here.
French Clover, a €30m early-stage evergreen fund to back startups reshaping the future of work and education, was launched by Entrepreneur Samuel Tual. Read more here.
Onstage, which organises Europe’s largest demo day, announced its first fund of $10m. I spoke with founding partner Joel here.
🔎 IN OTHER NEWS
Lovable made its first acquisition. It has purchased European cloud provider Molnett. Read more here.
Project Europe and ElevenLabs are teaming up for a hackathon in Warsaw this week. I’ll be live-streaming the whole thing.
The UK Government announced its latest budget. Overall the reaction was mixed but there was some good bits in there for startups, especially around stock options where the UK now leads all of Europe. Read more here.
THAT’S ALL. Thank you.
Seb