🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
Synthesia hit $4bn this week, and a made a bunch of employees cash millionaires as it did so. An ex-DeepMinder is starting his own post-LLM startup in London, and Hugging Face turns down Nvidia.
Let’s get into it.
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💰 BIG ROUNDS
UK-based Synthesia raised a $200m Series E round led by Google Ventures, doubling its valuation to $4bn in 12 months. Check out my interview with the CEO here.
German robotics startup RobCo raised a $100m Series C, co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lingotto, to scale Physical AI deployments across the US and Europe. Read more here.
UK payments startup Sokin secured a $100m long-term debt facility led by Oxford Finance to accelerate international expansion and scale its global payments infrastructure. Read more here.
Swedish marketing intelligence platform Funnel secured an $80m debt facility from HSBC Innovation Banking and Hercules Capital. Read more here.
UK-based LegalTech Orbital raised a €50m Series B round led by Brighton Park Capital to expand its AI platform for real estate law. Read more here.
Danish challenger bank Lunar raised €46m from Heartland, Orbit Alliance and new investor 100A. Read more here.
German HealthTech Recare raised €37m led by DNV to scale its AI-driven care coordination platform and expand internationally. Read more here.
UK-based subscription infrastructure Raylo platform raised £30m to accelerate expansion across device categories and international markets. Read more here.
German compliance technology startup heyData raised a $16.5m Series A round led by Riverside Acceleration Capital to scale its unified security and compliance platform for European SMEs. Read more here.
💸 SMALLER BUT INTERESTING ROUNDS
Swedish Brickanta raised an $8m seed led by Northzone in under two weeks for its AI-native operating system for construction. Read more here.
French BottleCap AI, which is building architecture-first foundational LLMs to massively improve the efficiency of models, raised a $7.5m seed led by 20VC and a host of Europe’s top founders. One of its co-founders, Tomas Mikolov, is one of the world’s leading AI researchers. Read more here.
UK-based London-based Pallma AI, which is building the security layer for agentic enterprise systems, raised a $1.6m pre-seed round led by Marathon Venture Capital. Read more here.
🇪🇺 THE SCALING EUROPE SHOW
This week I published interviews with:
🚀 Victor Riparbelli: Co-Founder & CEO at Synthesia on raising a $200m Series E. Check it out here.
🚀 Vidu Shanmugarajah: GP at Google Ventures, on backing Synthesia from Series B to a $200m Series E. Check it out here.
🚀 Kanishka Narayan MP: Minister for AI and Online Safety, on how the UK can win in AI. Check it out here.
🚀 Josh Reiner: VP of EMEA at Wiz: Check it out here.
🚀 Jacob Bro: Co-Founder and Partner at 2150 on raising its second fund and reaching €500m in assets under management. Check it out here.
🚀 Mark Lippett: CEO at XMOS on designing chips in the UK. Check it out here.
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📰 BIG NEWS
Ineffable Intelligence
One of Google DeepMind's earliest, and most impressive, researchers has left the company to build his own AI startup that is aiming to go beyond what LLMs have achieved.
David Silver was one of the earliest researchers at DeepMind and was responsible for "Reinforcement Learning" - a way of training AI models from experience rather than historical data (i.e. they learn by trial and error as opposed to learning from historical data).
He has now founded Ineffable Intelligence, which according to someone close to Silver, will aim to build “an endlessly learning superintelligence that self-discovers the foundations of all knowledge,”.
This type of AI overcomes a constraint of LLMs - that they are limited by our own knowledge and data that we feed them. Silver wants to build AI that can figure things out on its own.
This could unlock the next wave of AI advancements and it's being built here in Europe.
Read more here.
Hugging Face
The French-founded open-source AI company turned down a $500m investment from NVIDIA.
Melissa Heikkilä in the FT has reported that the company was offered by $500m by NVIDIA at a $7bn valuation - almost double at what it last raised.
The company declined to comment on the supposed investment offer but did say "it does not want a single dominant investor that could sway decisions."
Read more here.
European AI Adoption
The Microsoft AI Economy Institute released a report that stated Europe has the highest rate of AI adoption of any region in the world.
The only countries with higher rates of adoption are Singapore and the UAE, and on a regional view Europe is miles ahead.
China, the US, Russia, Brazil, India and other non-european major economies are lagging behind Europe in adoption.
Arguably the biggest opportunities in AI are not in building the tech itself, but by adopting and implementing it across every other industry as quickly as possible.
Check out the report here.
💰 M&A
German Kaia Health got acquired by Sword Health in a $285 million deal, strengthening Sword’s push to scale AI-driven care in the US and marking its entry into the German healthcare market. Read more here.
Irish fund governance services provider Carne Group sold a significant minority stake to Permira at a €1.4B valuation. Read more here.
Estonian-based AI-driven expense and bill management startup Envoice was acquired by project management platform Scoro. Read more here.
German data and AI training startup StackFuel was acquired by London-based EdTech unicorn Multiverse to scale AI upskilling across Germany, with a goal to train 100,000 workers and accelerate enterprise adoption of AI skills. Read more here.
Münster-based AI investing startup Vickii got acquired by the finanzen.net to scale its AI-powered investing engine and team within a European financial platform reaching millions of users. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
Paris-based Eurazeo is targeting a €500m close for its Future Industries Fund to back late-stage venture and early growth companies building industrial and climate transition technologies. Read more here.
US- and Europe-focused VC Voyager Ventures closed a $275m Fund II to back early-stage founders building energy, advanced manufacturing, and AI technologies. Read more here.
Paris-based VC firm daphni closed its €260m Blue fund to back early-stage science-based startups. Read more here.
London-based VC firm 2150 closed its €210m second fund, bringing AUM to €500m as it continues backing climate-driven urban systems. Read more here.
Switzerland-based early-stage VC firm b2venture closed its €150m Fund V. Read more here.
Berlin-based early-stage VC seed+speed Ventures closed its third fund at €90m, tripling its original target. Read more here.
Copenhagen-based The Footprint Firm closed its €76m Footprint Fund I to back early-stage climate and DeepTech companies across Northern Europe. Read more here.
ZOHO. VC, the venture arm of ZOLLHOF – Tech Incubator, completed a first close of its inaugural fund. Read more here.
🔎 IN OTHER NEWS
Applications for a new Project Europe / Nucleate Bio Hackathon are now open here.
Nik Storonsky, the founder of Revolut, has moved his official residence back to the UK. Read more here.
ElevenLabs got 31,000 job applications in a single month last month.
Synthesia’s $4bn Series E also made multiple employees cash millionaires.
Revolut and ElevenLabs are partnering up as Revolut deploys ElevenLabs Agents across its customer support, as well as on F1 sponsorship!
Judith Dada and others launched Relativity Collective - a new initiative to bring together future founders from Europe’s leading universities, who intend to launch a startup within the next 12–18 months.
Slush appointed a new CEO - Noora Saksa.
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Thank you.
Seb