🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
It’s been a relatively quiet week for European Tech. My favourite story was that there are now more US tech workers coming to Europe, than the other way around. This would have been unimaginable 10 years ago.
Read on.
The GTM10 Awards just opened their nominations. They’re looking for the strongest European GTM operators. Nominate your picks here.
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🇪🇺 Sign up to Scaling Europe Daily
A month ago I launched my new daily newsletter covering European Tech. It’s got 1k+ subs and covers everything you need to know about European Tech on a daily basis.
A lot of this news will come from my relationships with VCs and founders, as well as social media (e.g. founders building in public). The aim is to cover the news that mainstream publications aren’t covering as well as the big stories.
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💰 BIG ROUNDS
Spanish spacetech company PLD Space raised a €180m Series C led by Mitsubishi Electric. Read more here.
Dutch RIFT raised $132m in a combined Series B and EU Innovation Fund backing for its climate tech solution aiming to avoid over 1m tonnes of CO₂. Read more here.
UK-based self-driving startup Oxa raised a $103m Series D backed by the UK’s National Wealth Fund and NVentures. Read more here.
German quick commerce startup Flink raised $100m in a growth round led by Prosus. Read more here.
Dutch payments technology firm Silverflow raised a €37m Series B led by Picus Capital. Read more here.
Swedish data platform Validio raised a $30m Series A led by Plural to improve enterprise data quality for analytics, compliance and AI adoption. Read more here.
German battery manufacturer UniverCell raised a €30m Series B to scale lithium-ion cell manufacturing in Europe. Read more here.
FrenchAI patent platform DeepIP raised a $25m Series B co-led by Korelya Capital and Serena. Read more here.
💸 SMALLER BUT INTERESTING ROUNDS
🇪🇺 THE SCALING EUROPE SHOW
This week I published interviews with:
Jan-Hendrik Boelens: Founder and CEO of Alpine Eagle on building drone on drone defence, here.
Louise Boucher: Founder and Managing Partner of Sisyphus Ventures, here.
Georgian Andrei Oprisor: GM at Revolut People on Revolut's formula for high performance, here.
Des Traynor: Co-founder at Intercom on cannibalising their own product, here.
Amelia Miller: Co-founder of ivee on raising their £1m Seed, here.
Pierre Proner: Co-founder and CEO at Lawhive discussing their $60m Series B, here.
Victoria Weller: Operations at ElevenLabs on growing from 10 people to 400 in 3 years, here.
Danae Shell: Founder and CEO of Valla, here.
Bryan Kim, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz on how they won the ElevenLabs Series A, here.
The Scaling Europe show is sponsored by SurrealDB, Omni and Venture Comet LTD and presented by Deel - check them out here.
📰 BIG NEWS
US - Europe Tech worker flows
There are now more tech workers going from the US to Europe than the other way around.
For the past year lots of tech executives have been flying over to join European Tech companies (Lovable, VEED, Multiverse have all had americans join recently), but this is the first time there's real data.
The graph below shows that there are more tech workers moving to Europe from the US than the other way around.
This is unlikely to come as a great surprise to anyone in European Tech but it's still interesting to see.
Read more here.
UFORCE
The UK and Ukraine minted their first defence tech ‘unicorn’ as UFORCE (a London-based startup founded and run by Ukrainians) raised $50 million in seed funding at a valuation of over $1 billion.
The startup makes land, sea and aerial systems that are already deployed extensively to Ukraine’s forces across multiple campaigns.
It is already profitable on bookings that it says are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, growing 450% in 2025.
Read more here.
Pasqal
Another Quantum startup from Europe is going public via SPAC.
Last week it was Finnish IQM, this time its French Pasqal which aims to turn neutral-atom tech into quantum computers that can beat classical machines.
In 2023 it raised a €100m Series B round led by new investor Temasek, and now
the company is looking at a $2bn valuation via a public listing.
Read more here.
💰 M&A
Finnish gesture control startup Doublepoint got acquired by Oura as it looks to add AI-powered gesture interactions to its smart rings. Read more here.
Lisbon-based ocean rate platform Cargofive got acquired by Berlin-based cargo.one. Read more here.
Italian adtech company Aryel got acquired by global programmatic exchange Onetag to integrate immersive creative formats into its platform. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
German GHARAGE Ventures launched a €40m Fund I to back early-stage TravelTech and RetailTech startups globally. Read more here.
The European Investment Fund committed €50m to Join Capital’s €235m Fund III to back early-stage European startups building defence, dual-use, security and space technologies. Read more here.
Lithuanian first-check VC fund FIRSTPICK launched a €25m fund to back early-stage Baltic startups. Read more here.
🔎 IN OTHER NEWS
British BrewDog got acquired after going in to administration, leaving 220k crowdfunders with nothing. Read more here.
The UK Government is setting up a new AI research lab to fund the "next big AI breakthroughs". Read more here.
The Mayor of London sent Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei an invitation to move to London after the AI giant’s spat with President Trump. Read more here.
🎪 EVENTS
Andre Retterath’s (aka the Data Driven VC) is hosting the Virtual DDVC Summit! Join 500+ investors and learn from 30+ expert speakers how leading VC, PE, and LP firms transform their operations with alternative data, AI, and automation. Get your SUPER EARLY BIRD ticket here.
EU Startups Summit: Join Europe’s top startups, investors, and innovators for 2 days of networking, inspiration, and learning. The next edition will take place on May 7-8, 2026 in sunny Malta. Sign up with the code SCALING20 to get 20% off.
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Thank you.
Seb