🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
It’s been a crazy week for European Tech. A $1bn Seed, a $2bn Series C, Alan valued at €5bn, Legora valued at $5.5bn, and Entrepreneurs First became a unicorn.
Read on.
For more of my stuff:
💰 BIG ROUNDS
UK AI infrastructure hyperscaler Nscale raised $2bn in Europe’s largest ever Series C. Read more here.
French Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) raised $1.03bn in Europe’s largest ever Seed funding to develop next-generation “world models”. Read more here.
Swedish Legora raised $550m in Series D funding led by Accel at a $5.55bn valuation to accelerate its expansion in the United States. Read more here.
UK-based (but Ukrainian-founded) defence startup UFORCE raised a $50m Seed funding at a $1bn+ valuation to build autonomous defence systems across air, sea and land. Read more here.
UK-based Entrepreneurs First raised $200m at a $1.3bn valuation.
French Insurtech Alan raised €100m at a €5bn valuation. Read more here.
German Qdrant raised a $50m Series B to expand its open-source vector search engine for production AI systems. Read more here.
UK-based industrial startup Isembard raised a $50m Series A to scale its software-powered factories for aerospace, defence and energy sectors. Read more here.
French healthtech Waiv raised $33m to scale its AI-powered medical testing platform designed to improve cancer detection. Read more here.
French cybersecurity startup Escape raised an $18m Series A led by Balderton to scale its AI-powered offensive security engineering platform. Read more here.
UK-based Outpost raised a €15m Series A funding to build an AI-powered payments platform enabling merchants to sell globally. Read more here.
UK-based sovereign AI startup Augur raised a $15m Seed led by Plural to scale its AI platform that uses existing cameras and sensors to detect security threats across critical infrastructure. Read more here.
Italian cybersecurity startup Cleafy raised a €12m Series B for its platform that helps banks detect and prevent fraud and cyberattacks earlier. Read more here.
💸 SMALLER BUT INTERESTING ROUNDS
German Tower raised €5.5m for its novel approach to data engineering in the AI era. Read more here.
German Neuramancer raised a €1.7m pre-seed to scale its deepfake detection tools. Read more here.
Ukrainian-Estonian Defence-tech Black Forest Systems raised $400k to scale infantry drone platform. Read more here.
🇪🇺 THE SCALING EUROPE SHOW
This week I published interviews with:
Niklas Zennström: CEO at Atomico. Here.
Ross McNairn: Founder and CEO at Wordsmith AI discussing their explosive growth, here.
Jonny Clifford: Partner at Entrepreneurs First on their $200m raise, here.
Jan Hammer: Partner at Index Ventures on Alan's €5bn valuation, here.
Shardul Shah: Partner at Index Ventures on the acquisition on Wiz, here.
The Scaling Europe show is sponsored by SurrealDB, Omni and Venture Comet LTD and presented by Deel - check them out here.
📰 BIG NEWS
Revolut
The big news of the week for Revolut was that it finally got its UK Banking Licence, four years after applying.
Revolut Bank UK Ltd is set to roll out new banking services for its 13 million UK customers.
This is amazing news for the Fintech and will unlock huge revenue opportunities for the business.
Read more here.
EU-INC
The Commission’s proposal for the 28th regime has been leaked and it appears to stop short of establishing a truly independent European company form.
Instead of creating a centralised system, the draft defers legal interpretation to national courts and company registration to national registries.
As a result the ecosystem is pushing back and trying to get the Commission to truly build a pan-european registration system.
Read more here.
Alan
The French digital health insurance provider released some big news this week:
Hitting €785m in ARR (53% YoY)
Achieving operational profitability in France
Raising €100m at a €5bn valuation led by Index Ventures
The company has seen great growth from Belgium and Spain, as well as expansion into the public sector.
In 2026, its tenth year, the company is aiming to surpass €1bn of ARR.
Read more here.
💰 M&A
💶 FUND NEWS
Spanish Samaipata has launched its third fund targeting €110m to back early-stage AI startups across Europe, with €70m already raised from investors. Read more here.
French Elaia closed its third DeepTech Seed fund at €134m to back early-stage B2B deeptech startups across Europe. Read more here.
German UVC Partners has reached a €77m first close for a new growth fund targeting €150m, as the firm moves into multi-stage investing to back breakout companies from its portfolio. Read more here.
🔎 IN OTHER NEWS
I predicted Arbio will be an upcoming European unicorn. It’s growing rapidly and doing 8-figure of annual revenue.
Denmark’s proposed wealth tax is getting a lot of push back, here.
Wayve has signed an agreement with Nissan and Uber to roll out robotaxis in Japan this year.
Google DeepMind named their new King's Cross office. Demis Hassabis announced Platform 37 - the new office and hub for AI innovation next to King’s Cross station.
🎪 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