🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
This newsletter has just hit 10k readers! So a BIG thank you to all of you for signing up and reading - it means the world to me.
Also thank you to those who completed my poll last week - Monday was the most popular response by far so I will continue to send it then (except, like this week, where Monday is a holiday).
Big news this week included two new unicorns, one Chip startup that’s about to be a unicorn, and the UK government trying to get Anthropic to list in London.
Read on.
For more of my stuff:
🇪🇺 BIG NEWS FROM ME
I launched The Scaling Europe Top 50 - a definitive list of the 50 fastest growing companies in Europe, based on 2025 revenue data.
Check out the site here to nominate a company. I will then be making A LOT of noise/content about the companies that make it.
The report and list are sponsored by J.P. Morgan and Nebius.
💰 BIG ROUNDS
Belgium-based Keyrock raised a Series C to scale its crypto market infrastructure and services, reaching unicorn status at a $1.1bn valuation. Read more here.
Swiss Kandou AI raised a $225m Series A to scale high-speed chip interconnect technology tackling AI data bottlenecks. Read more here.
UK startup 9fin raised a $170m Series C to expand its AI-powered debt markets platform, reaching unicorn status at a $1.3bn valuation. Read more here.
Irish drone company Manna raised a $50m Series B. Read more here.
UK-based Sona raised a $45m Series B to build AI software for frontline workforce operations and expand in the US. Read more here.
German Midas raised a $50m Series A to expand its tokenised investment infrastructure and build onchain liquidity for instant redemptions. Read more here.
French Standing Ovation raised a €30m Series B to scale precision fermentation dairy proteins. Read more here.
French Kestra raised a €21m Series A to scale its open-source orchestration platform. Read more here.
French Generare raised a €20m Series A to build a molecular data platform for drug discovery using microbial genomes. Read more here.
💸 SMALLER BUT INTERESTING ROUNDS
French Omniscient, a decision intelligence platform for boards and senior executives, raised a $4.1m pre-seed. Read more here.
Italian Wearable Robotics raised a €5m Series A for its wearable robotics. Read more here.
Finnish Sensmet raised €1.5m to help secure the supply of critical and strategically important raw materials. Read more here.
🇪🇺 THE SCALING EUROPE SHOW
This week I published interviews with:
The Scaling Europe show is sponsored by SurrealDB, Omni and Venture Comet LTD and presented by Deel - check them out here.
📰 BIG NEWS
Legora
Last week CEO Max Junestrand announced that the company had surpassed $100m ARR.
It took the company less than 18 months to surpass $100m, faster than almost any other SaaS company in history, including Harvey.
Full chart here:
Mistral
Last week it raised $830m in debt to build Nvidia-powered AI centres, with the first facility being built near Paris which will start operations before the end of June.
It will house 13,800 of Nvidia’s top-end GB300 AI chips.
Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO, said:
"Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe,”
The company 20x’ed revenue in the last year, surpassed $400m of ARR and is on track to surpass $1bn this year.
Read more here.
Fractile
UK Chip startup Fractile is supposedly raising $200m to take on Nvidia at a $1bn valuation.
Its chips rely on a different kind of memory technology to Nvidia’s GPUs called static random access memory (SRAM), which is to improve the speed and cost of AI inference.
The raise follows another big UK Chip raise - OLIX which raised $220m at a $1bn valuation earlier this year.
The UK has now produced two Chip unicorns in 2026, which is amazing to see.
Read more here.
Anthropic
The UK Government is trying to tempt Anthropic to expand its presence in the UK, from expanding its London office all the way to a potential dual listing.
The $380bn American AI lab is in a fight with the US defence department after the company refused to budge on “red lines” about use of its technology in warfighting.
The plans will be put to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei when he visits the UK in late May as part of a trip to meet European customers and policymakers.
Read more here
📰 SMALLER NEWS
Monzo is shutting down its US expansion, making 50 people redundant. Read more here.
The founders of YC are coming to Stockholm for a special event - check the event page out here.
Dutch AI infrastructure company Nebius announced that it's building one of Europe’s largest data centres.
Palantir is offering 18-year olds in the UK a £60k internship to skip university.
Revolut is targeting a Peruvian banking licence, read more here.
Databricks is going to invest over £600m to expand its UK presence. Read more here.
Matt Clifford has stepped down from Entrepreneurs First after 15 years.
💰 M&A
Uber bought Berlin-based Blacklane to expand its premium chauffeur and Uber Elite offerings globally. Read more here.
Swiss Starmind got acquired by US company Capacity to integrate its AI knowledge discovery technology into a broader support automation platform. Read more here.
Swedish Readly got acquired by France-based Cafeyn to scale its European press platform. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
UK-based Empirical Ventures secured £10m from the British Business Bank to back science-led deeptech startups. Read more here.
UK-based British Growth Partnership Fund I reached a £200m first close backed by pension funds to invest in venture capital. Read more here.
UK government-backed Bootstrap4F reached a £130m first close for its Women Backing Women fund to back female-led and mixed-gender fund managers investing in female-led startups. Read more here.
🎪 EVENTS
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.
If you’ve got this far you should DEFINITELY subscribe to my daily newsletter here.
Thank you.
Seb