🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
It was a big week last week. Klarna IPO’ed, Starling Bank and ElevenLabs kicked off secondaries, over $3bn was raised by European startups, and much more.
Last week on The Scaling Europe Show I spoke to
Alan Chang, Cofounder and CEO at Fuse Energy
Richard Hollingsworth, Cofounder and CEO at Fyxer AI
Andreas Klinger, Co-initiator at EU Inc
Sam Tidswell-Norrish, Founder at OPUS
Sandeep Bakshi, Head of Investments (Europe) at Prosus Ventures
I’d be very grateful if you could check out my referral scheme (see below). Share this newsletter and get a free Scaling Europe hat (+ my undying gratitude).
💰 BIG ROUNDS
French Mistral officially announced its €1.7bn funding round led by ASML, at a valuation of €11.7bn. Great piece in the FT here.
Swedish EcoDataCenter, which serves cloud and AI applications, secured €600 million in debt financing from Deutsche Bank Private Credit and Infrastructure. Read more here.
UK-based CuspAI announced a $100m Series A co-led by US fund New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Temasek.
Finnish DataCrunch raised €55m (debt and equity) for its AI computing infrastructure. The round was led by byFounders, Skaala, pension fund provider Varma and Finnish sovereign wealth fund Tes. Read more here.
French Scintil Photonics raised a €50m Series B co-led by Yotta Capital Partners and NGP Capital, with participation from Nvidia. See more here.
Finnish Space-tech ReOrbit raised a €45 million Series A led by Varma, Elo, Icebreaker.vc, Expansion VC, 10x Founders, and Inventure. It also, interestingly, included €9m from Finnish crowdfunders. Read more here.
UK-based Fyxer AI raised a $30m Series B from Madrona after hitting $17m ARR eight months after hitting $1m ARR. Good piece in the Times here.
German Proxima Fusion has raised another €15m, extending its Series A to €145m. The additional cash came from CDP Venture Capital, the European Innovation Council Fund (EICF) and hedge fund Brevan Howard. The original €130m was led by Cherry Ventures and Balderton Capital. Read more here.
💸 SMALLER BUT INTERESTING ROUNDS
Berlin-based AI companion app Born raised a $15m Series A funding from Accel, Tencent and Laton Ventures. See more here.
Spanish startup Altan is building software that runs itself and just raised €2.5m. See more here.
Swedish startup Saltfish is building the video engagement layer for websites and software products and just raised $0.7m. See more here.
📰 STARTUP NEWS
Klarna
The Swedish fintech finally IPO’ed. Here are the key details:
Shares popped >15% upon opening but have now settled down to $42, which is +5% above the initial $40 and indicates a valuation of $16bn.
The company raised $1.4bn and early investors cashed out a lot.
Founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski owns $1bn worth of shares but hasn’t sold any yet.
Sequoia is one of the big winners, owning 23% of the company. See more here.
ElevenLabs
The AI startup confirmed the rumours surrounding an employee secondary sale and revealed it was at a valuation of $6.6bn.
Founder Mati Staniszewski also revealed that the company is now doing $200m ARR.
Check out the 20VC episode where he discussed it here.
Revolut
Two bits of news relating to Europe’s most valuable private company (and 8th most valuable private company in the world):
It’s expanding into the UAE and has secured initial regulatory approval from the UAE Central Bank to offer services (such as card issuance, customer accounts, and transfers) there. See more here.
The company is going big on AI. It’s building several AI voice products (such as AI-powered call centre agents, AI-driven outbound sales agents and voice assistants) as well as AI personal assistants, chatbots and copilots. See more here.
Starling
The UK fintech has reached out to Morgan Stanley and Rothschild to oversee a secondary sale which would see early investors cashing out a portion of their holdings at a valuation of £4bn.
The company was last valued at £2.5bn in 2022 when it raised £130m.
The fintech has got over 4 million customers in the UK and is currently looking into an acquisition of a US bank to enable it to expand there.
Read more here.
Bending Spoons / Vimeo
The large Italian conglomerate which has acquired over 50 startups (including WeTransfer, komoot and Evernote) announced that it’s acquiring Vimeo for $1.38bn cash.
Vimeo is a video hosting and sharing company that was spun out from a larger organisation and publicly listed in 2021, however since then it has lost over 90% of its market value.
Read more here.
Black Forest Labs
The German AI image generation startup has signed a multi-year contract with Meta.
The $140m deal with enable the social media firm to use the startup’s AI image generation tools.
Read more here.
EU-INC
The EU-INC initiative is urging the EU to adopt a unified legal framework that allows startups to launch, raise capital, attract talent and scale seamlessly across European borders.
There’s currently a public consultation happening, where you can make sure your voice is heard. Check it out here, or for more context go here.
💶 FUND NEWS
Speedinvest has raised €30m for its first continuation fund, with another €30m fund to be closed in the next few weeks. This will allow it to keep hold of its late stage companies for longer while also providing a route for LPs to cash out.
German early-stage VC Vireo Ventures, which invests in companies working to electrify industries away from fossil fuels, closed its first fund at €50m.
📰 IN OTHER NEWS
A report from Antler highlighted that there have been 14 “Rocketships” in Europe - companies founded in, or after, 2020 that have become unicorns. It also highlighted that 90% of European unicorn founders since 2022 are technical, compared to 80% in the US.
I’ve launched a paid version of this newsletter that will include extra articles that go in a lot more depth on specific issues. Sign up here: https://scaling-europe.beehiiv.com/upgrade
Seb