🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
Swedish legal AI scale-up Legora is reportedly in talks at a $10bn+ valuation, Lovable raised $400m at a $13.3bn valuation, and London has a new AI lab in stealth.
Read on.
Check out the Scaling Europe instagram page here where we just hit 12k!
💰 BIG ROUNDS
Stockholm-based Lovable raised a $400m Series C led by Menlo Ventures at a $13.3bn valuation. The Scaleup Europe Fund co-led as its second-ever investment. Read more here.
Cambridge-based Cambridge Aerospace raised a $300m Series C at a $3.4bn valuation led by DFJ Growth to accelerate manufacturing of its low-cost interceptor missile systems. Read more here.
Bristol-based Vertical Aerospace secured €86.6m in financing commitments to advance its electric air taxi aircraft towards certification and commercialisation. Read more here.
Lancaster University spin-out Mindgard raised €26m Series A led by Album VC. Read more here.
Stockholm-based Quartr raised €15.6m to expand its AI-ready public company IR data platform. Read more here.
💰 SLIGHTLY SMALLER ROUNDS
London-based Edgify raised $9m Series A+ led by Rank Ventures to scale its edge AI platform in physical retail.
Danish Palette raised a €3m pre-seed to build an OS for AI-native teams. Read more here.
Swedish Millow raised €2m to expand its mycelium protein across Nordic foodservice. Nice climate/food angle. Read more here.
🎙️ Podcast of the Week - Jan Oberhauser, Founder & CEO at n8n
n8n recently doubled its valuation after raising a strategic investment from SAP. It's now one of Europe’s, and one of Germany's, most valuable AI companies, valued at €5.2 billion.
I sat down with Jan for nearly an hour where we discussed the growth of the company and where it's come from, spending years building before seeing any traction and why he refused to incorporate in America.
I am very excited to be partnering with Lovable. I have built my entire Scaling Europe site using Lovable as well as my entire backend and CRM.
It has enabled me to build the tech I required in significantly less time, allowing me to focus on making more content. Over 200,000 projects are built every day using it.
So just GET STARTED: https://lovable.link/Ll2YCAX
📰 BIG NEWS
Legora
Swedish legal AI startup Legora is reportedly in early talks with investors to raise fresh capital at a $10bn+ valuation, nearly doubling its $5.6bn March 2026 mark in just four months.
ARR grew 50% quarter-on-quarter to $150m in Q2 2026 while its customer base grew 25% to 1,500 law firms and in-house legal teams, and headcount has grown from 40 to 700 with plans to hit 1,500 by year-end. New offices in Madrid, Milan and Paris opening in Q3.
Read more here.
Another London frontier AI lab, targeting $500m
Jack Parker-Holder, the Google DeepMind researcher who led the company's world-models development and co-led Genie 3, is founding a new London frontier AI lab and reportedly targeting a $500m raise. Six other DeepMind researchers are involved.
Index Ventures is reportedly in talks to lead the round.
The lab joins Ineffable Intelligence, Recursive Superintelligence and Callosum in a growing cluster of London frontier AI labs. A useful counter-signal to last week's Hassabis story.
Read more here.
📰 SMALLER NEWS
Revolut got its French banking licence. Read more here.
Uber expanded its robotaxi partnerships across Europe, deepening its autonomous rollout following the Wayve TfL licences last week. Read more here.
Nick Blair, son of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, is reportedly in talks with investors to raise around $200m for London-based defence tech startup Pyra
The UK government pledged £130m to the automotive industry for zero-emission technologies.
The British state is reportedly struggling with "agentic flooding": citizens using AI agents to file complaints, tax appeals and tribunal claims at scale, driving a 55% year-on-year rise in employment tribunal backlogs.
💰 M&A
German robotics company NEURA Robotics acquired Bosch Rexroth's ACTIVE Shuttle. Read more here.
Duolingo acquired London-based animation studio Animade. Read more here.
Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly's Eldridge acquired an ownership stake in Slovak agentic AI firm Sudolabs to accelerate its US expansion. Read more here.
Copenhagen-based Again was acquired by San Diego-based Genomatica to combine AI-driven discovery with industrial biomanufacturing. Read more here.
German pet-food company VAFO Group acquired Berlin's Pets Deli. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
Accel raised an enlarged $800m early-stage fund for European and Israeli startups as part of a $3.5bn global fund raise. Backer of Monzo and Lovable. Read more here.
Exponent closed a €750m H&MV Engineering continuation fund at a €1.4bn valuation. Read more here.
UK deeptech and life sciences VC Northern Gritstone is opening a San Francisco office to attract US investors to its portfolio of Northern spin-outs. £382m raised so far.
The UK government backed a £100m expansion of the British Business Bank's Investor Pathways Capital Initiative, funding up to 10 new regional VC funds outside London.
🎪 EVENTS
Parloa has announced WAVE 2026: The AI + CX conference: October 7-8, 700+ enterprise AI and CX leaders in Berlin for hands-on workshops, a look at real-world AI roadmaps, and a peek into what's coming next. 30+ speakers, including leaders from HealthEquity, AUTO1, Langdock, and SAP, as well as world champion Bastian Schweinsteiger. Register now with code W26-ScalingEu-50 for 50% off here.
Tickets are available for Wave, the leading tech conference in Turin. Confirmed speakers include Dario Amodei, Jony Ive, Charlie Songhurst, and many more. Get 10% off using discount code SCALINGEUROPE-WAVE10 at checkout here.
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Thank you.
Seb