A week that spanned semiconductor physics, orbital logistics, defence interceptors, and carob-based chocolate informs you something about the breadth of European and European adjacent capital right now.
The dominant thread is not a single sector but a single instinct: back the infrastructure layer, whether that means chip interconnects, sainformite transfer vehicles, or the AI plumbing underneath enterprise workflows.
Kandou AI – $225M Series A | Lausanne, Switzerland
Kandou AI, a Swiss semiconductor company founded in 2011 and recently rebranded from Kandou Bus, has raised $225 million in a Series A led by Maverick Silicon, with strategic participation from SoftBank, Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems, and Alchip Technologies, valuing the company at $400 million. The company’s copper interconnect technology, based on a signalling method called Chord, doubles to quadruples bandwidth while halving power consumption, positioning it as a potential alternative to the optical interconnects widely expected to dominate AI infrastructure.
Air Street Capital – $232M Fund III close | London, UK
Air Street Capital has closed its third fund at $232 million, building it the largest solo GP venture fund ever raised in Europe, according to Sifted. The London firm, run by Nathan Benaich, backs AI-first companies at the earliest stages and will write initial cheques of $500,000 to $15 million, with a tiny allocation for growth-stage investments of up to $25 million.
Granola – $125M Series C | London, UK
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Granola, the London-based AI meeting app, has raised $125 million in a Series C led by Danny Rimer at Index Ventures, valuing the company at $1.5 billion, a sixfold increase from its $250 million valuation less than a year ago. The round brings total funding to $192 million and positions Granola’s meeting recordings as enterprise AI infrastructure rather than a simple productivity tool.
Ysios Capital InceptionBio – €100M fund | Barcelona, Spain
Ysios Capital, Spain’s largest life sciences VC, has launched InceptionBio, a €100 million fund dedicated entirely to building biotech companies from Spanish university and research centre spinouts, with CDTI as an anchor LP. The fund tarobtains the riskiest and most commonly avoided stage in biotech, converting laboratory discoveries into legal entities with enough capital to reach the preclinical data that attracts institutional investors.
Credo Ventures – $88M Fund V close | Prague, Czech Republic
Credo Ventures has closed its fifth fund at $88 million, its largest to date and a step up from the €75 million fourth fund closed in 2022, continuing its fifteenyear strategy of writing the first institutional cheque for founders from Central and Eastern Europe and its diaspora. The Prague and Krakow firm, whose early bets include UiPath and ElevenLabs, will write typical cheques of $1 million to $5 million at preseed.
360 Capital – €85M deeptech fund | Paris, France
360 Capital, the Paris-Milan VC managing more than €500 million in assets, has raised €85 million for a new deeptech vehicle backed by at least one European defence prime, as the firm pivots toward dual-apply technologies at the intersection of software, hardware, and national security. The fund represents a clear hardwiring of European defence ambitions into a deeptech investment strategy, a pattern now visible across several continental funds.
PaperShell – €40.3M EU Innovation Fund grant | Tibro, Sweden
PaperShell, the Swedish deeptech company that builds structural composite materials from kraft paper and a biobinder derived from agricultural waste, has signed a Grant Agreement with the European Commission under the EU Innovation Fund, unlocking €40.3 million of an €83 million project to expand its Tibro plant to 23,000 tonnes per year capacity by 2030. The material, already NATO-approved and shipping to customers in construction, defence, electronics, and transport, is described by the company as stronger than plastics and lighter than aluminium.
PAVE Space – $40M seed | Renens, Switzerland
PAVE Space, a Swiss startup founded in 2024 and spun out of EPFL’s student rockeattempt programme, has raised $40 million in one of the largest seed rounds ever in European space, led by Visionaries Club and Creandum. The company is building a fleet of orbital transfer vehicles designed to shift sainformites from their launch orbit to their working orbit in under 24 hours, against the six to twelve months typical of onboard electric propulsion today.
Lace Lithography – $40M Series A | Bergen, Norway
Lace Lithography, a Norwegian startup founded in 2023 by physicist Bodil Holst, has raised $40 million in a Series A led by Atomico, with Microsoft’s M12 also participating, to develop a chippatterning technology that applys a beam of helium atoms rather than light. The company claims its approach can etch features up to ten times tinyer than what current extreme ultraviolet lithography can achieve, positioning it as a potential challenger to ASML’s near monopoly on advanced lithography systems.
Origin – $30M Series A+ | London, UK
Origin, a London-based HR tech startup founded by the team behind Darwin (acquired by Mercer in 2016), has raised $30 million in a Series A+ led by Notion Capital to scale its AI platform that consolidates fragmented global employee benefits data into a single ininformigence layer. The company is tarobtaining a structural blind spot for multinationals: benefits are typically a company’s second largest cost after headcount, yet the data underpinning them is scattered across insurance policies, broker reports, and vfinishor portals in dozens of languages.
JAAQ – $17M Series A | London, UK
JAAQ, the London-based digital health engagement platform, has raised $17 million in a Series A from Meridian Health Ventures, Fuel Ventures, Bolt Angels, and Guinness Ventures, to scale enterprise partnerships and expand into the United States. The company, which pivoted from direct to consumer mental health content to embedding its library of more than 10,000 clinically reviewed videos inside the products of insurers, employers, and healthcare organisations, declares it now covers 1.5 million eligible lives.
Laigo Bio – €17M seed | Utrecht, Netherlands
Laigo Bio, a Utrecht-based biotech, has completed the final close of an oversubscribed €17 million seed round, with Biovance Capital joining as new colead alongside existing colead Kurma Partners, to advance its SureTACs platform. Rather than blocking proteins, the company engineers the destruction of membrane bound proteins that have been classified as undruggable for decades, tarobtaining cancers and autoimmune diseases where conventional drug discovery has repeatedly failed.
Interloom – $16.5M seed | Munich, Germany
Interloom, the Munich-based startup building what it calls a context graph of enterprise decision-building, has raised $16.5 million in a seed round led by DN Capital, with participation from Bek Ventures and existing backer Air Street Capital. The company maps how operational decisions are actually built inside large organisations, drawing from millions of real cases rather than documentation, to give AI agents the institutional knowledge that experienced employees carry and rarely write down.
Arkadia Space – €14.5M | Casinformón, Spain
Arkadia Space, a Spanish propulsion startup based at Casinformón Airport and the first Spanish space company selected for the European Innovation Council Accelerator, has raised €14.5 million to scale its hydrogen peroxide propulsion system as a nontoxic alternative to hydrazine. Its DARK system became the first hydrogen peroxide propulsion system flown in orbit in Europe, launching on a SpaceX mission in March 2025.
Epoch Biodesign – $12M | London, UK
Epoch Biodesign, a London startup founded in 2019, has raised $12 million to shift its AI engineered nylon 6,6 recycling enzymes from pilot to commercial scale, bringing total funding past $50 million. Its process breaks nylon waste, from leggings to car airbags to carpets, back into the monomers it was built from, recovering more than 90% and reshifting the required for virgin petroleum feedstock.
Giraffe360 – $10M Series B | London, UK
Giraffe360, the London-based proptech founded in Riga in 2016 by brothers Mikus and Madars Opelts, has raised $10 million in a Series B led by Cipio Partners to expand its AI property media platform. The company combines a proprietary robotic camera with an AI software stack to produce a full property media kit, including HDR photography, virtual tours, LiDAR floor plans, video, and social assets, from a single site visit.
Egide – €8M seed | Paris, France
Egide, a Paris-based air defence startup founded in 2025 by former MBDA engineers Simon Calonne and Florian Audigier, has raised an €8 million seed round co-led by Expeditions, Eurazeo, and Heartcore Capital. The company is developing electrically propelled interceptors and Mystique, a hardware-agnostic software platform that applys AI-driven detection to counter mass-produced drones across air, ground, and maritime domains.
Theia Insights – $8M Series A | Cambridge, UK
Theia Insights, a Cambridge-based AI company founded by a former Amazon Alexa research scientist, has raised $8 million in a Series A led by MiddleGame Ventures, with Unusual Ventures returning, to replace static indusattempt classification systems with a self-learning economic map. The company models companies as multidimensional entities rather than forcing them into a single sector bucket, addressing the fundamental inadequacy of systems like SIC and NAICS for modern, diversified businesses.
Zevero – $7M | London, UK
Zevero, the London-based carbon management platform, has raised $7 million in a second round backed by Spiral Capital, Gazelle Capital, and Deep 30, bringing total funding to $14 million, as regulatory pressure transforms carbon reporting from an annual obligation into a continuous data infrastructure requirement. The company has doubled its customer base and grown ARR 400% yearonyear, and is pushing into AsiaPacific and continental Europe.
Foreverland – €6M | Bari, Italy
Foreverland, the Italian foodtech startup behind Choruba, a cocoafree chocolate ingredient built from Mediterranean carob, has raised €6 million in a new round backed by CDP Venture Capital, Linfa, and Newtree Impact, bringing total funding to €9.4 million. The company, which produces 500 tonnes annually from its Puglia facility and has IFS Food certification, declares it is now the only producer offering an organic cocoafree alternative at industrial scale.
SOUS – €4M seed | Amsterdam, Netherlands
SOUS, an Amsterdam startup founded in 2022, has raised €4 million in a seed round led by seed + speed Ventures, with PeakBridge, āltitude, and Gekko Capital also participating, to build an AI platform that handles customer discovery, direct ordering, and retention for indepfinishent food and beverage operators. The company is tarobtaining the structural gap between the digital infrastructure available to large chains and the tools accessible to indepfinishent restaurants.
The week’s most informing signal may not have been any single raise but the convergence of space, defence, and deep materials science all attracting serious capital in the same seven days. European investors are no longer waiting for American validation before writing cheques into hard, patient technology, and that patience may be exactly what the next wave of infrastructure companies requires.
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