European startup news, funding rounds and events
Fundraising intelligence, founder interviews and the events that actually move the ecosystem.
Agenda – next 30 days
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IFA 2026: the twenty startups who pitched, and the one who won
A company that prints implantable human tissue won a pitch competition at a consumer electronics fair. Cellbricks Therapeutics took the IFA Pitch Battle 2026 on the…
Ben Costantini
Composites Are About High Performance. So Are Events.
A startup event strategy needs the same discipline. Spend enough time around (deep-tech) startups and you start noticing a familiar pattern. The same founders appear at…
The most digital companies in the world are opening coffee shops
The AI industry runs on GPUs, APIs and Discord servers. So why is an AI insurance startup valued at $4 billion signing a lease for a…
Ben CostantiniThe Selected podcast
Tips & advice
The empty startup area: why tradeshows fail at startup sales
Picture this. A strategy director at a major exhibition calls with six weeks to go before the show. The brand new startup area has sold exactly…
Ben Costantini
Why events are lying about their metrics
This week I read about a hackathon claiming 6,000 attendees over a single weekend. The venues hosting it can’t accommodate more than 1,000 people. Nobody in…
Ben Costantini
The hidden costs of events: Why founders get the math wrong
Most startup founders treat events like they’re going travelling: count the days, block the calendar, done. But event tickets don’t come cheap, and the actual affair…
Ben CostantiniSpotlight
Tekever
AI-powered autonomous drones and surveillance as a service
Latest
Primo raises €6.9M to send AI agents into corporate IT
Paris-based Primo raises €6.9M co-led by returning backers Headline and Global Founders Capital to deploy autonomous AI agents that run corporate IT end to end.
Biolevate raises €30M Series A for life sciences AI
Biolevate's €30M Series A, co-led by RAISE France and Orange Ventures, puts Dataiku alumni behind evidence-grade AI agents for pharma and opens a Boston office.
Verda raises $189M Series B to scale Europe’s full-stack AI cloud
Helsinki's Verda raises a $189M Series B led by Emergence Capital at a $1B+ valuation, becoming Europe's newest unicorn and scaling its full-stack AI cloud from renewable-powered Nordic data centres.
Spott raises $21M Series A for AI-native recruitment software
Balderton Capital leads a $21M Series A in Spott, the Leuven startup whose AI-native ATS and CRM already runs hundreds of recruitment agencies, with revenue up more than tenfold since…
Metris Energy raises $5M seed for AI-run solar asset management
London's Metris Energy has raised a $5M seed led by Berlin's PT1 to put more than 10,000 solar plants under AI management, with Octopus Ventures and AENU returning.
Latest funding
| Company | Round | Lead | Sector | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tekever Defence AI · Portugal | Series D+ | UC Investments, Baillie Gifford (co-leads) | Defence AI | €498M |
| mika Accounting Automation · Germany | Seed | Smedvig Ventures | Accounting Automation | €6M |
| Relaisanté Health · France | Series A | Ternel, Aquiti, Elaia, AFI Ventures | Health | €6M |
| Lightspring Deep tech · France | Seed | Atlantic, OVNI Capital | Deep tech | €3.1M |
| Morphotonics Deep tech · Netherlands | Series B | – | Deep tech | €40M |
| Zeliq SaaS · France | Seed | The Moon Venture | SaaS | €7M |
Browse the ecosystem
Call for startups
Ultra Long Duration Energy Storage Project Development Studies (Relaunch) 2026
Innovate UK and UKRI relaunched this grant competition to fund project development studies for ultra long duration electrochemical energy storage – technology built to…
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