Arlequin AI raises €28M Series A to scale Europe’s answer to Palantir

Paris-based Arlequin AI has raised a €28M Series A co-led by redalpine and OTB Ventures, with Bpifrance’s Defence Innovation Fund, Xavier Niel, Vsquared Ventures and 10x Founders joining, to scale its topological neural networks for intelligence and security work across Europe.

Everyone says Europe cannot fund its own strategic technology – and then a two-year-old Paris lab closes one of the larger French AI Series A rounds of the season, backed by a defence fund our own public bank set up for exactly this. Below, I lay out the round, the unusual pair of founders behind it, and why this cheque says more about where European capital is heading than its size suggests.

A €28M cheque for a two-year-old Paris lab

Announced on 10 September 2026, the round is co-led by Swiss firm redalpine and Amsterdam-based OTB Ventures, joined by Bpifrance’s Defence Innovation Fund and Xavier Niel, investing personally. Existing backers Vsquared Ventures and 10x Founders both increased their positions, per the company’s announcement.

The raise brings Arlequin AI’s total funding to €32.4M, fifteen months after a €4.4M seed led by Vsquared Ventures in June 2025. The new capital goes to growing the technical team, opening offices in London and Berlin, standing up an AI lab in Silicon Valley, and pushing commercial deployment across Europe and beyond.

“AI sovereignty is not only about where models are built or data is hosted. It is about having control over the technologies that increasingly underpin our most critical decisions,” said Jeremy Teboul of OTB Ventures in the announcement.

From interviewing terrorists to topological neural networks

Arlequin AI is not a typical AI founding story. CEO Hugo Micheron is a scholar of jihadism who spent years interviewing convicted terrorists and lectured at Princeton from 2020 to 2023; co-founder Antoine Jardin is a former CNRS research engineer who worked on large-scale data analysis on the Jean Zay supercomputer. They founded the company in Paris in 2024, and the team now counts roughly 50 people, including more than 35 engineers and over 15 PhDs and postdocs, according to the company.

The product is a deliberate detour around large language models. Arlequin builds topological neural networks – architectures that learn from data points and the relationships between them – to surface connections across documents, transactions, video, audio and seized devices, while keeping every finding traceable back to the underlying evidence. That traceability is the selling point for its buyers: governments and large organisations, more than 30 clients across four European countries, in both Western and Eastern Europe.

The comparison the company itself invites is Palantir – the American default for intelligence-grade data analysis – and the pitch is a European-built, European-controlled alternative.

The defence AI market behind the round

The segment Arlequin sells into is growing steadily rather than explosively. Grand View Research valued the global AI in military market at $9.3bn in 2024, forecasting a 13.0% CAGR from 2025 to 2030 to reach $19.3bn (report published December 2024). A 13% growth rate is not generative-AI froth; it is procurement-paced growth, which suits a company selling into governments on multi-year cycles.

For scale inside our own fundraising data: the same week, Paris-based Implicity raised a €35M growth round for AI cardiac monitoring, and London’s Jack and Jill closed a Series A recorded at €34.9M in our database, led by Air Street Capital. A €28M Series A puts Arlequin in the top band of European AI Series A rounds this September, and it is the largest French one in our records this month.

Sovereignty capital is getting specific

Remember when “European sovereignty” was a panel topic? What we are seeing now is that money turning into named funds with mandates. Bpifrance’s Defence Innovation Fund appearing alongside two pan-European VCs and Xavier Niel is precisely the stack the ecosystem has been asking for: public defence capital, private growth capital and a French angel with conviction, all in one round.

The pattern extends beyond Paris. The Exploration Company’s $450M Series C pulled EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund into space logistics last week; Arlequin pulls a defence fund into applied AI this week. The good news is that the sovereignty premium is no longer rhetorical – it is showing up on cap tables, at seed-to-A speed, fifteen months between rounds.

The thing to watch is the Silicon Valley AI lab. A French intelligence-tech company opening a research outpost in the US – rather than the reverse – is a small inversion of the usual traffic, and whether it stays a lab or becomes a beachhead will say a lot about where the company’s centre of gravity lands.

Europe did not need another chatbot. It needed infrastructure it controls for the decisions that matter most, built by people who understand the problem from the inside. Arlequin AI is now funded to build exactly that – let’s watch how far €28M and a room full of PhDs can take it.