EQT pips Atomico to 5bn....
Seb Johnson
May 26, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
A big week for European capital. EQT beat Atomico to manage the EU's €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund, Earlybird and AVP are teaming up on a €500m defence fund, and Spain's EOS-X Space raised $140m to fly tourists to the edge of the stratosphere.
Read on (and follow my new instagram page here)
Also, if you're interested in monetising AI products and scaling new business models, join me at Beelieve '26. Sign up here with the code "SCALE".
💰 BIG ROUNDS
Spanish EOS-X Space raised $140m to scale its space tourism business, which lifts pressurised capsules to the edge of the stratosphere using eco-friendly balloons. Read more here.
German Eterno is reportedly raising more than $100m from Verdane to scale its preventative health and longevity clinics. Read more here.
London-based Primer raised a €86.2m Series C to expand its AI payments capabilities and accelerate its growth in the US. Read more here.
Polish Viktor.com raised a $75m Series A led by Accel after hitting a $15m revenue run rate within 10 weeks of launch, building an AI coworker for Slack and Microsoft Teams that connects to more than 3,000 workplace tools. Read more here.
London-based Fresha secured €68.9m from KKR at a $1bn valuation to scale its beauty and wellness booking and business management platform globally. Read more here.
French Alice & Bob expanded its €100m Series B with an investment from NVentures, to advance fault-tolerant quantum computing built on its cat-qubit architecture. Read more here.
Milan-based Lexroom raised a €42.9m Series B led by Left Lane Capital to expand its AI legal research, drafting and analysis platform across civil-law Europe. Read more here.
Paris-based Dust raised a $40m Series B led by Sequoia to build a shared workspace where business teams and AI agents can work together across company context. Read more here.
Paris-based Pivot raised a €34.4m Series B led by Forestay Capital and Notion Capital to scale its agentic AI procurement platform, handling purchasing, invoices, payments and spend visibility in one place. Read more here.
Berlin-based bunch raised a €30.1m Series B to modernise private markets infrastructure for European fund managers and institutional investors. Read more here.
UK-founded CircuitHub raised $28m to expand its automated electronics manufacturing platform across the US and Europe, turning circuit board designs into production-ready boards in days. Read more here.
London-based Scope AI raised $20m led by Index Ventures to build an AI workflow platform for industrial inspections, targeting the testing, inspection and certification market. Read more here.
Paris-based Prelude raised a €17.2m Series A to expand its onboarding and trust infrastructure platform, helping companies verify users, reduce fraud and improve conversion. Read more here.
Semiconductors: Powering the Future of European DeepTech
By Attilio Leccisotti, Partner
Semiconductors have firmly established themselves as the flagship segment of Europe’s venture capital DeepTech landscape. Once overshadowed by software-centric investment themes, the sector now commands record levels of funding as investors recognise the vital nature of the physical infrastructure underpinning artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and quantum computing.
European startups are carving out defensible positions in specialist areas like photonics, neuromorphic architectures, and ultra-low-power edge processors where proximity to world-class research institutions in Leuven, Grenoble, and Dresden provides a durable competitive edge. The EU Chips Act, which mobilises over €43 billion in public and private investment, has further catalysed momentum by de-risking early-stage capital deployment and anchoring fabrication capacity on the continent.
What makes semiconductors uniquely compelling for DeepTech investors is the compounding demand cycle: every generational leap in computing, from cloud-scale AI training to on-device inference, requires fundamentally new chip designs. Europe’s growing ecosystem of fabless innovators, coupled with strategic public commitment, positions the region not merely as a participant in the global semiconductor race but as a credible leader in defining its next chapter.
Mishcon vantage point
We are embedded in and watching what the UK's role in this European revolution can be, particularly the technology being developed out of the golden triangle (London-Oxford-Cambridge). It's unlikely to be left behind given titans such as Arm building since the 1990s in Cambridge to Mach42, a University of Oxford spinout using machine learning to simulate semiconductor designs, which raised £4.5m in funding and was aiming to halve the analog semiconductor product development cycle by 2026.
Get a 30-minute free consultation here.
📰 BIG NEWS
EQT
This week the European Innovation Council picked EQT to manage the €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund - beating London's Atomico in the final round, with Eurazeo knocked out earlier.
At €5bn it's the largest fund of its kind in Europe, and it will write growth cheques into AI, quantum, dual-use and defence tech, clean energy, space, biotech and medtech.
The EQT are supposedly pushing to be able to invest in UK startups, something that is currently prohibited.
Read more here.
Earlybird and AVP
Berlin's Earlybird and Paris-based AVP are reportedly teaming up to raise a €500m fund dedicated to defence. If it closes, it will be one of the largest defence-focused funds in Europe.
This is a rare cross-border joint venture between two firms with roughly €2.5bn AUM each, and neither is a traditional defence investor. Earlybird skews deeptech (Isar Aerospace, N26); AVP leans software and fintech.
It’s a real sign of the times that two large Generalist firms are looking to invest in Defence.
Read more here
📰 SMALLER NEWS
ElevenLabs hired just 150 people out of 80,000 applications in Q1. That's a 0.2% success rate. It's hiring for 250 roles now.
OpenAI has launched a brand new function called Founder Experience, that will be headed up by Laura Modiano and led from London.
Monzo reported a leap in revenue and profits as it ramps up its EU expansion, with a launch in Spain on the way. Read more here.
OURA has filed to IPO in the US. Details are TBC.
German Dunia Innovations unveiled a €280m Berlin "GigaLab" to industrialise AI-driven materials discovery. Read more here.
UK robotics startup Humanoid signed a manufacturing agreement with Bosch to support production of its HMND 01 humanoid robots for the European market
Bliq.ai won approval for fully driverless road operations in Estonia, an interesting regulatory first for autonomous driving in the Baltics. Read more here.
Six European semiconductor startups formed a new lobby group to make sure startup interests are heard as Europe shapes its chip policy, countering the influence of larger incumbents.
💰 M&A
French Mistral acquired Austrian Emmi AI to strengthen its industrial AI offering for aerospace, automotive and other engineering-heavy sectors. Read more here.
Dutch bike-rental company Swapfiets acquired Berlin-based e-bike company Dance to accelerate its growth across Europe. Read more here.
Spanish Factorial acquired YepCode to drive a new generation of AI-powered HR integrations. Read more here.
Milan-based Cosmico raised €12m and acquired Flatmates to expand its Future of Work platform across Italy, Spain and the US. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
London-based Lauxera Capital Partners closed its second healthtech growth fund at €520m to back European healthtech companies across medical devices, digital health, pharma services and life science tools. Read more here.
London-based Mouro Capital secured a €343.7m first close for its third fund to back financial services and technology companies across North America, Europe and Latin America. Read more here.
Athens-based Skybound Venture Capital secured a $38m first close for its deeptech fund to back early-stage founders building across infrastructure, advanced computing and bioengineering. Read more here.
The Ispania Growth Fund, a €300m fund created by the Qatar Investment Authority and Cofides to support the green and digital transition in Spain, was launched. Read more here.
The British Business Bank committed £25m to Antler's UK Fund II, backing pre-seed founders from day zero with cheques of up to £500k. Read more here.
Málaga-based Magnific launched a €10m fund to help creative and marketing teams adopt AI-powered production workflows at scale. Read more here.
🎪 EVENTS
Chargebee is hosting their third annual conference, Beelieve '26, on 4th June, 2026. This year's theme is The Next Frontier: Scaling AI-Era Business Models. The conference brings together operators building and scaling AI-era business models, with sessions covering pricing, monetization, and the GTM systems required to make them work. Register here for free using code SCALE
👷🏾♀️ JOBS OF THE WEEK
Over 3000 people have clicked to apply to jobs on my new job board, including for some fantastic jobs:
Wordsmith AI is hiring a Product Legal Engineer + remote AEs, a Product Engineer, and a GTM Legal Engineer
Exein is hiring a Principal Software Engineer & a Linux Security Engineer
Lawhive is hiring for a Product Engineer (US Growth) + head of Product Engineering, a Brand Lead and a role in the Founder's Office.
tem, l is hiring for a VP Communications + Senior ML engineers, a Product Marketing Manager, and a Senior Staff Engineer.
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Thank you.
Seb