Mistral signs big customer, Stark to be valued at 2.5bn....
Seb Johnson
June 01, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
London has reclaimed Europe's top tech spot from Paris, Mistral signed Airbus and BMW as flagship industrial customers, London AI lab Inherent emerged from stealth with $50m to build "AI-native science”, and Stark is raising again.
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
German Focused Energy raised $240m to advance its laser-based fusion energy programme. Read more here.
Dublin-based Fonoa raised a €94.4m Series C and acquired PwC's indirect tax platform Edge to build an AI-powered tax operating system for global businesses. Read more here.
UK-based IQE plc raised £81m, with a US firm taking a significant stake in the compound semiconductor maker. Read more here.
Italian WeRoad raised a €49m Series C led by Airbnb to expand its community-driven travel platform into the US market. Read more here.
London-based Orbital Industries raised a €43m Series B led by Plural to build AI-designed industrial hardware and data centre infrastructure for next-generation AI compute — including a PFAS-free cooling fluid and modular data centre systems for GPUs. Picks-and-shovels play. Read more here.
London-based Geordie AI raised a €25m Series A to help enterprises secure and govern AI agents at scale — reportedly with 1,300% ARR growth in early 2026. Read more here.
Austrian REPS raised $23.6m to turn road traffic into electricity through its road-based energy harvesting system. Read more here.
Belgian D-CRBN raised a €17.5m Series A to recycle industrial CO₂ emissions into circular carbon molecules using electrified plasma technology. Read more here.
French Lucis raised a €17.1m Series A led by Singular, with backing from YC and General Catalyst, to scale its AI-powered preventive health platform across Europe. Read more here.
London-based RevEng.AI raised a $15m Series A to help organisations verify and secure AI-generated software at the binary level. As enterprises drown in AI-written code, verification is becoming its own category. Read more here.
French MokN raised a €12.9m Series A - GV's first-ever investment in a French startup - to help enterprises recover compromised credentials before they can be exploited. Read more here.
💰 SLIGHTLY SMALLER ROUNDS
UK-based Mykor raised £4m led by the Clean Growth Fund to commercialise its fungi-grown construction materials, with commercial agreements already in hand. A genuinely interesting climate/deeptech story.
London-based Voxmind raised a £546k pre-seed for voice biometrics - a category most of the cloud giants have just exited, leaving a real gap as voice authentication and deepfake detection become live security issues. Read more here.
Life Sciences: The Golden Triangle Tightens Its Grip on European Innovation
By Patrick Farrant, Partner & Lizzie Wilson, Partner
Life sciences investment is surging back into the UK's Golden Triangle. In Q1 2026, innovators raised £753.7m across 136 deals, with London, Oxford and Cambridge capturing 72% of that value. The corridor now commands over 60% of all UK life sciences venture capital a concentration of scientific capital unmatched anywhere in Europe.
The fundamentals are compounding. AstraZeneca has recommitted to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. Larry Ellison's investment in the Ellison Institute of Technology has reinforced Oxford's global standing in translational science. And landmark exits are happening at pace – Sanofi's acquisition of ViceBio, alongside Oxford Ionics and OrganOx in 2025 are proving the ecosystem can generate returns at scale. With 72% of approved medications now originating from biotech companies and Big Pharma facing a projected $67bn patent cliff by 2029, acquisition pressure on Golden Triangle pipelines will only intensify.
What makes this cluster uniquely durable is the flywheel between world-class research institutions, deep pools of specialist capital, and maturing physical infrastructure. With 3.7 million square feet of science space under construction across the Triangle, the ecosystem is scaling to match the ambition.
Mishcon vantage point
Our 2025 Fundraising Report confirms the pattern: deal flow remains concentrated across London, Cambridge and Oxford, with healthtech ranking as our second most active sector and university spinouts featuring prominently. We are advising at the heart of this ecosystem from Relation Therapeutics' strategic collaboration with Novartis, Arecor’s royatly monetisation trasnction with Ligand, through to Optibrium's drug discovery financing. Strategically located within the Golden Triangle, we are well positioned to continue contributing to the innovation economy and to support founders commercialising the next wave of breakthrough science.
Get a 30-minute free consultation here.
📰 BIG NEWS
London
This week Dealroom released its latest Tech Ecosystem Index, where it ranks tech hubs based on its growth, scale and density.
Last year Paris took the number one position and now London has taken it back.
The UK capital’s return to the top spot is driven by record AI investment - $7bn in 2025, as well asThe being home to 138 unicorns, including Wayve, Granola, OLIX and ElevenLabs.
This year the UK has continued to fly and has attracted 48% of all European Venture capital.
Amazing news for London, and a great report as always from the Dealroom team: https://lnkd.in/eZkFEa27
Stark
The German Drone startup is raising €300m at a €2.5bn valuation just months after raising at a €1bn valuation.
It became a unicorn earlier this year and now the FT has reported that it is raising an additional €300m at a €2.5bn valuation.
Helsing is raising $1bn+ at an $18bn valuation while Quantum Systems is also raising again.
German Defence is VERY HOT right now.
Read more here.
Mistral
Mistral had a big week. It signed flagship deals with Airbus and BMW, launched Vibe (its new product line), and announced a major data centre push.
The Airbus deal is a five-year partnership covering defence, space and helicopter programmes. Airbus gets access to Mistral's full product range and researchers, with priority on onboard AI for aircraft and spacecraft, automated technical documentation, AI-driven engineering simulations, and edge AI for flight safety.
The BMW deal is more specific: Mistral will train custom models on BMW's archive of crash simulation data to build automotive-grade AI for vehicle development.
The deals come as European companies grow increasingly uneasy about depending on US AI providers, given data sovereignty and the legal reach of US law over data on US infrastructure.
Read more here.
📰 SMALLER NEWS
London-based data centre firm Pure DC secured $2.7bn in financing to accelerate AI infrastructure growth across Europe and the Middle East. Read more here.
Peec AI hit $10m ARR and is expanding to the US.
Moneybox hit £19bn AUM. Read more here.
Nearly a third of European founders are considering moving their headquarters to the United States. Read more here.
💰 M&A
Finnish Grundium acquired Danish Visiopharm to build an end-to-end AI precision pathology platform combining digital imaging and AI-driven diagnostics. Read more here.
Hamburg-based InfiniteRoots acquired Berlin-based Bosque Foods as it looks to scale industrial mycelium production. Read more here.
UK payments fintech TrueLayer acquired Dutch fintech In3 to expand into consumer credit and offer both debit and credit payment options at checkout. Read more here.
Dutch AI marketing company Aizy acquired fellow Dutch performance marketing software company Uptmz to create an integrated advertising platform across Google, Microsoft and Meta. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
London-based Transition Ventures closed a €128m second fund to back early-stage companies building at the intersection of AI and the physical world. Read more here.
Oxford-based Longwall Venture Partners secured a £50m commitment from the British Business Bank for its new £100m deeptech fund focused on science and engineering startups. Read more here.
Copenhagen-based byFounders closed an oversubscribed third fund at more than €130m to back the next generation of founders building globally from the Nordics. Read more here.
Berlin-based Marvelous and the Joachim Herz Foundation launched a €20m deeptech fund to help technologies move from lab to industrial scale across advanced materials, waste valorisation and robotics. Read more here.
Gary Lineker's London-based media and production company Goalhanger launched Goalhanger Ventures to back creator-led media businesses across video, podcasts and social platforms. 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 3,700 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