A big week for European sovereignty
Seb Johnson
June 29, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
A defining week for European sovereignty. Berlin's Stark closed €500m at a €3.5bn valuation, Nearfield Instruments banked $380m in the largest Dutch deeptech round ever, and Seedcamp raised $330m to back the next generation of European companies.
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💰 BIG ROUNDS
Paris-based Alan raised a €480m Series G at a €5.5bn valuation to expand internationally, pursue acquisitions and invest in AI healthcare services. Read more here.
Paris- and Boston-based Bionyra Pharma launched with a €143m Series A to advance biologics for inflammatory diseases. Read more here.
Munich-based FINN raised a €140m Series D, including nearly €100m in equity and €40m in debt, bringing its valuation above €1bn. A new German unicorn for car subscriptions. Read more here.
Dutch Leyden Labs raised €40m to advance its intranasal antibody platform targeting influenza, coronaviruses and other respiratory viruses. Read more here.
London-based Isometric raised a €34m Series A to scale its AI certification platform for industrial markets. Read more here.
Spanish-founded Prosper AI raised a $30m Series A led by a16z to expand its AI platform that automates patient operations across the healthcare journey. Read more here.
Paris-based Tsuga raised a €30m Series A to scale its AI-native observability platform for AI agent infrastructure. As enterprises deploy more agents, the observability layer is becoming its own category. Read more here.
French Tissium raised €30m and secured up to €30m in debt to roll out its tissue repair technology in the US and fund clinical trials. Read more here.
Bristol-based Astral Systems raised a €26m Series A to scale its multi-state fusion technology for medical isotope production and advance modular reactor development. Read more here.
French AlpSemi raised a €17m Series A to advance its solid-state circuit breaker technology, sitting neatly inside Europe's chip-and-power sovereignty push. Read more here.
London-based Seltz raised $12.5m Seed to build a new generation of web search infrastructure designed for AI agents. As agents become bigger consumers of search than humans, the entire stack needs rebuilding. Read more here.
💰 SLIGHTLY SMALLER ROUNDS
Danish Acodyne secured €2.5m to develop next-generation autonomous logistics aircraft. A nice fit with this week's broader European sovereignty thread. Read more here.
Serbian SuperPlane raised $2.6m to turn production operations into an AI-native workflow layer. Worth watching as Western European industrial buyers look further east for software. Read more here.
German Wakeline landed €2.1m to bring continuous learning to AI, a niche but important research-to-product direction. Read more here.
📰 BIG NEWS
Nearfield Instruments
Rotterdam-based Nearfield Instruments, the 2016 TNO spin-out that builds atomic force microscopes for chip inspection, closed a $380m Series D at a $1.6bn valuation. It's the largest ever Dutch deeptech funding round.
The round was led by Fidelity, with Temasek, Walden Catalyst, Innovation Industries, M&G Investments, Invest-NL and Qatar's QIA joining.
Nearfield's atomic force microscopes are the precision tools that verify whether what comes off ASML's lithography machines actually matches what was designed. Strategically important kit for European chip sovereignty.
Read more here.
Stark / ARX
Berlin's Stark raised a €500m Series C co-led by Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund at a valuation above €3.5bn. The round brings total funding to around €640m, with around 80% earmarked for R&D and manufacturing.
The same week, Germany's ARX Robotics and Ukraine's Roboneers announced ARX Industries, a joint venture to mass-produce the battle-tested Rys Pro unmanned ground vehicle across plants in Germany and Ukraine.
Both governments are backing the structure. A serious week for European defence manufacturing.
Seedcamp
The firm announced raising $320m this week.
The money is split with $220m for Seedcamp VII, the flagship first check fund, and $100m for the Select fund, which focuses primarily on backing portfolio winners as they scale toward Series B and beyond.
It's become one of the leading early-stage funds in Europe. Seedcamp Fund III has now returned over 13x DPI to its LPs, and Fund IV sits at over 5x net TVPI.
Some of the companies it has backed include Revolut, Wise, UiPath, Synthesia and Fluidstack.
📰 SMALLER NEWS
Dutch-founded, but now US HQ’ed, General Intuition raised $320m at a $2.3bn valuation to develop AI models that learn from video game data to power robots and autonomous systems in the real world. Read more here.
The UK Government is investing £60m into in two university-led AI research labs. Read more here.
Scottish startup Wordsmith AI took out billboards in Boston to thank/apologise to the city for the 50k scots that descended on the city. See more here.
Judith Dada, GP at Visionaries, is joining Langdock as Co-CEO.
💰 M&A
US retail giant Walmart acquired French connected-TV adtech Vibe.co to expand its CTV advertising capabilities for SMB and mid-market advertisers. Read more here. A reportedly $1bn+ exit.
French health-tech Withings acquired Rennes-based medtech company Biosency to expand its remote patient monitoring capabilities. Read more here.
Polish LiveKid acquired Latin American Aldea to expand its early childhood education platform into Latin America. Read more here.
German House of Gaia Group acquired Codio Impact to expand its sustainability impact platform. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
The Hague-based Main Capital Partners closed €5.25bn across two funds to back profitable software companies across Europe, North America and the UK. The largest enterprise software fund close in Europe this year. Read more here.
Helsinki-based CapMan Infra announced the first close of its Nordic Infrastructure III fund, targeting €750m to invest in infrastructure across the Nordics. Read more here.
Denmark's export credit agency and national promotional bank EIFO committed €200m to the Scaleup Europe Fund, a meaningful follow-on to EQT's mandate to manage that fund earlier this year. Read more here.
The British Business Bank committed €104m to support 10 first-time UK venture capital fund managers through its Investor Pathways Capital initiative. Read more here.
Stockholm-based Norrsken Launcher closed its second fund at €80m to back European impact startups with a hands-on, operational investment model. Read more here.
Romania-based Nucleo Ventures launched a €34m fund to back startups and SMEs across Central and Eastern Europe. Read more here.
🎪 EVENTS
I’m going to be running a Fintech/AI event with the team at Dust in London. It’s early but there’s a placeholder Luma here.
Tickets are available for Wave, the leading tech conference in Turin. Confirmed speakers include Dario Amodei, Jony Ive, Charlie Songhurst, and many more. Get 10% off using discount code SCALINGEUROPE-WAVE10 at checkout here.
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Thank you.
Seb