Two IPOs and ElevenLabs valued at $22bn....
Seb Johnson
July 06, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
🌟 QUICK INTRO
What a week.
Two European tech companies IPO’d in the US. Quantum Systems raised $1.2bn at an $8bn valuation, and ElevenLabs is set to be valued at $22bn. The market is HOT and the liquidity window is well and truly OPEN.
Read on.
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💰 BIG ROUNDS
Munich-based Quantum Systems raised a $1.2bn Series D at an $8bn valuation. The largest private defence-tech financing in European history. Read more here.
Vilnius-based InSoil secured €120m to expand lending to agricultural SMEs adopting regenerative farming practices. Read more here.
Barcelona-based Openchip secured €115m from Spain's SETT to strengthen Europe's semiconductor capabilities and accelerate the design of high-performance, energy-efficient chips for AI and HPC. Government-anchored chip sovereignty investment. Read more here.
Prague-based EquiLibre Technologies closed a Series A at a $500m+ valuation led by Creandum (reportedly their largest investment to date), applying reinforcement-learning AI to financial markets. Read more here.
Berlin-based Theo raised a $25m Series A to scale its AI platform for automating real estate operations. Read more here.
London-based Gaussion raised €24.5m to scale its battery intelligence technology for applications ranging from EVs and drones to data centres. Read more here.
Spanish Telum Therapeutics raised a €18m Series A to advance treatments for pneumonia. Read more here.
Trondheim-based Alva Industries raised €16m to expand manufacturing, advance its next-generation electric motor technology and support international growth. Read more here.
Oslo-based Six Robotics raised a €12m Seed to advance its autonomy software platform for unmanned systems, with Norwegian defence partners on board. Read more here.
London-based geoSurge raised a €10m Seed to help brands understand how they're represented inside AI-generated outputs and expand its Corpus Engineering platform. Read more here.
💰 SLIGHTLY SMALLER ROUNDS
Estonian Vegvisir raised funding to connect allied unmanned systems through a unified command platform. Very on-theme for the week's defence spend. Read more here.
Belgian Visiblie raised €500k for AI search visibility, another entrant in the growing "AI SEO" category. Read more here.
UK university-founded BidScript crossed $1m in total pre-seed funding for its AI tender platform. Read more here.
Sponsored by Dust
Dust is a multiplayer AI platform that lets companies build teams of AI agents that work alongside people, plugged into their tools and data. Rather than handing each department its own separate AI product, Dust acts as a shared layer across the organisation, so agents can be mentioned in a conversation, collaborate with each other, and take real actions in company systems, all within the permissions leadership sets.
Most teams still use AI privately. Everyone has an assistant, everyone gets a personal productivity bump, and all the useful context stays locked inside individual chat windows. That's genuinely helpful, but it's a ceiling. One person learns a better way to work and the company carries on exactly as before.
The real shift is multiplayer. It happens when agents join the same workflows as people and other agents: handing work over, reusing what another team has already figured out, and contributing to a shared system instead of starting from zero every time. Take lead qualification. The single-player version is a rep spending 30 minutes hunting for information and updating the CRM, each doing it slightly differently. The multiplayer version is an agent that gathers the data, applies the company's own criteria, updates the CRM and routes the lead, in two minutes, as a shared workflow that improves with use. The test is simple: if you removed AI tomorrow and important work stopped functioning, the organisation itself has genuinely changed.
For European enterprises, the harder questions come next. Who can build agents, what they can access, which actions need approval. Done well, governance isn't a brake; it's what lets bottom-up experimentation scale safely. And the operating knowledge that accumulates should belong to the company, not stay trapped inside a model provider. That, ultimately, is what sovereignty over your own intelligence looks like.
Check it out here.
📰 BIG NEWS
ElevenLabs
One of Europe's most exciting startups is reportedly in early talks for a tender offer that could value the London-based voice AI company at $22bn, roughly double its February valuation of $11bn.
The company disclosed in May that ARR had passed $500m. The deal is expected to close by September.
Read more here.
Bending Spoons
Italian app studio Bending Spoons (Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, AOL, Eventbrite) went public on the Nasdaq on 1 July under the ticker BSP, pricing its IPO above range at $29 per share and raising $1.68bn at an $18.4bn valuation.
The market response was strong. Shares opened at $31 and closed the first day at $40.50, a 39.7% gain on the IPO price.
A landmark European tech IPO and a great result for the team.
Read more here.
IQM
Espoo-based IQM Quantum Computers became the first European quantum computing company to list on a major US exchange, going public on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on 2 July under the ticker IQMX at a $1.9bn valuation. The listing was completed via a business combination with Real Asset Acquisition Corp, a SPAC.
IQM has €337m in pro forma cash to fund its next phase of growth, reported €31m in 2025 revenue and claims to have sold 23 quantum computers worldwide (more than any other quantum manufacturer). It's also getting a dual listing on Nasdaq Helsinki.
Read more here.
📰 SMALLER NEWS
STATION F companies raised a record breaking €1.3bn in the first half of 2026.
The Top 10 most valuable startups in Europe are now worth over $200bn. Read more here.
Wayve launched an $85m employee tender offer at $8.5Bn valuation. Read more here.
Andy Burnham, the man who looks likely to become the UK’s next Prime Minister, has suggested he cancel contracts with Palantir.
France is looking to ban the UK from taking part in the 5bn EU Scale Up fund. Read more here.
💰 M&A
French pharma Ipsen agreed to acquire Swiss biotech Memo Therapeutics for up to €700m. Read more here.
US-listed Datadog acquired Adaptive ML, the New York- and Paris-headquartered frontier AI startup building the first Reinforcement Learning Operations (RLOps) platform. The Paris research team joins Datadog AI Research. Read more here.
Bremen-based The Exploration Company acquired European Astrotech to expand its space capabilities. Read more here.
UK-based Saltroad raised £15m and acquired AI platform Ogma to scale speech therapy for children. Read more here
💶 FUND NEWS
The UK government announced £1.6bn for the UK Defence Innovation Fund through 2030, alongside a £580m investment in Dstl's Porton Down research site, including a new lab for biological threats. Read more here.
Prague-based Orbit Capital closed its Growth Debt Fund II at €107m to provide venture debt to post-Series A technology companies across CEE and Europe. Read more here.
Milan-based P101 integrated PranaVentures and launched the €100m Prana101 fund to back Pre-Seed and Seed startups across Italy and Europe. Read more here.
London-based Tapestry VC launched a €70m Fund III with the British Business Bank as co-anchor to back repeat founders across Europe and North America. Nothing was among their early bets. Read more here.
UK-based Osney Capital closed its oversubscribed €69m debut fund to back early-stage UK cybersecurity startups. Read more here.
Copenhagen-based Climentum Capital reached a €60m first close of its second fund to back European climate HardTech startups developing industrial and energy technologies. Read more here.
London-based Ruya Ventures closed its first €43m fund to back DeepTech companies from day one, supporting them from lab to commercial scale. Read more here.
🎪 EVENTS
I’m going to be running a Fintech/AI event with the team at Dust in London this week, check it out 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