Two new unicorns and Lovable valued at $13bn....
Seb Johnson
July 13, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
Things are certainly not quieting down for summer just yet. This week Proxima Fusion raised the largest European fusion round ever at €411m, Europe minted two new unicorns in Kraken Technology Group and Oxylabs, and Lovable is rumoured to be raising at $13bn+.
Read on.
I've just launched ANOTHER new instagram page, this one is me talking about tech here!
💰 BIG ROUNDS
Munich-based Proxima Fusion raised €411m at a €2.4bn valuation, led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures, to build Alpha, a net-energy stellarator demonstrator paving the way for a commercial fusion power plant. Read more here.
Paris-based Skello secured a €200m growth investment to accelerate its European expansion and AI tools for frontline workforce management. Read more here.
Munich-based QuantumDiamonds raised €91m combining equity and EU Chips Act non-dilutive funding to scale its quantum-based semiconductor inspection technology. Read more here.
Lisbon-based BIZAY secured a €48.7m Series D to consolidate the global customisation market and accelerate its US operations. Read more here.
London-based Alchemab Therapeutics secured a €29.3m Series A extension from the British Business Bank to advance its AI-enabled pipeline of human-derived antibodies for hard-to-treat diseases. Read more here.
London-based Fleek raised a €22m Series B to digitise the global secondhand fashion supply chain with AI infrastructure automating inventory assessment, grading and trading at scale. Read more here.
London-based Axle Energy secured a €21m Series A to expand its energy flexibility platform turning EV chargers, batteries and heat pumps into grid-balancing capacity across the UK and internationally. Read more here.
Belgian e-peas raised €19.2m to scale its ultra-low-power energy harvesting and power management semiconductors. Read more here.
Bilbao-based Sherpa.ai raised $18m to accelerate its data-sovereign AI platform for regulated sectors. Read more here.
London-based Hive raised $15m pre-Series A to build a silicon brain that automates industrial machines without cloud dependency or large training sets. Read more here.
💰 SLIGHTLY SMALLER ROUNDS
Czech Wultra raised a €6.8m Series A to expand its post-quantum digital identity platform. Ties nicely to the broader sovereignty and post-quantum security thread. Read more here.
Swedish Nordic Forestry Automation closed a record €4.3m round for physical AI applied to forestry machinery. A very specific vertical, but forestry is a huge Nordic industry. Read more here.
Dutch Dawnguard landed €2.8m for AI-native security architecture automation. Another cybersecurity startup building for the agent era. 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
The LeCun / Extelligence Invest saga
Yann LeCun, the former Meta chief AI scientist, was reportedly launching a new VC fund called Extelligence Invest to back AI, data infrastructure, healthcare, robotics and deeptech startups.
Then the fund shut down within hours of the original article coming out as it was revealed he had exclusivity arrangements with a separate firm.
What a mess. Read more here.
Lovable
Lovable is in talks to a raise $300m at a $13.2bn valuation. This is double its valuation when it raised its $300m Series B earlier this year.
The company's last public ARR announcement put it at $500m. I've heard it's now above $600m ARR.
Either way, a fairly steep multiple, but nothing out of the ordinary given the current market.
Menlo Ventures are said to be leading the round.
Read more here.
Two new European unicorns
Two European companies hit unicorn status this week.
Kraken, based in Fareham, UK, raised a $175m Series B with backing from the NATO Innovation Fund and Rheinmetall to expand development of its uncrewed surface vessels for maritime defence. Another addition to Europe's growing defence unicorn cluster.
Oxylabs, the Vilnius-based data infrastructure company, secured €113.6m at a €3.1bn valuation, ending an 11-year bootstrapped streak. With over €305m ARR, Oxylabs becomes Lithuania's second most valuable private company.
Read more on Kraken here and Oxylabs here.
📰 SMALLER NEWS
Laura McGinnis has joined the Singular London office as a Partner.
Payhawk surpassed $100m ARR.
Thought Machine surpassed $100m in annual revenue.
Nscale secured a $900m revolving credit facility to accelerate its AI data centre build-out across the US, Europe and APAC.
💰 M&A
Swiss pharma giant Novartis agreed to acquire London-based Myricx Bio for up to $1.5bn ($1.1bn upfront plus $400m in milestones) to advance next-generation antibody-drug conjugates for oncology. Myricx had only raised $121m since 2019. Read more here.
London-based Circeus acquired UK-based Encodian, a document automation provider for Microsoft Power Platform, to add agentic AI experiences to Encodian's offerings. Read more here.
Swiss luxury watchmaking startups Efteor and Télôs Watch were acquired by Vam Investments, marking the official launch of Groupe Chaumont alongside Le Composant and Henri Robert. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
Warsaw- and London-based Expeditions closed its second fund at €197m, surpassing its revised €150m target, to back European defence tech startups. Backed by BAE Systems. Read more here.
🎪 EVENTS
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