Hugging Face gets bought for $13bn and Lovable buys its domain
Seb Johnson
September 07, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes
🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
Nvidia agreed to acquire Paris-founded Hugging Face for $12.9bn, London AI cloud Nscale landed a $45bn compute deal with Anthropic, and SoftBank is reportedly acquiring Norwegian humanoid robotics company 1X Technologies for $6bn.
Read on.
💰 BIG ROUNDS
Spanish PLD Space was awarded €158.9m by the European Space Agency. Read more here.
London-based Stability AI raised a $76m Series B with Warner and Sony investing to expand its creative AI tools for music, gaming and entertainment. Read more here.
Lausanne-based Adaptyv Bio raised a €34.35m Series A to build an automated lab for AI-driven protein design. Read more here.
UK-founded Breedr raised a €23m Series B led by Partech to expand its livestock technology platform globally. Read more here.
Eindhoven-based VitalFluid raised €17.2m to scale its plasma-activated water technology for sustainable crop protection. Read more here.
Stockholm-based eComID raised €14.6m to build the "shopping passport" for AI-powered personalised commerce. Read more here.
Brussels-based Maash raised €12.15m to take mycoprotein production to industrial scale. Read more here.
UK-based Certain Energy raised a €11.6m Series A led by the British Business Bank to commercialise its manganese-based long-duration flow batteries. Read more here.
💰 SLIGHTLY SMALLER ROUNDS
Belgian Motion landed $2m to expand humanoid robot deployments across Europe. Small round, very on-theme. Read more here.
UK-based Embedd raised a £2m pre-seed led by Seedcamp to automate chip software integration for physical AI systems. Chip sovereignty adjacent. Read more here.
UK-based Boldr raised a £3.6m pre-Series A led by Unconventional Ventures to turn home heating and cooling systems into flexible grid capacity via HVAC contractors. Read more here.
🎙️ Podcast of the Week - Patrick Murphy, Partner at Tapestry VC.
Tapestry VC backs repeat founders who are already building their second or third company. Around 60% of Europe's new unicorns in the past couple of years have come from exactly that group, and Tapestry recently closed an $80m third fund to keep backing them.
Patrick Murphy is a Partner at Tapestry VC. Seven of the roughly 70 investments he's made in his career have grown into $100m+ revenue companies, a track record few investors can match.
I am very excited to be partnering with Lovable. I have built my entire Scaling Europe site using Lovable as well as my entire backend and CRM.
It has enabled me to build the tech I required in significantly less time, allowing me to focus on making more content. Over 200,000 projects are built every day using it.
So just GET STARTED: https://lovable.link/Ll2YCAX
📰 BIG NEWS
Nvidia & Hugging Face
Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire Paris-headquartered Hugging Face for $12.9bn, folding one of the most-used open-source AI platforms into its stack.
Hugging Face has become the default hub for open-source model weights, datasets and inference, with millions of developers using it.
Hugging Face is undoubtedly an American company, however the founders our French and its largest office is in Paris. It was also one of the earliest Station F companies and its biggest ever exit to date, so overall, still a great success for the European tech ecosystem.
Read more here
Nscale
London-based AI cloud Nscale struck a $45bn deal with Anthropic to rent compute capacity over the next six years, its largest customer contract to date and one of the biggest cloud deals ever announced by a European tech company.
The deal brings Nscale's total contracted revenue to $51bn ahead of its planned $3bn US IPO. Capacity reportedly opened up after Microsoft walked away from a previous Nscale arrangement earlier this summer.
Read more here.
📰 SMALLER NEWS
The UK Scale-Up Fund manager selection has kicked off with Schroders and M&G as the two frontrunners, causing an uproar in the UK tech ecosystem. Several early-stage VCs also applied. Concern is that the frontrunners lack the tech deployment experience to run the £1bn+ pension-backed vehicle well. Read more here.
Lovable officially bought the lovable.com domain.
Revolut launched a proprietary AI unit and proclaimed the virtues of building in-house rather than relying on third parties. Read more here.
Revolut has officially surpassed 80m users and is on track to hit 100m by mid-2027.
Fireworks AI, the $17bn US AI infrastructure company, is expanding to London.
Jack & Jill, the AI recruitment startup, is now offering engineers a minimum compensation package of £360k. A striking snapshot of the London AI talent market right now.
💰 M&A
SoftBank is reportedly acquiring Norwegian humanoid robotics company 1X Technologies at a $6bn valuation. Follows SoftBank's recent Gravis Robotics investment. Read more here.
Metzingen-based NEURA Robotics, fresh off its €1.2bn raise, acquired Adlatus Robotics to give cleaning robots a new brain. Read more here.
Austrian health IT group x-tention acquired a majority stake in Innsbruck-based healthtech company syndena. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
🎪 EVENTS
Parloa has announced WAVE 2026: The AI + CX conference: October 7-8, 700+ enterprise AI and CX leaders in Berlin for hands-on workshops, a look at real-world AI roadmaps, and a peek into what's coming next. 30+ speakers, including leaders from HealthEquity, AUTO1, Langdock, and SAP, as well as world champion Bastian Schweinsteiger. Register now with code W26-ScalingEu-50 for 50% off 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.
THAT’S ALL
Thank you.
Seb