Mistral, Miro, EU Inc and much more...
Seb Johnson
September 14, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
Bending Spoons is buying Miro for €1.7bn, Mistral raised a Samsung-led €3bn Series D at a €21bn valuation (the largest equity fundraise ever by a European tech company), and Europe's tech leaders published an open letter warning EU lawmakers they have 100 days to save EU Inc.
Read on.
💰 BIG ROUNDS
Paris-based Mistral raised a €3bn Series D led by Samsung at a €21bn valuation, with the Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity co-leading. The largest equity fundraise ever by a European tech company. Read more here.
UK-founded Fluidstack raised $1.5bn led by Jane Street at an $18bn valuation to scale its AI data centre operations, including facilities housing Google's AI chips. Read more here.
German The Exploration Company raised a €387m Series C to accelerate development of its reusable Nyx capsule and Storm rocket engine. Read more here.
Valencia-based iPronics raised a €107.6m Series B with Nvidia backing to scale optical networking for AI data centres. Read more here.
French Positive (formerly Sarbacane) completed a €106m refinancing to fund acquisitions. Read more here.
Berlin-based Limetax raised €36m (€6m pre-Seed equity plus €30m credit facility) to build an AI-powered group of German tax and accounting firms. Read more here.
Paris-based Implicity raised €35m to accelerate international expansion and AI capabilities for cardiac remote monitoring. Read more here.
Paris-based Arlequin AI raised a €28m Series A to develop its topological neural network architecture for analysing complex datasets. Read more here.
London-based CloudNC raised a €17.2m Series B extension led by Nimble Ventures to scale its AI-powered precision machining software. Read more here.
Luxembourg-based Fundcraft raised a €12m growth round to expand digital fund operations and AI capabilities across Europe. Read more here.
Belgian Octave.energy raised a €10m Series A to scale its smart battery storage and energy management solutions across Europe. Profitable. Read more here.
UK-based Bolter, built by Improbable, raised $10m to let non-technical staff describe business tasks in plain language for AI agents to handle. Read more here.
💰 SLIGHTLY SMALLER ROUNDS
Sheffield-based SCI Semiconductor raised £5m led by PXN Ventures to design chips that embed memory safety directly into computer architecture. Chip sovereignty adjacent. Read more here.
UK-based Anemo Labs raised £700k to give AI a sense of smell. Unusual category, worth watching. Read more here.
Ukrainian Robutler raised $400k led by ZAS Ventures to build what it calls the "YouTube of software." Read more here.
🎙️ Podcast of the Week - Zeynep Yavuz-Willson, Partner at General Catalyst
GC has built one of the most active investment theses in Europe around artificial intelligence transforming massive service industries like law, property management, accounting, and insurance.
Within the team Zeynep herself has built a remarkable portfolio backing companies like Legora and Dwelly
We sat down to discuss GC's thesis, her own thinking in AI, and where value is going to end up being captured.
World Wide Technology is a $20bn technology solutions provider, privately held, with a focus on AI. We have been an NVIDIA global partner for over a decade, we delivered the first AI-powered national data centre for a sovereign AI platform, and we helped build four of the world's top twenty supercomputers to serve multiple NeoClouds and Hyperscalers globally.
We help organisations get from use case identification to business outcome at scale, through AI Studio: a single secure platform combining strategic visioning, governance and practical guidance to accelerate AI adoption with measurable results. Top tier partner to the likes of NVIDIA, VAST, HPE, Supermicro, AMD and Intel, ensures WWT are genuinely vendor agnostic across a 200-plus partner ecosystem.
Now we are working to bridge the gap between the companies building AI in Europe and the infrastructure and enterprise demand waiting for them. Find out more at wwt.com
📰 BIG NEWS
Bending Spoons / Miro
Bending Spoons entered into an agreement to acquire Miro for €1.7bn in an all-cash transaction ($1.36bn enterprise value, ~$1.79bn equity value including net cash).
Miro reportedly has around $600m in ARR, nearly 90% from business and enterprise customers. Certain Miro shareholders have agreed to reinvest $295m of their proceeds into newly issued Bending Spoons equity. Deal expected to close in Q4 2026.
This is Bending Spoons' second mega-deal in as many weeks after the $1.3bn Airtable acquisition.
Read more here.
EU-INC
European tech founders and investors published an open letter urging EU lawmakers not to dilute the proposed EU Inc legal entity, warning they have 100 days to save the reform.
The signatories argue that watering down key provisions like a single central registry and standardised employee stock option rules would render the framework ineffective. EU Inc was meant to let European startups incorporate under a single pan-European entity rather than juggling 27 different national regimes.
If the reform lands intact, it's the single biggest structural fix European founders have asked for in a decade.
Read more here.
📰 SMALLER NEWS
Antler research argues Europe's unicorn boom is masking an early-stage funding crisis, with pre-Seed and Seed cheque sizes lagging as capital concentrates at the top. Read more here.
An Anthropic safety researcher warned that there is a >10% chance AI could "kill all humans" within the next decade. Read more here.
Ineffable Intelligence revealed six new co-founders, taking the team to seven: all DeepMind or Google Brain alumni. Read more here.
Matt Clifford stepped down as ARIA chair after taking full-time role at Anthropic as managing director for international affairs. MPs had flagged a conflict of interest overseeing taxpayer-funded AI research while working for an AI lab. Read more here.
The chief robotics officer of Mistral is supposedly raising $200 million for his own world model, here.
💰 M&A
French sustainability platform Greenly acquired Swedish climate data startup Normative for 700m SEK. Read more here.
Milan-based Lexroom made its first acquisitions, buying Paris-based Query Juriste and Sofia-based Praven Intelekt to expand into French legal research and Central and Eastern Europe. Read more here.
Alleroed-based T1A Group acquired Leiden-based Flex IT to create a €150m European circular IT platform. Read more here.
UK-based Pri0r1ty Intelligence acquired Pirkx to add an SME employee wellbeing and benefits platform. Read more here.
Italian Biorsaf acquired Bologna-based Cooki to create Italy's first end-to-end food compliance and data platform. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
The UK government launched the £150m Northern Scaleup Fund to back university spinouts and scaling businesses across northern England, announced alongside Chancellor Healey's unicorn-doubling pledge. Read more here.
London-based Claret Capital Partners closed Fund IV at €575m, exceeding its €500m target, to back European tech, life sciences and impact companies with growth debt. Read more here.
UK-based Molten Ventures closed a €203m first close on its Growth Fund with the British Business Bank as cornerstone, targeting Space, AI, FinTech, Quantum and DeepTech. Read more here.
UK-based Clean Growth Fund added institutional backing as Fund II reached €94.5m towards its €174m target for UK ClimateTech startups. Read more here.
Ghent-based WAD Capital reached a €67.5m first close on its debut fund following a €25m EIF investment, matching experienced managers with small and mid-sized European companies facing succession challenges. Read more here.
Finnish Nordic Foodtech VC added a €30m EIF commitment to Fund II, taking it towards €80m, to back early-stage AgriTech. Read more here.
🎪 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