Europe has finally got a benchmark-beating AI model...
Seb Johnson
October 05, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
ElevenLabs doubled its valuation to $22bn in a $300m secondary, Aleph Alpha released Kolibri (a sovereign open-weight German LLM), and Monzo’s reported acquisition fell through.
Read on.
💰 BIG ROUNDS
UK-based Nscale raised $3.36bn in pre-IPO convertible notes. Read more here.
German Reverion raised a €154.2m Series B. Planning 800 new hires at a new factory. Read more here.
Swedish Voi secured a €150m revolving credit facility. Read more here.
UK-based Metaview raised a €55.2m Series C led by Insight Partners. Read more here.
Italian Aptadir Therapeutics raised a €41.4m seed. Read more here.
UK-based Reactive Technologies secured €19m in EIB financing. Read more here.
German Restate raised a €18.4m Series A. Read more here.
Swedish IPercept raised a €15.18m Series A. Read more here.
German Everphone raised €15m. Read more here.
Italian Complaion raised €13.5m. Read more here.
French Inbolt raised €11m. Read more here.
French Rayon raised a €10m Series A. Read more here.
💰 SLIGHTLY SMALLER ROUNDS
Danish Tryp.com raised €1.9m. Built by six engineering students, now at 10m users. Read more here.
Danish Sovera Security secured €535k from EIFO for sovereign AI cybersecurity. Read more here.
UK-based Lifesaver Power raised £335k from Middleton Enterprises. Phone-charging battery rentals at venues like Wimbledon. Read more here.
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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
ElevenLabs
UK-based ElevenLabs closed a $300m employee tender offer at a $22bn valuation, doubling the $11bn mark set by its Series D in February.
Led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price, with first-time buy-ins from EQT, Goldman Sachs, GIC, OTPP, Sapphire Ventures and BDT & MSD. Returning investors include a16z, Lightspeed, ICONIQ and D.E. Shaw.
ElevenLabs now employs 800+ people, 55% enterprise revenue mix, and ElevenAgents handles 15m+ conversations a week. Wellington and T. Rowe Price typically buy into private companies a year or two pre-IPO, so this looks like a classic pre-listing register.
Read more here.
Aleph Alpha
Aleph Alpha has just released Kolibri-1, a German-English model that on benchmarks beats Qwen, Nvidia's Nemotron and Mistral Small in its class on both English and German.
It has been built end to end in Germany and trained on infrastructure in Germany and Finland, and designed around the EU AI Act and GDPR.
Sovereign AI has been such a hot topic this year across Europe. We now have an open source model that is competing with similar models from the U.S. and China.
This is amazing news for Europe.
To be clear this is not a frontier-level model, but for European companies that want a capable model they fully control, it's the strongest homegrown option yet.
Read more here
📰 SMALLER NEWS
Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned that time is running out for society to keep control of increasingly autonomous AI models. Read more here.
ElevenLabs opened offices in Amsterdam and Brussels as it expands into the two countries.
Checkout.com announced hitting $750 million of annualised revenue.
Indian payments firm Airtel Money is set to raise £529m in London's largest IPO in five years at a £5.3bn valuation. A notable win for the LSE. Read more here.
OpenAI halted the release of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal safety evaluations fell short of alignment and security standards. Read more here.
Finland's Oura delayed its planned $15bn US IPO. Read more here.
The UK Scale-Up Fund is hunting for an investment manager, with Northern Gritstone, Octopus Ventures, Railpen and Nest reportedly in the running. Read more here.
💰 M&A
Brazilian Nubank has stopped talks to acquire UK-based Monzo at £8-10bn. Read more here.
Danish Aspirity Partners acquired a majority stake in Danish Onomondo for over €100m. Read more here.
French Airbus acquired French Quarkslab to boost its cybersecurity capabilities. Read more here.
UK-based Lottie acquired UK-based CareMaster to expand its AI push into care operations. Read more here.
Indian HCLSoftware is acquiring Croatian RPA platform Robotiq.ai. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
Global VC Headline closed a $400m Fund VIII for Seed and Series A European AI startups. Backer of Mistral and Black Forest Labs. Read more here.
UK-based DIG Ventures closed a €106m Fund III for European AI and cloud infrastructure startups. Read more here.
French Sofinnova Partners closed an oversubscribed €82m MD Start IV medtech company-building fund. Read more here.
Bulgarian LAUNCHub Ventures secured a €65m first close on Fund III, targeting €75m+ for pre-Seed and Seed CEE/SEE startups. Read more here.
Finnish Fortum and Swedish Norrsken launched a €62m Evolve fund for European deep-tech energy transition startups. Read more here.
Italian Eureka! Venture launched a €20m Deep Tech Lazio fund for early-stage advanced materials, AI and Physical AI startups. 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