Europe has got a new fastest-growing company EVER.
Seb Johnson
October 12, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
🌟 QUICK INTRO
Hello and welcome back.
A huge week for European AI with new flagship models from Mistral, Aleph Alpha and Black Forest Labs. SAP also agreed to acquire Belgian TechWolf in Belgium's largest ever VC-backed exit, Isomorphic Labs is reportedly in early talks at a $40-50bn valuation, and Germany's microagi says it has hit $100m ARR six months after launch.
Read on.
💰 BIG ROUNDS
French Spiko raised a $90m Series B led by NEA. Read more here.
UK-based Universal Quantum raised a €89m Series A. UK's largest ever quantum Series A. Read more here.
Danish Breye Therapeutics raised a €67.5m Series A. Read more here.
Swedish Yazen raised €50m. Read more here.
Swedish Trustly secured $40m in equity commitments. Read more here.
Dutch Hadrian raised $40m led by ForgePoint for autonomous AI pentesting. Read more here.
UK-based Noah raised a $38m Seed. Read more here.
European Namespace raised a €37m Series B. Read more here.
French Vates raised a €30m Series B led by Iris. Read more here.
UK-based TrueLayer raised $27m led by CDP Venture Capital. Read more here.
French WhiteLab Genomics raised a €23.2m Series B. Read more here.
French VoltR raised €22m. Read more here.
💰 SLIGHTLY SMALLER ROUNDS
🎙️ Podcast of the Week - Laura Connell - Managing Partner at Atomico
Laura invests in companies at the growth stage where she has backed in some of Europe's most exciting late-stage companies, including The Exploration Company, Corti and PhysicsX.
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
A huge week for European AI
Three major European AI labs shipped flagship models within a week of each other.
Mistral released Mistral Large 4 ("Le Chonk") on 6 October: a 1 trillion-parameter MoE (49bn active) multimodal model trained from scratch on 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips in Mistral's own European data centres. Open weights expected around 27 October. Mistral claims it is the best open-weights model from the US or Europe on aggregated benchmarks.
Aleph Alpha released Kolibri on 3 October: a 78bn-parameter MoE (3.46bn active) sovereign English-German model, trained on German and Finnish infrastructure and published open-weight on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0.
Black Forest Labs launched FLUX 3 Image on 1-2 October, with multi-step region-precise editing, 4K output and JSON bounding-box controls. Open weights promised in the coming weeks.
market-leading models all released within a week of each other, all coming from Europe. NICE
Microagi
German physical AI startup microagi says it has gone from zero to $100m ARR in six months since launching Shift, per a post from CEO Bercan Kilic. The company raised a $55m Hummingbird-led seed in July (reportedly Germany's largest ever seed).
microagi runs on data: it records workers using cameras and sensor-equipped gloves, then uses the footage to teach robotics models to perform specific jobs on specific customer factory floors. Its Atlas platform then fine-tunes models on each customer's operations.
See the original post here.
Isomorphic Labs
The AI drug discovery company is reportedly in early talks to raise money at a valuation of $40bn to $50bn per Bloomberg, less than five months after closing its $2.1bn Series B at $8bn.
The move follows an expanded Biohub/DOE/NIH open datasets effort, with Isomorphic contributing alongside DeepMind and Meta ($300m combined). Hassabis now expects first clinical trials by the end of 2026.
However the main thing that has changed, and the thing that is driving the increased valuation, according to insiders I've spoken to, is that Demis is now pretty much full-time working on the company.
Read more here.
📰 SMALLER NEWS
European startups raised €15.8bn in September, nearly five times August's total. Read more here.
The UK and Germany launched an industrial tech corridor to accelerate AI and deeptech growth. Read more here.
The UK launched a Scaleup Pathway linking London deeptech with West Midlands manufacturing. Read more here.
Delivery Hero alumni have built 150 startups worth €7.5bn, making it Europe's biggest founder factory. Read more here.
ARX Robotics and Roboneers are stepping up their UGV collaboration for Ukraine's battlefield. Read more here.
Bolter, the new UK AI startup that spun out of Improbable, has just released a tool so you can connect and speak to all your AI agents in one place. Check it out here.
Civo announced plans to build 40 edge data centres in the UK to power sovereign AI compute. Read more here.
Dust, the Sequoia Capital-backed AI startup, has just launched in London. Read more here. The team are also hosting a CFO breakfast with Spendesk. Sign up here.
💰 M&A
Belgian TechWolf was bought by SAP in what was referred to as the largest VC exit ever for any Belgian company ever. I've spoken to insiders who say this was a solid exit for all investors and the team. Read more here.
German Personio acquired German Circula to bring payroll, expenses and benefits under one roof. Read more here.
US Sovos acquired French Flowie for autonomous AI finance agents. Read more here.
UK-based Kortext acquired UK-based StudyStash to expand its adaptive learning platform. Read more here.
💶 FUND NEWS
Dutch Forbion raised €2.3bn across two funds with backing from Eli Lilly, PGGM and KfW Capital. Read more here.
Endeavor Catalyst closed a $320m Fund V, with Europe now its fastest-growing market. Read more here.
Dutch Graduate Ventures closed a €125m second seed fund for university spinouts. Read more here.
Danish PSV Tech closed Fund II at €56m for Nordic pre-product-market-fit startups. Read more here.
UK-based Nevermind VC launched with a €23.6m first close for dual-use deeptech startups. Read more here.
The British Business Bank committed €11m to Fuel Ventures for early-stage founders. Read more here.
THAT’S ALL
Thank you.
Seb