Pathfounders Newsletter: Europe’s biggest stories this week

Burbidge is back: UK veteran VC launches NFG
After co-founding one of the UK's first early-stage VCs (Passion Capital) and a period working as an angel, executive and government advisor, Eileen Burbidge is back as a Solo GP and plans to mix it up with the new wave of AI-powered early-stage founders.  We conducted an exclusive in-depth interview with her for this week’s podcast.

Tandem Health raised $100m to build an AI-native operating system for European healthcare 
Stockholm’s Tandem Health raised a $100m Series B led by EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund. Its medical assistant is already used across thousands of European care organisations. Pathfounders interviewed Tandem’s UK health director on the podcast about the raise this week. 

Rome’s Exein raised $270m at a $1.7bn valuation for Physical AI cybersecurity
Rome-based Exein is building security infrastructure for internet-connected machines, from industrial systems and robots to cars, medical devices and semiconductors. 

EUCLYD landed more than €200m Series A to challenge the AI compute status quo
Eindhoven-based EUCLYD raised more than €200m to build ultra-efficient infrastructure for foundation-model inference, with Samsung, the Scaleup Europe Fund and other investors backing the round. The appointment of former ASML chief Peter Wennink as chairman added some industrial heft to it’s attempt to attack Nvidia’s hegemony.

Open Cosmos raised €300m to scale Europe’s satellite manufacturing and intelligence stack
Open Cosmos secured €300m to expand satellite manufacturing, connectivity and Earth-observation services. The round was led by European investors and included participation from ETF Partners, Lightrock, British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI), Institut Català de Finances (ICF) and Entrepreneurs First. Convex, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), Phoenix Court, home of LocalGlobe and Latitude, and Claret Capital Partners also participated.

EnduroSat raised €178m and crosses the $1bn valuation mark
Bulgarian-founded EnduroSat raised €178m and said it has moved into unicorn territory. Its pitch is to turn satellites from bespoke hardware projects into a more standardised, repeatable infrastructure product.

Google committed its biggest European investment to Finland
Google plans at least €13bn of digital infrastructure investment in Finland. The investment will cover new data centres and supporting infrastructure in Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala, alongside partnerships focused on clean energy, electricity-grid resilience, biodiversity, education and workforce development.

Report warns Europe risks AI marginalisation without a major compute build-out
A group of senior European policy and technology figures argued Europe needs vastly more datacentre capacity and frontier-AI expertise inside institutions. The report, called Transformative AI Strategy for Europe, outlines recommendations to ensure that Europe can thrive in the new AI era. It was criticised by some as being more talk, and not enough action. 

Australia considers banning smart glasses in public offices
Privacy and security concerns around always-on camera devices are spooking legislators. if Australia goes for a ban, expect European countries to take note.

Antler warns Europe’s unicorn boom is masking an early-stage funding crisis
Antler’s analysis points to sharp falls in pre-seed, seed and Series A activity alongside a much lower seed-to-Series A conversion rate. Antler‘s new report, A Tale of Two Tiers, analyses 760 European unicorn founders and 81,055 funding rounds since 2000, and finds record-breaking “rocketship” unicorns masking a collapse in early-stage funding. Seed-to-Series A conversion has fallen from 23.3% to just 9.3%, with deals at pre-seed, seed and Series A down 38%, 41% and 45% since 2021, while the number of active early-stage investors has dropped by more than 40%.

Crane Venture Partners raised $484m across four vehicles
Crane is expanding across Europe, the US and APAC while building an inception-to-seed platform with MassMutual Ventures. The four vehicles making up the total amount are Crane III at €146 million ($169 million), Crane APAC I at €129 million ($150 million), Crane US I at €86 million ($100 million), and Crane Opportunity Fund at €56 million ($65 million). They also plan to create an inception-to-Seed venture platform in partnership with MassMutual Ventures (MMV).

Ramp launches in the UK with an AI-token spend proposition
Ramp is entering Britain after buying Swedish payments infrastructure, and is pitching tools to help startups control model and token spend. 

Isometric extends its Series A to $50m as carbon markets mature
London-based Isometric is expanding from carbon removal verification towards a wider industrial-certification role. Joining previous investors are Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. (ICE), Acario Innovation (the corporate venture arm of Tokyo Gas), BY Venture Partners, Dubai Future District Fund, Earth VC, Motion Ventures, One Capital, Plug and Play, Verb Ventures, and Legora founder Max Junestrand.

Jack & Jill raises $40m for AI agents on both sides of hiring
The London startup puts agents to work for candidates and employers, attacking matching, search and application friction simultaneously. The round was led by Air Street Capital, with new investors Madrona and Antler joining. Existing backers Creandum, Ada Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, Expedite Capital and Repeat.vc also joined the round, alongside current investors Dig Ventures, Firedrop, Episode 1 and Playfair. 

Treble raises $18m to bring sound and voice into Physical AI
Reykjavik-based Treble builds acoustic simulation and synthetic audio data for products, wearables and robots. Vision has dominated Physical AI, but it turns out sound is just as important. 

EU plans tighter age restrictions for social media and AI chatbots
Proposed EU rules would restrict independent access for younger users across social platforms, games and AI chatbots.

Nomos raises €20m to connect household energy assets to electricity markets
Berlin-based Nomos links batteries, EVs and heat pumps to market signals through local installers.

Revolut faces a $3m ransom demand after a customer-data breach
Hackers threatened to sell confidential records unless the fintech paid. 

Brighteye Ventures reaches a $72m first close for Fund III
Brighteye is broadening from edtech into what it calls “HumanOS”: technology for learning, work and adaptation. Basically it invests in companies rethinking how people learn and work.

European startups increasingly look abroad for growth capital
Companies don’t leave Europe overnight, but scaling changes their capital needs and investor base. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre estimates that 3.3–4.3% of European venture-backed companies relocate fully or partially. Among comparable companies without venture capital, the figure is even lower, at 0.3–0.5%. So reports of mass departures from Europe are incorrect. The issue is when they scale. 

One in five Britons now use AI to follow the news, Ofcom says
AI is becoming a news interface, not just a writing tool. That shift concentrates power in systems that summarise, rank and repackage journalism without users necessarily visiting the original source.

A few months after launching Pathfounders, we’re adding something new.

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