The week’s highlights
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Orbital Industries, $50m Series B
Guys, remember your history. The people who got rich in the gold rush weren’t the gold miners. It was the people selling the picks and shovels! Duh!
So guess what? Orbital Industries is building industrial hardware and datacentre infrastructure using - guess what - AI-driven engineering and materials discovery. The Series B was led by Plural to commercialise an AI-designed, PFAS-free cooling fluid and modular data centre systems for next-generation GPUs. And its AI engine ‘Orb’ can simulate 100,000 atoms on a single GPU and (they claim) runs 10x faster than its nearest alternative. In other words, almost every hyperscaler out there is likely to look at their solutions. And on that note, London data centre firm Pure DC secured $2.7BN for European and Middle East expansion, for instance. And HSBC put £400m into a UAE data centre.
Geordie AI, $30m Series A
Aside from sounding like the invention of someone from Newcastle, here’s why it matters: If enterprises are deploying AI agents, they need governance, monitoring and security, because as we know, AI agents are SO RELIABLE AND SECURE, NOT. Geordie has a security layer for all that, and customers are buying into it. The company reported 1,300% ARR growth in early 2026, so the numbers are there. For those of you at the back who still don’t get it, this is like investing in a CrowdStrike for the Agentic era. And to that end, RevEng.AI raised $15M because AI-written code needs verification, right? Or do you trust not to f-up? Quite.
Lucis, $20m Series A
Do you not follow 66-year-old Dr Mark Hyman (and friend of RFK), who looks 40-ish, and his ‘functional health’ schtick? Where have you been, Grandad? Preventive health is all over the place, but to keep tabs on yourself you need biomarkers and your doctor not to be an aXXhole about it. Lucis has wrapped all that up into a package which puts it on a par with Function Health in the US, and is a more 360 degree approach than Neko or Thriva (I mean, I’m not sure I care that much about my moles or my salt levels anyway). You can see our Pathfounders interview with the founder here. Lucis has YC, General Catalyst and Singular behind it.
Avrea, $4.7m pre-seed
AI coding tools are flooding software teams with generated code, but testing, validation and deployment pipelines were not built for that volume. In other words, the more code AI writes, the more valuable verification becomes. Avrea is attacking CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (or Deployment) for this AI coding era. Remember our coverage/podcast about Rezonant, which is aimed at product teams swamped by AI-code slop? Same kinda thing.
Quanscient, €10m Series A
This one has all the deeptech buzzwords: cloud-based “multiphysics” simulation (WTAF), quantum algorithms and AI-native hardware engineering. Someone give me a cold shower! But seriously, if Europe wants industrial AI, it needs companies like this.
Honourable mentions
allO: AI operating system for restaurants. Nice vertical SaaS/AI wedge. Raised $14M Series A led by Zigg Capital.
Mykor: fungi-grown construction materials. Strong climate/deeptech story, especially with claimed commercial agreements. Raised raised £4 million in a round led by Clean Growth Fund.
Caudal Energy: tidal power is interesting and underfunded, but the market risk is tricky. Raise led by Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE) and Empirical Ventures
Pacifico Biolabs: clever asset-light alternative protein thesis using idle brewery infrastructure, but foodtech remains a tougher funding category. Closed a closed a €7M ($8.1M) funding round.
Voxmind: raised a £546k Pre-Seed funding as cloud giants exit voice biometrics market as voice authentication and deepfake detection becomes a live issue in security terms.
The week in Geopolitics
(or how to sound intelligent at the next BBQ, dinner, etc)
AI became a moral-political issue at the highest religious level (well, if you’re Catholic…) after Pope Leo denounced a ‘culture of power driving the rise of AI, and said it needs to be ‘disarmed’. We can’t really see anything wrong with that. And expect a startup to appear calling itself Nehemiah…
The EU pushed for more tech sovereignty. Brussels appears to be shifting from regulating US tech to favouring European alternatives. If only they’d thought of that 20 years ago?
On that note, As European companies look for alternatives to US tech giants in the race for AI, Airbus and BMW partnered with French startup Mistral AI to develop systems ranging from flight safety and defence technology to car crash simulations.
Not to be outdone, Rachel Reeves told ministers to ‘buy British’ in four key industries as procurement started to influence UK industrial policy.
And the UK could join the €4bn EU start-up fund this year as the UK tries to edge back towards Europe. Rule Britannia!
The last word
London retook the European crown from Paris, helped by AI and deeptech. And the Dealroom data shows that AI now accounts for around 30 per cent of VC investment in Europe. Just don’t try to buy a flat in King’s Cross…
Join us for an inaugural gathering designed for people who believe the future is not something we inherit, but something we actively choose.
On the Podcast this week:
Transition Ventures transitions to a new world
Transition Ventures' second fund has closed at over $150M, bringing AUM to $300M. David Helgason, founding CEO of Unity Software (NYSE: U), spent two decades giving developers the tools to build virtual worlds. Now, with Transition, he's backing the founders building the physical one. He spoke to Pathfounders Editor Mike Butcher about its pivot towards rarified areas such as photonics and even small modular reactors.
Headlines on Pathfounders
The startup that created Devin, the world’s first AI software engineer, has more than doubled its valuation in just eight months
Lucis competes most directly with Thriva in at-home biomarker testing and Neko Health in preventive-health positioning
It's likely that the application of AI to SMEs attracted KKR
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