Pathfounders Newsletter: Reaction to our Phoenix Court story; Join us for our next event; And it's Recursive, not Ricursive. OK?

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Referring to one’s own writing is a little like, to paraphrase W.H. Auden, enjoying the smell of one’s own farts. With that mental image conjured, let’s start with the exclusive/scoop/insert-journalistic-term-here story that Pathfounders broke this week: influential UK VC Phoenix Court pivoted in a very significant way, with four partners departing and the whole firm shifting to a shared ownership model (including non-partner team members). The majority shareholder of the Ltd topco (not an LLP, as with most VCs) was also to become the firm’s non-profit foundation, which donates huge sums to their local area in North London. Quite the legacy play.

This was one of our best-read stories to date, especially given that it was supposed to be unveiled at a big event next week at Somerset House. 

Given you, our subscribers, are the people most important to us, let us also exclusively reveal to you what a few other VCs sent us as feedback on the story, though most declined to go off the record (VC is just SUCH an intimate industry, isn’t it?).

Some pointed out to us that both Kindred Capital and Passion Capital had done this in the past, but that “PC making the foundation the largest shareholder is definitely new,” said one.

The one person who did go on the record was Chrys Chrysanthou, General Partner at Kindred Capital, who told us Kindred always “had equal everything from day zero. Equal ownership, carry, profit share. Regardless of background, experience, track record, age etc. Equal across the board, even to new members joining. We’ve been big believers in that. We’re just 4 GPs… no associates/principals. Our CFO and even the office manager have always had carry.”

That said, he did say those people don’t have ownership in the main company: “We are structured the way we are because of who we are. We care about generosity (hence carry to founders as well) and not creating friction where there shouldn’t be.”

If the Phoenix Court structure benefits them, he said, “great for them... [but] I don’t think all firms should be the same. Different structures work for different cultures/people. We gave our ‘carry to founders’ model to other firms, and they implemented it, but it didn’t work for them. They did it as a marketing exercise. For us, it’s who we are, not marketing.”

So there you go. The VC Ships sail boldly onwards, with each pirate ship flying its own flags, and plotting their own individual courses…

Suffice it to say, it’s been a fairly busy week in tech. 

• Perhaps the biggest signal story this week was Anthropic’s reported $30Bn funding round at a $900B valuation. If it turns out to be true, Anthropic will be poised to enter trillion-dollar valuation territory (according to Bloomberg, which broke the story). I mean, the Series G, a $30 billion round led by Coatue and Singapore’s GIC, only closed three months ago! We’re not in Kansas any more, Dorothy… Turns out AI for the enterprise is the strategy Altman should have pursued after all, instead of teasing us with a p*rn version of Chat.

• London+SF startup Recursive Superintelligence raised more than $650 million from venture capital firms including GV (formerly Google Ventures), Greycroft, Nvidia and AMD, based on the idea that A.I. will soon be powerful enough to improve itself with little or no help from human developers. It is thus valued at $4 billion. The six-month-old company has offices in San Francisco and London and has fewer than 30 employees. Here’s a post from the CEO. PLEASE do not confuse it with Ricursive Intelligence in the US, which raised $335M at a $4B valuation in February. OK? Got that? Recursive not Ricursive. It seems fairly simple to us.

• DeepMind’s AI-driven drug discovery spinout Isomorphic Labs was in advanced discussions on a  $2.1Bn raise, reportedly led by existing investor Thrive Capital, and potentially joined by other existing investors, Google Ventures and Alphabet, along with new backers MGX, Temasek and CapitalG. The funding suggested Europe has a shot at owning a category-defining AI application.

• Euan Blair’s Multiverse appeared to be repositioning from apprenticeships/edtech into “AI adoption platform” to become a sort of corporate AI retraining layer for Europe. Make of that what you will. But the British upskilling platform raised a €60 million ($70 million) in new funding round at a €1.8 billion ($2.1Bn) valuation to expand across Europe, led by Schroders Capital, with participation from existing investors including General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, D1 Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Bond, and StepStone Group. 

Let’s just check that progress: Multiverse was founded in 2016 by Euan Blair and Sophie Adelman. In September 2021, Multiverse nabbed $130M at an a $875M valuation. Then in June 2022, it raised £163 million ($220 million) of investment, which valued the company at $1.7B. And now here we are in 2026 with a fresh $70 at $2.1Bn.

Somehow, the investors have not been spooked by the April 2026 story in The Times, that Multiverse faced being shut out of a new UK government training scheme as “questions mount over its performance and rapid expansion.” Multiverse was not included in the initial rollout of a new programme, despite its scale and reliance on public funding. And only 52.6 per cent of Multiverse apprentices complete their courses, well below the sector average. Do pharmacists and nurses need AI courses? Multiverse is providing them anyway. And now the company lives to fight another day. Let’s hope they can ‘cross the chasm’ into the sunlit uplands of our AI-trained future. 

• Speaking of Blairs, former LocalGlobe VC Suzanne Ashman (or Suzanne Ashman Blair, take your pick) became the new Managing Partner for the UK government’s £500 million Sovereign AI fund. That’s going to be an interesting story to watch, given its potentially political nature. I mean, ‘Blair’ might be the hint you need: Her father-in-law has significant connections to the US tech sector, for instance. Acting in her favour is the fact that Ashman is almost universally liked in the tech startup and investment industry, and was one of LocalGlobe and Latitude’s (under the Phoenix Court umbrella) most successful investors, leading the investment into Motorway, a used car marketplace which is now valued at more than $1 billion, and Open Cosmos, which builds and operates satellites. In many ways, her appointment is bang on the money for the aims of that fund, and she deserves the space to succeed on her own merits.

• SAP made a “strategic investment” of (reportedly) 60 million euros in the Berlin-based automation startup n8n, for just under a 1.3 percent stake, apparently raising the startup’s valuation to $5.2 billion, more than double the value set during the last funding round in October 2025, when n8n was valued at approximately $2.5 billion. We’re happy to be enlightened otherwise, but as far as we can tell, the move went almost completely unnoticed by the tech press. 

• Robert Vis, founder/CEO of Messagebird, tweeted  a note he’s sent to all employees on why they were  decreasing their European headcount by 20% “as we shift our employee base closer to our customers in the US.” The reasons? “75% of our revenue now comes from US-headquartered companies, including most of the Fortune 500, all of big tech, and many AI-native companies,” he wrote. “As per my recent shareholders note, Bird is profitable and growing, with roughly $250m in net revenue for 2025 and based on valuation roughly the 30th largest company of The Netherlands. However comparing to the US we would not even make the top 1000. This decision is not about whether the business is healthy. It is about where the business has moved and its future to grow and win which is simply shifting away from Europe.” He framed the cuts as strategic rather than performance-related, citing the growing difficulty of building a global tech company from Europe (sigh…) and the reduced need for some dedicated headcount because of AI. Quite the criticism.

• Defence company Destinus is reportedly considering an Amsterdam IPO, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. The firm, based in Valkenburg in Zuid-Holland, is in discussions with investors to raise approximately €200 million, based on an expected annual revenue of around €500 million. Interesting, given the defence capital boom for the likes of Helsing, Tekever and Anduril.

• UK semiconductor startup Fractile raised $220 million in Series B funding to build its specialised AI inference chips. Accel, Founders Fund, and Factorial Funds led the funding, with Gigascale, Conviction, Buckley Ventures, O1A, 8VC, and Felicis joining. What a shame that Rishi Sunak ignored Graphcore in 2024 (despite a public plea from the founders) after talking about ‘exascale’ computing in 2023. A parallel universe lost forever.

• Nscale is on a roll. The UK AI infrastructure startup backed by Nvidia, secured a fresh $790m in debt financing for the development of an AI data centre in Norway. This was the one which OpenAI said it wanted for Stargate Norway, then backtracked. The debt financing came from Dutch multinational bank ABN AMRO and others. 

• It turns out Ofcom in the UK may have some teeth after all. Elon Musk’s X platform promised to block UK access to accounts linked to banned terrorist groups under an agreement with the communications regulator to crack down on terrorist and hate content. X said it would also review suspected illegal terrorist and hate content within 48 hours and seek expert advice on how to handle such content. Maybe X needs UK ad revenue after all?

• UK AI and robotics startup Humanoid signed a ‘phased deployment and supply agreement’ with Schaeffler (a motion technology manufacturer in automotive / aerospace) to integrate humanoid robots directly into live manufacturing operations across two Schaeffler sites in Germany.  

• London-based Lansdowne Partners had a first close at €128.9 million ($150 million) for a fund to support university spinouts. 

• Lightrock launched an investment platform targeting growth-stage companies in South and Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, following the close of $500m (£374.6m) for its Accelerate7 fund to put $10m-$50m into energy, mobility and enabling technologies. The fund has already backed four firms, India’s SolarSquare and Euler, Kenya’s Sun King and Cambodia’s ATEC Global. 

• Arãya Ventures and Sie Ventures partnered to launch the Arãya Sie Fund, with a £7.5m first close to back female founders building in AI, deeptech, fintech, healthcare and sustainability. 

• Front Ventures, a Swedish investment company that specializes in the defense industry and the fintech sector (quite the combination…) opened an office in Lviv, and has previoulsy invested in Black Forest System, SkyHunter, and Aeromotors. 

• Agentic AI startup Parloa also partnered with SAP (these SAP guys are way busier than usual) to bring Parloa's AI agents and SAP Service Cloud AI agents together.

• Milan-based Pillar raised €12 million in seed funding led by Earlybird and Base10 Partners. Pillar helps construction companies replace spreadsheets and manage cash flow, invoices, subcontractors, and site operations with their platform.

• Paris-based White Circle raised $11M in seed funding from operators and investors across OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Hugging Face, Mistral, Datadog, and Sentry. Founded by engineer Denis Shilov after his universal jailbreak exposed safety flaws in major AI models, the new seed funding comes from backers such as Romain Huet, head of developer experience at OpenAI; Durk Kingma, an OpenAI cofounder now at Anthropic; Guillaume Lample, cofounder and chief scientist at Mistral; and Thomas Wolf, cofounder and chief science officer at Hugging Face. 

• OpenAI set up a new majority-owned company, OpenAI Deployment Company, after the acquisition of Tomoro, an OpenAI-aligned consulting firm whose UK clients include Tesco and Virgin Atlantic. It will have more than $4 billion in initial investment from a 19-firm partnership led by TPG, with Advent, Bain Capital and Brookfield as co-leads. They are basically copying the ‘embedded-consultant’ model that Anthropic has been using to put Claude into UK and European enterprises.

• Adfin, a London-based FinTech startup building an agentic money movement platform for businesses, raised €15.3 million ($18 million) in Series A funding led by Index Ventures, with participation from Visionaries Club and new investors Stéphane Kurgan (former COO of King) and Andrey Khusid (founder of Miro). It’s now raised €25.5 million ($30 million) in total. 

• Dessn, which lets product designers iterate on existing codebases using AI, raised $6 million in a round led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks and N49P. Unlike Lovable or Vercel’s v0, Dessn is aimed at teams with existing production codebases who want to iterate fast. 

• The UK's share of European venture capital is at an all-time high, according to Dealroom: 48% so far in 2026 (it’s only May), compared to the long-run average of 35.5%.  The driver is a run of AI mega-rounds (IsomorphicLabs — $2.1B Series B. Nscale — $2B Series C.  Wayve — $1.2B Series D. Ineffable Intelligence — $1.1B Seed. Recursive Superintelligence — $650M Seed. ElevenLabs — $500M Series D.

The FT is getting ‘down with the kids’. It thinks London’s King’s Cross is the new “Silicon Roundabout of AI”. Google’s long-delayed King’s Cross headquarters, a 330-metre “landscraper” (because apparently skyscrapers were too inefficient), is finally set to open later this year, after construction began back in 2017. Its painfully slow arrival neatly mirrors the wider King’s Cross redevelopment, a rare British planning saga that did not end in total farce.

Admittedly, the area has gone from a shorthand for urban decay to London’s new tech and AI power centre. Google DeepMind has been there for a while. OpenAI and Anthropic are moving in, and nearby are Synthesia, Wayve, Isomorphic Labs, AstraZeneca and GSK (no, those last two are not startups FYI). The basics make sense: great transport links, proximity to UCL and Cambridge, lots of (cheaper than SF!) talent, and an actually fun area to hang out in. 

The downside? Property prices are going up. Neighbouring Somers Town remains deprived. And being a base for OpenAI and Anthropic, etc., is great for them, but these are effectively corporate jobs, which will push up hiring salaries for early-stage startups. I mean, it only took 30 years, £3bn and a very long building. But well done, all concerned. Are we doing “Londonmaxxing” right?

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