*Get Pathfounders journalism via WhatsApp*
Join our next events:
LONDON:
The Sovereign AI Race Is On: What are the opportunities for founders and investors?
July 16, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Speakers include:
• James Wise, Partner at Balderton Capital
• Ben Peters, Co-Founder and CEO of Cogna
• Vaysh Kewada, Co-Founder and CEO of Salience Labs
• Carlos Munoz Ferrandis - Co-founder & COO at Alinia AI
BERLIN:
Is infrastructure the hot new space for startups?
Monday, June 29, 6:00 PM
Oliver Lichtenstein, CEO of Beagle Systems, will unpack how autonomous drone technology is moving from defence-adjacent curiosity to mission-critical infrastructure
[email protected] to partner on your events
The week in review
Perhaps the biggest news this week was that UK start-up CuspAI was seeking a $400mn funding round from investors, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's family office. Cusp AI (which I wrote about in 2024) has an AI platform to design new materials “to tackle global sustainability and clean energy challenges.” It now has a valuation of $2.6 billion.
As a result, a few VCs who invested in its first few rounds have been somewhat preening themselves publicly about their involvement. Tommy Stadlen, Giant Co-Founder, posted on LinkedIn that they’d “helped seed Cusp just two years ago. Giant Ventures has backed Cusp six times now in all.” Northzone also joined in, trumpeting its investment in a blog post on its site.
But documents seen by Pathfounders suggest that Giant is one of the smaller institutional investors. Others might be feeling a lot happier than Giant and Northzone, but are keeping quiet about it. We are reliably informed, for instance, that Hoxton Ventures led the Pre-Seed round in Cusp AI and was the second-largest shareholder after Temasek (which led the Series A with NEA). Indeed, Lightspeed and LocalGlobe put in almost double the amount as Northzone at pre-Seed, but we haven’t seen anyone from their camps shouting about it much (unless we missed a post somewhere?!) Feel free to enlighten us otherwise. All that said, co-founder Chad Edwards is very happy with Giant, saying he was “forever indebted”.
If you’d like to send us more VC “inside baseball” chats email [email protected] or our sekret squirrel anonymous form.
Listen to the Pope?
Pathfounders had a fantastic opinion piece from Labour MP Dan Aldridge MP: “The Pope’s warning on AI cannot be left unanswered by politicians”. His argument was that the Pope has articulated the moral principles that should guide the age of AI. Now, democratically elected politicians must lead the debate that the technology industry has, thus far, dominated. Well worth your time.
The voyage of the Odyssey
London is continuing its run of ‘London Maxxing’ (pulease…) hotness. Odyssey secured a $310m round, backed by Amazon alongside Nvidia and AMD. Natural Capital led the Series B at a $1.45B valuation, with Amazon, GV (Google Ventures), AMD Ventures, EQT Ventures, IQT, and others participating. The company is building world models: AI systems that learn enough about physics, causality, dynamics, and behaviour to simulate interactive environments in real time, thus becoming a new foundation-model layer for robotics, science, healthcare, education, and gaming. And Amazon is not only investing. AWS is becoming Odyssey's preferred cloud provider, and Odyssey is collaborating with Amazon's Annapurna Labs to optimise its models for Trainium. Bully for them! COE and co-founder Oliver Cameron is an interesting chap. He was at Udacity, as VP of Engineering, Product, and Content, and built online programs in autonomous vehicles, robotics, and deep learning. He then co-founded Voyage in 2017, a self-driving car company which put autonomous taxi services inside retirement communities! So smart. Voyage raised $52 million before being acquired by Cruise, General Motors’ autonomous vehicle division, in 2021.
It’s all going Agentic
Some former Palantir employees (from a while back, admittedly) raised $60M for their London-based AI enterprise startup Conduct. Index, ICONIQ and SAP-backed startup building an AI operating layer for SAP, Oracle and Salesforce systems. The Series A investment in Conduct was co-led by new investors Index Ventures and Iconiq, with a strategic investment from SAP, with participation from existing investors Creandum, Lucid Capital and Booom. Conduct has raised around $72m in total, following a $12m seed round last year. CEO Jan Philipp Haas was previously Head of Pre-Sales, Germany, Austria & Switzerland for Palantir, but he left in July 2023, so it’s not like he’s bounced straight out of Alex Karp’s lap.
Blossoming in the battlefield
French ‘battlefield AI’ software startup Comand AI raised €32m from Blossom Capital and Saab. It says it has battlefield software tested with operational military units. Is this Blossom’s first foray into Defence tech? No, but it’s a rare one, as far as we can tell. Blossom is also in Frankenburg Technologies, which, in May 2025, raised €4M at a €150M valuation to develop air defence missiles. Missiles! Blossom and Shellona each contributed €2M to the startup.
Yes, more Agentic
NeuralTrust closed $20M to expand its AI agent security platform. The Barcelona company raised what it calls Europe’s largest cybersecurity seed to secure and govern enterprise AI agents. The round was led by Alstin Capital, with participation from VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banc Sabadell, EA Ventures Plug and Play Fund, and Finaves, the venture capital fund of IESE Business School. Enterprises are expanding AI agents so need all kinds of controls around visibility, governance, and security.
Our pick of the key stories from this week
Headlines on Pathfounders
AVP and Earlybird target €500m for European defence growth fund
While European countries are committing early-stage funds to defence tech, startups are still looking to US investors to scale, risking the loss of tech, IP, and talent from Europe.
Prism tool shows developers the carbon impact of AI as they code
With carbon emissions still a controversial aspect of AI, can a new tool help mitigate the effects?
VCs, founders and 'role models' launch initiative to ignite new culture of ambition in UK
The move joins another new initiative in this arena. Will it work this time?
Look out Neko — Aus-based Everlab raises $45.5M to expand its healthtech platform to the UK
UK consumers are about to be pitched a full-blow preventative health startup which is also aiming its services at executive teams in companies.
Causa Prima raises $10M to let AI agents negotiate B2B payments
The platform connects both parties on the same network.
Anthropic export ban ignites debate amongst European founders and investors
Should Europe get behind Mistral, or let the market decide? The European tech ecosystem is talking about nothing else this weekend.
What else?
• Send us pitches, column ideas, etc. via [email protected]
• Subscribe to Pathfounders on YouTube, Spotify, Apple iTunes
• Check out our new selection of tech startup and investment events.
• Get Pathfounders news via WhatsApp (main WA feed) or via the Public channel.
• To partner with Pathfounders, email us on [email protected]
• Take our short, three-question reader survey here.
That’s all, folks
Follow Pathfounders: LinkedIn, X (Formerly Twitter), BlueSky, Telegram, Facebook, Instagram, Luma (events), RSS Feed for all posts, Podcast: Spotify , YouTube, TikTok, and Contact Pathfounders Anonymously. We are not on Substack, but we publish headlines from here.
