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The drinks are on EQT
The big fund news of the week was that EQT had been chosen by the European Commission to manage the new Scaleup Europe Fund, a planned €5bn vehicle designed to back European technology scaleups from Series B onwards. Some €2.5bn is already committed from the EIC and major LPs, including Novo Holdings, Santander/Mouro Capital and APG.
Essentially, this is Europe trying to put its money where its mouth is regarding the “scaleup gap”.
The fund will target companies in digital technology, industrial systems and life sciences, with the aim of helping Europe’s strongest startups become global leaders without being forced to sell to US or Asian buyers, list overseas, or shift their centre of gravity out of Europe.
EQT CEO Per Franzén framed it as a critical moment for Europe: the continent can create strong early-stage tech companies, but still struggles to scale them into $10bn+ global champions. EQT says Europe has lost significant tech value over the past decade because too many promising companies have exited or scaled abroad (he means the US, of course).
The firm ended up beating out the likes of the UK’s Atomico and Vitruvian Partners, and France’s Eurazeo, in a closely watched selection process.
But the more interesting thing around it was the rather cute statements by various funds after they’d realised they’d lost the bid.
For instance, Niklas Zennström, CEO of Atomico, (Founder of Skype, etc) posted on LinkedIn, congratulating EQT on being selected as custodian. Nothing out of the ordinary there, and all in the realm of good sportsmanship.
But what all of Europe’s VCs are chattering about isn’t the wonderful potential of the Scaleup Fund, so much as all the millions in management fees on a €5bn fund they’d just missed out. Cry into your martinis, people!
The week’s highlights
Europe’s capital grows
• Lansdowne Partners launched a fund aimed at the UK’s university research base and startup ecosystem. It hit a first close of $150m (£112m) and aims at a $200m (£149m) cap. LPs include British Business Bank, Aviva Investors, Lloyds Banking Group, and Lansdowne Investors.
• British Business Bank made a £25m cornerstone commitment to Antler’s UK Fund II, which aims to be Antler’s largest single-location fund to date.
• Athens-based Skybound Venture Capital launched its founder-led VC fund focused on deeptech startups, with a $38 million first close anchored by the European Investment Fund. Based in Athens, Skybound was founded by Thaleia Misailidou, who previously worked at Marathon Venture Capital, and George Varvarelis, co-founder of Augmenta, which was acquired.
• Lauxera Capital Partners closed its second healthtech growth fund at €520 million, exceeding its €500 million hard cap. It invests between €20 and €50 million in European healthtech companies
Mistral acquiring Emmi and the path to industrial AI
• Pathfounders broke the news several hours before it was announced that European LLM player Mistral had acquired Emmi AI, the Linz, Austria AI startup, in a deal described by sources as “definitely not” an ‘acqui-hire’. Emmi builds AI models that generate industrial engineering simulations, completing them in seconds rather than days.
The acquisition is only Mistral’s second ever, after it acquired Koyeb, a high-performance serverless infrastructure for AI, earlier this year.
It is a fast exit for a company that had only raised its €15 million seed round in April 2025, then described as the largest seed round ever raised by an Austrian startup. That round was led by 3VC, Speedinvest, Serena Data Ventures and PUSH VC.
It was the strongest indication yet that Europe’s AI race is moving away from chatbots and into industrial physics.
Warming to that theme, Scope, a London-based AI workflow platform for testing, inspection and certification, raised $20 million in a round led by Index Ventures with participation from Susa Ventures, Entrepreneurs First and Syndicate 1. Notable angels include Mehdi Ghissassi (Ai71, ex-DeepMind), Cedric Pech (MongoDB), Naren Shaam (Omio) and Andy Szybalski (Microsoft AI).
And speaking of industry, ClearOps, a Munich-based enterprise SaaS startup building an AI-powered after-sales platform for industrial OEMs, closed a €8.6 million Series A.
Enterprise is still sexy, and Enterprise AI is even sexier
Pivot, a Paris-based startup building an AI-driven procurement platform, raised $40 million in a Series B funding round, bringing the company’s total funding to $70 million. The “oversubscribed” round was led by Forestay Capital and Notion Capital, with participation from Greyhound and various others, including Hedosophia, Visionaries Club, and Emblem.
Viktor, an AI agent that operates like a virtual coworker embedded inside a company’s Slack or Microsoft Teams workspace, raised a $75 million Series A, led by London’s Accel with participation from Bek Ventures, Kaya VC, Inovo VC, and Tenacity Capital. Angel investors, including Slack cofounders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli, and executives from Google DeepMind, Figma, and ElevenLabs also participated. It says it's already reached a $15 million annualised revenue run rate.
The AI metal boom is on
More than 100 new datacentres in the UK plan to burn gas to generate electricity, some potentially doing so permanently, wrote The Guardian, in horror. Apparently, the problem is an inevitable consequence of a years-long wait to connect to the National Grid.
What the Guardian didn’t write about was the news that Greenpixie had closed a £4.7m pre-Series A round for its platform, which helps companies make decisions around the sustainability of their cloud infrastructure and large-scale AI deployment. According to figures from the International Data Center Authority (IDCA) almost a third (29%) of enterprise cloud use is wasted each year due to a lack of visibility for decision-makers.
The funding round was led by VERBUND X Ventures, with participation from Octopus Ventures, Armajaro Holdings and Green Angel Ventures.
Defence and Sovereignty - yes, they’re still a thing
Europe keeps talking about sovereignty and national security. Speaking as a Brit, it all sounds very familiar.
To that end, the UK government backed defence tech companies by awarding contracts of up to £4m to work with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to boost rapid procurement and deliver cutting-edge technology for the UK Armed Forces. The new scheme gives accelerated contracts to smaller companies. That won’t get them very far, but it’s a start.
Slightly more encouraging was the news that Earlybird VC and French investor AVP are raising a joint €500m defence fund in a rare joint venture in the European VC ecosystem.
It was not that long ago that even "dual use" technologies in Europe were often considered "uninvestable" by European LP/GPs. How times change, huh.
Not to be outdone, Swiss-founded defence startup Destinus is reportedly seeking around €200 million, targeting a valuation above €5 billion, ahead of a potential Amsterdam IPO. It has an annual revenue of roughly €500 million. Destinus develops drones, cruise missiles, loitering munitions, and interceptor systems. Earlier this year, Destinus secured convertible notes at a valuation above €1 billion.
Wasn’t Destinus supposed to be a cargo rocket? That’s quite a pivot. Perhaps it got jealous of Helsing’s valuation?
The robots are coming
Manufacturing giant Bosch announced a deal with British AI and robotics group Humanoid, entering into a manufacturing agreement to support the production of HMND 01 humanoid robots for the European market.
Meanwhile, Roboxi, a Stavanger-based startup specialising in airport airside automation and autonomy, completed a share issue raising approximately €13 million in new equity. The primary investors are Norwegian.
How many more law startups do we need?
Yes, folks, the AI-powered LegalTech / LawTech startups just keep coming.
Milan-based legal AI company Lexroom raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Left Lane Capital, with participation from Base10 Partners, Eurazeo, Acurio Ventures, Entourage and View Different. The round came eight months after the company’s Series A and brings Lexroom’s total funding to more than $73 million.
Lexroom says its platform is built on a proprietary database of more than six million verified legal sources and plans to expand out of Italy into Spain and Germany.
In theory, the raise takes on Harvey, valued at $11 billion, and Swedish rival Legora, valued at $5.55 billion. But does it?
And what the “F” is the difference, I hear you ask?
Well, as far as I can tell, Harvey and Legora are focused on common-law markets like the US and UK, where legal reasoning centres on case precedent. Lexroom was built for codified statutes and jurisdiction-specific procedures. That needs localised legal datasets, multilingual capability, etc. Guess where the law is like that? Continental Europe. Bingo.
Not to be outdone, LawX snapped up €7.5M led by Motive Partners for a legal platform aimed at Germany’s law firms.
On the Podcast this week:
UK/US startup CircuitHub wants to compress that time from weeks to days and bring manufacturing closer to those companies.
It’s now raised $28 million Series A round to expand its automated electronics manufacturing platform. The entire round was taken by UK-based VC Plural.
“The big thing that we really sell is speed,” founder and CEO Andrew Seddon told the Pathfounders Podcast. “Traditionally, in the industry, it takes about two to three weeks to get an assembled circuit board produced. And we’re able to do that in two to three days.”
Mistral’s acquisition of Austrian startup Emmi AI (which Pathfounders broke) marks a shift in Europe’s AI story, away from chatbots and into the industrial systems that underpin advanced manufacturing.
Emmi builds AI models that enable engineering simulations to run in seconds rather than days. Guillaume Decugis, General Partner of Serena Data Ventures, an early investor in Emmi, told the Pathfounders Podcast the deal was driven by commercial traction and strategic fit. For Mistral, best known as Europe’s leading LLM company, Emmi adds a vertical AI asset in the “language of physics,” hinting at where the next battleground in AI may lie.
Headlines on Pathfounders
The shock addition to Verisart's platform highlights the peril of being a high-profile person who needs to verify, incontrovertibly, what they produce.
CircuitHub allows engineers to get finished printed circuit boards in days, meaning huge acceleration for hardware operations.
Guillaume Decugis, General Partner of Serena Data Ventures, told the Pathfounders Podcast, Mistral's acquisition of Emmi suggests the continent is about to meet San Fransico's foundational AI model with vertical AI plays
As it approaches more than $1 billion in commitments to its next fund, Mouro Capital thinks fintech is about to be redefined in the AI era
In a clear bid to extend its AI offering, Mistral will now be able to offer speedy industrial engineering simulations
Upcoming Pathfounders Events
• YourStory PR and Pathfounders are bringing together founders, investors and enterprise leaders for an exclusive evening in London exploring the rise of AI-native startups: Get your tickets here!
• PLUS: Pathfounders is partnering with the new Renaissance Summit (tickets here). Exclusive Early Bird Discount to the Pathfounders community.
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Where to find Pathfounders next:
Tuesday, May 26: Scarcity to Saturation: Picking Winners Amid AI Fever
6:00 PM - 9:00 PM, London, England
27-05-2026 — 29-05-2026 — Panathēnea Festival, Athens
Here’s our industry events guide for the rest of May
MAY
18-05-2026 — 22-05-2026 — ViennaUP Vienna
18-05-2026 — 20-05-2026 — re:publica Berlin
19-05-2026 — 20-05-2026 — EHL HumanX Lausanne
19-05-2026 — 20-05-2026 — TechTour Growth Deeptech
19-05-2026 — AWS Connect Day (ViennaUP)
20-05-2026 — 21-05-2026 — Deeptech Momentum
20-05-2026 — 21-05-2026 — Infoshare Gdansk
21-05-2026 — 22-05-2026 — DOERS Summit Limassol
21-05-2026 — 22-05-2026 — Latitude59 Tallinn
21-05-2026 — Upstream Rotterdam
21-05-2026 — Startup Days Bern
22-05-2026 — 29-05-2026 — Dublin Tech Week
26-05-2026 — 27-05-2026 — Stockholm Tech Show
27-05-2026 — 29-05-2026 — Panathēnea Festival, Athens
27-05-2026 — 28-05-2026 — Dublin Tech Summit
27-05-2026 — 29-05-2026 — Katapult Future Fest 2026
That’s all, folks
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