Welcome to our 275th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Salesforce makes its biggest AI bet since Slack 👀
Fundraising news from the week: billion-dollar world models, a €500m defense war chest, and AI built to run the real world ⚡
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: banking-in-a-box, AI babysitting other AI, NHS paperwork, and CRISPR gone multiplayer 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the weekEuropean investors AVP and Earlybird have launched E2D, a €500 million growth-stage fund focused on dual-use and defense technologies.
The fund is one of the biggest Franco-German defense investment partnerships in European tech. 🛰️ It will invest across space, air, land, maritime, and subsurface technologies that can serve both military and civilian applications.
E2D plans to back around 20 companies, with average investments of roughly €25 million each. The idea is to keep Europe’s defense talent, capital, and intellectual property on the continent instead of watching its best startups scale with US money.
AVP and Earlybird launch E2D, a €500M European Dual-Use and Defence Growth Fund
Odyssey has raised a $310 million Series B at a $1.45 billion valuation, led by Natural Capital.
The company is building “world models,” aka AI systems that understand physics, human behavior, and cause-and-effect relationships to simulate the real world in real time.
The fresh capital will accelerate research and scale computing infrastructure. Odyssey says the industry is nearing its “GPT-3 moment” for world models. 🤯
Conduct raised $60 million in a Series A co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ. The startup builds an AI operating system that ingests custom code, configs, and dependencies and links business processes to the exact code that runs them.
Its agents analyze source code and company context so changes that used to take months can happen in an afternoon.
The funding will scale engineering and go-to-market, expand beyond SAP, and open a second HQ in New York. Early customers report design cycles 10x faster and 50-80% cost savings in migrations. 😎
Our $60m Series A: Unlocking the Systems that Power the Everyday
Comand AI closed a €32 million Series A led by Blossom Capital. The startup makes Prevail, a C2 (command-and-control) platform that runs specialised AI agents as a “digital command staff.”
Prevail turns sensor and drone data into decision-ready insights. A single laptop can act as a command node that coordinates units and swarms, while humans keep final authority.
The new cash will push Prevail deeper into NATO markets, expand air and maritime use, and fund integration work with Saab’s GlobalEye, a Europe-first alternative to US systems like Palantir’s Maven. 🚀
Orbio closed a $21 million Series A led by Dawn Capital. The startup has now raised $26 million total to date. Pilots are moving into full deployments.
Orbio builds AI agents that interview candidates, assess fit, monitor output, and run daily check-ins. The agents share data across the employee lifecycle so onboarding, hiring quality, retention, and exit insights continuously improve. The new funds will be used to hire talent and develop more AI agents. 🙌
Orbio Raises $21 Million to Automate Hiring and Onboarding for Frontline Workers
🔥 Up-and-coming startups Most banks still run on core systems older than their newest hires, and ripping them out is the kind of project that ends careers.
Monument Technology, spun out of UK challenger Monument Bank, raised £18 million in Seed funding to sell its tech to everyone else: a white-label “Bank in a Box” that bundles core banking, payments and customer channels into one managed package institutions can switch on.
The round nearly doubled its £10 million target, and the company says it has already opened a Series A at a higher valuation. 💸
Early proof it works: it has migrated its first client, Ecology Building Society, and started rolling out to Castle Trust Bank, its first regulated UK bank.
Enterprises are unleashing AI agents faster than anyone can keep track of them.
The catch? Most security teams have no idea how many are running, or what they’re quietly allowed to do.
NeuralTrust raised $20 million, reportedly the largest cybersecurity seed ever for an EU company, led by Alstin Capital.
Its platform sits between the agents and everything they touch, inspecting every model, tool and data call before it executes and blocking anything that looks off. NeuralTrust says roughly 1 in 80 agent interactions it sees is outright malicious. 👀
The pitch is partly geographic. Its biggest rivals are American, and with clients like Iberia, Air Europa and Banc Sabadell, it’s betting European enterprises would rather have a European name on the invoice.
NeuralTrust Raises $20M to Secure the Growing Swarm of AI Agents in the Enterprise
Almost everyone building AI for the NHS is aiming it at clinicians. But a big chunk of the waiting-list problem isn’t clinical, it’s the admin teams drowning in test results, rebookings and patients quietly stuck in a care pathway. 😥
Frontier Health, founded by ex-Palantir healthcare lead Rachel Finegold, raised $16 million in Seed funding led by Atomico to scale JUNO, an AI “teammate” that navigates existing systems the way a human coordinator would and hands a case to a person when it gets stuck.
In its first trust, JUNO saved 221 staff days in eight weeks and cut the median time patients spent on a pathway by 22%.
With seven million people on the NHS waiting list, the most overlooked workers in the building might turn out to be the most fundable.
An ex-Palantir Leader Raised $16M to Point AI at the NHS’s Paperwork, Not Its Doctors
As audit firms race to bolt AI onto their workflows, regulators are watching closely, and a botched audit is the kind of mistake that lands in headlines and courtrooms.
Cortea raised €12 million in Seed funding led by Dawn Capital to build a “quality layer” that double-checks audit work before sign-off, cross-referencing figures, disclosures and filings to catch what humans miss.
The standout stat: last season its agents reviewed more than 4,000 audit reports and flagged issues in every single one. 👀
Warren has raised €10 million in Seed funding led by Motive Ventures, the early-stage arm of Motive Partners, with F Capital.
The Ghent-based fintech runs its own regulated pension fund that invests employer contributions into low-cost ETFs with no entry, exit, or AUM fees. A direct shot at Belgium’s branch 21 insurance products that barely outrun inflation. The median supplementary pension for Belgians aged 56 to 65 sits under €10,000, less than a second-hand car, after 40 years of work.
Around 100 Belgian companies are already on the platform. The fresh capital funds thirty new hires and a push toward 100,000 employees by 2028, after which Warren eyes expansion into one or two bigger European markets.
Finally, a pension product that isn’t a black box. 📦
Rainbow Crops has raised an oversubscribed €9.7 million Seed round. As a 2025 spin-off from VIB-UGent, the company builds Trait Foundry, a platform that uses AI to predict which gene combinations matter, then edits 50 to 100 of them at once, instead of the one-gene-at-a-time grind most breeding programs are stuck with.
The round tops up a $7 million Gates Foundation grant and follows proof-of-concept in corn, with automated greenhouses screening up to 16,000 plants per run. Money goes to more crops, more R&D hires, and a seed-company collaboration in the works.
Corteva’s presence on the cap table is the real tell here, one of the world’s biggest seed companies just bought a front-row seat. CRISPR, but make it multiplayer. 👯
📰 Tech news of the weekSalesforce has signed a deal to acquire Fin, the AI customer service company formerly known as Intercom, for $3.6 billion. Fin’s Apex model resolves 76% of support queries without a human, across chat, email, phone, WhatsApp, SMS and Slack, and brings 30,000+ business customers straight into Agentforce.
It’s Salesforce’s biggest AI bet since buying Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021.
The timing is the punchline. Fin rebranded from Intercom just last month to cement its AI pivot, and now gets swallowed by the exact platform it was trying to compete with. Agentforce is the build-it-yourself enterprise option; Fin was the plug-and-play one. Buying it lets Salesforce sell both ends of the bar. Rebrand, then get acquired by your own competition. Bold strategy. 🤓
👔 Internships & job offersFundraising & Investor Relations Associate - blisce/ (Paris)
VC Investment Analyst - Allocator One (Vienna)
Associate/Senior Associate - Zinc Innovation Partners (London)
Analyst/Associate (seed) - Partech (Paris)
Venture AI & Operations Specialist - Blum Ventures (Höchst, Austria)
👉 You can also read more about baby vc on our website and follow our updates on LinkedIn, or directly reach out to us at hello@baby-vc.co! 🤝
The whole baby vc crew 🖤
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.