Welcome to our 280th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
We hope you’re enjoying the summer season, dear readers 🌞 As for us, we’ll be taking a pause from our weekly fundraising news until early September. This year though, we’ll be releasing some special seasonal content (stay tuned for interviews and deep dives!) to keep you company while you’re lounging on the beach.
See you soon, and have a great summer break! 💛
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Europe's tech conference circuit gets bought up, and Sifted goes shopping for the very first time 🤝
Fundraising news from the week: AI gets smaller, and defence tech moves into production ⚡
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: AI coworkers taking your calls, reasoning-first world models, and femtech going clinical 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the weekMultiverse Computing just pulled off a $570 million Series C at a $1.7 billion (€1.5 billion) valuation, co-led by Forgepoint Capital International, BNPP Solar Impulse Venture Fund, and Bullhound Capital. The goal is to make AI smaller, cheaper, and way less power-hungry. Its core tech, CompactifAI, uses tensor networks (quantum physics math) to shrink large language models by 80-95% with minimal accuracy loss. 🤖
The round, which marks one of Europe’s biggest AI raises, will fund R&D, expand Multiverse’s library of compressed models, and push into global markets while building “sovereign AI” infrastructure. The company is also layering software to optimize where AI runs (device vs. cloud) in real time, helping enterprises cut massive compute and energy costs.
Augustus just locked in a $180 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, led by Tiger Global. The startup is building what it calls a “Global Dollar Bank,” which fintechs and banks worldwide can plug into US dollar accounts directly without clunky intermediaries. Its API-first platform connects to payment rails like SWIFT, ACH, SEPA, and even stablecoins. It also runs on its in-house core system, Marble, which uses AI to speed up settlements and keep things running 24/7. 🔌
The fundraise follows a rare milestone: conditional approval for a US national bank charter, making it one of only eight approved since 2010. That means it can build regulated banking infrastructure from scratch, not just sit on top of it.
Humanoid just pulled in a $152 million Series A at a $1.35 billion valuation, led by Prime Movers Lab. The idea is to blend AI + robotics to create “physical AI” that can actually do stuff in the real world.
The fresh cash will fund next-gen robot development, scale its KinetIQ AI platform, and kick off mass manufacturing. Humanoid is also lining up real-world deployments later this year, with partners like Nvidia, Siemens, SAP, and Bosch in the mix. A standout move: a deal with Schaeffler to roll out thousands of robots in manufacturing. In other words, labor shortages meet automation, and investors are very, very in. 🙋
Robotics Startup Humanoid Raises $152 Million Series A Round at $1.35 Billion Valuation
Greenjets just locked in $40 million in Series A funding, led by Blossom Capital. The startup builds propulsion systems, aircraft platforms, and launch tech using a shared stack that enables faster iteration and scalable production. Long-term, they’re trying to become the UK’s next aerospace heavyweight by making aircraft that are quieter, faster, and cheaper to deploy… especially for defense use cases.
Their plan is to go from R&D into full-on production mode, with plans to deliver thousands of systems within 12 months and expand globally. The timing is sharp: the company was just selected by the UK Ministry of Defence to develop a low-cost drone interceptor, a hot priority as drone warfare reshapes modern conflict. 🔥
Greenjets Sets Course to Become the UK’s Next Aerospace Prime
Arrakis just dropped out of stealth with a $30 million Series A led by Blossom Capital, bringing total funding to ~$38 million in just six months. The thesis is that most AI stops at dashboards, but Arrakis pushes it into the “last mile” of real-world operations. Its platform deploys AI agents directly into legacy industrial systems across energy, logistics, and manufacturing. 🤖
The tech blends forward-deployed engineers with a model-agnostic platform. It lets companies train and launch custom AI agents in weeks. Early results are punchy, like cutting procurement cycle times by 90%.
As an even bigger flex, Arrakis is targeting the 70% of workers outside the office, where AI adoption has lagged but ROI is massive.
Arrakis Comes out of Stealth With $38M to Help Industrial Enterprises Compete in the AI Era
🔥 Up-and-coming startups telli closed a $15 million Seed round led by redalpine, with Cherry Ventures, Y Combinator, Mutschler and a handful of angels joining. That brings total funding past $18.5 million.
Founded by Finn zur Mühlen, Philipp Baumanns and Seb Hapte-Selassie, telli builds AI agents (fronted by an AI coworker called Charlie) that run customer-facing operations across voice, chat, WhatsApp, SMS and email.
Its agents already handle millions of conversations for the likes of Sky, Viessmann, Enpal and Vaillant, going up against incumbents like Talkdesk and Aircall with an AI-first pitch instead of a bolted-on one. The team also claims 9x year-on-year revenue growth, so the pace matches the ambition. 😎
telli Secures $15M Seed to Automate Customer-Facing Operations
kausable raised €12 million in Seed funding led by UVC Partners and Entourage. Founded in 2025 by three physicists with ties to Heidelberg University and Black Forest Labs, kausable builds causal “world models” designed to reason about new situations instead of needing constant retraining on ever-larger datasets.
Most AI remembers the past, kausable wants AI that reasons about the future.
It’s already published research with Columbia University and built TipPFN, a zero-shot model for forecasting rare, high-impact events. 🎤
Womed closed over €7 million, split between €5 million from professional investors and €2.1 million raised from the public via crowdfunding, more than double its original crowdfunding target.
Founded in 2018 by Gonzague Issenmann, Xavier Garric and Dr. Stéphanie Huberlant, Womed already commercializes Womed Leaf, a polymer-based device preventing intrauterine adhesions, now FDA-cleared and sold across 14 European countries.
The new money funds two treatments in the pipeline: a non-surgical, non-hormonal fibroid treatment and a therapy for acute uterine bleeding, both heading into clinical trials soon.🩸
📰 Tech news of the weekConferences have become one of tech’s better businesses. Sell tickets to ten thousand executives, take sponsorship money from everyone trying to reach them, rinse and repeat. 💸
Hyve, the B2B events group taken private by Hellman & Friedman in June, has acquired all three events built by Michael Amar and Charlie Meraud’s team: RAISE Summit for enterprise AI, MACHINA Summit for physical AI and robotics, and Signal Week (ex-Paris Blockchain Week).
The scale explains the appetite: RAISE pulled more than 15,000 attendees from around 90 countries this year.
Hyve is bundling the trio into what it calls an “AI SuperVertical.” They want to be the room where it happens for European AI.
The terms are undisclosed, but the founders all stay on to run the events. The plan is geographic cloning, starting with the US. 👀
Sifted, the FT-founded European tech publication, has bought Onstage, the demo day platform that became a default first stop for founders wanting investor attention without joining an accelerator. This is Sifted’s first-ever acquisition.
Onstage runs a Demo Day that is free for founders, with no fees or equity, and an independent board picking who gets to pitch, backed by 300+ funds including Balderton, Sequoia, and LocalGlobe. Alumni have raised more than £500 million between them.
Nothing changes operationally, and the next Demo Day runs in October as planned. The Onstage Fund and its SPVs are not part of the deal and keep operating independently. 🤝
👔 Internships & job offersPraktikant Venture Capital - LEA Partners (Karlsruhe)
Visiting Analyst - Ship2Ventures (Barcelona)
Visiting Analyst - Seedcamp (London)
Visiting Analyst - b2venture (Berlin)
Investment Manager & Principal - YZR Capital (Munich)
Analyst/Associate - Seedcamp (London)
Junior Finance & Data Analyst - GET Fund (Munich)
Associate - 10x Founders (Munich)
👉 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 🖤
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