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Welcome to our 267th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.

🔍 Topics we'll cover this week

General news from the week: Elon wants to teach us a thing or two about the future of knowledge work, and Europe is rebuilding tech independence from the ground up 👀
Fundraising news from the week: space becomes rentable, and synthetic fuels eye fossil parity ⚡
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: ocean-scale robotics, private AI environments, and heat as the next energy frontier 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week

Enjoy the read! 💛

☎️ Berlin Calling ☎️

We are partnering with Deep Tech Momentum to get our community into the most important room in Europe this May.

3,000+ senior decision-makers, 500+ investors, and the brightest founders in AI and Deep Tech, all under the same roof in Wilhelm Studios, Berlin on May 20th and 21st 2026.

We have a limited number of discount codes for our community:

⚡️ Get €250 OFF with code: BABYVC250 ⚡️

(valid for the first 50 uses only, be fast!)

🤑 Fundraising of the week

☁️ Verda raises €100 million to build Europe’s AI cloud challenger (🇫🇮)

Verda just locked in €100 million in a blended equity + debt round led by Lifeline Ventures. The company (formerly DataCrunch) is building an AI-first cloud platform designed for machine learning workloads. Verda claims pricing up to 90% lower than AWS and Azure, powered entirely by renewable energy. 🌱

Hyperscalers weren’t built for AI, but Verda is. Verda’s vertically integrated stack and NVIDIA partnerships give them tighter control over performance and cost.

Bonus: they’re already at €51.3 million annualized revenue and cash-flow positive (pretty impressive for this stage). 👀

💸 DFF Ventures raises €70 million to double down on AI for “real-world” industries (🇳🇱)

DFF Ventures just closed its Fund III at €70 million. The thesis is to build software + AI for messy, under-digitized industries, like logistics, trade, and operations. 🚛

The tech focuses on Vertical AI…in other words, tools trained on niche industry data that create defensibility through insights, networks, and time (i.e. not easy to copy overnight).

The fresh cash will fund Pre-Seed checks (€250,000 to €2.5 million) for global startups from day one. It also expands DFF’s reach beyond Europe. This raise lands in a broader wave, with ~€420 million deployed across new early-stage funds in 2026 alone.

📦 Cloudsmith raises $72 million to secure the AI-era software supply chain (🇬🇧)

Cloudsmith just locked in $72 million in Series C funding, led by TCV, to become the gatekeeper of the AI software boom. As AI agents churn out code at insane speed, companies are drowning in software “artifacts” (i.e., packages, dependencies, and components). Cloudsmith’s platform steps in to manage, secure, and monitor all of it. ✈️

The timing isn’t random. AI-generated code is scaling faster than humans can review it, which turns software security into a boardroom-level problem. Cloudsmith gives enterprises the tools to stay compliant, reduce risk, and actually trust what they’re shipping.

🔥 Rivan raises €28.7 million to scale synthetic fuel production across Europe (🇬🇧)

Rivan just locked in €28.7 million in fresh funding, led by IQ Capital. The company is building synthetic fuels like Synthetic Natural Gas (SNG). These are designed to replace fossil fuels in heavy industries like steel, cement, and aviation. The idea is to match fossil fuel costs, cut emissions, and stop Europe from relying on imports for ~60% of its energy (yikes 😬).

The new cash will fund major scale-up moves. First up: Project Starwell, which aims to become Europe’s largest SNG plant and the first to inject synthetic gas into the UK grid. Then comes Production Base 1, a hardware hub to mass-produce fuel systems. Rivan is going full-stack, controlling everything from CO2 capture to fuel synthesis.

If they pull this off, they could undercut fossil fuels within 2-3 years, which would be a serious plot twist for the energy market.

🚀 UNIVITY raises €27 million to build sovereign space internet for telecoms (🇫🇷)

UNIVITY just pulled in a €27 million Series A, led by Bpifrance via its Deeptech 2030 fund, to rethink how telecom operators access space. Instead of building their own satellites (or relying on giants like SpaceX), telcos can “rent” space infrastructure.

UNIVITY operates in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), which means lower latency and better performance. It also plugs directly into existing 5G networks, so your phone doesn’t need to change. 🌍

The fresh cash will fund its uniShape program, a first-of-its-kind VLEO 5G demonstrator with two satellites testing direct-to-smartphone connectivity. The company also plans to scale manufacturing near Toulouse and convert early telecom interest into real contracts. With €67 million+ total funding and demand heating up, UNIVITY is racing to give Europe a sovereign alternative to Starlink-style dominance.

🚀 ATMOS Space Cargo raises €25.7 million to close Europe’s return-from-orbit gap (🇩🇪/🇫🇷)

ATMOS Space Cargo has closed a €25.7 million Series A to build something Europe doesn’t have: a way to bring payloads back from space.

Founded in 2022, ATMOS develops reusable spacecraft that can carry cargo to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), operate autonomously for hours to months, and return to Earth in a controlled re-entry. The secret sauce? An Inflatable Atmospheric Decelerator (IAD) that acts as both heat shield and aerodynamic brake, with a non-ablative design that minimizes material loss. Recovery operations will launch from the Azores under Portuguese jurisdiction. 🛰️

The funding will build a three-vehicle PHOENIX 2 fleet, launch ATMOS WORKS for government and defense customers, and develop PHOENIX 3, the next-gen vehicle with 10x capacity.

Europe currently has zero sovereign return-from-orbit capability. ATMOS wants to change that.

🔥 Up-and-coming startups

🔥 Exergy3 raises €11.4 million to turn wasted renewable energy into industrial heat (🇬🇧)

Edinburgh-based Exergy3 has closed €11.4 million (£10 million) in Seed funding to scale its ultra-high temperature thermal energy storage tech. The round was led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Clean Energy Ventures.

The pitch is elegant: when renewables overproduce and electricity prices go negative, that energy gets wasted. Exergy3 captures it, stores it at temperatures up to 1,200°C, and delivers it as clean industrial heat.

That solves three problems at once: industrial decarbonisation, grid balancing, and energy security. 🌱

Industrial heat is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, responsible for a huge chunk of emissions. Exergy3 is betting that storing heat, not just electricity, is the missing piece.

🤖 Bubble Robotics raises $5 million to build an autonomous workforce for the ocean (🇨🇭/🇫🇷)

Bubble Robotics has emerged from stealth with $5 million in Pre-Seed funding led by Episode 1 Ventures and Asterion Ventures. The startup is building autonomous underwater and surface robots for continuous offshore operations.

The ocean is Earth’s last industrial frontier, and right now, monitoring it is expensive, dangerous, and sporadic. Bubble’s robotics-as-a-service platform lets offshore energy, maritime infrastructure, and security operators cut costs by up to 70% while gaining real-time visibility over critical assets. Think offshore wind farms, subsea cables, ports, and biodiversity mapping. 🌊

The long-term vision? A distributed network of ocean robots, like a satellite constellation but underwater.

🧱 ConfidentialMind raises €3.5 million in Seed funding to make AI deployment as sovereign as your data (🇫🇮)

ConfidentialMind just closed a €3.5 million Seed round backed by D11Z. Ventures (the family office of Lidl founder Dieter Schwarz) and Lifeline Ventures.

They’re building infrastructure that lets companies, universities, and governments run AI agents in their own private environments. The startup’s premise is simple: AI middleware should be owned, not rented from an American cloud provider. ☁️

Whether it’s on your laptop, your data centre, or a sovereign cloud, ConfidentialMind enables full-stack agentic systems without giving up control. 🛡️

It’s already in use by institutions like the University of Helsinki, and is now expanding globally.

📰 Tech news of the week

🚀 SpaceX secures $60 billion option to buy Cursor (🇺🇸)

Cursor was about to raise $2 billion (reportedly at $50 billion valuation)…then SpaceX came knocking with an offer they couldn’t refuse. 👀

Cursor’s valuation had skyrocketed to $29.3 billion last November. They were reportedly in talks with a16z, Thrive, and NVIDIA to nearly 2x at that number. But with SpaceX’s option, Cursor gets cash now (a guaranteed $10 billion for their work). In exchange, SpaceX gets first dibs on a co-developed next-gen tool in the realm of knowledge work AI. 💸

Also worth watching: Cursor is already training new models on tens of thousands of xAI chips, and its top engineers just moved in-house to join Musk directly.

👔 Internships & job offers

Internships

VC Analyst - M Capital (Bordeaux)

VC Analysts - elaia (Paris)

Investor Relations Intern - Partech (Paris)

VC Analyst - 50 Partners Tech (Paris)

VC Analyst - Provence Angels (Marseille)

Venture Capital Analyst - BGV (Paris)

Visiting Analyst Growth - redalpine (London)

VC Analyst Intern - isai (Paris)

Internship Program - Verdane (Nordics/DACH/UK)

Venture Capital Analyst - WENVEST (Munich)

Jobs

Analys/Associate - LUMO Labs (Barcelona)

Investment Associate - Better Society Capital (London)

Senior Associate or Principal - Marvelous (Berlin/London)

👉 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! 🤝

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Elon's buying spree