Welcome to our 268th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Europe faces its fossil dependency, and Vinted quietly scales to €8 billion 👀
Fundraising news from the week: AI is leaving the cloud 👋
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: construction robots, orbital intelligence, premium data for agents, and creator-led prediction markets 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
Onstage Demo Day is back.
If you’re a European founder who wants to build VC relationships, get reach across the ecosystem, or simply put your company in the room - you don’t need to be raising to apply.
In one room, they will have:
💰 200+ leading VCs (inc. General Catalyst, Cherry Ventures, LocalGlobe)
📺 Key media leaders in VC (inc. Matt Wilson from Jack and Jill)
🕺 20 of the best founders in Europe
Hear back within three weeks.
Applications close 9am BST on 12th May.
🤑 Fundraising of the weekEarlybird VC just closed its €360 million Fund VIII (its largest fund ever) backed by institutional investors and family offices. The firm didn’t “raise a round” in the startup sense, but it effectively leads its own strategy shift here. The focus is deeptech and the lower layers of the AI stack (i.e., infrastructure, developer tools, and foundational models) because margins are fatter and moats are stronger. Apps are easy to spin up. Infrastructure is harder to kill.
The new capital will fuel early-stage bets across Europe. Earlybird is also making a structural bet, aka a “perpetual ownership” model where only active partners own equity. ⚙️
Earlybird Closes €360M Fund VIII, Doubling Down on Deeptech and Long-Term Ownership
Kompas VC just closed its €160 million Fund II, with backing led by existing LP VKR Holding and new investor Realdania. The firm focuses on early-stage startups from Seed to Series B. It typically writes checks of €3 million to €5 million. Its thesis is to bring AI into the physical world (i.e., industrial robotics, advanced materials, and decentralized energy). ⚡
Kompas is betting that real value comes when AI leaves the cloud and hits the ground. And the timing is huge, given that supply chain chaos, reshoring, and energy security are currently top priorities in Europe and the US.
Kompas VC Closes €160M Fund II to Back Industrial AI in a Fragmented World
Sereact just pulled in $110 million in a Series B led by Headline, bringing total funding to over $140 million. The company builds AI software (not hardware) that acts as a universal “brain” for robots. It gives them vision + decision-making skills so they can handle real-world tasks like picking, assembling, and placing objects with precision. 🎯
The fresh cash will fuel its new model, Cortex 2, and push a major US expansion (hello Boston office). Cortex 2 trains robots on different behaviors, then picks the best move in real time. That means smarter automation across industries like logistics and manufacturing, with clients like BMW and Daimler Truck already in the mix.
SPREAD raised $30 million in Series B funding, led by OTB Ventures, to expand globally and double down on its industrial AI stack. The company is engineering data is scattered across tools like PLM, CAD, and ERP. SPREAD plugs into all of them. It organizes everything into a unified system called an “Engineering Information Model.” The result is a live “Product Twin” that tracks a product across its full lifecycle. 🤖
SPREAD is already live in 100+ enterprise environments, with heavyweights like Volkswagen, BMW, and Rheinmetall. The payoff has manifested itself, with up to 30% faster development cycles and 75% less troubleshooting time. The new funds will fuel international expansion and deeper product development.
SPREAD Lands $30M to Scale Industrial AI Platform for Global Manufacturing
🔥 Up-and-coming startups All3 is rethinking construction from scratch. They just pulled in $25 million in a Seed round led by RTP Global.
The aim is to replace the entire building process. Their stack combines AI design software, robotic micro-factories, and a spider-like “Mantis” robot that assembles buildings on-site. It’s a full-stack, vertically integrated play in an industry that has barely improved productivity in 50 years. 😬
The tech is ambitious. AI turns a site or brief into a ready-to-build design. Factories produce ultra-precise components (down to 0.2mm). Then robots handle assembly, from placement to finishing. All3 claims up to 30% cost savings, 50% faster timelines, and 25% lower carbon. The new funds will fuel R&D and support its first commercial projects in Germany, where housing shortages and labor gaps make this bet especially spicy.
All3 Raises $25m to Automate Construction with Legged Robots and AI Design Software
Spaceflux has closed £9 million in total Seed funding, after a £3.5 million extension led by Blackfinch Ventures, with participation from Foresight Group and the UK Innovation and Science Seed Fund (backed by the UK Space Agency).
The company delivers sovereign space domain awareness (SDA) and AI-driven intelligence to allied governments, defence operators, and commercial clients.
In plain terms: tracking what’s happening in an increasingly crowded and contested orbital environment. Spaceflux operates a proprietary global telescope network that feeds real-time data into its AI platform. 🔭
Spaceflux has already been selected by MDA Space for a Canadian space surveillance programme.
Spaceflux Extends Funding Round, Bringing Total to £9 Million
Redpine has closed an $8 million Seed round led by NordicNinja, with participation from Luminar Ventures and node.vc. The startup is tackling one of AI’s biggest bottlenecks: access to high-quality, licensed, non-public data.
AI models have chewed through most of the open internet. 🫠 What’s left is paywalled, proprietary, or legally messy. Redpine builds API-based infrastructure that gives AI companies and agents secure access to premium, multimodal datasets at scale.
As AI shifts from chatbots to autonomous agents, the winners will be those with access to data that isn’t already in everyone’s training set.
Stockholm’s Redpine Raises €6.8M to Unlock Licensed Premium Data for AI Agents
Prediction markets platform XO Market has closed a $6 million Seed round to let users create and trade their own markets, instead of relying on an internal listings committee. The round was led by 20VC and Picus Capital.
The pitch is simple, existing giants like Polymarket and Kalshi are “Netflix” style, curated, top-down markets.
XO wants to be creator-led and permissionless: anyone spins up a market, liquidity flows in, and price becomes the signal. If it works, it turns prediction markets from a niche product into a platform. If it doesn’t, it becomes a moderation and market-manipulation minefield. Either way, spicy. 🌶️
XO Market Bets on User-Generated Prediction Markets to Rival Polymarket and Kalshi
📰 Tech news of the weekEurope is bleeding billions to power a fossil-fuelled economy. And Norrsken’s had enough.
This week, a coalition led by Norrsken VC released an open letter calling on EU leaders to commit to a 50% electrification target by 2040. That’s double today’s share of electricity in final energy consumption. 👀
The case is urgent: energy crises since 2021 have cost Europe over €930 billion in excess fossil import premiums. And yet, deployment is stalling. 13 offshore wind projects were just scrapped in Sweden.
Clean energy tech is already cheaper, proven, and grid-ready. What’s missing?
Europe Urged to Become First “Electro-Continent” with 50% Electrification Target by 2040
Lithuania’s largest startup is cashing out big.
Vinted has closed a €880 million secondary share sale, valuing the secondhand fashion marketplace at €8 billion.
The deal was led by EQT, Schroders Capital and Teachers’ Venture Growth. No new capital raised, just a reshuffling of the cap table that gives early backers and employees a well-earned exit.
Vinted has quietly become a European recommerce giant, expanding into books, electronics, and toys. It now operates in 26 countries and runs its own shipping and payments stack. 📦
Crucially, the company says it has enough cash flow to fund future growth without raising primary. A reminder that not all unicorns need a burn rate to match.
Vinted Hits €8B Valuation as EQT Leads €880M Secondary Share Sale
👔 Internships & job offersVenture Capital Internship - b2venture (Berlin)
Visiting Analyst - byFounders (Copenhagen/Stockholm)
Associate Venture Philanthropy - Telos Impact (Paris/Bruxelles)
Investment Analyst - Haufe Group Ventures (Remote/Berlin)
Principal - 50 Partners Tech (Paris)
VC Associate DeepTech & AI - 50 Partners Tech (Paris/Bruxelles)
Investment Associate - Eka Ventures (London)
Analyst - Haatch (UK/Hybrid)
👉 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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