Welcome to our 266th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Europe rolls out its ultimate backup plan via the cloud, while a €1.4B bet keeps its green steel ambitions alive 👀
Fundraising news from the week: AI expands into cognition, compliance, and surveillance 🧠
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: self-improving AI systems, security for autonomous agents, and community notes for the entire internet 📝
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🇩🇪 Berlin is calling 🇩🇪
Ever wondered how VCs actually decide where to put their money? Now you can find out.
HPI Engine is launching a 5-week short program that takes you behind the scenes of venture capital, from fund structures and deal sourcing to term sheets and startup valuations.
What’s included: → 3 live sessions (2h each) → Harvard Business simulation → 1-on-1 coffee chat with a VC → Certificate of Completion from HPI
Open to bachelor, master & PhD students from all universities. No prior finance knowledge needed.
🤑 Fundraising of the weekEurope has elite neuroscience research, but turning it into big business? Not so much.
Enter Newfund, which just closed its €60 million HEKA fund (the first Europe-only BrainTech fund) backed by ~100 family offices and founders from its network. The fund focuses on startups building AI diagnostics, digital therapies, and neurotech tools. 🧩
Their idea is that Europe builds the science, but the US currently captures the upside…so HEKA aims to bridge that gap.
The plan is to invest in ~25 startups and fast-track them into US markets, including FDA approval and commercial rollout. So far, 8 of 9 portfolio companies are already active stateside, and some even landed in Stanford’s StartX (casual flex).
The fresh capital will go toward backing more BrainTech founders and helping them scale globally before the US fully runs away with a market that pulled in $4.2 billion in 2025.
Newfund Closes €60M to Invest in Brain Science and AI Startups
Solidroad just pulled in $25 million in a Series A round led by Hedosophia. The startup builds an AI system that reviews customer support across chat, email, phone, and video. It scores agent performance, flags issues, and turns real conversations into training simulations. 🤖 The platform has already analyzed millions of interactions for companies, like Ryanair and Crypto.com.
The new cash will fund team growth and product upgrades, with expansion in San Francisco and Dublin. Solidroad wants to kill off manual QA and replace it with automated insights and coaching. The idea is more consistency, less guesswork, and support teams that actually improve over time.
Irish-Founded Solidroad Secures $25M to Transform Customer Support Quality Assurance with AI
spektr just locked in a $20 million Series A led by NEA to automate one of finance’s most painfully manual jobs: compliance. Today, analysts still grind through KYC/KYB checks by digging across PDFs, databases, and random sources. It’s slow, repetitive, and honestly pretty soul-crushing. 😵💫
spektr flips the script with AI agents that research companies, verify data, and generate risk assessments in minutes instead of hours.
The platform essentially replaces “copy-paste ops” with automated workflows that scale across onboarding and ongoing monitoring
Already used by players like Pleo and Santander Leasing, spektr is betting it can become the brain behind compliance, while maybe making auditors slightly less miserable along the way.
spektr Raises $20M Series A to Eliminate Manual Compliance Work Across Financial Services
If satellites are too high and drones too short-lived, then maybe the answer floats somewhere in between.
Kelluu just raised €15 million in Series A funding to expand its autonomous airship fleet, offering days-long aerial surveillance at drone-level detail.
The round was led by the NATO Innovation Fund, marking its first investment in Finland.
Unlike traditional ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) systems, Kelluu’s airships go beyond protecting borders. They currently operate persistently across remote terrain, detecting wildfires, monitoring infrastructure, and strengthening NATO’s Eastern Flank. 🌍
🔥 Up-and-coming startups Did this startup just take stealth mode to another level? 👀
No product launch, no published paper, but $500 million at a $4 billion valuation locked in.
The startup is founded by Tim Rocktäschel (ex-Deepmind and Meta) and Richard Socher (ex-Salesforce) who are chasing what is arguably the holy grail of AI: recursive models that can redesign and retrain themselves without human intervention. So the anti-thesis of “human in the loop,” meaning the model writes its own successor. 🌀
With backing from GV and NVIDIA, Recursive Superintelligence is betting that eliminating humans from the fine-tuning cycle could accelerate AI evolution from 18 months per version…to 18 hours.
Europe’s defence stack wasn’t built for autonomy. Stendr wants to change that.
Their thesis? Democracies need to own not just the hardware, but the full autonomy stack.
They just raised $5.4 million in one of the largest pre-seeds in Nordic defence thus far, co-led by Rainfall, ACME, and Skyfall.
Stendr is building a vertically integrated defence platform, combining multi-sensor hardware with AI-native software, starting with drone defence.
Stendr Raises $5.4M in Oversubscribed Pre-Seed Round to Build the Nordics’ Next Defence Prime
If you enjoyed building with legos growing up, this one’s for you.
Schematik just raised $4.6 million in pre-seed funding from Lightspeed to make building hardware as easy as building software. Making hardware hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades, but with generative AI, it’s finally possible to get a reliable assistant that outputs the code, wiring, components and assembly steps for electronics.
Schematik started outas a side hobby from the former CPO of Veed.io, but then the launch quickly went viral with over 350K views on X.
Could making hardware simple crack a whole new economic opportunity the same way Lovable and Claude Code are democratizing software? 🤔 We can’t wait to find out.
Schematik Raises $4.6M Pre-Seed to Help Anyone Build Hardware With AI
Flare has closed a €3.6 million Pre-Seed round led by 20VC. The startup is building trust infrastructure for knowledge validation, essentially X’s community notes but for the whole internet.
The timing makes sense. AI can now generate convincing claims faster than humans can verify them. Flare’s bet: as synthetic content floods the web, people will need a reliable layer to separate fact from fiction. Think “TikTok meets Wikipedia,” as Sifted put it. 📲
The company is targeting a future where every piece of information online can be annotated, fact-checked, and contextualized by the crowd.
Whether that’s utopian or chaotic remains to be seen, but investors are buying the vision.
Danish Startup Flare Bags €3.6M to Support Knowledge Validation
📰 Tech news of the weekMost EU countries, including defense agencies, still rely on US cloud providers. What happens if the US flips the switch on European cloud access?
That fear just got a contingency plan. At the European Data Summit in Berlin, four companies, Italy’s Cubbit and Elemento Cloud, Germany’s SUSE, and Bulgaria’s StorPool, unveiled a joint sovereign “Disaster Recovery Pack” designed to keep critical workloads running even if foreign infrastructure gets pulled.
The new stack lets organizations fail over to fully European infrastructure with no foreign dependencies. 🔐 It’s not a replacement for AWS or Azure. But, it’s a lifeboat.
With digital sovereignty climbing the political agenda, expect more plays like this. The message to Brussels: Europe can build its own backup.
Europe Builds its First “Kill-Switch Proof” Cloud Recovery Stack
Green steel startup Stegra has landed a €1.4 billion lifeline led by the Wallenberg family, Sweden’s most influential industrial dynasty. The funding will complete construction of the world’s first large-scale hydrogen-based steel plant in Boden, northern Sweden.
Stegra needed to close the financing gap to keep Europe’s flagship green steel bet alive. The new round brings in a mix of new and existing investors, giving the plant a fully funded path to completion.
Steel production using green hydrogen instead of coal could cut emissions dramatically in one of the world’s dirtiest industries. 🧼
The stakes are high.
This is one of Europe’s most important industrial decarbonization projects, and its success or failure will signal whether the continent can actually build the green infrastructure it keeps talking about.
Stegra Bags €1.4B Rescue Funding Package for Giant European Green-Steel Plant
CamGraPhIC, a subsidiary of Cambridge spin-out 2D Photonics, has secured €211 million in EU-approved Italian state aid to industrialize graphene-based optical interconnects. It’s one of the largest deeptech funding deals in Italian history. 🤌 The funding comes under European state aid rules and will support a new manufacturing facility and R&D scale-up.
AI’s bottleneck isn’t compute anymore, it’s how data moves between chips.
Traditional silicon photonics can’t keep up and CamGraPhIC’s graphene-based tech promises higher bandwidth density, lower latency, and better energy efficiency. That matters for AI data centers, high-performance computing, and anywhere electrons need to move faster than physics currently allows. Whoever solves the interconnect problem unlocks the next phase of AI infrastructure.
👔 Internships & job offersJunior Analyst - Novo Holdings (Copenhagen)
Analyst M&A - Acquest (Paris)
Analyst PE - Andera Infra (Paris)
VC Internship - Shift4Good (Paris or Singapore)
VC/PE Analyst - Starquest (Paris)
VC Associate - Ulixes Capital Partners (Romes)
Investment Analyst - Capnamic (Cologne)
👉 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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