Welcome to our 269th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: enterprises are racing to build AI that actually understands business data, and this digital healthcare unicorn is cracking open one of the world’s most locked-down medical systems 👀
Fundraising news from the week: quantum computing inches closer to commercial reality, hospitality software goes full autopilot, and AI-native workflow systems come for SaaS sprawl ⚡
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: geology copilots for critical minerals, proactive AI ops agents, and biometric payments that want to replace the wallet entirely 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the weekQuantum Motion just locked in a $160 million Series C led by DCVC and Kembara to push quantum computing into the real world. Their bet is to skip the sci-fi lab setups and build quantum machines using standard silicon transistors, aka the same tech inside your phone. The result is 100x less cost and space, and 1,000x less energy than competing approaches. ⚡
The goal is to make quantum computers that fit inside existing data centers (not custom-built mega-facilities). Fresh capital will fund commercialization and scale-up, as the company doubles down on manufacturing partnerships and global expansion. Notably, they already pulled off a first-ever commercial deployment of a full-stack silicon CMOS quantum computer in 2025.
Quantum Motion Raises $160 Million Series C to Deliver Quantum Computing’s “Transistor Moment”
Dutch startup QuantWare just pulled in a hefty $178 million Series B (largest ever for a dedicated quantum processor company), with Intel Capital among the investors. The pitch is to build the world’s most powerful quantum processors using its proprietary VIO™ architecture. In plain English, VIO™ is a modular system that lets companies “stack” quantum chips together like Lego blocks 🧩… making it way easier to scale from today’s limits to 10,000-qubit machines (about 100x bigger than current tech).
The fresh cash will fund two big bets: (1) scaling VIO™ and (2) building KiloFab, the world’s largest dedicated quantum chip factory, boosting production capacity by 20x. With 50+ customers across 20 countries and an oversubscribed round, the quantum arms race is heating up.
Italy’s traveltech player Smartness just pulled off a €47 million Series B, the largest ever for a vertical SaaS company in Italy. The round was co-led by United Ventures and CDP Venture Capital. The company builds AI tools for hotels and rentals. It’s basically an “autopilot mode” for hospitality.
The plan is to go full throttle across Europe. The new cash will fund deeper AI product development and strategic acquisitions. 🤖 Smartness already serves 5,000+ clients in 41 countries and has grown 6x since 2023.
London-based Ethos just locked in a $22.75 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. From Ethos’ POV, LinkedIn-style profiles are mid. Thus, they’re solving this via voice-based AI interviews to capture what people actually know beyond their job titles. That means companies can ask hyper-specific questions (i.e., niche fintech operators or research-heavy doctors) and get better matches, faster. 🎯
The tech works like this: experts go through voice onboarding. AI agents ask layered questions. The system builds a deep “knowledge graph” of skills. Then companies query it in plain English. The result is sharper matchmaking than legacy players like GLG. Ethos is already pulling in eight-figure annualized revenue and adding ~35,000 experts per week. The new funds will go toward scaling the network and improving the AI layer.
Ethos Raises $22.75M from a16z for Its Expert Network with Voice Onboarding
🔥 Up-and-coming startups Enterprise operations today are stitched together with spreadsheets, inboxes, and software no one really likes. Pit, founded by the former product brains behind Klarna, iZettle, and Voi, just raised a €13.6 million round led by a16z to fix that. Their pitch? Build an AI-native team that learns how your company works and outputs production-grade software that runs it — securely, governably, and on infrastructure that lasts.
Pit Studio observes how teams operate and automates their workflows, while Pit Cloud handles the enterprise-grade compliance (SSO, RBAC, ISO 27001) you’d normally need a whole IT department for. Already deployed across logistics, healthcare, and e-commerce, it’s reporting 10,000+ hours saved and 99% invoice acceptance rates. Real software, not prototypes — shipped in weeks.
Stockholm’s Pit Exits Stealth with €13.6M a16z-led Funding to Offer “AI Product Teams as a Service”
Lithium demand is up 400%. And exploration still takes 7 to 15 years to find a new deposit. 🕰️
Enter Lithosquare, a startup combining foundational AI with science-based geological models to accelerate mineral discovery by up to 10x.
It’s just raised €21.3 million in Seed funding to help solve the raw materials bottleneck slowing the energy transition. The goal is to give the West a resilient, science-led path to supply independence.
Instead of replacing geologists, Lithosquare supercharges them: turning months of analysis into days, cutting unnecessary drilling, and surfacing high-certainty targets faster.
The platform is already working with exploration teams across Europe, Africa, LATAM, and the US.
CodeWords wants every business (and granddad) to have its own AI ops team. No prompt engineering or setup required. 👴🏻
The startup just raised a £6.6 million Seed round led by Visionaries. Founded by a team with roots in neurosymbolic reasoning, it’s backed by angels from OpenAI, Mistral, Zapier, and Supercell.
The vision? Automate operations so your team can focus on the work only humans should do. The team is currently focused on building Cody, an AI agent that learns how a company runs and quietly automates what’s repeatable. Think dealflow monitoring, lead gen, or content production, all triggered without being asked.
CodeWords Raises $9M to Bring Proactive AI Agents to Businesses
London-based Five ID, founded by Revolut alumni, has closed a $6 million Seed round to bring palm scan payments to Europe. The idea is simple: no phone, no card, no PIN. Just wave your hand at checkout, and you’re done.
Five is pitching palm biometrics as the next shift in in-person payments, taking aim at the fees and friction baked into legacy rails. If they pull it off, “tap to pay” starts looking…a little 2019. 👀
📰 Tech news of the weekSAP has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Freiburg-based Prior Labs, the startup behind Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) built to understand the thing enterprise runs on: tables, spreadsheets, and structured business data.
The goal is to fold one of the leading TFM research teams into SAP and establish a “globally leading frontier AI lab in Europe.”
Why this matters? LLMs are great at text, but enterprise value lives in rows, columns, numbers, and messy operational reality. SAP wants models that can reason over structured data natively, inside the workflows where CFOs, supply chain teams, and ops live. If SAP nails TFMs, it’s not a chatbot. It’s the spreadsheet whisperer. 📊
SAP to Acquire Prior Labs to Establish a Globally Leading Frontier AI Lab in Europe
Doctolib has acquired London-based NHS GP software startup Medicus and is backing its UK debut with more than £100 million to modernise primary care tech.
The plans? 150 hires plus a London R&D centre because “entering the UK market” means showing up with builders, not brochures. It’s the first new GP clinical software system to land in the NHS in 25 years, built via NHS England’s Tech Innovation Framework, and designed to meet national requirements and plug into key systems (including the NHS App).
Doctolib just bought a fast pass into the most locked-down market in UK healthcare IT. 🔐
Doctolib Acquires NHS Software Startup Medicus, Plans £100M Push Into UK Primary Care
👔 Internships & job offersVisiting Investment Analyst - P3A (Berlin)
Junior Analyst - makesense (Paris)
Visiting Analyst - FoodLabs (Berlin)
Fund Operations Analyst - b2venture (Berlin)
Senior Associate/Principal - Marvelous (Berlin)
Analyste Fundraising - Cambon Partners (Paris)
👉 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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