Welcome to our 277th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Brussels’ new mega-fund gets tangled in a French-UK turf war before it’s spent a euro 🇪🇺
Fundraising news from the week: solo GPs go big, betting on repeat founders, and deeptech that hasn’t left the lab yet ⚡
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: drone swarms for the battlefield, AI that rewires its own reputation and an agent for NHS admin 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the week🛩️ Quantum Systems raises $1.2 billion to scale interoperable autonomous systems (🇩🇪)
Quantum Systems closed a $1.2 billion Series D co-led by Blackstone, Noteus, Airbus and Advent, valuing the company at about $8 billion post-money. The startup builds MOSAIC UXS, a software ecosystem that links uncrewed platforms, sensors, and drone-ports so air, land, and sea systems talk and operate together.
Proceeds will expand production, harden supply chains, scale deployment across allied markets, and boost AI and software development. Notably, the company says it’s profitable, executed over 19,000 missions in Ukraine (2025), and just doubled its valuation. 👀
🤖 EquiLibre hits a $500 million-plus valuation to scale AI trading ops (🇨🇿)
EquiLibre Technologies closed a Series A and now sits at a valuation above $500 million. The round was led by Creandum, and the exact amount raised was not disclosed.
EquiLibre is a Prague-based frontier AI trading lab that trains large models with reinforcement learning. Their agents trade billions of dollars in markets daily. The new funds will expand compute infrastructure and hire more deep-learning researchers and engineers. 🧑💻
EquiLibre Technologies Closes Series A Funding At Over $500M Valuation
🏢 Theo raises €25 million to automate property ownership (🇩🇪)
Theo closed a €25 million Series A led by Insight Partners, with a debt facility from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. Total funding for the company now sits at €36 million. The round follows a year of 400% revenue growth and comes as Theo already operates more than 25,000 apartments. 🛋️
Theo’s product is Prosa, an AI ops layer that handles bookkeeping, maintenance, letting, sales, tenant complaints, and invoice approvals. Human experts supervise and correct the AI, which feeds a growing contextual knowledge graph. The new capital will scale Prosa, expand ops, and accelerate product development as Theo pushes to replace siloed legacy tools.
Theo Raises €25M to Scale Their AI System That Operates Real Estate
🔁 Tapestry VC bags $80 million to double down on Europe’s repeat-founder boom (🇬🇧)
Tapestry VC has launched an $80 million Fund III to deepen its focus on backing repeat founders across Europe and North America, almost triple the size of its previous funds. Founded by Patrick Murphy, the fund will open a flagship London office as Murphy relocates from San Francisco.
Dealroom data shared by Tapestry shows that startups led by second- and third-time European founders have created $2.2 trillion in value and employ over two million people at 23,000 companies. The timing couldn’t be sweeter: the fund launch comes right after Fin (formerly Intercom) was acquired by Salesforce for approximately $3.6 billion, an early Tapestry bet.
Europe’s second-and-third-time founders are quietly minting more value than anyone gives them credit for. Turns out getting burned once just makes you a better arsonist. 🔥
🔬 Ex-Speedinvest partner Rick Hao closes $50 million solo GP fund to get deeptech out of the lab (🇬🇧)
Rick Hao, former head of Speedinvest’s deep tech team, has raised $50 million for his solo fund, Ruya Ventures, focused on building a portfolio of 20 deeptech companies worldwide across AI, batteries, robotics, semiconductors, materials science and novel computing.
Ruya Ventures closed in under a year, oversubscribed, and has already deployed capital into five companies.
Hao is betting against the trend of ever-larger deeptech vehicles, Ruya attracted more interest than needed in less than a year, but Hao chose to keep the fund at $50 million on purpose.
Investing even before the company name is decided, Hao explains that most deeptech companies stall not because the science is wrong but because no one helps founders cross the chasm from prototype to scaled product. 📈
Rick Hao Moves on From Speedinvest to Launch a $50M Solo Deeptech Fund
🔥 Up-and-coming startups 🤖 Six Robotics raises €12 million Seed to turn drone swarms into a single fighting force (🇳🇴)
Norway doesn’t do things halfway when it comes to defence tech. ⚔
Oslo-based Six Robotics has raised €12 million in a Seed round led by DTCP through its DTCP Defence fund, to scale its Valkyrie autonomy platform for unmanned systems. The company built its platform in collaboration with the Norwegian Armed Forces and the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, and grew from five to almost 90 employees on friends-and-family money alone before taking a euro of institutional capital.
The pitch is straightforward: swarm coordination as a force multiplier for contested environments. Six Robotics has already integrated its software with Berlin-based Stark’s kamikaze drones for “recce-strike” missions, and with Norwegian command-and-control firm Teleplan Globe’s FACNAV system.
Norwegian Six Robotics secures €12M seed round to expand unmanned systems autonomy platform
🧠 geoSurge bags €10 million Seed to hack how AI models remember your brand (🇬🇧)
Forget SEO, geoSurge says the real fight is inside the model’s memory.
The London-based DeepTech company announced a €10 million Seed round led by AlbionVC to expand its “Corpus Engineering” methodology.
CEO Francisco Vigo’s framing is blunt: “prompt-level tracking and surface analytics will increasingly commoditise as AI infrastructure matures... the deeper opportunity is helping companies impact the underlying representation layer that drives those outputs.”
Meaning, shape what LLMs learn about you in the first place. 👀
London’s geoSurge Raises €10M to Help Brands Understand AI-Generated Outputs
🏥 Frontier Health raises $16 million Seed to fix the NHS admin nobody wanted to touch (🇬🇧)
Everyone’s building AI scribes for doctors. Frontier Health went after the coordinators instead.
Founder Rachel Finegold spent six years as Palantir’s healthcare lead, working across more than 40 NHS hospitals during the pandemic, before building JUNO, an AI agent that chases test results, rebooks missed appointments and flags patients at risk of falling through the cracks.
The results are what pulled Atomico in earlier than usual. When JUNO was first used at East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, it saved 221 staff days in eight weeks and reduced the median patient pathway time by 22%. Meanwhile seven million patients sit on the NHS waiting list, and in 2024 administrative AI got 60% of all healthcare AI investment, but most of that went to clinical documentation, not to the staff managing patient flow.
Turns out the bottleneck was never the doctors. 🩺
💸 Warren wants to make Belgian pensions actually worth something (🇧🇪)
The median supplementary pension reserve for Belgian workers aged 56 to 65 is under €10,000. 🥲
Warren, a Ghent-based fintech, wants to fix that and raised €10 million in Seed funding. Warren runs its own licensed pension fund that invests in ETFs without management fees, no entry fees, exit fees, or percentage charges on assets. Within a year of launching, about 100 Belgian companies have switched their pension plans to Warren, and the company is targeting 100,000 employees on the platform by 2028.
📰 Tech news of the week🇪🇺 France moves to lock the UK out of the EU’s €5 billion Scaleup Fund
France is seeking to block the UK’s participation in the EU’s €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund, casting doubt over hopes that British startups could gain access to the bloc’s ambitious late-stage investment vehicle.
The dispute comes after the British Business Bank had reportedly agreed terms with the EU Commission for participation, conditional on UK startups also being eligible for investment, before France leading other member states to block further progress.
The fund itself is meant to be commercially run managed independently by EQT and designed to write growth-stage cheques from Series B onward into companies in AI, quantum computing, clean energy, space technology and biotech.
Nothing says “European tech sovereignty” quite like a good old-fashioned turf war before a single euro’s been deployed. 🙄
Exclusive: France seeks to block UK role in €5bn EU Scaleup fund
🇮🇹 Bending Spoons lists on Nasdaq, raising $1.68 billion in one of 2026’s few software IPOs
Bending Spoons priced its IPO at $29 per share, raising about $1.68 billion in total, and began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker BSP. The Milanese “software surgeon,” whose portfolio serves over 500 million monthly active users and more than 9 million monthly paying customers, owns a genuinely odd collection of old-internet brands: Eventbrite, Evernote, Vimeo, AOL, WeTransfer and Meetup.
The growth story is real, not just nostalgia bait. Revenue grew from $387 million in 2023 to $1.31 billion in 2025, an 84% CAGR. The share of AI content at Bending Spoons grew from less than 10% in Q1 2025 to more than 90% by the end of Q1 2026, with around 70% authored by AI alone. 🫣
Bending Spoons S.p.A. Announces Pricing of Initial Public Offering
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
Finance Intern - Faraday Venture Partners (Madrid)
Venture Capital Internship - Peak (Berlin/Munich/Amsterdam) Platform Analyst Traineeship
Visiting Analyst Program - Kfund (Madrid)
Jobs
Investment Associate - Zacua Ventures (Madrid)
Analyst/Associate - Peak (Berlin/Munich/Amsterdam)
Investor Relation Analyst - HTGF (Bonn/Berlin/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 🖤
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.