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Welcome to our 272nd newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.

🔍 Topics we'll cover this week

General news from the week: Another all-time high for LLM valuation, and this French powerhouse wants to become Europe's own compute power provider 🎇
Fundraising news from the week: tax engines, compute hardware, and agent governance get an AI boost 🧠
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: your attention needs an operating system 🤳
Internship & Job offers of the week

Enjoy the read! 💛

🤑 Fundraising of the week

Fonoa just locked in $110 million in Series C funding, led by Headline, and made a power move by acquiring PwC’s tax platform, Edge. The startup is basically building an AI-powered “tax brain” for global companies. It handles everything from tax calculation to e-invoicing and compliance across 190+ jurisdictions.

The new cash plus the PwC deal lets Fonoa stitch the entire tax lifecycle into one system. It’s aiming to be the first fully unified, end-to-end tax operating system. The idea is to help companies stay globally compliant without losing their minds. 😅

byFounders just closed an oversubscribed €130 million+ Fund III. No single “lead investor” here, since it’s a VC fund backed by LPs. The firm doubles down on early-stage investing across the Nordics.

The new capital will fuel more bets on founders tackling hard problems. It will also expand their tight-knit “collective” model, where operators and founders actively support each other. 🤝 This is yet another strong signal that the Nordics keep punching above their weight in tech despite being deemed a “smaller” region.

Orbital Industries just pulled in a $50 million Series B led by Plural (no valuation disclosed). The startup uses its AI model “Orb” to simulate atomic behavior and design new materials faster than traditional methods. Orb can simulate 100,000 atoms on a single GPU and runs about 10x faster than rival models from Meta and Microsoft.

Instead of licensing discoveries like most competitors, Orbital is going full-stack. It builds the materials, the hardware, and the manufacturing. Yes, vertical integration is back in fashion. The new cash will scale its first products (AI-designed cooling systems and modular data centers), expand the team, and push into new industries. If its 2027 launch hits, this could be the first-ever commercial AI-designed molecule to reach market. 🚀

Geordie AI just locked in a $30 million Series A led by Balderton Capital, jumping into one of the messiest problems in enterprise AI, which is keeping autonomous agents from going rogue. These agents act like digital employees by making decisions and touching multiple systems. Geordie’s platform gives companies real-time visibility into what these agents are doing, what they can access, and where risks hide.

The funds will go toward scaling its security and governance platform as enterprises rush to deploy agent-based AI safely. 🛟 The pitch is that traditional security tools are not built for autonomous systems, and trying to use them is basically “whack-a-mole.” In one case, Owkin found 327% more AI agents than expected and avoided $13 million in potential risk exposure using Geordie.

Paris-based Lucis just locked in a €17.1 million Series A led by Singular, pushing total funding to €24 million. The startup is on a mission to make “getting sick” feel outdated. It uses AI plus analysis of 110+ blood biomarkers to flag health risks before symptoms even show up.

The platform turns blood data into personalized tips on nutrition, supplements, and lifestyle, all reviewed by doctors. 👩‍⚕️ Early results look strong: 75% of users improved at least one biomarker in six months without meds, and 80% came back for more testing. The new funds will fuel product scaling and expansion across Europe.

🔥 Up-and-coming startups

Paris-based Opal just raised $10 million in Seed funding to help you stop doomscrolling. 📵

The app, already used by 1 million people daily, blocks distracting apps and helps users reclaim their focus, a category the team calls “attention management.” Backed by Speedinvest since 2020, Opal hit $10 million ARR with just 11 people.

The pitch? Personal AGI is coming, and the bottleneck won’t be access to intelligence, it’ll be your ability to pay attention. Even Grimes is a fan.

Put your phone down (after reading this newsletter of course 😉).

📰 Tech news of the week

Anthropic just raised a jaw-dropping $65 billion in a Series H that values the company at $965 billion, officially dethroning OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI startup. So much for being the quiet, “safety-focused” lab in the corner. 👀

The Claude-maker also teased “Mythos,” its long-withheld next-gen AI model, saying it’ll hit wide release in “coming weeks” once additional cyber safeguards are locked in.

“Models of this capability level require stronger safeguards before they can be generally released,” the company noted. Translation: it’s powerful enough to be scary.

With $47 billion ARR and IPO chatter heating up, Anthropic is now knocking on the door of a trillion-dollar valuation. The AI arms race just crowned a new leader and OpenAI is officially playing catch-up.

Mistral is done relying on other people’s GPUs. The Paris-based AI lab just raised $830 million in debt financing to build its own Nvidia-powered data centers across Europe, a pivot from pure software to capital-intensive infrastructure. 🏗️

First up: a 44-megawatt facility near Paris housing 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs, going live by mid-2026.

The new “Mistral Compute” offering will give customers access to a private, integrated stack: GPUs, orchestration, APIs etc. From bare-metal servers to fully-managed PaaS.

CEO Arthur Mensch put it bluntly: “Europe needs AI cloud infrastructure.” He’s building it.

Berlin-based Peec AI just crossed $10 million ARR and it only took 16 months. The startup helps brands track and optimize their visibility in AI-generated search results (think showing up when someone asks ChatGPT for product recommendations).

GEO is the new SEO, apparently. 🔍

The company more than doubled revenue in just five months, riding the wave as enterprises scramble to figure out how to game AI search before their competitors do. With AI eating traditional search for breakfast, Peec is selling the shovels. Smart play.

👔 Internships & job offers

Junior Analyst - Meridiam GIGF (Paris)

VC Analyst Internship - Inovexus (Paris)

Finance & Operations - Auxxo (Berlin)

Investment Internship - SHIFT Invest (The Netherlands)

Junior Analyst - Novo Holdings (Copenhagen)

Visiting Analyst Intern - GET Fund (Munich)

Investment Manager - Pymwymic (The Netherlands)

Investment Analyst - Future Planet Capital (London)

Investment Analyst/Associate - Extantia (Berlin)

Associate Growth Equity - redalpine (London/Zurich)

👉 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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