Hello and welcome to Sunday CET.
This week:
how do you align sovereign objectives with LPs return-maximization capitalist mantra?
EU stalling AI regulation vs American shaping it in real time
Let’s get right at it.
Enjoy,
Dragos
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Interesting early stage deals
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🇫🇮 Retailgrid - AI workbook for retailers
🇵🇱 Viktor - generic orchestration AI agent
Cheat sheets
Tier one American investors and their (250) Euro deals from the past year.
Euro startups at YC spring 2026.
Active investors - mega deals, early stage fundings in April.
Europe’s most active late stage investors.
Europe’s most active AI investors
Europe’s most active angels
Investors on the move
Phil Chambers joined Balderton Capital as partner
Simon Pastor joined Index Ventures as partner
Philip Specht was promoted to GP at AENU
Nikita Andersson ended her working with Hummingbird Ventures
Those are just a few notable moves from last month. Sign up for Watchlist and get access to an up-to-date archive tracker of key VC hirings from across Europe.
Market notes
One of this week’s highlights - EQT is the designated manager of EU’s 5B late stage VC fund. EQT is Europe's largest private markets investor sitting on $291B worth of AuM - makes for a credible, defensible choice on the bureaucracy side.
Few quick notes on this:
the other finalist, Atomico, while led by a Swede, is HQ-ed in the UK, no longer part of the EU since Brexit - this may or may not have played a role in the selection process
EQT is primarily a buyout/PE firm by DNA rather than a vanilla VC company - the deal adds strategic momentum for the Swedish, with new CEO Per Franzen overseeing the transition from a traditional buyout firm to an asset-class giant targeting 2X over the next five years.
they’re fifth worldwide in terms of AuM:
#4 Carlyle is 1.5x larger w/ 440B
#3 KKR is 2.5x larger w/ 686B
#2 Apollo 3x larger at 840B
#1 Blackstone is 4x larger at 1.17T
managing a growth-stage deep tech fund for the EU is a somewhat different animal, more VC-adjacent - they’ll build upon EQT's existing VC practice platform, already restructured a bit in the past year i.e merged EQT Ventures (early-stage) and EQT Growth (late-stage) into a single, unified platform.
the people leading the new EU fund are Ted Persson and Victor Englesson, chaired by Christian Sinding (ex-CEO of EQT) - all as experienced as they come in the finance business.
More interesting and less discussed though - how does this fit into a continent with a broken exit infrastructure? EQT can invest in great companies, but returns in PE/growth are ultimately an exit problem, not a portfolio-building problem.
European tech IPO markets are thin, and the liquidity events require American listings or US acquirers. If the American macro environment stays depressed - compressed multiples, risk-off sentiment, M&A frozen by high cost of capital - those exit routes shrink dramatically.
at the end of the day, Europe is still a fragmented amalgam of 27 markets with 27 different regulatory regimes, with poor retail investor culture and an European pension system allergic to local private equity.
if EQT builds a portfolio of 20-30 high-quality European scale-ups and then hits a wall trying to exit them, that failure becomes a political embarrassment.
it’s basically hitting on your own limitations - you'd have the EU's own flagship fund, managed by Europe's largest PE firm, publicly unable to generate returns because European capital markets can't absorb listings.
The fund makes for a 5-6 years time horizon, when the first portfolio companies need exits - that’s a seemingly reasonable deadline for the macro to change and a proper context for political and institutional pressure to force structural reform of European capital markets. Five years is also a cycle in the political circles deciding on high level stuff for making impact.
So far so good, and hope (and money) is not something Europeans are lacking. Execution is. And real talk - the EU’s modus operandi is to build instruments to work around structural problems rather than fix them. The EIB, the EIC Fund itself, InvestEU are all patches - i.e mechanisms that substitute public and quasi-public capital for the private capital that doesn't exist, rather than creating conditions for that private capital to develop organically.
This fund fits the pattern, and may as well even lead to a perverse reaction and actually reduce urgency for capital markets reform by providing an off-ramp - companies that would otherwise have been forced to list or sell to US buyers now have a European growth capital option, which takes pressure off the reform agenda.
And who knows, maybe EQT will also become an agent of change - from what I am hearing, the Swedish already signalled some of this, and maybe their work will impact policy as well.
Here’s a closing thought - the returns objective, which is a standard KPI in the finance world, is at odds with the EU itself.
The EU's stated goal - stopping European companies from relocating to raise capital - is a sovereignty objective, not a return-maximization one. EQT's job may effectively be to provide patient quasi-public capital that prevents brain drain and keeps strategic companies onshore, with returns that are acceptable rather than exceptional.
That's not necessarily a problem for EQT as a firm - the fees and the institutional relationships with European sovereigns are valuable regardless of IRR. But how do you align it with the other LPs, which are private companies needing to maximise ROI w/ a fiduciary duty to their own stakeholders. i.e. Novo, Santander, Allianz?
It’s a tension and evidence thus far though indicates an evident market approach mis-match between some of the best finance professionals and a bureaucratic and inefficient system. But hiring professionals to do the job is fundamentally the right move for a class of European politicians who’ve played VC for a long time.
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Also notable
speaking of the EU, the latest from their AI agenda is an official announcement that EU agrees to simplify AI rules - basically PR talk for postponement of enacting their own AI ruling rushed off in 2024. It’s a limbo position they willingly put themselves into because of incompetence - and now buying more time realizing that the technical infrastructure to actually obey the law doesn’t exist yet. And while “this AI revolution” thing is unfolding in real time under their eyes, they needed a fix to save face by avoiding a compliance disaster where companies would be legally required to follow standards that hadn't been written yet.
otoh, compare and contrast with how the American government treats the AI impact in the business community - namely it listens and adapts in real time to key stakeholders who actually understand AI. David Sacks, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg spoke directly with president Trump in order to derail a planned AI executive order by warning that even a voluntary system for previewing frontier models with the government could become a de facto approval regime that might slow US AI development.
Uber now owns 19.5% of Delivery Hero from Germany, and has become the largest shareholder. DH is at $17.2B in revenue last year, which is about the same as Uber’s food-delivery revenue for 2025.
Commerzbank officially rejected UniCredit’s €39B acquisition offer because of a lack of an adequate premium and risks including lingering Russia exposure that could be a net negative - so it’s a no at this price, it looks more like a public rejection aimed at forcing better terms, rather than a permanently closed door.
Airbus has been fairly visible lately, now inaugurating a hefty €260 million Paris campus dedicated to military digital technologies. One thing is for
sureshure - France doesn’t lack working spaces for startups, on top of their Europe-leading startup subsidies.speaking of France, this week it also made the headlines with AION, a €10B/100MW AI gigafactory jointly managed by strategic French companies - one of the five large data centers the EU is building on the continent to develop AI models.
ten years ago London was a destination - now it is a compromise. London's economy has grown at a tenth the rate of 20 years ago, with falling employment, slowing population growth and weakening productivity raising alarm among Treasury officials and economists
SpaceX’s TAM
NB1: 600B in advertising is 2X+ from what Google makes today out of ads. In 2025, ad revenue for X nee Twitter reached $1.8B, +7% yoy.
NB2: The first 14 pages are pictures of rockets and the prospectus is longer than The Great Gastby - that’s how you sell conviction worth of $2T, reminds me of the ‘there’s a sucker born every minute’ quote.
the French mastermind behind a €1B Ponzi scheme.
Trump administration to require most immigrants seeking green cards to leave the US first.
it’s 2030 and Russia invaded Estonia - the Brits live-simulated operating 100,000 NATO troops out of the Charing Cross tube.
is this investor a fit for my raise?
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