Swedish founders know what great looks like

tough times for sustainability driven investments as well as for capex intensive with long lead-time to scaling

super long on AI - 8 out their latest 10 bets were on AI companies

no $1T candidates in Europe yet

a bunch of high profile European investors switching jobs

7 new funds with fresh powder

10 European mega deals & multiple long tail vertical early stage moves

European investors dealing in the US

… and more → zero noise, just pure signal = everything that was important in VC Europe this week ← join Europe’s best investors and get it in your inbox from here

Q3 in Europe - high signal & high value deals and most active investors in the Nordics, DACH, UK, France, Americans etc

Active investors and high signal startups in Italy, Spain, Sweden

British case for AI prediction markets

Lovable’s financial projections.

the VC economics for a drone interceptor biz

Last week’s results:

Let’s see your say this week - click on the link of your choice below - we’ll add the result next week.

The UK is doing a smart thing - they set up an AI procurement and R&D fund, and added some high profile local VCs in the mix. Combine it to the last minute change of heart of not going forward with the exit tax - and Brits can hope again. Until the next political iteration, of course.

Meanwhile on the continent, social media declared victory as the EU is said to be reviewing the cookie banners law - Europe is at the stage of amending past incompetent behaviour, and that includes postponing the enactment of new AI legislation as well as a fully-fledged German/French summit entirely dedicated to ‘unlocking EU's competitiveness and building EU's digital sovereignty’. Aside the presumably-good-albeit-cringy-sounding intentions and that nothing good ever came from politicians having opinions on tech - who would have ever imagined Germans and French working together at all? 😀

Here’s another piece of good news - good in the sense of market-driven positivism, very rare in Europe these days: the Dutch intend to change the stock options legislation as taxation would be deferred until the actual sale of the shares, completely solving the liquidity issue. If it goes through - the earliest in 2027 - Netherlands will be singular in Europe not taxing ex-ante the startups work.

Useless to say - all eyes (and industry pressure) are on the EU Inc, probably the most impactful would-be piece of legislation that should act as a growth driver for startups in Europe in the future. The surrounding political narrative is encouraging - yet to see the light of the day, best case scenario has it effective in a couple of years.

As Roxanne Varza was rightly pointing to me in an interview to be published in a future Sunday CET NL - we need good legislation today, not in two years. But delayed gratification is where we’re at right now in Europe.

Also notable this week, Atomico published their annual review of what they see in the VC ecosystem in Europe, with a rather upbeat story about a market that’s been struggling for more than 36 months now and where early stage funding euros are either spent on US expansion or on the war economy. Tom and co did an admirable exercise of positivism about a depressed island - alas, the report is a media product of one of the more invested spenders in Europe both at retail and via other funds, and so it’s natural to be more projecting than reflecting.

If you talk to regular founders in Europe, they’ll tell you that building local tech startups fast is far from ideal and not improving, in spite of their European home preference and a renewed energy sparkled by the new tech cycle - and it is the very reason for the constant and quiet brain drain to the US. Not black and white of course, depends on who customers are and whether you look at the full or empty part of the glass, I guess.

Two years of Lovable, one of Europe’s outliers when it comes to VC-funded tech startups - they’re at $200M ARR and just closed the B round at $6.3B with CapitalG and Khosla in the lead. There’s also some local local media speculations about their VAT tax in Sweden - it’s just bickering, hard to believe that a $6B company cannot afford an accountant who knows what he’s doing.

China’s AI company Manus has opened their fourth non-Chinese office (after Singapore, Tokyo, and San Francisco) in Paris, which will be ‘the center of European AI’. I thought they’d be after some lightweight sales evangelism with local startups - they gotta pay up if they’re after poaching tech talent, in Paris there’s stiff competition from both homegrown Mistral and big American companies.

Yann LeCun, the French who’s helped Facebook count in AI, is leaving the company after 12 years to do his own startup thing.

UBS is serious about re-domiciling from Europe to the US and have held talks with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent about it. Meanwhile in Germany, Deutsche Bank targets a 13% return on tangible equity by 2028, out of three-year strategy projecting €2B in cost savings.

Nokia splits AI business into separate unit after $1B Nvidia investment.

As the Brits want to keep their companies from fleeing to US stock exchanges, they’ll now combine real-time data from different equity trading platforms into a single feed - would cost about £93 million and bring £100 million of benefits.

Why is Germany in a deep industrial malaise - a bit more tied to the past and unwilling to adapt to changing technology and demand, and that, as a result, it is weathering the current transformation worse.

Klarna’s founder is nervous about the spending on AI data centers - may have something to do with the $200B worth of Big Tech borrowing against AI infra i.e. Amazon’s $15 billion, Alphabet’s $25 billion, Meta’s $30 billion, and Oracle’s $18 billion bond offerings. Even Google’s boss sees some elements of irrationality.

OpenAI did a vertical finance deal with Intuit in the US and is considering launching health tools for consumers - the latter particularly interesting to follow, as in Europe the preventative health VC hype kinda died down, while in the US Function just raised at $2.5B.

Also OpenAI is internally acknowledging the vibes out there to be rough for a bit due to Google, which otoh must double its AI serving capacity every six months in order to meet surging customer demand - it’s what PJ is saying above about the road to model commodification.

What insiders really think about the AI race.

Meet CoreWeave, the AI industry’s ticking time bomb.

Saudi Arabia’s giant fund is low on cash.

A look at how the sausage is done aka a survey about how production AI teams use tech.

Cyprus’s layers of sovereignty - Greek Cyprus, Turkish Cyprus (the Turkish interpretation), Republic of Cyprus under Turkish occupation (the Greek interpretation), unified Cyprus (recognized by the EU and also many Cypriot citizens, though the Turkish part is exempt from EU laws and obligations, in any case not recognized by Turkey), the EU, and last but not least Britain claims and possesses, as full sovereign, three percent of Cyprus territory, an arrangement contested by no one.

fyi - there’s a scamming scheme impersonating media pubs people from the US.

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