Hello and welcome to Sunday CET!

Q3 already, hot town summer in the city as the song goes - and lots of AC discussions on the internet because of it. Today’s edition will include my two cents on it, alongside a sobering reality check about how the EU interprets its ongoing startups legislation upgrade and review a bunch of early stage stealth startups.

Enjoy and stay cool,
Dragos

Market talk

The EU (not) understanding of startups

Remember EU Inc aiming to create a pan-European solution for a better environment for building local startups? Some guys have spent a lot of time, effort and their own money in order to get the EU legislation updated to the 21st century and give the local startups a minimum chance for not having to immigrate to the US in order to build meaningful business.

Here’s an update on that.

After taking couple of years to get it into attention and have it explained properly to all sorts of clerks and politicians, we’re at the point where the EU guys processed it into their system and came up with an output to be pushed further for bureacrating vetting.

And there’s one good news and another that’s bad with this output. The good news is that document is vague as fuck, meaning that it’s highly open to interpretation. The bad one is that directionally, instead of a instating a single rulebook and entity behind a 28 regime, it creates 27 interpretations for it as it’s requiring all the member states to implement the same - and creates more bureaucracy instead of cutting it.

If this goes through, not only that it is simply not the best solution to the problem that needs to be solved, but also, sadly, shows that those guys don’t get it. It’s a simple reality check - the EU suggestion going forward not only doesn’t help the end customer (i.e. tax payers willing to build startups in Europe) but also shows, once again, the disconnect between EU clerks and what’s happening in the real world.

Here’s Philipp for reference:

The proposal tries to be everything to everyone - and ends up serving no one. […] It gives the illusion of progress or alignment. It creates a narrative of reform while leaving the root fragmentation untouched. You might call it a directive. But there's no direction.

I have said it many times, and will say it once more - any European startup will likely become successful (i.e. significant tax contributor to the EU) in spite of the European legislation and their decision makers, not because of them. If this goes through like this, it just shows that Europe’s not serious about startups - alas, it’s good to get a reality check once in a while, wouldn’t you say?

What do you guys make of it?

Europe’s less talked-about early stage

This week, Creandum put out a list of fifty early stage startups they call ‘the most promising’ in Europe - it is a cool marketing idea for the Swedish VC especially coming from an existing actor with skin in the game, and whose core job is to know the startup ecosystem upside down.

As this is also happens to be our bread and butter at Nordic 9/SundayCET - we put out such lists for our customers every week - I was quick to jump and see how many I didn’t know about. Not too many, to my surprise, confirming the quality of our work for capturing early stage signals in Europe - but there was no 100% overlap, either.

Here’s who I didn’t know about:

🇪🇸 Afori - incubated by wefox's founders
- agentic AI solution purpose-built for insurance brokers

🇪🇸 Cala AI - stealth
- knowledge-based SAAS used for curating and verifying internet data into a linked graph
- CEO was head of Apple media knowledge

🇫🇷 Clarifeye - stealth
- GenAI-ready knowledge warehouse that transforms unstructured content into data assets
- CEO is a phd who did two other startups before.

🇫🇷 Everyday - stealth
- AI agents for gaming apps.
- CEO is ex-Homa

🇬🇧 Intropy
- AI tool dedicated to the spare parts businesses
- CEO has worked for Tractable for five years prior to

🇪🇸 Omnia
- SAAS platform used for monitor AI engine citations
- founder is ex-Klarna where he built stuff independently from scratch both product and commercial ops

🇩🇪 Zauber - stealth
- AI agents for logistics
- founded by Erik Muttersbach of Forto

The full Creandum list is available here - highly recommended if you’re into early stage startups that are not in the media, that is. And of course - here’s our own 2025 under the radar list that has about 800 names to date.

A summer special

Speaking of our work, we’ve been doing quietly a lot of heavy lifting every week for keeping track of what’s happening in the European startup ecosystem. It’s work I am very proud of - our edge is focusing on the “why”, not just “who/what/when” - with a high end product that’s not optimised for clicks and attention but rather for understanding quick what is actually important.

We have a lot of back and forth about making it available to more people and one of our customers gave me a cool idea about this - create a summer special with a pop product available for a limited time and consisting of a one weekly email covering the essentials i.e. interesting deals, active investors, moves, pivots, notable news etc. Think of a better version of what we do daily on Linkedin and a lite version of our current paid products.

If that’s your thing, joining is free but need to be pre-approved here (takes 10 seconds).

Btw, if you’re not a customer already, this is the easiest way to become one.

Interesting deals

🇪🇸 Kuikads (API-first platform for instant video production) - pre-seed
🇫🇷 Massive Dynamic (AI-powered platform to help marketing teams) - seed
🇩🇪 Peec AI (GEO platform) - seed

• we add more of those on Linkedin.

What would you invest in?

I have picked three early stage, seed level startups from Europe with intriguing odds for growing. You're the VC - who gets your term sheet?

Last week’s results:

Which startup would you invest in?

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🇸🇪 Attini - serverless framework for Infrastructure as Code (34%)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🇳🇴 Völur - AI tool used to optimize meat producing value chains (22%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🇦🇹 Circly - interactive predictive software modules for retailers. (44%)

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

Cheat sheets

• AI deals made by Europe's mega funds

• AI deals made by American multistage investors

• seed-to-series A deals closed post 2023

• Europe's space flagship biz

• A look at the stablecoins moves.

Intel this week

• building CoreWeave-like startups in Europe

• tier one growth investor gets a new Europe head in London

• Swedish VC reshuffling its ops - new boss & new strategy

• most active dealers in Europe last month - VCs, angels, Americans

• the rationale of a 6M seed for a new-gen AI analytics SAAS - aye or nay? We do this every week, btw.

Best content on Europe in your inbox - gotta join to get value. Or you can just sit on the sidelines and complain about how bad Sifted is.

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Local affairs

• Crédit Agricole’s custody arm Caceis has become the first major EU bank to receive a MiCA license - i.e. authorization required for companies providing crypto-asset services in the EU under the new legislation.

• Banco Santander purchased the British unit of Banco Sabadell for £2.65B.

• Euronext wants to buy the Athens stock exchange operator for €399 million.

• More problems for London public listings - almost 40% of public company acquisitions were leaked to the media before they were announced.

• Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures sold a nearly £50 million stake in Wise - Valar is Wise’s largest external shareholder.

Investors

• Pareto opened a Hacker House in Paris - tres kewl.

• Index Ventures put out the new book version you can read for free of the American GTM for startups - somehow fitting timing to the EU f-up mentioned above.

• AI is eating Europe - and Europe eats AI.

• Top thirty most sought-after venture-backed companies in the secondary market.

• Vinod Khosla put out a new podcast.

• KKR’s head of Europe also did a good podcast - he knows Buffet and Draghi’s materials by heart and quotes them like the bible.

Policy

• The EU says it will continue rolling out AI legislation on schedule, in spite of the local AI companies evidencing that this is just bad for business.

• Germany's data protection watchdogs said DeepSeek's app illegally sends user data to China and asked Google and Apple to consider blocking the Chinese service.

• The strike against Tesla in Sweden has been going on for over 600 days. Nothing happened.

New economy

• American investors including Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, and Joe Lonsdale are backing Erebor, a new national bank aiming to fill the post-Silicon Valley Bank vacuum for crypto-friendly, defense-adjacent, and AI-focused startups - online only.

• Circle applied with a US banking regulator to establish a national trust bank.

• Robinhood launched tokens allowing EU users to trade in via tokens linked to stocks of privately-held American companies, starting with OpenAI and SpaceX. OpenAI was quick to respond that Robinhood's tokens aren't equity in the company.

• How Oracle is winning the AI computing market - btw, OpenAI is a big customer, just did a $30B purchase largely bankrolled by SoftBank, and which is for enough energy to power more than 3 million homes, but will instead feed the Stargate initiative.

Comparables

• Grammarly acquires email startup Superhuman for an un-disclosed amount → Superhuman had 50k customers producing $35 million a year as of 2024, and was last valued by VCs at $825 million in August 2021.

• Figma announced filing for IPO in a deal expected to value the company at $15-20B → Q1 2025 turnover - $228M (+46%).

  • in 2022, Fima was valued at $20 billion by Adobe in a deal not allowed by the American regulators

  • in 2024, it was valued at $12.5 billion in a tender offer that allowed its employees and early investors to cash out some of their stake

• Activist hedge fund Starboard bought 9% for a $160 million stake in Tripadvisor.

• Anthropic revenue has almost 4X-ed revenues since the start of the year to $4 billion annualized ARR - that’s $333 million per month.

Sentiment

• The US dollar is on track for its worst year in modern history - down more than 7% this year and Morgan Stanley predicts it could fall another 10%. A weaker dollar could make US exports more competitive, boosting Trump’s plan to rebalance US trade, but makes imports more expensive

• Trump’s punitive measures against Harvard would impact the school of up to a $1 billion a year in revenue.

• Researchers at Anthropic and AI safety company Andon Labs have created an instance of Claude Sonnet 3.7 and let it manage an automated store in the office as a small business for about a month. Didn’t work well.

Closing notes

• Canadians are raving about living in Singapore.

• Current situation in Britain - is the M&S strawberry sandwich liable for VAT tax?

• Nantes train station, which has just been renovated for some $40M in 2020, had to be closed down due to the extremely high temperatures - it just wasn’t designed to withstand the heat. A nice piece of architecture, useless nonetheless.

  • it’s gotten so ridiculous in France that extremist politicians have made AC in every house their election agenda.

  • btw, Europe has more heat deaths per year than the United States loses to gun deaths. The AC or lack thereof in some parts of Europe is an issue every single summer and a good occasion for Americans dunking on how backwards Europe has it. Alas, to be frank, in Europe it feels like we’re stuck living in badly-managed museums at times and when you’re focused on preserving heritage at all costs, you simply forget to understand what evolution involves while the need to be better every day simply disappears - all while life evolves, and society’s needs with it.

• People are using AI to sit with them while they trip on psychedelics. On a serious note, don’t do drugs, kids, just look at Elon Musk - dude made a party and is a politician now, building robots and rockets and going to Mars is not working out for him apparently.

• Why is everyone inviting strangers to their weddings?

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

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Created every Sunday by @drnovac of Nordic 9 with weekly notes and observations from the European startup ecosystem.

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