Robot making startups in Europe (about 90 names)

European startups building data centers in space - essentials

Defence in Europe - startups that raised and active investors across the continent

Europe’s most active late stage investors (GC and HV toe-to-toe)

Europe’s most active AI investors (the usual suspects but some new names as well)

Europe’s most active angels

Active American investors in Europe (other than YC, that is)

Creandum’s big bet on crypto

The heterogeneous computing path from Europe

Who is doing nuclear business in Europe atm (edge investors, yet to be a mainstream thing)

I am seeing quite a few exits and secondaries these days - granted, not $1B+ bangers that excite social media enthusiasts but reasonably good money returned to investors for a market starved for success stories.

Numbers are not high since getting to $100M in sales is really hard to begin with, in a high pressure category of local VC-backed startups that are all available for sale. Pivoting a 2023-2025 SAAS vintage to AI-only native operating requires serious efforts, both technical and strategic, and it’s not like the market changed over night just because now everybody finally knows what Claude is - while doing AI stretching, there’s very few series As and Bs from the said batch that are yet in the vicinity of the higher end 100m sales bracket.

That’s also in contrast to the VC expectations set by the likes of Legora, ElevenLabs or Lovable, market leaders which are obvious outliers but became the expected standard from everybody else.

Yes, the money side has changed its narrative dramatically in a mere 12 months but products and customers are still on a marginal AI adoption and business model change. AI may be yet another pretext for cutting costs while on the revenue side, except for a few notable specific verticals, the overall demand is weak as we’re still in a big economic crisis, with worldwide wars and inflation, that’s hard to see an end in sight - that makes it hard to reconcile what you hear from the VC-hyping media and the reality in the field, companies are struggling, there’s quiet laying offs everywhere, startups closing down etc.

Alas, it is also true that this context presents an opportunity for the healthy ones to augment and buy business on the cheap, a good consolidation time where category leaders merge to build comprehensive platforms rather than single-point solutions. Adyen is a good example from this week - the Dutch have made their first acquisition ever as just shelled €750 million for a German company doing less than €60M ARR, which is a decent multiple. Other notable events from this year include - Faculty at 1B, Gleamer at 270M, Kaia at 285M or Bioniq sold for 150M.

Also worth mentioning Aleph Alpha being sold to Canada’s Cohere, a highly strategic move, as well as Elon Musk sniffing Mistral, as he eventually settled for Cursor - Mistral is in a very hard to get play, as they found a sovereign niche on local European grounds, which makes it very hard for an M&A discussion. As an anecdote, I have been using their product more and more as a third banana option lately, it’s not that bad.

Overall, those edge plays are healthy when market is bad, and the American IPO outlook remains a question mark, as everybody expects SpaceX to dry out all other events. And as valuations ballooned, AI exits will be increasingly more difficult because they have no markets to land, other than the IPO, which is macro dependent, which is terrible and will be for the next few years.

I was watching this video with Matt, Ian and Finn and was thinking that the Brits have quietly started pulling some cogent threads - at the macro level moves such as SovAI or Quantum, as well as a bunch of investment bets that were up-marked in Q1 such as Nscale, Wayve, Synthesia, ElevenLabs (btw, none of their founders are British - Australian, Kiwi, Danish and Polish 😀 ).

The VC spending also is there - 4 out 10 VC dollars went to UK startups in Q1 this year, way higher than 30%-ish allocations from the past couple of years.

Point is that there’s many good British signals for seriously tackling some hard problems, going a few technical levels deeper than the usual top of the line discussions.

It helps that they also notably have good people involved in high level decisions such as James or Matt, which are game changers in a macro ruled mostly by incompetent politicians - not only they know what they’re doing but move fast, or at least faster than the usual redtape required by governmental affairs, and that impacts the end results.

In general, the British discourse seems more articulate and professional than its European counterpart - aside of an overall dire national context, it looks encouraging from the outside and I believe those efforts will see fruition faster than what we all expect to see in Europe, which is suffocated by bureaucracy and political incapacity. That’s also a good side of Brexit, as not being coupled to the federation gives the Brits more flexibility and agility for taking strategic decisions.

Anthropic made waves this week by offering London salaries upwards of £630k - being valued at $1 trillion helps, I guess. Both OpenAI and Anthropic announced significant expanded footprints in London this year, which makes the local talent market as competitive as ever - btw, OAI just poached Airbnb's European head and made him head of EMEA.

Lyft puts more pins in Europe as it paid $55M for Gett’s British unit which is running 75% of the black cab drivers in London and doing somewhere around $20 million a year - they also bought Freenow from the Germans for 200M and TBR from Glasgow for 112M.

Meanwhile, Uber spent $318M for an additional 4.5% stake in Delivery Hero and made a strategic investment in a French startup operating hydrogen-powered taxi fleets.

Airbus also notably made two sovereign cyber security purchases these days - a British and a French.

Sovereign is the most over-used word today as it makes for the easiest sale pitch ever - the BT edition (actually a good Nscale biz devel effort).

UniCredit, which now holds nearly 30% of Commerzbank, pivoted from a pure takeover attempt to a predator-turned-activist strategy, with a restructuring proposal for Commerzbank to follow as a standalone entity. The Germans play also the sovereign behind their government in what should be a free market event - the state has just 10% of the equity, while BlackRock and Norges Bank have a combined 8%.

Yet another pan-European merger deal, Germany’s E ON is advancing plans for a merger with UK-based competitor Ovo Energy, looking for a combined customer larger than those of British Gas and Octopus Energy, the market leaders - Ovo is owned by Mayfair Equity, Morgan Stanley and Mitsubishi, and produced north of £5b in 2024.

While the Brits have spent the last two years pushing pension funds to invest more in private markets, exiting them is not making financial sense today - it’s economically rational to stay put, even if it conflicts with ideal portfolio construction. If they want out, they need to take significant discounts, which range from 10% on the low end to a whopping 50% for distressed or over-leveraged assets.

The UAE launched a new government model - within two years, 50% of government sectors, services, and operations will run on Agentic AI, making the UAE the first government globally to operate through autonomous systems. Can’t find a prediction market bet for it though. 😀 Seriously speaking, Headless 360 should be talked about more seriously in Europe, I have seen zero hot takes from the usual local noise makers this week.

40+ cryptocurrency kidnappings in France so far this year.

Why Rome never industrialized.

Helium is hard to replace.

2026 PE AI radar.

World's biggest condom maker set to raise prices by up to 30% due to Iran war.