Hey there,

Welcome to Sunday CET, folks!

Saturday morning doing this email is my favorite part of the week - crisp and quiet all around, hot cuppa, lil’ jazz and birds chirping on the background and a clear mind putting together what’s happened on the European startup scene.

This week - Trump sends tariffs letter right after the EU caved in to American tech (TACO or not TACO?), Temasek got pissed at FT and JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon calls Europe a loser, in a mannered way of course. And more, a lot more for your Sunday reading pleasure - let’s get right at it!

Enjoy - do good and be cool,
Dragos

PS. Reminder - we’re running a summer special, you can sign up from here.

Signals

Interesting deals

🇬🇧 ​ScienceMachine (AI biotech agents) - pre-seed
🇫🇷 Relief AI​ (CPQ platform) - seed
🇩🇪 roofline (nex-gen AI compiler) - 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?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🇳🇱 Lemni - AI agents for customer interactions (20% of votes)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🇩🇪 Litona - producers of cathodes for sodium-ion batteries (40% of votes)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🇸🇪 Monoscope - AI alternative to Notion-like tools (40% of votes)

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

Cheat sheets

• The success seed odds for a German GEO startup.

• Coreweave. But German.

• Hot French AI startups.

• Swedish active investors and their deals.

• AI deals made by Europe's mega funds

• AI deals made by American multistage investors

• Seed-to-series A deals closed after 2023

Intel this week

• Speedinvest has a new chairman

• details about a British defence tech startup backed by tier one European and American investors

• growth deals in Norway

• observability, infra orchestration, B2B payments and Swedish doing an Oura-like ring

• H1 data shows Euro startup investments on a very thin ice - who are the local heroes, multi-stagers and American dealers still spending

Best content on Europe in your inbox - join to stay in the loop along Europe’s top investors.

Local numbers

• Revolut to trade at $65B in a deal including primary led by Greenoaks.

• Mistral also in talks to raise $1B, both equity and debt.

• Meta paid €3B for a little under 3% of Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica of Italy, and is considering further investment that could build the stake to ~5%

• Lloyds in a would-be deal to buy Curve for £120 million - price tag lower than the C round valuation done in 2023.

• Ikea’s local competitor in Spain does €300M a year and is in trade talks at €500M.

• UK VC funds (2005-2020 vintages) have delivered 12.6% net IRR, while the average fund (median return) has generated just a 4.0% net IRR. In contrast, just 10% of funds are delivering an IRR of 20% or more - link

• Revolut has 5 million users in Spain - up from just 1 million in 2022.

Dealings

• Is Temasek souring on Europe a year after opening a Paris office to great fanfare? Not really, in spite of FT’s writing about it - the FT take pissed off the Singapore fund because the journalist took a claim out of a context, so they put out the transcript of the convo.

• Jamie Dimon to Europe: [The Americans] We’ve got this huge strong market and our companies are big and successful, have huge kinds of scale that are global. You have that, but less and less - you’re losing.

• Brussels wants to be like Paris and will have their own Station F built by Thibaud Elziere of Hexa.

• American boutique bankers eat Paris banking elite’s lunch.

• Liechtenstein faces the threat of a major financial crisis due to the mass resignations of managers at trusts and foundations linked to Russian assets.

• ESA announced funding for five rocket challengers as part of SpaceX catch-up mission - Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, Orbital Express, PLD Space

  and Rocket Factory Augsburg.

• Speaking of which, Eutelsat has officially become a political gig, as we mentioned a few weeks back - Macron had the British government take a 11% equity in the French company in order to compete with Starlink. Not holding my breath though.

Policy

• The EU dropped plans to levy a tax on digital companies - a move that hands victory to Donald Trump and U.S. tech giants like Apple and Meta.

• Trump forcing EU’s hands is not for nothing for the big tech as Google, Msft and the likes will heavily discount cloud computing services for the United States government.

• At the same time, on this fine summer weekend, Trump sent to the EU an official letter for a 30% tariff on imports to the US from 1 August. Officially, Europeans stay on message and away from antagonizing positions, like they have since the public humiliation events from earlier this year (Vance in Munich and Zelensky in the White House). Un-officially, they say it is just a negotiating tactic, because TACO.

• In 2024, Germany had the highest start-up rate measured in 25 years, as 9.8% of the German population had founded or were in the process of founding a business in the last 3.5 years.

• Former British PM got his old job back, joins Goldman Sachs as a senior adviser.

• Wages in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, and France grew year-on-year by 5.5%, 5.3%, 3.8%, and 1.9%, respectively, in May 2025 - above the inflation.

• EU gives green light for Bulgaria to adopt the euro as currency.

• Jokes write themselves - Spain awards Huawei contracts to manage intelligence agency wiretaps.

New economy

• Hugging Face launched some cool robots, available for pre-order here.

• Meta hired Apple’s top engineer and manager in charge of AI models - paid him $200 million.

• Google hired Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in $2.4B AI talent deal - the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3B acquisition deal just two months ago, but apparently Open AI walked away (technically, the deal expired without closing).

• Cloudflare launched a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping.

• Twitter/X CEO steps down after two years, people amazed she lasted that long.

• Jack Dorsey launched a new peer-to-peer messaging app that works entirely off internet, over Bluetooth mesh networks.

• Bitcoin topped $118,000 - investors expect to go higher in the second part of the year.

• Nvidia notched a market capitalization of $4 trillion.

• Substack had a record 73.9 million site visitors last month, beating the traffic on WSJ and CBS - over 50 of its creators make $1M+ per year.

• Firms like Sequoia are bulletproof until they aren’t - Sequoia bets on silence on ideological stance.

Evergreens

(1)
- In Europe, B2B customers ask: “Do we have budget for this?”
- In the US, it’s more often: “Will this drive ROI?”
This simple difference shapes everything from how you pitch, to how you price, to how quickly you close.
(2)
- In the UK, it's "What week are you available?"
- In SF, it's "What time are you available?"
You need to build better reference points as an entrepreneur to set the pace. This [SF] is the place.
(3)
- The key advantages of hiring in the U.K. is that Brits do the same work as Americans but for a third of the price.

Closing notes

• This adds up to the pile of similar stories and anecdotes of late, kind of shocking to see how low London has gotten - a guy was stabbed to death outside a five-star hotel in west London, next to Hyde Park, over a Rolex watch.

• A French-led team of researchers has lifted 22 massive stone blocks out of the Mediterranean Sea that were once part of the legendary Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

• Automated logistics will impact 1/3 of US GDP - it lowers the fixed costs of transportation, allowing movement point-to-point in smaller vehicles.

• Between 2003 and 2024, the amount of time that Americans spent attending or hosting a social event declined by 50 percent.

• Brazil and China sign agreement for Atlantic to Pacific railway - 3000 km.

• Levelsio on a podcast with John Collison of Stripe.

• Paul McCartney will tour North America this fall - he’s 83 years old.

• Does AI damage your brain?

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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