Good morning,

Welcome to Sunday CET.

Today, we have a look at the second incarnation of Project Europe, which will put €600k per logo from day one rather than €200k - at par to what YC is doing - all while keeping its age filter for reasons that are not really obvious to the eye of your usual news aggregator.

Enjoy,
Dragos

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This summer, Project Europe is raising a second fund for their startup accelerator program backing European founders under 25.

This one is 3x bigger, explicitly positioned as a European alternative for Y Combinator - still the benchmark European founders measure themselves against.

18 months ago I was writing the following about the debut of Project Europe:

I still think it’s a good idea and a meaningful value creator. Net-net, they have produced tangible results that could stand the PMF test for a product that’s been heavily pushed on the socials - they deployed $6m+ against 22 startups, half of which raised a subsequent round post incubation per our tracking over at Nordic 9. Notably, one was sold to Aikido and another raised seed at 45m post with an American investor.

Which makes the age barrier a bit of a head scratcher for fund two - it's unchanged at under-25 only. As an entry mechanism, it worked - a clean filter that created scarcity and a strong brand differentiator. Does it make sense at 3x the size?

Today, capital is concentrating hard on signal - pedigree, prior exits, technical depth accumulated over years. Europe's best-funded founders skew older, not younger, whether ex-DeepMind, ex-FAANG or second-time operators with domain depth. An under-25, first-time-founder filter structurally excludes most of the cohort currently producing the outcomes Project Europe is promising - Europe's next 100b company.

However, here’s another way to look at it - this is actually a pricing mechanism rather than a talent thesis. Typical European investors will be quick to dismiss a 23-year-old with no track record, which is precisely why 200k buys 6.66%. Otoh, same investor will happily pay 20m pre for a paper project done by an ex-DeepMind or a second-time operator. The age filter is there because it's the only pool where a 200k cheque still buys a real position, instead of a fraction of a point. All while statistically the outliers are rarer on this segment but not zero - and the fund model only needs one.

The age segment also comes with a distribution advantage that’s hard for everybody else to price in. Euro VC talks about itself in wooden institutional language - a banal industry made to sound both prestigious and closed. It works with LPs and partially on founders who already know the rules of the game - but not with the younger generations. Project Europe reaches them because its media register is the opposite i.e unpolished and unmediated in a way you won't find in investor comms or the media cast around them. Any fund could announce an under-25 programme tomorrow - it would see a fraction of the application, the inbound is a function of audience resonance, not of how important an investor looks inside their own echo chamber.

A first-time under 25 founder carrying up to 600k of converting paper is a harder sell at the priced seed than the same company built by someone with a track record - market is buying records and pedigree. 11/22 from Project Europe have raised a subsequent round, which is pretty good this early - the program put them on a trajectory where what matters is who leads those rounds and at what marks, and notably none of those rounds were led by Project Europe's own backers - Felicis, Crane, Connect Ventures, Project A, Expeditions. Outside money, outside pricing.

So: does the filter still make sense? At 10m across 22 companies, yes - it was a cheap way to buy real ownership in a pool nobody else was bidding for, and it produced an exit and a 45m post. At 3x the size the maths is different, because the fund now needs a larger outcome, not just a good one, and it's hunting for it in the smallest and least-proven founder pool in Europe. The filter that made fund one cheap is what makes fund two a concentration bet.

One term makes that bet stranger still: Project Europe won't invest beyond the first priced round. No pro rata into the winners, by policy. The full terms and a YC side-by-side in tomorrow's intel - you can sign up from here.

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We have screened 600+ fundraising deals closed in Europe in July.

We archive/transform deal-related data into an easy-searchable intelligent asset at N9, and email a selection of the interesting ones to our customers every week.

Every week, we grade the ones that matter by the capital event quality, proof vs. price, and investor signal. Below a selection of recent top grades:

Ⓐ+  🇬🇧 Volta - $300m seed+series A, vertically integrated AI infrastructure platform​
​
Ⓐ ​ 🇳🇱 Ore Energy - $43m series A, manufacturer of iron-air batteries 
Ⓐ ​ 🇩🇪 HappyRobot - $150m series C, end-to-end AI agents for complex industries. 
Ⓐ ​ 🇬🇧 Olix - $312m series B, manufacturer of specialized AI computer chips

The DB with the graded deals here - by country, sector or investor.

In the first half of 2026, we have tracked 188 new funds closed in Europe:

The full list here.

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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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