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Dragos
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Market talk
🦞 OpenClaw is probably the most interesting tech thing Europe has produced since the Kazaa days - I haven’t been so hooked since I discovered the internet as a kid.
If you don’t know what I am talking about, you’re likely following the wrong news sources. Below some quick observations:
In simple words, OC is an open-source AI personal assistant that runs locally on your computer and can do stuff for you i.e. send emails, build new agents, and even make updates to itself on your behalf - you can interact directly for giving commands via text or voice messages like Whatsapp et al.
using it is more eye-opening than reading about it - when you install it, you need to be aware of the risks, as you’d need to give it lots of permissions that can make you either uncomfortable or at risk of losing stuff.
if you’re a non-techie control freak, it ain’t for you - or best to try it on an isolated environment.
also, it can get pretty expensive to run, since you're paying for API calls to underlying models - YMMV but easily $50+ a day, on top of a regular AI sub.
Usage has literally exploded, with many local use cases, folks getting involved and byproducts - as well as an unusual offshoot called Moltbook, a social network whereas OpenClaw AI agents interact with each other by themselves i.e post content, comment and upvote among each other.
they are essentially self-organizing but sparked by human prompts, which check on them once in a while to keep them alive.
but in just a few days Moltbook’s become already a robust, self-sustaining ecosystem where agents not only interact but also conduct security audits, form research groups, and debate existential topics independently.
It’s crazy and a bit sureal - AI autonomy compounds exponentially, blending social dynamics with economic and research layers, as agents can use tokens or payments for coordination and value exchange.
we’re at a point where feedback loops form quickly, agents can generate culture-like behavior and weirdness scales faster than usefulness
still very early, but looks like a preview of something much bigger - if Moltbook develops its own norms, its own economy of skills and reputation, it could become a layer of the internet that doesn't really have a precedent.
And Moltbook is just a mere OC customisation. As I said - you rather have to use it to get it.
Today, OC feels like a toy - still fairly basic and risky. I think this will change quickly, with better guardrails, a proper UX, and a better separation between personal and institutional agents.
But this toy feeling is why I believe we’re at a point of no return, as we’re transitioning from chatbots to agents - i.e. today startups selling AI agents are just doing mostly A to B flows that could run automatically.
OC closes loops and have them running 24/7, coordinating with other agents and owning tasks end-to-end.
By comparison, every AI product now looks a bit underpowered, even if it’s safer or more polished.
Plug it in at the intersection with real-life business cases, beyond the typical SAAS-turned-agents for productivity/marketing the market is full of, and you’ve got a proper conversation.
Not least, it is remarkable that a tiny open source project from an European corner beat established companies funded with shitloads of money on willingness to ship autonomy.
validates user demand for consumer AI, if nothing else. Opens multiple optionality avenues either, both B2C and B2B.
OC will force labs to move faster - sooner rather than later all vendors will provide OC-like tools inside controlled environments i.e sandboxed execution, explicit user approvals and strong defaults.
OC exists partly because open-source moves faster than safety-first companies can. A smart play would be a collab. of some sorts rather than the typical zero sum game of copying it like monkeys.
not least, we will also see more security narratives from the big labs, just like back in the Linux days, when it started eating into enterprise operating systems - it's a real security argument, but it will also conveniently serve their competitive interests
Also worth knowing - the hero of this story: Pete, an Austrian in London, who’s built it himself in a couple of months and took just two weeks to get viral.
He’s also built and sold a tech startup before, which gave him FU money - at odds with VCs trying to befriend him on the ‘let’s get rich together’ premise. From the outside (saw him in a couple of podcasts - this one is pretty good), dude is solid, nice, human and knows what he’s doing - if you’re a money person, you probably want to be in his corner.
And if you’re a techie and haven’t tried it yet - you’re missing out.
Signals
We have screened through almost 130 fundraising deals closed in Europe this week.
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.
Below a recap of the week.
Trivia question
Which European investor led Anthropic’s Series A? Answer at the end of the email.
Interesting early stage deals
🇬🇧 aisy - AI-native threat model intelligence platform
🇬🇧 Bleap - blockchain-based neobank
🇸🇪 Dentio - AI assistant for dentists
🇪🇸 Mito AI - AI software for film makers
🇬🇧 Ylookup - agentic workflow engine for audit and tax
Big numbers
🇳🇴 Norway’s $2.2 trillion sovereign wealth fund made $247 billion in profits in 2025 - equities, which make up about 71% of the fund's investments, returned 19.3%.
🇪🇺 EIB is projected to spend €100 billion in 2026, 5% of which in security-related investments. Same spend like in 2025 - 60% of which went to green projects.
🇪🇺 TikTok delivers €31 billion in direct, indirect, and induced economic output through advertising in Europe.
🇳🇱 Prosus has at least $10 billion to spend including in Europe - CEO also says Europe does business as if it’s 1996. He’s not wrong.
🇬🇧 Synthesia announced last year’s $200 million series E led by GV at $4B.
🇬🇧 OnlyFans to sell 60% of its biz to institutional investors at $3.5B.
🇩🇪 RobCo raised $100 million series C led by Lightspeed at $500M+.
Conversation starters
🇫🇷 Hugging Face turned down a $500 million Nvidia deal at $7B.
makes you wonder what’s actually behind and why they fed FT to spread it out - possibly recent staff leaving for better pay? A sovereign signal? Something else?
fwiw, HF raised series D in 2024, is profitable and doing somewhere less than half a bil in turnover.
🇫🇷 The French government is phasing out Teams, Zoom and other American tools to be replaced with a French solution called Visio.
🇩🇪 Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest arms manufacturer, is in talks with local satellite producer OHB to create a satellite service for the German army that rivals Elon Musk’s Starlink - 100-200 communications satellites in low Earth orbit.
🇳🇱 ASML will cut 1700 jobs (4%) in NL, after record year w/ net profit of €9.6 billion in 2025, on turnover of €31.7 billion - yup, AI replacing humans.
🇸🇪 Legora did a summit in Stockholm, and Max a good podcast interview.
🇪🇸 Samaipata did a deal with Anthropic for getting its portfolio access to subsidised resources (did a similar one with Nvidia last year) - it’s one of the unfair advantage plays in the VC cheat sheet.
🇷🇴 Romanian telecom Digi is looking for a €2B IPO in the Spanish public market.
🇪🇺 500+ early stage/stealth startups to watch out for in Europe.
🇫🇷 Profile of Yann LeCun’s new venture, AMI Labs.
🇳🇴 Norway’s 1% wealth tax on unrealized gains drove out 100 of their top 400 taxpayers in just two years.
👏 Investors new gigs - quite a few pivoting from tier one mid positions to tech companies.
💡 You’re a startup with cold network - you just need two directories: one of investors and another with Euro startup people already moved to US.
We add more signals on Linkedin and keep a religious track of what’s interesting in Europe on Nordic9.
We produce intel notes for the best investors in Europe every week - join them!
Tech business
Anthropic:
raised its revenue forecast to $18 billion in 2026 (4X) and $55 billion in 2027.
is looking to raise $20 billion from the likes of GIC and Coatue - double the initially planned capital.
the Pentagon and Anthropic are at an impasse under a $200m contract as officials are pushing to override the startup’s AI use restrictions for autonomous weapons and surveillance.
OpenAI
plans an IPO for the fourth quarter of the year
also plans to raise $100 billion, with SoftBank and Amazon negotiating an additional $30 billion investment.
Musk
Tesla is ending production of the Model S sedan and Model X SUV, with the factories for those models to be retrofitted into a facility for Optimus robots, eventually churning out a million bots per year - the car business will focus on selling to more affordable models.
Tesla also invested $2 billion in xAI despite shareholders rejecting a similar proposal last year in a nonbinding measure.
SpaceX is in merger talks with xAI ahead of planned IPO. It’s financial engineering for maximizing payout at IPO, expecting for the entire combo roughly a $1.5 trillion valuation.
More:
Google dropped Gemini updates + a Genie model capable of generating diverse, interactive environments + the AlphaGenome AI model
Demis teases Google Glass 2.0 for May-June this year.
China - Moonshot AI, a Chinese large-language model developer, released its new foundation model, Kimi K2.5, which is pretty good.
A humanoid robot washed dishes without human intervention for four minutes.
Apple breaks records with revenues of $143.8 billion, driven by astounding demand for the iPhone 17 , whose sales grew by 23%.
Also notable
Orlando Bravo - People are taking enormous risks for small probabilities of enormous returns.
Tether buys up to $1 billion of gold per month (1 to 2 tons a week), now at 140 tons worth $24B - traders say it is becoming a market-moving force in the global gold trade.
Private credit firms sold a record $15 billion in debt to themselves in 2025 - 4X yoy - through continuation deals, where fund managers create new vehicles to buy loans from their old funds.
The European Commission adopted its first-ever EU Visa Strategy - one of its objectives is creating a fast lane for high-skilled workers.
The UK will build AI tools to upgrade public services with funding from Meta.
The EU ordered Google to open Android to rival AI assistants and give data to other search engine providers.
France presses Capgemini over ICE deal for a tool to identify and track foreigners on US soil.
Nope, it’s not an impression - the VC business has long lost its soul, following the wider breakdown in ethics in society.
Swiss entrepreneur spent 13 hours in Davos jail.
Davos in quotes.
Trivia answer: 🇪🇪 Jaan Tallinn (Metaplanet) led Anthropic’s $124 million series A in 2021.
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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