Good morning and welcome to Sunday CET!

Two things this week:

More on that below, in an overall packed one. Enjoy,
Dragos

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This week Anthropic has been rumoured raising at 900b+, after OpenAI was traded at 852b earlier this year. Those asset prices seemed alien a few years back, and were reached after less than 10 years of OpenAI work - Anthropic was forked from OAI 5 years ago.

What’s interesting to me is that the numbers are not speculatively made out of thin VC air - they’re based on real revenues growing at rates that fit a DCF model. The number of customers spending over $100k annually on Claude has grown 7x in the past year, and have some 1,000 customers spending $1M+ annually, doubling from 500+ in under two months. Those crazy numbers translate into $45b annualized revenue and 20x revenue multiple - not insane for a high-growth software business.

Otoh, the fact that so much capital is concentrating in a handful of AI labs also means a very small number of companies have market power. Even crazier, this is not a mature environment, we’re still in an emerging market, far from an equilibrium, and nobody can tell for sure whether Anthropic or OpenAI will still be the dominant player in 5 years - the models are improving at an incredible pace and there’s many well-funded global incumbents, including Chinese labs which don’t get talked enough on a public level.

And the more we advance, the higher the barrier entries, as the cost of compute is a decisive factor for winning - note the circular structure of the funds i.e Google just invested $40b in Anthropic while Anthropic pays Google billions for compute. It’s kinda self-referential - how do you even differentiate between ‘channel fees’ and ‘investment returns’ in the statements?

Amazon took 15 years to reach similar market caps, Google took 10 years as a public company, even Facebook was much slower. However, those companies were about commerce and selling attention, while AI at this scale is transformative - automating cognitive labor is a much deeper economic shift. More importantly, the above-mentioned handful of private companies also get to control the infrastructure for cognitive work, or the backbone for the society - entire industries, governments, education systems. That creates leverage that's hard to regulate after the fact.

Which brings us to Europe, which has no foundation model lab operating at the frontier. Mistral is the closest thing, and it's orders of magnitude smaller, as the gap in raw AI capability is probably widening weekly. This also makes the eternal European tech conundrum even more actual - are we doomed to be tech laggards defined by a consumers market happily adopting whatever cool tech Americans invent?

This cycle is more nuanced this time methinks - we have a stronger talent pool filling out some local gaps, and that includes the Europeans working in the US and giving back, meaning a generation that doesn’t blindly copy what they see in the US. And oddly enough - I never thought I’d ever say this - there’s also a good edge of the regulation if shit hits the fan and AI systems cause significant harms i.e. biased hiring, manipulated information environments, opaque decision-making in courts or healthcare etc.

Nevertheless, let’s not forget that on this continent we’re living in a socialist-first amalgam of cultures and AI simply involves extra-pressure from a ‘growth and return on capital’ paradigm, best reflected by the ‘one-employee unicorn’ obsession and the constant fear of being trapped in a permanent underclass. And this happens in a society close to cracking, as is already alienated by the Russians, Trump, own leadership incompetence and the usual racist frictions.

There’s a reason for kids hating on AI (including mine) as well as Americans melting down right in the thick of it, an anguish which sooner or later will propagate over the ocean. I guess we need serious broader questioning on a larger societal level about who actually benefits after all if the productivity gains from AI are substantive.

And I can go on and on, this is real tech talk btw, not unicorns counting. Admittedly there’s timid Euro chatter here and there - Europeans are seemingly more concerned about internet cookies, GDPR obedience and prideful yet useless f-you games all while those societal disconnects are getting wider as shit gets real. And if you peek outside the bubble, it kinda looks like we’re all frogs sitting calmly in water that’s slowly getting hotter, aren’t we?

Alas, we’re living incredibly interesting times, mid compression of several transitions simultaneously: the end of US unipolar dominance, the automation of cognitive labor, the breakdown of postwar institutional architecture, and a great power competition that has AI capability at its center. Each of those alone would be a massive generation-defining shift - they're happening together, in a decade, and we’re right in the middle of it.

You know you’ve been doing European VC intel for too long if you remember distinctly when a 100m+ Series A was a black swan event in the money managers community playing god with European startups.

Today, 100m seems to become the standard for whatever labelled sovereign AI and foundational model layer in Europe.

I just did a quick look at the data this morning, thought might as well put here what I found.

This year, we’ve had 46 officially announced transactions above the 100m mark. That’s ten more than what we had in the first half of 2025 (36) and roughly half of the 97 for the whole 2025.

Those 46 deals though totalled almost $10b more than last year - $16.3b vs $6.7b. Ten friggin’ billion. Of those 46 deals - 5b+ comes from the following 10 deals:

Cranked three more interesting things for you.

1. Europe is doing roughly one 100m+ early stage deal a month. The total number of 2025+2026 early stage + series A deals is 16. Across 17 months of European VC, math tells that we have roughly one 100m+ early stage deal a month. So much for a black swan event.

Out of those, 9 (56%) are deals done by AI startups - that’s more than half:

2. Google rules AI in Europe

That was kind of evident from Isomorphic Labs deal announcement earlier this week, whereas Google threw everything and the kitchen sink at the deal - GV, CapitalG and the mother company Alphabet all contributed to make the numbers work, alongside some strategic governmental funds. No outsiders in the transaction.

Alas all GV, CapitalG and Google have all been in more European deals lately. Here’s the most active VCs in the above 16 deals:

Most active non-VC investors

3. Most $100M+ rounds in Europe happen at Series B/C. For the same 2025-2026 period, 100m+ Series B + Series C combined = 52 deals (22 AI / 30 non-AI) - that's 3x+ times the 16 above-mentioned early-stage rounds.

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Great, will forward • Good • Meh

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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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