Hey there - welcome to Sunday CET!

The first Sunday of the summer - almost mid-year, my favorite part of the year, do you want to know why? I usually wake up early in the morning and go to the farmers market - besides getting local produce, I like to talk to those people and learn about their stories (best way to take the pulse of the economy btw) - and I buy strawberries. And if you’re into strawberries, this is the best time of the year to eat them because it is their season and the only time when they got that divine taste you will never ever get the rest of the year, no matter how much champagne you combine them with.

Life is made of simple things, right? 😀 

Today we talk France - again - with a look at what’s behind the French AI hype, the Irish cashing out almost half a billion (!), recession signals, TACO tariffs and Sweden slowly stepping into the 21 century.

And a whole lotta more. Let me know what you make of it!

Dragos

PS Today, we’re all eyes on Poland. 🤞

Market talk

The French AI startups

Take a step back and look a bit at the market - if it weren’t for AI, the startup environment would be in a massive depression. And that’s kind of a global trend, not only in Europe - the AI deals have been capturing disproportionate investor attention, propping up the local tech ecosystems.

In Europe, the AI wave has been particularly fitting for the French since the government was already pushing startups as an alternative national growth lever - and were quick to raise to the task, with local AI startups attracting record-breaking rounds in the past couple of years.

Something to be proud of too - it’s a big leap from the usual French approach of building startups by cloning American counterparts. 😀 Jokes aside, startups today went beyond the empty hype because the AI un-leashed the proverbial French creativity and turned it into tech excitement, based on real talent, major funding commitments from tier one investors, and political momentum.

And yes, the French AI ecosystem is a bit overexposed in the media relative to actual deployment (see last week’s puerile PR gag) but it is also ambitious in the right ways (i.e open-source, sovereignty) while still early-stage compared to US/China AI giants. If execution doesn’t match expectations in the next 12–24 months, this hype could backfire, but if even one or two major French players scale globally, the hype may prove justified and make for nice media stories, if nothing else.

Until that times comes, I wanted a reality check about what actually happened in France in the past 16 months from an AI startup investment perspective - namely, the kind of assets investors found interesting. So I screened through Nordic9’s 250 AI startups from France that have raised early stage funding - pre-seed, seed and series As - during January 2024 - April 2025 and found plenty of AI picks & shovels, of course - we’re in that part of the tech cycle - but also a preponderant effort across horizontal SAAS or vertical-specific domains, with a bit of deep tech too. I specifically had a look at:

• the series A deals - Bioptimus​, Maki and Spore Bio stand at the top.

• expensive seed deals - Flex AI, Adaptive ML, Orasio in the lead

• a selection of other interesting early stage AI - Mec Agent, Cube AI, Bright Clue​, Eden are intriguing

• the YC AI startups

… and put everything in a cheat sheet, available for our customers. Become one now!

Signals

Interesting deals

🇩🇰 Today (AI sales-assistant for financial and insurance advisors) - pre-seed
🇸🇪 Endra (AI platform for MEP design) - pre-seed
🇫🇮 Way Data Tech (data platform for fleet management) - pre-seed
🇪🇸 Rillet (new-gen ERP) - series A

• we add more of those on Linkedin.

What would you invest in

• One reader suggested this so here we go, if you like the idea, we’ll do this every week.

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?

Click on the link of your choice below - we’ll add the result next week

Conversation starters

• A good time to buy - Uber continues building market share in Europe and acquires largest taxi company Dantaxi from Triton to create the leading mobility platform in Denmark with 3,500 taxi drivers - btw, Triton bought the major package in 2017, when it had 1,600 taxis producing around $250M GMV. Similar grabbing moves in the Euro banking system w/ UniCredit paying €600 million to double its stake to nearly 20% in Greece's Alpha Bank.

• (Almost) half a billion back in the Irish startup ecosystem - That’s from one single exit at €425 million announced this week in the cash-depressed European venture ecosystem. Frontline Ventures, One Peak Partners and Sands Capital Ventures are among the ones on the receiving end.

• Bad economy is bad - HSBC laid off a dozen of its analysts while Business Insider also made 21% of its staff rdedundant, including folks from the UK team - after Techcrunch disposed of its entire European team last month.

• The Brits are doing things - After the plans for a new secondary market from earlier this month, the British government announced this week the intent to require the pension funds to invest in private markets and domestic companies, setting asset allocation targets. Btw, the UK pension schemes have among the lowest proportion of funds held in domestic stocks and private assets compared to other markets.

• Are we ready for the worst? - The EU plans a stress test of non-banks which aims to assess how a systemic market shock could ripple through entities such as hedge funds, private equity firms, pension funds, and insurers. At the end of 2023, non-banks accounted for roughly a quarter of the €19 trillion in loans across the Eurozone.

• More heat pumps in the UK - The Brits made installing a heat pump in the UK a whole lot easier. As a Swedish anecdote, a bunch of well funded local startups riding the heat pump wave are not doing too well business wise.

• Europe is nice but - The CEO of Cloudflare, which has made fairly sizeable investments in Europe, speaks out about Portugal’s bad legislation, bureaucracy and in general huge inertia when it comes to dealing with people paid to solve tax payers’ problems. And yes, the Lisbon airport is terrible too. Related anecdote: a couple living in Lisbon built a company, raised over a million euros, and had two kids, before their home, a process they started working on over four years ago, was finally finished.

• Immigrants are great for society - Immigrants founded or co-founded more than half of US tech unicorns, companies valued at $1 billion or more. Put this in context with the anti-immigrant sentiment that today features dominantly in public debates in Europe.

• About those American tariff threats A columnist for Britain’s FT came up with a term to describe Trump’s effect on markets: the TACO trade - short for Trump Always Chickens Out. Dude was not happy about it, as expected, but we’re in a situation where even Russians started mocking him publicly now.

What is important in European startups

This week two super cool European startups have raised growth money - some of the better ones I have seen coming out of Europe this year, I believe they’ll become multibillion business sooner rather than later.

• one is the only startup that can give the American dominant market leader a run for its money because they’re doing something nobody else does - yup, they cracked the code, from Europe of all places.

• the other has found a sweet spot by turning a specific American model into a lucrative neutral platform based in Europe with a beautiful business model in a ever-growing yet ever fragmented ecosystem.

• none of them is a clone, au contraire - highly innovative, with solid growth and both funded by American investors.

My findings are detailed in tomorrow’s intel, which is fairly comprehensive every week - try it out for free.

Worth noting

🇬🇧 Those thieves need to be more talked about, not doing any good to the community.

Builder AI faked business with an Indian company for years to falsely inflate its sales - the two companies routinely billed one another for roughly the same amounts between 2021 and 2024.

🇪🇺 This morning I wanted to write a bit about the tentative document the EU put out as guidance for what they want to do about startups. I stopped after a minute - it is a 20 page dense PDF document, wooden language-written full of footnotes, like a research paper, in a similar fashion I wrote my master of science thesis in strategy 20 years ago. Except that this document has a different purpose and audience than academia - those EU guys just live in their own disconnected bubble, in spite of their good intentions, they could use some PR training tbh as millions of people need to understand what a few thousands fonctionnaires produce for them. That’s just real talk - don’t throw stones at me!

🤖 Mary Meeker put out a 340 page report about the AI investments ecosystem. Technical lingo but comestible. 😀 

🇬🇧 There remains a misconception that women in investing are still on the sidelines.

💲 Since the lack of IPOs cut off liquidity events, a lot of VCs are putting their stakes for sale at a discount - here’s a background chat about it.

₿ Trump Media wants to raise $2.5 billion to buy bitcoin - btw, in Sweden there is a startup that just raised $2 million from private investors to purchase bitcoin as a treasury asset - the story is in tomorrow’s intel update.

🇷🇺 Elon Musk's startup xAI invested in Telegram in a $300 million deal that also includes rolling out Grok chatbot - Telegram will also earn 50% of the revenue from xAI. Musk then tweeted that no deal had been signed.

• the Russian business is fairly popular in the US - Telegram also just raised $1.7 billion in convertible bonds from institutional investors like Citadel, BlackRock and Mubadala.

⚙️ Good Q&A with Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

🇯🇵 Japan telecom giant NTT Docomo to purchase a local online bank for $5.1 billion.

☕ Starbucks owes almost $2 billion in coffee to its customers, money stuck into virtual cards on their loyalty app - for context, Starbucks made about $36 billion in revenue in 2024, and earned a profit of $3.7 billion.

🧑‍🎓 The majority of the international students in the US are PhD level and the flood of White House actions aimed at private colleges is a nightmare scenario for America’s elite universities.

🇫🇷 French business schools are fast-tracking or extending application deadlines for foreign students who fear being caught by the Trump administration’s curbs on visas.

🇪🇺 The US restricts far more online content than the EU - data says.

🇸🇪 Sweden gets slowly into the 21 century and eases alcohol monopoly - on the other side of the spectrum, the Russian war in Europe prevented the country to become the first cashless society.

🇩🇰 Denmark will raise retirement age to highest in Europe - 70.

🇸🇰 The governor of Slovakia’s central bank was convicted for a €48,000 bribery to get granted expedited VAT refunds - he was also in the governing council of the European Central Bank btw.

🫢 Crypto related kidnappings continue in France, with an attempt in Nantes this week - 24 people were arrested. Not a French thing apparently, as in New York an Italian tourist was tortured for providing access to his crypto wallet.

🏃‍♂️ A French developer living in Amsterdam did a side gig with an app that lets users create custom running routes that look realistic on Strava - he did it because he got pissed with Strava mules i.e. folks getting paid to run for other people and improve their stats.

🙈 Summer rentals in the Hamptons are down 30% - you know what that means, right?

🇫🇷 Forget about investor dinner events for socializing, the French are now doing sauna events.

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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