Good morning and welcome to Sunday CET!

Today we look at the AI holes from investors portfolio in Europe and we talk about money and comps and how Zuckerberg took over Switzerland.

And more! Let me know what you make of it!

Enjoy, Dragos

Signals

Europe’s best AI

For the past couple of weeks I have put together two cheat sheets comparing the AI investment deals done by the largest funds active on the early stage startup scene in Europe - five from US and five originating on this side of the ocean.

Ended up with a list of more than 100 startups which, I believe, represent a good reflection of where the European tech is in terms of investors expectations these days - it’s Europe’s best product to date when it comes to startup tech. 

And sure, AI is cool and they speak about it even on TV, but it’s cooler to be able to compare apples with apples, so I sorted those by their vertical and split them by each portfolio of their respective investors - ended up with the below heat map.

Your key read of it, whether an investor or a founder - all those zeros in there represent market holes.

The data and more meat on the bone on the cheat sheets for our customers - which you should consider to become one, if you’re into this kind of stuff.

Interesting deals

🇨🇿 Waypoint AI (AI for production defects) - pre-seed
🇫🇷 Wilgo (AI education app for students) - seed
🇩🇪 Lyceum Tech - (simplified AI model training and deployment SAAS) - seed
🇩🇪 ​Unchained Robotics​ (AI-control system for electronics production) - series A

• 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:

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🇫🇷 Juno Tech (Paris) - no-code AI solution for manufacturers (63%)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🇩🇪 Hale (Berlin) - virtual-first clinic for gynecological conditions ​ (15%)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🇸🇪 Moonrise​ (Stockholm) - digital coaching platform for women (22%)

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

Cheat sheets

• AI deals made by Europe's mega funds

• AI deals made by American multistage investors

• seed-to-series A deals closed post 2023

• Europe's space flagship biz

• A look at the stablecoins moves.

• Where is the money in the stellarators business?

Intel this week

• a review of the funds out in the market raising (many!)

• tier 1 American investors keep hiring in London

• top European investors are doing liquidity events

• the Torsten Reil and Daniel Ek connection

• European GPT for engineering

Best content on Europe in your inbox - gotta pay to get value, but you can sample it for a week. Or you can just sit on the sidelines and complain about how bad Sifted is.

StartEngine’s $30M Surge — Own a Piece Before June 26

StartEngine is the investing platform providing exposure to pre-IPO companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Databricks.

After doubling their revenues YoY in 2024 ($23M to $48M), StartEngine’s now tripled first quarter revenue YoY to a record $30M, based on its unaudited Q1 2025 financials. Now you can join 45K+ shareholders across all offerings before this round closes next month.

Invest in StartEngine

_{Reg A+ via StartEngine Crowdfunding, Inc. No BD/intermediary involved. Investment is speculative, illiquid & high risk. See OC and Risks on page.}

European affairs

🇨🇭 Meta poached the only three people from Open AI’s Zurich office, the same ones that Open AI poached from Google earlier this winter to open their local office - they were cheap but probably 5X-ed their income in six months.

• that’s like winning the lottery, most likely generational money for a regular early engineering career in Europe.

• OpenAI’s typical comp is a flat $300k base salary plus $500k in annual PPU (profit-participation unit) vesting.

• here’s a plausible scenario for Meta’s offer:
  - base salary $350k
  - annual RSU grant $1M vested 25% per year over 4 years
  - one-time signing bonus paid on joining - $3M
  - retention bonus $1M (paid starting with the end of year 2)

• hard to run into those numbers, even in Zurich.

• now that the Swiss are gone, OpenAI has engineering presence in Dublin, London, Paris and Munich afaik - the Americans got serious about Europe in mid‑2023 when they hired Sandro  Gianella to lead the local ops, and they also have visible a startups rep, Laura, who’s also working for a16z as a scout - here’s a podcast where she talks about her OpenAI tasks.

🇳🇴 Visma picks London for IPO - provisionally. The Norwegians considered an IPO in 2023 but instead raised capital in a private share sale that valued it at around €19 billion - Hg Capital controls 70% of it.

🇬🇧 Builder ai ‘Chief Wizard’ Sachin Dev Duggal made $20 million in share sales - yes, that guy who inflated his startup’s revenue and went on to convince investors put $250 million in a blockbuster round led by the Qatar Investment Authority.

💲 A stablecoin pegged to the Russian rouble and designed to allow cross-border payments in spite of western sanctions on Russia moved some $9.3 billion on a dedicated crypto exchange in just four months since it was launched - launched by a fugitive Moldovan oligarch and a Russian defence sector bank.

• meanwhile, the Swiss from Bank of International Settlements → stablecoins offer some promise on tokenisation but fall short of requirements to be the mainstay of the monetary system when set against the three key tests of singleness, elasticity and integrity.

Policy

🤖 The Danish government is changing copyright law to ensure that everybody has the right to their own body, facial features and voice - to clamp down on the creation and dissemination of AI-generated deepfakes, that is.

🇬🇧 Amazon to make a £40B investment in the UK - one of the ten largest private sector employers in the country.

🇪🇺 “The whole [European] Parliament is corrupt. It’s sensitive, but it’s part of the system.” - Do you expect those guys to get the tech opportunity in Europe? 😄

💪 Brexit was the single stupidest thing any country has ever done - hard to refute that.

Big business 

✍️ The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup can get the distribution before the incumbent can build the innovation - Cursor reached $100M ARR in 21 months and is eating Github’s lunch as we speak.

🚕 Nissan became the latest carmaker to apply for a banking license.

💲 Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company, again, overtaking Microsoft.

🇨🇳 A Chinese firm announced a BlackBerry-like smartphone with a physical keyboard.

 🤯 Ifty Ahmed was a very good venture capitalist, albeit a corrupt one.

Sentiment

🛍️ McKinsey put out a 2025 state of the consumer report.

🐻 Btw, the American consumer sentiment remains below December 2024, right after the elections; consumer views are still broadly consistent with an economic slowdown and an increase in inflation to come.

• I am still bear rather than bull on what’s to come - this week Middle East seems to have calmed down, the NATO event went on un-eventfully and we still have the American tariffs situation. The we can do whatever we want is far from an assuring sentiment and the longer uncertainty remains elevated, the more negative its impact on the economy.

• markets are seemingly optimist though, especially with the new wave of tech IPOs combined with the AI eferverscence from the private market - alas investors are starved for liquidity events, on both sides of the pond.

🧭 Speaking of NATO, you realize how bad of a shape Europe is in when you read about how its top politicians humiliated themselves at this week’s NATO reunion. Because the Russian threat to the European civilisation is more real than any regular Joe realises, and we’re with our pants down big time.

🇺🇸 Socialist Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary this week stunned the local elite.

• this will be interesting to follow in the November general elections - Zohran is a man of the little people in a city that’s the most progressive in US, and New York City’s first Muslim and first South Asian Democratic nominee for mayor.

• good or bad, that’s an open ended discussion - we are seeing cases like Zohran in Europe with every election in every country, and it’s a great reflexion of the times we live in, on both sides of the pond, people have had enough with the establishment and the endemic corruption of the politicians. And so, you don’t need a good economic program to be popular with the masses and get their vote but rather challenge the establishment in a credible way.

• notably, that’s also the core of what MAGA preaches, btw, and why they’re meeting/supporting all European extremist parties - those are perceived, incorrectly, as anti-establishments folks whereas most of them are in Russians pockets, and in Europe it’s common knowledge that Russians are heavily meddling and corrupting left and right politicians and influencers you’d expect least.

Closing notes

🤷 An American journalist briefly comes to London to do an event and capture the European tech zeitgeist - that’s all it takes.

🎙️ Q&A with Peter Thiel.

🔋 Andrej Karpathy: Software is changing (again)

🧞 Is Dude Perfect the next Disney?

🤓 The best VCs build needle magnets.

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

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