Hola people!

It’s Sunday, it’s a new edition of Sunday CET. Today’s stories include the French doing PR and international investors in their ecosystem, Builder AI founder plotting to re-purchase the company for scraps and the Germany’s best investor (who dat?).

And a whole lotta more - ping me with thoughts and comments.

Enjoy,
Dragos

Market talk

This week, Dealroom put out a report claiming that Paris surpassed London as Europe's leading tech ecosystem. The claim is based on a technical observation and reminds me of the old saying ‘if you torture the data, it will tell anything you want to hear’ - while London consistently attracts higher funding amounts and sees the most closed deals in Europe by far, Paris emerged based on estimated valuation gains from the funding rounds and this is how the French kicked London ass in social media this week.

It’s a classical PR twist meant to bring in clicks and attention at least once a year, when Macron convenes the local ecosystem. And at the end of the day, it’s just an ego thing, right? - and what would we do in our little European ecosystem without the French ego? 😃 The whole continent is driven by nationalistic ego but that’s a topic for another day.

Jokes aside, France has spent a lot of money on startups to get where it is today ($8 out $10 comes from the government via BPIFrance, btw) and Macron explicitly made his agenda to push tech startups to a country that still has its peculiar socialist way of running a market-based economy. And this is not just good, it’s fantastic for a lot of reasons and a great example to any other European country! And besides making tech startups the new hipster trend for the local bourgeois, this actually led to a bit of renaissance making some of the French tech expats to actually return to the country - plenty of $ available and lower competition than in London/Bay Area is a great USP, n'est-ce pas?

However - let’s not get carried away. How many anecdotes do you know about non-French startup founders from anywhere in Europe saying ‘I am moving to Paris to raise money and build tech’ as opposed to, say London? Not that many, I bet - that’s because there’s not. The general tech startup trend in France, Sweden, Spain, Romania or any Euro corner is moving out from Europe to the US - either directly or via London. Not to or even via Paris.

Having said that, I thought it’d be fitting to have a look at the international spenders on French tech startups from the past 16 months or so. Below some quick findings.

If we put aside YC, which incubated 30 startups since winter 2024, it’s not that many international investors that are super active in France. At early stage, Speedinvest and Seedcamp take the lion share, of course, LocalGlobe is in there too, Heartcore did some non-crypto as well (they have a French crypto guy running a sub-fund), FJ Labs bien sur (Fabrice is French), Matterwave, Moonfire, Verve and Cherry made a few deals too.

From multi-stage funds, the usual suspects include Balderton, EQT, Index, 20vc now that they have a French team and the Americans, with and without the scouts - Accel, Sequoia, a16z, Headline, GC, Lightspeed did one too. Some late stage dealers did their thing - DST Global, Ribbit, GreenOaks, Base10.

Data per Nordic 9, which took less than a minute to extract the above intel. You should subscribe if data is your thing btw, N9 is one of the better datasets solely focused on investors activity in Europe - and not saying because I have built it and nurture it every day, but have already a few million data entries on investors dealing across more than 30 countries, super detailed and professional, cleaned out to the dot, unlike other vendors out there. 😀 

Signals

Interesting deals

🇩🇰 Fortiv (AI-native platform for regulatory compliance) - pre-seed
🇫🇷 Tamtam (end-to-end data platform for sales people) - seed
🇩🇪 sensmore (physical AI) - seed
🇬🇧 Rivan (modular, vertically integrated, synthetic fuel plants) - seed

• we add more of those on Linkedin.

Conversation starters

• Builder ai went under because lenders started calling their money back and strapped the company of cash. The numbers were cooked - 2024 revenues were revised down from $220 million to $55 million, and 2023 revenues dropped from $180 million to $45 million. Meanwhile, the founder plots to buy the failed company for $10 million in initial funding, with $25 million needed before the company has to raise money again - Builder’s last known valuation exceeded $1.3 billion, achieved during its Series D funding round in May 2023. The founder stepped down back in March exactly because of the scrutiny over the above financial practices.

• Philipp Moehring was declared investor of the year in Germany - he totally deserves the love, besides him being a super cool guy, Tiny has one of the more interesting early stage portfolio in Europe. PS. Don’t tell the Germans they’re being ridiculous, their ego is as big as the French above 😀 

• Taavet and Sten are at it again and put together the largest Nordic hub for tech to be opened in Talinn in 2027.

• Klarna’s CEO presented the company’s quarterly earnings yesterday via an AI-generated avatar + UBS has built virtual versions of 35 of its 720 analysts doing video for customers.

• Strava was just valued by Sequoia at $2.2B at <$500M in ARR while also Sequoia bought Clay at $1.5B earlier this month, due to a combo of hype and explosive growth (6X last year).

• btw, OnlyFans is also for sale - $8B is the asking price, at $6.3B revenue for 2023 (ICYMI, OF’s British founders are out with a competitor)

The road to 100M ARR

This week I had a closer, ‘compare and contrast’ look at two fundraising deals:

• one from France and the other Germany

• one valued at 15M-ish (seed) the other at almost 100M (series A)

• both building biz in specific energy verticals complementing each other

• SAAS+marketplace plays, model breakdown, revenue dynamics, market drivers, customer profiles and the fast path to building a 100M ARR business.

• promising European assets that are not optimised for Silicon Valley, btw

My findings are detailed in tomorrow’s intel, which is fairly comprehensive every week, and to which you can sign up for here.

Worth noting

🤖 Story of the week in the tech world is OpenAI buying Jony Ive’s AI hardware startup.

• they’ve been working together on a new hardware device for a couple of years already - that’s just a market signal (which wiped off $60B off of Apple’s market value), with a nice cinematic trailer teasing that OpenAI will start producing the said-hardware later next year.

• there’s skepticism out there, to which I concur.

🇸🇪 You know who was an investor in Jony Ive’s above-business just acquired by OpenAI? Klarna’s CEO - who is an active investor on both sides of the ocean.

 Trump threatened a 25% tarriff if Apple doesn’t build iPhones in America.

• is it time yet to make a switch and start buying Nothing?

• Apple has enough problems as is, sales are going down, totally missed on AI, OpenAI is doing physical AI instead of them, and the law forced them to open up the App Stores to third party payments.

• it looks like the company badly needs a new CEO to do what Satya did with Microsoft - the only upside, if you can call it so, is that you can’t take Trump’s tariff threats too seriously when they’re made public.

🤯 Another crazy stuff this week was Trump administration revoking Harvard's ability to enroll international students.

• the ability of attracting the best of the best from all over the world is one of America’s strongest point. Or was prior to Trump’s new mandate.

• for those not following, the beef started with Trump’s attacks as a response to Harvard handling of antisemitism allegations, but quickly evolved into a broader culture war battle under the broader America-first, anti-globalist messaging.

• the school has become a liberal symbol of elites in a country that’s either populist MAGA or an enemy of the state -

• even crazier is that Americans are increasingly reluctant to express freely their opinions, in a country which, again, it used to be the bedrock for freedom of speech.

⚙️ This week Google made public some cool tools to geek out with - they’re catching up fast and plastered AI into all the enterprise and consumers tools.

₿ Stablecoins are becoming a thing and the Genius Act that was passed by the US this week will have a material impact in the market.

🎙️ Jon Stewart on the latest Bill Simmons podcast is a good listen.

• I am a regular consumer of Bill’s shows btw, he's a journalist who left ESPN to build his media business, which he sold after four years for $250 million to Daniel Ek/Spotify.

• also notable - ICYMI, this winter Simmons/Spotify hired Zach Lowe, the best NBA writer on the planet, if you’re into NBA, he’s your man.

🇷🇺 France barred Telegram founder Pavel Durov from traveling to US.

• Durov/Telegram is Putin’s tool, this week he tried to meddle in the Romanian elections btw.

🇪🇸 Two from Madrid → the main airport Barajas has a homeless problem + and Jeff Bezos did his bachelor party in Madrid.

• btw, I will be in Madrid the next few weeks, ping me if you around.

💲 Tesla’s CFO received a record $139 million paycheck in 2025, the highest for any finance chief and more than most CEOs

🇹🇼 Jensen Huang keynote in Taiwan at Computex this week.

🧲 The agentic web and original sin.

🍹 People stopped drinking because of screen time rather than health concerns.

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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