One year after becoming the first private European company to conduct an orbital re-entry, ATMOS Space Cargo has raised €25.7 million to go from a single demonstrator to a three-vehicle fleet. Finnish airship maker Kelluu closed a NATO-backed round, quantum photonics spin-off Pixel Photonics moved from lab bench to chip, and the EIC awarded €118 million across thirty breakthrough research projects.
Startups & Funding
Kelluu raises €15M for autonomous airship surveillance, led by NATO Innovation Fund
Finnish deep tech company Kelluu builds and operates autonomous hydrogen-powered airships for persistent aerial surveillance. It closed a €15 million Series A led by the NATO Innovation Fund; the Fund's first investment in a Finnish company. Kelluu's fleet has logged over 50,000 kilometres, including twelve-hour Arctic missions through sustained GNSS jamming at temperatures as low as −33°C. The round also funds Kelluu AI Labs, the company's effort to build large-scale geospatial foundation models from the data its airships continuously collect. Keen Venture Partners, Swedish defence-focused Gungnir Capital, and Finnish state investor Tesi joined. (Tech.eu)
Seapoint raises €7.5M to become the financial home for European startup founders
Seapoint is an AI-native financial operations platform for European startups. It raised €7.5 million in seed funding led by London fintech investor 13books, bringing total raised to €10 million. Founded by Sean Mullaney, former European CIO at Stripe, with a team more than half of whom are Stripe alumni, the company consolidates what founders typically manage across multiple banks, accounting tools, and spreadsheets into a single interface covering bookkeeping, payroll, multi-currency accounts, and treasury. Former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson and Intercom co-founder Des Traynor are also backing. (BeBeez)
ShanX Medtech closes €15M seed for rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing
Rotterdam-based ShanX Medtech raised €15 million to advance its in-vitro diagnostic platform for rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing: a tool that identifies effective antibiotics far faster than conventional culture methods. Antimicrobial resistance is one of the EU's declared public health priorities. ShanX is positioned to fill a diagnostic gap that has persisted despite years of regulatory pressure, and the funding will support clinical validation and preparation for market launch. (Tech.eu)
Herbert Ventures launches €32.5M Fund I for European deep tech pre-seed and seed
Zurich-based Herbert Ventures has closed a €32.5 million debut fund to back deep tech founders and serial entrepreneurs at pre-seed and seed across Europe. It joins a growing number of specialist early-stage vehicles targeting hardware-intensive, science-heavy startups; a segment where generalist funds have historically underwritten too little risk, too late. (EU-Startups)
Products & Technology
ATMOS Space Cargo closes €25.7M Series A to scale Europe's orbital return fleet
Franco-German orbital logistics startup ATMOS Space Cargo closed a €25.7 million Series A co-led by Balnord and Expansion Ventures, with participation from the EIC Accelerator, OTB Ventures, Seraphim, and High-Tech Gründerfonds, among others. The raise comes exactly one year after ATMOS completed Europe's first private orbital re-entry with PHOENIX 1. Capital will fund an initial three-vehicle PHOENIX 2 fleet, early development of PHOENIX 3 (ten times the payload capacity of its predecessor), and ATMOS WORKS: a dedicated service line for governmental and defence customers seeking sovereign access to routine orbital return. Proof of concept to commercial infrastructure, in twelve months. (Tech.eu)
Advanced Machine Intelligence closes $1B seed — Europe's largest ever
Paris-based Advanced Machine Intelligence raised $1 billion at seed stage in Q1 2026, the largest seed-stage raise in European tech history. The company has shared limited public detail on its research agenda. But the round signals that investors are prepared to write continent-scale cheques to back sovereign AI research capacity inside Europe; a structural shift that would have been implausible three years ago. (Tech.eu)
Research & Deep Tech
Pixel Photonics raises €13.5M to bring quantum photon detectors to chip scale
Münster-based Pixel Photonics, a 2021 spin-off from the University of Münster, raised €13.5 million: a €5 million seed round led by Futury Capital, plus €8.5 million from the EIC Accelerator. The company makes waveguide-integrated superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (WI-SNSPDs), miniaturising the bulky cryogenic lab setups used in quantum optics onto compact chip-scale devices. Selected from roughly 1,000 EIC applicants as one of 61 winners, Pixel Photonics sits at the intersection of quantum sensing, secure communications, and European semiconductor manufacturing ambitions. (EU-Startups)
EIC awards €118M across 30 Pathfinder breakthrough research projects
The European Innovation Council has awarded €118 million to thirty new research teams under the 2025 EIC Pathfinder Challenges, selected from 647 eligible proposals; roughly €3.9 million per project. Priority areas include AI agents for cancer diagnosis, autonomous robot collectives for construction environments, biotech for climate-resilient crops, and waste-to-value devices for circular production of fuels and chemicals. Pathfinder funding typically runs four to five years, taking projects from early hypothesis to first demonstrator. It is, in aggregate, a meaningful supply-side bet on European deep tech. (EIC)
One to watch
Peak Quantum, a pre-seed quantum computing hardware company, raised €2.2 million this week. It's a small number. But the willingness of investors to back hardware-native quantum bets at this stage, independent of the established European incumbents, mirrors the early signals in quantum photonics and superconducting chips a few years before they became a distinct asset class. Worth following as the European quantum stack fills in below the headline names. (Sesamers)