The European Innovation Council's STEP Scale Up scheme awarded €146.5 million in equity to eight deep tech companies on 27 April, spanning quantum computing, space transportation, industrial biotech, and clean energy. The cohort includes Alice & Bob (France) building fault-tolerant quantum computers and Payload Aerospace (Spain) developing lunar and Martian cargo vehicles. EU institutional capital is now backing hardware-intensive, long-horizon bets in earnest. The ERC's concurrent announcement of Plus Grants for high-risk fundamental research adds weight to the same signal. (EIC)
Startups & Funding
Ineffable Intelligence (London) closed a $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion post-money valuation, the largest seed financing in European tech history. European investors are now writing venture-scale cheques at pre-product stage for frontier model research; the assumption that this territory belongs entirely to the US is no longer holding. (EU-Startups)
PAVE Space (Switzerland) raised $40 million to expand its in-orbit satellite transportation service, which uses a "kickstage" platform to reposition satellites between orbits within 24 hours. The constellation servicing market grows with satellite density in low Earth orbit; demand is early but accelerating. (Tech.eu)
Onodrim Industries (Amsterdam) secured €40 million in seed funding to scale its defence and industrial technology stack, integrating hardware, software, and manufacturing into platforms for European infrastructure. The round reflects growing appetite for non-US sovereign suppliers as EU member states accelerate defence spending under EDIP and related programmes. (Tech.eu)
QuoIntelligence (Frankfurt) closed a €7.3 million Series A led by Elevator Ventures, Raiffeisen Bank International's VC arm, to expand its EU-compliant threat intelligence platform. The company's KARLA AI analyst synthesises cyber, physical, and geopolitical signals for organisations navigating NIS2 and DORA compliance; it estimates the addressable market at over 160,000 European organisations. (TechFundingNews)
Hades Mining (Germany) raised €15 million for its laser-based drilling technology, applied to both geothermal energy extraction and critical mineral recovery from deep underground. The approach replaces mechanical rotary drilling with precision lasers, cutting time and cost for deep wells; the timing is good as the EU's domestic critical minerals strategy moves into higher gear. (Tech.eu)
Products & Technology
Euro-Office, developed by Nextcloud and Ionos in partnership with XWiki and the EuroStack initiative, entered technical preview this month as an open-source, sovereign alternative to Microsoft 365. The suite forks OnlyOffice's open-source components, audited and rebuilt to strip Russian-origin proprietary code, and is designed so "anyone can check it themselves." A stable release is targeted for summer 2026. (Open Source For You)
Interloom (Germany) raised $16.5 million for its AI-powered work navigation platform, which automates enterprise tasks by learning from organisational knowledge and ERP data. The product targets wholesale distributors and mid-market B2B businesses where workflow automation has lagged behind consumer AI deployments. (Tech.eu)
Research & Deep Tech
Alice & Bob (France) and Quantware (Netherlands) both received EIC STEP Scale Up funding this week. Alice & Bob is building toward a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer; Quantware is developing a 3D quantum architecture for scaling qubit counts. The two companies take different technical approaches, and funding both in the same cohort suggests the EIC is placing a portfolio bet on quantum rather than picking a single architecture winner. (EIC)
Again Bio (Denmark) uses AI-designed biocatalysts combined with waste CO₂ as feedstock to rebuild chemical production processes from scratch. Also in the STEP cohort, the company is part of an emerging class of industrial biotech ventures attacking decarbonisation at the process level, not through downstream offsets. (EIC)
One to watch
Chiral Nano (Switzerland) raised $12 million to build precision manufacturing equipment for integrating nanomaterials into semiconductor and quantum devices. The company operates at a layer below most visible deep tech investment: not building the quantum computer, but manufacturing the components that go into it. As the quantum and photonics supply chain Europeanises, companies solving fabrication bottlenecks at this level become disproportionately important. (Tech.eu)