QuantWare, the Delft-based quantum processor company spun out of TU Delft and QuTech in 2021, closed a €152 million ($178 million) Series B on May 5; it is the largest private round any dedicated quantum processor company has raised. Intel Capital, In-Q-Tel (the CIA's strategic investment arm), and ETF Partners joined a syndicate including FORWARD.one and Invest-NL in an oversubscribed round tied to the launch of VIO-40K, a processor architecture targeting 10,000 qubits: one hundred times larger than today's commercial state of the art. The capital funds KiloFab, a dedicated open-architecture fabrication facility in Delft that will expand production capacity twenty-fold. QuantWare already ships to more than 50 customers across 20 countries; it is the largest commercial quantum processor supplier by volume in the world. (Business Wire)
Startups & Funding
Legora extended its Series D to $600 million on April 30, adding NVIDIA's NVentures and Atlassian as corporate backers and reaching a $5.6 billion post-money valuation. The Stockholm legal-AI company has passed $100 million in ARR and serves more than 1,000 organisations across 50 markets. It is now the European company most directly contesting US-based Harvey for dominance in enterprise legal workflow; few European SaaS companies have reached that scale at this speed. (Tech.eu)
eleQtron closed a €57 million Series A on the same day: also May 5. The round was led by Schwarz Digits, the tech arm of the Lidl and Kaufland parent, with the EIC Fund participating alongside Earlybird and development banks NRW.BANK and IFB Hamburg. The University of Siegen spinout builds trapped-ion quantum computers using its proprietary MAGIC technology, which controls qubits with microwaves rather than lasers; the company argues this reduces the complexity of scaling. It already has an order backlog exceeding €60 million and more than 100 employees. (EU-Startups)
The EIC STEP Scale Up scheme announced eight companies eligible for a combined €146.5 million in equity investments, between €10 and €30 million each, from a €300 million annual pool. The shortlist spans Alice & Bob (France, cat-qubit quantum), Reverion (Germany, reversible biogas fuel cells), Aignostics (Germany, AI pathology), Endurosat (Bulgaria, space intelligence), Payload Aerospace (Spain, lunar and Mars cargo transport), Again Bio (Denmark, CO2-feedstock biocatalysts), Greenland Resources (Denmark, critical minerals), and QuantWare. The scheme targets a specific financing gap: the €50–150 million round size that European deep-tech companies have historically struggled to close without turning to US investors. (EIC)
European venture funding reached $17.6 billion in Q1 2026, up nearly 30% year over year. AI claimed more than half of European venture dollars for the first time. The anchor was AMI, the Paris-based company founded by former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun, which closed a $1 billion seed round; the largest seed round ever raised on the continent. (Crunchbase)
Products & Technology
Inbolt, the Paris-based physical-AI company, is expanding into the US and Japan after deploying its 3D vision and robotic guidance system in more than 70 factories across Europe. Its technology enables industrial robotic arms to adapt in real time to variable environments; conventional machine vision handles this poorly, and Inbolt has logged more than 20 million robot cycles to prove the gap. The move follows a €15 million Series A led by Exor Ventures in 2024, and takes Inbolt into automotive and electronics markets where automating complex assembly has long resisted solution. (Inbolt)
Aignostics (Berlin) launched a new foundation model for computational pathology in January 2026, built on AI work developed alongside Mayo Clinic and Boehringer Ingelheim for drug discovery pipelines. Selected this week for EIC STEP Scale Up consideration. The company's thesis is that biopharma AI needs models trained on curated clinical data, not generalised ones trained on everything; its work with two of the field's most credible institutions is the evidence base for that claim. (Aignostics)
Research & Deep Tech
Alice & Bob is investing $50 million in a new fabrication lab north of Paris, building in-house chip production capacity as part of France's €500 million PROQCIMA programme; the programme aims to deliver a 128-logical-qubit fault-tolerant demonstrator by 2030 and a 2,048-qubit commercial system by 2035. The startup's cat-qubit approach encodes error correction into the physical structure of the qubit itself, which Alice & Bob argues will substantially reduce the overhead required to reach fault tolerance compared to conventional superconducting architectures. In April, it also secured a €3.4 million ARPA-E award from the US Department of Energy to explore quantum-assisted discovery of rare-earth-free magnets. (TNW / EU-Startups)
Again Bio (Copenhagen) is replacing petrochemical feedstocks with AI-designed biocatalysts that convert waste CO2 into industrial chemicals. Selected for EIC STEP Scale Up. The ambition is not to clean up a manufacturing process at the margin; it is to attack the feedstock logic of an entire industry. No revenue figures have been disclosed. (EIC)
One to watch
PLD Space (Spain) is building MIURA 5, a reusable orbital launcher for small and medium satellites, with a test flight targeted for this year from CSG Kourou in French Guiana. The company closed a €180 million Series C in March 2026, led by Mitsubishi Electric alongside Spanish public investors, and followed it in April with a €30 million EIB venture debt facility; total 2026 financing stands at €210 million. European launch capacity has grown quickly, but sovereign access to orbit remains a structural priority; PLD Space is one of the few European companies with a credible near-term path to commercial orbital launches. (Spaceflight Now / EIB)