Munich-based Quantum Systems closed a $1.2 billion Series D on July 2, and five days earlier Munich-adjacent Proxima Fusion closed €411 million, the largest fusion round in European history. Two of the biggest deep-tech checks Europe has ever written, both landing in the same city in the same week.
The split is the story. One company builds autonomous drones for the battlefield; the other is trying to build a power plant that doesn't exist yet, using physics that hasn't been proven at scale.
Defence tech drew 43% of European deep-tech venture money in 2025, roughly double its 2022 share. This week is a reminder that the other bets are still getting placed, just at a smaller and rarer scale.
Startups & Funding
Quantum Systems raises $1.2B, doubling its valuation to $8B
Munich-based Quantum Systems closed a $1.2 billion Series D on July 2, co-led by Blackstone, Airbus, Advent, and Noteus, with Fidelity, Wellington Management, and BOND also participating. The round takes the drone maker's valuation to roughly $8 billion, more than double the $3.5 billion it was valued at in late 2025.
Alongside the financing, Airbus Defence and Space agreed to deepen its partnership with Quantum Systems on next-generation autonomous systems. The company's drones flew more than 19,000 missions in Ukraine in 2025.
It has expanded production into Romania, the Baltics, the US, and Australia. This is now the largest defence-tech financing round in Europe to date.
(CNBC / EU-Startups)
Orbit Capital closes €107M venture debt fund for CEE scaleups
Prague and Warsaw-based Orbit Capital closed its Growth Debt Fund II at €107 million in early July, above its original target, anchored by the European Investment Fund alongside Rentea, Česká spořitelna, and Conseq. The fund targets post-Series A companies with at least €3 million in revenue and 30% year-on-year growth, writing tickets of €3 million to €15 million.
Five investments are already made, including Czech firms Sloneek and IAG, and Polish company Talkin' Things. It is a quieter kind of capital than a headline Series D, but venture debt is the layer that lets CEE scaleups grow without diluting further.
Dutch voice-AI startup Whispp raises €5M with EIC backing
Leiden-based Whispp raised €5 million to scale its on-device voice reconstruction technology, which restores natural-sounding speech for people with speech impairments such as stuttering or dysarthria. The round was led by LUMO Labs, with additional non-dilutive funding from the EIC Accelerator.
The company runs its models on-device rather than in the cloud, a deliberate choice given how sensitive real-time speech data is. It is a small round next to Quantum Systems and Proxima Fusion, but it is the kind of narrow, well-targeted deep-tech bet the EIC's blended-finance model exists to support.
Products & Technology
Prague's EquiLibre hits $500M valuation trading with poker-AI methods
EquiLibre Technologies, founded by former DeepMind and Google researchers in Prague, closed a Series A at a €438 million ($500 million) valuation led by Creandum. The company applies reinforcement learning, the technique behind DeepMind's poker and Go agents, to live financial trading rather than the supervised learning most trading algorithms use.
Its agents now trade billions of dollars daily on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq through a partnership with Tower Research Capital, and the company says it hasn't had a negative month since going live last year. Most of the new capital goes toward compute, to build one of the larger dedicated compute clusters in the region.
(TechCrunch / Tech Funding News)
Brussels proposes a Cloud and AI Development Act to close Europe's compute gap
The European Commission tabled the Cloud and AI Development Act on July 2, a legislative push to expand European cloud and data-centre capacity as the foundation for its AI ambitions. The consultation runs to August 27.
It lands the same week Nvidia said a record 35 AI supercomputers are now in development across Europe, backed by close to €10 billion in EuroHPC commitments and a separate €20 billion InvestAI facility meant to seed AI gigafactories. The legislation is the attempt to make sure the compute gets built on European terms rather than simply hosted for someone else.
(Global Government Forum / NVIDIA Newsroom)
Climate & Energy
Proxima Fusion raises €411M, the largest fusion round in European history
Munich-based Proxima Fusion raised €411 million ($468 million) on July 7, at a €2.4 billion valuation, led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures with RWE and Google as strategic investors. KfW Capital, SPRIND, and the EIC Fund joined a long list of returning backers.
The money funds Alpha, a net-energy stellarator demonstrator being built near Munich in partnership with the state of Bavaria, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, and RWE. Stellarators are a harder engineering problem than the tokamak design most fusion startups chase, but Proxima is betting the steadier plasma confinement pays off once the reactor has to run continuously rather than in a lab.
(Proxima Fusion / Sifted)
Research & Deep Tech
Spanish researchers find a natural brake on tumour growth
A team led by the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria and CIC bioGUNE identified how the protein ASPA helps prevent cancer-associated fibroblasts, the cells in a tumour's microenvironment that drive growth and invasion, from activating. The work was published in Nature Communications on July 7.
The finding gives researchers a specific molecular target rather than a general description of how tumours spread, and a way to flag which cancers are more likely to turn aggressive before they do.
(ERC)
Spain's Quside ships quantum-security hardware built on a decade of photonics research
Barcelona's Quside, spun out of the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), is now shipping commercial quantum-random-number-generation hardware to customers worldwide, according to reporting on Spain's semiconductor strategy published July 3. The company is one of the clearest cases of Spanish photonics research turning into a shipping product rather than a lab demo.
Spain isn't trying to compete with Germany or the Netherlands on chip manufacturing scale. Its bet is narrower: photonics, quantum hardware, and chip design, areas where a smaller ecosystem can still own a real piece of the stack.
One to Watch
Whether fusion catches up to defence tech's share of deep-tech capital
Defence and security startups took 43% of European deep-tech venture funding in 2025, roughly double their 2022 share. Proxima Fusion's €411 million round is one of the few climate hard-tech deals of comparable size this year, and fusion overall remains a fraction of what drone and autonomy companies are raising.
Watch whether Proxima's round pulls more capital toward fusion and other capital-intensive climate bets over the second half of 2026, or whether it stays the exception that proves how lopsided the deep-tech capital split has become.