Stockholm-based Neko Health closed a €612.7 million Series C on July 15, one of the largest healthtech rounds Europe has seen this year. The same week, Dutch defence startup Destinus was named prime contractor on Bliksem EXO, a five-company consortium building Europe's first sovereign upper-layer missile shield.
Both are deep-tech companies scaling fast. One is doing it on private capital chasing a consumer market; the other is doing it inside a government-backed industrial programme. Neither route is the safer bet, but each shows a different answer to the same question: how does a European deep-tech company get big.
Startups & Funding
Neko Health raises €612.7M as Daniel Ek's health-scan clinics prepare a US launch
Neko Health, the Stockholm-based preventive healthcare company co-founded by Spotify's Daniel Ek, closed a €612.7 million ($700 million) Series C on July 15. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, co-led by O.G. Venture Partners, with existing backers Atomico, General Catalyst, and Lakestar returning alongside new investors Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum, and BDT & MSD.
The company's 60-minute full-body scans have drawn over 350,000 registered members since its 2023 launch, and more than 100,000 have already completed one. Neko says clinics are now profitable at the individual-location level, and the fresh capital will fund its first US clinics in New York and other cities this year.
(EU-Startups / Sifted)
Destinus becomes prime contractor on Europe's first sovereign missile shield
Dutch defence startup Destinus was named consortium lead and prime contractor for Bliksem EXO on July 14, a new programme to build Europe's first sovereign exo-atmospheric missile defence system. MBDA Deutschland and Airbus Defence and Space are among the four other companies in the consortium, alongside Safran Electronics & Defense.
Destinus will lead development of the interceptor's kill vehicle, designed to destroy medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles above the atmosphere through direct impact rather than an explosive warhead. Joint engineering starts in August 2026, with a space test of the kill vehicle planned for 2027.
Founded in 2021, Destinus has spent four years building autonomous aircraft and strike systems. This is its first turn coordinating a multinational programme alongside contractors many times its size.
Munich's Project Q raises €15M Series A eleven months after its last round
Munich- and Berlin-based Project Q closed a €15 million Series A on July 14, led by Expeditions with participation from German defence group Hensoldt and VC firm Heliad. It is the company's second raise in under a year.
The capital funds further development of HYDRIS, an open-source platform that connects legacy defence systems, sensors, and command infrastructure through a vendor-neutral architecture, aimed at reducing European militaries' reliance on foreign-built digital systems. Founded in 2021, the company is backed entirely by European investors.
Products & Technology
Amsterdam's Monumental raises $32M to put bricklaying robots to work at scale
Amsterdam-based Monumental closed a $32 million Series B on July 15, led by Khosla Ventures. The company builds autonomous bricklaying robots and deploys them as a construction service rather than selling the hardware directly, absorbing the integration work that has slowed robotics adoption on building sites.
Its fleet of more than 150 robots is already active across the Netherlands and the UK and has helped build over 100 structures. The new funding goes toward a larger engineering team and an expanded range of construction tasks the robots can perform.
(Tech.eu)
Climate & Energy
Lisbon's Pollen raises €3.2M to make battery swapping work across motorcycle brands
Lisbon-based Pollen raised €3.2 million in seed funding, announced July 15, led by Pale Blue Dot and Mustard Seed Maze. The startup has built a universal battery for electric mopeds and motorcycles that works across manufacturers, a problem that has kept swap networks confined to a handful of Asian markets where one company controls both the vehicle and the battery.
Three stations are already live at Galp fuel stations in Lisbon, swapping batteries in seconds and running automated health diagnostics on every unit that comes back in. The company plans to expand to more European markets and sees the same swappable-battery model applying to delivery vehicles and marine electric propulsion.
(Tech.eu)
Research & Deep Tech
Researchers identify how plant roots sense and steer away from rot
A team including researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria found that plant roots detect decaying plant matter through pH gradients left by fungal decomposition and actively grow away from it, a response the researchers call saprotropism. The study, published in Science on July 10, tested the response in Arabidopsis and in crops including wheat, canola, and tomato.
The mechanism only triggers on decaying plant material, not animal matter, and works by redistributing a stress hormone that redirects root growth before contact. It gives plant breeders a specific pathway to target for crops that need to grow in soil with more decaying organic matter, rather than a general description of root avoidance behaviour.
QuiX Quantum delivers a room-temperature universal photonic quantum computer to Germany's DLR
Dutch company QuiX Quantum announced Carina on July 14, a universal photonic quantum computing architecture built to run in standard data centres rather than a physics lab. The core hardware has been delivered to the German Aerospace Center's Quantum Computing Initiative under the Universal Photonic Quantum Computer project.
Unlike earlier photonic systems limited to narrow tasks like boson sampling, Carina implements a full gate set, meaning it can in principle run any gate-based quantum algorithm. QuiX says the system is a stepping stone toward Dedalo, its next architecture aimed at logical, error-corrected qubits.
(The Quantum Insider / Quantum Computing Report)
One to Watch
Whether Destinus hits its 2027 deadline for a space test of Europe's missile interceptor
Bliksem EXO is a fast timeline for a five-company consortium that has not yet signed a binding agreement. Joint engineering starts in August 2026, and the group plans to test the exo-atmospheric kill vehicle in space in 2027, with a formal Consortium Agreement still to be negotiated within three months of the July 14 letter of intent.
Watch whether Destinus, a company four years old, can hold that schedule while coordinating partners the size of Airbus and Safran. If it does, it becomes the template for how European startups earn prime-contractor status on sovereign defence programmes rather than just supplying components to them.