Volta, a London company founded this year, came out of stealth on Wednesday with roughly $300 million raised, a $2.4 billion valuation, and a six-year contract worth about $10 billion. The customer is reportedly Anthropic, and the first site is a 133 MW facility in Norway built with the crypto miner Bitdeer.
A company that did not exist in January now claims a compute pipeline above a gigawatt. Either European power and land have become the scarce input everyone wants, or this market is pricing things it cannot yet see.
Startups & Funding
Brussels writes its first growth cheque, and it goes to a satellite company
The Scaleup Europe Fund, the €5 billion vehicle set up by the Commission and managed by EQT, made its debut investment this week by co-leading a €1 billion Series F in ICEYE. The Finnish company runs one of the world's largest synthetic aperture radar constellations and supplies sovereign systems to seven European governments.
We flagged the fund's first cheques as the thing to watch in July, when Denmark's EIFO anchored it. The answer is radar satellites rather than compute; that is where Europe judges its growth-capital gap to be sharpest.
(EQT)
Berlin's Moss becomes a unicorn on a €30 million round
Moss, a Berlin expense-management company moving into finance automation, closed a €30 million Series C led by Portage at a €1 billion valuation. It reports over €70 million in annual recurring revenue across 5,000 businesses in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Austria.
The round size is the interesting part. A billion-euro valuation bought with €30 million of new money is a different animal from one bought with €300 million.
(Sifted)
Portugal puts recovery money behind space traffic control
Neuraspace, founded in 2020 and based in Coimbra, raised €15.6 million to expand its AI platform for tracking satellites and avoiding collisions. Only €6 million is a venture Series B; the other €9.6 million comes from Portugal's EU-backed Recovery and Resilience Plan.
It already monitors more than 600 satellites and holds contracts with the Portuguese Air Force and NATO. Building dual-use space awareness on pandemic recovery money is an unusual route, and one smaller member states may copy.
Products & Technology
A Zurich startup builds robots for the racks nobody can safely open
Exclaim Robotics left stealth with $4.95 million co-led by Founderful and Playfair. Its robots navigate a data hall unaided and work the front face of a rack, starting with fibre connectors, transceivers, and failed drives.
The thesis is narrow on purpose. The next generation of AI data centres distributes 800 volts DC inside the rack, which turns reseating a transceiver into arc-flash work.
(Sifted)
Olix triples its valuation in six months on optical chips
Olix, the UK company formerly called Flux Computing, raised $312 million at a $3.3 billion valuation for chips that run AI inference with light rather than electricity. Arm joined the round alongside the UK government's sovereign AI venture fund, with Reed Hastings investing personally.
In February it raised $220 million at just over $1 billion. Optical computing has promised more than it shipped for two decades; the question is whether these chips reach customers before the valuation needs feeding again.
(Tech.eu)
Bending Spoons buys Airtable at a fifth of its peak price
The Milan company agreed to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal valuing it at $1.285 billion, or roughly $2.25 billion once cash on the balance sheet is counted. Airtable was worth $11.7 billion in late 2021 and now carries about $480 million in annual recurring revenue.
It is Bending Spoons' first acquisition since listing on July 1. Buying deflated software and running it for cash depends on someone else having overpaid first, and the 2021 cohort still supplies targets.
Climate & Energy
A motor company bets that the cheapest rare earth is none
Advanced Electric Machines raised £16 million led by Barclays Climate Ventures, Northstar Ventures, and the Low Carbon Innovation Fund, with loan support from Innovate UK. It builds electric motors with no permanent magnets and no rare earth content, and has swapped copper windings for aluminium.
The motors are already made at commercial scale in Washington, in the north east of England. Every European carmaker holds a rare earth exposure it cannot hedge, so a working magnet-free motor is a supply-chain question before it is an efficiency one.
(Tech.eu)
Research & Deep Tech
Würzburg gets a maser to run warm
Physicists at the University of Würzburg published a silicon carbide maser in Nature Communications on Wednesday that runs continuously above room temperature. The team, led by Vladimir Dyakonov, engineered atomic defects whose quantum spins emit coherent microwaves when excited by light, then built a resonator good enough to sustain the oscillation.
Masers have needed cryogenics, which kept them in laboratories. This one reaches magnetic sensitivity near 20 picotesla in a material the chip industry already manufactures; that is the difference between a physics result and a component.
(Phys.org)
Arctic fires follow the lights, not just the heat
A University of Zurich team compared Arctic fire records from 2001 to 2013 against satellite measurements of artificial night-time light, using illumination as a proxy for settlements and industry. Fires occurred 2.5 times more often in lit areas than in climatically comparable dark ones.
The results are in Communications Earth & Environment, with first author Cengiz Akandil working alongside NASA Goddard and the University of Münster. It makes Arctic fire risk partly a question of where infrastructure goes, which is more tractable than the climate signal underneath it.
(Phys.org)
One to Watch
FuVeX takes Spanish long-range drones into the dual-use market
FuVeX, founded in Navarre in 2013 by Carlos Matilla, raised an oversubscribed €3 million round with SODENA, SEGO Venture, and Izertis Ventures, plus €400,000 from Spain's CDTI for a defence research project. Its long-range drones inspect critical infrastructure; the plan is defence and security across Europe and Latin America.
Watch whether a thirteen-year-old civil inspection firm can survive defence procurement timelines, and whether the CDTI grant becomes a programme of record. Spain has few drone makers this mature, so the answer shapes what its 2027 procurement can buy at home.
(FinSMEs)