Brussels spent the week attaching clocks to things. An age gate for social media, a handling fee on parcels, a 42 working day deadline for defence permits, each with a date and a default if nobody acts.
The money moved the other way. The EU's own EUR 5 billion scaleup fund opened talks with a London company, Revolut said it wants New York alongside London, and new data showed 80 of the 86 unicorns founded by Central and Eastern Europeans were built elsewhere.
Policy & Regulation
The KIDS Act makes platforms prove they are safe
The Commission published the EU KIDS Act on 17 September. It bans social media accounts for under 13s, sets an EU minimum account age of 15, and gives 13 and 14 year olds a parent-managed account with a limited contact list.
The reversal is the mechanism that matters. Platforms must file compliance plans showing the service is age-appropriate by design, instead of regulators proving harm afterwards.
Enforcement runs on Digital Services Act machinery: a 90 day fast-track procedure and the existing ceiling of 6% of global turnover. AI chatbots are off by default for minors.
Parliament had already voted for something stricter
The day the Act landed, MEPs adopted a non-binding report on minors online by 395 votes to 136, with 80 abstentions. Rapporteur Sandro Ruotolo wants supervised access from 13 to 15 capped at one hour a day, a ban on addictive design, and age verification that keeps no personal data.
Parliament has marked where it will push in negotiation. The one hour cap is the number to watch.
(Eunews)
Parcels from outside the EU get a price, and customs gets an agency
Parliament approved the Customs Code reform on 16 September. Platforms facilitating sales from outside the EU become the importer of record and must hold authorised economic operator or trusted trader status, the part aimed at shell-company imports.
A per-parcel handling fee starts no later than 1 November 2026, at an amount the Commission sets and reviews every two years. Sellers holding EU warehouse stock pay less.
A new EU Customs Authority in Lille will run a Data Hub replacing more than 111 national systems, optional from 2031, mandatory from 2034. The fee arrives in six weeks; the plumbing takes eight years.
Defence permits now expire in the applicant's favour
Also on 16 September, Parliament adopted the three Omnibus V texts, the permits one by 540 votes to 105. National authorities have 42 working days to decide on a defence readiness project, extendable twice by up to 60 days, and silence past the deadline counts as approval.
The package also raises procurement thresholds, stretches framework agreements from seven to ten years, and allows exemptions from environmental rules where justified for defence.
Europe is trying tacit approval first on weapons factories rather than on grid connections or housing. Anyone who wants it applied elsewhere now has a precedent to cite.
Capital & Investment
Bulgaria gets its first space unicorn, with the EIC on the cap table
EnduroSat raised $205 million, about EUR 178 million, at a valuation above $1 billion. Riot Ventures and Atreides Management led, with the European Innovation Council alongside Google Ventures, Founders Fund, and Lux Capital.
This is the Sofia company's third round in sixteen months, after EUR 43 million in May 2025 and $104 million that October. It builds modular satellites from 70kg to five tonnes and has launched 103 of them.
Bulgaria has designated the Sofia site a national priority investment. The same money also opens a US factory, so European public capital got in early and the manufacturing base is already splitting in two.
The EU's scaleup fund is in talks with a London company
The EUR 5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund, seeded with EUR 1 billion from the Commission and managed by EQT, is discussing a role in ElevenLabs' raise of more than $500 million. ElevenLabs was valued at $11 billion in February and reportedly at $22 billion in a July secondary.
We covered its licensed-catalogue music model last week. The company sits in London, outside the EU, with founders from Warsaw and a growing Polish team; its chief executive has floated a Warsaw dual listing in two to three years.
After Iceye, Lovable, Mistral AI, and Tandem Health, the question the Commission will eventually face is what the EUR 1 billion bought that private capital would not have funded anyway.
(TNW)
Revolut wants two listings and one investor base
Nik Storonsky told Les Echos that Revolut is planning a dual listing in London and New York, targeting $150 billion to $200 billion, no earlier than 2028. A July secondary priced the company near $115 billion, up from $75 billion in November.
He was blunt about why: the United States has the deeper pool of institutional money. We noted the conditional US banking licence three weeks ago; this is the same logic applied to the share register.
(Euronews)
A EUR 8 million Paris company becomes the front door to the Commission's cloud
Cycloid, which has raised EUR 8 million in total, has been picked as the developer-facing portal for the Commission's EUR 180 million, six-year sovereign cloud framework. Up to 5,000 EC developers get one interface across Post Telecom, STACKIT, Scaleway, and Proximus.
Sovereignty frameworks usually get judged on which hyperscalers they shut out. This one will be judged on whether the layer above four European providers is good enough that developers stop asking for AWS.
Talent & Workforce
Six of 86
Dealroom's European Diaspora Index counts 86 unicorns co-founded by someone from Central or Eastern Europe, worth roughly $1.8 trillion together. Six were founded in the founder's home country; 76 of the other 80 were founded in the United States, and OpenAI, xAI, Databricks, and Snowflake hold 78% of the value.
The index records where people went, not where they would go now. The EnduroSat round above is the counter-example the numbers do not yet contain.
One to Watch
The frontier lab meeting nobody has scheduled
In the State of the Union we flagged last week, von der Leyen said the dangers of self-improving models are becoming clearer, and announced she will invite the leading AI labs to discuss how public authorities can help pace the frontier. She also promised safety cooperation with Canada and the UK on model evaluation.
No date, no attendee list, no legal basis. Watch whether it gets a date before the AI Act's next implementation milestones, and whether European labs are in the room or only the American ones being asked to slow down.
(Euronews)