TEKEVER closed the first $580 million of a Series D at a $6.4 billion valuation, led by Baillie Gifford and UC Investments, the University of California's investment office. It is UC's first direct investment in Europe, and it makes TEKEVER the most valuable technology company ever headquartered in Portugal.
The raise follows the British Army's choice of TEKEVER's AR5 drone for CORVUS, a surveillance programme worth up to £400 million over ten years. Ricardo Mendes now says an IPO is "on the horizon" and that TEKEVER plans to buy its way through an industry that is consolidating.
Two decades of building aircraft in Portugal got the company here; the money for the next step comes partly from California. Further down this week's list the backers are closer to home: Dutch and EU public funds in Morphotonics, legal publishers in Noxtua, and two national agencies paying for chip design.
(ECO)
Startups & Funding
Verda becomes a unicorn five months after its last equity round
Verda, the Helsinki AI cloud formerly called DataCrunch, raised €164.8 million led by Emergence Capital, with Supermicro, MUFG Innovation Partners, the pension insurer Varma, and the state investor Tesi. It is the company's third financing of 2026, after a €102 million equity round in April and the €22 million Nordic Investment Bank loan we covered in July.
Verda reported a €143.85 million annualised revenue run rate in July and runs its Finnish data centres on renewable power. Supermicro, which makes the servers GPU clouds run on, is now a shareholder.
Basecamp Research raises $140 million to turn its gene atlas into medicines
London's Basecamp Research closed a $140 million Series C led by S32, with NVIDIA, Anthropic's Anthology Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund, and the UK's Sovereign AI unit. Its models are trained on the Trillion Gene Atlas, sequence data collected through partnerships in more than 30 countries.
The first target is in vivo cell therapy: reprogramming a patient's cells inside the body instead of extracting and re-engineering them at hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient. The programmes are still preclinical, and the clinic is where a data advantage either becomes a drug or does not.
Legal publishers take majority control of Noxtua
Berlin's Noxtua raised more than €100 million in a Series C that hands majority ownership to C.H.Beck, the Munich legal publisher founded in 1763. It is Beck's largest investment ever, and Austria's MANZ joins alongside partner publishers in Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Sweden, and Bulgaria.
Earlier backers including KDDI and the law firms CMS and Dentons sold out, though CMS stays on as anchor client.
Legora, reportedly in talks at around $8.5 billion, sells workflow to law firms. Noxtua is betting that in civil-law Europe the durable asset is the commentary and case law the publishers own.
NATO's fund and In-Q-Tel back a Stockholm radio link
Terasi, a spin-out from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, raised an €11 million seed co-led by the NATO Innovation Fund and Join Capital, with In-Q-Tel, the US intelligence community's venture arm, and D3. It builds pocket-sized, high-frequency wireless links that carry gigabit speeds without fibre or towers.
James Campion pitches it for places where satellites and spectrum may be contested. The same property matters for grids and emergency services after sabotage or storms, and the Swedish state lender Almi Invest is among the returning backers.
(Tech.eu)
Products & Technology
Morphotonics sells the machines that make display glasses
Veldhoven's Morphotonics raised more than €40 million in a Series B, with Invest-NL joining 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, BOM, the EIC Fund, and the EIB. Its large-area nanoimprint machines press nanoscale patterns into liquid resin, cure them with UV light, and repeat the pattern across big panels.
Its Cypris platform makes waveguides, the transparent parts that put an image in front of the eye. Revenue tripled from 2024 to 2025 with customers in China, Taiwan, the US, and Europe, and Hugo da Silva now wants the same process to make co-packaged optics for data centres.
Lightspring prints the lens straight onto the photonic chip
Lightspring, spun out of the FEMTO-ST institute in Besançon, raised €3.1 million in seed funding led by Atlantic and OVNI Capital, plus a €350,000 i-Lab grant. Packaging makes up about half the cost of a photonic integrated circuit, mostly because fibres have to be aligned to the chip to within micrometres.
Lightspring uses two-photon polymerisation to write microlenses and waveguides directly onto the chip.
It claims coupling losses below 0.5 dB with no active alignment, against 2 to 3 dB for current methods. If that holds on a production line, it removes a slow, low-yield step from every chip.
Climate & Energy
CIOC Energy gets paid only when the battery earns more
Belgium's CIOC Energy raised €3 million from the renewable developer CleverNett, which takes a minority stake. Founded in 2023, it monitors, controls, and trades solar panels, batteries, and chargers at more than 100 business sites, plus 2,000 home batteries through CleverNett: over 100 MWh of storage and 200 MWp of solar.
It takes a share of the extra return it generates and nothing when it adds none. Alexander De Bièvre says the team sold batteries for years and saw how fast things go wrong when nobody watches them.
The money buys direct market access in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Romania. A performance fee is an easy pitch to a business that bought a battery and never saw the savings.
(Tech.eu)
Research & Deep Tech
TU Dresden stacks organic 2D polymers the way physicists stack graphene
A team led by Xinliang Feng at TU Dresden, with partners in Halle, Mainz, and South Korea, built van der Waals heterostructures entirely from organic 2D polymers, assembled layer by layer on a water surface. They made ten stacks from five polymers, with the lattice mismatch set deliberately between 0% and 18%.
Lattice-matched stacks grew epitaxially and worked as diodes with rectification ratios above 10⁷, higher than reported oxide heterostructures and single-molecule rectifiers. The ratio fell as the mismatch grew, which gives chemists a design rule where they had trial and error.
(Nature)
Institut Pasteur rewrites a fifty-year-old model of the archaeal cell wall
Simonetta Gribaldo's group at Institut Pasteur, with the University of Regensburg, identified ArmA, the first enzyme known to cut the peptidoglycan-like wall of methane-producing archaea. They found it in Methanobrevibacter smithii, one of the dominant microbes in the human gut.
Digesting the wall with ArmA revealed a sugar nobody had described, now named N-acetylarmosamine, and a structure that overturns the model held for fifty years. The cell also needs ArmA to finish dividing.
The practical gain is a tool. Methanogens have been hard to study for lack of one, and their relatives in cattle rumens produce methane that farm policy is trying to cut.
(Nature)
One to Watch
SPRIND and NADI want AI to design chips in weeks
Germany's SPRIND and NADI, the Dutch agency we covered at its launch last week, opened their first joint programme: a €40 million AI-Native Chip Design Challenge running over 20 months. Applications close on 30 November, with up to €2.6 million per team for an eight-month first stage and up to €7 million for a twelve-month second stage.
The target is AI systems that run the design flow on their own, from architecture search to RTL generation and verification. Teams that finish stage two are promised follow-on funding "in the tens of millions" for tape-out.
Euclyd, which raised over €200 million last week, will not have silicon to show until 2028. Watch which teams clear the first stage in the second half of 2027, and whether any of them come from a chipmaker rather than a software lab.
(SPRIND)