Siemens has led a nine-figure investment in Skeleton Technologies that values the Tallinn company at more than $1 billion. Skeleton, founded in 2009, makes supercapacitors from what it calls Curved Graphene and sells them with power electronics that smooth out the millisecond load swings of GPU clusters.
The money goes mainly to manufacturing in the United States and R&D in Silicon Valley, where the hyperscalers are. CEO Taavi Madiberk wants "a full US value chain, from cells to complete systems" ahead of a US listing planned for 2027.
Several of this week's deals followed the same route: European research, a valuation set by American demand, and new capacity built near the buyer. A few were deliberately built to keep the work at home.
Startups & Funding
Stryker buys an option on CMR Surgical
Stryker will put about $400 million (£300 million) of preferred equity into CMR Surgical, the Cambridge maker of the Versius soft-tissue robot. The deal also gives Stryker an exclusive option to buy all of CMR later.
Stryker becomes Versius's exclusive US sales agent, while CMR keeps development and sales everywhere else. "We have evaluated the segment carefully for years," says Stryker's Andy Pierce; the deal still needs regulatory approval.
(Stryker)
Indra and the Spanish state back Qilimanjaro's quantum computers
Barcelona's Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech closed a €19.6 million first tranche of its Series A. Indra put in €10 million through IndraMind, its sovereign AI unit, and SETT, the state technology fund, added €9.6 million.
We covered its analogue machine going live at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in May. It has now deployed eight systems built on fluxonium qubits, three of them at BSC, and expects to close the round in the fourth quarter.
The announcement frames the round as sovereignty: technology "being built in Spain continues to grow in Spain."
Products & Technology
Salience Labs raises $125 million for switches that keep light as light
Salience Labs, founded in 2021 in Milton, Oxfordshire, on research from Oxford and Münster, raised a $125 million Series B led by Bullhound Capital. AMD Ventures, Intel Capital and the British Business Bank took part.
Its optical circuit switches route data centre traffic without converting it to electrical signals and back. It showed a 64-port unit in September, but has named no customer, and the 128- and 256-port switches the money pays for have no date.
The round also funds a second office on the US West Coast.
(TNW)
Rohlik's founder raises $32 million to map work before automating it
Duvo raised a $32 million Series A led by Balderton, with Index, Northzone and Credo, for $48 million in total. Its founder, the Czech entrepreneur Tomáš Čupr, also runs Rohlik, the online grocer.
He found that automating Rohlik stalled because "much of that knowledge lived in people's heads." Duvo's Clarity tool interviews staff and records their screens to map a process before agents automate it.
Retailers and consumer goods companies come first, then the US.
(Tech.eu)
Climate & Energy
Epyr raises €15 million after a paper mill test works
Paris-based Epyr raised a €15 million Series A led by SlateVC. Its units use cheap electricity to heat firebricks and release the stored heat as steam when a factory needs it.
The first, at WEPA's paper mill in Troyes, was built in under six months and supplies up to a quarter of the site's steam. Next comes a 35 MWh unit at Papeco's Orval-sur-Sienne mill, meant to replace all of its gas.
France has already had more hours of near-zero or negative power prices this year than in all of 2025, the founders say. That cheap power is what the storage runs on.
Research & Deep Tech
A Budapest drug reopens blocked capillaries after a heart attack
After a heart attack, doctors can reopen the artery and blood still fails to reach the smallest vessels. This "capillary no-reflow" raises the risk of death, and no therapy targets it.
A team from Budapest biotech Motorpharma, Eötvös Loránd and Semmelweis universities, with Bristol and Institut Curie, built R(+)2501, a drug that relaxes the cells squeezing those capillaries. In animal models of heart attack and acute kidney injury, it restored capillary flow and improved survival without disturbing blood pressure.
(Nature)
San Sebastián grows molecular chains that could carry qubits
Jose Ignacio Pascual's group at CIC nanoGUNE, with chemists from Santiago de Compostela and CEA-Saclay, built chains of carbon triangulene molecules on a superconducting surface. Each chain carries half a spin at each end.
Chains with an odd number of units coupled to the superconductor, and chains with an even number did not. Because chain length sets the coupling, the authors see a route to molecular spin qubits made of carbon.
(Nature)
One to Watch
KP Labs has until the end of 2027 to fly its computers on CAMILA
KP Labs, a Polish maker of satellite computers that process data in orbit, received €4.42 million from Momentum Capital Partners, a Polish growth fund. ESA, NASA, Airbus and Thales Alenia Space are customers, and its own Intuition-1 satellite flew from 2023 to 2026.
The money pays for serial production of its hardware. KP Labs supplies the onboard computers for CAMILA, Poland's national Earth observation constellation, which is due in orbit by the end of 2027.
Last week's state-backed space fund in Kraków has still named no first investment. Watch whether KP Labs ships serial units in time for CAMILA, and whether Polish public money follows the private round.
(Tech.eu)