Member states spent the week cutting EU Inc back toward a registration form. A Council compromise deleted the central registry and capped stock options, and on Monday Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee postponed its vote for the second time this month.
Outside the Council, money moved quickly. Nvidia took stakes in nine British and French startups, London's state investors backed six venture funds and a surveillance startup, and a Barcelona lender closed the largest round in Spanish fintech.
Policy & Regulation
EU Inc loses its registry and most of its stock options
The founders behind the EU-INC campaign wrote to heads of government on 15 October that the company form they had been promised "no longer exists". An Irish presidency compromise deleted the central digital registry and limited the common stock option scheme to companies with fewer than 1,000 employees and less than EUR 450 million in revenue, according to Science|Business reporting cited by Trending Topics.
A second text adds stricter checks at incorporation. Commissioner Stéphane Séjourné said he could not imagine the 28th regime without harmonised stock options, and member states aim to settle their mandate by the end of October.
Parliament is stuck on something else. Rapporteur René Repasi's compromise on employee co-determination failed on 5 October, and the committee cancelled the vote rescheduled for 19 October, though S&D, EPP, and Renew all say a deal is still possible.
The European Trade Union Confederation fears free choice of seat will let firms escape board-level worker representation, and German notaries cite money-laundering risk. The campaign already concedes local labour law, and a single register with ownership records answers the laundering worry better than 27 separate ones.
Last month we covered the founders' 100-day letter, which named the registry as a red line. Six weeks into that campaign, the registry is the first of its five demands to drop out of the Council text.
(Trending Topics; Table.Media)
Dublin gets a declaration, and Brussels asks companies for compute
Ministers adopted the Dublin Declaration on Trustworthy, Safe and Sovereign AI at Ireland's AI summit on 14 October. It lists seven priority areas, from safety to public-sector adoption, but sets no budget, deadline, or reporting duty.
The next day the Commission launched RAISE, a pledging scheme that asks companies for model access, computing capacity, data, and licences for European scientists. The Novo Nordisk Foundation, Nvidia, Elsevier, Sanofi, Frontiers, Mistral AI, and Google DeepMind signed first, and Mistral AI and CERN announced a foundation model for physics.
Pledges must go "beyond direct commercial interests" and will be reviewed once a year at the AI in Science Summit. That annual review is the only check written in so far.
(Irish Department of Enterprise; European Commission)
Poland's cyber law reaches twice as many firms as expected
Nearly 70,500 entities now sit on the register of "essential" and "important" entities under Poland's National Cybersecurity System Act, its transposition of NIS2, Rzeczpospolita reported on 12 October. That is almost double the estimate, after self-registration closed on 3 October.
The law moves responsibility for cybersecurity from IT departments to management boards. Supervisors who planned around the old estimate now have a real count of how far NIS2 reaches into the Polish economy, and firms that qualified but missed the deadline are already out of compliance.
Capital & Investment
Nvidia buys into nine British and French startups in three days
On 13 October Nvidia took minority stakes in Doctolib, Entalpic, Genesis AI, and Pigment, and pledged compute worth $250 million over five years to agentic AI safety research at UCL, Oxford, and Imperial College. Two days later in London it added Boltz, Foresight, Hiverge, Prima Mente, and Riverlane.
No stake sizes were disclosed. Six weeks after agreeing to buy Hugging Face, the main supplier of Europe's sovereign AI build-out also owns part of the companies those programmes are meant to grow.
London's state investors back six funds and a camera startup
The British Business Bank committed £180 million to six AI and deeptech funds on 15 October. Intrepid Growth Partners took the largest share at £55 million, with Crane, Headline, Entrepreneurs First, Evantic, and Connect splitting the rest.
The £500 million Sovereign AI Fund backed Augur, a London company whose technical leads came from Palantir and whose software reads live feeds from existing cameras and is already used by Transport for London. The amount is undisclosed, and Augur gets time on the Isambard-AI supercomputer.
Augur raised a $15 million seed round led by Plural earlier this year. It is the fund's first bet on monitoring public space, and the fund's privacy claims will be tested in the cities that buy it.
ID Finance raises Spain's largest fintech round, mostly as debt
The Barcelona lender raised EUR 545 million from i80 Group, Kingsway Capital, Spice Expeditions, and WashU. El Periódico puts the equity at about EUR 45 million, with close to EUR 500 million of asset-backed debt from i80.
The money moves ID Finance from short-term loans into buy-now, pay-later through its Plazo app, which passed 400,000 customers and turned a profit last year. The group's 2025 revenue was EUR 243 million.
The revised Consumer Credit Directive applies from 20 November 2026 and brings buy-now, pay-later under creditworthiness checks, so Plazo will scale under stricter lending rules than the ones it grew up with.
(Dealroom; Ecosistema Startup)
Work & Society
A third of surveyed firms already use AI to monitor staff
A Eurobarometer survey of SMEs and mid-caps, published on 14 October, found that 42% use AI or algorithmic management, mostly in limited trials. Among surveyed companies, 36% use these tools to monitor performance and productivity, and 30% for planning and staff scheduling.
Almost half (49%) do not trust automated systems for decisions about staff, and only 2% of decisions are fully automated. The Commission says its Quality Jobs Act, due later this year, will set rules on algorithmic management, two weeks after Parliament asked for risk checks before such systems arrive.
One to Watch
Brussels drafts a tool to close the single market
After the 16 October summit, Ursula von der Leyen said the Commission will present DiversifyEU in December to speed up companies' de-risking from single suppliers. It will also propose a solidarity mechanism against coercion and, building on a Franco-German paper, an instrument to limit access to the single market "fast and immediately".
She put the 2025 trade deficit with China at EUR 1 billion a day. Watch whether the new instrument reaches tech supply chains such as rare earths and magnets, and whether the Commission can trigger it alone or needs a Council majority.