Pigment, the Paris company whose software helps large firms plan budgets, operations and forecasts, raised $250 million at a $2.3 billion valuation. The Scaleup Europe Fund led the Series E.
The fund is the EU's €5 billion vehicle for late-stage rounds, and EQT manages it.
In August the fund made its first investment by co-leading ICEYE's round, and it has also backed Mistral. Pigment's customers include Siemens and Unilever, and AI companies such as Anthropic and ElevenLabs.
Greenoaks, Iconiq, IVP and Meritech followed on, and NVIDIA's stake had already been announced. The money pays for R&D and engineering hires.
In July we asked whether Brussels' cheques would arrive before more scale-ups go to US capital. Three months on, the cheques are arriving, and US investors are still in the rounds.
(Tech.eu)
Startups & Funding
Legora raises $550 million at $8.8 billion
Legora, the Stockholm legal AI company, raised a $550 million Series E at an $8.8 billion valuation. Six months ago its Series D closed at $5.6 billion.
In July it bought Wexler, its fifth acquisition of the year. In September we noted that its US rival Harvey saw gross margins turn negative as token use rose, and that Legora faces the same arithmetic.
The new round gives it room to absorb those costs while it keeps buying smaller rivals.
Blackwall reaches $2.2 billion a month after joining Estonia's unicorns
Blackwall, the Estonian web security company formerly called Botguard, raised a $100 million Series C at a $2.2 billion valuation. AVP led the round.
Last month it was reported at €1 billion, fifth in Estonia's TopTech ranking.
Its software runs inside hosting providers' own infrastructure and separates real visitors and legitimate bots from attacks. It does not compete with the providers for customers, as the big content-delivery networks do.
The pitch now is AI agents. "A tsunami of agents will overwhelm infrastructure optimised for human traffic," says AVP's Warda Shaheen.
The money pays for operations in 12 regions.
(Tech.eu)
Coherence Quantum raises €2.78 million for the wiring around qubits
Coherence Quantum, an Aalto University spin-out in Espoo, raised a €2.78 million seed round led by Lifeline Ventures, with Mårten Mickos as an angel. It is building cryogenic signalling and control hardware for solid-state quantum processors.
CTO Suman Kundu helped build Aalto's 20-qubit Q20 machine, and CPO Erkki Soininen came from the cryostat maker Bluefors.
Larger processors need more control lines inside the cryostat. Finland is also home to Bluefors, one of the main makers of those cryostats.
Products & Technology
Enact Intelligence raises €26.7 million to give robots a sense of force
Enact Intelligence, a Zurich robotics startup founded in March, came out of stealth with a €26.68 million ($30 million) pre-seed. Redalpine, Notion Capital and firstminute capital invested.
Arthur Mensch of Mistral and Yann LeCun put in money as angels.
Founder Manuel Yves Galliker led software for 1X's NEO humanoid and later worked at Physical Intelligence. His bet is that robots relying on vision alone cannot handle objects reliably, and that the haptic sensors on the market are too fragile or too costly for factories.
Enact builds its own actuators to collect high-precision force data and trains its models on that data. Its investors see the data as hard to copy.
Photon Bridge raises €10 million to make lasers for AI data centres
Photon Bridge, an Eindhoven company called Photon IP until last year, raised €10 million. The Amadeus APEX Technology Fund and 360 Capital co-led the round.
As data centres move chip-to-chip links from copper to light, they need millions of lasers a year. The supply chain was built for telecoms, which needs far fewer.
Photon Bridge combines several weaker lasers on different wavelengths into one fibre, because weaker lasers fail testing less often.
It has no factory and works with several indium phosphide foundries. First samples are due in 2027 and volume production in 2028.
(TNW)
Climate & Energy
A Dutch-German team puts a salt marsh in a wave flume
Researchers from Delft, Twente, Utrecht, Wageningen, NIOZ and Leibniz University Hannover moved intact salt marsh into one of the world's largest wave flumes. They then hit it with waves up to two metres high.
The soil held, with negligible erosion. The plants were damaged progressively, and their effect weakened as they broke.
On calm coasts, with waves under a metre, the vegetation cut wave height by 10% to 50%. On high-energy coasts it never exceeded 10%.
Planners counting on marshes as storm defence now have a threshold to design around.
(Nature)
Research & Deep Tech
Cologne finds why cold worms live longer
Moderate cold extends lifespan across species, and a University of Cologne team has traced one mechanism in the worm C. elegans.
Cold switches on an enzyme in muscle that makes a metabolite called BH2. BH2 travels to the gut and neurons, where it is converted into a cofactor that helps keep proteins from clumping.
Raising BH2 production in muscle alone extended lifespan, even at normal temperatures. In human cells, BH2 or tyrosine supplements reduced the protein aggregates linked to Huntington's disease and ALS.
(Nature)
One to Watch
What the Scaleup Europe Fund backs next
ICEYE, Mistral and Pigment all had strong private investors before the fund arrived.
Watch whether its next cheque goes to a company still struggling to raise a late-stage round in Europe, such as a hardware or climate scale-up. Also watch whether it leads a round with no large US fund alongside.
(Tech.eu)