Startups & Funding

Kelluu raises €15M for autonomous airship surveillance, led by NATO Innovation Fund

Finnish deep tech company Kelluu builds and operates autonomous hydrogen-powered airships for persistent aerial surveillance. It closed a €15 million Series A led by the NATO Innovation Fund; the Fund's first investment in a Finnish company. Kelluu's fleet has logged over 50,000 kilometres, including twelve-hour Arctic missions through sustained GNSS jamming at temperatures as low as −33°C. The round also funds Kelluu AI Labs, the company's effort to build large-scale geospatial foundation models from the data its airships continuously collect. Keen Venture Partners, Swedish defence-focused Gungnir Capital, and Finnish state investor Tesi joined. (Tech.eu)

Seapoint raises €7.5M to become the financial home for European startup founders

Seapoint is an AI-native financial operations platform for European startups. It raised €7.5 million in seed funding led by London fintech investor 13books, bringing total raised to €10 million. Founded by Sean Mullaney, former European CIO at Stripe, with a team more than half of whom are Stripe alumni, the company consolidates what founders typically manage across multiple banks, accounting tools, and spreadsheets into a single interface covering bookkeeping, payroll, multi-currency accounts, and treasury. Former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson and Intercom co-founder Des Traynor are also backing. (BeBeez)

ShanX Medtech closes €15M seed for rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing

Rotterdam-based ShanX Medtech raised €15 million to advance its in-vitro diagnostic platform for rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing: a tool that identifies effective antibiotics far faster than conventional culture methods. Antimicrobial resistance is one of the EU's declared public health priorities. ShanX is positioned to fill a diagnostic gap that has persisted despite years of regulatory pressure, and the funding will support clinical validation and preparation for market launch. (Tech.eu)

Herbert Ventures launches €32.5M Fund I for European deep tech pre-seed and seed

Zurich-based Herbert Ventures has closed a €32.5 million debut fund to back deep tech founders and serial entrepreneurs at pre-seed and seed across Europe. It joins a growing number of specialist early-stage vehicles targeting hardware-intensive, science-heavy startups; a segment where generalist funds have historically underwritten too little risk, too late. (EU-Startups)

Products & Technology

ATMOS Space Cargo closes €25.7M Series A to scale Europe's orbital return fleet

Franco-German orbital logistics startup ATMOS Space Cargo closed a €25.7 million Series A co-led by Balnord and Expansion Ventures, with participation from the EIC Accelerator, OTB Ventures, Seraphim, and High-Tech Gründerfonds, among others. The raise comes exactly one year after ATMOS completed Europe's first private orbital re-entry with PHOENIX 1. Capital will fund an initial three-vehicle PHOENIX 2 fleet, early development of PHOENIX 3 (ten times the payload capacity of its predecessor), and ATMOS WORKS: a dedicated service line for governmental and defence customers seeking sovereign access to routine orbital return. Proof of concept to commercial infrastructure, in twelve months. (Tech.eu)

Advanced Machine Intelligence closes $1B seed — Europe's largest ever

Paris-based Advanced Machine Intelligence raised $1 billion at seed stage in Q1 2026, the largest seed-stage raise in European tech history. The company has shared limited public detail on its research agenda. But the round signals that investors are prepared to write continent-scale cheques to back sovereign AI research capacity inside Europe; a structural shift that would have been implausible three years ago. (Tech.eu)

Research & Deep Tech

Pixel Photonics raises €13.5M to bring quantum photon detectors to chip scale

Münster-based Pixel Photonics, a 2021 spin-off from the University of Münster, raised €13.5 million: a €5 million seed round led by Futury Capital, plus €8.5 million from the EIC Accelerator. The company makes waveguide-integrated superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (WI-SNSPDs), miniaturising the bulky cryogenic lab setups used in quantum optics onto compact chip-scale devices. Selected from roughly 1,000 EIC applicants as one of 61 winners, Pixel Photonics sits at the intersection of quantum sensing, secure communications, and European semiconductor manufacturing ambitions. (EU-Startups)

EIC awards €118M across 30 Pathfinder breakthrough research projects

The European Innovation Council has awarded €118 million to thirty new research teams under the 2025 EIC Pathfinder Challenges, selected from 647 eligible proposals; roughly €3.9 million per project. Priority areas include AI agents for cancer diagnosis, autonomous robot collectives for construction environments, biotech for climate-resilient crops, and waste-to-value devices for circular production of fuels and chemicals. Pathfinder funding typically runs four to five years, taking projects from early hypothesis to first demonstrator. It is, in aggregate, a meaningful supply-side bet on European deep tech. (EIC)

One to watch

Peak Quantum, a pre-seed quantum computing hardware company, raised €2.2 million this week. It's a small number. But the willingness of investors to back hardware-native quantum bets at this stage, independent of the established European incumbents, mirrors the early signals in quantum photonics and superconducting chips a few years before they became a distinct asset class. Worth following as the European quantum stack fills in below the headline names. (Sesamers)

Thomas di Luccio writes about the structural forces shaping European technology.

© Thomas di Luccio & The Long Build | All rights reserved. Unauthorised reproduction or redistribution without explicit written permission is prohibited.

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Policy & Regulation

DMA: Commission moves on Google search data. On April 16, the European Commission proposed measures requiring Google to share search engine data with third parties under the Digital Markets Act. The move follows the €500M and €200M fines handed to Apple and Meta respectively last year; total EU penalties on US tech companies have now crossed $7 billion over two years. The Trump administration has publicly framed this enforcement wave as economic warfare and is weighing retaliatory trade measures, putting the Commission's next steps under unusual geopolitical scrutiny. (CNBC)

Cloud sovereignty: Commission settles first EU-only procurement. On April 17, the Commission awarded a €180M, six-year sovereign cloud framework contract to four European providers: OVHCloud/CleverCloud (led by Post Telecom), STACKIT (Germany), Scaleway (France), and a Proximus-led consortium incorporating Mistral and S3NS. Eligibility required a minimum SEAL-2 rating under the new Cloud Sovereignty Framework, which sets measurable criteria across eight objectives including supply chain transparency and resilience against non-EU disruptions. The Commission intends the framework as a replicable model for public sector digital procurement across Europe. (European Commission)

GDPR: CNIL fine signals rising breach liability. France's CNIL fined Free Mobile €27 million for failing to protect subscriber data following a 2024 cyberattack that exposed approximately 24 million customer contracts. The action fits an accelerating pattern: total GDPR fines have now exceeded €7.1 billion across more than 2,800 decisions since 2018, and European data protection authorities are processing 443 breach notifications per day, up 22% year on year. (Kiteworks)

AI Act: GPAI guidance gap widens. With the August 2 enforcement date for general-purpose AI model obligations now under four months away, the European AI Office has not yet published the final Code of Practice on AI-generated content marking; publication is currently scheduled for June. For GPAI providers, that leaves a narrow window between guidance and compliance. The Commission's parallel push to delay high-risk AI rules makes the gap between the Act's ambitions and its operational readiness harder to ignore. (EU Artificial Intelligence Act)

Capital & Investment

EIF launches €15bn fund of funds. The European Investment Fund is raising ETCI 2, a €15 billion vehicle targeting 100 growth-stage VC firms across Europe; it would be the largest public fund of funds in European history. The EIB and EIF have committed €1.25 billion as anchor investors, with a first close expected this summer. The goal is to unlock €80 billion in scaleup financing. The first iteration (2023, €3.9bn) backed 14 mega-funds and supported 11 unicorns including DeepL and TravelPerk; the new fund will invest up to €200M per company, against a €60M average in the first wave. (Sifted)

Q1 2026: AI takes the majority. European venture reached $17.6 billion in Q1 2026, up 30% year on year and marking the second consecutive growth quarter. AI startups captured more than half of total funding ($9.2 billion) for the first time. The concentration, however, is stark: deal volume fell 40% annually, with seed rounds down 44% and early stage down 30%. Capital is consolidating into fewer, larger bets; the companies that will need late-stage rounds in 2027-2028 may find a thinner pipeline behind them. (Crunchbase)

Mega-rounds dominate Q1. The quarter's headline raises came from AI legaltech Legora (>$500M), data centre builder Nscale (>$1bn), autonomous driving company Wayve (>$1bn), and Advanced Machine Intelligence, a physical AI frontier lab that raised $1 billion in what it described as Europe's largest-ever seed round. UK startups led geographically with $7.4bn; France reached $2.9bn, consolidating its position as Europe's hub for frontier AI research and infrastructure. (Crunchbase)

New fund vehicles emerge. Spanish VC Seaya held the first close of a €1 billion Growth Tech Fund I focused on applied AI and deeptech. Deeptech growth firm Kembara reached a €750M first close toward a €1 billion target, putting it in contention as Europe's largest dedicated deeptech growth fund. The EIF also backed the Baltic Innovation Fund 3 (€225M), a five-year vehicle targeting 8–11 regional PE and VC funds. (Vestbee)

One to Watch

April 28 AI Omnibus trilogue. Parliament and Council negotiators enter the second trilogue on the Digital Omnibus AI package next Monday with positions broadly aligned on the key delay proposals. If a political agreement is reached, formal endorsement from both institutions would follow in May or June; the last major uncertainty over European AI compliance timelines would be resolved. The outcome will define whether the AI Act's August 2026 deadline remains nominally in force or is formally superseded. Watch for the Commission's readout after the session. (European Parliament Legislative Train)

Thomas di Luccio writes about the structural forces shaping European technology.

© Thomas di Luccio & The Long Build | All rights reserved. Unauthorised reproduction or redistribution without explicit written permission is prohibited.

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Startups & Funding

PAVE Space (Lausanne) closed a $40M seed round led by Visionaries Club and Creandum to build orbital transfer vehicles capable of repositioning satellites between orbits in under 24 hours. Founded by EPFL engineers from the student-run Gruyère Space Programme, the company already holds eight reservation agreements from satellite operators, and its first orbital demonstrator — GRAZE — is targeting launch in October. The round lands as European launch infrastructure matures and demand for in-orbit servicing accelerates. (SpaceNews)

Eka Ventures (London) closed its second fund at £80M ($107M), making it the UK's largest early-stage impact VC. The fund backs pre-seed and seed startups across health, decarbonisation of consumer behaviour, and access to essential services. The British Business Bank anchors the fund with £40M. Eka explicitly targets startups "leaning into regulation" — an acknowledgement that in a tightening regulatory environment, compliance-native builders have a structural edge over incumbents. (Sifted)

Onodrim Industries (Amsterdam) raised €40M in seed funding to build integrated hardware and software platforms for European defence and industrial infrastructure. Led by Founders Fund, Lakestar, and General Catalyst, the round reflects sustained transatlantic investor appetite for European defence tech as rearmament spending accelerates. The company is targeting border protection, resilient supply chains, and interoperability between European and allied forces. (PR Newswire)

Hades Mining (Germany) secured €15M seed to develop next-generation drilling and subsurface technologies for geothermal energy extraction and critical minerals recovery. The company sits at an intersection that is increasingly strategic: energy security and the materials supply chain for the green transition, two areas where European supply chain independence is under sustained political pressure. (Tech.eu)

Products & Technology

Euro-Office launched as a coalition of European companies — including Nextcloud, Ionos, XWiki, and Eurostack — forked OnlyOffice to build a sovereign, open-source Microsoft 365 alternative for the European public sector and enterprise market. The launch immediately triggered a legal dispute with OnlyOffice's parent over AGPL license provisions, with OnlyOffice suspending its Nextcloud partnership and claiming trademark violations. A stable release is targeted for summer 2026. The fork drama aside, the underlying demand is real: European governments are actively seeking alternatives to US hyperscaler productivity stacks. (The Register)

Interloom (Germany) raised $16.5M to build an AI-powered work navigation system that automates operational tasks by learning from a company's existing ERP workflows. It is the kind of B2B infrastructure product that rarely makes headlines but quietly displaces entire categories of middleware software; the kind of thing that gets deployed, then forgotten about, then becomes load-bearing. (Tech.eu)

Research & Deep Tech

The European Commission proposed AGILE (Programme for Agile and Rapid Defence Innovation) as a €115M pilot to compress defence technology timelines from development to deployment within one to three years. Unlike traditional EU procurement, AGILE permits single-company applications, eliminates mandatory multinational consortia, and allows retroactive funding for work already completed. The proposal targets AI for military decision-making, quantum computing applications, and autonomous drone systems — an acknowledgement that European procurement timelines have historically left the continent with technology that arrives after the window has closed. (Euronews)

Chiral Nano (Switzerland) raised $12M to build precision manufacturing equipment for integrating nanomaterials into semiconductors and quantum devices. The company's work sits at the convergence of materials science, chip fabrication, and quantum hardware — three areas where European supply chain independence is strategically critical and where a handful of specialised equipment makers could become quietly essential. (Tech.eu)

One to watch

Peak Quantum secured €5M to develop error-resilient quantum chips alongside a European pilot manufacturing line. The company is betting that Europe can establish indigenous quantum hardware capacity before the market consolidates around a handful of US and Chinese players. That window will not stay open indefinitely; the question is whether €5M seed capital is enough runway to prove the chip architecture before the larger players close the gap. (Tech.eu)

Thomas di Luccio writes about the structural forces shaping European technology.

© Thomas di Luccio & The Long Build | All rights reserved. Unauthorised reproduction or redistribution without explicit written permission is prohibited.

Subscribe and read more at thelongbuild.eu.