Porsche and the Aachen recycler cylib have produced pilot battery cells in which 100% of the cathode active material, the lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese, came from Porsche’s own end-of-life packs. The EU Batteries Regulation will require only 6% recycled lithium and 6% recycled nickel in a new battery from August 2031. Porsche and the […]

If email is more your thing, you can always subscribe to our newsletter and receive a more robust version of this round-up delivered to your inbox.

❗ Want to explore the data in more detail? The free, open-access Tech.eu Funding Explorer offers deeper insights into funding rounds, investor activity, company profiles and market trends.

Either way, let's get you up to speed.

? Notable and big funding rounds

?? Open Cosmos secures €300M to expand satellite intelligence and connectivity

?? Exein raises $270M at $1.7B valuation, claims title of Europe’s most valuable cybersecurity scaleup

?? Fever raises $250M in funding round led by EQT

?? AI chip startup EUCLYD lands over €200M Series A, taps ex-ASML chief Peter Wennink as Chairman

??‍?? Noteworthy acquisitions and mergers

??Endra launches Power Studio and acquires Planlabs to expand into mechanical engineering

?? LeHibou acquires Afarax and accelerates its expansion in Europe

?? The Vienna Stock Exchange is acquiring a majority stake in North Data

?? Fime acquires Red Alert Labs

? Interesting moves from investors

? BioInnovation Institute backs 17 early-stage startups with €9.5M

? Brighteye Ventures lands $72M first close to back the future of learning and work

?.Crane Venture Partners raises €419 million as it expands across Europe, APAC and the US

?️ In other (important) news

?? Europe at "acute risk of marginalisation" unless billions in AI funding committed, warns new report

?? Swedish fintech Trustly to cut around 200 jobs

?️ Research by LF Energy finds open source could deliver 2-5x more value for energy grids

? Monzo launches metal credit card that auto-invests cashback

? Recommended reads and listens

?? Finland's top-funded tech companies in H1 2026

?️ Kuva Space takes on illicit crop monitoring with hyperspectral satellites and AI

?? From Oatly to agritech: inside Sweden’s evolving foodtech ecosystem

? Open AI closes the gap as Europe bets on sovereignty and infrastructure

? European tech startups to watch 

?? OriginalVoices raises £1M pre-seed round led by Iona Star

?? Nearby Computing secures €680,000 to scale cloud-to-edge orchestration platform

?? AI-native game studio Arcustin Games raises $500,000 from Webrazzi GSYF

?? Custodea secures €350,000 to give European SMEs greater control over their data

?? Fastweb+Vodafone backs Italian insurtech Mama Insurance in new funding round

“In reality, we are currently planning a dual listing, on the London Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq,” Nik Storonsky told Les Echos. The Revolut founder was in Paris on Monday. Gabriel Nédélec and Ingrid Feuerstein interviewed him for the French paper, which published on Thursday. It is the first time he has pointed to a […]

An LNG tanker carrying American liquefied natural gas to Italy stopped short of its destination this month, after its crew found they could no longer reach some of the ship’s internal control systems. The crew reported it as a suspected cyberattack, but what it actually was has not been established. The Vivit Africa LNG was […]

Penelope Health, a real-time provider and payer policy intelligence platform out of London, today announced €87 million ($100 million) in funding, as well as a partnership with HealthTech infrastructure platform Thoreau – in order to create a shared layer for real-time payments and clinical rules.

The funding was provided by Thoreau, along with existing backers Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments (BHI), Twine Ventures, and Seedcamp. The funds will be used to create new products that bring administrative efficiency to navigating payer requirements.

“The rules that determine whether care is covered by insurance are foundational to the healthcare system, yet they remain opaque, fragmented, difficult to interpret, and are constantly changing. Penelope was founded to turn that complexity into a dependable, up-to-date reference that healthcare companies can use in real time,” says Dr. Sohum Patel, Chief Executive Officer of Penelope Health.

Penelope Health’s funding comes amid continued 2026 investment in European healthcare infrastructure and AI tools aimed at reducing administrative workloads.

EU-Startups has reported approximately €182.5 million across a selected group of comparable and adjacent rounds this year, including €86.5 million for Stockholm-based Tandem Health, up to €37 million for Berlin-based Recare, and €4.2 million for Barcelona-based Health Force, whose AI agents handle hospital-insurance processes such as prior-authorisation checks and claims.

In the UK, London-based Semble raised €34.7 million to scale its healthcare management platform, while Flexzo AI secured €10.3 million for agentic healthcare workforce technology.

Mattijs De Paepe, Chief Technology Officer of Penelope Health, adds, “Realising our vision requires a deep technical understanding of constantly evolving payer rules. We are excited to build the infrastructure for AI to power a more efficient healthcare system. The opportunity extends far beyond any single workflow. We believe that a shared infrastructure layer can remove administrative burden for both payers and providers.”

Penelope was co-founded in 2025 by Dr. Sohum Patel, Chief Executive Officer, and Mattijs De Paepe, Chief Technology Officer. Before founding Penelope, Dr. Patel practiced in both inpatient and outpatient settings in the UK’s National Health Service at the Royal Free London and University College London hospital systems, where he saw firsthand how administrative complexity interferes with patient care.

Mattijs previously spent nearly four years at Via Transportation, where he built machine-learning systems for the company’s transit products.

The company explains that they convert the complex web of disparate data into a single infrastructure layer for healthcare. The platform enables healthcare companies to check coverage requirements, compare policies across payers, and streamline their internal operations, providing organisations with instant, structured access to payer medical coverage policies across the majority of insured Americans.

This replaces the custom, one-off connections and manual searches for policy information, with a single connection​ any system can use.

Penelope’s platform currently covers policies for over 200 million Americans, spanning more than 15,000 procedures and drug codes.

The post With 200 million patients covered, Penelope Health secures €87 million in funding appeared first on EU-Startups.

Lord Tom Watson, Baron Watson of Wyre Forest, Labor’s former deputy leader, has joined Palantir as a senior vice president, an appointment he announced on X. He called it: “Palantir is the most interesting company on the planet, doing work of real consequence: helping Britain and its allies defend themselves, helping police protect our citizens, […]

The shop workers in Italy waited until their busiest day of the year to stop working. On Friday, the day the iPhone 18 Pro was launched worldwide, all 17 Apple stores in Italy went on strike. “For Apple as a company, image is very important,” Nicholas Pezze, a Filcams CGIL representative, told Reuters. “As unions, we […]

“We did not set out to build another health insurance company,” said Ty Wang, co-founder and chief executive of Angle Health. The aim, he told the Wall Street Journal, was to stop “this kind of death spiral of cost within our healthcare system.” His company has just raised $600m at a $2.7bn valuation. Vitruvian Partners […]

Mozilla’s latest State of Open Source AI report argues that open-source and open-weight AI have moved beyond experimentation and become a significant part of the global AI ecosystem, driven by rapidly improving capabilities, lower costs, and greater control over model deployment.

The September 2026 assessment examines the state of open AI across capability, adoption, infrastructure, investment, regulation, and sovereignty, including where Europe is gaining ground — and where it continues to lag behind the US and China.

Open AI moves from promising to ready

In a letter accompanying the report, Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian offers several examples of open AI being developed in Europe. ​ In Lausanne, researchers built an open medical model with the Red Cross, tuned to its humanitarian guidelines, with clinical trials being prepared at home and in Tanzania. ​

“They built it themselves. They didn't ask permission, they didn't rent it — they own it, theirs to run, change, and keep.” ​

He says these aren't outliers. Open-source and open-weight AI have become one of the fastest-growing builder ecosystems in software history: on Hugging Face alone, 2.5 million public models, 13 million users, and a third of the Fortune 500.

On OpenRouter, where developers route real production traffic, open-weight models grew from a sliver to roughly a third of usage by late 2025. Six months on, the platform moves 25 trillion tokens a week — five times more — and the single biggest source of that traffic is an open model. ​

“This spring, the best closed model scored 60 and the best open models 54. A year earlier, the leading open model scored 22. The frontier still leads on the hardest problems — and for the work most builders actually ship, where price, control, and deployability decide, the data does not say “promising.”It says “ready.” If you have been waiting for open AI to grow up, stop waiting.”

Europe is in the open AI race, but China leads the frontier

The report finds that while Europe is present in open AI, it is not leading at the frontier. The strongest open models assessed are overwhelmingly Chinese, with Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, and Qwen 3.8 among the leaders. European player Mistral appears further down the capability spectrum with Mistral Medium 3.5.

Further, Mistral’s openness comes with commercial restrictions. Mistral Medium 3.5 uses a modified MIT licence with a revenue carve-out, illustrating the report’s broader warning that “open weights” and genuinely open-source AI are not necessarily the same thing. Open AI as a route to greater technological sovereignty.

The report positions open AI as a route to retaining local ownership and control of models, data, and infrastructure, rather than renting access from dominant providers.

One example is Switzerland, where a public consortium trained a national model using public supercomputers and released the weights, data, and training code, making the model available for others to copy and adapt. This is unusual.

Across the 16 notable releases Mozilla examined, none provided the complete data recipe required by the Open Source Initiative definition. Europe’s opportunity may lie above the model layer

Further, the bigger European challenge may be deployment rather than model capability. Globally, 79 per cent of developers surveyed use open models, but only 51 per cent of open-model users get them into production, compared with 63 per cent for closed models.

Mozilla attributes the gap largely to operational tooling and trust rather than raw model performance. This creates an opportunity above the model layer for European companies, particularly in deployment infrastructure, orchestration, compliance, security, and enterprise tooling rather than necessarily trying to build another frontier foundation model. Economics could also lower the barrier for European entrants.

Capable open models can increasingly run on relatively modest hardware, while Mozilla argues that more capability gains are coming from post-training rather than ever-larger pretraining runs. This could shift differentiation towards post-training data, reward design, and reinforcement-learning environments, where smaller companies can compete with less capital and compute.

The UK bets £500M on sovereign AI

The UK is backing the development of Lumen Sovereign, which developer Cosine describes as Britain’s first sovereign frontier AI model. The model is being trained entirely on Isambard-AI in Bristol, using compute awarded through the UK government’s £500 million Sovereign AI programme.

Thirteen organisations are involved in the design phase, spanning banking, defence, telecommunications, and professional services, including HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest, LSEG, BAE Systems, Babcock, BT, and the Alan Turing Institute.

However, the report notes that their involvement represents design-phase agreements rather than purchase commitments.

Lumen is being developed using proprietary datasets covering more than 30 regulated workflows and is intended for air-gapped deployment within customers’ infrastructure by the end of 2026.

Because customers must hold the weights themselves, such deployments exclude API-only providers — creating what Mozilla sees as a growing market for open-weight and on-premises AI.

The model is being developed using proprietary datasets covering more than 30 regulated workflows, to enable air-gapped deployment within customers’ own infrastructure by the end of 2026. This requirement means customers need to hold the model weights themselves, effectively excluding API-only providers from such deployments. The report also points to Cohere’s plans to roughly triple its UK office footprint as another indication of growing demand for sovereign AI in the country.

Is the EU AI Act keeping pace with open AI?

The report questions whether the EU AI Act's use of training compute as a proxy for systemic risk can keep pace with increasingly efficient models.

Sparse models can now achieve comparable capabilities using significantly less compute, potentially placing similarly capable models under different regulatory requirements.

Mozilla also notes that open source does not provide a blanket exemption from the AI Act. Companies that substantially modify or adapt open models for high-risk uses, such as hiring, credit scoring, or medical diagnostics, can themselves become responsible for meeting the relevant regulatory obligations.

Cycloid, a French Internal Developer Portal and Platform company, will be used by the European Commission (EC) as the developer-facing portal for its new sovereign cloud framework, giving up to 5,000 developers across the EC unified access to cloud services from four European providers.

Announced on 17 April 2026, the six-year, €180 million framework gives EU institutions, bodies and agencies access to cloud services from four European providers: Post Telecom, with partners CleverCloud and OVHcloud; STACKIT; Scaleway; and Proximus, with partners S3NS (a Thales–Google Cloud joint venture), Clarence and Mistral.

The development marks another step in Cycloid’s expansion following its €5 million Series A round in February 2025, which was led by Reflexion Capital with participation from five French angel investors and brought its total funding to €8 million. At the time, the company said the investment would support its growth across Europe and an expansion into North America.

Cycloid has also been building its European footprint through partnerships. Last year, the company signed a strategic agreement with DACH-based services provider cloudXcelerate to bring its platform to businesses dealing with cloud migration challenges across the region.

“A sovereign cloud framework is only as sovereign as the choices it leaves open,” says Benjamin Brial, founder and CEO of Cycloid. “The European Commission has set a new bar for what cloud sovereignty means in practice, now it is important for developers to use the framework in the real world, with the freedom to move between providers and enjoy the capability to build a portal that fits their needs. That’s precisely what Cycloid has been built for.”

Founded in 2015 by former Red Hat cloud executive Benjamin Brial, Cycloid develops technology designed to centralise access to infrastructure, cloud services, automation and developer tools. Its platform allows organisations to create self-service environments for developers while retaining governance, security and cost controls across different infrastructure providers.

Rather than operating separately across each provider, developers at the Commission will be able to use Cycloid as a common interface for accessing and managing services available through the framework.

The agreement builds on an existing relationship between Cycloid and the European Commission. According to the company, the Commission previously operated an internally developed portal for close to a decade before replacing it with Cycloid around a year ago. The platform now connects teams, tools, infrastructure and automation across the Commission’s IT environment.

For platform teams, Cycloid’s Internal Developer Portal can be configured around an organisation’s security, governance and infrastructure requirements. Developers can then use the resulting self-service environment to design, deploy and manage applications and infrastructure across private cloud, public cloud and sovereign cloud environments.

The approach is intended to reduce the need for institutions to build and maintain bespoke developer portals internally. Cycloid also supports official and custom plugins, allowing organisations to connect the portal with existing IT tools rather than replacing their wider technology stack.

This multi-provider approach is particularly relevant to the Commission’s sovereign cloud strategy. Its framework was designed in part to diversify suppliers and reduce dependence on a single cloud provider, while introducing measurable sovereignty requirements for services procured by EU bodies.

Cycloid says its platform is designed around the same principle of portability. EC entities can use one portal while selecting between different European providers, private infrastructure, public cloud environments or on-premise systems depending on the requirements of individual workloads.

Cycloid and the European Commission have additionally signed a strategic agreement that, according to the company, makes Cycloid a pre-approved software supplier through the Commission’s DIGIT software broker. This means other EU public institutions can procure its technology under negotiated rates and terms designed around EU regulatory requirements.

For Cycloid, this latest agreement provides a significant public-sector use case as it continues the international expansion funded by last year’s Series A.

It also places the startup directly within a wider European shift towards sovereign and multi-provider cloud infrastructure, where the ability to move workloads and developer services between providers is becoming an increasingly important consideration.

The post Cycloid plugs into European Commission’s €180 million sovereign cloud framework following Series A appeared first on EU-Startups.

Anthropic has set up a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place to run physical biology experiments rather than simulate them. The company confirms it exists, yet it will not say what it is for, beyond ruling out the obvious answer, which is drug discovery. The news was reported by Reuters today, […]

“Visions are painted in words, but measured in deeds,” David Wang wrote in the foreword to Huawei’s latest forecast. The company published two reports days before Huawei Connect 2026 opened, and they explain most of what it launched there. The first is Intelligent World 2035, subtitled Turning Vision into Action. The second is the Global […]

The highest-paying robotics job at OpenAI right now pays up to $500,000 and does not involve working directly with robots. This role is for a machine learning engineer, with a listed salary range of $380,000 to $500,000 plus equity, and the main responsibility is building the pipeline that supports training runs. OpenAI’s careers page lists […]

“Maybe the type of risk from AI that they can feel, they can perceive, is something that people in China or AI model providers in China cannot,” Eric Xu said in Shanghai this week. Huawei’s rotating chairman was talking about American AI labs. His argument is that Chinese developers have not yet hit the safety […]

Over the past two years, Oracle has invested tens of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure that powers other companies’ AI. But it wasn’t until April that its own employees received a broadly useful AI tool. Co-CEO Clay Magouyrk admitted, “I don’t think we figured out how to make AI really that useful for […]

Big Picture Bio, a London-based BioTech startup developing AI-designed combination therapies for cancer and other complex diseases, has emerged from stealth with a combined funding round of €2.55 million (£2.2 million).

The funding comprises a €1.75 million (£1.5 million) pre-Seed round co-led by Kadmos Capital and Exceptional Ventures, alongside €815k (£700k) in non-dilutive support from Innovate UK’s Investor Partnerships Programme. Gloucester Ventures and angel investor John White also participated in the pre-Seed round.

“I had the privilege of working closely with Kerstin and Mark at the very beginning of Deep Science Ventures, and saw first-hand the determination, conviction and sheer resolve they bring to building ambitious, scalable businesses,” said Remy Kesrouani, Managing Partner, Kadmos Capital.

He added, “Big Picture Bio is the culmination of that journey, applying a genuinely differentiated approach to AI to one of drug development’s hardest problems: predicting how complex clinical trials will actually behave.”

Founded by CEO Dr Kerstin Papenfuss and CTO Dr Mark Hammond, Big Picture Bio has built a generative “world model” that simulates how tumours, immune cells and surrounding tissue interact, with the aim of identifying which drug combinations, and in what sequence, are most likely to hold off cancer resistance.

Before spinning out Big Picture Bio, both founders spent years at Deep Science Ventures. Papenfuss built and led DSV’s therapeutics team, founding 12 therapeutics and enabling-technology companies during her time there, and previously held roles at LifeArc and the Cell & Gene Therapy Catapult.

Hammond co-founded DSV and took it “from €174k to a €1.16 billion+ portfolio”, led its engineering work on agentic scientific discovery, and was previously involved in licensing and investment at Imperial College, whose spin-outs during his tenure included Hinge Health, Hark, and Monolith.

The pair have worked together for seven years, building companies that tackle complex, evolving diseases across the DSV portfolio. With Big Picture Bio, they argue that a full pairwise screen of just 100 drugs at 100 doses would require roughly 50 million lab experiments, a scale no physical screen can reach but its models can search computationally in seconds.

The company says its predictive approach has already been tested against real clinical data, including correctly forecasting the failure of Regeneron’s fianlimab trial, and posting 14 predictions ahead of the 2026 ASCO oncology conference, of which 12 proved accurate.

“Cancer is not one disease driven by one target, but we still develop drugs as if it were. Combinations are how we beat it – and with more than 900 billion of them possible, no lab on earth can test its way to the right ones,” said Dr Kerstin Papenfuss, CEO and co-founder, Big Picture Bio.

She added, “That is the problem we built Big Picture Bio to solve: model the disease as the dynamic system it actually is, then design against it – combinations chosen because they are most likely to work in patients, not because they were the ones we could get to. This funding takes our first designed combinations out of the model and into the lab.”

Big Picture Bio’s advisory team also draws on senior pharma expertise, including Dr Laura Rosenberg (Director of Target Validation at AstraZeneca), Dr Duncan Young (Head of Search & Evaluation, Oncology Business Development & Licensing at AstraZeneca), Dr Garry Pairaudeau (former CTO of Exscientia and CEO of DaltonTx), and Dr Christian Dillon (Chief Scientific Officer at PhoreMost). 

Big Picture Bio will use the funding to take its AI-designed cancer combination therapies from computer models into the wet lab. The firm will initially focus on cancer and immune-mediated diseases but aims to move beyond trial-and-error combination testing altogether, eventually designing new treatments from scratch rather than only recombining existing drugs.

The post London-based Big Picture Bio emerges from stealth with €2.55 million to develop AI-designed cancer drug combinations appeared first on EU-Startups.

Geoffrey Hinton gave the United States Senate a deadline on Wednesday, and it was shorter than the legislative calendar. “Maybe a year, but not much more than a year,” he said, about how long Congress has to put guardrails around artificial intelligence. He was speaking at a closed, hour-long briefing at the Capitol convened by […]

“Electricity is essential for computing,” said Zhou Jianjun, who runs global marketing, sales and services at Huawei Digital Power. “Today, in the AI era, the startup, shutdown, and load fluctuations of a large AIDC campus can all impact grid operations.” He was unveiling Huawei’s grid-interactive AI data centre solution in Shenzhen. Days later the same […]