Cambridge-based PlaqueTec, a MedTech company specialising in intracoronary liquid biopsy to identify inflammatory drivers of cardiovascular disease (CVD), has raised €4.2 million ($5 million) in fresh funding. The oversubscribed financing round was funded entirely by the company’s existing investor base. 

Martin Stapleton, Chairperson, PlaqueTec, commented, “The decision by our existing shareholders to reinvest, and to do so at a level that exceeded our target, speaks directly to their confidence in what PlaqueTec’s data is revealing about cardiovascular disease. We are building something genuinely differentiated: a high-resolution, intracoronary data asset that is poised to underpin the next generation of cardiovascular therapeutics. This round validates that strategy and gives us the runway to prove it.”

Founded in 2008, PlaqueTec is pursuing a better understanding of the biological mechanisms of coronary artery disease (CAD) to advance the development of precision medicine.

Atherosclerotic disease causes plaque build-up that narrows or blocks the arteries that supply blood to the heart, brain and limbs, and is a leading cause of death globally.

According to the company, current treatment approaches are largely one-size-fits-all and therefore ineffective for many patients. To address this, PlaqueTec has developed a proprietary technology and data analysis platform to endotype patients and uncover potential biomarkers of coronary vascular function and plaque progression.

The startup claims that a more detailed understanding of patient endotypes will support drug development by identifying new targets in specific patient groups, thereby reducing clinical trial sizes and costs, and increasing success rates, ultimately improving outcomes for patients.

The fresh capital will be used by the company to build out PlaqueTec’s proprietary cardiovascular data lake, BioCarta, a growing repository of unique intracoronary proteomic and clinical data.

PlaqueTec states that the BioCarta database contains proteomic data obtained from patient samples collected in the BIOPATTERN trial using its intracoronary liquid biopsy approach. Using the coronary concentration gradient, the liquid biopsy device samples proteomic biomarkers directly at the site of plaque formation, generating data that cannot be obtained through conventional systemic blood sampling.

The company’s ongoing BIOPATTERN trial is generating proteomic data across a growing patient cohort, with several potential targets identified in sub-groups accounting for the majority of the studied coronary artery disease population. Its data lake strategy positions these findings as a platform asset for partnership and licensing with leading pharmaceutical companies engaged in cardiovascular drug development.

The company is based at the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge, UK. It is actively engaged in discussions with potential pharmaceutical and BioTech partners seeking to leverage its intracoronary insights to inform target selection and patient stratification strategies.

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Stuttgart-based Sereact, an innovator in physical AI for warehouses and manufacturing, has raised a €93 million ($110 million) Series B round in order to scale their ‘Cortex 2’ offering and to open its first office in the U.S. in Boston at some point during the coming summer – aiming to hire new staff locally.

The round was led by Headline, with participation from Bullhound Capital, Daphni, and Felix Capital. Existing investors Air Street Capital, Creandum, and Point Nine once again invested in Sereact. This follows a €25 million Series A round in 2025, as covered by EU-Startups.

“We bet early that you can’t build real robotics AI in a lab,” says Ralf Gulde, CEO and co-founder. “You build it with a data flywheel fed by real deployments – shipping into production, living with the failures, and letting the model learn from what actually happens on the floor. The numbers show it worked. Two hundred systems. One billion picks. One intervention per 53,000. Nobody else is close.”

Sereact’s Series B sits within a sizeable 2026 funding environment for European physical AI, robotics and automation companies, where reported activity across warehouse picking, pallet handling, industrial manufacturing automation, autonomous inspection, robotic manipulation and physical-AI data infrastructure.

“The robot dreams in latent space. We give it a form of imagination – the ability to anticipate how the world will respond before it moves,” adds Marc Tuscher, co-founder and CTO. “We don’t build robots. We don’t sell services. We ship one thing: the model that runs on any robot. Single arms, dual arms, humanoids, fixed cells – same brain across all of it. Hardware is becoming a commodity. The model isn’t.”

Founded in 2021, Sereact builds AI for robots that work in the physical world. Among its offerings are its Cortex brain, which runs across single-arm picking cells, dual-arm returns stations, humanoid robots; and Sereact Lens, a 3D perception system for inventory and quality control.

According to the company, warehouses were the first deployment because no other environment provides the same combination of data points: billions of real interactions, every object shape imaginable, hard throughput constraints, and consequences when the robot gets it wrong.

More than 200 Sereact systems are already live across Europe, allegedly making Sereact the most deployed AI picking robot company in the world. Those systems, all running the Cortex brain, have completed over 1 billion real production picks for customers including Active Ants, Austrian Post, BMW, bol., Daimler Truck, DeltiLog, Mercedes-Benz, Monta, MS Direct, PepsiCo and Rohlik Group.

“The physical AI opportunity is one of the largest we’ve seen in a generation, and we believe it will rewire global supply chains and manufacturing. Behind great opportunities and great companies are great founders, and Ralf and Marc are building into that opportunity the right way: real deployments, real data, and a model that compounds and gets better with every single pick.

“Customers love the product, which leads to continued expansion, only accelerating the data flywheel – this is why we are so excited to back Sereact,” says Trevor Neff, Growth Partner at Headline .

Cortex 2 augments a vision-language-action (VLA) with a world model. It runs possible actions against a learned model of physics and object behaviour, picks the one most likely to work, and updates in real time as the scene changes.

Sereact says that the shift from reacting to reasoning is what takes Cortex out of the picking bin and into the kind of work where contact matters. Assembling a component under tension. Placing a windshield wiper without scratching it. Kitting parts that have to land in exactly the right orientation for the next station. That’s the next market Sereact is going after with Cortex 2.

Sereact demonstrated the current generation at MODEX in Atlanta this month – single-arm picking, dual-arm returns handling, and the Sereact Lens 3D perception system – and North American interest has reportedly grown steadily since.

Bullhound Capital Founding Partner Per Roman: “After looking at a deluge of humanoid robotics companies, my fellow Partner Alon Kuperman and I were delighted to meet Ralf and Marc, the co-founders of Sereact, who have built an AI operating system that seamlessly retrofits into the world’s vast fleet of industrial robots already in action.”

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German robotics startup Sereact has raised $110m in a Series B funding round, with the funding used to develop and scale its latest AI model and US expansion, it announced today.

The round was led by San Francisco and Berlin-based VC Headline, with Bullhound Capital, Felix Capital, and Daphni also investing. Returning investors Air Street Capital, Creandum, and Point Nine also participated.

It follows its €25m ($29m) Series A funding in January last year, which was led by Creandum. It has raised more than $140m in total.  

The Stuttgart-based company, which employs around 100 people. develops AI-powered robotics tech that is deployed across various industries and use cases for customers in the US and Europe. Its AI software equips robots with general-purpose visual and manipulation capabilities, enabling them to perceive their environment and devise intelligent strategies to perform a wide range of physical tasks.  

The bulk of the new funding will be used to develop its latest AI model, Cortex 2, which is launching today. The model trains a robot on different physical behaviours, helping it pick the one most likely to succeed.  

Ralf Guide, co-founder and CEO, said: "It takes Cortex out of the picking bin and into work where contact matters - assembly under tension, kitting, placement where every millimetre counts. We don't build robots. We don't sell services. We ship one thing: the model that runs on any robot. Single arm, dual arm, humanoid, fixed cell - same brain across all of it.”

The funding will also be used for US expansion, the 2021-founded startup said, with a new office in Boston, where it plans to staff up across engineering, commercial and other areas.

Sereact's customers include BMW, Daimler Truck, Bol and Active Ants, and the real-world deployment of its products creates a real-time data flywheel from which Sereact systems learn to continually improve far beyond systems trained primarily on synthetic data, it added.

Threat intelligence company QuoIntelligence today announced the close of a €7.3 million Series A financing round.  

QuoIntelligence is building the Unified Risk Intelligence standard for European mid-market organisations,  delivering finished threat intelligence that arrives already analysed, already contextualised, and ready to act on, with no in-house team required to operate it.

 NIS2 and DORA together mandate proactive, preemptive cyber risk management and supply chain oversight across more than 160,000 European organisations – creating structural demand for continuous, forward-looking intelligence.

 However, most companies have no in-house function, and building one requires a significant six-figure investment in talent alone – before accounting for the time to operationalise it.  At the same time, European procurement frameworks are increasingly requiring that highly sensitive data remain within EU jurisdictions, thus disqualifying non-EU vendors that have historically dominated the market.  

QuoIntelligence provides finished intelligence, produced by European technology, stored in German soil, delivered within hours of onboarding, requiring no internal team to operate.  

Founded in Frankfurt in 2020, the company serves organisations across Europe in the finance, government, manufacturing, retail, and transportation sectors.  

Its analyst-first model combines Mercury, an AI-powered threat intelligence platform, with a team of European analysts who review, curate, and contextualise every intelligence output in the client’s language and sector. KARLA, the company’s conversational AI analyst, makes that intelligence accessible at every level of an organisation – from the board to the security analyst.

European sovereignty is not just a differentiator for QuoIntelligence – it is a structural fact. The company is incorporated under German law, operates two additional entities in Spain and Italy, and stores all intelligence data under EU jurisdiction – regardless of where its clients are located.  QuoIntelligence is one of the few providers able to satisfy those requirements while matching the intelligence depth previously available only from US, Russian, or Israeli vendors.

The round is led by Elevator Ventures, the venture capital arm of Raiffeisen Bank International, and co-led by BMH Beteiligungs Managementgesellschaft Hessen (BMH), with participation from returning investor eCAPITAL ENTREPRENEURIAL PARTNERS, and further support from Mercurius Private Equity.

Marco Riccardi, CEO and Founder, QuoIntelligence, contends that  world-class threat intelligence has always been described as something only large teams can produce.  

“We built QuoIntelligence to prove that wrong: our vision is Unified Risk Intelligence - cyber threats, physical risks, and geopolitical signals converging into decisions, not just alerts, for any organisation, within hours of onboarding, under European law.

NIS2 and DORA have turned what was a competitive advantage for our customers into a regulatory baseline for every mid-market  company in Europe.”

Magdalena Chalas, Senior Investment Manager, Elevator Ventures, shared:

 “By  empowering organisations across Europe to proactively address evolving cyber threats,  QuoIntelligence plays a crucial role in reinforcing Europe’s independence and security in the digital  age.”

According to Dirk Seewald, Managing Partner, eCAPITAL ENTREPRENEURIAL PARTNERS, cyber threat intelligence is moving from a specialist function into core risk management.

 “Our follow-on investment reflects a conviction we had from day one and that QuoIntelligence has since validated:  it can deliver relevant, tailored intelligence to Europe’s mid-market firms in regulated sectors without  requiring them to build an in-house function.”

Funding will be deployed across go-to-market expansion, product development, and team growth.

The round amount is undisclosed. Backers include Nordic Makers, Emblem, the Lovable company itself, the Sequoia Scout Fund, and the Andreessen Horowitz Scout Fund. Lovable CEO Anton Osika personally endorsed the team. Atech lets users describe a hardware concept in natural language and receive a working prototype. Atech, a Copenhagen-based AI hardware startup, has raised […]

Axomove, a Lille-based digital health company focused on prevention and rehabilitation, has raised €4 million in a Series A round to drive the commercial rollout of its solution and scale in the market.

The round was co-led by the Digital Prevention Fund managed by Bpifrance and Go Capital, with participation from Inco Ventures and existing investor Faraday Venture Partners.

“The confidence of leading institutional investors validates the relevance of our strategy and reinforces our ambition to become a standard of care in prevention and rehabilitation,” said Boris Lévêque, co-founder and CEO of Axomove.

Founded in 2019, Axomove provides a personalised care pathway that combines digital support with follow-up by healthcare professionals, following a hospital episode.  

The company states that its adoption leads to measurable clinical benefits for patients, including doubling functional capacity and increasing treatment adherence fivefold. Additionally, it offers considerable economic and social advantages: a 50% drop in absenteeism and a threefold reduction in healthcare expenses. 

“Since our entry in 2022, Axomove has demonstrated very strong execution capabilities, validating its proposition both clinically and commercially. The combination of a digital solution and healthcare support is effectively addressing a structural issue, such as musculoskeletal disorders, with tangible impact on patients and companies. The project’s evolution, together with the quality of the team and their ambition, reinforces our conviction to continue supporting them in this new phase of growth,” said Gonzalo Tradacete, CEO and founder of Faraday Venture Partners.

In 2022, the company raised €1.6 million, supported by Spanish fund Faraday Venture Partners, along with home care group Santélys and Groupe JLO.

With the fresh capital, the company plans to drive commercial development across corporate, insurance and healthcare provider segments, expand reimbursement coverage to new musculoskeletal conditions and metabolic diseases, with a focus on obesity, and advance the technological platform to enhance user experience through advanced motion capture and gamification features. 

Axomove serves 150 clients, including hospitals, corporations, and insurers such as Air France, Thales, Allianz, Alliance Klesia-Generali, CHU de Lille, and Ramsay Santé, totaling 75,000 users. 

Its solution is already reimbursed by the French Social Security for patients with lower back pain. It has a team of 30 professionals and plans to double its workforce over the next three years. 

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Iran’s strike on SABIC’s Jubail petrochemical complex in early April halted production of the resin used to make PCB laminates. Goldman Sachs analysts say prices surged 40% in April alone. A South Korean supplier to Samsung and AMD says epoxy resin wait times have stretched from three weeks to fifteen. The Iran war that began […]

The promotional discount runs until 5 May 2026. Even at full price, V4-Pro already undercuts GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, and Gemini 3.1 Pro on per-token costs. The move is a direct challenge to the pricing strategy of US AI providers at a moment when the Trump administration has accused Chinese firms of distilling American AI […]

Noreja, a Vorarlberg, Austria-based startup offering AI-powered process intelligence, has closed its €1.1 million funding round to invest in growth and expand its sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

The company secured this funding from both existing and new investors and partners, including Markus Neumayr, Jan Sprengnetter, Prof. Martin Kaiser, and Gordana McNamara. Going forward, McNamara will support Noreja as an advisor specialising in go-to-market strategy and as a fractional CCO.

“With the successful completion of this funding round, we are laying the groundwork for Noreja’s next phase of growth. Together with our investors and partners, we aim to further develop our product and establish Noreja as one of the leading platforms in the field of Generative Process Intelligence,” said Noreja co-founders Dr Lukas Pfahlsberger and Dr Philipp Waibel in a joint statement.

Noreja was founded in 2021 as a spin-off of the Vienna University of Economics and Business by Dr Lukas Pfahlsberger, Dr Philipp Waibel, and Prof. Dr Jan Mendling. The company helps organisations identify process weaknesses more effectively, better understand complex interdependencies, and make optimisation potential visible with precision, based on knowledge graphs and AI.

The startup strives to create the most advanced process intelligence solution available. It emphasises that its technological foundation relies on knowledge graphs, which AI uses to enhance understanding of business processes and provide analyses of weaknesses, inefficiencies, and optimisation potential. AI agents then take over optimisation tasks autonomously. Noreja calls this approach Generative Process Intelligence.

Its platform comprises a dashboard, analyser, Minerva and workbench. The Dashboard combines different widgets so users can capture volume, times, variants, deviations, and developments. 

The analyser acts as the user’s interactive workspace for the examination of every process step. Minerva, the company’s context-sensitive AI assistant, connects process data with additional knowledge such as SLAs, organisational rules, or external influences, delivering answers that go beyond classic Event Logs.

Builder, which serves as the control centre for every analytical foundation: Here, users can connect data sources, model events, and define dimension logic that later powers dashboards, analyser, and AI features. 

And Workbench, which serves as the users’ technical laboratory: a fully integrated Jupyter Notebook directly on the Noreja Knowledge Graph. Data scientists, engineers, and analysts can work here with Python as if they were in their familiar notebook environment, only directly on the graph database.

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AI hardware startup Atech has raised a Pre-Seed round with participation from Nordic Makers, Emblem, Lovable, Sequoia Scout Fund (Sequoia), and Andreessen Horowitz Scout Fund (A16z). 

Founded by Vladimir Baran (CCO), Tomas Erik Harmer (CEO), and David Stålmarck (CTO), Atech is building a platform that makes hardware development accessible to everyone, removing one of tech’s highest barriers to entry. 

Building a hardware prototype has traditionally required years of specialised expertise or significant investment in engineering talent.

That barrier has kept countless ideas on paper and locked hardware innovation behind a small group of specialists. 

While software development has been democratised over the past decade, hardware has remained stubbornly difficult to access. Atech is closing that gap, making physical creation as intuitive and flexible as building a web app. 

Atech introduces ‘vibe-engineering’ for hardware. Just as modern AI tools have made software creation accessible to non-developers, Atech lets users describe a hardware concept in natural language and receive a working prototype in minutes, with all underlying technical complexity handled by the platform. 

According to Tomas Harmer, CEO of Atech:

"Software has an entire stack of tools that lets a teenager build an app in a weekend, hardware doesn’t, and we’re still working at the first level of abstraction.

Atech is building the missing layers, so creating in the physical world can feel as fast and joyful as writing code." 

”I am seeing the same patterns Lovable had, but for hardware. I'm really excited to see Atech’s journey. The team is one of a kind,"  shared Anton Osika, CEO of Lovable.

The rise of Physical AI — intelligent systems that sense, interact with, and act upon the real world –- is accelerating demand for hardware expertise at every level. 

As this shift unfolds, the ability to build and control physical systems will become a foundational skill, not a niche one.
 Atech believes hardware should be as programmable, adaptable, and user-driven as software. The company is building the tools to make that a reality. 

Lead image: David Stålmarck (CTO), Tomas Erik Harmer (CEO, and Vladimir Baran (CCO), co-founders of Atech.

QuoIntelligence, a Frankfurt-based provider of Unified Risk Intelligence, today announced the close of a €7.3 million Series A funding round to support go-to-market expansion, product development, and team growth.

The round was led by Elevator Ventures, the venture capital arm of Raiffeisen Bank International, and co-led by BMH Beteiligungs- Managementgesellschaft Hessen (BMH), with participation from returning investor eCAPITAL ENTREPRENEURIAL PARTNERS, and further supported by Mercurius Private Equity.

Marco Riccardi, CEO and founder, QuoIntelligence, said, “World-class threat intelligence has always been described as something only large teams can produce. We built QuoIntelligence to prove that wrong: our vision is Unified Risk Intelligence – cyber threats, physical risks, and geopolitical signals converging into decisions, not just alerts, for any organisation, within hours of onboarding, under European law. 

“NIS2 and DORA have turned what was a competitive advantage for our customers into a regulatory baseline for every mid-market company in Europe. This round gives us the fuel to build that standard at scale, and Elevator Ventures, BMH, and eCapital are the partners who make it possible.”

Founded in Frankfurt in 2020 by Marco Riccardi, QuoIntelligence offers Unified Risk Intelligence to European mid-market organisations. It claims to deliver finished threat intelligence that is already analysed, already contextualised, and ready to act on, with no in-house team required to operate it.

According to the company, the two EU cybersecurity regulations NIS2 and DORA together mandate proactive and preemptive cyber risk management and supply chain oversight across more than 160,000 European organisations. This creates a structural demand for continuous, forward-looking intelligence.

It also mentions that most organisations lack an in-house function, and establishing one demands a substantial six-figure investment in talent, not counting the time needed to operationalise it. 

At the same time, European procurement frameworks are increasingly requiring that highly sensitive data remain under EU jurisdictions. This disqualifies the non-EU vendors that have historically dominated the market.

QuoIntelligence claims to be the answer by providing finished intelligence, produced using European technology, stored on German soil, delivered within hours of onboarding, and requiring no internal team to operate.

It states that its analyst-first model combines Mercury, an AI-powered threat intelligence platform, with a team of European analysts who review, curate, and contextualise every intelligence output in the client’s language and sector. 

The company’s conversational AI analyst is called KARLA, which makes that intelligence accessible at every level of an organisation. 

Emphasising the importance of  European sovereignty for QuoIntelligence, the company highlights that it is incorporated under German law, operates two additional entities in Spain and Italy, and stores all intelligence data under EU jurisdiction, regardless of where its clients are located. QuoIntelligence claims to be one of the few providers able to satisfy those requirements while matching the intelligence depth previously available only from US, Russian or Israeli vendors.

Apart from the capital, the company notes that Elevator Ventures’ deep roots in DACH and CEE banking and financial services make it a strategically significant partner. “QuoIntelligence’s primary growth vector runs directly through financial sector clients navigating DORA and NIS2 compliance requirements, and Elevator Ventures’ network opens doors that are central to that expansion,” says the German startup. 

BMH, as Hessen’s leading public equity investor and a wholly owned subsidiary of Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen Girozentrale (Helaba), connects QuoIntelligence directly to the German Mittelstand (SMEs) it is building for. 

Explaining why it chose Frankfurt as its base, the company says, “Frankfurt is Europe’s financial capital, home to the European Central Bank and the operational centre of much of the German Mittelstand now falling inside NIS2 and DORA scope. For a company building Unified Risk Intelligence for regulated European organisations, Frankfurt is not a satellite to the market – it is the market.”

In 2023, the company raised €5 million in a seed financing round led by DeepTech VC investor eCAPITAL Entrepreneurial Partners.

QuoIntelligence meets ISO 27001, NIS2 and DORA requirements and is an official ENISA provider, and serves organisations in finance, government, manufacturing, retail and transportation across Europe. It enters this financing round with strong revenue growth momentum, recording zero client churn in 2025. Its customer lifetime value has grown nearly six times since 2023.

This year, the company plans to prioritise a channel-led go-to-market strategy, with system integrators, resellers and service providers beginning to drive a growing share of new business.

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A coalition of major European investors, corporations and high-growth startups today published an open letter to European policymakers and leaders, calling for a commitment to make Europe the world’s first “electro-continent” – an economy where over 50 per cent of final energy consumption runs on clean, domestically produced electricity by 2040.

The letter, coordinated by Norrsken (inc Norrsken Foundation and Norrsken Evolve) and backed by the Corporate Leaders Group Europe (CLG Europe), H&M, Oatly, Einride, Flower, Trawa, and others, argues that Europe’s chronic vulnerability to energy price shocks must end.

The signatories are urging EU leaders to set a robust target: electricity's share of final energy consumption must reach 50 per cent by 2040, giving regulators, investors, and member states a shared destination to build toward. 

I spoke to David Frykman, Founding General Partner of Norrsken VC, to learn more. 

Three shocks, one lesson: Europe’s energy model is no longer viable

The open letter arrives as Europe weathers its third fossil fuel price shock since 2022. Russia’s weaponisation of gas pipelines, the Red Sea shipping disruptions, and now the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have each triggered spikes in European energy costs.

In the first 30 days of the Iran conflict, the EU paid an additional €14 billion in fossil fuel imports. Between 2021 and 2024, energy crises cost Europe an estimated €930 billion in crisis premiums above normal prices. 

According to Frykman, in the first 30 days of the Iran conflict alone, the additional cost of fossil fuel imports could have financed two large-scale nuclear reactors. The crisis premium Europe paid between 2021 and 2024 could have financed more than the EU's entire existing nuclear fleet. 

“The cost of inaction arrives with every crisis, and it is getting higher." 

Between 2021 and 2025, Europe paid over €1 trillion in what could be described as an “energy crisis premium” — largely due to fossil fuel imports.

According to Frykman, this has reinforced external dependencies. That’s ultimately the core issue this initiative is trying to address.

He offers a strong wake-up call, asserting: 

“Europe runs on fuel it does not own, shipped through waters it does not control. Three energy shocks in four years should settle the argument.

The region can no longer rely on burning expensive imports.  

The only cheap energy Europe can produce at scale, on its own soil, is clean electricity. It is time to end the fossil fuel chokehold on Europe's economy, once and for all. Europe must become the world's first electro-continent.” 

What does the “Electro Union” actually mean in practice?

At its core, the proposal sets a clear target: by 2040, 50 per cent of Europe’s economy should run on clean electricity — roughly double today’s level. Today, that figure is closer to 25 per cent.

According to Frykman, in practical terms, this is about doubling electrification across industries — from transport to heavy industry — using existing technologies.

Technically, Europe could electrify up to 90 per cent of its economy “using existing technologies."

"The capital, talent, and market demand are already there.

China did not become the world's first electro-state by accident. It set a direction and delivered.

Europe needs the same clarity of purpose – a commitment that gives investors, entrepreneurs, regulators, and member states a shared destination to build toward, accelerating permitting reform, grid investment, and cross-border energy integration. That is what making the EU the Electro Union means."

Why now?

I wondered why this push is happening now, after decades of energy shocks? Europe has experienced multiple energy shocks over decades, yet dependency on imported fossil fuels persists.

Frykman admits that this is something many people are asking. 

“What’s different now is a convergence of factors. First, there’s growing public fatigue: energy shocks are no longer abstract — they’re visible in household bills, inflation, and interest rates."

Second, the economics have shifted. 

“In many cases, building new clean energy capacity is now cheaper than continuing to rely on fossil fuels.”

And third, there’s a competitiveness issue. The European industry pays roughly twice as much for energy as its US counterparts do.

"That creates a structural disadvantage, particularly in an era where energy-intensive sectors like AI and data infrastructure are becoming central.”

Europe’s energy transition faces a political, not technological, constraint

From an investor’s perspective, Frykman asserts that predictability is key, and Europe has been inconsistent. 

“Regulatory environments vary widely between countries, and permitting timelines can range from one to ten years, sometimes with projects being revoked late in the process.

Despite that, the underlying thesis is straightforward: capital flows to the most efficient solutions. Increasingly, that means wind, solar, and other forms of clean energy.”

He contends that what’s often missing is political alignment, sharing:

“There are cases where fully funded, shovel-ready renewable projects have been blocked at the policy level.”

So the issue isn’t necessarily a lack of innovation or investment appetite — it’s that regulatory and political barriers are slowing deployment. Sweden halted plans for 13 offshore wind farms in the Baltic Sea — projects that together could have added tens of gigawatts of new electricity capacity. This is because the Swedish military argued that large clusters of offshore turbines would interfere with radar and surveillance systems, making it harder to detect aircraft or missiles and reducing response times in a conflict scenario. 

According to WindEurope, these projects combined could have doubled Sweden’s current electricity generation capacity, and their cancellation threatens the country’s industrial competitiveness and its broader energy security goals. 

Frykman contends, “Ultimately, much of this comes down to political decision-making. If policymakers allow the market to function — allocating capital to where it can be used most efficiently — then the system is far more likely to deliver the outcomes needed.”

A new wave of energy startups is rising in Europe — against structural headwinds

Despite these constraints, Europe is producing a new generation of energy startups attempting to reshape the system. Europe is home to a number of energy unicorns (and soonicorns) like Verkor, focused on low-carbon battery gigafactories and German energy unicorn 1KOMMA5°, which aims to turn homes into self-sufficient, electrified energy systems.

However, in October 2025, 1KOMMA5° filed a complaint with the European Commission against Germany’s plan to subsidise up to 20 GW of new gas-fired power plants, arguing the policy constitutes unlawful state aid that distorts competition and raises costs for the energy transition. 

The company said the proposed subsidies and capacity payments unfairly favour centralised fossil-fuel infrastructure over cheaper, decentralised solutions like virtual power plants, potentially crowding out cleantech innovation and increasing electricity prices for consumers.

But Europe is also home to cautionary examples, such as Northvolt, which highlights how difficult it is to scale gigafactories.

For Frykman, there’s an important distinction between types of investment.

“Deploying proven technologies — like wind, solar, or battery storage projects — is relatively low risk and largely execution-driven.”

But building entirely new industrial ecosystems at scale is a different challenge.

“Competing globally, particularly with countries that have significant state backing, requires coordinated support. For projects of that magnitude, public and private alignment becomes critical.

That said, these large-scale industrial bets represent a small portion of the overall investment needed — the majority can be driven by the market.”

Can Europe surge ahead or just catch up? 

Frykman draws a clear distinction between Europe’s position in traditional and clean energy — while the continent remains structurally disadvantaged in fossil fuels, that same constraint could become a catalyst for leadership in renewables, if it can align policy, cost, and infrastructure with rising demand.

Frykman explained that in terms of conventional energy, Europe is clearly behind, partly due to higher energy costs. But in clean energy, the picture is more balanced. He contends:

“Europe has the potential to lead, particularly because it lacks the same level of domestic fossil fuel resources as countries like the US.

That constraint effectively forces a faster shift toward renewables. And importantly, clean energy is now the most cost-effective option for new capacity. That creates a structural advantage if Europe moves decisively.”

But there is a competitiveness gap 

As AI drives exponential demand for compute, Europe’s energy costs are no longer just an economic issue — they are a structural competitiveness risk.

The letter warns that Europe’s energy cost disadvantage is undermining its industrial base and its ability to compete in the AI era. According to the IEA, industrial electricity prices in the EU are roughly twice those in the United States and about 50 per cent higher than in China. 

As the AI race accelerates – with global data centre electricity consumption projected to more than double by 2030, according to the IEA – the cost of power is becoming the decisive factor in where the next generation of major companies are built. 

Frykman contends that without a clear strategy, this becomes a “competitiveness problem.”

“The logical path forward is to pair data centre expansion with new, domestically produced clean energy. But enabling that at scale requires policy support alongside market forces.”

The problem is no longer economic

The coalition points to the economics as already resolved: solar costs have dropped over 90 per cent in the past decade, and over 90 per cent of new renewable projects are now cheaper than the fossil fuel alternative. Wind and solar generated more EU electricity than fossil fuels for the first time in 2025. 

Further, Frykman contends that while there’s been a lot of attention around next-generation nuclear technologies in Europe and the US, in some regions — particularly China — these technologies are already operational at scale.

“In the West, development is ongoing, but attention tends to move in cycles. Just because something drops out of the spotlight doesn’t mean progress has stopped. Nuclear is likely to complement renewables.”

However, he contends that Europe cannot run on homegrown clean electricity if its economy is still wired to burn fossil fuels. 

“Around 90 per cent of it can be electrified with technology that already exists. Less than a quarter runs on electricity today. And that number has barely moved in over a decade. This needs to change for Europe to end its dependence on expensive imports”, said Frykman. 

Signatories  

The open letter is signed by: 

• Norrsken VC 
• Norrsken Evolve 
• Norrsken Foundation 
• Corporate Leaders Group Europe 
• H&M 
• Oatly 
• Einride 
• Terralayr 
• Flower 
• Fever 
• trawa
  
  

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