AI-powered defense, quantum chip testing, cardiac scans, and much more...
What's Up Tech? #229
Welcome to our 229th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Europe’s deep tech talent machine hits 1M trained, and the UK drops billions to double down on sovereign AI 🤝
Fundraising news from the week: A UK merger debuting with multi-million fund, and AI agents chart another new territory 💸
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: Quantum chip testers in the Netherlands, and a marketing co-pilot built for speed 🏁
🆕 Product news from the week: scroll to the end for one-liner, stand-out headlines on the latest tech that you should read more about 👀
Internships & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the week🚀 PXN Group forms with £670 million to supercharge the North’s VC game (🇬🇧)
Two of the UK’s top regional VC firms, Par Equity and Praetura Ventures, are joining forces to create PXN Group, a new powerhouse managing £670 million in assets. The merged firm claims the title of fastest-growing investment firm outside London, and will now be doling out cheques from £200,000 to £8 million across seed to scale-up stages. The goal is to plug the funding gap and make the North of the UK a serious startup player.
The new funds will target early and growth-stage companies beyond the London bubble, with a suite of equity, VCT, EIS, and inheritance tax-friendly products. Par Equity brings a top-performing EIS fund and even a carbon-capture mandate with Aviva, while Praetura offers regional VCTs and runs the £100 million NPIF II fund for the British Business Bank. Once the merger is live, PXN will be a one-stop-shop for founders, family offices, and financial advisers hungry for UK-wide returns. 🌱
Merger Creates PXN Group – a £670m Northern Investment Powerhouse
🛡️ Helsing raises €600 million to double down on AI-powered defense tech (🇩🇪)
German defense tech startup Helsing just secured €600 million in a Series D led by Daniel Ek’s investment firm, Prima Materia. The raise more than doubled its valuation to €12 billion, putting Helsing among Europe’s most valuable startups. Helsing’s striving to build AI for “all-domain” military operations and flex European tech muscle on the global stage.
Founded in 2021, Helsing develops AI software that helps military forces make faster, smarter decisions across land, air, sea, space, and cyber. The company’s tech has already seen real-world action in Ukraine, where it’s helped with frontline ops since 2022. The fresh funds will fuel more R&D, scaling, and cross-border defense deployments, just as Europe scrambles to beef up its geopolitical defense game. 🔥
🧠 PhysicsX raises $135 million to overhaul industrial engineering with AI-native tools (🇬🇧)
Engineers, rejoice: the boring CAD days are numbered! London-based PhysicsX just scored $135 million in Series B funding, with Atomico leading the round. The startup builds AI-native software that helps engineers design and simulate faster, smarter, and with fewer headaches, especially in high-stakes fields like aerospace, defense, and semiconductors.
Founded by ex-F1 and McKinsey/QuantumBlack brainiacs, PhysicsX is basically giving engineers superpowers. With over four times the revenue since 2023 and 150+ employees, they’ll use the fresh cash to go global and pump out even bigger AI models for physics-heavy industries. 🏎️
PhysicsX Raises $135M Series B to Usher in a New Era of AI-Native Engineering and Manufacturing
💸 Finom raises €115 million to automate SMB banking with AI tools (🇳🇱)
Finom just secured €115 million in Series C funding, led by AVP, to help it become the go-to neobank for Europe’s 26 million SMBs. The Amsterdam-based startup blends banking, invoicing, and AI-powered accounting into one slick platform so small business owners can finally ghost their accountants. 👻
The fresh cash will fund strategic acquisitions, product expansion, and internal AI agents (aka fewer humans, more bots). Finom’s now raised about $346 million total and is eyeing 1 million customers by 2026.
🎥 Animaj raises $85 million to turn kids’ content into global AI-powered franchises (🇫🇷)
Paris-based Animaj just locked in $85 million in fresh funding to level up children’s entertainment. The round was led by HarbourView and Bpifrance Large Venture. Animaj uses GenAI to crank out high-quality animated content fast (think sketch-to-scene with zero burnout). Its game plan is to snag underutilized kids’ IP (like Pocoyo), pump it full of AI juice, and launch it across YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Spotify, Roblox, and more. 🎮
This isn’t your grandma’s cartoon studio, Animaj is a platform-native, AI-first franchise machine. With over 22 billion views and 240 million monthly viewers, they’re scaling hard to make their stories go global from day one.
🩺 Nabla raises $70 million to build clinical AI agents that do your charting… and then some (🇫🇷)
Paris-based Nabla just scored $70 million in Series C funding, led by HV Capital, bringing its total raised to $120 million. Once just a fancy notetaker for doctors, Nabla now flexes agentic AI that can chart, code, order labs, and even click through your EHR (like a caffeinated intern hehe). 👦
Their tech plugs into over 130 healthcare orgs and powers 85,000 clinicians, automating all the annoying, repetitive tasks that make doctors scream into the void. New funding will fuel the rollout of custom AI agents, one for smarter coding, one for inpatient nurse support, and one to basically do your job if you let it.
Nabla Banks $70M Series C to Build Out Agentic AI for Clinical Workflows
🔥 Up-and-coming startups to watch🟠 Orange Quantum Systems raises €12 million to turbocharge quantum chip testing (🇳🇱)
Dutch startup Orange Quantum Systems just pulled in €12 million in seed funding to build next-gen testing tools for quantum chips. The round, which was the largest seed raise ever in the Netherlands’ quantum sector, was led by Icecat Capital.
Their tech is simple-ish: it speeds up the painfully slow process of testing quantum chips so that manufacturers can keep scaling qubit counts fast. Funds will go toward building test systems that cut down testing time from weeks to days, helping power the next wave of industrial-scale quantum computing. 🖥️
❤️🔥 No heart can wait: DESKi raises $6 million to bring AI-powered cardiac scans to the masses (🇫🇷)
Bordeaux-based DESKi just bagged $6 million in Seed funding to scale its AI-first cardiac ultrasound tool, “HeartFocus”, across Europe and the US. Backed by Racine² (Serena + makesense), BNP Paribas Développement, Épopée Gestion, Good Only Ventures, Better Angle, and NACo, the round will help take DESKi from clinical validation to global rollout.
HeartFocus enables any healthcare worker, not just trained cardiologists, to capture diagnostic-grade heart scans after just hours of training. FDA-cleared and trained on 10+ million data points, the AI provides real-time guidance and integrates with existing care platforms. 🩺
DESKi Closes $6M Seed to Expand AI in Early Disease Detection
🏎️ Superscale AI just raised $5 million to make marketing on autopilot (🇩🇪)
German startup Superscale AI has landed a $5 million Pre-Seed round led by Creandum, with backing from Interface Capital, s16vc, and a star-studded list of angels including Peter Welinder (OpenAI), Austin Lau (Anthropic), and Philipp Westermeyer (OMR). The goal? Build the Shopify of marketing execution.
Plug in a product URL and Superscale’s platform breaks it down into strategy, messaging, audiences, and UGC-style ads, all ready to edit via a chat interface and launch in minutes. The best part? It learns from performance data to optimize campaigns as they run. Backed by a team with a decade of product-building experience, Superscale moved from concept to waitlist in just 3 months.
Superscale AI Secures $5M Pre-Seed to Build the Future of Autonomous Marketing
📰 Tech news of the week🇪🇺 Europe’s deep tech talent machine just crossed 1 million trained
From hydrogen infrastructure to AI-powered industry, Europe’s green and digital ambitions are only as strong as the workforce building them. But with 70% of EU deep tech startups struggling to find experienced engineers, the talent crunch is real and it's slowing down progress.
That’s where the EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative steps in. Launched in 2022, this ambitious programme is building Europe’s human capital engine by upskilling one million people in deep tech by 2025. The effort is part of the New European Innovation Agenda, and it’s already delivering: 1 million learners trained, 600+ partners onboard, and over 200 courses spanning AI, quantum computing, advanced materials, and more.
It’s not just a numbers game, diversity is on the agenda too. Women now make up 36% of all talents trained, surpassing expectations and nudging deep tech toward a more inclusive future. 🤝
EIT Deep Tech Talent Initiative: 1M Talents Trained in Europe and Counting
📰 Product news of the weekHowdy, Austin 🤠 Tesla launches robotaxi in the Texan city among invite-only riders
Introducing OpenAI for Government, starting with a $200-million contract with the US Department of Defense 🪖
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
Analyst Intern - Earlybird (Berlin/Munich)
Analyst - Chausson Partners (Paris)
VC Analyst Intern - Ternel (Paris)
Jobs
Associate - Positron Ventures (Remote)
Senior Associate/Principal - SE Ventures (Paris/Grenoble)
Associate - Episode 1 (London)
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The whole baby vc crew 🖤