ALS breakthroughs, defensible IP, programmable creativity, and much more...
What's Up Tech? #251
Welcome to our 251st newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, Aris Sevastianos and baby vc fellows Hanna Rosmarie Grothe, Jiexuan Jiang, Moritz Muller, and Elena Thörner.
Wishing you a wonderful holiday season, and thank you for being with us again this year. Our community has grown to more than 9,000 of you, and we couldn’t be more excited about what’s ahead.
We’ll be back on January 13th. Until then, enjoy the celebrations and have a great feast!
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: a big week for Germany with an announcement of a new multi-billion investment push and a local retail investing giant becoming its most valuable startup 🇩🇪
Fundraising news from the week: Engineering moves closer to first principles, and innovation gets packaged into defensible IP 🧬
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: ‘Photoshopped’ is a legacy term, and energy optimization finally built for real operators ⚡
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the week⚡Life sciences VC Medicxi announces €500 million Fund V (🇬🇧🇨🇭)
Medicxi announced the closing of Medicxi V, a €500 million fund, continuing its asset-centric strategy of building biotechnology companies around clear product visions designed to transform patient care.
What makes this raise stand out is Medicxi’s company-creation-first approach. Instead of deploying capital into large portfolios, the firm works hands-on with drug hunters and clinicians to form focused biotech companies around single therapeutic assets.
This approach has led Medicxi to create 16 companies, deliver over 20 positive clinical data readouts, and realize more than $1 billion through IPOs and strategic acquisitions. 👏
💗 Lovable raises its third round this year, landing half a million in funding (🇸🇪)
Lovable crossed Seed to Series B just this year. Yup, you read that right. In their latest funding round led by CapitalG and Menlo Ventures, they raised $330 million. 👏
The company has tripled its valuation from $1.8 billion to $6.6 billion in just five months, with Nvidia, Google, and Salesforce now among its backers.
Yes, the valuation is impressive, but what stands out the most to us is the relentless vision of the team to usher in the age of the builder. There are now over 100,000+ new projects being built on Lovable daily. Over 6 million visits have also been tracked on Lovable-built websites.
CEO Anton Osika and his team continues to prove that world-class AI companies can be built from Stockholm. 🇸🇪
🧠 Neural Concept raises $100 million in Series C funding to scale AI-native engineering (🇨🇭)
Neural Concept has raised $100 million in a Series C round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives.
Spun out of EPFL in 2019, the company builds CAD-native enterprise AI that understands geometry, physics, and design constraints.
Translation: it plugs AI directly into engineering and simulation workflows so teams can test way more designs, way earlier, and avoid painful late-stage changes. ⚙️
The fresh capital will fuel faster product development, including a generative CAD capability planned for early 2026 and global go-to-market expansion. Neural Concept is also doubling down on deep partnerships with heavyweights like Nvidia, Siemens, Ansys, Microsoft, and AWS.
👩💻 Ankar raises $20 million to turn innovation chaos into defensible IP (🇬🇧)
Ankar just closed a $20 million Series A, led by Atomico, to build an enterprise-grade operating system for patents. The platform uses AI to analyze novelty, scan prior art, and help draft patent claims. 🔐
Ankar argues that patents are so two thousand and late, while innovation is moving at AI speed. 🏃♀️
The startup unifies the full patent lifecycle in one secure workflow and taps into 150+ million patent filings and 250+ million scientific publications. Customers see an average 40% productivity boost, shifting hundreds of hours back to high-value work.
Ankar Lands $20M Series A to Reinvent How Innovation Becomes Defensible IP
⚡ Axoltis Pharma raises €18 million to accelerate development of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) drug candidate (🇫🇷)
Axoltis Pharma has raised €18 million in a Series A funding round to push forward the development of a new treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a severe and currently incurable neurological disease.
The round was co-led by FIDAT Ventures and Cenitz, with participation from existing investors and an equity crowdfunding campaign.
The funding will support ongoing Phase 2 clinical trials of NX210c, an experimental drug designed to help protect nerve cells and repair the blood–brain barrier, which is often damaged in ALS.
If successful, NX210c could represent a meaningful breakthrough for ALS patients, a group that today has very limited treatment options and a life expectancy of just a few years after diagnosis. 💊
🔥 Up-and-coming startups 🏗️ Endra raises $20 million in Seed funding to automate the hidden systems that make buildings tick (🇸🇪)
Construction is facing a supercycle with soaring demand and tighter climate targets. But with, productivity falling behind. Endra thinks the fix starts with three letters: MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) systems. 🧑🔧
The company just closed a $20 million Seed round led by Notion Capital to replace months of manual MEP engineering with a fully automated AI workflow, delivering up to 70x efficiency gains.
And, if you’re having doubts on whether this is a niche problem: more than 600 companies across 90+ countries are already on Endra’s waitlist. 👀
Endra Raises $20M Seed to Unlock Faster, Greener Construction at Global Scale
🤖 Arcads.ai raises $16 million in Seed funding to let AI handle the entire ad creative grind (🇫🇷)
Creating high-performing ads is expensive, slow, and increasingly formulaic. Arcads AI thinks it’s time to automate the whole thing. 📹
The startup has raised a $16 million Seed round led by Eurazeo to scale its platform that generates social-ready marketing videos entirely with AI, from UGC-style actors to product demos and try-ons, across 35+ languages.
Just one year after launch, Arcads is already serving over 6,000 customers worldwide and producing roughly 100,000 video assets every month. 👀
Arcads.ai Raises $16M in Seed Funding to Accelerate Development in the United States
⚡ Skye raises $11 million Seed round to put industrial energy consumption on autopilot (🇸🇪)
In Europe, electricity prices are volatile, and the bills keep racking up. It’s no surprise eergy efficiency is fast becoming a competitive moat. Skye is betting that software is the way forward. 🏭
The company has raised an $11 million Seed round led by Transition VC to scale Energy Autopilot, software that actively monitors and controls electricity consumption by managing power peaks, price swings, and energy storage in real time.
The bold claim? Cutting industrial electricity costs by up to 50 percent. 👏
Skye Raises $11M to Help Companies Cut Industrial Energy Costs
📰 Tech news of the week💳 Germany announces €130-billion investment push to de-risk private capital in defense, AI, and infrastructure (🇩🇪)
Germany wants private capital back in the game and it’s putting public money on the line to make it happen.
The government has launched the Germany Fund, committing around €30 billion in public funding and guarantees to unlock up to €130 billion in total investment. 🏗️
Rather than a classic fund, the initiative uses loans, guarantees, and equity stakes via state bank KfW to lower risk for investors backing energy infrastructure, deep tech, AI, biotech, raw materials, and defence capabilities.
Germany Launches 30B Euro Fund to Mobilize Private Investment
💰 Trade Republic becomes Germany’s highest valued startup, hitting multi-billion valuation after secondary share announcement
Trade Republic has become Germany’s most valuable startup, reaching a €12.5 billion valuation and overtaking defence technology company Helsing. 🇩🇪
The valuation was set through a €1.2 billion secondary share sale led by Founders Fund, in which existing investors purchased shares from early backers rather than providing new primary capital.
The transaction provided liquidity for existing shareholders while allowing Trade Republic to remain privately held and focused on execution.
It also reflects a broader European trend, with late-stage startups increasingly using secondary rounds to gain liquidity as IPO markets remain subdued.
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
Startup Support Intern - Venturelab (Zurich)
Growth Analyst - Inovexus (Paris)
Investor Relations & Growth Intern - Carbon Equity (Berlin)
Jobs
Senior Investor - Mundi Ventures (Madrid)
Events Manager VC - Cherry Ventures (London)
Investor - Norrsken (Stockholm)
Investor Relations & Growth - Carbon Equity (Berlin)
You can also read more about baby vc on our website and follow our updates on LinkedIn, or directly reach out to us at hello@baby-vc.co! 🤝
The whole baby vc crew 🖤