Bisous for Bezos?
What's Up Tech? #270
Welcome to our 270th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Amazon drops billions into France, and the race to own Europe's AI backbone gets very real 🌍
Fundraising news from the week: drug design engines, custom AI silicon, and a workforce platform gunning for enterprise AI adoption at scale ⚡
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: construction on autopilot, real-time AI security, and cloud infrastructure rebuilt from scratch 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the week🧪 Isomorphic Labs raises $2.1 billion to supercharge AI drug discovery (🇬🇧)
Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1 billion in a Series B led by Thrive Capital. The company spun out of DeepMind in 2021 and uses AlphaFold-style protein-structure AI to design drug candidates.
It’s already partnered with big pharmas like Eli Lilly and Novartis and says it has started pre-clinical trials. The fresh cash will scale its platform, hire drug experts, and push candidates toward the clinic. 🧑🔬
🚀 Fractile raises $220 million to speed up AI inference (🇬🇧)
Fractile closed a $220 million round led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund. Fractile builds custom chips and systems to slash AI query-to-output time. Current models can take about a month to produce 100 million tokens at ~40 tokens/second. Fractile aims for ~1,200 tokens/second so those same runs finish in a day. 😎
New funds will push the first chips and systems into customers’ hands and scale engineering across the stack, from architecture to foundry process. The company says that aside from speed for today’s apps, this unlocks whole new, expensive-but-possible AI workloads in drug discovery, materials, and agentic coding.
Fractile Raises $220M to Build the Next Generation of Inference Hardware
🎮 Grand Games raises $70 million to scale hybrid casual mobile games (🇹🇷)
Grand Games raised $70 million in a Series B led by Balderton’s Growth Fund. The round brings total funding to $103 million and pushes the company toward unicorn valuation after roughly 6x value growth since last year with only single-digit dilution.
Grand builds hybrid casual puzzle games with short daily sessions and premium design. It has six live titles, 50 million+ downloads, and recent US iOS #1 and #2 hits. The new capital will fuel marketing, hiring, and launching more games from its five autonomous studios based in Istanbul. 🏁
Grand Games Raises $70M Series B to Scale Hybrid Casual Gaming
🎯 Multiverse raises $70 million to scale AI upskilling across Europe (🇬🇧)
Multiverse pulled in $70 million in a round led by Schroders Capital. The raise values the company at $2.1 billion and follows a 50% year-on-year revenue jump and its first cash-positive quarter.
The startup sells an AI-upskilling stack (i.e., training + coaching + platform) that sits between AI tools and the people who must use them. It just bought Berlin-based StackFuel, whose courses boast a 92% completion rate, and its Atlas coaching product tripled daily active users last year. The money will speed European expansion and team growth. 📈
Multiverse Raises $70m at a $2.1bn Valuation to Push Its AI-Adoption Pitch Across Europe
📸 eyeo raises €40 million to rewire camera sensors (🇳🇱)
eyeo secured €40 million in a Series A led by Innovation Industries. That brings total funding to €55 million. The startup builds CMOS-compatible sensors using its Nanophotonic Color Splitting platform. Instead of absorptive color filters, tiny optical structures split and steer light to pixels. That boosts light sensitivity, color accuracy, and resolution while enabling smaller pixels (essentially doing more with less light). 🔆
eyeo will use the cash to scale from R&D to mass production. They’ll hire engineers, push next-gen sensor development, and lock in OEM partnerships for mobile, industrial, XR, and smart-city use cases.
eyeo Secures €40M Series A to Transform Camera Sensors with Color-Splitting Technology
🧠 Fifth Dimension raises £19 million Series A to make ‘Selling Sunset’ smarter (🇬🇧)
Real assets are the world’s largest and most data-fragmented asset class. Investment managers routinely juggle ERPs, deal platforms, spreadsheets, data rooms, and email threads, none of which talk to each other.
Fifth Dimension has raised its Series A funding led by HV Capital to help firms juggle that complexity. The platform unifies a firm’s fragmented institutional and market data into a single intelligence layer, powered by its AI agent Ellie, which screens deals, drafts IC memos, monitors portfolio variance, and surfaces risk proactively.
Clients, including BXP, Realty Income, and Peachtree Group, report deploying 5x more capital with the same team and complex deals underwritten in days rather than weeks. The company generates 70% of revenue from the US and is setting its sights on Singapore as its home base for its APAC expansion. 💸
Fifth Dimension Raises £19.2M to Scale Its Decision Intelligence Platform
💳 Adfin raises $18 million to build the agentic finance platform that makes money move (🇬🇧)
In the UK, nearly two-thirds of SME invoices are paid late, and it’s killing businesses. Most finance teams are still managing this with manual follow-ups, disconnected tools, and crossed fingers. 😬
Adfin has raised an $18 million Series A led by Index Ventures. The company builds an agentic money movement platform. What does that look like? Proprietary payment infrastructure combined with AI agents that decide the best action for each invoice, automate collections, and handle reconciliation across accounting platforms like Xero and QuickBooks.
Customers see a late-payment rate of 9%, which is nearly 7x better than the UK average. The platform now serves over 1,500 businesses and has been named the third fastest-growing technology company in Europe. 💸
With $18M in New Funding, Adfin Expands AI-Powered Business Finance
🔥 Up-and-coming startups 🏗️ Pillar raises €12 million to build the OS for construction contractors (🇮🇹)
Pillar has raised a €12 million Seed round led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Base10 Partners, bringing total funding to €15.2 million in under eight months since public launch.
Construction is the second-largest industry in the world by GDP contribution, yet one of the least digitized. The platform gives contractors a single AI-powered control room: real-time margin tracking, quote generation, workforce management, invoice processing, and project reporting.
In under a year, Pillar has processed over 460,000 invoices and recorded €1 million in ARR in the first four months of 2026 with double-digit month-on-month growth. 🚀
Pillar Secures €12M to Build an AI-Powered Operating System for Construction
🔐 White Circle raises $11 million to stop enterprise AI from going rogue (🇫🇷)
White Circle just closed an $11 million Seed from a who’s-who of AI royalty: angels from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Hugging Face, and Datadog. Not bad for a company whose founder went viral for jailbreaking every major AI model in one evening. 😅
They build a real-time control layer for enterprise AI, handling monitoring, guardrails, and governance so models don’t leak sensitive data or go off-script. The funding will fuel product development and expansion across the US, UK, and Europe.
Because if you’re going to let AI loose in your enterprise, someone better be watching. 👀
☁️ Zerops raises $2 million to make cloud infrastructure actually work for AI (🇨🇿)
Zerops just closed a $2 million Seed led by Gi21 Capital.
The Platform-as-a-Service startup is tackling one of dev’s oldest headaches: code that works locally but breaks in production. Revolutionary concept, we know. 🙄
Zerops built a unified cloud architecture that eliminates the gap between dev and production environments, claiming up to 4x cost efficiency versus legacy platforms. The fresh capital will fund expansion into the US and Asia, plus product development as AI agents start writing (and deploying) more code.
📰 Tech news of the week☁️ Amazon drops €15+ billion on France because one AI hub wasn’t enough (🇺🇸🇫🇷)
Amazon just announced plans to invest more than €15 billion in France over three years (2026–2028). This represents its largest commitment to the country ever. The cash will fund new logistics centers, expand AWS data centers, and beef up cloud and AI capabilities.
The deal also promises 7,000+ permanent jobs, starting with three new distribution centers opening in 2026. It’s a not-so-subtle flex as Big Tech races to lock down European AI infrastructure before regulators get even feistier.
Microsoft and Google have already made similar moves, Amazon’s just making sure it doesn’t get left behind.
Bienvenue, Bezos. 🥐
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
Visiting Analyst - Matterwave Ventures (Munich)
Investor Relations Analyst Intern - blisce/ (Paris)
VC Analyst Intern - Educapital (Paris)
Analyste Impact Investing - Phitrust (Paris)
Visiting Analyst - Ananda (Munich)
Analyste venture capital digital - Bpifrance (Paris)
Jobs
Venture Capital Investor - Merantix (Berlin)
Investment Associate - Transition (London)
Finance & Strategy Associate - redalpine (Zug)
Investment Associate/Analyst (several roles) - Future Planet Capital (London)
Investment Manager/Associate - Ananda (Munich)
👉 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 🖤
Celebrity capital allocation always looks glamorous on the surface. Then you trace where the actual long-term returns came from and realise quiet compounding rarely photographs particularly well.