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What's Up Tech? #271
Welcome to our 271st newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Europe bets €5 billion on its own tech champions, and a Berlin startup quietly becomes the first to run driverless on EU roads 👀
Fundraising news from the week: quantum computing gets NVIDIA-certified, and procurement finally gets a full-stack reset ⚡
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: AI search optimization, patent litigation on autopilot, and brain-computer interfaces built to scale 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the week🚀 EOS-X Space raises €120 million to take balloon-powered space tourism (and AI defense tech) to new heights (🇪🇸)
EOS-X Space just secured a €120 million Series D as it gears up for a potential 2027 IPO in New York. The company is building a low Earth orbit flight system using eco-friendly stratospheric balloons, offering a five-hour, “chill” trip to space. 🌝
Furthermore, EOS-X is spinning up a new division focused on AI-driven security and advanced data systems for civil and defense use. Fresh funds will fuel this dual play: scaling space tourism, expanding satellite and aerospace projects, and pushing international growth through a new innovation unit.
💳 Primer raises $100 million Series C (🇬🇧)
Primer just locked in an oversubscribed $100 million Series C led by Sofina. The pitch is that payments are messy, fragmented, and low-key chaotic. Primer fixes that by acting as a unified infrastructure layer. It plugs into the full payment lifecycle and captures 400+ data points per transaction, giving companies one clean source of truth.
Now, the company is going full-send on AI. Its tool, Primer Companion, is evolving from “helpful assistant” to “autonomous operator” that can run experiments and optimize payments in real time. 🤖
Primer Raises $100M Series C to Bring AI to Every Payment and Accelerate US Expansion
⚛️ Alice & Bob extends to €100 million Series B to scale fault-tolerant quantum computing with NVIDIA (🇫🇷)
Alice & Bob just got a boost from NVentures, NVIDIA’s VC arm, which extended its €100 million Series B. Alice & Bob builds fault-tolerant quantum computers using “cat qubits,” a design meant to reduce errors that usually make quantum systems glitchy and, frankly, a bit chaotic.
The duo has been teaming up since 2024, plugging Alice & Bob’s tech into NVIDIA’s hybrid stack (CUDA-Q, cuQuantum, and friends).
The goal is to merge quantum with GPUs to power next-gen supercomputing. ⚡ Fresh capital will push R&D and help bring these hybrid quantum-classical systems into real-world high-performance computing centers.
Alice & Bob Announces Investment From NVIDIA’s VC Arm in Series B Extension
📚 Lexroom raises $50 million to scale data-first legal AI across Europe (🇮🇹)
Lexroom just locked in a $50 million Series B led by Left Lane Capital. The startup builds AI for lawyers, but with receipts. Its system pulls from a proprietary database of 6 million+ verified legal documents across civil law systems, so outputs are grounded and traceable. Tasks that once took days now take minutes. 🏃♀️
In a space known for slow tech adoption, Lexroom is positioning itself as AI that lawyers actually trust and use. Today, it’s already used by 8,000+ legal teams, with strong daily engagement.
The objective is to take over civil law Europe, one jurisdiction at a time. New funds will fuel expansion into markets like Spain and Germany, plus deeper local customization.
Lexroom Raises $50M Series B to Expand Data-First Legal AI Across Civil Law Europe
💨 Pivot is replacing legacy procurement with an AI-native OS and a $40 million Series B round (🇫🇷)
Procurement is one of the last enterprise dinosaurs. Pivot is betting it can rebuild the whole stack from the ground up.
They just pulled in $40 million in Series B funding (total funding: now $70 million), led by Forestay Capital and Notion Capital. The company aims to kill the spreadsheet chaos and email ping-pong that still runs procurement at big companies. Pivot’s agentic AI acts like an always-on operator. It automates sourcing, approvals, invoicing, and payments. 🖥️
The company already operates in 25+ countries and processes $3 billion in invoices annually, with customers like DoorDash and Lemonade.
🤖 Prelude raises $20 million Series A to ID humans, bots, and agents alike (🇫🇷)
In 2026, you genuinely can’t tell who’s using your digital product. 🤷♀️ As AI agents and bots replace humans in onboarding flows, the old toolkit of CAPTCHAs and OTP codes is officially out.
The company just raised a $20 million Series A led by 20VC to evolve from a phone verification API into a full-stack digital trust platform. It bundles telecom signals, device intelligence, and behavioral patterns into a continuous trust engine that runs across the entire user lifecycle, not just at signup. Revenue and customer base both grew 6x over the past year, with clients including BeReal and Voodoo. 👀
Prelude was founded by the duo behind Zenly, the location-sharing app Snap shut down in 2023. The Zenly origin is in the product. The founders watched firsthand how broken onboarding destroys retention and built the fix they wished they’d had.
Prelude Raises $20M Series A to Build the AI-Age Trust Layer
⚙️ Scope raises €17 million to drag industrial inspection out of the clipboard era (🇬🇧)
The testing, inspection, and certification (TIC) industry (aka. the people who verify whether your bridge, oil rig, or aerospace component is actually safe) is a $300 billion global market. And yes, it still run on paper. 📄
Scope raised €17 million led by Index Ventures to automate that reporting layer for field inspection teams. Inspectors capture findings on-site via voice, video, and notes, then the platform surfaces relevant context and generates structured reports in minutes.
Since launching in July 2025, ARR has grown 9x. Scope has also held a 100% pilot-to-paid conversion rate, with inspectors from 6 of the top 10 global TIC companies already on the platform. 🚀
🔥 Up-and-coming startups 🔍 Searchable raises €12 million in Seed funding so your brand stops getting ghosted by AI (🇬🇧)
65% of searches now end without a single website click. AI overviews appear in nearly half of all Google queries, and ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are fast becoming the first stop for product recommendations.
If you’re just doing traditional SEO these days, your brand is probably getting ghosted. 👻
Searchable raised €12 million at a €72 million valuation, led by Headline, the VC firm that previously backed Semrush, to build the Semrush equivalent for AI-native search.
The platform tracks brand visibility across 10 AI search engines and automates the optimisation work to improve it.
Launched in January 2026, it hit £1.4m ARR in under 4.5 months with nearly 1,000 customers. 👀
⚖️ Months after YC, Stilta raises $10.5 million Seed round to make patent litigation easier (🇸🇪)
What patent invalidity research actually looks like: sifting through hundreds of millions of patents, scientific papers, and archived web pages to build a case that a competitor’s IP shouldn’t hold up in court.
As you can imagine, it takes months…and it costs a fortune. 😬
Stilta raised a $10.5 million Seed round led by a16z to automate that layer of the process using AI agents.
Founded in December 2025 by four ex-McKinsey engineers, the platform handles invalidity and infringement analysis end-to-end, drawing on hundreds of millions of patents and scientific articles, and doing it in hours rather than weeks.
Three months after commercial launch, it had already signed Roche, Alfa Laval, and Maersk, plus three of the five largest IP firms globally.
Stilta Raises $10.5M from a16z and YC to Help Companies Rediscover the Patents They Forgot They Had
🧠 Neurosoft Bioelectronics raises $7.5 million to make brain-computer interfaces less sci-fi, more scalable (🇨🇭)
Neurosoft Bioelectronics just closed an oversubscribed $7.5 million Seed led by Skybound Venture Capital.
The startup is building soft, stretchable brain-computer interfaces that sit on the brain’s surface without penetrating tissue, think Neuralink but less invasive.
The funding will accelerate clinical trials in the US and Europe as Neurosoft pushes to make BCIs actually manufacturable at scale.
Your brain called, it wants an upgrade. 🤖
Neurosoft Bioelectronics Raises $7.5M for Scalable Brain-Computer Interfaces
📰 Tech news of the week☁️ EQT wins the keys to Europe’s €5 billion tech war chest (🇸🇪/🇪🇺)
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner! 🏆
Swedish PE giant EQT just beat out Atomico and Eurazeo to manage the EU’s €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund, the bloc’s biggest bet yet on homegrown tech champions. The European Innovation Council made the call after a closely-watched selection process.
The fund will target AI, quantum computing, clean energy, space, and biotech, with first investments expected by autumn 2026. EQT says it already has over 100 companies in the pipeline.
Plot twist: they also want to back UK startups with EU money.
Brexit who?
🚗 Bliq.ai gets Europe’s first green light for truly driverless cars (🇩🇪/🇪🇪)
Bliq.ai just became the first company to receive approval for fully driverless road operations in an EU member state.
The Berlin-based startup can now run its vehicles on Estonian public roads without anyone behind the wheel, just remote supervision.
Bliq already has a dozen vehicles in operation and claims to run the largest driverless fleet in the EU. Estonia’s forward-thinking regulatory environment made it the perfect testing ground.
Meanwhile, the rest of Europe is still debating roundabout rules.
Classic. 🇪🇺
Bliq.ai Wins Approval for Fully Driverless Road Operations in Estonia
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
United Founders - Venture Capital Analyst Intern (Paris)
VC Analyste - CentraleSupélec Venture (Paris)
Analyste Dealflow & Sales - Super Capital (Paris)
VC Analyste Stagiaire Time4 - daphni (Paris)
Investment interns - Junction Growth Investors (Antwerp)
Visiting Analyst - Headline (Berlin)
Jobs
Senior Principal/Investment Manager - The Resolution Foundation (London)
Associate - Italian Founders Fund (Milan)
👉 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 🖤