Europe's AI Excellence Hub, a big player enters speech-to-text tech, and robots for logistics
What's Up Tech? #213
Welcome to our 213th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: a change is gonna come with a new AI Excellence Centre in Paris, and Stripe’s push for European reforms
Fundraising news from the week: AI-powered last-mile delivery, and Fund F closes an oversubscribed fund💰
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: helping students decide on tertiary education, and AI agents for the financial industry 🤖
Internships & Job offers of the week
🆕 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 👀
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the week🚲 Relay raises $35 million to enhance end-to-end delivery for merchants (🇬🇧)
Relay just secured a $35-million Series A round, led by Plural, the fund started by ex-Wise founder, Taavet Hinrikus.
Their play? Turning last-mile delivery into an AI-powered logistics machine. They claim their system could cut out 1 billion miles of unnecessary delivery travel, through swapping outdated fixed-route systems for on-demand couriers and hyperlocal hubs. Think DoorDash, but for parcels.
The cash infusion will fuel a nationwide UK expansion and AI-driven route optimisation. With Vinted, TikTok, and Temu already on board, Relay is on its way to hitting solid traction. 🏃♀️
Europe’s Relay Pulls in $35M Series A after Applying Asia’s Model to Delivery
🙋♀️ Fund F closes €28 million fund to back gender-diverse startups (🇦🇹)
Fund F has closed its fund, well above its initial €20-million target. The oversubscribed round reflects strong market confidence in Fund F’s mission to support female-led and mixed-gender startups at the Pre-Seed and Seed stages across Europe. 💖
The European Investment Fund (EIF) joined as a major investor with a €10 million commitment. Since its first close, the fund has invested in 14 startups, including AI-BOB, a Swedish AI-powered compliance platform.
🧬 Cambridge Innovation Capital launches £100 million fund to keep deeptech and life sciences startups in the UK (🇬🇧)
Cambridge, already crowned the world’s top tech cluster, just got another boost in its bid to become Europe’s Silicon Valley. 👑
UK-based deeptech and life science startups struggling to scale are getting assistance with Cambridge Innovation Capital’s latest £100 million Opportunity Fund. With up to £20 million per investment, the fund aims to stop Britain’s best tech from fleeing overseas for cash.
Heavy hitters Aviva Investors and British Patient Capital are backing the fund, betting big on the UK’s evolving scale-up ecosystem. Some big investment moves include backing chipmaker Pragmatic Semiconductor and quantum computing firm Riverlane.
Cambridge Innovation Capital Launches £100M Fund for Deeptech and Life Sciences
🚚 Nomagic raises $44 million to back continue innovation within the warehouses and fulfillment sector (🇵🇱)
Nomagic locked in a $44 million funding round, with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development leading the charge. Their AI-powered robotic arms handle picking, packing, and sorting, making e-commerce fulfillment faster and more efficient.
Nomagic’s ARR skyrocketed 220% in 2024, and they’re gunning for another 200% jump in 2025. The fresh capital will scale deployments across Europe and train its AI on even more warehouse data, pushing the company closer to becoming the go-to automation partner for the biggest retailers and logistics giants. 🛍️
Nomagic Raises $44M to Scale European Picking Robot Deployments
Unique raises $30 million to drive “Agentic AI” in financial services (🇨🇭)
Unique has secured $30 million in a Series A round led by DN Capital and CommerzVentures. Founded in 2021, Unique is tapping into the rising “AI agent” movement, creating agents going beyond simple chatbots to perform complex tasks autonomously. 🤖
Targeting the financial services sector, Unique provides AI-driven solutions for banking, insurance, and private equity, automating processes like research, compliance, and KYC. Its AI agents include an investment research assistant that synthesizes internal and external data, as well as a due diligence tool that analyzes documents and suggests follow-up questions for financial professionals. 🏦
The company has come a long way, pivoting from its original idea of creating AI-generated video for sales teams, raising over $50 million to-date, and charting its expansion to key financial hubs in the US, UK, and Singapore.
🔥 Up-and-coming startups to watch📚 Edumapper raises €5 million to help students choose higher education programs (🇫🇷)
Choosing where you go to uni can often be an anxiety-inducing and painful decision. But, Edumapper plans to change that.
The firm has just secured €5 million Pre-seed funding to expand its edtech platform, which helps students compare and select higher education programs. The round was led by daphni.
Founded in 2024 by ex-founders of MeilleursAgents, Edumapper offers free content on admission requirements, courses, student life, and career prospects for programs in France and internationally.
The funding will be used to enhance the platform, expand educational offerings, and reach more students and institutions, making informed academic decisions easier for students from all backgrounds. 🧑🎓
🏒 SponsWatch raises €1 million in Seed funding to bring tech into the sports sponsorship arena (🇸🇪)
With sports sponsorship money flowing like Gatorade at a championship game, the market for sports analytics is ripe with opportunity. 🤑
SponsWatch, a startup that tracks brand exposure in sports and media, raised $1.05M in Seed funding led by Node.vc. The company’s AI scans video, images, audio, and text, analyzing every frame to tell brands exactly how much screen time they get across TV, streaming, social media, and websites. Currently SponsWatch is working with Swedish Women’s Pro Hockey, Swedish Table Tennis, and Dutch speed skating. They plan to expand across the Nordics, Europe, and the US with the fresh round of funding.
Stockholm's Sponsorship Analytics Startup SponsWatch Raises $1.05M Seed Round
📰 Tech news of the week🇫🇷 World Economic Forum and VivaTech to launch European AI Excellence Centre in Paris
The World Economic Forum and VivaTech are set to open the European Centre for AI Excellence (CAIE) in Paris in 2025, joining the Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) global network. The centre aims to drive AI innovation, foster cross-border research, and promote responsible AI adoption in Europe. 🇪🇺
Supported by the AI Governance Alliance, CAIE will tackle AI challenges specific to Europe while enhancing the continent’s competitiveness on the global stage. It will connect policymakers, businesses, and researchers to develop AI solutions that balance innovation with individual rights. The initiative aligns with France’s growing role in AI, building on discussions from the Action AI Summit hosted by President Emmanuel Macron.
World Economic Forum to Launch European Centre for AI Excellence in Paris
⚠️ Stripe hits $91.5 billion valuation, calls out Europe’s "Existential Crisis”
Stripe just hit a $91.5 billion valuation in a secondary share sale, up from $70 billion last year. The round lets current and former employees cash out, but Irish co-founders Patrick and John Collison had bigger things on their minds: calling for sweeping capital, regulatory, and labor reform across Europe.
In their annual letter, the two co-founders argue that Europe’s outdated financial systems make it harder for companies to raise money, pointing out that non-bank lending accounts for just 32% of corporate financing in the EU compared to 80% in the US.
To help, Stripe plans to expand its lending arm, Stripe Capital, to support European businesses. Their message? Europe can’t afford to sit still — otherwise, its tech ecosystem risks falling further behind Silicon Valley. 😬
🗣️ ElevenLabs enters speech-to-text race, claims to outperform OpenAI and Google
ElevenLabs, the AI audio startup known for its synthetic voice generation, has launched its first speech-to-text model, claiming it surpasses Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash and OpenAI’s Whisper Large V3 in accuracy across 99 languages. 🤯
This move expands ElevenLabs' focus beyond text-to-speech into audio transcription, a competitive space with the likes of Otter and Sanas. The launch follows the company’s $180 million Series C funding round in January, with post-money valuation of $3.3 billion.
Founded in 2022 by former Google and Palantir employees, ElevenLabs has over 200 employees across the US, UK, Poland, and Hungary. With OpenAI expected to deepen its audio AI investments, ElevenLabs is positioning itself as a top competitor in AI-powered voice and transcription technology.
ElevenLabs Releases New AI model It Says Outperforms Rivals at Google and OpenAI
📰 Product news of the weekNature is springing back to life: Mycelium’s big breakthrough for alt-protein
Call ended for Skype: Microsoft is calling it quits, 14 years after acquiring what once was a buzzy little European startup
Europe 🫶 Lovable: 30,000 paying customers and $17 million ARR in just 5 months? Their traction has just been unbeatable
Orion 💫 Mythical Giant, Constellation, and GPT Model: Open AI releases its largest model to-date; check out its performance
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
Internship Corporate Venture Capital - Engie New Ventures (Paris)
Visiting Analyst - Porsche Ventures (Berlin)
VC Analyst & Program Manager - Sopra Steria (Paris)
Jobs
Investment Associate - byFounders (Copenhagen)
Investment Analyst - Norrsken VC (Stockholm)
Junior Analyst - High-Tech Gründerfonds (Bonn/Berlin/München)
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