Europe’s new research push, new German unicorns, startup passports, and much more...
What's Up Tech? #223
Welcome to our 223rd newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos, featuring current baby vc fellows Benedikt Münzberg, Janis Deuringer, Amie Sophie Scholz and Lucia Buser.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Sweden is going all-in on AI, and Europe is looking for PhD’s 🧠
Fundraising news from the week: Germany welcomes two new unicorns, and an AI to handle cold call objections 📞
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: from digital passports to AI-powered cranes, the EU’s got new pipes and platforms 🏗️
🆕 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! 💛
🎉 Some special announcements👉 Looking for an IRL program to launch a great startup?
Get an all-inclusive, 4-month experience made for ambitious European founders to build great startups. Apply to the Bright Labs experience by May 16.
🚀 Applications are open for the 2025 Norrsken Accelerator!
Get €250K up front, join Europe’s top pre-seed founders, and scale with world-class support. Know a great founder? Nominate them here.
🏳️🌈 identity.vc is running a 5-minute survey to better understand and support LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs. If you identify as an LGBTQ+ founder, take the survey. ✨
🤑 Fundraising of the week💸 Adams Street Partners is going cross-continental with a €270-million debut European VC fund (🇺🇸🇬🇧)
Adams Street Partners, one of the world’s biggest fund-of-funds with $62 billion AUM, just raised €270 million for its first dedicated European VC fund, overshooting its original €200 million target. The fund will mostly back new early-stage VCs, reserving up to 30% for secondaries and co-investments. 🎯
It’s not Adams Street’s first rodeo in Europe. They’ve already invested $2 billion into 70+ European VC funds over two decades, but it’s their first Europe-only vehicle. Over the next few years, the firm aims to build exposure across 400 early-stage companies, while backing 10–20 GPs across the continent. Five fund commitments have already been made, with more deals closing soon. 🤫
Adams Street Raises €270M Debut Fund to Back Early-Stage European VC
🚁 Quantum Systems raises €160 million to scale AI-powered drones for global defense and industry (🇩🇪)
Quantum Systems just unlocked €160 million in a Series C round and unicorn status, taking its autonomous drones global. 🌎 The round was led by Balderton Capital.
So, what do they actually build? AI-powered unmanned aerial systems that thrive in the wild: think no GPS, bad comms, high-stakes zones. Their latest model, Vector AI, is already deployed in Ukraine and NATO-aligned regions, handling ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) tasks. They’ve also got traction in agriculture, mining, and infrastructure.
With 550+ employees and recent acquisitions, such as Nordic Unmanned, Quantum’s aiming to become Europe’s go-to for dual-use aerial autonomy. 📈
AI-Powered Drone Systems Take Flight: Quantum Systems Lands €160M to Lead Global Aerial Intelligence
📞 Parloa is reinventing customer service with $120 million Series C funding (🇩🇪)
Two unicorns in a row for Germany? 🦄 Parloa has raised $120 million in Series C funding, reaching a valuation of over $1 billion. The round was led by Durable Capital Partners, Altimeter Capital, and General Catalyst.
Parloa builds an AI Agent Management Platform (AMP) designed to help enterprises deploy dynamic, personalised AI agents at scale, specifically tailored for customer service teams. The platform allows companies to simulate, test, and monitor AI agents before launch, ensuring safe and high-quality interactions. 🗣️
This marks a major milestone for the company which had previously raised $66 million in its Series B just about 12 months ago.
Parloa Raises $120M Series C to Reinvent Customer Service with Agentic AI
🩺 Hilo secures $42 million in Series B funding to manage blood pressure (🇨🇭)
Hilo (formerly known as Aktiia) has raised $42 million in Series B funding to accelerate the global expansion of its blood pressure health platform.
Hilo is known for its continuous blood pressure monitoring technology. Their promise? No clunky cuffs. No guesswork. Just clean, continuous, clinically-relevant data.
Delivered through a sleek, wearable bracelet paired with a user-friendly digital platform, the technology aims to transform how hypertension is tracked and managed for millions worldwide.🫀
Aktiia Becomes Hilo and Raises $42M in Series B Funding from Global Investors
🚀 StackOne raises $20 million to supercharge AI integrations in enterprise SaaS (🇬🇧)
StackOne just locked in a $20 million Series A, led by Google Ventures.
What’s the hype all about? Most B2B tools still take 3+ weeks to launch one integration. StackOne is aiming to crush that inefficiency with a proprietary real-time engine, a new AI-first tool-calling language model, and over 3,000 actions across 200+ integrations. Think HR, CRM, security alerts — all plug-and-play, but secure. 👏
Their secret sauce? Founders Romain Sestier and Guillaume Lebedel spent a decade watching teams burn months on integrations at places like Google and Oracle, so they built the platform they always wished existed. StackOne is redefining what modern integration infrastructure should look like in an AI-native world.
🔥 Up-and-coming startups to watch🪪 Duna raises €10.7 million to kill clunky onboarding and build the business passport of the future (🇩🇪)
Forget faxed forms and slow-motion compliance checks. Amsterdam-based Duna just locked in €10.7 million in Seed funding to overhaul how enterprises verify business customers, starting with onboarding, and aiming much, much bigger. 🤯
Founded in 2023 by David Schreiber and Duco van Lanschot (both early Stripe folks, btw), Duna is building what they call a “shareable business identity” — think digital passport for companies. One that handles compliance, onboarding, and verification without killing UX.
Duna’s already plugged into heavyweights like Plaid, Bol, Moss, and Sequra, and reports a 38% lift in onboarding conversion in just 6 months. The vision? Instant, secure business ID across borders and industries.
Dutch Startup Duna Lands €10.7M to Simplify Business Identity
🏗️ Scalera raises €5.7 million to get rid of construction’s procurement mess with AI (🇨🇭)
Scalera is doing what the construction industry hasn’t managed in decades: bringing order to its €11.5 trillion global procurement chaos. With Germany and Austria in its sights, Scalera is laying the foundation to become the go-to procurement engine for builders across the DACH region.
Spun out of ETH Zürich and founded just last year by Leonardo Reinhard, Sven Affeltranger, and Federico Gossi, Scalera automates the most painful parts of construction tendering (aka. the process where companies invite contractors to bid on a construction project). 🚧
Instead of going through pages of complex documents, their platform uses AI to understand what’s being asked and connects it to the right suppliers. It works with industry-standard codes like NPK, BKP, VOB, and ÖNorm to make sure nothing gets lost in translation. The result? Less manual work, fewer errors, and smoother collaboration across the supply chain.
☎️ Solda.AI banks €3.5 million to bring autonomous AI closers to the sales floor (🇩🇪)
Solda.AI is giving sales teams a serious AI upgrade…and maybe even a much-deserved break. ☕️ The round was led by Accel, and the mission is bold: replace cold callers with voice agents that can actually close deals.
Forget IVRs and basic bots. 🤖 Solda’s building fully autonomous AI voice agents that do the hard stuff: dialing leads, handling objections, following up, and sealing the deal, in real time, in multiple languages, and at enterprise scale.
In 2024, their voice agents reportedly drove €6.1 million in new revenue for clients, with a target of €26.4 million by year-end. 💸
German AI Startup Solda.AI Raises €3.5M for Telesales Voice Agents
📰 Tech news of the week👩💻 Swedish AI Reform launches to give 2.3 million people free AI tools (🇸🇪)
Sweden’s going full tech-utopia, calling back to their 90s-era home PC reform that turbocharged digital literacy across the country.
The Swedish AI Reform just dropped, giving free access to AI tools for 2.3 million educators, public workers, students, and non-profits. Announced at the Sana AI Summit with a cameo from Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, the initiative is backed by Sana and the Swedish AI Reform Foundation.
The reform hands out access to Sana Agents, an AI platform built on top-tier models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Initial funding comes from Sana, plus a handful of private tech moguls (Thomas von Koch, Sven Hagströmer, and others). And, with Sweden recently slipping from 17th to 25th on the Global AI Index, this reform feels more like a national reset button.
Btw, access is open now to qualifying institutions. Just verify your org and dive in. 🥽
Swedish AI Reform Launches to Give 2.3M Swedes Free Access to Advanced AI Tools
🇪🇺 Choose Europe for Science project: €500 million to make Europe a “magnet for researchers”
The European Commission has launched its “Choose Europe” initiative to attract international scientists to the European Union. The program will invest €500 million between 2025 and 2027 to encourage researchers from a myriad of fields including social science, healthcare and climate change to work in the EU. 👩🔬
The goal of the program is to position Europe as a global hub for scientific research. To achieve this, the investment is directed to long-term funding through higher salaries, longer contracts and infrastructure investments to attract top talent.
While Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the Commission, did not explicitly mention the United States, she made clear that questioning or cutting funding to independent research is “a gigantic miscalculation”. Her remarks were widely taken as a strong signal to attract US scientists facing uncertainty under President Trump’s administration.
🛩️ Tekever is investing £400 million into supercharging UK drone ops (🇬🇧)
Drone maker Tekever just dropped a massive flex: it’s pouring £400 million into ramping up UK operations, complete with 1,000+ new hires. The move, dubbed Project Overmatch, is backed by Tekever itself with no outside lead investor, and aims to cement the UK as a defense tech powerhouse. 💪
The real star here? The AR3, Tekever’s AI-powered drone that’s been battle-tested in Ukraine, clocking over 10,000 combat flight hours. It’s now been tapped by the Royal Air Force as part of StormShroud, a new electronic warfare system using Leonardo UK's BriteStorm tech to jam enemy radar and protect Typhoons and F-35s. Think stealthy robo-birds with a killer instinct.
Tekever’s plan is to make the UK the hub for cutting-edge, adaptive defense tech.
Tekever’s UK UAV Output to Soar with £400M ‘Overmatch’ Investment
📰 Product news of the weekEuropean defense resilience comes in the form of an alliance: ATMOS and ARX Robotics join forces for Europe’s first orbital depot
Swipe right for your next coffee chat: Gigi just dropped, and LinkedIn is buzzing
Brought to you by the minds behind Tiktok: a new open-source AI automation agent reporting for duty
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
VC Intern - Greencode Ventures (Helsinki)
Investor Relations & Business Development Intern - Partech (Paris)
Founder’s Associate Intern - Merantix Capital (Berlin)
Jobs
Venture Capital Analyst - Ananda Impact Ventures (Munich)
Marketing Lead - Creandum (London)
Investor - Founders Factory (London)
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 🖤