Frenemies in Paris
What's Up Tech? #257
Welcome to our 257th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Big Tech rivals team up to supercharge Europe’s AI startup scene 🤝
Fundraising news from the week: photonic chips and GPU clusters pull mega-rounds, while critical minerals and industrial supply heat up 🔥
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: brain-inspired edge AI for the physical world, and leaner search for greener data centers 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the week🐶 Lassie raises $75 million to build Europe’s prevention-first pet insurance empire (🇸🇪)
Stockholm-based Lassie just raised $75 million in a Series C led by Balderton Capital. Lassie sells localized pet insurance through a daily-use app that pushes preventive care, rewards good pet-parent behavior, and uses AI to make the whole experience less painful.
Powered by agentic AI, Lassie processes 60% of claims end-to-end in around six minutes in Germany, just from a photo of a vet bill. 🧾 The company already operates in Sweden, Germany, and France, covers over 250,000 pets, and has hit more than $100 million in ARR. The new funding will fuel expansion into Europe’s biggest pet insurance markets and further investment in AI-driven claims and preventive health tools. Lassie is also scaling partnerships like Lidl (via Lidl Plus rewards) and Tractive to link real-world pet behavior data to discounts.
🪨 Hades raises €15 million to drill for critical minerals with lasers (🇩🇪)
German mining startup Hades raised €15 million at a €67.5 million valuation, as Europe panics about being dangerously dependent on imported critical minerals. The Seed round was co-led by HV Capital and Headline.
Hades is building a laser-based drilling system designed to make deep drilling faster and cheaper, unlocking both critical mineral extraction and geothermal energy. ⚡ The fresh cash will go toward hiring (from 11 employees to 36 by end of 2026), expanding workshop capacity, and buying more lasers and machinery. The fundraising follows major lab progress, including tests showing rock-destruction performance, borehole “lava clearing,” and 200 kilowatts of delivered energy with an unnamed European partner. The first operational site is targeted for 2029.
🏗️ Andercore raises $40 million to automate industrial trade with AI (🇩🇪)
Andercore just raised $40 million in a Series B round to scale its AI-driven industrial trade platform across Europe. The round was led by Atomico. Total funding now sits at $75 million. Essentially, they’re building software for the least sexy but most important part of the economy: global wholesale trade, which boasts a market worth tens of trillions of dollars annually.
Andercore runs an asset-light model where it buys from international suppliers and sells to local industrial buyers, using proprietary AI to manage pricing, quoting, quality control, distribution, and embedded financing. 🚢 The fresh capital will fund geographic expansion, deeper category coverage (i.e., infrastructure, energy, building materials), and continued AI development, eventually enabling suppliers to sell directly through the platform.
Andercore Secures $40M Series B for AI-Driven Industrial Trade Platform
🎉 Naboo raises $70 million to turn corporate events into an AI-powered procurement machine (🇫🇷)
Paris-based event-tech startup Naboo just raised $70 million in a Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company is basically trying to make corporate event planning less of a chaotic spreadsheet nightmare. Naboo offers an all-in-one platform for booking and managing corporate events across the meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions space.
Now Naboo wants to go beyond events and build a broader procurement platform for “tail spend” categories. The new funds will be used to develop an AI booking agent 🤖, launch a corporate payment card integrated into client systems, and automate tender management for events of different sizes. They’re also eyeing other procurement categories with complex compliance and supply chain requirements.
Naboo Raises $70M from Lightspeed for AI-Powered Events Procurement
💡 Olix raises $220 million to take on Nvidia with photonic AI chips (🇬🇧)
London-based Olix has secured $220 million in new funding, pushing its valuation above $1 billion and making it one of the UK’s newest unicorns. Total funding now sits at roughly $250 million since the company launched in 2024. At just 25 years old, founder James Dacombe is leading a rare British charge into one of tech’s most capital intensive sectors.
The company is building an Optical Tensor Processing Unit (OTPU) that uses photonics instead of traditional GPU architecture to handle AI inference tasks. By combining SRAM with photonics, Olix claims it can deliver higher efficiency and lower costs than current designs that rely on high bandwidth memory. The company expects to ship its first products to customers by 2027.
If it delivers, Olix would mark a rare breakthrough for a UK founded AI chip company in a market defined by scale, capital intensity, and Nvidia’s dominance. 🥇
Olix Nabs $220M for Photonic AI Inference Chips to Take on Nvidia
🖥️ Nscale locks in €1.1 billion to flood Europe with GPUs (🇬🇧)
British hyperscaler Nscale just signed a €1.1 billion GPU-backed debt facility led by PIMCO, Blue Owl, and LuminArx. Add that to a €146 million Series A and a monster €936 million Series B, and you’re looking at €2.1 billion raised in just over a year for a company founded in 2024. 🤯
The pitch is simple: Europe needs its own AI compute layer, and Nscale is building it.
The company runs vertically integrated infrastructure from data centres in Norway, Portugal, Iceland, and the UK, powered by some of the cheapest renewable energy on the planet. Recent wins include the Stargate Norway partnership with Aker and OpenAI targeting 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by end of 2026, a deal to supply Microsoft with another 100,000, and the acquisition of data centre consultancy Future-tech.
Europe’s GPU arms race is on, and Nscale is stacking chips.
London’s Nscale Signs €1.1B Debt Facility to Deploy Large-Scale GPU Clusters in Europe
🔥 Up-and-coming startups 🧠 Stanhope AI raises €6.7 million to bring brain-inspired intelligence to the physical world (🇬🇧)
British DeepTech startup Stanhope AI just locked in €6.7 million in Seed funding to build AI that actually understands the real world. The round was led by Frontline Ventures, with Paladin Capital Group, Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund, UCL Technology Fund, and MMC Ventures joining in.
Stanhope is developing what it calls a “Real World Model,” a framework for adaptive intelligence where instead of relying on massive cloud infrastructure and static datasets, their AI runs directly on devices at the edge and learns in real time.
The pitch is compelling. LLMs hallucinate. Stanhope’s brain-inspired systems reason, adapt, and act with genuine agency. In a world racing toward physical AI, that difference matters. 🤖
Stanhope AI Raises €6.7M for Adaptive AI in Robotics and Defence Applications
🔍 Vesiro raises €1.6 million to make data search faster and greener (🇸🇪)
Gothenburg-based Vesiro just closed €1.6 million in Seed funding to tackle a growing problem: data centers are eating the planet. 🪐
Spun out of Chalmers University, Vesiro builds a plug-in for Elasticsearch that makes search way more efficient. The result: same workloads, fewer servers, lower costs, less energy. With data centers already consuming around 1% of global electricity and climbing fast, that math matters. 📉
The funding will go toward expanding the technical team and accelerating product rollout, targeting organizations with heavy Elasticsearch use cases in BI, e-commerce, and AI.
Vesiro Raises €1.6M to Optimise Elasticsearch and Lower Server Energy Use
📰 Tech news of the week🤝 OpenAI, Anthropic, and Big Tech bury the hatchet to launch European AI accelerator (🇫🇷)
OpenAI and Anthropic have been throwing shade at each other for weeks. Super Bowl ads, social media jabs, the works. But now? They’re teaming up. The two rivals have joined forces with Meta, Microsoft, Google, Mistral, Qualcomm, AMD, Snowflake, and Sequoia Capital to launch F/ai, a new accelerator for AI startups in Europe, run by Paris-based Station F. 🇪🇺
It’s the first time all of these players have collaborated on an accelerator. The first cohort kicked off January 13 with 20 AI-native startups, all building applications on top of existing models. The batch has already raised over €34 million, and 80% are led by repeat founders. Names stay under wraps until the program wraps in early April.
The subtext? Europe has fallen behind in the AI race, and Big Tech wants a foothold in the region before the next wave of winners emerges.
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
VC Intern - Ternel (Paris)
VC Analyst Intern - RAISE Ventures (Paris)
VC Analyst Intern - Axeleo Capital (Paris)
Visiting Analyst - Atomico (Berlin)
Internship/Working Student - Hitachi Ventures (Munich)
VC Analyst - AFI Ventures (Paris)
Jobs
Northzone - Associates (London/Berlin/New York)
Investment Principal - Rypples (London)
Head of Investor Relations - Vireo Ventures (Berlin)
Operations Analyst/Associate - Flexstone Partners (Paris)
Investment Associate - Balderton (London)
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