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What's Up Tech? #278
Welcome to our 278th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Britain believes again (and no, we’re not just talking about the World Cup) 👀
Fundraising news from the week: fusion goes commercial, crew-free navies get funded, and AI’s data appetite pays off big ⚡
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: industrial silicon brains, chip-agnostic inference, factory-floor AI, and forgotten protein crops 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the week⚡ Proxima Fusion raises €411 million to build Europe’s commercial fusion champion (🇩🇪)
Proxima Fusion just pulled in €411 million at a €2.4 billion valuation, making it Europe’s best-funded fusion startup. The round was led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures. Their tech focuses on stellarators, a type of fusion reactor that uses complex magnetic fields to contain ultra-hot plasma and generate clean, near-limitless energy.
The fresh capital will fund “Alpha,” a net-energy fusion demonstrator near Munich, and scale production of superconducting magnets and core components. It will also support hiring across Germany, Switzerland, and the UK as Proxima pushes for full vertical integration.
The goal is to move fusion from lab experiment to real-world power plant in the early 2030s. Europe is clearly not trying to get lapped by the US or China here. 💪
Proxima Fusion Raises €411M to Build Europe’s Commercial Fusion Champion
🚤 Kraken Technology Group raises $175 million at $1 billion valuation to scale uncrewed naval tech (🇬🇧)
Kraken Technology Group just locked in $175 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, led by DTCP. The company builds high-speed uncrewed surface vessels. Think autonomous boats packed with sensors and payload systems for defense missions (very “send the bots” energy 🤖).
The fresh cash will fund global manufacturing expansion and faster product development. Kraken is already working with NATO partners and defense orgs like USSOCOM, with active deployments in real-world conflict zones. The raise stands out because the maritime defense space is historically underfunded, yet Kraken is moving fast and landing major contracts.
Now it’s scaling globally with partners across Europe, the US, and beyond.
👩💻 Oxylabs raises $130 million to power the agentic AI data layer (🇱🇹)
Oxylabs just secured $130 million from Warburg Pincus, hitting a $3.6 billion valuation and cementing itself as one of Lithuania’s most valuable tech companies. The platform provides large-scale web data access (i.e., proxies, scraping tools, and real-time pipelines that feed AI systems fresh internet data). The company is already at $350 million ARR and serves 350,000+ clients, including major AI and Fortune 500 players.
The fresh capital will fund product expansion, global infrastructure, and M&A, as Oxylabs doubles down on tools like web indexing and headless browsers. Notably, this is its first-ever external investment after a decade of bootstrapped growth… rare for a company at this scale. TL;DR: AI agents are hungry, and Oxylabs is selling the data buffet. 🍽️
Oxylabs Reaches $3.6B Value After Agreeing to Its First Outside Investment
🔋 Axle Energy raises $25 million Series A to scale distributed energy platform (🇬🇧)
Axle Energy just pulled in $25 million in a Series A led by Energize Capital. The startup connects devices like EVs, batteries, and heat pumps into one coordinated energy network. ⚡️ It already manages 300,000+ devices and 2 GW of capacity (yes, bigger than a nuclear reactor).
The idea is to turn everyday energy devices into a flexible, grid-supporting powerhouse. The new funds will fuel global expansion and build out infrastructure for cheaper, cleaner energy systems.
In other words, your EV might soon moonlight as a grid asset. And investors are betting big that this “distributed everything” model is the future of energy.
Axle Energy Raises $25M Series A To Expand Distributed Energy Platform
🔥 Up-and-coming startups 🤖 HIVE raises $15 million to build a “silicon brain” for industrial machines (🇳🇴)
HIVE just pulled in $15 million in a Pre-Series A led by SuperSeed. The startup is building a “silicon brain” that plugs into existing machines like forklifts and excavators, no new hardware needed. The goal is to have one AI run any machine, not siloed bots for each one (kinda like giving your entire fleet a shared brain that keeps learning on the job).
The tech is already live in tunnels, quarries, and logistics ops, with pilots at players like Yara and Toyota Material Handling. The fresh cash will fund hiring and a push into the US market.
From a bigger picture, industrial automation is a $238 billion market, and HIVE wants a slice by upgrading old machines instead of replacing them. 🚧
Hive Raises $15M in Pre-Series A to Create a Silicon Brain that Can Operate Any Industrial Machine
🧠 ZML raises $20 million to run AI models transparently and at max speed across any chip (🇫🇷)
ZML has raised a $20 million Seed round led by 20VC.
The startup, founded by Zenly alum Steeve Morin, just launched LLMD, a free inference server that runs open-source LLMs like LLaMa, Gemma, Qwen and Mistral across five chip architectures: Nvidia CUDA, AMD ROCm, Google TPU, Intel oneAPI and Apple Metal.
GPU scarcity has made “which chip do we even have access to” a real infrastructure headache, and ZML’s pitch is that you shouldn’t have to care. LLMD is free but not open source, which is its own bet: give away the product, monetize the platform later. 💸
Hot French Startup ZML Releases Free Product to Speed Inference Across Lots of AI Chips
🏭 Polysense nabs $10.7 million to teach factory cameras what a bad potato looks like (🇧🇪)
Polysense has closed an oversubscribed $10.7 million Seed round led by Felix Capital. That’s up from a $2.2 million raise just over a year ago, a fast jump for a company selling into an industry that doesn’t move fast.
Polysense builds AI-powered quality control and process optimization software for food factories, combining continuous in-line inspection with automated process control to cut waste.
It’s already deployed with major producers including Agristo, Darta and Poppies Bakeries, and one European potato processor cut peeling time by 45% using its real-time monitoring. 🥔
Polysense Raises $10.7M to Scale AI Quality Control for Food Manufacturers
🧬 Aardaia bags €5 million to build tomorrow’s protein crops out of a forgotten wild tuber (🇳🇱)
Aardaia has raised an oversubscribed €5 million Seed round led by Point Nine, a rare move outside the fund’s usual software territory.
Founded in 2025, Aardaia is domesticating the aardaker, a wild European legume that fixes its own nitrogen and produces a protein-rich tuber, using large-scale genomic sequencing rather than gene editing. The goal: cut Europe’s reliance on imported protein crops and synthetic fertilizer.
The company plans to screen 750,000 aardaker genotypes this year and two million in 2027.🌱
🔦 Aylight closes €4.5 million to reinvent the laser behind AI’s optical bottleneck (🇨🇭)
Aylight has closed a €4.5 million Pre-Seed round co-led by Elaia and Swisscom Ventures.
Founded in 2025 by Bahareh Marzban and Dmitry Kazakov out of ETH Zürich research, Aylight builds chip-scale multiwavelength lasers, a single chip generating multiple precisely spaced wavelengths instead of the usual pile of discrete lasers.⚡️
The target is AI data centers, where hyperscalers pushing to 800G and 1.6T optical links are running into a laser supply crunch. The optical interconnect market is projected to hit $34.54 billion by 2030, and Aylight wants its foundry-compatible chips inside it.
Funding goes toward first semiconductor-foundry prototypes and R&D headcount.
Aylight Closes €4.5M Pre-Seed Round to Advance Optical Interconnect Technology
📰 Tech news of the week🇬🇧 UK Dynamism Fund launches to bankroll Britain's "believers and builders"
Britain has spent years exporting its best scientists and engineers. A new fund wants to flip that trend, betting that the UK can still be the most dynamic country in the world if enough people are given the money and mandate to try. 🚀
The UK Dynamism Fund, led by Andrew Bennett, anchor funded by XTX Markets, and incubated by Renaissance Philanthropy launched this week. The fund aims to be a philanthropic vehicle to back talent, science, institutions, and culture aimed at UK renewal. It’s essentially grant and fellowship capital chasing national ambition.
London’s finance elite is now bankrolling a national ambition campaign says something about how seriously the “stuck economy” narrative has landed. 👀 Early backers include Matt Clifford (Entrepreneur First) and Kitty Mayo (Project Europe).
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
Full-Time Visiting Analyst - Norrsken (Stockholm)
Finance and Investor Relations Internship - SHS Capital (Tübigen)
Jobs
Investment Analyst/Associate (Data Ventures) - Serena (Paris)
Head of Venture Growth & Funding - Zinc (London)
Junior Investment Analyst - Nordic Alpha Partners (Copenhagen)
ESG & Impact Associate - Ship2Ventures (Barcelona)
Principal - 2150 (London)
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