School's back with DIY quantum
What's Up Tech? #255
Welcome to our 255th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: DIY quantum computers enter the classroom, as Europe doubles down on turning fundamental science into real companies and real talent pipelines ⚛️
Fundraising news from the week: lab-to-market breakthroughs and sustainable cities 🧪
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: patient experience gets smarter, AI models get some much needed downsizing, and a construction OS for all the pre-work 🏗️
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the week🔬 Constructor Capital closes €93 million to back founders making the lab to market leap (🇨🇭)
Swiss VC firm Constructor Capital just closed its first fund at €92.8 million to invest in Seed and Series A startups in DeepTech, software, and EdTech. The fund is backed by tech entrepreneurs, family offices, and investment bankers, with capital deployment already underway. Ticket sizes range from €840K to €12.6 million, targeting Europe, the US, UAE, and Singapore. 🌍
What sets Constructor apart: it’s the venture arm of the Constructor Group ecosystem, which includes Germany’s largest private STEM university, research labs, and an equity-free accelerator. Portfolio companies get direct access to talent, testing environments, and a network of 50+ top universities (Harvard, MIT, Oxford, ETH Zurich) plus hundreds of researchers, including Nobel laureates.
🧪 daphni closes €260 million to bet on science that software can’t copy (🇫🇷)
Paris-based VC daphni just hit the final close of its daphni Blue fund at €260 million, beating its initial target in under nine months. The thesis is sharp: in a world where AI and software are increasingly commoditised, the only durable moat is deep scientific IP. So daphni is backing “scientist-entrepreneurs” working in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and life sciences.
Tickets range from €500K to €10 million, with follow-ons up to €20 million, targeting 40–50 companies over the fund’s life. Two more TechBio deals in France and the UK are already in the pipeline. 🧬
The message? Europe’s 2.2 million researchers are the new competitive edge.
French VC Daphni Blue Closes €260M Fund to Turn Science Into Startups
⚡ Voyager Ventures raises $275 million to rebuild the base layer of the economy (🇺🇸/🇬🇧/🇩🇪)
Voyager Ventures just closed a $275 million Fund II to back the infrastructure that makes everything else possible: energy, advanced manufacturing, critical materials, and physical AI.
The thesis is simple: the old economy ran on finite fuels and brittle systems.
Voyager is betting on tech that just performs better. That means energy production and storage, domestic materials manufacturing, AI that optimises physical systems, and next-gen mobility across air, land, and sea. 🌊
🦄 b2venture hits €150 million hard cap to keep minting European unicorns (🇨🇭/🇩🇪)
Swiss-founded VC b2venture just closed Fund V at its €150 million hard cap, its largest early-stage fund to date. Backed by institutional LPs, portfolio founders and longtime angel investors, the fund will back around 35 startups across Europe with an industry-agnostic, community-driven model. 🤝
Founded in 2000, b2venture has backed at least one unicorn per fund, celebrated 11 IPOs and 30+ trade sales. In 2025 alone, it saw one IPO (Navan) and seven exits, including Araris Biotech and Neptune (sold to OpenAI). 📈
With 350+ angel investors embedded in its model, b2venture is betting that domain knowledge, not just capital, is what builds category-defining companies.
💻 Fleet enters first LBO at €100 million valuation to scale IT management for SMEs (🇫🇷)
Paris-based Fleet just entered its first-ever LBO at a €100 million valuation, after seven years of pure bootstrapping. The deal is led by ISAI Expansion, marking Fleet’s first external capital raise.
Founded in 2019, Fleet offers an all-in-one platform for SMEs to manage IT equipment, fleets, and security, from procurement to recycling. Think fast global hardware delivery, a centralized fleet management “Cockpit,” premium IT support, and built-in cybersecurity. The new funds will support international expansion, product development, and team growth, while giving liquidity to founders and employees… all without giving up control. Not bad for a company that grew over 90% in 2025, serves nearly 2,000 clients, and now has its sights set on €100 million in ARR within four years. 🚀
Bootstrapped for Seven Years, French IT Scale-Up Fleet Enters First LBO at €100 Million Valuation
🧪 Biorce raises €43.8 million to speed up AI-powered clinical trials (🇪🇸)
Barcelona-based Biorce closed a €43.8 million Series A, led by DST Global Partners, in what it says is the largest Series A ever in the Iberian HealthTech and AI ecosystem. The startup builds Aika, a regulatory-friendly AI platform that helps pharma teams design, justify, and run clinical trials faster without asking regulators to “just trust the algorithm.” 😏
Aika is trained on ~1 million clinical trials and uses a “human-in-the-loop” approach, meaning every AI recommendation is explainable to bodies like the FDA and EMA. The new funding will fuel US expansion (including an R&D hub in Austin), team growth to ~250 employees, and faster product development, with new modules for contracts, budgeting, and operational planning. Oh, and Biorce ended last year at ~200% above its revenue target, which probably helped investors hit “send” on that wire.
Barcelona-Based Biorce Closes €43.8 Million Series A to Accelerate AI-Driven Clinical Trials
💰 2150 raises €210 million to double down on sustainable cities (🇬🇧)
Venture firm 2150 has closed its €210 million second fund, pushing total assets under management to €500 million. The fund was anchored by Viessmann Generations Group. The strategy is to back tech that makes cities work better for humans and the planet. Urban areas drive 80% of global prosperity, so fixing them is a pretty big deal.
2150’s tech focus spans energy systems, industrial heat, lower-carbon cement, cooling, mobility, and circular economy plays. 🌍 Since Fund I, its 27 portfolio companies have generated over $1 billion in annual revenue, employ 4,500+ people, and cut emissions at megatonne scale. The new capital will fuel global scale-ups like AtmosZero, Metycle, and Mission Zero Technologies, with more stealth bets on the way.
🔥 Up-and-coming startups 🧠 InsiderCX raises €1.5 million to scale its AI-powered patient experience platform (🇭🇷)
Croatian healthtech startup InsiderCX just raised €1.5 million in a Seed round led by GapMinder. Founded in 2020, the company builds an AI-driven patient feedback platform for private healthcare providers. It uses mobile channels like WhatsApp and proprietary algorithms to capture up to 10 times more actionable insights than traditional surveys. In other words, fewer angry patients, fewer surprise complaints, and fewer revenue leaks. 😬
The fresh capital will fund international expansion into the UK, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and the Netherlands, plus a push into healthcare insurance and deeper AI development. InsiderCX is fully verticalized for healthcare and runs on in-house AI, not off-the-shelf models, with hands-on support baked in. The platform already processes feedback from over 500,000 patients annually across six markets, and revenue tripled in 2024.
Croatian InsiderCX Secures Seed Round to Expand Its AI-powered Patient Experience Platform
⚡ BottleCap AI raises $7.5 million Seed to cap the runaway costs of large language models (🇨🇿)
Yes, AI models keep getting smarter, but they’re also getting bigger and pricier. Everyone’s go-to trick of piling on billions of parameters is yielding diminishing returns. And sooner or later, we’ll be entering into an efficiency crisis. 😬
Amidst this, BottleCap AI is focusing on downsizing. The company has just raised $7.5 million led by 20VC to design “architecture-first” AI models that do more with less.
Its first product, an AI news app called Pulse, showcases this efficiency ethos by curating tech headlines with real-time community insights, all powered by BottleCap’s own streamlined language model.
The broader vision is to turn cutting-edge AI research into practical tools without needing a trillion parameters. It’s a bet that the next AI giant will rise from smart engineering, not brute-force compute.
🤖 Twin raises $10 million in Seed funding to launch an AI browser that can run your business on autopilot (🇫🇷)
Ever wanted to generate another you? Sounds like the premise of The Substance, but we’re talking about Twin. 👯
Twin just secured a $10 million Seed round led by LocalGlobe to help non-technical users deploy fully autonomous agents for everyday business tasks. Think: sales calls, scheduling, and paperwork.
Twin’s platform works like a cloud-based AI browser for ops. No code needed, just describe a workflow and the AI figures out the rest.
In a one-month beta, users spun up over 100,000 of these agents, tackling projects like cold-calling customers. Each agent comes with a human-like long-term memory and a cost-savvy execution strategy (think 150+ tasks in a run for under $1 by switching to cheaper models mid-task).
Sounds like we’re getting closer and closer to a tireless AI workforce. 👀
Twin, the AI Company Builder: Announcing our Public Launch and $10M Seed Round
🏗️ Brickanta is laying the foundation for an AI operating system in construction with $8 million in Seed funding secured (🇸🇪)
Before ground is ever broken, planning a construction project means drowning in bids, budgets, and spreadsheet. A small mistake early on can lead to massive cost overruns later.
Brickanta just secured an $8 million Seed round led by Northzone to develop an “AI-native” operating system that automates pre-construction tasks like bid analysis, cost estimation, and procurement planning.
The platform acts like an AI preconstruction desk, catching errors and optimizing plans upfront to prevent headaches on the jobsite.
Ultimately, Brickanta is out to boost a sector that’s suffered from stagnant productivity for decades. Even hard-hat industries can get a high-tech efficiency upgrade.
📰 Tech news of the week⚛️ Make way for DIY quantum computers: Qilimanjaro launches “EduQit” (🇪🇸)
Quantum computing education has a hands-on problem. Most students only get to learn from theory and simulations, with little exposure to how quantum hardware actually works.
Qilimanjaro aims to fix that with EduQit, a do-it-yourself quantum computer kit that lets universities build and operate a small superconducting quantum machine right on campus.
The kit includes all the essentials of a quantum computer: a cryogenic refrigerator, specialized control electronics, and Qilimanjaro’s proprietary fluxonium qubits.
By giving future quantum engineers a chance to get their hands on real qubits, Qilimanjaro hopes to bridge the theory–practice divide and cultivate a new generation of quantum experts ready to push the field forward. 🚀
Qilimanjaro Launches EduQit: A Build-Your-Own Quantum Computer for Education and Research
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
VC Analyst - Sistafund (Paris)
Visiting Analyst - YZR Capital (Munich)
VC Analyst Intern - Opera Tech Ventures (Paris)
VC Analyst - Sowefund (Paris)
Visiting Associate - First Momentum Ventures (Munich/Remote)
VC Analyst - Breega (Paris)
Jobs
Investor - Antler (Berlin)
Investment Principal - Rypples (London)
Partner Associate - Heal Capital (Berlin)
VC Associate (Healthtech) - Newfund (USA/French hire)
Associate/Investment Manager - GreenTech Venture & Growth fund (Paris)
Investment Associate - Bynd Venture Capital (Madrid)
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 🖤