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What's Up Tech? #273
Welcome to our 273rd newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🥨 Bits & Pretzels is opening their iconic conference to YOU.
We secured 30 student tickets (€199 instead of a fortune) for the baby vc community!
Join 7,500 founders, top-tier VCs, and tech execs at the Oktoberfest tents in Munich on Sept 28–30, 2026.🍻
👉 Apply for your student pass here 👈
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: This VC rallies Europe's biggest names behind a "Built in Europe" push for homegrown tech 🇪🇺
Fundraising news from the week: quantum goes commercial, and AI muscles into law, HR, and the physical world ⚡
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: soft x-ray chip metrology, compliance as code, and agentic AI for engineering 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the week⚛️ OQC raises £260 million to scale quantum computing infrastructure (🇬🇧)
UK-based Oxford Quantum Circuits just raised £260 million in an oversubscribed Series C, the largest private funding round ever for a European quantum computing company. The round was led by Bullhound Capital. OQC builds superconducting quantum computers for enterprise and government customers. 🏛️
The new funding will help OQC expand internationally, deploy more systems across key markets, and accelerate its push toward commercially useful, fault-tolerant quantum computing. The company already operates quantum infrastructure across Europe, North America, and Asia, with deployments in the UK, US, Japan, and Spain.
OQC Raises £260m in Europe’s Largest Ever Private Quantum Computing Funding Round
📈 Factorial raises $150 million Series D at a $2.5 billion valuation to become one of Europe’s most valuable AI scale-ups (🇪🇸)
Barcelona-based Factorial has raised a $150 million Series D led by General Catalyst, pushing the company’s valuation to $2.5 billion and placing it among the EU’s most valuable AI scale-ups. 💰 Factorial started as HR software, but now it’s betting on AI-powered workforce operations. Its platform uses AI agents to help companies manage HR, finance, and IT workflows from a single system.
The fresh capital will fuel expansion across Europe, with Germany as the top priority. The company is opening a Munich office, ramping hiring, and investing heavily in local product development. The raise also marks General Catalyst’s first direct equity investment in Factorial.
⚛️ Quobly raises €115 million Series A to scale silicon quantum computing for commercial deployment (🇫🇷)
French quantum startup Quobly has raised €115 million in a Series A led by Bpifrance, STMicroelectronics, and SEALSQ. The company is building quantum computers using silicon chips and existing semiconductor manufacturing techniques, which is a big departure from many quantum rivals that still rely on more specialized, lab-heavy approaches.
Quobly says it has already manufactured more than 2.4 million qubits and filed around 65 patents. 🤯 The fresh capital will help industrialize its technology, improve system performance, and advance its first commercial platform, Alloy Pioneer, ahead of planned cloud access in 2026.
Quobly Secures €115M to Scale Silicon Quantum Computing for Global Commercial Deployment
⚖️ Wordsmith raises €60.2 million Series B to scale AI-powered legal workflows (🇬🇧🇺🇸)
Edinburgh-based Wordsmith has raised €60.2 million in a Series B round to expand its AI platform for in-house legal teams. The round was led by existing and new investors, as corporate legal departments face mounting pressure to do more with less.
Wordsmith’s technology automates routine legal work, including document review and processing. Think of it as an AI co-pilot for legal teams. 🧑⚖️🤖 The new funding will be used to improve the platform’s AI capabilities, strengthen infrastructure, and grow the team.
🧪 Apoha raises $36 million Series A to bring AI into molecular reality (🇬🇧)
London-based biotech startup Apoha has emerged from stealth with $36 million in Series A funding. It is building “Liquid Brain,” an AI-powered sensing platform that tries to observe how they actually behave in real-world conditions. The goal is to turn messy physical reactions into rich, high-dimensional data the AI can learn from. 🧠
The round was a Series A and was led by undisclosed investors, with funds going toward scaling wet-lab infrastructure, improving the platform, and pushing toward commercial deployment. Early signals include work in antibody discovery, where it helps flag molecular issues that only show up under realistic conditions. One example includes Mythic Therapeutics, where the system reportedly caught subtle differences between nearly identical antibodies.
Apoha Raises $36 Million to Bring AI into Materials Discovery
🌍 Gigaton raises $26 million Series A to AI-optimize heavy industry emissions and costs (🇬🇧)
Gigaton (formerly Carbon Re) just locked in $26 million in a Series A led by Plural. The UK-based startup builds AI-powered autonomous control software for industrial plants like cement, steel, glass, and chemicals. Their system sits deep inside plant operations and runs simulations in real time. It predicts outcomes before changes happen, then adjusts things like fuel mix, kiln speed, and oxygen levels. In practice, it’s already helping companies save $1-3 million per plant annually and cut around 30,000 tonnes of CO₂ per site. 🏭
The new capital will go toward scaling the team 5x and expanding into steel, glass, and chemicals. These industries eat roughly a quarter of global energy, so the upside is massive (and so is the mess they’re trying to fix). Investors are basically betting that software can finally sit in the control room and out-think decades of industrial inertia.
Gigaton Raises $26 Million to Slash Emissions Across Cement, Steel, Glass, Chemicals Sectors
🔥 Up-and-coming startups 🩻 Invisix raises €20 million in Seed funding to see inside chips that optics can no longer read (🇳🇱)
Chips keep getting smaller and more three-dimensional, and the optical tools used to measure them mid-production can no longer see the buried structures inside. That blind spot quietly kills yield. 👀
Invisix, spun out of ASML, has just raised €20 million in Seed funding. They use soft x-rays to measure the nanoscale features inside advanced chips without slicing the wafer open.
What does that buy you? Faster checks, fewer scrapped batches, and visibility into the gate-all-around transistors that today’s tools can’t resolve.
The pitch is unusually de-risked for a Seed: a licensed decade of ASML research, plus a 2023 public demo run with Intel and imec. No rival has a soft x-ray metrology tool on the market yet, so if Invisix ships first, it owns a category the incumbents can’t reach with light. 🚀
⚖️ Bayshore raises $8 million to turn compliance rules into code (🇩🇪)
Regulation has piled up faster than anyone can read it, and compliance teams spend their days manually translating dense legal text into something the business can actually follow.
Bayshore, freshly out of stealth, turns regulations and internal policies into machine-readable code that runs auditable AI agents: routine cases get handled automatically, the tricky ones escalate to a human. Earlybird led the $8 million Seed.
Most AI is probabilistic, meaning it guesses, which is a non-starter when an auditor asks why a decision got made. Bayshore pairs rule-based logic with human legal interpretation, so every output comes with a paper trail.📝
🤖 Archestra.AI raises $10 million to let AI agents access your sensitive data (without the chaos) (🇬🇧)
London-based Archestra.AI just closed a $10 million Seed led by 20VC, with angels including Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel and HubSpot SVP Kieran Flanagan.
Total funding now sits at $13.5 million.
Here’s the problem: everyone wants AI agents running their business, but nobody trusts them near the good stuff. Most enterprises are stuck deploying agents for glorified chatbot duty terrified of what happens when they touch actual sensitive data.
Founded in 2025 by Grafana Labs alumni, Archestra builds the missing security layer. Their open-source platform manages access permissions, monitors agent behavior, and enforces data governance across internal systems like HR platforms, email, Slack, you name it. Basically, let your agents do real work without your CISO having a meltdown. 😅
Multiple Fortune 500s are already live.
Archestra.AI Raises $10M to Unlock Next-Gen Agentic Use Case
⚙️ NP Company raises €6 million to make engineering simulations instant (🇫🇷)
Paris-based NP Company just closed a €6 million Pre-Seed led by Partech, with backing from Mistral AI co-founder Guillaume Lample, the Peugeot family office, and founders from Dataiku and Artefact. Not a bad cap table for at this stage. 👀
Their belief is that engineering simulation is stuck in the Stone Age. Running a single design test can take days, which means engineers spend more time waiting than actually engineering. NP Company is building transformer-based physics models, think LLMs, but for industrial simulation, that can explore thousands of designs in the time it used to take to run one.
The Inria-born team is targeting aerospace, defense, energy, and automotive, going after a simulation market projected to hit $30 billion by 2030.
The funding will scale their research team and push development of automated design tools. Legacy simulators, your days are numbered. 🚀
NP Company Secures €6M Pre-Seed to Advance AI for Engineering
📰 Tech news of the week🇪🇺 Balderton launches “Built in Europe” campaign to remind everyone the continent can actually scale tech (🇬🇧)
Balderton Capital just dropped a six-figure “Built in Europe” campaign and recruited 100+ founders to prove you don’t need a Silicon Valley zip code to build a world-class company.
The OOH ads are live across London, Paris, Berlin, Munich, and Stockholm, spotlighting 14 of Europe’s biggest names: Revolut, Mistral, Wayve, ElevenLabs, Synthesia, Lovable, and more. There’s also a jobs platform aggregating 20,000+ open roles from 1,000 European startups.
Founders, you got the message? Stop moving to San Francisco, the talent war is being fought at home. 💪
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
Bras droit des fondatrices - WinEquity (Paris)
Analyst - Ring Generations (Paris)
Analyste Investissement Agri Impact - Citizen Capital (Paris)
Intern Venture Capital - Slingshot Ventures (Amsterdam)
Jobs
Chief of Staff – Elaia and LEC (Paris)
Senior VC Associate - INCO (Paris)
Investment Analyst - Catapult Digital (London)
Chief of Staff - Volta (Amsterdam)
Venture Building Associate - Foodlabs (Berlin)
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