Berlin’s Stark is raising €300M at a €2.5B valuation. The kamikaze drone maker was founded 18 months ago.
Berlin’s Stark is raising €300M at a €2.5B valuation. The kamikaze drone maker was founded 18 months ago.

Stark, a Berlin-based strike drone startup founded in 2024, is in discussions to raise at least €300 million at a valuation of approximately €2.5 billion, the Financial Times reported. If completed, the deal would more than double the company’s valuati…

Picogrid raises $45M to become the neutral integration layer for modern defence
Picogrid raises $45M to become the neutral integration layer for modern defence

The Pentagon is buying defence hardware faster than it can make any of it talk to each other. Sensors, autonomous platforms, edge compute, electronic-warfare payloads, space and undersea systems, all arriving at once, each speaking its own dialect. Pic…

Fonoa raises $110M and buys PwC’s tax software to build a real-time compliance platform
Fonoa raises $110M and buys PwC’s tax software to build a real-time compliance platform

The Dublin-registered tax-tech firm paired a Series C led by Headline with the acquisition of PwC’s Indirect Tax Edge, a bet that periodic compliance is giving way to real-time. Indirect tax is the kind of problem most people never think about until a …

Transition Ventures lands $150M Fund II with Olix, Applied Atomics and Seneca on the portfolio
Transition Ventures lands $150M Fund II with Olix, Applied Atomics and Seneca on the portfolio

Transition Ventures, the London-based early-stage firm led by Unity co-founder David Helgason, has closed a $150m second fund, bringing the platform’s assets under management to over $300m. Fund II will continue Transition’s thesis that the most conseq…

AtlasEdge raises $1.2bn in debt to scale its European data-centre footprint
AtlasEdge raises $1.2bn in debt to scale its European data-centre footprint

AtlasEdge, the European data-centre operator jointly owned by Liberty Global and DigitalBridge, has secured roughly $1.2bn in debt financing to scale its data-centre footprint across the continent, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday. The facil…

Orbital Industries raises $50M Series B for AI-designed data-centre hardware
Orbital Industries raises $50M Series B for AI-designed data-centre hardware

The London-and-San-Francisco startup, formerly Orbital Materials, has closed $50M led by Plural for PFAS-free cooling fluid and modular high-density compute infrastructure. Orbital Industries, the London-and-San-Francisco AI-materials startup formerly …

France’s startup scene is falling behind the US and Europe, and AI is both the cause and the cure
France’s startup scene is falling behind the US and Europe, and AI is both the cause and the cure

A new report on the French tech ecosystem by Alexandre Dewez, a partner at venture firm 20VC, paints a picture of a startup scene that is growing more dependent on a handful of AI companies while the rest of the market stalls. French startups raised €6…

Cognition just raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation, and 90% of its own code is written by its AI
Cognition just raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation, and 90% of its own code is written by its AI

Cognition AI has raised more than $1 billion in new funding at a $26 billion valuation, more than doubling its worth since a September round that valued the company at $10.2 billion. The round was co-led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with …

Capchase raises $200 million to replace the banks slowing down enterprise tech deals
Capchase raises $200 million to replace the banks slowing down enterprise tech deals

  Capchase, a New York-based vendor financing platform for enterprise technology companies, has raised more than $200 million in new funding to scale its embedded lending infrastructure globally. The round, a mix of debt warehouse facilities and equity…

Airis Labs comes out of stealth with $60M and a video-intelligence pitch to defence agencies
Airis Labs comes out of stealth with $60M and a video-intelligence pitch to defence agencies

The Tel Aviv-founded defence-AI firm has closed a $31M Series B led by PSG Equity, bringing total funding to $60M as it scales US operations from Washington DC. Airis Labs, the defence-AI startup that has spent the past two and a half years operating i…