From a record-breaking artificial intelligence seed in Paris to Croatian drones and Lithuanian food tech, Europe’s startup ecosystem had a busy week.
The week of March 9-15 was an exceptional week for European venture capital by any measure. Two deals alone, one in London and one in Paris, totaled nearly three billion dollars.
But beyond the headline numbers, what the week really illustrated was the texture on which European investors’ confidence now rests: AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, healthcare technology, defense and cross-border trade.
The geography stretched from Vilnius to Zagreb to the Swiss Alps. However, the themes clearly felt the moment.
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The ten most important funding rounds in Europe this week.
1. Nscale – €1.7 billion Series C | London, Great Britain
Start with the number: 1.7 billion euros, or $2 billion. It’s not only the largest European funding round of the week, but according to the company itself, it’s the largest equity round ever raised by a European startup.
The list of investors alone speaks volumes: Nvidia, Citadel, Dell, Nokia, Jane Street and Point72, with lead backers Aker ASA and 8090 Industries.
Founded a year ago in 2024, Nscale is building a vertically integrated AI infrastructure, from GPU computing and networking to data services and orchestration software, to highlight just how fast it’s going.
The Series C valued the company at $14.6 billionA more than four-fold jump from the $3.1 billion it raised in September 2025 Series B. That September round itself was described as a record breaker.
The round follows Nscale’s €1.1 billion debt facility signed in February. The company is building at a pace that has few precedents in the European tech ecosystem.
2. AMI Labs – $1.03 billion seed | Paris, France
The largest seed round ever grown by a European company, and probably anywhere. Advanced Machine Intelligence, AMI, announced that it has pronounced the French word for “friend”. $1.03 billion increase On March 10, just four months after its establishment.
The company is chaired by Turing Award-winning computer scientist Yann LeCun, who spent 12 years at Meta before leaving in November 2025 to build something he believes the broader AI industry doesn’t want to build.
The founding team includes former Meta AI researchers Saining Xie, Pascale Fung, and Michael Rabbat. Strategic investors include Nvidia, Samsung, Toyota Ventures, Jeff Bezos and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
AMI has no product and no revenue. The first year will be devoted entirely to research, LeCun said. That the investors committed a billion dollars on these terms reflects both the credibility of the team and the large amount of capital now seeking the next paradigm shift in AI.
3. Isembard – £37.5m Series A | London, Great Britain
In less than a year, London-based Isembard has raised £37.5 million ($50 million) to expand its network of AI-powered factories focused on high-precision manufacturing for the aerospace and defense sectors.
The round was led by Union Square Ventures with participation from Tamarack Global, IQ Capital, Notion Capital and CIV. Angel investors included Deel founder Alex Bouaziz and former Wise CFO Matt Briers.
Isembard’s model is unusual in manufacturing: it owns and operates its own facilities, and operates a network of franchised sites built around MasonOS, a custom agent operating system for factory management.
4. Waiver – $33 million | Paris, France
Waiv is a product of French-American biotech company Owkin, which this week launched as an independent entity alongside a $33 million funding round.
The company, formerly Owkin Dx, develops AI-powered precision testing tools for oncology: it analyzes routine pathology slides and multimodal patient data to identify biomarkers and predict response to treatment.
What sets Waiv apart from the broader AI health cluster is its focus on tests that already exist in the clinical workflow, routine slide analysis, and being dramatically more informative. Its products include RlapsRisk BC (breast cancer recurrence prediction), MSIntuit and BRCAura.
The company has existing partnerships with pharmaceutical groups and counts leading hospital systems among its clients. The spin-off as an independent entity aims to accelerate commercial development without the constraints of the parent company’s strategic priorities.
5. Qevlar AI – $30 million Series A | Paris, France
Security operations centers face a by now well-understood problem: too many alerts, too few analysts, too much time for each investigation.
In a large enterprise, the average alert takes 32-61 minutes to manually investigate. Qevlar AI claims its platform does this in less than three minutes. On March 10, investors decided it was worth $30 million.
Founded in 2022 by Ahmed Acçak, the Paris-based startup has built an agent AI platform that connects to existing security tools (SIEM, EDR, CTI) and automates the full investigative workflow at Tier-2 and Tier-3 depths. Instead of just checking for alerts, the system builds a graph-based understanding of the attack surface.
The round was co-hosted by Partech and Forgepoint Capital International, with participation from EQT Ventures. Forgepoint led the company’s previous $14 million raise, a continued show of confidence.
The new capital will fund geographic expansion in EMEA and Asia-Pacific and product development towards predictive threat hunting.
6. Saltz – 20 million euro Series A | Vilnius, Lithuania
The food distribution sector in Europe is fragmented, largely offline and resistant to modernization. Founded in 2022 by Oberlo and Shopify veterans Andrius Å limas, Tomas Å limas and Reinis Å trodahs, Saltz aims to do for professional kitchens what these platforms do for e-commerce merchants. This It secured 20 million euros in Series A funding On March 9.
The platform connects restaurants and professional kitchens with food suppliers, integrating catalogs, ordering, payments and logistics in a single interface. It operates in approximately 20 countries with clients including Hilton, Marriott International and independent restaurant operators.
The company plans to hire more than 100 people across engineering, product, sales and operations by the end of 2026. It targets fresh and frozen foods, particularly meat and seafood, where supply chains are the most complex and the margins for improvement the greatest.
7. Forpost – $17.5 million Series A | London, Great Britain
Cross-border sales have always been attractive in theory and complicated in practice: VAT registrations, non-traveling payment infrastructure and tax liability in jurisdictions the merchant has never visited.
Outpost, a London-based platform built by former Revolut executives, It collected 17.5 million dollars March 10 to address those issues at the infrastructure layer.
The round was led by Ribbit Capital, the venture firm behind Revolut, Coinbase and Stripe. Outpost’s platform handles payments and tax compliance for merchants selling internationally, creates local legal entities, and creates payment rails in the markets they enter that the merchant is not directly responsible for.
Context is important here: the trade tariff environment of 2026 has made cross-border trade both more attractive and legally more treacherous. The Outpost is built for this strain.
8. Orga – €12.7 million Series A | Osijek, Croatia
Croatian drone maker Orga has been building first-person drone systems since 2018, primarily for the hobbyist market, and increasingly for defense.
On March 10, Lightspeed Venture Partners raised €12.7 million in Series A led by Expeditions, an early-stage investor with participation from Taiwania Capital, Aymo and Radius Capital.
What sets Orga apart in the increasingly crowded drone landscape is its level of vertical integration: it designs and manufactures its own flight controllers, radios, motors, cameras and printed circuit boards without Chinese-made components. Its facility in Osijek currently produces 280,000 NDAA-compliant drones annually.
The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program plans to buy up to 300,000 small attack drones by 2027. Orga CEO Srdjan Kovacevic announced that the company is ready to compete for these contracts.
9. Sepriy – €13.4 million Series A | Fribourg, Switzerland
Sepriy develops high-performance cellulose-based ingredients for industrial applications, targeting markets where synthetic materials face regulatory pressure or durability testing.
His €13.4 million Series AInter IKEA Group, which closed this week, counts among its backers Inter IKEA Group, a notable strategic investor in a materials company working on sustainable alternatives to petroleum-derived inputs.
Switzerland’s deep tech sector consistently produces university spin-offs in materials science, and Sepriy fits that pattern: founded with roots in academic research, now moving towards commercial scale. The round will fund the expansion of manufacturing capacity and customer development.
10. Lemrock – €6 million seed | Paris, France
While Nscale and AMI represent the biggest bets of the week, Lemrock represents one of the most interesting. Founded in 2025, the Paris-based startup builds infrastructure that enables brands to sell directly within conversational AI environments, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and their equivalents.
He announced on March 11 €6 million seed round Galion.exe is led by Criteo founder Jean-Baptiste Rudelle on the board.
The company already works with more than 60 brands in Europe and the US, including Maisons du Monde, Cdiscount and Engie, generating more than 100 million monthly interactions.
The round is smaller than the others on this list. But the question Lemrock addresses is what happens to commerce when AI agents become the primary interface for product discovery, a big and yet unasked question.
