From a record-breaking AI startup in Paris to Croatian drones and Lithuanian food tech, Europe’s startup ecosystem has had a busy week.
The week of March 9th to 15th was by all accounts an exceptional week for European venture capital. Two deals alone, one in London and one in Paris, amounted to almost three billion dollars.
But beyond the headlines, the week really showed what European investor confidence looks like right now: AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, healthtech, defense and cross-border trade have all completed significant rounds.
The geography stretched from Vilnius to Zagreb to the Swiss Alps. However, the themes were unmistakably shaped by this moment.
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Here are the ten most significant funding rounds in Europe this week.
1. Nscale – 1.7 billion euros Series C | London, UK
Start with the number: 1.7 billion euros or $2 billion. Not only is this the largest European funding round of the week, it is also the largest equity round ever raised by a European startup, according to the company.
The list of investors alone illustrates the extent of the ambitions: Nvidia, Citadel, Dell, Nokia, Jane Street and Point72 as well as the main financiers Aker ASA and 8090 Industries.
Nscale was founded a year ago in 2024 to underline how quickly development has evolved. Nscale builds a vertically integrated AI infrastructure, from GPU computing and networking to data services and orchestration software.
The Series C values ​​the company at $14.6 billion, a more than four-fold increase from its Series B valuation of $3.1 billion in September 2025. This September round itself has been described as record-breaking.
This round follows a €1.1 billion credit facility that Nscale signed in February. The company is building at a speed rarely seen before in the European tech ecosystem.
2. AMI Labs – Seed Funding Worth $1.03 Billion | Paris, France
The largest seed round ever raised by a European company and possibly anywhere else. Advanced Machine Intelligence, AMI, pronounced the French word for “friend,” announced its $1.03 billion capital raise on March 10, just four months after its founding.
The company’s chairman is Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning computer scientist who spent 12 years at Meta before leaving the company in November 2025 to build something he believes the entire AI industry is not ready 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. LeCun said the first year will be dedicated entirely to research. That investors transferred a billion dollars on these terms reflects both the credibility of the team and the sheer amount of capital now awaiting the next paradigm shift in AI.
3. Isembard – £37.5m Series A | London, UK
Less than a year after its seed round, London-based Isembard raised 37.5 million pounds ($50 million) to expand its network of AI-powered factories focused on high-precision manufacturing for the aerospace and defense industries.
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: The company owns and operates its own facilities and also operates a network of franchise locations based on MasonOS, its proprietary agent operating system for factory management.
4. Waiver – $33 million | Paris, France
Waiv is a spinout from Owkin, the French-American biotech company that launched as an independent entity this week in a $33 million funding round.
The company, previously known as 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 healthcare cluster is its focus on making tests already in the clinical workflow and routine slide analysis significantly more meaningful. Its products include RlapsRisk BC (breast cancer recurrence prediction), MSIntuit and BRCAura.
The company has existing partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and counts leading hospital systems among its customers. The spin-off as an independent entity is intended to accelerate commercial development without being constrained by a parent company’s strategic priorities.
5. Qevlar AI – $30M Series A | Paris, France
Security centers face a problem that is now well understood: too many alerts, too few analysts, too much time per investigation.
On average, manually investigating an alert in a large organization takes between 32 and 61 minutes. Qevlar AI claims its platform does this in under three minutes. On March 10, investors decided it was worth $30 million.
Founded in 2022 by Ahmed Achchak, the Paris-based startup has developed an agentic AI platform that connects to existing security tools (SIEM, EDR, CTI) and automates the entire investigation workflow at Tier 2 and Tier 3 depth. Instead of simply triaging alerts, the system creates a diagram-based understanding of the attack surface.
The round was co-led by Partech and Forgepoint Capital International, with EQT Ventures also participating. Forgepoint had led the company’s previous capital raise of $14 million, a sign of continued conviction.
The new capital will fund geographic expansion in EMEA and Asia Pacific as well as product development for predictive threat hunting.
6. Saltz – 20 million euros 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 Šlimas, Tomas Šlimas and Reinis Štrodahs, Saltz seeks to do for professional kitchens what those platforms did for e-commerce retailers. On March 9, the company secured €20 million in Series A funding.
The platform connects restaurants and professional kitchens with food suppliers and bundles catalogs, orders, payments and logistics in a single interface. The company operates in approximately 20 countries and its customers include Hilton, Marriott International and independent restaurant operators.
The company plans to hire more than 100 employees 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 most complex and have the greatest scope for improvement.
7. Outpost – $17.5M Series A | London, UK
Cross-border selling has always been attractive in theory, but complicated in practice: VAT registrations, payment infrastructure that is not mobile, and tax liability in jurisdictions a merchant has never visited.
Outpost, a London-based platform founded by former Revolut executives, raised $17.5 million on March 10 to solve these problems at the infrastructure level.
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, creating local legal entities and payment rails in the markets they enter so that the merchant has no direct liability.
This is where the context matters: Trade tariffs in 2026 have made cross-border trade simultaneously more attractive and legally more treacherous. Outpost builds on exactly this tension.
8. Orqa – €12.7 million Series A | Osijek, Croatia
The Croatian drone manufacturer Orqa has been building first-person view drone systems since 2018, initially for the enthusiast market and increasingly for defense.
On March 10, the company raised €12.7 million in a Series A led by Expeditions, the early-stage investor specializing in European security, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Taiwania Capital, Aymo and Radius Capital.
What sets Orqa apart in an increasingly crowded drone landscape is its level of vertical integration: The company designs and manufactures its own flight controllers, radios, motors, cameras and circuit boards, without components made in China. The Osijek factory currently produces up to 280,000 NDAA-compliant drones annually.
The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Program plans to procure up to 300,000 small attack drones by 2027. Orqa CEO Srdjan Kovacevic has made it clear that the company is positioning itself to compete for these contracts.
9. Seprify – 13.4 million euros Series A | Freiburg, Switzerland
Seprify develops high-performance cellulose-based ingredients for industrial applications, targeting markets where synthetic materials face regulatory pressure or sustainability scrutiny.
The €13.4 million Series A, which closed this week, counts among its backers Inter IKEA Group, a well-known strategic investor in a materials company working on sustainable alternatives to petroleum-derived raw materials.
The Swiss deep tech sector has spawned a steady stream of university spin-offs in materials science, and Seprify fits this pattern: founded with roots in academic research, now on its way to commercial scale. The round will fund production capacity expansion and customer development.
10. Lemrock – seeds worth 6 million euros | Paris, France
If Nscale and AMI represent the biggest bets of the week, Lemrock is one of the most interesting. Founded in 2025, the Paris-based startup is building an infrastructure that enables brands to sell directly into conversational AI environments, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and their equivalents.
On March 11, the company announced a €6 million seed round led by Galion.exe, with Criteo founder Jean-Baptiste Rudelle joining the board.
The company already works with more than 60 brands in Europe and the United States, including Maisons du Monde, Cdiscount and Engie, processing over 100 million interactions monthly.
The round is small compared to the others on this list. But the question Lemrock answers: What happens to retail when AI agents become the primary product discovery interface is a large one and one that has rarely been asked.
