Recently Funded Startups 🪴
This week's top raises, $3.5B raised, across Europe and North America.
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Europe
Stark, the German maker of weaponized drones, raised €500M at a €3.5B valuation, with Sequoia, Founders Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund, and Peter Thiel among the backers. More than 80% of the capital goes straight into R&D and manufacturing, funding electronic warfare research and production scale-up. Founded in 2024, Stark has become the poster child for a European defense tech surge driven by governments ramping up military spend.
Nearfield Instruments raises $380M Series D
Nearfield Instruments raised $380M in a Series D at a $1.6B valuation, led by Fidelity with Temasek, QIA, Walden Catalyst, and others, the largest deeptech round in Dutch history. The Rotterdam-based TNO spinout makes metrology and inspection tools that chipmakers use to control next-generation semiconductor production, and will spend the funding on R&D, innovation, and expanded manufacturing capacity.
Alan raised €480M in a Series G at a €5.5bn valuation, led by new investor Prosus and coming just months after a €100M round at €5bn. The Paris-based health insurer crossed €800M in ARR in Q1 2026 with 1.1 million customers across France, Spain, Belgium, and Canada. The pace tells the story: European insurtech that pairs coverage with care navigation and AI health tooling is now compounding fast enough to raise twice in a single year, and Alan plans to spend the money on new countries and acquisitions.
Tissium raised €60M to bring its sutureless nerve repair system, the only such device cleared by the FDA, into US operating rooms. The platform uses a 3D-printed chamber and a light-cured biodegradable polymer to hold severed nerve ends together without piercing them, an approach the Paris medtech argues avoids the scarring that limits stitched repairs to roughly 54% functional recovery.
JUPUS raised €13M in a Series A led by Semapa Next to build AI secretarial software for law firms. The pitch tracks a structural gap: over the past three decades, newly trained legal assistants in Germany fell more than 70%, while practising lawyers tripled and admin workloads kept climbing, hitting the small and mid-sized firms that make up most of Europe’s legal market. JUPUS automates calls, intake, case prep, and drafting for more than 2,000 lawyers and 2,000 daily cases, and quadrupled ARR in 2025 as it sells the staffing shortfall as the wedge.
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North America
Upscale AI raises $190M Series A
Upscale AI raised $190M in a Series A-1 extension led by Premji Invest, bringing total funding to $500M at a $2B valuation, with Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, and Temasek joining the round. The startup is building Skyhammer, a purpose-built scale-up switch ASIC to link GPUs and XPUs at high speed, positioning itself as a pure-play backend-networking supplier to hyperscalers and neoclouds.
Kalshi is in talks to raise at a roughly $40B valuation that could close as soon as Q3, nearly doubling the $22B mark it hit just a month earlier when it raised $1B in May. The jump tracks a broader bet that prediction markets are becoming real financial infrastructure, not a novelty, with election and event contracts pulling serious volume. For founders, the signal is that capital is concentrating fast in the category leaders, and the gap between the top platform and everyone else is widening with every round.
Runpod raised $100M in a Series A led by Summit Partners, reaching a $1B valuation and bringing total funding to $122M. The company pitches itself as an end-to-end “AI developer cloud” spanning experimentation, training, fine-tuning, and deployment, and says it has drawn over one million developers and served more than 20 billion inference requests since launch.
Aseon Labs raised $10M in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners to build parking-space-sized pods that autonomously charge, clean, and inspect robotaxis. The startup targets deadhead miles, the empty trips robotaxis make to distant depots that account for roughly 44% of Waymo’s California fleet mileage, by scattering pods across parking lots, gas stations, and charging hubs.
Groq raised $650M led by Disruptive, the firm run by its chairman Alex Davis, alongside hedge fund Infinitum. The round comes six months after Nvidia licensed Groq’s chip IP and poached founder Jonathan Ross and other execs in a not-acqui-hire deal. With Nvidia now shipping its own LPU inference hardware, Groq has pivoted to its neocloud business, now 13 data centers serving over five million developers, and re-staffed with a new COO, CTO, and CPO. It was last valued at $6.9B in September and didn’t disclose a new figure.
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