Sophie Renard 
Backbone, a Belgian food‑industry software startup founded in 2025, secured €4 million in a pre‑seed round led by Pitchdrive. The funding will accelerate its AI‑driven platform that centralises quality and compliance data for food companies and supports its expansion into the UK and the Netherlands.
French AI startup Mistral AI secured a massive €3 billion financing round, with strategic investors Samsung, Nvidia, ASML and the European Scaleup Fund leading the round. The capital will be used to scale up its AI model development, hire talent and build out compute resources, positioning Mistral as a major player in the European generative‑AI landscape.
Space Cargo Unlimited announced a strategic investment in Novespace, the leading European provider of parabolic flight services and a subsidiary of France’s space agency CNES. The deal makes Space Cargo a shareholder alongside CNES, adding short‑duration microgravity access to its portfolio of autonomous space manufacturing platforms and strengthening its vision of an integrated fleet for research and commercial manufacturing in orbit.
Swiss email security startup xorlab secured €5 million in a Series A+ round led by Spicehaus Partners to scale its AI‑driven email security platform across Europe, targeting financial, healthcare, critical‑infrastructure and public‑sector customers.
Swiss construction‑tech startup Foldcast received €160k from Venture Kick to scale its recyclable paper mould system that reduces concrete use, aiming to launch pilots and commercial partnerships across Europe.
Swiss biotech startup PANDA Therapeutics received a €160,000 grant from Venture Kick to develop a first‑in‑class antibody therapy that simultaneously targets multiple harmful protein deposits in Alzheimer’s disease, aiming to improve treatment effectiveness and slow disease progression.
French startup Pollen Robotics, now part of Hugging Face, introduced Microduck – a low‑cost, sensor‑rich desktop robot that runs open‑source software and can execute AI models in the physical world. Priced at $400, the robot ships in late 2026 to Europe and the US, aiming to democratise AI‑enabled robotics similar to how Raspberry Pi popularised low‑cost computing.
Montpellier‑based dental robotics startup Lupin Dental raised €15 million in a Series A round led by Fynveur, with participation from Bpifrance, Invus and other investors, to scale its robotic platform for minimally invasive dental procedures.
French quantum‑computing startup Pasqal has entered the Nasdaq market after securing $360 million in financing, marking a major milestone for the company and the European deep‑tech ecosystem.
Brussels‑based Motion, a startup providing humanoid robots as a subscription service for industrial and logistics firms, secured $2 million in pre‑seed funding led by Extantia Capital with participation from Norrsken Evolve. The capital will be used to turn pilot projects into commercial deployments, grow the team and fleet, and expand throughout the Benelux market.