Summer of Scale

The weather wasn't the only thing scorching hot this summer. Our portfolio was also on fire.

Three companies became unicorns in just two months!

Kraken Technology Group raised $175 million at a $1 billion valuation to scale its autonomous maritime defence systems. Moove secured $250 million at a $2.1 billion valuation to expand its global autonomous mobility infrastructure. And Fasset closed a $68 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, building the financial infrastructure growth markets have long lacked.

Pliant also crossed $100 million in ARR, and Ona officially joined OpenAI.

Plenty happened while Europe tried to stay cool. Here's what you might have missed.

→ Have You Heard? Major new rounds for Kraken Technology Group, Moove, Fasset, and Greyparrot.

→ Portfolio News: Pliant reaches $100M ARR, Ona officially joins OpenAI, Runware puts an AI data centre inside a shipping container, NeuroHarmonics unveils its first brain-interface device platform, and mimic partners with Black Forest Labs to bring frontier Video-Action Models to the factory floor.

→ Our Perspective: Crypto is becoming less of a category and more of the plumbing behind money, banking, and AI. Our second Crypto 50 EMEA maps the 50 companies and protocols driving the shift.

Additional portfolio updates, deep-dive content, job openings, and more below ⬇️

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Have you heard?

Kraken Technology Group raises a $175M Series B at a $1B valuation to strengthen maritime defence readiness for NATO and allied partners.

Founded in the UK, Kraken builds scalable maritime defence systems, including high-speed uncrewed vessels designed for complex maritime operations.

Over the past year, the team has secured major contracts with the UK Ministry of Defence, NATO European partners, and USSOCOM, while building manufacturing partnerships with Anduril Industries, Rheinmetall, and Davie Shipyards to support global deployment.

Bloomberg has more on the round.

Moove raises a $250M Series C at a $2.1B valuation to support its next phase of growth in autonomous mobility.

Since leading Moove’s first institutional round, we’ve watched the team evolve from revenue-based vehicle financing into a full-stack infrastructure layer for global mobility platforms. Through deep partnerships with Uber and Waymo, Moove is now helping power both today’s ride-hailing ecosystems and the rollout of autonomous fleets.

In just six years, Moove has grown from 76 vehicles in Lagos to more than 42,000 vehicles across 29 cities in 13 countries, reaching more than $400M in ARR.

The round was led by Mubadala and co-led by Woven Capital, Toyota’s growth fund, and Ion Pacific. Bloomberg covered the news, while our team took a deeper look at how Moove became a global category leader on our blog.

Fasset raised a $68M Series C at a $1B valuation, becoming one of the Middle East’s newest fintech unicorns. We first invested in Fasset earlier this year, and the team has continued its rapid global growth since. Annualized transaction volume has now surpassed $40B, its Own Network spans more than 100 banking corridors, and more than 1,000 enterprises use the platform. CoinDesk has the story, and our team also pulled back the curtain on how Fasset built the financial infrastructure for the Global South on our blog.

More funding news:

• Greyparrot raises a $27M Series B to scale the AI infrastructure making waste measurable, recoverable, and investable. Since we led Greyparrot’s Seed round in 2020, the London-based company has grown its AI waste intelligence platform across more than 20 countries. Its systems sit above sorting belts and provide continuous, real-time visibility into material flows, replacing the manual sampling traditionally used by recycling facilities. Read more in Tech.eu.

Welcome to the Family

Agon emerges from stealth with $30M in funding to build AI-powered virtual battlefields. Founded by former Anduril Europe director Tristam Constant and Cambridge Aerospace co-founder Junaid Hussain, Agon is building synthetic combat environments where autonomous systems can be trained, tested, and hardened against adversaries that adapt with them. We backed the team at pre-Seed and are excited to finally share the news. Read more in Resilience Media.

• Keyper is building a new operating and financial layer for residential real estate in the GCC. Across the region, payments, financing, property management, and tenant relationships remain fragmented across separate systems. The Dubai-based company is bringing those pieces together into a single platform for landlords, tenants, and property owners. Forbes Middle East covered the round, while our team explains why we believe the real estate OS is being built in Dubai on the Speedinvest blog.
• Gyre Energy is using physics-based AI and thermal energy storage to optimise existing cooling systems, reducing energy costs while maintaining stable temperatures. After delivering 38% cost savings in its initial commercial partnerships, the UK-based company is now scaling its technology with a deployment at a major cold storage facility operated by one of the world’s largest logistics companies. Read more in The Next Web.

Portfolio Headlines & Highlights

News and updates from across our portfolio

• Pliant has reached $100M in ARR, a major milestone for one of Europe’s leading B2B payments companies. We sat down with Co-Founder and CEO Malte Rau to discuss the decisions behind the journey, from investing in infrastructure early to expanding internationally with discipline. Sifted also covered the milestone.
• Ona’s acquisition by OpenAI has officially closed. From leading Ona’s first funding round in 2020 to today, it has been an incredible journey.
• Runware has launched a new kind of portable data centre designed to make AI inference as cheap as electricity. Its Sonic Inference Pods pack 1MW of compute and around 1,200 GPUs into a 20-foot shipping container that can be deployed wherever power and connectivity are available.
• NeuroHarmonics has unveiled its first device platform, using low-intensity focused ultrasound to precisely target areas just a few millimetres wide deep inside the brain, without surgery, implants, anaesthesia, or head shaving.
• mimic and Black Forest Labs are partnering to bring frontier Video-Action Models to the factory floor, starting with Audi. Their new FLUX-mimic model helps robots learn complex manipulation tasks from video with substantially less robot demonstration data, opening up new possibilities for automating difficult production and logistics tasks. BONUS: Mimic has also been named one of the 25 robotics startups to watch by investors.
• Gigs is powering a new built-in travel eSIM for Motorola phones, giving users access to mobile data across more than 190 countries without needing a physical SIM.
• Flowdesk has secured a full broker-dealer licence in Dubai, expanding its regulated presence in the region as it continues to build institutional infrastructure for digital asset markets.
• Remberg founder David Hahn speaks with Germany's FAZ about how maintenance software for machines is growing even more important in the age of AI, with AI agents now helping cut downtime even further.
• Astral Systems has opened commercial access to its privately owned deuterium-tritium fusion facility, one of the few platforms outside a national lab to achieve neutron exposure comparable to the JET tokamak, following 60 hours of sustained fusion operation.
• SILQ has secured $100M in financing facilities to expand Fina, its embedded SME financing platform, across Saudi Arabia and South Asia.

Our Perspective

Sector-focused expertise and insights on the VC ecosystem at large

Eight months after we published the inaugural Speedinvest Crypto 50 EMEA, Mastercard completed its acquisition of BVNK for up to $1.8B, eToro bought Zengo, and Elliptic, Keyrock, and OpenFX each raised $100M+.

Our second edition reflects just how quickly the market has moved, featuring 46 private companies and four token-governed protocols on a map that looks very different from last year.

Explore the Speedinvest Crypto 50 EMEA 2026 on our blog.

• Our CEO & Managing Partner, Oliver Holle, sat down with Die Presse to unpack Europe's AI consolidation wave, including Speedinvest's record exit selling Ona to OpenAI, the biggest deal OpenAI has ever made in Europe, and why Austria's start-up scene remains ten years behind on university spinouts.
• In our latest Founder Coffee Chat, Estelle Salomon sits down with onepot Co-Founder Andrei Tyrin. They discuss why chemical synthesis remains one of the hardest parts of drug discovery to automate, how onepot’s AI chemist ‘Phil’ works, and what it takes to bring chemistry, robotics, machine learning, and software together under one roof.
• Our General Partner Stefan Klestil joined Couchonomics with Arjun to discuss venture capital, fintech investing, AI, digital assets, founder psychology, and why the Middle East and Africa have become one of the world's most compelling investment opportunities.
• Our Fintech investor, Paula Schumacher, spoke at FIxBE Berlin, sharing the skills and qualities of Gen Z founders and her view on investing in top talent.

Who's Hiring?

There are more than 1,000 vacancies across our portfolio. Browse open jobs below and on our website.

• Kraken: Systems Engineer - UK
• ARX Robotics: Mechanical Design Engineer (R&D) - Kyiv
• Vocca: Account Manager - Paris
• Seqera Labs: Head of Platform Engineering - Barcelona
• GetVocal AI: Senior AI Software Engineer - Paris
• Opus: Chief of Staff / Founders Associate - Berlin

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See you next month!