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Why Global AI Leaders Are Turning to Europe

Why Global AI Leaders Are Turning to Europe
Discover more at www.speedinvest.com

For years, the conversation around AI has focused on large language models. Increasingly, global AI winners are looking for something else: the infrastructure, expertise, and domain knowledge needed to bring AI into real-world use.

This month, OpenAI announced its acquisition of our portfolio company Ona, which we first backed in 2020 and have supported through every chapter since. The news comes just weeks after Mistral acquired another Speedinvest-backed company, Emmi AI.

While the companies operate in very different domains, the signal is the same.

Global AI leaders are turning to Europe for the specialist technologies needed to power the next generation of enterprise software, industrial systems, and AI applications.

That's not all. Keep scrolling for even more news and updates.

→ Have You Heard? Astral Systems raises a £23M Series A to scale its multi-state fusion technology, and we welcomed two new companies to our portfolio in the past month.

→ Speedinvest News: Speedinvest has joined Invest Qatar Gateway, a new initiative connecting founders with leading global venture capital firms. The launch builds on our growing presence in the region through the QIA Fund of Funds programme and our commitment to supporting the next generation of startups in Qatar.

→ Our Perspective: The AI era "can be frightening," says our CEO & Managing Partner, Oliver Holle, to Austria's Kurier newspaper, but we remain bullish on AI and Europe’s ability to produce the next generation of global technology leaders.

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Have you heard?

Talmon Firestone, Dr Tom Wallace-Smith, and the Astral Systems team.

Astral Systems has raised a £23M Series A to scale its multi-state fusion technology and bring medical isotope production to market.

The Bristol-based deep tech company is making nuclear fusion commercially useful today, not decades from now, by building compact fusion reactors that produce critical medical isotopes used in cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Read more about the funding round in The Times and from Seb Johnson of Scaling Europe, including how Astral is using fusion to solve immediate real-world problems, including shortages of life-saving cancer therapies and advanced industrial applications.

Seltz founder Antonio Mallia and team

Search engines were built for people browsing the web, not AI agents trying to find the right information fast. That’s why we’re excited to co-lead Seltz’s $12m Seed round.

The San Francisco-based company is rebuilding the web retrieval layer specifically for agents, giving AI systems access to fresh, citable, low-latency information through its own independent crawling, indexing, and retrieval infrastructure.

Fortune has more on the funding round and how Seltz is tackling one of the core infrastructure problems behind production-grade AI agents.

Kyrok Co-Founders Lukas Bierfreund and Daniel Hofinger

Europe’s pharma and chemical SMEs are under pressure from ageing systems, ageing workforces, and fragile supply chains.

Berlin-based Kyrok is building an AI operating system for the teams holding those supply chains together, helping existing customers save more than 80% of time on routine tasks while reducing errors. 

Tech.eu has more on the company's €3.1M pre-Seed round, which we led, and the industry-specific AI agents they're building to automate routine work while keeping people in control of final decisions.

Portfolio Headlines & Highlights

News and updates from across our portfolio

Eliott Hoffenburg, Founder & CEO of Paris-based Vocca AI, was invited by French President Emmanuel Macron to Palais de l’Élysée to discuss the importance of building AI champions from Europe.

Our Perspective

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

Has there ever been a better time to build a company? Or a harder one?

Following the acquisitions of Emmi AI and Ona, our CEO & Managing Partner, Oliver Holle, sat down with Austrian newspaper KURIER to discuss the AI boom, the next wave of startup funding, why the speed and intensity of competition in the AI era "can be frightening," and why he remains bullish on both AI and Europe’s ability to produce the next generation of global technology leaders.

  • Before becoming an investor, Oliver was a founder. In a candid interview on the Fayl Tales podcast, he reflects on the startup that nearly broke him, the lessons learned from failure, and the experiences that ultimately led him to build Speedinvest.
  • Similarly, Oliver spoke to Brutkasten about the competitive VC environment, the IPO market, and why AI is just getting started.
  • What makes European AI companies strategically valuable? In a recent
    interview with FAZ    , our Partner Florian Obst explains why global AI leaders are increasingly looking to Europe for specialized technologies built around security, compliance, and complex enterprise workflows.
  • What happens when AI starts replacing labor arbitrage? Our Varun Rekhi
    shares his perspective with TechCrunch on how AI could reshape global outsourcing and what that means for one of India’s most important export industries.

Who's Hiring?

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

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