Europe’s Startup Scene Shatters Records: From $2B AI Infrastructure to $1B Seed, Here’s What’s Really Happening

The week of March 9-15, 2025, will go down in European tech history as the moment when the continent’s startup ecosystem proved it can not only compete with Silicon Valley valuations but occasionally obliterate them. With two deals alone accounting for nearly $3 billion, this wasn’t just another funding week—it was a seismic shift in where global capital is placing its biggest bets.

What makes this week extraordinary isn’t just the headline numbers, but what they reveal about investor psychology in 2025. AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, health tech, defense, and cross-border commerce all secured meaningful rounds. The geography stretched from Vilnius to Zagreb to the Swiss Alps, but the themes felt unmistakably of this moment: speed, scale, and solving problems that matter.

Here are the ten most significant funding rounds that defined Europe’s record-breaking week:

1. Nscale – €1.7 billion Series C | London, UK

Start with the number: €1.7 billion, or $2 billion. That’s not just the largest European funding round of the week—it’s, according to the company itself, the largest equity round ever raised by a European startup.

The investor list alone communicates the scale of ambition: Nvidia, Citadel, Dell, Nokia, Jane Street, and Point72, alongside lead backers Aker ASA and 8090 Industries.

Founded in 2024, Nscale builds vertically integrated AI infrastructure, from GPU compute and networking to data services and orchestration software. The Series C values the company at $14.6 billion, a more than fourfold jump from the $3.1 billion valuation it achieved at its Series B in September 2025. That September round was itself described as record-breaking.

This round follows a €1.1 billion debt facility Nscale signed in February. The company is building at a speed that has few precedents in the European tech ecosystem.

2. AMI Labs – $1.03 billion seed | Paris, France

The largest seed round ever raised by a European company, and quite possibly anywhere. Advanced Machine Intelligence, AMI (pronounced the French word for “friend”), announced its $1.03 billion raise on March 10, just four months after it was founded.

The company is chaired by Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning computer scientist who spent 12 years at Meta before departing in November 2025 to build something he believes the wider AI industry is unwilling 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 devoted entirely to research. That investors handed over a billion dollars on those terms reflects both the credibility of the team and the sheer amount of capital now looking for the next paradigm shift in AI.

3. Isembard – £37.5 million Series A | London, UK

Less than a year after its seed round, London-based Isembard raised £37.5 million ($50 million) to expand its network of AI-powered factories focused on high-precision manufacturing for the aerospace and defense sectors.

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 the manufacturing space: it owns and operates its own facilities and also runs a network of franchise-operated sites built around MasonOS, its proprietary agentic operating system for factory management.

4. Waiv – $33 million | Paris, France

Waiv is a spinout from Owkin, the French-American biotech company, launched as an independent entity this week alongside a $33 million funding round.

The company, previously operating as Owkin Dx, develops AI-powered precision testing tools for oncology: analyzing routine pathology slides and multimodal patient data to identify biomarkers and predict treatment response.

What distinguishes Waiv from the broader AI health cluster is its focus on making tests that already exist in the clinical workflow—routine slide analysis—dramatically more informative. Its products include RlapsRisk BC (breast cancer relapse prediction), MSIntuit, and BRCAura.

The company has existing partnerships with pharmaceutical groups and counts leading hospital systems among its customers. Spinning out as an independent entity is intended to accelerate commercial development without the constraints of a parent company’s strategic priorities.

5. Qevlar AI – $30 million Series A | Paris, France

Security operations centers face a problem that is, by now, well understood: too many alerts, too few analysts, too much time per investigation. The average alert at a major enterprise takes between 32 and 61 minutes to investigate manually. Qevlar AI claims its platform does it in under three minutes. On March 10, investors decided that was worth $30 million.

The Paris-based startup, founded in 2022 by Ahmed Achchak, has built an agentic AI platform that connects to existing security tooling (SIEM, EDR, CTI) and automates the full investigation workflow at Tier-2 and Tier-3 depth. Rather than simply triaging alerts, the system builds a graph-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 $14 million raise, a show of continued conviction.

The new capital will fund geographic expansion into EMEA and Asia-Pacific, and product development toward predictive threat hunting.

6. Saltz – €20 million Series A | Vilnius, Lithuania

The food distribution sector in Europe is fragmented, largely offline, and resistant to modernization. Saltz, founded in 2022 by Andrius Šlimas, Tomas Šlimas, and Reinis Štrodahs, veterans of Oberlo and Shopify, is attempting to do for professional kitchens what those platforms did for e-commerce merchants. It secured €20 million in Series A funding on March 9.

The platform connects restaurants and professional kitchens with food suppliers, aggregating catalogs, orders, payments, and logistics into a single interface. It operates in roughly 20 countries, with clients including Hilton, Marriott International, and independent restaurant operators.

The company plans to hire more than 100 people by the end of 2026 across engineering, product, sales, and operations. It is targeting fresh and frozen food products, specifically meat and seafood, where supply chains are most complex and margins for improvement are largest.

7. Outpost – $17.5 million Series A | London, UK

Cross-border selling has always been theoretically appealing and practically complicated: VAT registrations, payment infrastructure that does not travel, and tax liability in jurisdictions a merchant has never visited. Outpost, a London-based platform built by former Revolut executives, raised $17.5 million on March 10 to solve those problems at the infrastructure layer.

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 the merchant carries no direct liability.

The context matters here: 2026’s trade tariff environment has made cross-border commerce simultaneously more attractive and more legally treacherous. Outpost is building for exactly that tension.

8. Orqa – €12.7 million Series A | Osijek, Croatia

Croatian drone maker Orqa has been building first-person-view drone systems since 2018, first for the enthusiast market, increasingly for defense. On March 10, it raised €12.7 million in a Series A led by Expeditions, the early-stage investor focused on European security, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Taiwania Capital, Aymo, and Radius Capital also participating.

What distinguishes Orqa in an increasingly crowded drone landscape is its level of vertical integration: it designs and manufactures its own flight controllers, radios, motors, cameras, and printed circuit boards, with no Chinese-made components. Its facility in Osijek currently produces up to 280,000 NDAA-compliant drones annually.

The Pentagon’s Drone Dominance Programme is planning to procure up to 300,000 small attack drones by 2027. Orqa’s CEO Srdjan Kovacevic has made clear that the company is positioning itself to compete for those contracts.

9. Seprify – €13.4 million Series A | Fribourg, Switzerland

Seprify develops high-performance cellulose-based ingredients for industrial applications, targeting markets where synthetic materials face regulatory pressure or sustainability scrutiny. Its €13.4 million Series A, which closed this week, counts Inter IKEA Group among its backers—a notable strategic investor for a materials company working on sustainable alternatives to petroleum-derived inputs.

The Swiss deep-tech sector has been producing a steady stream of university spinouts in materials science, and Seprify fits that pattern: founded with roots in academic research, now moving toward commercial scale. The round will fund production capacity expansion and customer development.

10. Lemrock – €6 million seed | Paris, France

If Nscale and AMI represent the week’s largest bets, Lemrock represents one of its most interesting ones. The Paris-based startup, founded in 2025, is building infrastructure that allows brands to sell directly within conversational AI environments—ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and their equivalents.

On March 11, it 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 across Europe and the United States, including Maisons du Monde, Cdiscount, and Engie, and processes over 100 million interactions monthly.

The round is small relative to the others on this list. But the question Lemrock is answering—what happens to commerce when AI agents become the primary product-discovery interface—is large, and it has barely been asked yet.

Europe’s top 10 funding rounds this week (9 -15 March)

Europe’s Startup Scene Shatters Records: From $2B AI Infrastructure to $1B Seed, Here’s What’s Really Happening

1. Nscale – €1.7 billion Series C | London, UK

2. AMI Labs – $1.03 billion seed | Paris, France

3. Isembard – £37.5 million Series A | London, UK

4. Waiv – $33 million | Paris, France

5. Qevlar AI – $30 million Series A | Paris, France

6. Saltz – €20 million Series A | Vilnius, Lithuania

7. Outpost – $17.5 million Series A | London, UK

8. Orqa – €12.7 million Series A | Osijek, Croatia

9. Seprify – €13.4 million Series A | Fribourg, Switzerland

10. Lemrock – €6 million seed | Paris, France

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