Quote of the day: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood” - Marie Sklodowska-Curie (Scientist, two times Noble laureate).

Most VC programs explain how funds operate. This one puts you in the driver’s seat 👏🏼

Step into the VC Fund Manager Masterclass, an immersive, high-intensity experience that compresses a full 10–15 year venture fund journey into just three days. You’ll build, launch, and run a fund in real time, making hundreds of investment decisions alongside ambitious peers in a competitive, collaborative environment.

Register your interest!

Designed to unlock access and accelerate younger professionals into fund leadership, this programme equips you with LP-grade skills, powerful networks, and the confidence to raise and manage institutional capital.

Join us and be part of the next wave shaping Europe’s venture future!

🎉 If you are interested in exploring event and partnership opportunities with us, please click below to chat with ⭐️ Kasia! ⭐️

Event and partnership opportunities!

👉 DeepTech and the New Power Layer 🧠

Everyone is talking about AI applications. Far fewer are talking about the infrastructure making them possible. But that lower layer - semiconductors, compute, industrial tooling, advanced manufacturing - is strategic right now for competitiveness.

This, happens at the same time as European DeepTech funding keeps rising.

The interesting part is that, precisely for the components needed for compute, this no longer feels like a niche “chip industry” story. The companies that win the next decade will not just build better software - they will build on top of better infrastructure, better supply chains, better economics of compute, and better access to industrial bottlenecks.

💡 Market insight: Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Semiconductor Revenue to Exceed $1.3 Trillion in 2026

📊 Europe’s deeptech base is getting harder to ignore

According to the 2026 European Deeptech Report, Europe’s VC-backed deeptech sector is now worth $690 billion, and deeptech captured a record 32% of all European VC investment in 2025, with total funding reaching $20.3 billion. Just as importantly, the report highlights Future of Compute as the fastest-growing segment - a strong signal that the next strategic layer of value creation may sit deeper in the stack than most people assumed.

That matters because it changes the conversation, cause Europe already has genuine assets in DeepTech and must double down on those.

🧩 Why semiconductors suddenly matter to everyone

Semiconductors sit underneath nearly everything people now describe as “the future”: AI, defence, robotics, industrial automation, cloud infrastructure, mobility, energy systems, medical devices. That is exactly why the European Commission does not frame chips as just another industry vertical. Under the European Chip Act, semiconductors are treated as a matter of resilience, reduced external dependency, and technological sovereignty, with the EU aiming to double its global market share in semiconductors to 20%.

💡 The European Chip Act focuses on five strategic objectives:

1. Strengthening research and technological leadership

2. Building and reinforcing Europe’s capacity to innovate in the design, manufacturing and packaging of advanced chips

3. Putting in place an adequate framework to increase production by 2030

4. Addressing the skills shortage and attracting new talent

5. Developing an in-depth understanding of global semiconductor supply chain

That is what makes this moment so interesting. Chips are no longer just components in the background. They are becoming part of the strategic architecture of growth and technology sovereignty. The question is no longer only who builds the best products on top of AI. It is increasingly who has access to the infrastructure layer beneath it - and who controls the bottlenecks.

💡⚙️ What sits behind compute?

When people talk about “compute,” they usually mean raw processing power. But behind that sits a much larger technical stack.

At the core are semiconductors - especially logic chips like GPUs and CPUs, plus HBM (high-bandwidth memory), which is increasingly critical for AI workloads because it allows models to move and process huge amounts of data fast enough to be useful.

But chips are only one part of the power layer. To produce advanced semiconductors, the industry depends on an extremely specialized manufacturing chain: EDA software to design chips, lithography systems to print microscopic patterns onto wafers, deposition and etching tools to build transistor layers, advanced packaging to connect chips efficiently, and highly precise materials and optics throughout the process.

Then comes the infrastructure needed to actually use that compute at scale: data centres, power supply, cooling, and networking. AI systems are not limited only by chips; they are also constrained by electricity availability, thermal management, and the ability to move data quickly between processors, memory, and storage. That is why “the future of compute” is not just a chip story. It is a systems story - one that spans semiconductors, manufacturing equipment, memory, energy, and industrial infrastructure.

📈 How the market is looking

Gartner now forecasts global semiconductor revenue will exceed $1.3 trillion in 2026, up 64% year over year, which it describes as the strongest growth the industry has seen in the last two decades. It also expects AI semiconductors to represent 30% of total semiconductor revenue in 2026. That is a remarkable figure. It means the AI boom is no longer just visible in software budgets or cloud spending - it is reshaping the physical infrastructure layer itself.

👉 We see the same story in company results. TSMC reported $35.9 billion of revenue in Q1 2026, above its own guidance, and guided Q2 revenue to $39.0 billion to $40.2 billion.

👉 ASML, one of Europe’s most strategically important technology companies, reported €8.8 billion in Q1 2026 net sales and now expects €36 billion to €40 billion in full-year 2026 net sales. In its own words, the growth outlook is being driven by ongoing AI-related infrastructure investments, with customers increasing their short- and medium-term demand.

💡 Market insight: According to Sequoia, the foundations of the AI market are solidifying. Which would lead to value moving from hype at the app layer toward the enabling stack underneath it.

🇪🇺 Europe may not control the whole stack - but it should be able to control some core points

Europe is not the center of leading-edge chip fabrication, or base models. But leadership does not always mean total dominance. DeepTech is not built only on speed or software distribution. It is built on precision, technical depth, manufacturing integration, and longer-term defensibility. In a world obsessed with the application layer, Europe may still have an edge in some of the layers beneath it.

Europe’s DeepTech story is not appearing out of nowhere. According to Walden Catalyst, the region is home to 30% of the world’s top deeptech universities, produces twice as many science and engineering graduates as the US, and since 2015, one-third of its deeptech startups have emerged from research spinouts -especially in fields like photonics, quantum technologies, and advanced computing. In other words, this is not only a capital story. It is also a capability story. And the segment is resilient to market shifts.

So Europe is not short on innovation. The bigger problem is value capture. Atomico argues that while Europe now generates 17% of new global enterprise value, it captures only 10% of global exit value - a gap that helps explain why the region so often builds important companies but does not always keep the long-term rewards. Their example is DeepMind: founded in London, sold early, and ultimately becoming part of a much larger value creation story that accrued primarily to Alphabet rather than to Europe. It is a reminder that Europe’s challenge is no longer only to produce world-class companies, but to scale them, finance them, and retain more of the upside they create.

Hence, the more difficult question is not whether Europe can generate DeepTech companies. It clearly can. The harder question is whether it can scale and retain them. Walden estimates a $4B to $24B annual growth-stage funding shortfall, says 70% of late-stage capital comes from non-European investors, and notes that more than 80% of exits are driven by M&A.

👀 🔚 On the lookout

There’s still the debate of whether software would eat everything. But we also should look lower down the stack. Not because software stops mattering. But because the real scarcity is moving toward chips, compute, infrastructure, and the systems that make the rest of the digital economy possible.

🙌🏼 People who inspired us lately

Anne Boden 💥

Anne Boden is the founder and former CEO of Starling Bank, widely recognised as the first woman to found a British bank. She has become one of Europe’s best-known fintech entrepreneurs, building Starling into one of the UK’s leading digital banks and more recently shifting her focus toward AI through her new venture, AI By Boden.

👉 Find more about her here!

🤑 Latest Fund News

Seaya launches €1B growth fund to back Europe’s next tech champions!

Madrid-based Seaya has launched Seaya Growth Tech Fund I, a pan-European growth vehicle targeting up to €1B, anchored by a €300M commitment from the European Investment Fund. The fund will invest in later-stage European companies across applied AI, deep tech, fintech, climate solutions, and commerce, with the goal of addressing Europe’s growth-stage funding gap and helping scale local tech leaders into global champions.

👉 Find more here!

Kompas VC closes €160M second fund to back industrial tech across Europe and beyond

Copenhagen-based Kompas VC has reached the final close of its second fund at €160M, adding Danish philanthropic organization Realdania at the final close alongside returning backer VKR Holding. The firm had previously announced a €150M first close in 2025 and now manages around €300M across two funds.

👉 Find more here!

Abenex launches €150M Article 9 fund to back Europe’s industrial decarbonisation core

Paris-based private equity firm Abenex has completed the first closing of its new Industries 9.0 Fund, with commitments already exceeding 50% of its €150M target. The Article 9 strategy is focused on industrial SMEs in France, Italy and Benelux, targeting companies valued at up to €60M with equity tickets ranging from €5M to €20M.

👉 Find more here!

Nordic Science Investments doubles down on science-based venture after Taaleri deal

Helsinki-based Nordic Science Investments (NSI) is staying active after Taaleri acquired a 51% majority stake in the firm earlier this month, a move designed to expand Taaleri into early-stage, research-driven venture capital. NSI has now led a €450K pre-seed round in GlobeVAC, a University of Helsinki spinout developing cellulose-based technology to stabilize vaccines and biologics at room temperature.

👉 Find more here!

Funding news⚡

Laigo Bio completes oversubscribed seed financing of €17 million

Industry: Biotech / Therapeutics | Location: 🇳🇱 Netherlands | Funding: €17M

Utrecht-based Laigo Bio, co-founded by Madelon Maurice, has raised €17 million in a round led by Biovance Capital to advance its therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

👉 Read more here.

Deeptech startup Renasens lands €10M!

Industry: ClimateTech / Textile Recycling | Location: 🇸🇪 Sweden | Funding: €10M

Stockholm-based Renasens, founded by Jade Abir Bouledjouidja, has raised €10 million in a round led by Extantia to scale its CO₂-based textile recycling technology across Europe.

👉 Read more here.

Audicin raises $1.9M to expand real-time nervous system tech

Industry: HealthTech / Neurotechnology | Location: 🇫🇮 Finland | Funding: $1.9M

Finland-based Audicin, co-founded by Laura Avonius and Dr. Victoria Williamson, has secured $1.9 million in funding led by private investors, with backing from Petteri Lahtela and Virpi Tuomivaara. The company is working to commercialise its sleep headband, which uses nervous-system-regulating neurotechnology.

👉 Read more here.

Lace Raises $40M Series A! 🎉

Industry: Semiconductors / DeepTech | Location: 🇳🇴 Norway | Funding: $40M

Norwegian Lace Lithography, co-founded by Bodil Holst, has raised $40 million in a round led by Atomico for its chipmaking equipment startup.

👉 Read more here.

Other updates! 🎉

🤯 Exciting venture lab opportunity!

Fraunhofer HHI is opening two commercially ready research areas to startup teams through its venture lab, Silicon Allee. Selected founders will be able to build inside the institute, with access to patents, labs and researchers, while being employed by Fraunhofer HHI for 12 months, with three salaries covered by the institute.

🔬 The model is particularly founder-friendly: no upfront licensing fees, and around 10% virtual equity only converts if the startup raises €1M+.

🚀 The two current focus areas are Trustworthy, Transparent AI - covering explainability, robustness and EU AI Act-relevant use cases - and Photorealistic 3D with Gaussian Splatting, with applications across AR, robotics and industrial environments.

Rather than a traditional accelerator, this is positioned as a research-to-startup pathway embedded within one of Europe’s leading applied research institutes.

👉 Find more here! 🫆

✨ Panathēnea Festival returns to Athens on 27–29 May 2026!

Bringing together 10,000 founders, investors, operators and creators for three days at the intersection of tech, startups and culture. 🇬🇷🚀 The lineup includes voices from ElevenLabs, Index Ventures, Sequoia, Atomico, Balderton, Accel, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Microsoft and Google, alongside founders from Bolt, Deel, Fuse Energy and Runway.

🌆 Expect 70+ side events across the city, curated 1:1 meetings, and a chance to connect with some of the most relevant people shaping Europe’s startup ecosystem.

🎟️ Readers can use the code EUWOMENVCEP26 for an extra 20% discount on current ticket prices.

🔵 Menopause 2.0 is back!

It is a global virtual conference covering perimenopause and menopause as a societal, economic, workplace and healthcare issue. Following the success of 2024 and 2025 conferences, they are bringing it back again in 2026!

Book your ticket now: Here!

👉 Discount code applies: EUROPEANWOMENINVC

🎧📚 What are we reading and listening to?

🔵 Europe must not wait for policy reforms to mobilise venture capital for startups, Phillipe Tibi has warned

Philippe Tibi’s message is simple: Europe does not have time to wait for structural reforms to solve its startup funding gap. Instead, governments should push institutional capital into venture now, or risk seeing the continent’s most strategic startups financed - and ultimately shaped - from outside Europe.

👉 Read more here.

Attend one of our partners’ events 🎟️

• EU-Startups Summit, May 7th, Malta 🇲🇹

  • 20% discount code: EWVC20

• The Venture City Summit 2026, May 28, 🇪🇸 Madrid

  • In order to attend this event reach out directly to the Venture City team at summit@theventure.city for more information

• Panathēnea Festival, May 27–29, 2026, 🇬🇷 Athens

  • 🎟️ 20% discount code: EUWOMENVCEP26

• SuperReturn Venture, June 8-10th, 🇩🇪 Berlin

• SuperReturn International, June 8-12, 🇩🇪 Berlin

  • 10% discount code: FKR3646EWVC

• Super Return Emerging Markets, June 15-17, 🇳🇱 Amsterdam

• Menopause 2.0, Global Virtual Conference 🔵

  • 🎟️ Discount code: EUROPEANWOMENINVC

  • 📩 Link here!

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Join us as member, partner or ally | Book a meeting

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

👉 If you are a pre-seed startup and would like to be listed on Evertrace, feel free to reach out!

The next wave of venture growth it’s being written in labs, greenhouses, clinical trials, and stealth-mode garages. Who is at the helm of many of these frontier ventures? Female founders who are blending scientific depth with commercial firepower.

Together with Evertrace, we bring founders who are redesigning entire markets: From energy transition, to early disease detection. 🏃🏽‍♀️

💥 Meet female founders that are building the infrastructure of tomorrow:

Doko

📍🇵🇹 Lisbon, Portugal

#DigitalWellbeing #EdTech #ChildSafety

Doko is building a privacy-first app that helps children and teenagers navigate the digital world with greater emotional awareness, healthier habits, and resilience. Rather than relying on control, restriction, or surveillance, the platform takes a fundamentally different approach by encouraging reflection, healthier digital choices, and stronger emotional grounding. Doko helps young people face online risks, social pressure, and difficult moments with more clarity and confidence, supporting them in building the awareness and judgement to understand what they experience online and how to respond with self-trust.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Sara Dias is a serial founder and technologist with deep experience in agile product delivery. Before founding Doko, she served as Scrum Master at AKASHA Foundation, a decentralised social networking project, and co-founded DEFYME, a Web3 venture where she led product management for nearly three years. Earlier in her career, she held Scrum Master roles at Vodafone, Volkswagen Digital Solutions, and Diffblue, an Oxford-based AI startup, and worked as a Solutions Architect and Software Developer in London’s agency scene. She holds a Master of Science in Computer Software Engineering from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering from NOVA University Lisbon.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Doko addresses the rapidly expanding digital wellbeing market for young people with a differentiated privacy-first, empowerment-over-surveillance approach, led by a serial founder with an Oxford computer science pedigree and more than a decade of experience shipping product across Web3, telecoms, and AI.

Oly Care

📍 🇪🇸 Madrid, Spain

#HealthTech #WorkforceAutomation #AgenticAI

Oly Care is building the agentic operating system for healthcare staffing, autonomously running compliance, workforce allocation, and pay across the United Kingdom’s healthcare recruitment ecosystem. The platform is not another marketplace or management tool, but rather the connective layer linking healthcare organisations, agencies, and clinicians. For healthcare organisations, it delivers more predictable staffing and compliance with fewer unknowns. For agencies, it provides transparent and cost-efficient back-office automation. For clinicians, it offers a single digital identity for every role, shift, and renewal.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Amy Freelander is a serial founder with more than 19 years of experience in product and technology leadership. Before co-founding Oly Care, she ran her own fractional product consultancy, TCH LDR, working with scaling startups. She previously served as Interim Head of Product at Capital On Tap and held senior product management roles at Linnworks and Magnetic Rock. She spent two years as Senior Product Technology Manager at Google and earlier built her technical career at CyberSource, a Visa company, and Oxford Information Labs. She holds an MBA from Warwick Business School and a BA in Computing and Spanish from the University of Kent.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Oly Care targets the chronically inefficient UK healthcare staffing market, worth billions annually, with an agentic AI layer that automates compliance, allocation, and payroll end to end. It is led by a Google-trained product leader with an MBA and a track record of founding and scaling product organisations.

Celium

📍 🇩🇰 Copenhagen, Denmark

#DeepTech #IoT #ClimateMonitoring

Celium is an off-grid connectivity solution designed to safeguard and monitor vast areas in extreme environments where traditional infrastructure fails. The technology enables reliable sensor connectivity through a mesh-of-stars network topology, providing extended coverage, long operational lifetime, and self-healing communication between nodes. Celium supports critical applications such as seismic monitoring, glacier observation, and early wildfire detection, operating as a fully infrastructure-free network while maintaining compatibility with conventional communication systems.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Cristina Semikina is a young serial founder and software engineer with a strong academic foundation in computer science. She currently works as a Software Engineer at Connected Cars in Denmark while building Celium. Previously, she co-founded Tekup Innovations, a venture she led for over two years, and interned as a Software Engineer at Replai and Ambidata. She also served as Coordinator of the Event Department at the ISEP Computer Science Students’ Association. She holds a Master of Engineering in Computer Engineering from DTU, studied Computer Science at Aarhus University, and earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Informatics from ISEP in Porto.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Celium tackles the growing demand for remote environmental monitoring infrastructure, from wildfire detection to glacier observation, with a self-healing mesh network that requires zero existing infrastructure. The company is led by a technically accomplished founder with strong academic depth and hands-on engineering experience.

Product Taste

📍 🇫🇷 Paris, France

#ProductManagement #AICopilot #B2BSaaS

Product Taste is the AI copilot for product discovery, built to help product teams cut through the noise and make confident decisions about what to build next. The platform centralises user data, surfaces insights, and turns scattered signals into rigorous product decisions, replacing weeks of manual discovery work with a faster, more structured process. Product Taste is designed for Heads of Product, CPOs, Product Managers, Product Designers, and User Researchers who need to move from raw data to actionable direction without losing depth.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Myriam Bossard is a product leader with more than a decade of experience spanning luxury consumer brands and high-growth technology companies. Before founding Product Taste, she spent over two years as Senior Product Manager at Doctrine, a legal technology platform, and prior to that rose from Product Manager to Lead Product Manager at Ornikar. Earlier in her career, she held brand marketing and product roles at Coty, Sephora, and Ladurée Paris. She holds a Master in Management from ESCP Business School, studied business administration at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and completed coursework at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Product Taste addresses the universal pain point of product discovery inefficiency with an AI-first approach, led by a founder who combines deep product management expertise from scaling Doctrine and Ornikar with globally oriented business training.

LAM’ON

📍 🇧🇬 Sofia, Bulgaria

#ClimateTech #Materials #SustainablePackaging

LAM’ON is building a sustainable alternative to conventional flexible plastic packaging, targeting one of the largest and least solved pain points in the transition to more circular materials. The company is developing a scalable, drop-in solution designed to work with existing industrial processes while responding to rising regulatory pressure and growing corporate demand for more sustainable packaging formats.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Gergana Stancheva is Co-Founder and COO of LAM’ON. Alongside leading operations and scaling, she plays a key role in shaping the company’s brand, communication, and market positioning, translating deep-tech innovation into a clear and compelling story for partners and customers.

Both founders are recognised as Forbes 30 Under 30 honorees and Darik 40 Under 40 leaders in Bulgaria.

🔓 Investor Lens:

LAM’ON is addressing one of the largest and least solved challenges in sustainability, flexible plastic packaging, by delivering a scalable, drop-in alternative with strong environmental and regulatory tailwinds. With proven industrial compatibility, early commercial traction, and a clear path toward high-barrier food packaging, the company is well-positioned to capture a growing market driven by EU regulation and corporate demand for sustainable materials.

KIGO

📍 🇬🇧 London, United Kingdom

#MobilityTech #ClimateTech #SchoolTransport

KIGO is a UK-based platform focused on transforming one of the most overlooked yet highly repetitive daily transport systems: the school run. The platform enables safer, more coordinated, and more sustainable school journeys by working with schools and local authorities to reduce congestion, lower emissions, and improve safety for families. Combining behavioural insights, trusted community coordination, and data-driven optimisation, KIGO is designed to create measurable real-world impact in local mobility systems.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Moria Bennett is the Founder and CEO of KIGO. Her work builds on previous experience helping scale Tevva Motors, where she worked on electric transport solutions and saw firsthand the impact of mobility systems on emissions, infrastructure, and communities. KIGO was recently selected for the UK Department for Transport and Connected Places Catapult Transport AI programme and is currently progressing pilot discussions with local authorities.

🔓 Investor Lens:

KIGO is tackling a deeply embedded, high-frequency urban mobility problem with a platform model that sits at the intersection of climate, public infrastructure, behavioural coordination, and family safety. With clear public-sector relevance, measurable sustainability outcomes, and early programme validation, the company is well positioned to become part of the next generation of local transport infrastructure.

💡 Stay tuned, we’ll be back mid-next month with another round of female founders to watch.

👉 If you’d like to nominate a founder for the spotlight, reach out!

👐🏼 As European Women in VC, we’ll keep spotlighting founders who show us where capital, policy, and partnerships must go next. With Europe already trailing the US, we simply can’t afford to leave half the talent pool untapped. Together with Evertrace, we’re here to make sure these founders, and the markets they’re reshaping, are impossible to overlook.

About our Partner

Evertrace - Data-intelligence company that helps venture funds, corporates, tech companies, family offices, and other investment professionals discover the most promising (pre-)seed startups and founders before they appear on traditional radars. By tracking the earliest digital footprints across trade registries, code repositories, domains, research, patents, and social activity. Its “founder detection engine” turns scattered signals into a clear picture of who is building what, and where.

Through its platform, Evertrace massively expands a fund’s sourcing surface area, ensuring investors see a much broader – and more relevant – pipeline of early-stage opportunities and connect with exceptional founders while relationships are still truly proprietary. Evertrace’s long-term vision is to become the definitive bridge between capital and entrepreneurs: widening access, surfacing underestimated and diverse teams, and helping ensure that breakthrough ideas get the visibility and funding they deserve.

👉 Find more about them here!

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

👉 If you are a pre-seed startup and would like to be listed on Evertrace, feel free to reach out!

The next wave of venture growth it’s being written in labs, greenhouses, clinical trials, and stealth-mode garages. Who is at the helm of many of these frontier ventures? Female founders who are blending scientific depth with commercial firepower.

Together with Evertrace, we bring founders who are redesigning entire markets: From energy transition, to early disease detection. 🏃🏽‍♀️

💥 Meet female founders that are building the infrastructure of tomorrow:

Fria Care

📍 🇬🇧 London, United Kingdom

#HealthTech #MentalHealth #FemTech

Fria is a digital health platform tackling disordered eating, a condition that affects millions of young women worldwide yet remains underserved by existing solutions. The company combines gold-standard multimodal therapeutic approaches with strong consumer app design and advanced personalisation to deliver more effective support. Already rated 4.5 stars by more than 200 women in early access, Fria is currently in beta and seeking clinical collaborators to help shape the future of eating disorder recovery.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Marie Findlay is a product engineer turned founder with deep experience in health technology. Before launching Fria, she spent four years at Second Nature, rising from Product Engineer to Product Engineering Lead. Earlier, she held roles at LeSalon, Beauhurst, and the Royal Society for Public Health. She holds a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Fria addresses a large underserved market in eating disorder support with a product already showing strong early engagement and signs of real behaviour change. Led by a founder with hands-on product and healthtech experience, the company sits at the intersection of digital therapeutics, women’s health, and consumer-grade care delivery.

TaraVera Bio

📍 🇬🇧 London, United Kingdom

#BioTech #Pharma #Neurodegeneration

TaraVera Bio is developing first-in-class therapeutics that target disease-modifying pathways in neurodegeneration. The company is focused on conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, with an ambition to move beyond symptom management and address the underlying biology of neuronal decline.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Dr Radha Desai is a neuroscientist and drug discovery expert with more than twenty years of pharmaceutical R&D experience. Before co-founding TaraVera Bio, she spent seven years at MSD, rising to Associate Principal Scientist. Earlier, she held positions at the Royal Veterinary College, the Francis Crick Institute, and Pfizer. She holds a PhD in Neuroscience from UCL, an MSc in Pharmacology from Oxford, an MS in Biophysics from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, and completed Cornell’s Women’s Leadership Programme.

🔓 Investor Lens:

TaraVera Bio is targeting one of the largest unmet needs in medicine. With a founder who combines scientific depth, translational research experience, and major pharma credibility, the company has the kind of leadership profile institutional biotech investors tend to take seriously from day one.

Pomodo

📍 🇩🇪 Munich, Germany

#Hardware #ConsumerTech #DeepTech

Pomodo is an early-stage hardware venture based in Munich. Still in stealth, the company is building a consumer technology product shaped by deep enterprise engineering experience and design thinking, with the ambition to create a new category of hardware.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Gülden Bilgütay is a software engineer and product builder with more than a decade of experience across Big Tech and elite consulting. Before co-founding Pomodo, she was a Digital Specialist at McKinsey and previously spent four years at Microsoft. Earlier, she held engineering and architecture roles at Ericsson and Garanti BBVA Teknoloji. She holds an MBA from Koç University, completed the Women’s Leadership Programme at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and earned a BSc from Yaşar University.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Pomodo is led by a founder with an unusually strong mix of engineering execution and strategic operating experience. That combination matters in hardware, where moving from concept to manufacturing requires both technical depth and disciplined decision-making.

ApplyBtn

📍 🇪🇸 Madrid, Spain

#AI #CareerTech #Automation

ApplyBtn helps job seekers complete applications faster and better using AI. By analysing a user’s CV and the job description, it generates accurate answers, autofills forms, and tailors each application directly on the page. For professionals managing multiple applications, it removes the friction of repetitive form filling while making each submission more personalised.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Marina Orlova is a serial founder and full-stack engineer with more than twenty years of experience across enterprise consulting, e-commerce, and venture-backed startups. Before launching ApplyBtn, she held engineering roles at Garden Computing and Omnipresent, and was previously a founding engineer at NFTit. She also co-founded and served as Tech Lead at pelleteria.ru. She began her career in data warehousing and project management at GlowByte Consulting.

🔓 Investor Lens:

ApplyBtn goes after a universal workflow pain point with an AI-native product that could become highly habitual if adoption is strong. It is built by a founder with long-standing execution experience across both startup and enterprise environments.

Aranthos

📍 🇫🇷 Paris, France

#AI #Observability #AutonomousSystems

Aranthos builds behavioural observability for autonomous systems in production. As AI agents begin taking real-world actions at scale, from moving money to changing workflows and modifying code, Aranthos monitors behaviour externally through read-only signals from official APIs. It detects behavioural drift over time and generates evidence-backed alerts when execution deviates from baseline, helping enterprises govern autonomous systems as they scale.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Clotilde Arléry is a technical founder whose background spans AI research, cybersecurity, and public service. Before co-founding Aranthos, she was a research intern at NVIDIA in the DevTech division, worked in security at Orange Cyberdefense, and served as President of Union PSL. She is also a Réserviste Opérationnel in the French Army’s 7e Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins. She studied Sciences for a Sustainable World at École Normale Supérieure and holds a Licence in Economics and Corporate Finance from Aix-Marseille University.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Aranthos is building in a category that barely exists today but is likely to become essential as enterprises deploy autonomous systems more broadly. It is a sharp thesis on AI governance, led by a founder with credible technical and security grounding.

Theon

📍 🇬🇷 Heraklion, Greece

#HealthTech #AI #MedicalInfrastructure

Theon is building medical infrastructure for the post-AGI world. The company develops AI-driven data systems to support clinical decision-making, diagnostics, and healthcare operations as medicine enters a new era of advanced artificial intelligence. Based in Crete, Theon draws on computational biology and data science to help the medical sector adopt advanced AI more safely and effectively.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Eleftheria Psilou is a serial founder, data scientist, and AI researcher. Before co-founding Theon, she co-founded CausalMind and spent nearly two years as a Data Scientist at ICS-FORTH, one of Greece’s leading research institutes, where she had earlier served as a Research Assistant. She also completed a research internship at IBM. She holds both a Master’s and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of Crete.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Theon is positioned around one of the most important bottlenecks in healthcare AI: making powerful systems safe, usable, and operational in real medical settings. The founder’s research pedigree and serial founder profile strengthen the company’s credibility in a technically demanding space.

💡 Stay tuned, we’ll be back mid-next month with another round of female founders to watch.

👉 If you’d like to nominate a founder for the spotlight, reach out!

👐🏼 As European Women in VC, we’ll keep spotlighting founders who show us where capital, policy, and partnerships must go next. With Europe already trailing the US, we simply can’t afford to leave half the talent pool untapped. Together with Evertrace, we’re here to make sure these founders, and the markets they’re reshaping, are impossible to overlook.

About our Partner

Evertrace - Data-intelligence company that helps venture funds, corporates, tech companies, family offices, and other investment professionals discover the most promising (pre-)seed startups and founders before they appear on traditional radars. By tracking the earliest digital footprints across trade registries, code repositories, domains, research, patents, and social activity. Its “founder detection engine” turns scattered signals into a clear picture of who is building what, and where.

Through its platform, Evertrace massively expands a fund’s sourcing surface area, ensuring investors see a much broader – and more relevant – pipeline of early-stage opportunities and connect with exceptional founders while relationships are still truly proprietary. Evertrace’s long-term vision is to become the definitive bridge between capital and entrepreneurs: widening access, surfacing underestimated and diverse teams, and helping ensure that breakthrough ideas get the visibility and funding they deserve.

👉 Find more about them here!

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

Quote of the day: "If I didn’t fill my schedule with things I felt were important, other people would fill my schedule with things they felt were important” - Melinda Gates (Businesswoman).

🎉 If you are interested in exploring event and partnership opportunities with us, please click below to chat with ⭐️ Kasia! ⭐️

Event and partnership opportunities!

VC Tech Stack Pulse 2026 · Take the survey

VC group chats are full of tool recommendations that disappear the moment you need them. The VC Tech Stack Pulse 2026 by AGX, Venture Connections, and European Women in VC maps what VCs actually use - what works, what doesn’t, and what’s just noise. No vendor bias.

We have strong momentum already, with 100+ responses from funds globally. The more responses, the better the benchmark for everyone.

Participants get the full, detailed results - real benchmarks you won’t find anywhere else.

…yes, Excel counts as your tech stack too. 😉

Take The Pulse Now (it only takes 5 minutes)

Fill out the survey

👉 AI adoption is up. Competitive readiness isn’t

We have heard a lot around tech circles. A few weeks ago, a shocking line stated that many companies have already been “kicked out of the arena” (see the full post here) - they just do not know it yet. The reason is simple. It captured something the market is only now beginning to understand: in AI, adoption is no longer the story. Organizational speed is (see more here).

Most serious companies now use AI in some form. McKinsey’s latest global survey found that 88% of organizations use AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year earlier. But only around one-third say they have begun scaling AI across the enterprise. The majority are still somewhere between experimentation and rollout. That gap matters. The market is splitting now between the companies that can actually change how work gets done right now.

Adoption is broad. Rewiring is rare

There is a lot of AI activity in the market right now. There is much less AI transformation.

💡 McKinsey’s data is telling on this point. Only 39% of respondents report any enterprise-level EBIT impact from AI, even as usage has become mainstream. Its standout finding is even more important: the companies seeing the strongest impact are much more likely to have fundamentally redesigned workflows, not merely layered AI onto existing processes. AI high performers are nearly 3x more likely than others to redesign workflows, and roughly three-quarters of them are already scaling AI, versus only about one-third of the rest.

That is the first real market divide of 2026. Not between companies that “have AI” and those that do not. Between companies that have embedded AI into their operating model and those still decorating legacy processes with new tooling.

Featured initiative

EIC Women Leadership Programme: Calling Women Researchers & Entrepreneurs

Are you a woman researcher or entrepreneur looking to grow your leadership skills and expand your network? The EIC is launching cohorts for both entrepreneurs (founders, C-level, senior managers) and researchers ready to turn science into business.

Applications open, register your expression of interest now to get priority access.

Apply here

Capital is not just flowing into AI. It is concentrating

If enterprise adoption is one side of the story, capital markets are the other. The OECD’s latest figures should be required reading for anyone investing in, building in, or regulating this space. In 2025, AI companies captured 61% of all global venture capital investment value - $258.7bn out of $427.1bn total VC. That is more than double AI’s share in 2022, when it stood at 30%.

The concentration is not only sectoral. It is geographic. The US accounted for roughly 75% of global AI VC deal value in 2025. The EU27 accounted for just 6%. AI is diffusing broadly across organizations. But the economic upside is concentrating very narrowly. For founders, that means the competitive landscape is becoming more brutal, faster. For VCs, it means the AI trade is increasingly a scale-capital trade.

💡 Market Insight: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Waymo made February the biggest month in venture yet (read more here).

Europe is not missing AI. It is missing capture

Europe is adopting AI. Eurostat reports that 19.95% of EU enterprises with at least 10 employees used at least one AI technology in 2025, up from 13.48% in 2024. Among large enterprises, adoption reached 55.03%. So this is not a story of European indifference. It is a story of uneven diffusion and weak capture. Europe has users. Europe has talent. Europe has startups. But when it comes to late-stage ownership, compute concentration, and venture-scale value capture, the center of gravity is still overwhelmingly American. The OECD’s 75% US vs. 6% EU27 split makes that brutally clear.

That has consequences:

• For founders, the bar is no longer “can we build in Europe?” It is “can we build, scale, and remain strategically relevant from Europe?”

• For VCs, it reinforces the opportunity - and risk - in backing teams that can convert European technical depth into commercial scale before US capital captures the upside.

• For institutions, it means that AI policy cannot stop at adoption targets. It has to deal with retention of value.

The AI race is now an infrastructure story too

The European Commission is now treating AI capacity as industrial policy. In October 2025 it said the network had expanded to 19 AI Factories across 16 Member States, with more than €500m in joint investment in that third wave alone. Total commitments to the AI Factories and Antennas initiative now exceed €2.6bn.

Earlier, in February 2025, the Commission launched InvestAI, an initiative designed to mobilise €200bn for AI investment, including a €20bn European fund for AI gigafactories. There are still many changes to happen across industries.

Europe is no longer just talking about AI regulation. It is now explicitly talking about compute, capacity and industrial build-out. That matters because the next phase of the AI market is not purely a software race. It is increasingly a race across:

• Compute access

• Energy availability

• Procurement capacity

• Data location

• Security posture

• Industrial scale

Reskilling is no longer an HR issue. It is a competitiveness issue

The labor story is also getting sharper. PwC’s 2025 AI Jobs Barometer found that skills demanded in the most AI-exposed occupations are changing 66% faster than in the least exposed ones. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum estimates that by 2030, labor-market churn will affect 22% of today’s jobs, with 170 million new roles created and 92 million displaced, for a net increase of 78 million jobs.

Taken together, the message is straightforward: the economic question is no longer whether AI will change work. It is whether firms and countries can adapt quickly enough to where work is moving. That is why reskilling should no longer be framed as a soft workforce initiative. As the usage of model capabilities are barely scratching the surface, reskilling for the future is a strategic priority to navigate labor market imapcts:

🙌🏼 People who inspired us lately

Sarah Friar 💥

Sarah Friar is an Irish-American business executive and operator who is currently CFO of OpenAI. Before joining OpenAI in 2024, she served as CEO of Nextdoor and earlier as CFO of Square (now Block), building a reputation as one of the most prominent finance and operating leaders in tech.

Over the course of her career, Friar has also held roles at Salesforce, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, and today sits on boards including Walmart and Consensys. OpenAI described her as its first CFO when announcing her hire, underscoring the scale and strategic importance of the role as the company entered a new phase of growth.

👉 Find more about her here!

🤑 Latest Fund News

🫆 New Climate VC VitaminºC Raises €18M!

A new name in climate venture: VitaminºC has announced the first close of its €18M debut fund, backing pre-seed and seed climate tech startups across Europe and the US.

Based in Zurich and San Francisco, and founded by Nathalie Moral and Sophie Lamparter, the firm is positioning itself as a transatlantic bridge for climate founders - combining European impact investing depth with US scaling expertise. At a time when climate funding has slowed and many generalist funds have stepped back, VitaminºC is making the opposite bet: that this reset is exactly when specialist capital matters most.

🌱 Michelle Volz (Ex-a16z Partner) Launches $50m Pax Ventures

Michelle has raised $50 million for her new venture fund. As she puts it: “There are a lot of ways to make money. I want to make money on people actually doing important things rather than AI slop”. Volz says she ultimately hopes to expand Pax Ventures beyond a one-person partnership. But for now she’s investing solo, and on ‘Industrial-Scale Markets’.

Read more here!

Carbon13: The European Venture Accelerator! 💥

Carbon13’s first ever European Venture Accelerator is a year-long programme with €150-250k funding opportunity. It is designed to equip European climate tech ventures with the knowledge, network and investment needed to scale.

Applications are closing on the 27th of March.

👉 Read more here.

🎉 Portfolio milestone: Climentum Capital’s first exit!

A big milestone for one of our members’ portfolios: Climentum Capital has announced its first exit.

Its portfolio company Kärnfull Next, a developer of small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear projects, has been acquired - an important signal not just for the nuclear ecosystem, but for the broader climate and deeptech venture market. At a time when many LPs are asking harder questions on liquidity and distributions, this is exactly the kind of outcome that helps prove that exits are possible and DPI is real.

👉 Read more here.

👏 WakeUp Capital has been selected for the ImpactAssets 50 (IA 50) 2026 as an Emerging Impact Manager

IA 50 has served as one of the most respected global guides to impact investing fund managers, spotlighting those deploying capital to generate measurable environmental and social impact alongside strong financial returns. Congratulations WakeUp Capital!

Funding news⚡

🇬🇧 FYLD raises €34M to scale AI for field operations!

Industry: AI / Industrial Tech | Location: 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | Funding: €34M

London-based FYLD, co-founded by Shelley Copsey, has raised €34 million to expand its AI-driven field operations platform. The round was led by Energy Impact Partners LP. FYLD helps frontline and field-based teams improve safety, productivity, and decision-making by using AI to streamline operational workflows in real time.

👉 Read more here.

Other updates! 🎉

• Avra van der Zee has joined San Francisco-based SOSV as a General Partner.

• Pauliina Martikainen-Rahnu has been promoted as a Managing Partner at Maki.vc

• Katharina Wilhelm has joined Creandum as a Partner in the firm’s Berlin office.

• Emily Eisenblätter has joined OVNI Capital as a Partner opening the firm’s Berlin office.

• Adriana Saman has been promoted to Partner at California-based Clocktower Ventures.

• Anne-Marie Christoffersen-Deb joined Copenhagen-based Unconventional Ventures as a Head of Investments.

• Karine Peters has been promoted to Managing Director, at Hamburg, Germany-based T.Capital, the investment arm of Deutsche Telekom.

• Alysaa Co has been promoted to Partner at San Francisco-based Bain Capital Ventures (BCV). The firm also promoted Amanda Huang to Principal.

🤯 50 Diverse Led Impact Startups to Watch in Europe!

Excited to be part of the first edition of 50 Diverse Led Impact Startups to Watch in Europe, an initiative by Impact Shakers and 4P CAPITAL spotlighting early stage startups led by underrepresented founders building real solutions to complex challenges.

👉 If you know a diverse-led impact startup in Europe that should be on the radar, nominations are open now -> link 💙

🎧📚 What are we reading and listening to?

🔵 EWVC Interviews

👉 Scaling 🇫🇮 Finland’s Potential, Interview with Samuel Wendelin, Tesi

👉 Navigating LP-GP Dynamic, Interview with Lisa Edgar

👉 Investing in Sovereignty, Interview with Erin Hallock, NATO Innovation Fund

🔵 Why Not Investing in Women Is Commercial Madness

“Female founders are being irrationally starved of capital, costing the 🇬🇧 UK £310 billion”.

👉 Read more here.

🔵 Nina Foote: Women in FinTech Powerlist 2025

Volution Partner & Chief of Staff Nina Foote has been recognised as a Senior Leader in the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist 2025. Nina plays a central role in 🇬🇧 Volution’s leadership, helping drive the firm’s strategy, operations and growth. She also champions ESG and actively supports the wider FinTech ecosystem through founder programmes and industry engagement.

👉 Read more here.

🔵 The State of the Market in 2026: IPO Candidates

👉 Read more here!

🔵 Venture is splitting into two asset classes

Peter Walker’s latest remarks on venture dynamics put language around something many managers have felt for a while: “venture capital” no longer behaves like a single asset class. On one end, you have megafunds operating with a scale, risk profile and capital deployment logic that barely resembles traditional venture. On the other, you have emerging managers trying to build differentiated strategies in a market increasingly distorted by concentration.

👉 Read more here!

🔵 Amilis Wins Global AI Innovator of the Year at Pitch2Tokyo

Amilis has been named Global AI Innovator of the Year at the Venture Café Global Pitch2Tokyo finals, a global competition bringing together leading startups from 18 cities across the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Following regional selection rounds involving hundreds of companies, a small group of founders were invited to pitch in Tokyo across sectors including healthcare, climate and deep technology. Amilis was selected as the top company globally.

👉 Read more here.

👀 What we’ve been up to

VC Fund Manager Academy, March 2026

Sixteen brilliant participants came together for our VC Fund Manager Academy cohort this month, compressing the full 10–15 year journey of running a venture fund into just three days. A huge congrats to this group, it was an intense journey! 👏👏👏

Agnieszka Grabowska, PhD · Alejo Lauria · Allegra Kowalewski-Ferreira · Andrea Waldhart · Annalisa Andaloro · Diana Tsinis · Hampus Björklin · Iryna Krepchuk · Jodi Bartin · Magdalena Dybal · Manuel Yoon · Marta Mrozowicz · Nicola Stanislawska · Pricillia Sinambela · Sara Kangaspeska · Weili Wang

👉 Powered by Venture Connections · European Women in VC

Wanna join the next cohort? Reach out to Kasia

🇬🇧 Gen X & the Pension Challenge

Our 🇬🇧 UK Venture Partner Florence joined the Social Market Foundation for an important conversation about the growing Gen X pension gap. It's a topic we've been pushing forward since H2 2025, we need pension systems that protect beneficiaries well while also allocating capital intelligently into productive parts of the economy.

👉 Join the discussion here.

🇬🇧 Thousand Faces Angel Investing Roundtable

Female angel investing is growing fast, and so is the community around it. From tax-efficient structures like SEIS to syndication networks and impact-led theses, the roundtable hosted by Thousand Faces hosted by Anna Colombatti, CAIA and Dr Laura Cantora was full of practical, honest insights.

The more women who write angel cheques, the stronger the ecosystem becomes.

👉 Join the discussion here.

🇪🇸 Women in Investment Coffee at 4YFN2026

We co-organised a networking coffee during 4YFN alongside WA4STEAM and WeInvest LatAm, bringing together investors and ecosystem builders from across Europe. 👉 Join the discussion here.

🇬🇧 Grow London International Women's Day

We had a fantastic time at the Grow London International Women’s Day event yesterday, an inspiring room full of women thinking seriously about how we support each other to grow. The message was clear: women need to move from being AI consumers to AI builders, and the moment to start experimenting is now.

👉 Join the discussion here.

🇱🇹 "Capital Stays Where Confidence Pays" Panel Discussion

At the invitation of the Governor Gediminas Šimkus of the central bank of 🇱🇹 Lithuania, Kinga Stanislawska joined leaders: Vladas Algirdas Bumelis, Director General of Northway Biotech, Vida Staskoniene, EMBA, Director of the Investment Development Department of Invest Lithuania, Rolandas Valiūnas, Chair of the Board of the Investors' Forum, and explored what truly keeps investor confidence alive, credible institutions, legal certainty, and national reputation. The session was moderated by David Barwick, journalist covering finance and economics.

🇬🇧 Founders Forum - VC night in London

A wonderful night at Founders Forum Group, with rich conversation around the UK's Sovereign AI Fund, the deepening European AI landscape, and the early-stage opportunity right now. What stood out most: the growing number of women stepping forward to lead funds. Momentum is real.

Thanks Brent Hoberman and Carolyn Dawson! 👉 Join the discussion here.

European Women Backing African Innovation

Our 🇬🇧 UK Venture Partner Florence Bavanandan was at the Launch Africa Ventures Investor Immersion this week, and welcomed two exceptional European LPs, Gry Loseth and Urte Zahn , alongside three powerful female-led African startups: Sudor Apps , ToumAI and Africa Foresight Group (AFG / Peralta).

The future of venture is cross-continental. 🌍 👉 Join the discussion here.

Attend one of our partners’ events 🎟️

• Impact Summit Europe, April 14-15th, 🇳🇱 Amsterdam

• 0100 Europe 2026, April 21-23rd, 🇳🇱 Amsterdam

• Iceland Innovation Week, April 28-29th, 🇮🇸 Reykjavík

  • Use our discount code INVESTINNORDICS26 to get 15% off

• EU-Startups Summit, May 7th, Malta 🇲🇹

  • 20% discount code: EWVC20

• The Venture City Summit 2026, May 28, 🇪🇸 Madrid

  • In order to attend this event reach out directly to the Venture City team at summit@theventure.city for more information

• SuperReturn Venture, June 8-10th, 🇩🇪 Berlin

• SuperReturn International, June 8-12, 🇩🇪 Berlin

  • 10% discount code: FKR3646EWVC

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Join us as member, partner or ally | Book a meeting

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

Quote of the day: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has” — Margaret Mead; anthropologist, author and speaker.

🚨 Only 3 seats left 🚨

Most VC training teaches you how funds work.

This one makes you run one.*

*Immersive simulation - you will make 600+ real investment and fund management decisions, navigating a compressed 10–15 year fund lifecycle in just 3 days.
Contact: Alicja@europeanwomenvc.org

Register Interests

🎯 So-what: the consumer economy is “financializing” fast

The global consumer economy is currently undergoing a structural transformation characterized by the “financialization of everything,” a phenomenon where traditional consumption is replaced by speculative engagement with high-velocity digital assets.

A useful frame for what’s happening: consumer tech is moving from selling products to selling dopamine-priced exposure to outcomes. Not ownership, not utility, just the feeling of being “in the game” with instant feedback and a constant sense of possibility. Crypto was the early prototype, but the same behavioral engine now runs through trading apps, sports betting, and prediction markets.

👉 That’s also why this is starting to look like a real consumer category VCs can underwrite.

🇺🇸 US: Prediction markets are scaling like a consumer-fintech category

Kalshi is the clearest datapoint that this is no longer niche. In November 2025, Kalshi hit ~$5.8B in monthly trading volume (MarketWatch via Morningstar) - and the mix matters: by September 2025, MarketWatch reported $2.86B monthly volume with $2.56B coming from sports alone (MarketWatch via Morningstar).

Then the “this is consumer now” signal: the Financial Times reports Kalshi’s user base grew from 600,000 to 5.1 million within a year (FT) . That kind of adoption curve is what makes VCs stop arguing whether something is “investment” or “gambling” and start treating it like distribution infrastructure.

Even more telling: the FT also estimates Kalshi’s annualized sports-trading revenue at ~$1.3B, and notes Kalshi’s 2026 Super Bowl trading volume surpassed $1B (FT) . That is “sportsbook-scale” behavior, just wearing a different regulatory outfit.

🧩 What about Polymarket?

Polymarket volume estimates differ by dashboard or methodology. Some industry dashboards report Polymarket’s November 2025 monthly volume at “more than $3.7B” (Sportsbook Review). While another tracker puts Polymarket’s November volume at “more than $1.87B” (The Block).

🏦 Institutionalization: ICE effectively “blessed” prediction markets as data infrastructure

In October 2025, Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE owner) announced it would invest up to $2B in Polymarket at ~$8B valuation pre-investment, and crucially ICE would become a global distributor of Polymarket’s event-driven data (ICE) .

The FT framed this as part of Polymarket’s path toward mainstream financial integration, also noting Polymarket’s 2025 acquisition of QCX and QC Clearing for $112M as a potential route back into the US regulatory perimeter (FT) .

VC implication: the endgame isn’t just taking a spread on consumer bets. It’s owning (and distributing) the probability layer; a real-time sentiment and forecasting feed that can be sold into institutions, media, and fintech rails.

⚖️ Regulation might not be the risk, it might be the product (and the MOAT)

This category is scaling inside a jurisdictional knife-fight:

• Wired reports Kalshi is facing 19 lawsuits, and predicts a prolonged conflict over whether these contracts are federally regulated derivatives or state-regulated gambling (Wired) .

• The AP reports the CFTC has backed Kalshi/Polymarket against state attempts to ban them, signaling a meaningful policy posture shift (AP) .

• The Guardian captures the “lines have been blurred” framing: platforms say “event derivatives,” states say “unlicensed gambling,” and many expect it could end up at the Supreme Court level (Guardian) .

💡 Investor lens: In 2026, “regulatory strategy” isn’t a compliance thing. It is core product architecture: venue structure, market design, surveillance, user eligibility, and distribution partnerships.

🇪🇺 Europe’s landscape: Poland as a case study where demand leads

Poland is the cleanest European proof that demand beats policy. If the US is the regulated frontier (where the market grows and the winners tend to be licensed) Poland is the opposite: a country with intense appetite, tightly constrained legal supply, and a tax regime that makes the legal path feel expensive, friction-heavy, or simply unavailable. That triangle doesn’t “reduce gambling.” It re-routes it. In that world, the shadow market doesn’t sit at the edges; it becomes the real market, because it offers the product people actually want: seamless mobile access, broader selection, and fewer constraints.

An EY analysis (commissioned by the Polish “Graj Legalnie” association) estimates illegal online casino operators generated ~PLN 25.9B in turnover in 2023 (Graj Legalnie) . The same report estimates lost “gaming tax” revenues climbing to ~PLN 519M in 2023 (Graj Legalnie).

The policy setup matters here. Poland’s framework is unusually “tight” via monopoly structure - this report notes a state monopoly for online casinos exists only in Poland, Finland, and Austria. In practice, that combination (high demand and constrained legal supply) is exactly how shadow markets become the “real market.”

And taxation adds fuel. Poland’s Gambling Act applies a 12% tax on betting (base = total stakes), per SBC News’ summary of the legal framework (SBC News) . Meanwhile, the personal winnings tax fight is politically live: in December 2025, President Karol Nawrocki vetoed a proposal to raise the winnings tax from 10% to 15% (iGamingBusiness) .

👉 Europe’s takeaway is uncomfortable: Speculative demand is very real, but the continent’s fragmentation can push the growth curve into grey markets instead of building licensed champions. The result isn’t “less gambling.” It’s less visible gambling, with the same dopamine loop and fewer guardrails.

🫆 What are the implications for consumers?

The health risk is increasingly notable. The underlying psychological mechanism in all these platforms and new forms of attention is variable ratio reinforcement.

The impacts on health are already showing, according to data from the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, 31% of people who speculate with cryptocurrencies show symptoms of addiction, and 86% of that group simultaneously engage in other forms of gambling.

💡 Other interesting datapoints are:

• Excessive trading may be triggered by an addictive process.

• Men trade more than women, and unmarried men trade more than married men.

• Stock market crashes have been linked to upticks in suicide.

• Investors with a large differential between their existing economic conditions and their aspiration levels hold riskier stocks in their portfolios.

In the case of Poland, nearly one in three Polish citizens gambles, spending an average of approximately 5,750 PLN per year.

🧠 What VCs think: “momentum is the moat”

This isn’t just a betting story. It’s directly linked to the consumer distribution story.

a16z partner Bryan Kim’s thesis is explicit: in consumer AI, traditional moats decay faster because underlying models and infrastructure are widely available and shift rapidly.

💡 What matters is velocity: launch speed, distribution, and mindshare capture (a16z). Especially in an economy where attention span is short and dopamine controlled.

🐦 The “pigeons” metaphor (selection by speed)

Kim describes AI startups as a “flock” blasted into the sky in quick succession; most won’t gain enough lift, but the ones that “flap” hardest -shipping and iterating constantly- create distance from the pack (a16z).

🔁 Why this connects to consumer trends (gaming, markets and products)

The same mechanics powering prediction markets and gamified speculation -fast feedback loops, social virality, “scoreboards” (PnL, rankings), and winner-take-attention dynamics- now show up in go-to-market: build in public, high-frequency shipping, distribution-first.

👉 Lovable, Bolt, Krea and others have embraced this approach, regularly posting updates on everything from revenue benchmarks to daily active users to unsuccessful experiments.

🇪🇺 New Report just launched 🇪🇺

Closing Europe’s deep tech gender gap: women-led startups set to scale

Read more here

🙌🏼 People who inspired us lately

Elina Berrebi and Alice Albizzati

We are incredibly proud to see Elina Berrebi and Alice Albizzati, Revaia, receiving the insignia of Knight of the National Order of Merit (Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite), presented by Clara Chappaz.

"This distinction does not close a path. It reminds us that our choices today shape the world of our children."

Congratulations! A well-deserved honor!

Joanna Strober, Co-founder and CEO of Midi Health 💥

Joanna Strober is the co-founder of Midi Health, a virtual care platform delivering insurance-covered perimenopause and menopause care nationwide.

💥 Recently Midi Health has surpassed $1B Valuation!

Before Midi, she founded Kurbo (a digital therapeutic for childhood obesity) later acquired by WeightWatchers. She previously spent 20+ years investing in health and consumer companies across private equity and venture capital, with past portfolio exposure including consumer internet names like BlueNile, eToys, BabyCenter, HotJobs, and Flycast. She’s also the author of Getting to 50/50 and is a frequent speaker on women and leadership.

👉 Find more about her here!

🤑 Latest Fund News

Slate Closes First Fund at €132M! 💥

SlateVC's first growth fund focused on energy and circularity is live with a €132M first close. The 🇫🇷 Paris-based firm targets energy and circularity startups where environmental gains align with superior economics.

👉 Read more here.

Funding news⚡

🇩🇪 Berlin’s Andercore secures $40M Series B to expand its AI-driven industrial trade platform

Industry: Tech | Location: 🇩🇪 Berlin | Funding: $40M (Series B)

Andercore raised $40M in equity and debt to accelerate European expansion; the round includes Atomico and Project A, with Inven Capital joining, plus institutional financing from Commerzbank and KfW. The company is co-founded by Philipp Andernach (CEO) and Elsa Cordonnier (Product & Tech), and positions itself as “AI that moves containers of real products globally,” automating pricing/quoting/QA/logistics/embedded financing for cross-border industrial supply.

👉 Find more here!

🇫🇷 French Vizzia raises €30M Series B to scale municipal video surveillance across Europe

Industry: GovTech | Location: 🇫🇷 Paris | Funding: €30M (Series B)

Vizzia raised a €30M Series B led by Base10 Partners with participation from Headline and Sistafund, bringing total funding to €50M. Co-founder Katrin de Proyart points to “incredible momentum” as European local authorities prioritize safety and anti-social behaviour enforcement; Vizzia’s stack combines connected cameras with AI-enabled analysis to support investigations and issues like fly-tipping.

👉 Find more here!

🇮🇱 Venice Security launches with $33M to tackle privileged access risks in the AI era

Industry: Cybersecurity | Location: 🇮🇱 Israel | Funding: $33M

Venice (formerly Valkyrie) emerged from stealth with $33M total funding, including a $25M Series A led by IVP with participation from Index Ventures and others, to modernize privileged access management for cloud/SaaS/on-prem and increasingly AI-driven enterprise environments. Co-founder/CEO Rotem Lurie pitches the core insight succinctly: teams and environments change faster, and AI accelerates both operations and attackers; so access control has to become real-time and adaptive. In other words: identity security is moving from “vaults and approvals” to “continuous control loops.”

👉 Find more here!

🇸🇪 Sweden’s Lassie lands a $75M Series C to build a prevention-first pet care ecosystem

Industry: Insurtech | Location: 🇸🇪 Stockholm | Funding: $75M (Series C)

Lassie raised $75M Series C with participation from Balderton Capital, Felix Capital, Inventure, Passion Capital, and Stena Sessan as it expands its insurance and preventative care platform across Europe. The company was founded in 🇸🇪 Stockholm by Hedda Båverud Olsson and Sophie Wilkinson, alongside Johan Jönsson and is pushing a clear wedge: bundling insurance with daily-use preventive habits.

👉 Find more here!

🎧📚 What are we reading and listening to?

🔵🇮🇸 Interview with Hrönn Greipsdottir, New Venture Fund Kria

🔵🇬🇧 Interview with Christine Hockley, British Business Bank

🔵 Market pulse: Exits feel less fictional again (not good, but open)

💡 According to KPMG Venture Pulse, “These successful listings… bolstered confidence that the exit window for VC-backed companies is finally reopening”.

Europe’s proof point in Q3 wasn’t theoretical - it had a ticker. Klarna’s long-awaited IPO priced the company at $15.1B, which is well above its $6.7B 2022 private valuation, but still far below the $45.5B 2021 peak.

👉 Read it here!

🔵 Market pulse: The start of 2026 already brought a wave of new climate and deep tech funds across Europe, the US, and Australia!

🌱 Great announcements in the sector include:

• Mundi Ventures – €750m first close for Kembara Fund I, backing European deep tech and climate scaleups at Series B and C

• Novo Nordisk Foundation / BioInnovation Institute (BII) – up to €736m committed through 2035 to support life science and deep tech startups

• Eurazeo – €500m Future Industries Fund focused on capital-intensive climate and industrial technologies

• Obvious Ventures – $360m Fund V investing across planetary, human, and economic health

• Voyager Ventures – $275m Fund II backing energy, materials, industrial software, and the built environment

• daphni – €260m Blue Fund supporting science-driven European deep tech

• 2150 – €210m Fund II scaling climate technologies reshaping cities and heavy industry

  

👉 Read it here!

🔵 EQT: Seizing Europe’s Strategic Tech Opportunity

EQT’s take: Europe can produce the next wave of global tech champions, but only if it fixes the scale-up bottlenecks that push winners to the US; starting with simpler, unified rules (including an ambitious “28th regime”), more innovation-friendly public procurement, and a tighter bridge between late-stage capital and corporates via tools like offtake agreements and milestone-based financing. 🇪🇺🚀

👉 Read it here!

🔵 Judith Dada: Europe is not asleep. But it is not awake enough

Judith Dada (GP at Visionaries Club) talks to Amy Lewin and cuts through the noise and talks about Europe, and what it will take to accelerate competitiveness.

👉 Read more here!

🔵 Women Shaping Venture Capital in New Zealand

According to Yassin El Hardouz, New Zealand’s VC ecosystem is compact but highly influential, and the women operating at partner and leadership level play an outsized role in capital allocation, governance, deep tech commercialization, and global scaling.

👉 Read it here!

🔵 OpenLP: Where LPs should look for venture alpha

👉 Listen to it here!

👀 What we’ve been up to

EWVC Investor Breakfast in 🇪🇪 Tallinn!

A big thank you to all of you who joined us for the EWVC #InvestorBreakfast in 🇪🇪 Tallinn! It was great to host you at the Karma Ventures office and have an open discussion regarding the investment ecosystem in the Baltics.

👉 Read more here!

British Business Bank Annual Conference in 🇬🇧 Manchester

It was great to be in 🇬🇧 Manchester for the British Business Bank Annual Conference, joining investors, policymakers and ecosystem partners to discuss the future of UK venture and growth capital. Thank you for having us!

👉 Read reflections from the discussions here!

Online Session with Lisa Edgar, Inside the LP’s head

Together with the Invest in Women Taskforce, we were thrilled to host Lisa Edgar for a deep dive into the LP mindset. With 20+ years of experience investing in funds across the US, UK, and Europe, Lisa didn't hold back on the realities of fundraising today.

👉 Read more here!

Attend EWVC events

Networking Coffee, March 3rd, 🇪🇸 Barcelona

​REGISTER HERE, You need 4YFN ticket to access to venue.

VC Breakfast, March 25th, 🇵🇱 Warsaw

​➡️ REGISTER HERE

Attend one of our partners’ events 🎟️

• 4YFN, March 2-5th, 🇪🇸 Barcelona

  • Mail info@europeanwomenvc.org to apply for a complementary ticket

• The CTO Table, March 16th, 🇫🇷 Paris

• CEE VC Summit, March 24th, 🇵🇱 Warsaw

  • Mail konrad.koncerewicz@vestbee.com and mention EWVC network to apply for an invite

• TechChill 2026, March 25th, 🇱🇻 Riga

  • Use our discount code EWVC10 to get 10% off tickets

• Impact Summit Europe, April 14-15th, 🇳🇱 Amsterdam

• Iceland Innovation Week, April 28-29th, 🇮🇸 Reykjavík

  • Use our discount code INVESTINNORDICS26 to get 15% off

• EU-Startups Summit, May 7th, Malta 🇲🇹

  • 20% discount code: EWVC20

• The Venture City Summit 2026, May 28, 🇪🇸 Madrid

  • In order to attend this event reach out directly to the Venture City team at summit@theventure.city for more information

• SuperReturn Venture, June 8-10th, 🇩🇪 Berlin

• SuperReturn International, June 8-12, 🇩🇪 Berlin

  • 10% discount code: FKR3646EWVC

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Join us as member, partner or ally | Book a meeting

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

👉 If you are a pre-seed startup and would like to be listed on Evertrace, feel free to reach out!

The next wave of venture growth it’s being written in labs, greenhouses, clinical trials, and stealth-mode garages. Who is at the helm of many of these frontier ventures? Female founders who are blending scientific depth with commercial firepower.

Together with Evertrace, we bring founders who are redesigning entire markets: From energy transition, to early disease detection. 🏃🏽‍♀️

💥 Meet female founders that are building the infrastructure of tomorrow:

dayli.

📍 🇬🇧 London, United Kingdom

#AI #VoiceAssistant #ProductivityTech

dayli. is an AI voice assistant designed to learn your specific workflow and priorities. By digesting your emails, calendars, and notifications, it delivers a personalized voice briefing that helps busy professionals cut through digital noise and start every day with clarity on what matters most.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Yinnie Chan is a serial founder and VC-backed operator with over a decade of product leadership. Before dayli., she led product retention at Holland & Barrett, served as a PM at Gen H, and held growth roles at Dyson. She is an alumna of Warwick Business School and Harvard Online CS50x.

🔓 Investor Lens:

dayli. addresses the universal problem of information overload with a personalized AI layer. Built by a founder with deep product expertise at global brands, the company is positioned to turn a productivity tool into a daily habit for millions.

VAEV

📍 🇩🇰 Copenhagen, Denmark

#AI #NoCode #BusinessApps

VAEV is an AI-powered platform that enables teams to create business applications without requiring developer skills. It productizes the repetitive, difficult parts of internal projects - from data pipelines to workflow logic - allowing companies to move from idea to working tool in a fraction of the usual time.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Louise Garde Wibroe is a seasoned technology leader with nearly two decades of experience. She was previously a Partner at Inviso and a Senior Consultant at QVARTZ. She holds Master’s degrees from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Technology Sydney.

🔓 Investor Lens:

VAEV tackles the growing developer shortage by empowering non-technical teams to build their own tools. Led by a founder who spent 19 years solving enterprise-level digital problems, VAEV is set to become the default for internal business innovation.

Lentil Robotics

📍 🇩🇪 Berlin, Germany

#Robotics #ManufacturingTech #ComputerVision

Lentil Robotics develops robust robot vision for manufacturing. Its technology allows factories to automate complex tasks where objects appear in variable positions - a challenge that has historically required manual labor. By enabling robots to see and adapt in real-time, Lentil Robotics helps manufacturers boost throughput and reduce errors.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Amanda Malmqvist is a serial founder with deep roots in industrial robotics. She spent five years at Micropsi Industries, where she helped bring AI-driven robot control to factory floors across Europe. She holds a Master’s from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and studied at Columbia University.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Lentil Robotics targets a massive installed base of factories still running manual processes due to technical limitations. Malmqvist brings the technical credibility and industry network necessary to land early customers in a sector hungry for automation.

ReadHug

📍 🇬🇧 Cambridge, United Kingdom

#EdTech #Literacy #Sustainability

ReadHug is a social venture that promotes literacy and sustainability through community initiatives. It builds products and programs that make it easy for families to read together while reducing waste, turning a simple daily habit into a force for both learning and environmental good.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Nita Wakan combines strategy consulting with climate finance. She was a researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, a Manager at EY-Parthenon, and a Team Lead at Accenture. She holds a Master of Finance from the University of Cambridge.

🔓 Investor Lens:

ReadHug sits at the intersection of two high-growth sectors: EdTech and Sustainability. Led by a Cambridge-educated founder with “Big Four” experience, the model is designed to be both commercially viable and socially impactful.

Your Connect

📍 🇬🇧 London, United Kingdom

#Networking #Community #FamilyOffices

Your Connect is a curated network for founders, investors, and family offices. It acts as a platform to foster valuable, long-term relationships, helping members share deal flow and build the trust-based connections necessary to accelerate business growth.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Nathalie Sophie Sturm has 6 years of experience in finance. She previously held roles at Cube Green Energy, KanAm Grund Group, and SitusAMC. She holds degrees from EU Business School, and the University of Roehampton.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Your Connect addresses the rising demand for trusted deal flow networks. Sturm’s extensive background in investment gives her first-hand insight into the relationship-driven nature of capital movement.

Kite Motors

📍 🇸🇪 Stockholm, Sweden

#MobilityTech #Automotive #ElectricVehicles

Kite Motors is rethinking conventional car design from the ground up. Rooted in automotive engineering, the company is developing new approaches to how vehicles are conceived and structured, aiming to bring the next generation of mobility to market.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Saba Hajilou is an automotive engineer who rose through the ranks at Volvo Cars as a Body Structure Design Engineer. She was also a Team Leader at Manchester Stinger Motorsports and holds a Master of Engineering from the University of Manchester.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Kite Motors brings “Volvo DNA” to the challenge of reimagining vehicle design. Hajilou’s experience in real production programs, from concept to manufacturing, provides the rare combination of hands-on expertise and fresh thinking required in the automotive sector.

💡 Stay tuned, we’ll be back mid-next month with another round of female founders to watch.

👉 If you’d like to nominate a founder for the spotlight, reach out!

👐🏼 As European Women in VC, we’ll keep spotlighting founders who show us where capital, policy, and partnerships must go next. With Europe already trailing the US, we simply can’t afford to leave half the talent pool untapped. Together with Evertrace, we’re here to make sure these founders, and the markets they’re reshaping, are impossible to overlook.

About our Partner

Evertrace - Data-intelligence company that helps venture funds, corporates, tech companies, family offices, and other investment professionals discover the most promising (pre-)seed startups and founders before they appear on traditional radars. By tracking the earliest digital footprints across trade registries, code repositories, domains, research, patents, and social activity. Its “founder detection engine” turns scattered signals into a clear picture of who is building what, and where.

Through its platform, Evertrace massively expands a fund’s sourcing surface area, ensuring investors see a much broader – and more relevant – pipeline of early-stage opportunities and connect with exceptional founders while relationships are still truly proprietary. Evertrace’s long-term vision is to become the definitive bridge between capital and entrepreneurs: widening access, surfacing underestimated and diverse teams, and helping ensure that breakthrough ideas get the visibility and funding they deserve.

👉 Find more about them here!

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Join us as member, partner or ally | Book a meeting

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

Quote of the day: "Success comes when you put in small, consistent amounts of effort, every day and every week; it doesn’t matter whether you’re investing, filming two minutes of video content, or lifting dumbbells. Small, deliberate, regular efforts accumulate and in time pay off”.

👉 The LP Landscape: Europe’s State vs. America’s Deep Pockets

European VCs have long faced a funding base imbalance. Domestic institutional capital isn’t available at the scale needed, so European fund managers are seeking Limited Partners (LPs) abroad, notably in the U.S., Middle East, and Asia.

The contrast is stark: in Europe, government agencies and public programs still supply the largest share of VC fund capital (37% in 2023, far above any private source).

In the US, by contrast, the majority of venture LP money comes from private institutions, primarily pension funds, endowments and foundations. European pension funds control trillions of euros, yet allocate a negligible portion (around 0.01% of their assets) to venture capital. In the US, this figure is significantly higher, illustrating how much more active American institutions are in VC.

👉 Find more about this issue in the European Women in VC report of 2025: “Venture & growth capital in Europe”. Available in this link.

Join the conversation here

For European GPs, the implication is clear – if local pensions and insurers won’t step up, look elsewhere. In recent years, several of the largest US LPs have indeed “spied opportunity across the Atlantic,” actively investing in some of Europe’s best-known VC funds. That includes a number of prominent US university endowments and foundations now appearing in the LP lists of European funds. American institutions are not just staying home; they’re shopping for deals in Europe.

👉 According to VNTR — “Big university endowments and pension funds dominate American VC funds’ coffers, whereas in Europe most funding comes from state and government backers”.

🫆 Why U.S. Endowments? “Patient Capital” with a Mandate

U.S. university endowments are attractive LPs because of their sheer scale and mandate for high returns. Top endowments like Harvard and Yale manage tens of billions of dollars and allocate heavily to private equity and venture capital. For example, Harvard’s endowment (the world’s largest academic fund at $57B) allocates 41% of its assets to private equity (including venture), and Yale reportedly has about 50% of its $40B endowment in private equity. This is by design: these endowments pioneered the “Yale model” under the late David Swensen, shifting heavily into illiquid alternatives to capture outsized returns.

The reason is simple: They need those returns. Harvard’s endowment contributes roughly 35% of the university’s annual operating budget, and Yale’s share is similar. These funds aren’t rainy-day reserves; they must earn ~8–10% returns yearly just to fund salaries, research, and financial aid.

💡 There is a positive relationship between the overall portfolio risk level and 10-year overall portfolio returns.

In other words, endowments are structurally compelled to invest in VC/PE to meet their targets. They can’t park everything in bonds at 4% and call it a day. The long time horizons and “patient capital” nature of endowments make them well-suited to venture, where payouts take years. Indeed, U.S. endowments and foundations remain some of the most devoted allocators to venture funds, accounting for an estimated 15–20% of all VC fundraising (with the lion’s share coming from the richest few universities). This reliable appetite and sophistication make them coveted partners for fund managers.

💡 The Yale Model

Yale allocates ~75% to alternatives, including 40%+ to private equity and venture. This approach delivered 10.9% annualized returns over 20 years, vs. 7.3% for peers. Its success relies on early access to top-tier managers and long-term illiquidity tolerance.

🦾 Why Look to Europe Now?

For European VCs, landing a U.S. endowment can be a game-changer: it signals credibility, brings a stable long-term LP, and often opens doors to other U.S. institutional investors. Some prominent European firms have quietly built such relationships.

💡 Case study: Stockholm-based Creandum closed a new €500M fund in 2024 that included five of the eight largest U.S. university endowments among its backers. According to Creandum, about 80% of their capital comes from pensions, endowments and foundations (mostly U.S.-based).

👉 Find more here!

However, 2026 Will Be a Tough Sell 🌪️

Just as European GPs turn West, U.S. endowments themselves have hit headwinds. The past few years of market turmoil and policy changes have put endowments under unusual stress. Many are bumping up against the so-called “denominator effect” – when private holdings became an outsized percentage of their portfolios, some endowments need to slow new commitments until balances normalize. With few exits, endowments are sitting on paper gains but little liquidity. LPs now demand real distributions (DPI), not just high valuations, before re-committing to funds.

• 💸 Harvard sold $1B in private equity fund stakes on the secondary market to raise liquidity (Bloomberg via Adams Street).

• 💰 Yale plans to offload up to $6B, ~15% of its endowment, in PE and VC holdings (WSJ via Adams Street).

👏🏼 Building the Bridge: How to Attract U.S. Endowments

For European fund managers, attracting a US endowment is not a quick win. These institutions move slowly by design. First-time managers approaching endowments often vastly underestimate the timeline. The market is running 24–36 months for big endowments’ decision cycles. Extensive due diligence, multiple investment committee meetings, and cautious pacing are the norm.

The good news is that, despite recent market turbulence, endowments need to keep investing in venture. They are literally “structurally required” to allocate to VC/PE to meet their return targets.

💡 Market Insight: The LP Perspectives 2026 Report shows that most LPs have no plans to reduce VC commitments and allocations, despite most holdings underperforming benchmarks.

👉 Find more here!

FDI Ranking in 2024 ✨

To win over an endowment LP, European fund managers must adapt their playbooks in a few ways:

• 🕰️ Expect a long runway (often up to 36 months): for a first endowment commitment, especially if building the relationship from scratch. Many endowments think in multi-year (even multi-decade) partnerships.

• ✈️ Consistency beats campaign: steady touchpoints, updates, and a real relationship strategy help. For many GPs, placement agents and connectors can accelerate access and help navigate U.S. fundraising dynamics (and the compliance around paid endorsements).

• 🎯 What moves the needle:

  📈 DPI is a key metric right now: in a liquidity-tight market, cash returned matters more than ever.

  🧬 Differentiate: endowments (and their intermediaries) screen hard for a clear edge: strategy, access, sourcing, or repeatable value creation.

  💼 Alignment matters: meaningful GP commitment and investor-friendly economics help. And if an endowment has a co-invest program, co-invest rights can be a material lever.

  🔗 Reputation compounds: trusted references, institutional networks, and credible validation accelerate underwriting.

👉 Find more tips here.

↗️ Outlook for 2026: A Transatlantic Capital Bridge 🫆

There’s cautious optimism that 2026 could mark a reset for VC fundraising; if long-awaited liquidity materializes. Mega-IPOs like Stripe, Databricks, OpenAI, and several European unicorns could trigger a wave of distributions from 2015–2019 vintage funds, finally easing the denominator effect and freeing up capital.

European VC performance has held up well through the downturn, with funds recovering faster than U.S. peers. Some endowments are quietly rotating back into early-stage venture, recognizing this vintage may resemble post-crisis outliers like 2010–2012. But they’re more selective than ever, only funds showing strong DPI, clear edge, and institutional readiness will make it onto their shortlists. The next 12 months will test whether Europe can convert interest into capital.

Investors and founders on both sides should watch this space closely. For European GPs, the message is: cast your net wide and be prepared to meet the gold standard expectations of U.S. institutions. For U.S. endowments, it’s: don’t overlook the next Spotify or ASML being incubated in Europe; some of the best venture returns of the coming decade may lie across the pond. As the venture landscape globalizes, those who forge transatlantic ties now could reap outsized rewards tomorrow.

🙌🏼 People who inspired us lately

Lindsay Kaplan 💥

Lindsay Kaplan is an American entrepreneur, investor and the co-founder of Chief, a network for senior executive women.

In 2022, Kaplan and her co-founder Carolyn Childers raised $100 million, increasing Chief’s total funding to $140 million and reaching a $1 billion valuation, making it one of the fastest women-founded companies to achieve unicorn status.

👉 Find more about her here!

🤑 Latest Fund News

Vanagon Ventures closes €20M Fund I to back deeptech startups 💥

Vanagon Ventures, a German deeptech venture capital firm, has reached the final close of its €20 million Fund I. The fund is backed by Allocator One, alongside additional limited partners including family offices and high-net-worth individuals, senior technology executives from companies such as Apple and Google, and unicorn founders from the Munich ecosystem.

👉 Read more here.

Ananda Impact Ventures secures €73M first close for fifth Core Impact Fund 💥

Ananda Impact Ventures has completed a €73 million first close of its fifth Core Impact Fund, exceeding its €50 million target and representing the largest first close in the firm’s 16-year history. The fund is backed by a mix of returning and new investors, including the European Investment Fund (EIF), NRW.BANK, Investcorp-Tages, Mercator Foundation, and more than 40 family offices across Europe.

👉 Read more here.

Footprint Fund I raises €76m to back ambitious pre-seed and seed climate deep-tech 💥

The fund will invest in pre-seed and seed climate deep-tech and scale-up companies across Northern Europe. Footprint Fund I has already invested in 20 companies across energy, bio-solutions, AI & climate tech, circular manufacturing, the built environment, carbon removal, and food systems.

👉 Read more here.

Funding news⚡

🇬🇧 Anzen Industries raises $2.2M for chemical production innovation!

Industry: Deeptech | Location: 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | Funding: $2.2M

UK-based deeptech startup Anzen Industries has recently raised $2.2 million in pre-seed funding, led by LocalGlobe and Creator Fund, with participation from strategic angel investors across the UK, EU, and US, including Konstantin von Unger and early-stage investor Cory Levy. The company, founded by scientists Amy Locks and Pedro Lovatt Garcia, develops reusable, low-infrastructure enzyme reactors designed to manufacture complex molecules more efficiently than traditional chemical synthesis, plant extraction, or fermentation-based methods.

👉 Read more here.

🇳🇱 Pan Cancer T lands €10M to bring next-gen T-cell therapy to patients with deadly triple-negative breast cancer

Industry: Healthcare | Location: 🇳🇱 Netherlands | Funding: $10M

Rotterdam’s Pan Cancer T, co-founded by Dora Hammerl, lands a €10M round led by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs to finance their new generation of cell therapies for treating Triple- negative breast cancer.

👉 Read more here.

🇺🇸 Runware raises a $50 million Series A!

Industry: AI | Location: 🇺🇸 United States | Funding: $50M

San Francisco-headquartered AI-as-a-Service provider Runware has attracted a $50 million Series A round led by Dawn Capital, with participation from Speedinvest, Comcast Ventures, Insight Partners, a16z speedrun, Zero Prime Ventures, and Begin Capital. This follows a $13 million raise in September, and this combined funding will meet the rising global demand for high-speed media generation. The company is co-founded by Ioana Hreninciuc.

👉 Read more here.

🇫🇮 Avenue Biosciences raises $5.7M!

Industry: Deeptech | Location: 🇫🇮 Finland | Funding: $5.7M

Avenue Biosciences is a transatlantic biotechnology company dedicated to accelerating the discovery and development of protein biologics, so that no life-saving therapy goes unrealized because of production barriers. Avenue Biosciences has developed a protein engineering platform that combines organic biology and machine learning to boost protein production. The proprietary method is based on years of scientific research from the University of Helsinki, Finland.

👉 Read more here.

🇬🇧 Elyos AI has raised a €11 million Series A to scale agents

Industry: AI | Location: 🇬🇧 UK | Funding: €11M

London-based Elyos AI has closed an €11.1m Series A funding round to expand its AI agent platform targeting the trades and field services sector. Blackbird Ventures led the round, with participation from Y Combinator and Pi Labs, bringing total funding to €13.7m since the company was founded in 2023. The startup, founded by Adrian Johnston, Philippa Brown and Panos Stravopodis through Y Combinator, addresses a straightforward problem: missed calls mean missed revenue for trades businesses

👉 Read more here.

🇩🇪 one.five, co-founded by Claire Hae-Min Gusko, raises €14M!

Industry: AI | Location: 🇩🇪 Germany | Funding: €14M

Hamburg-based company building AI-powered solutions for packaging product development, has raised €14 million in Series A funding to scale its proprietary AI platform and data foundation. The round was led by Dr Hans Riegel Holding (shareholder HARIBO), with participation from 212 NexT, Symbia VC (Family Office), Btomorrow Ventures, KIMPA Impact (multi-family office), Zubi Capital and existing investors Speedinvest, Planet A, Green Generation Fund, Climentum Capital, Revent, and WEPA.

👉 Read more here.

🎧📚 What are we reading and listening to?

🔵 EU Inc: A New European Company Structure is Becoming a Reality

A top-level political commitment was made publicly on 20 Jan 2026 (Davos), where Von der Leyen announced the intention to create a “truly European company structure” branded EU Inc., including the 48-hour online incorporation ambition and “same capital regime” language. What changed:

• EU Inc now has a near-term legislative slot: the European Parliament’s research service notes a legislative proposal is scheduled for Q1 2026 and ties it to the Commission’s competitiveness agenda.

• Institutions are already gearing up: the same briefing says the European Parliament (JURI) is doing preparatory work, with a plenary vote tentatively scheduled for January 2026.

👉 Read more here.

🔵 Stanford University , Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology lead the rankings for unicorn founders.

👉 Read more here.

🔵 Mala Gaonkar’s Hedge Fund has hit $6B in AUM in three years.

👉 Read more about it here!

🔵 Sweden was HQ to 51% of the cohort of the fastest-growing startups in the Nordics & Benelux in 2025 🔥

👉 Find more here!

🔵 Isabel Fox (Lunar Ventures) - What I learned from a year of global LP meetings 🗣️

• She calls for a shift away from hype cycles and a return to funding real technologies solving meaningful global problems. In sectors like energy, health, food, and infrastructure-level AI.

• Isabel emphasizes that now is the time to build deep, long-term LP relationships, particularly with U.S. institutional LPs, rather than relying on local public or development capital.

• She believes emerging managers can shine if they bring clarity, courage, and grit, especially when others are retreating.

• Her call to action: Be authentic, stay the course, and double down on what matters most; not just to close a fund, but to build lasting firms.

👉 Find more here.

🔵 Yale Investments Launches 2026 Prospect Fellowship Applications!

The university will select five ‘forward-thinking’ investors to launch their own investment funds with funding from Yale.

Find more here.

👀 What we’ve been up to

Attend one of our partners’ events 🎟️

• Techarena, February 11-12th, 🇸🇪 Stockholm

  • Register now to secure the lowest-price ticket as soon as sales open

• CEE VC Summit, March 24th, 🇵🇱 Warsaw

  • Mail konrad.koncerewicz@vestbee.com and mention EWVC network to apply for an invite

• Iceland Innovation Week, April 28-29th, 🇮🇸 Reykjavík

  • Use our discount code INVESTINNORDICS26 to get 15% off

• SuperReturn Venture, June 8-10th, 🇩🇪 Berlin

• SuperReturn International, June 8-12, 🇩🇪 Berlin

  • 10% discount code: FKR3646EWVC

• EU-Startups Summit, May 7th, Malta 🇲🇹

  • 20% discount code: EWVC20

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Join us as member, partner or ally | Book a meeting

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

Quote of the day: "Success is when we help others succeed" — Simon Sinek (Writer)

VC Academy 2026

In March 2026, we launch a new 3-day online VC training. This is a ticketed entry program with very limited spots. Register your interest below to get the details first.

🗓️ When 18-20 March 2026
🕒 Time 14:00 - 18:00 CET

For whom? Experienced Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors, Exited Entrepreneurs

Register interest

🌟 Celebrating 2025

2025 has been a year of new funds, record-breaking rounds, transformative exits, and frontier science turning into real companies. 🫆

👉 Across Europe (and beyond), EWVC members have been raising capital, backing world-class founders, and shaping the next decade of climate, health, deep tech, and digital infrastructure. 🦾

Here’s a tour of the year’s milestones! 👏🏼

New Funds, First Closes & Platforms for the Next Decade 🏁

🌱 Rubio Impact Ventures – Fund III at €70M (and Counting)

Rubio Impact Ventures announced over €70M committed to its third fund, aiming to back ~30 companies tackling the climate crisis and social inequality. The fund is supported by Dutch entrepreneurs and families as well as EIF, Invest-NL, Oost NL, Brabantse Ontwikkelingsmaatschappij, ING Social Impact Investments and NN Social Innovation Fund, with RVO again providing a Seed Capital innovation loan. The fund remains open for 12 more months or until it hits target.

👉 Find more here!

🇪🇸 Kibo Ventures raises €100M for Fund IV!

Kibo Ventures surpassed €100M+ in commitments for Fund IV (target €120M, hard cap €150M), backed by a strong mix of long-term LPs and new institutional investors, family offices, and corporates. This brings us to €500M+ in assets under management.

👉 Read more here.

🧠 Adara Ventures – AV IV & NVIDIA Inception VC Alliance

Adara Ventures announced the first close of AV IV, targeting €100M to keep backing early-stage European deep tech in cybersecurity, applied AI, infrastructure, hardware, digital health, and space. Over 130 LPs are onboard — including many founders from Adara’s own portfolio. In parallel, Adara became the first European fund to join the NVIDIA Inception VC Alliance, unlocking privileged access to a global AI startup network.

👉 Find more in these links: AV IV and NVIDIA!

🛰 XAnge – “Venture into the Future” with XAnge 5

XAnge completed the first close of XAnge 5, a €200M early-stage fund focused on AI, frontier tech, and climate & sustainability. Building on a 20-year presence in France, Germany, and Belgium, XAnge 5 doubles down on the next generation of European category leaders.

👉 More information here!

🇸🇪 Course Corrected — Fund II First Close at €65M (and five new bets!)

Course Corrected reached the first close of its second fund at €65M earlier this year. Since the close, the team has remained highly active and has already made five new investments spanning robotics, electrification, and EV themes, underscoring continued LP conviction in Swedish climate venture despite a tougher fundraising backdrop.

👉 Find more about it here!

🇬🇧 Volution – $100M to Close the UK Scale-Up Gap

Volution launched a $100M UK-focused fund to tackle the post-Series A funding gap for UK fintech and SaaS. The fund quickly attracted attention from TechCrunch, Forbes, FT Adviser, Tech.eu, Finextra, Silicon Canals and more, underlining just how critical this capital is for the UK tech ecosystem.

👉 Find more information here!

🎼 OneRagtime – Rhapsody III & First-Decile Performance

OneRagtime launched Rhapsody III, its third fund focused on Seed and Series A startups in Europe, particularly AI-augmented platforms and deep tech. With 50+ portfolio companies, 250+ investors, and performance of 27% gross IRR, 2.2x TVPI, 0.5x DPI, the first two Rhapsody funds sit in the top decile of European VC. Diversity is embedded: 25% of the C-suite are women.

This year, Founder & CEO Stéphanie Hospital was also awarded the Légion d’Honneur, recognising her contribution to entrepreneurship and French tech.

👉 Find more here!

🌍 Odyssey – Launching with Positive MOIC from Day One

Odyssey officially launched in October to back ambitious European founders at the intersection of AI & deep tech, operating out of London and San Francisco.

• 4 investments already on the books

• First investment, Flow Engineering, raised a Series A led by Sequoia

• Thema is onboard as an anchor LP, with a second anchor in due diligence

• The fund is already in positive MOIC thanks to uprounds in the portfolio

• Final close is planned for early next year
  
  Portfolio companies include Flow Engineering, Viridi (“the ARM of the $5.7T chemical industry”), and a stealth neurotech startup building implantable bio-electrical interfaces for conditions such as amputations, hearing loss, and muscular dystrophy.

👉 Find more here!

♻️ Climentum Capital – GP Parity & Climate Industrialisation

Climentum Capital reached gender parity at GP level with the addition of Jennifer Dungs, a veteran of Porsche, BMW and InnoEnergy (where she oversaw 40+ hard-tech climate startups). With teams across the Nordics and Germany, Climentum continues to focus on industrial decarbonisation and electrification.

👉 Find all about it here!

🌿 Greencode Ventures – Fund I at €70M

Greencode Ventures completed fundraising for Fund I at €70M, already with 12 portfolio companies. The fund focuses on climate, digital and industrial tech, with recent investments such as Cronvall reflecting the strategy.

👉 Find more here!

🇱🇻 ALTUM launches Latvia’s 5th generation of VC funds – the largest to date

ALTUM launched Latvia’s 5th generation of VC funds, totalling €104M (including €81M from EU funds and ALTUM), continuing its 20-year role as an anchor investor in early-stage VC across te Baltics.

VC funds fill a critical market gap by spotting ambitious teams and backing innovative, scalable ideas before traditional finance can. With ALTUM as a cornerstone investor, these funds help ensure that talent in Latvia and across the EU has access to early, catalytic capital.

👉 Find more here!

👩‍💼 Auxxo – Female Catalyst Fund II, First Close at €26M

Auxxo achieved the first close of the Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund II at €26M in July, with the European Investment Fund as anchor investor. Final close is expected in summer 2026. Once again, Auxxo is channelling institutional capital into women-led innovation across Europe.

👉 Find more here and here!

➡️ OpenOcean - €100M first close

Open Ocean’s new fund with a target of €130 million is dedicated to supporting European category-defining software companies, increasing the emphasis on AI-driven data & software with our investment decisions.

👉 Read more here!

🌊 Voima Ventures – Fund III Final Close at €107M

Voima Ventures reached a €107M final close for its third fund, investing in 25 Nordic and Baltic deep-tech startups across:

• 🌍 Green transformation

• 🧬 Exponential healthcare

• 🤖 Platform technologies (quantum, AI, etc.)
  Recent investments include:

• 🇸🇪 Epigenica (SE) – high-throughput epigenetic screening

• 🇫🇮 Agate Sensors (FI) – hyperspectral microsensors for material analysis

• 🇸🇪 Farang (SE) – new foundational architecture beyond transformers

• 🇬🇧🇸🇪 Hormona (UK/SE) – AI + at-home testing for women’s hormonal health

• 🇫🇮 Gosta Labs (FI) – AI OS for oncology professionals
  
  Voima’s 2025 Impact Report shows strong sustainability outcomes and 34% diversity across 38 companies, delivering +52% net impact per euro invested vs ~5% for a typical US Fortune 500 portfolio.

Voima Ventures continues to expand its portfolio of over 38 active companies, bridging the gap between research and commercial success.

👉 Find more here!

🇳🇱 Borski Fund reached a final close after securing a €9M commitment from M&G Investments (hard cap €50M).

The fund is managed by a predominantly female fund management team investing into female-led tech start-ups or into companies offering products and services for women.
Simone Brummelhuis, managing partner and fund director said that she and her co-founder Laura Rooseboom’s ambition and ability to reach their hard cap of €50m was testament to the fact that first time funds and funds managed by women could achieve their aims, though it took longer to onboard investors than anticipated.

👉 Read more here!

🌬 Momentum Partners – Fund III First Close & Climate Wins

Momentum Partners closed the first round of its third green-tech fund at ~€36M, backed by EIF and leading Nordic investors, with a target to add another €15–20M by summer 2026.

From earlier funds, they saw two standout portfolio milestones in 2025:

• Nofence – one of Europe’s largest agtech rounds this year, a €30M+ Series B to scale virtual fencing for livestock, led by a strong climate-tech syndicate.

• Enerin – a €15M Series A into high-temperature industrial heat pumps (co-invested alongside Climentum and others).

👉 Find more here!

💡 BrightCap Ventures – Scaling BrightCap II

BrightCap’s second fund, BrightCap II, reached €47.5M after several closings since its 2024 launch, with 7 investments across the future of work, health-tech, and fintech/cybersecurity.

👉 Find more here!

🌍 WakeUp Capital – Building a €35M Impact Platform

WakeUp Capital’s latest close brings its fund size to €35M, with six investments so far in B2B tech-enabled companies in Ireland and Europe — all focused on building a more sustainable and inclusive future with market-rate returns. The team has a strong pipeline and aims to close two more deals before year-end.

👉 Find more here!

🇸🇪 Saminvest x Norrsken Evolve – Anchoring the Carbon-Free Economy

Saminvest became an anchor investor in Norrsken Evolve in August 2025. One of three GPs is female, and the fund focuses on the carbon-free economy, the infrastructure of tomorrow, and the future of Europe, with a fund size of €57M.

👉 Find more here!

🇬🇧 British Business Bank - Investor Pathways Capital

British Business Bank launched Investor Pathways Capital, a £400M initiative to support new and diverse fund managers building first-time VC funds.

👉 Find more here!

📡 Senovo – Fund IV First Close at €80M

Senovo announced the first closing of Fund IV at €80M, continuing its thesis of backing B2B SaaS and infrastructure. 2025 also brought big portfolio headlines:

• Parloa – $120M Series C to reinvent customer service with agentic AI

• FlowFuse – $7.2M to connect digital and physical worlds in industry

• FindIQ – launching a US market offensive

• Lative – funding to scale AI-powered sales planning

👉 Find more here!

🌎 EQWOW – LatAm Talent, Global Scale

2025 was a breakthrough year for EQWOW, which now holds six high-conviction investments in globally scalable LatAm startups across health, education, agriculture, digital inclusion, and climate. The majority are already expanding internationally — strong evidence that Latin America is home to world-class founders competing on a global stage.

👉 Find more here!

🇮🇸 Kría Innovation Fund – Backing 11 New Icelandic Startups

Iceland’s state-owned innovation fund, Kría, announced the results of its latest investment initiative, selecting 11 early-stage startups from a pool of 88 applicants. Kría is deploying ~ISK 300M (approx. €2M) into the cohort, requiring at least an equal match from private investors, effectively injecting over ISK 600M into the Icelandic early-stage ecosystem.

The selected companies span diverse sectors, including:

• Catecut: AI-automated product descriptions and photography for fashion retail.

• Grænafl: Electrification and hybrid solutions for the small vessel marine fleet.

• Circular Library: A sharing-economy platform to reduce waste.

• Disact: IoT/AI solutions for indoor climate and mold detection.

👉 Find more here!

💸 Exits, Rounds & Unicorns

💚 Revaia – Hublo Exit & Single-Asset Continuation Vehicle

Revaia celebrated a major exit with Hublo, France’s leading healthcare HR platform:

• Supported Hublo through three acquisitions, expansion to a full-stack HR suite, and 4x ARR growth

• Sold the company to Rothschild Five Arrows after a competitive process with eight top European growth funds

• Delivered a 4x multiple, 42% IRR, contributing to 25% DPI for Revaia Growth I

Convinced of further upside, Revaia launched a single-asset continuation vehicle to reinvest in Hublo, already securing over 75% of its allocation in just two months, with final close expected by year-end.

👉 Find more here!

🚀 FundingBox Deep Tech Fund - Conviction, Not Consensus: How to Get Returns Betting Early on the Next Wave

When they started investing with Fund I in 2020, the VC world was buzzing about blockchain. They chose a different path, guided by conviction, not consensus, allocating part of their portfolio to the next wave of technology: AI. Looking back, that focus has proven to be the right call.

This year, FundingBox Deep Tech Fund celebrated their first exit, from an AI-driven insurtech company. What seemed like a niche product for actuaries turned out to have broad market appeal, leading to a competitive acquisition.

The transaction delivered first distributions to our LPs, bringing the fund’s DPI to 0.3, placing them in the top decile of VC fund performance internationally.

They see this milestone not only as validation of their early AI thesis, but also as further proof that emerging managers can generate early liquidity, even in challenging exit markets. As they now look ahead to Fund II, they are observing the market closely, thinking carefully about which opportunities to back next and how to build on these early learnings.

🇮🇹 B Heroes - Bending Spoons, the first Italian decacorn

Bending Spoons, a tech company building and scaling global digital products used by millions, has officially become Italy’s first decacorn, reaching a $11 billion valuation following a $710 million round.

The round, combining both primary capital and secondary transactions, was announced just after the acquisition of AOL, marking one of the most significant back-to-back milestones ever seen in the Italian tech ecosystem.

👉 More about it here, here and here.

👩‍⚕️ 4impact – Majority-Female Climate & Energy Founders

4impact’s 2025 highlights:

• Renewed support for Carbon Equity as the all-female founding team closed another milestone round

• New investment in Exnaton’s Series A, backing an AI-powered intelligence platform helping utilities accelerate the energy transition

👉 Find all about: Carbon Equity and 4impact!

🤖 Three VC – Pactum’s $54M Series C

Three VC portfolio company Pactum AI raised a $54M Series C led by Insight Partners, scaling agentic AI for procurement and validating a category-defining vision.

👉 Find more here!

⚛️ Blankpage Capital – IQM Quantum Unicorn with €300M+ Series B

IQM Quantum Computers raised over €300M in Series B, one of the largest quantum rounds of 2025, and is now a unicorn. Having invested at Seed in 2019 when IQM was a four-person team, our member has seen first-hand how deep research + customer-desired products can scale globally.

👉 Find more here!

💍 Tesi – Oura’s Record €777M Round

Tesi celebrated Finland’s largest scale-up round ever: Oura raised ≈€777M (USD 900M) at a valuation above USD 11B, cementing its status as a global leader in wearable health. Tesi first invested in 2018 and remains a shareholder both directly and via Lifeline’s fund.

👉 Find more here!

🇫🇷🇪🇺 Bpifrance Digital Venture – Scaling AI & Photonics

Bpifrance Digital Venture is the early-stage tech venture capital arm within Bpifrance, focusing on innovative technology investments. In February 2025, they launched third-generation venture capital fund, Digital Venture 3. This €400 million fund brings our total assets under management to €1.1 billion.

Key 2025 rounds in Bpifrance’s portfolio included:

• €42M for Swann

• $58M for Scintil Photonics

• €1.7B raised by Mistral.ai
  A strong signal that Europe’s AI and deep-tech wave is not slowing down.

Positron Ventures - Aevoloop, Senara, CellX Biosolutions

Positron Ventures continues to double down on the future of food with a mix of strong follow-on support and new high-potential bets.

• Successful follow-on rounds for Senara (cultivated dairy for the next generation) and Aevoloop (Patented technology against plastic waste).

• New Investment: They also welcomed CellX to the portfolio.

⚡ Greencode Ventures – FLEXeCHARGE

Greencode Ventures portfolio company FLEXeCHARGE closed a successful round in June, further cementing the fund’s climate and industrial tech thesis.

👉 Find more here!

🛰 Nato Innovation Fund – Tekever Reaches Unicorn Status

NIF portfolio company Tekever became a unicorn, exceeded 10,000 operational flight hours in Ukraine, and took part in multiple NATO exercises, demonstrating the impact of dual-use aerospace technology in real-world operations.

👉 Find more here!

🧬 Nordscience – pixlbio’s 1000% Revenue Growth

Nordscience’s portfolio company Phenaros Pharmaceuticals acquired and merged with DefiniGEN, creating pixlbio, now serving 11 of the top 20 pharma companies and achieving >1000% revenue growth to mid-single-digit millions USD this year.

👉 Find more here!

📦 Planet A – Makersite & HIVED Series B

Planet A had a big year of climate and industrial innovation:

• Launched “Manufacturing Software GTM – The Founder Guide”, a go-to-market handbook co-created with 30+ industrial founders to help manufacturing SaaS companies scale in complex, risk-averse environments.

• Makersite – announced a €60M Series B to help manufacturers build better, cheaper, safer products.

• HIVED – raised a $42M Series B to scale ultra-reliable, AI-driven, fully electric parcel delivery.

👉 Find the guide here!

🛰 WakeUp Capital – National Grid & Autonomous Drones

WakeUp Capital highlighted portfolio company GRID, which partnered with National Grid in a world-first centralised autonomous aerial inspection capability for electricity infrastructure, a landmark moment for grid resilience and decarbonisation.

👉 Find more here!

🎥 BrightCap Ventures – LucidLink Wins an Emmy

BrightCap portfolio company LucidLink received an Emmy for Engineering, Science, and Technology, recognising its cloud-native file storage platform used by teams at Warner Bros., Paramount, Spotify and more to collaborate on massive media files.

👉 Find more here!

🧪 Deep Tech, Climate & Industrial Transformation

Onsight Ventures – Hermann Hauser Frontier Lab in Innsbruck

Onsight Ventures co-hosted the Hermann Hauser Frontier Lab in Innsbruck for the first time, a week-long program bringing together top deep-tech founders working at the cutting edge of science and entrepreneurship.

👉 Find more here!

🔥 Climentum Capital & Enerin – Electrifying Industrial Heat

Climentum Capital co-led a €14.4M round in Enerin, which is electrifying medium–high-temperature industrial heat (5% of global energy use) with compact 1 MW Stirling heat pumps. First deployments are planned for 2026, with 50,000+ European sites under regulatory pressure to decarbonise.

👉 Find more here!

🚄 Climentum Capital & Rail-Flow – The ERP of Rail Logistics

Climentum Capital also joined a €12.5M Series A in Rail-Flow, an “ERP for rail logistics” used by 500+ customers to automate end-to-end rail freight processes and shift cargo from road to low-carbon rail.

👉 Find more here!

⚛️ Novatron Fusion Group – 1000x Efficiency Potential

Climentum-backed Novatron Fusion Group AB published its first peer-reviewed paper in Nuclear Fusion, validating its “triple-force” plasma confinement concept and pointing to a potential 1000x improvement in confinement efficiency versus earlier mirror machines, a major step towards commercially viable fusion.

👉 Find more here!

🏆 Ecosystem Recognition & Firm-Level Highlights

🏅 OneRagtime – Légion d’Honneur for Stéphanie Hospital

Beyond fund metrics, Stéphanie Hospital’s Légion d’Honneur stands out as a national recognition of her role in building France’s entrepreneurial and tech ecosystem.

👉 Find more here!

🇫🇮 Tesi appointed Samuel Wendelin as Director of Fund Investments and a member of the Management Team.

Samuel Wendelin steps into the team leadership role from his previous position as Investment Director. He has been with Tesi since 2019, and prior to that, he worked at EY, Summa Capital, and Handelsbanken.

👉 Read more here!

🛡️ Nato Innovation Fund appoints Erin Hallock as Partner

The NATO Innovation Fund (NIF) announced the appointment of Erin Hallock as Partner, reinforcing the Fund’s mission to accelerate the industrial adoption of deep tech and frontier technologies that are critical to the Alliance’s security, resilience, and long-term innovation capacity.

👉 Learn more here!

🎙 Smart Society Ventures — Season 2, New Research & Houston Expansion!

Smart Society Ventures had a standout year across platform building and thought leadership. They launched Season 2 of The Smart Society Show, featuring guests including Boris Johnson, Catherine McKenna, Greg Jackson (Octopus Energy), Sir Danny Alexander (HSBC Infrastructure Finance & Sustainability), and Shannon Miller (Mainspring Energy).

On the research side, they published Building a Smart Society: Energy, Data Centers, and the Built Environment and The Decarbonization Investment Landscape: Exploring Forces Behind the Hidden $200 Trillion Opportunity, while also expanding their footprint with the launch of Smart Society Ventures in Houston.

👉 Find more here!

🏁 Octanova — Sónia Magalhães leads Startup World Cup Portugal

In 2025, Sónia Magalhães (Managing Partner at Octanova) served as Executive Director of Startup World Cup Portugal, leading the successful delivery of the first-ever edition of the event in Portugal. Startup World Cup is a global startup competition bringing together founders, investors, and ecosystem leaders, providing international visibility and access to cross-border networks. Following the success in Portugal, the same leadership team has been appointed to lead and organise future editions in Spain and Brazil, supporting the event’s international expansion.

👉 Find all about it here!

🏆 TheVentureCity – TIME Top VC Firm 2025

TheVentureCity was named one of TIME’s America’s Top Venture Capital Firms 2025, based on fundraising strength, investment activity, and exit performance. The award highlights TheVentureCity’s founder-driven, data-driven approach to building an investing platform “by founders, for founders”.

👉 Find it here!

🔭 Opportunities

🎓 Technology Transfer Fund – Fund Manager Role

A new €57M Technology Transfer fund is seeking a Fund Manager, with applications open until 24 March 2026. It’s a rare opportunity to lead a dedicated vehicle at the interface of research and commercialisation, catalysing future-proof ventures from lab to market.

👉 Find more here!

👏🏼 From first closes to rounds, 2025 showed just how powerful this community is when capital and diversity come together. Here’s to an even bolder 2026. 💫

Our Flagship Research Piece 🌟: Pension Funds and VC Flagship Report

First-of-its-kind study “Mapping Pension Funds’ Attitudes to Venture & Growth in Europe” developed by Venture Connections, European Women in VC and Pensions for Purpose. This report explores why the connection between pension funds and venture capital is weak today. And, most importantly, how to change it.

🌟 We have partnered with the most relevant voices in the ecosystem to deliver the pulse of the topic of the hour.

A huge thank you to our Report Partners: Atlantic Vantage Point (AVP), Eurazeo, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), European Circular Bioeconomy Fund (ECBF), Climate-KIC, EIT Digital, EIT Urban Mobility, perfORM Due Diligence Services and Siemens Energy Ventures for your strong support of our work and the agenda, and thank you to European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research & Innovation for the supportive collaboration!

Join the conversation here

Report in the news:

Financial Times | Pitchbook | IPE | Institutional Money | Fundview | Agefi | PensionsAge | European Pensions | SustainableViews | Pensions & Investments … and more

🙌🏼 People who inspired us lately

Leslie Wolff Golden 💥

Leslie Wolff Golden is Managing Director and Global Head of Capital Formation and Investor Relations at DigitalBridge, where she also leads marketing and communications across the Investment Management platform and serves on the Responsible Investment Committee.

Previously, she was a Managing Director in Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets’ Investor Solutions Group, focused on institutional fundraising and investor/consultant relationships. Earlier, she led Investor Relations at Ridgewood Energy and worked in principal investing and portfolio management. She began her career in investment banking at Lehman Brothers and later held roles at Bankers Trust and Bank of America (NationsBanc Montgomery).

“The biggest challenges are access to capital and access to power. For the industry, if we continue at the same pace of demand growth, power will become (and already has become) a gating item.” - Leslie Golden.

👉 Find more about her here.

🤑 Latest Fund News

Firgun Ventures $70M! 💥

London-based Firgun Ventures, co-founded by Zeynep Koruturk, launches with $70m for quantum tech innovation.

👉 Read more here.

🎧📚 What are we reading and listening to?

🔵 What a “healthy” venture market looks like (and where it’s getting distorted)

In a recent analysis of 2,000+ priced Seed and Series A rounds in the Bay Area + New York, Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson argues the venture market is still “healthy” if you define health as continued opportunity for high-impact, high-growth companies—even amid louder “AI bubble” discourse.

• The key nuance: the market is not uniformly overheated; froth is concentrated at the top end of Seed and Series A. At Seed, ~90% of priced rounds are below $20M, where specialist seed funds retain a clear edge; once rounds cross $20M, the dynamic flips: ~70% of $20M+ Seed deals involve a mega-fund, even though these rounds are only ~5% of total Seed activity.

👉 Read more about it here!

Attend one of our partners’ events 🎟️

• Techarena, February 11-12th, 🇸🇪 Stockholm

  • Register now to secure the lowest-price ticket as soon as sales open

• CEE VC Summit, March 24th, 🇵🇱 Warsaw

  • Mail konrad.koncerewicz@vestbee.com and mention EWVC network to apply for an invite

• EU-Startups Summit, May 7th, Malta 🇲🇹

  • 20% discount code: EWVC20

As 2025 comes to a close, we thank you for your support and look forward to reconnecting in 2026! 🎉 Wishing you a joyful New Year filled with peace, happiness, and success.

💙 Take a moment to relax, celebrate, and recharge. Here’s to a fantastic year ahead!

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Join us as member, partner or ally | Book a meeting

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

👉 If you are a pre-seed startup and would like to be listed on Evertrace, feel free to reach out!

The next wave of venture growth it’s being written in labs, greenhouses, clinical trials, and stealth-mode garages. Who is at the helm of many of these frontier ventures? Female founders who are blending scientific depth with commercial firepower.

Together with Evertrace, we bring founders who are redesigning entire markets: From energy transition, to early disease detection. 🏃🏽‍♀️

💥 Meet female founders that are building the infrastructure of tomorrow:

Newl App

📍🇬🇧 London, United Kingdom

#CareerTech #LifeDesign #TestDriveYourFuture

Newl is an AI future simulator that lets you safely test drive big life and career moves before you commit. You plug in your situation and get vivid future paths, day in the life scenes, and low risk experiments so you can choose your next chapter with more clarity, confidence, less financial anxiety and regret.

👩🏽 About the Founders:

Before founding the startup Alissa Voutova was Group Strategist at Global, leading strategic insight, creative ideation and growth projects. Earlier, she held senior planning roles at Initiative, dentsu, Carat and Posterscope, and founded Savour Drinks, a beta-tested savoury soft drinks venture. She holds a BSc from LSE and an MSc from the University of Bristol.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Newl tackles a very real problem with a product people already say gives them more clarity and confidence, led by a founder who has spent years turning deep consumer insight into practical, tested solutions.

Francis

📍🇬🇧 London, United Kingdom

#FinTech #TrackYourMoney

Francis is a personal finance app that turns messy spreadsheets and scattered accounts into one clear, dynamic portfolio dashboard. Connect pensions, property, investments, vested stock and cash, upload statements, or describe your finances in plain language. Built-in AI helps you ask smarter questions about your money, while strong encryption and strict data controls keep everything secure.

👩🏽 About the Founders:

Francis is founded by CEO Natalia Corobco, a fintech entrepreneur and ex Google leader in mobile apps, global partnerships and new market expansion, Marzia Niccolai, Chief AI Officer and former Google product and engineering leader with 19 years building AI powered products, and Gavin Kinghall Were, COO and seasoned technologist with 25 years across Google, Microsoft, Skype and Huawei scaling mobile ecosystems and client facing solutions.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Francis could become the default place people see and understand their money, with an AI powered product and a founding team from Google, Microsoft and fintech who know how to scale it.

Elna Health

📍🇪🇸 Barcelona, Spain

#HealthTech #MedTech #ClinicalSupport

Elna is a clinical intelligence platform that turns the latest medical evidence into clear, visual answers for clinicians at the point of care. By distilling guidelines, research and drug data into concise pathways, Elna helps healthcare professionals make faster, safer decisions in real time.

👩🏽 About the Founders:

Elna is led by Pau Rué, PhD, an AI and machine learning expert with 20+ years in medical and applied AI, Martina Pagura, a product and UX leader with 15+ years designing complex digital health tools for startups and global companies, and Mariel Beauroyre Hofmann, a growth and strategy lead with a strong background in research, policy analysis and data driven communication.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Elna offers fast, clear medical answers at the bedside, helping clinicians treat patients more safely and giving the company a widely needed service it can roll out across a very large hospital and clinic market.

Ella

📍🇩🇰 Copenhagen, Denmark

#ParentTech #SleepHelp

Ella is a digital baby sleep coach that learns your child’s rhythm and turns pediatric sleep research into simple daily guidance. It gives parents clear schedules, trends, and 24/7 support, so the whole family can rest better.

👩🏽 About the Founders:

Ella is founded by Cecilie Roth Rasmussen, a former Capgemini Invent strategy consultant and commercial excellence leader at Ellab with an MSc in Strategy, Organisation & Leadership from Copenhagen Business School. After becoming a parent and seeing how confusing and myth-driven baby sleep advice can be, she went deep into pediatric sleep research and is now building Ella to turn that evidence into calm, practical support for families.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Ella helps exhausted new parents make sense of their baby’s sleep with simple, research-based routines, tapping a massive, recurring market where a trusted early-years app can become a daily habit for millions of families.

Ana Liberman

📍🇩🇪 Berlin, Germany

#SecondTimeFounder #MBB

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Ana is a repeat founder with a background in strategy consulting and fintech product building. She previously founded and led Soundeon, a fintech startup in the IP management space, where she raised multiple VC rounds. After that she spent over four years as a management consultant at Bain & Company, focusing on M&A, due diligence, merger integration and growth strategies, and started her career at EY working on finance and automation projects. Ana holds a Bachelors in Jurisprudence from Lomonosov Moscow State University and a Graduate Diploma in Finance from the University of London.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Second time fintech founder with ex Bain experience who has already raised venture money, now building an AI first product from a deep understanding of how complex financial and enterprise workflows actually operate.

Zoe Mohl

📍🇫🇷 Paris, France

#ExVC #AngelInvestor #TopUniversity

👩🏽 About the Founders:

Zoe is a former VC principal and angel investor with a decade of experience across technology investing, strategy consulting and investment banking. Most recently she spent three years at Balderton Capital in Paris and London, leading and supporting investments in B2B software, infrastructure and vertical AI, and previously invested at Newfund while helping portfolio companies with exits, fundraisings and strategy. Before VC she worked as a technology and telecom strategy consultant at Altman Vilandrie in New York and as a technology investment banking analyst at J.P. Morgan in San Francisco, advising software and hardware companies on IPOs, M&A and financings. She holds a BA in Economics from Yale University.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Ex VC and active angel with deep pattern recognition in B2B software and infrastructure, now switching sides of the table to build her own company, informed by years of backing founders and seeing what it takes to scale from seed to breakout.

That’s all for this month’s spotlight. At European Women in VC x Evertrace, we believe in amplifying the talent and vision of women shaping Europe’s innovation.

💡 Stay tuned, we’ll be back mid-next month (in 2026! ✨) with another round of female founders to watch.

👉 If you’d like to nominate a founder for the spotlight, reach out!

👐🏼 As European Women in VC, we’ll keep spotlighting founders who show us where capital, policy, and partnerships must go next. With Europe already trailing the US, we simply can’t afford to leave half the talent pool untapped. Together with Evertrace, we’re here to make sure these founders, and the markets they’re reshaping, are impossible to overlook.

About our Partner

Evertrace - Data-intelligence company that helps venture funds, corporates, tech companies, family offices, and other investment professionals discover the most promising (pre-)seed startups and founders before they appear on traditional radars. By tracking the earliest digital footprints across trade registries, code repositories, domains, research, patents, and social activity. Its “founder detection engine” turns scattered signals into a clear picture of who is building what, and where.

Through its platform, Evertrace massively expands a fund’s sourcing surface area, ensuring investors see a much broader – and more relevant – pipeline of early-stage opportunities and connect with exceptional founders while relationships are still truly proprietary. Evertrace’s long-term vision is to become the definitive bridge between capital and entrepreneurs: widening access, surfacing underestimated and diverse teams, and helping ensure that breakthrough ideas get the visibility and funding they deserve.

👉 Find more about them here!

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Join us as member, partner or ally | Book a meeting

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

Quote of the day: "Be curious, not judgmental" — Walt Whitman

The EWVC team went to HEL…

SLUSH 2025

Together with Roschier, Adara Ventures, Butterfly Ventures, and the European Investment Fund (EIF), we hosted an investor breakfast at SLUSH, bringing together over 150 VCs, LPs, and partners.

👉 Want to learn more? Check out the highlights & join the discussion here.

🤖 Quantum Tech 2025: The Global Market, and How Europe and the U.S. Stack Up 📚

After years of speculation, quantum technology is becoming a market to watch. Venture funding into quantum startups hit around $2 billion in 2024, up roughly 50% year-on-year, and governments worldwide have announced tens of billions in funding commitments to win this “space race” of computing. What does this mean for investors and innovators? Below we dive into the current state of the quantum tech market as of November 2025.

📈 From transatlantic investment trends to breakout segments, key deals, government moves, ecosystem maturity, real-world traction, and where VCs should place their next bets.

🫆A Macro View: Quantum’s Market Moment in Late 2025

The quantum technology ecosystem in 2025 is small but rapidly growing and strategically critical. Quantum includes three sets of technologies:

Global revenue from quantum computing remains modest (on the order of a few hundred million dollars annually), but it’s expected to surpass $1 billion in 2025 as early customers pay for cloud access and pilot programs.

Both policymakers and investors see quantum tech as a key future driver of economic and security advantage. Governments have collectively committed over $42 billion to quantum R&D and infrastructure, with China, the U.S., Europe, and others treating it as a strategic priority.

🔗 Why all the fuss?

Because in the long run, quantum tech promises to unlock enormous value. Quantum computers might eventually solve problems intractable for classical machines, while quantum communications could enable unhackable networks, and quantum sensors could bring unprecedented precision to navigation, imaging, and timing. In short, quantum is no longer science fiction; it’s a nascent market transitioning from lab research to real-world development, backed by a quickly maturing ecosystem of startups.

👉 McKinsey predicts by 2035 the economic value derived from quantum computing will total up to $2 trillion.

💶 VC Investment Trends: Hype and Acceleration

🚀 After the 2019–2021 hype and a cautious 2022, funding into quantum startups rebounded: global investment jumped from $1.3B in 2023 to $2.0B in 2024 (+~50% YoY).

• That surge was highly concentrated: PsiQuantum ($624.6M) and Quantinuum ($300M) together made up ~$925M – almost half of all 2024 deal value.

• As a result, the U.S. captured ~78% of total quantum startup funding in 2024, with the rest split across Australia, the UK, the EU and Israel. (Quantum Technology Monitor 2025, McKinsey).

🧊 Investors are shifting away from “scaling” mid-life startups towards two ends: Emerging (<4 years) and mature (>8 years) companies, explicitly favoring validated tech and clearer paths to revenue.

• Investors want IP, traction and a credible edge over classical.

  • The high-profile case of Zapata Computing – which attempted a $190M reverse-merger and then ceased operations in 2024 – is now the go-to reminder that not every quantum story survives just on narrative.

• We are seeing consistent private funding and surge of public capital.

🌱 New founders keep entering, especially in Europe and Asia. New quantum startup creation rose 46% in 2024, with 19 companies founded vs 13 in 2023. The EU produced 8 of those 19 new startups and Asia 5, reflecting Europe’s strategy of seeding many spin-outs from its research base and Asia’s rapid catch-up.

🧭 In sum, the last 12–24 months look like a shake-out and scale-up phase, where capital is flowing back in, but into fewer, stronger players, while a new cohort of EU and Asian startups appears at the early stage.

🏃🏽‍♀️What is happening with Quantum? - Quantum Computing, Communication, Sensing, & Security

1️⃣ Quantum Computing

• Quantum computing companies generated $650–750M in revenue in 2024 and are expected to surpass $1B in 2025, mostly from cloud access, pilots and research contracts rather than at-scale production use.

• Quantum computing attracts the majority of quantum tech investment – about 60–65% of global quantum tech VC dollars flow into QC startups, especially hardware builders.

👉 Nvidia’s new Accelerated Quantum Research Center in Boston and DGX Quantum program explicitly target “accelerated quantum supercomputers” that integrate quantum hardware with AI/HPC systems, signaling that “quantum as an accelerator” will define the next 5–10 years.

2️⃣ Quantum Communication & Sensing

• The quantum communication market is still small but scaling fast: estimates put it at ~$1–1.2B in mid-2020s, with forecasts in the low tens of billions ($20B+) by 2035 on ~30%+ CAGR, driven by quantum key distribution (QKD) and secure links.

• Governments are the anchor customer: public entities represented roughly 62–66% of QComm spending in 2023, with telecom and cybersecurity players expected to take a larger share by 2035 as products mature.

• Quantum sensing is moving fastest toward real-world use. NATO and defence labs see quantum sensors as key for Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT).

3️⃣ Quantum Cybersecurity

• A powerful future quantum computer could crack today’s main encryption methods (RSA/ECC), so data we send over the internet, in banking or critical infrastructure would no longer be safe.

• On top of that, quantum tech can also improve security (e.g. quantum key distribution and better random number generators), which governments and telcos are already testing in pilot networks.

↗️ 👉 Looking Ahead: What Should We Expect?

As we head into 2026, the smart quantum bets aren’t just moonshot computers but everything that makes the stack usable and safe 🚧.

👉 There is space for software, middleware and tooling (SDKs, compilers, cloud APIs, error-correction) plus quantum sensing, which defence and research agencies already call the most mature quantum technology for GPS-denied navigation, underground mapping and next-gen medical and climate instruments.

🌍 The U.S. leans into big commercial bets and deep corporate and VC pockets, Europe is building a broad base of spin-outs, grants and specialist funds, and Asia (especially Japan and China) is ramping fast with multibillion-dollar national programmes.

🌟 The winning portfolios will be the ones that bridge the gaps: backing cross-border teams, plugging into consortia and accelerators, and using abundant public funding to de-risk hard science while pushing toward concrete use-cases.

Just Launched 🚀: Europe’s VC Gender Investment Gap Is Now Mapped 🙌🏻

Europe now has its first systematic, data-driven map of the gender investment gap in venture capital. Commissioned by the European Commission and the European Innovation Council (EIC), this landmark study finally moves the debate beyond anecdotes: between 2020 and 2025, women-led startups received just 12% of VC funding and 14.4% of rounds, while women represent only 16% of GPs, managing a mere 9% of AUM. 💥

🌟 At the heart of the research is the new EU Gender Investment Dashboard – a pan-European “accountability engine” built by CSES, Dealroom, RAND Europe and European Women in VC. It harmonises data across markets so LPs, GPs and policymakers can finally track who gets funded, who allocates capital, and where the gaps really are.

🙌🏻 A huge thank you to all contributing institutions, researchers, policymakers and investors who made this possible – and to the European Parliament’s Gender Equality Week for providing the stage to launch a conversation that is no longer about “awareness”, but about measurable change and performance.

👉 Join the conversation and explore the findings here!

Our Flagship Research Piece 🌟: Pension Funds and VC Flagship Report

First-of-its-kind study “Mapping Pension Funds’ Attitudes to Venture & Growth in Europe” developed by Venture Connections, European Women in VC and Pensions for Purpose. This report explores why the connection between pension funds and venture capital is weak today. And, most importantly, how to change it.

🌟 We have partnered with the most relevant voices in the ecosystem to deliver the pulse of the topic of the hour.

A huge thank you to our Report Partners: Atlantic Vantage Point (AVP), Eurazeo, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), European Circular Bioeconomy Fund (ECBF), Climate-KIC, EIT Digital, EIT Urban Mobility, perfORM Due Diligence Services and Siemens Energy Ventures for your strong support of our work and the agenda, and thank you to European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research & Innovation for the supportive collaboration!

Join the conversation here

Report in the news:

Financial Times | Pitchbook | IPE | Institutional Money | Fundview | Agefi | PensionsAge | European Pensions | SustainableViews | Pensions & Investments … and more

🙌🏼 People who inspired us lately

Mel Robbins 💥

Mel Robbins is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and the most trusted expert in personal growth, with 40 million followers worldwide.

“I’m not going to lie, changing my life wasn’t glamorous. It was grueling.

At 41, I was unemployed, drowning in debt, and so overwhelmed that I could barely get out of bed. Then everything changed with one simple tool: The 5 Second Rule. It got me moving, one small step at a time, and led me here.

Now, 15 years later, I host one of the world’s biggest podcasts, and my books have reached millions in over 50 languages. My work has changed billions of lives and can empower you too.

Over the years, I have learned that you don’t need to be fearless or have a perfect plan. You just have to decide that where you are right now isn’t where you want to be anymore”. - Mel Robbins

👉 Find more about her here.

🤑 Latest Fund News

Rubio Ventures raises €70M! 💥

Amsterdam-based Rubio Impact Ventures, founded by Machtelt Groothuis and Willemijn Verloop, closes a €70M fund to invest into 30 early and growth-stage companies addressing the climate crisis and social inequality.

👉 Read more here.

Cocoa II is now live!

Carmen started her career in politics before moving into investment banking at Morgan Stanley. Her transition into venture capital was driven by a desire to enhance her skills as a founder, discovering later that her passion was investing. She founded Cocoa Ventures, a European angel fund that writes checks between $250k-$500k at the pre-seed and seed stages and supports founders as their in-house VC.

👉 Read more here.

Funding news⚡

🇬🇧 Synthesia raises a new round!

Industry: Generative AI & Video | Location: 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | Funding: $200M

London-based Synthesia, co-founded by Lourdes Agapito, has secured a $200 million round led by Google Ventures. The capital will fuel the growth of their AI-generated video platform, helping companies create professional video content at scale without cameras, studios, or actors.

👉 Read more here.

🇬🇧 SAGES secures funding to scale circular dye innovation

Industry: Climate Tech & Materials | Location: 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | Funding: £190K

London-based SAGES, co-founded by Emily Taylor and Alice Simpson, has raised a £190K round led by the British Design Fund. The funding will support scaling production of their eco-friendly dyes derived from food waste, helping fashion and textiles brands cut emissions and reduce reliance on harmful chemical dyes.

👉 Read more here.

🇬🇧 REM3DY Health Group raises fresh capital for global expansion

Industry: Digital Health & Nutrition | Location: 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | Funding: £1.4M

British REM3DY Health Group, founded by Melissa Snover, has closed a £1.4M round led by Borski Fund. The new capital will back the international expansion of its personalised nutrition gummies, tailored to individual health needs through data-driven formulations.

👉 Read more here.

🎧📚 What are we reading and listening to?

🔵 Ksenija Pavletic has just been promoted to General Partner of JEITO!

Huge congrats to Ksenija Pavletic, who has just been promoted to General Partner at JEITO! This new chapter will be filled with impact in shaping the next generation of biopharma companies.

👉 Read more here.

Attend one of our partners’ events 🎟️

• Venture Capital Winter Ball, December 4th, 🇬🇧 London

• Techarena, February 11-12th, 🇸🇪 Stockholm

  • Register now to secure the lowest-price ticket as soon as sales open

• CEE VC Summit, March 24th, 🇵🇱 Warsaw

  • Mail konrad.koncerewicz@vestbee.com and mention EWVC network to apply for an invite

• EU-Startups Summit, May 7th, Malta 🇲🇹

  • 20% discount code: EWVC20

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Join us as member, partner or ally | Book a meeting

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

👉 If you are a pre-seed startup and would like to be listed on Evertrace, feel free to reach out!

The next wave of venture growth it’s being written in labs, greenhouses, clinical trials, and stealth-mode garages. Who is at the helm of many of these frontier ventures? Female founders who are blending scientific depth with commercial firepower.

Together with Evertrace, we bring founders who are redesigning entire markets: From energy transition, to early disease detection. 🏃🏽‍♀️

💥 Meet female founders that are building the infrastructure of tomorrow:

GreenBioNourish (GBN AB)

📍Malmö, Sweden

#FoodTech #BioTech #Nutrition

GreenBioNourish (GBN AB) is a Malmö University spin-off that helps food and beverage manufacturers increase micronutrient intake using biotech-derived fortification ingredients and turnkey formulations. Its patent-pending BoostNCaps™ nanocapsule system improves the bioavailability and stability of nutrients like iron, calcium, and vitamins in a wide range of foods and drinks, including cheese and powders, without changing taste or texture.

👩🏽 About the Founders:

Diverse scientific duo Marité Cárdenas Gómez and Rita Del Giudice with strong academic backgrounds in physical chemistry, biocolloids, biochemistry and biotechnology from Lund University and the University of Naples Federico II, holding senior roles as Professor / Ikerbasque Research Professor and Associate Professor / Senior Lecturer at Malmö University. They combine deep expertise in biointerfaces, biocolloids, cell and molecular biology.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Positioned at the intersection of food and biotech, using patent-pending nutrient capsules to make everyday foods healthier without changing taste or texture.

Trove

📍London, United Kingdom

#FinTech #SME

Trove helps small businesses collect unpaid invoices via bank transfer, making accounts receivable and credit control easier for owners, accountants, and bookkeepers. Users can see which customers have opened emails or clicked to pay, then escalate problem invoices when needed, which makes bank transfers almost as effective as direct debit while improving cash flow predictability for SMEs.

👩🏽 About the Founders:

Co founder Anna Turner-Major leads product and finance, bringing a master’s degree from the University of Oxford and experience as a strategy consultant at Bain & Company before holding senior operations and product roles at Spill. Technical co founder Robin Sonefors is a software engineer with experience as tech lead across several product companies, now focused on building Trove’s collections infrastructure for small businesses.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Attacks a common blind spot in small businesses, where structured credit control and collections tooling often do not exist. Trove is positioned as the default layer for chasing invoices, tapping a large, under-served SME market with strong expansion potential.

PoLightFilters

📍Cologne, Germany

#Photonics #Optics #DeepTech

PoLightFilters develops the next generation of optical filters, delivering angle independent spectral performance using organic, polariton based thin film technology. Its proprietary resonator structures keep the transmission spectrum stable even when light hits at oblique angles, solving the long standing blueshift problem of conventional interference filters.

👩🏽 About the Founders:

Founding team of Elena von der Heyden, Andreas Mischok, Emma Puttock, Dr. Ahmed Abdelmagid and Prof. Malte Gather, combining business, photonics, materials and production expertise. Elena holds a double master’s in International Management and leads business development. Andreas is a physicist specialising in thin-film polariton filters. Emma has a PhD in chemistry focused on organic photonics and electronics. Ahmed, production lead, has a PhD in Photonics and experience in lab setup, process optimisation and scaling. Malte is a Humboldt Professor with 20+ years in optical technologies and co-inventor of the filter technology. Together they bring the key ingredients for this startup: top-tier science, production know-how, strong networks and commercial focus.

🔓 Investor Lens:

PoLightFilters offers filters that stay consistent, helping manufacturers build smaller, more reliable devices and giving the company a “must have” component it can sell into many industries.

AnaMadness Sunfreaks

📍Berlin, Germany

#SunCare #SkinHealth #BiotechBeauty

AnaMadness Sunfreaks is a Berlin-based suncare startup mixing molecular science with bold beauty culture. The brand’s mission is to make skin cancer prevention cool, protection powerful, and skincare inclusive, with formulas designed for all skin tones and types.

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Founded by Dr. Ana Maria Gätjens-Sanchez, who holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from Humboldt University and Charité, with a background in molecular oncology research. She led projects at Charité before moving into strategy consulting, working on pharma and healthcare topics at Roland Berger and later as Senior Industry Analyst at Porsche Consulting. She now brings this mix of deep science and consulting experience to build AnaMadness Sunfreaks at the intersection of biotech, skin health and beauty culture.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Plays in a large, growing market at the crossroads of skincare, prevention and beauty, with a brand that makes daily SPF use aspirational. A scientific founder with oncology credentials and top-tier consulting experience gives strong credibility on both product and commercial strategy.

Niina Suuriniemi Hopper

📍Tampere, Finland

#AI #SaaS #Operations #TopUniversity #PhD

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Niina is a repeat founder and scientist by training. She previously founded and led EVA Global, an EV services company she built over seven years, and before that worked in research and regulatory roles in medtech and diagnostics. Niina holds a PhD in Musculoskeletal Tissue Regeneration & Stem Cell Research and a postdoc from the University of Cambridge, plus an MPhil in Molecular Biology and a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Tampere.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Serial founder with a strong academic backbone now building an AI-first ops product based on hard-won experience scaling her previous company.

Giorgia Capaccio

📍London, United Kingdom

#SecondTimeFounder #AI #Tech #TopUniversity

👩🏽 About the Founder:

Giorgia Capaccio is a second-time founder with education in finance and investing. She holds both a BSc and MSc in Finance from Bocconi University, graduating first class, and previously worked in markets and investing at London Stock Exchange Group and Cambridge Associates before founding Fluum and now building her next tech venture in stealth.

🔓 Investor Lens:

Serial founder with top-tier quantitative finance training and institutional investing experience, now applying that toolkit to build a tech product from the operator’s perspective.

That’s all for this month’s spotlight. At European Women in VC x Evertrace, we believe in amplifying the talent and vision of women shaping Europe’s innovation.

💡 Stay tuned, we’ll be back mid-next month with another round of female founders to watch.

👉 If you’d like to nominate a founder for the spotlight, reach out!

👐🏼 As European Women in VC, we’ll keep spotlighting founders who show us where capital, policy, and partnerships must go next. With Europe already trailing the US, we simply can’t afford to leave half the talent pool untapped. Together with Evertrace, we’re here to make sure these founders, and the markets they’re reshaping, are impossible to overlook.

About our Partner

Evertrace - Data-intelligence company that helps venture funds, corporates, tech companies, family offices, and other investment professionals discover the most promising (pre-)seed startups and founders before they appear on traditional radars. By tracking the earliest digital footprints across trade registries, code repositories, domains, research, patents, and social activity. Its “founder detection engine” turns scattered signals into a clear picture of who is building what, and where.

Through its platform, Evertrace massively expands a fund’s sourcing surface area, ensuring investors see a much broader – and more relevant – pipeline of early-stage opportunities and connect with exceptional founders while relationships are still truly proprietary. Evertrace’s long-term vision is to become the definitive bridge between capital and entrepreneurs: widening access, surfacing underestimated and diverse teams, and helping ensure that breakthrough ideas get the visibility and funding they deserve.

👉 Find more about them here!

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Join us as member, partner or ally | Book a meeting

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

Quote of the day: "When you are on the field, play as if nothing else matters. When you are off the filed, remember that the game does not matter at all"
— James Clear (Writer)

🇪🇺 The new normal: Outlook for October

Global AI startups raised ~$110B in 2024 (+62% YoY) even as overall tech VC fell. The U.S. dominated: ~42% of U.S. VC dollars 🇺🇸 ($80.7B) went to AI, while Europe drew $12.8B 🇪🇺 (25% of its VC). Europe was only ~12% of global AI VC, in what Dealroom called “the biggest wave ever”. 📈

This reflects a mindset gap, that is beginning to matter and materialize. In technological revolutions, speed and execution matter. U.S. investors tend to back vision-first, market-creating bets; while European VCs skew metrics-first. This is not to say that Europe cannot innovate, in fact U.S. funds are more present in European AI rounds this year. Investing activity from U.S. ticked up in early 2025, especially in AI and deeptech, proving interest in European talent and innovation.

Some of these landmark financings include Isomorphic Labs’ $600M led by US investors. Synthesia and ElevenLabs followed with ~$180 M each, also led by U.S.

📈 AI Funding Frenzy vs. Cautious Capital

In the U.S., competition for AI deals has led to outsized bets at huge valuations. By mid-2025, the five largest VC deals (all AI-related) made up 36.7% of total U.S. venture funding, more than double the share a year earlier.

👉 In Q2 2025 alone, the five biggest deals are all AI or AI-adjacent, and included:

• Scale AI ($14.3B)

• World View ($2.6B)

• Anduril ($2.5B)

• Thinking Machines ($2B)

• Safe Superintelligence ($2B)

👉 Investors are pouring money into AI startups at significantly higher valuations than other tech firms (median Series D+ valuations for AI companies are over 230% higher than non-AI peers) in fear of missing the next foundation-model breakthrough.

Giant funding rounds like Databricks’s $10 B raise (valuing it at $62 B) and OpenAI’s recent financing at a $157 B valuation have set new benchmarks.

🇪🇺 Europe, in contrast, has seen much smaller deals, its biggest AI financing of 2025 was Alphabet’s UK-based Isomorphic Labs raising $600 million (for AI-driven drug discovery), and even that was funded entirely by U.S. investors. Other top European AI startups like Synthesia and ElevenLabs raised on the order of $180 million this year, again led by large U.S. VC firms.

This dynamic is forcing European VCs to “up their game” in the AI era, balancing their hallmark diligence with a bit more Silicon Valley boldness, if they don’t want to be left behind. Despite the flood of capital, investors are mindful that not every AI bet will pay off, which is making these months especially challenging for diligence-oriented VCs. 🔗

💥 Enterprise AI: Big Tech Bets and Rising Corporate Investment

In this context, enterprises across industries are also racing to integrate and tech giants are heavily catalyzing this trend. One sign of how central AI has become for enterprise strategy is the rapid growth of corporate AI budgets.

👉 According to a16z, in a recent survey of 100 CIOs, large companies reported that their spending on AI (especially generative AI) is skyrocketing: On average CIOs expect about 75% growth in AI budgets over the next year, and one noted, “what I spent in 2023 I now spend in a week” in 2025.

This surge in enterprise demand is being enabled (and encouraged) by massive bets from technology leaders to build AI capabilities and infrastructure.

• 🏗 Google is ramping up in infrastructure: In 2025 it has increased its capital expenditures to about $85 billion, primarily to build out data centres, custom AI chips and cloud infrastructure for booming AI demand.

• 🤝 Microsoft is doubling down on its partnership with OpenAI: The companies announced a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment deal (reported as roughly $10 billion+) that embeds Microsoft deeply into OpenAI’s cloud, models and future AI ecosystem.

• ☁️ Amazon is also playing for keeps in AI infrastructure: Amazon has committed at least $4 billion into the AI startup Anthropic, making AWS its primary cloud and training partner, ensuring Amazon stays competitive in large-scale AI model hosting and services.

Notably, while European corporations are also exploring generative AI, the center of gravity for enterprise AI enablement lies largely with U.S.-based platforms and providers. This raises the stakes for Europe to invest in its own AI capacities (and regulatory frameworks) or risk relying on external innovation. But regardless of region, the message of 2025 is clear: AI in the enterprise is moving from optional experiment to operational necessity.

👉 Amidst all this quick shifts VCs also need to navigate the fact that AI’s biggest players are now financially and operationally intertwined, creating a feedback loop that blurs the line between investor, supplier, and customer:

• 💰 Nvidia ($4.5T market cap) is the center of gravity, supplying GPUs to everyone and investing up to $100B in OpenAI, whose massive compute demand drives Nvidia’s growth.

• 🧠 OpenAI ($500B valuation) isn’t just a software company anymore, it’s a capital magnet. It has:

  • A $300B cloud deal with Oracle,

  • A 6-gigawatt GPU deployment with AMD (which also gave OpenAI an option to buy 160M AMD shares), and

  • Heavy reliance on Microsoft ($3.9T), its largest backer and cloud host.

• ☁️ Oracle, AMD, and Intel all orbit this ecosystem, providing chips, cloud, and infrastructure while simultaneously becoming investors or vendors to one another.

• 🤖 Emerging AI companies like xAI, Mistral, Figure AI, Nscale, and Ambience Healthcare receive backing or compute from Nvidia, reinforcing the cycle.

💡 Market insight

Big Tech’s AI economy has become a closed capital loop, where the same few giants both fund and sell to one another. This structure inflates valuations, accelerates adoption, and raises systemic risk.

🩻 Healthcare: AI’s Surprising Adoption Leader

One of the most striking shifts in 2025 is that healthcare, historically considered a digital laggard, has emerged as a frontrunner in enterprise AI adoption.

👉 The $4.9 trillion U.S. healthcare industry (about one-fifth of the economy) traditionally accounted for only around 12% of software spend, but it is now deploying AI at more than double the rate of the broader economy.

In just the last two years, healthcare went from roughly 3% AI adoption to become America’s AI powerhouse sector. Today, an estimated 22% of healthcare organizations have implemented domain-specific AI solutions, a sevenfold increase over 2024 (and 10× higher than in 2023).

By comparison, fewer than one in ten companies in the overall economy (~9%) have deployed AI tools so far, and those that have often rely on generic offerings (like ChatGPT) rather than industry-tailored AI.

💡 Market Insight

What’s driving this rapid uptake? Simply put, the healthcare sector faces intense pressures (thin margins, labor shortages and burnout, rising medical costs, and long R&D cycles) that AI promises to help alleviate . These pain points have made AI a strategic priority for many healthcare leaders. Importantly, organizations are backing up the enthusiasm with real money.

Key Takeaways 🔗

• 🌍 AI capital concentration: Global AI startups raised $110 B in 2024 (+62 % YoY), yet 42 % of U.S. VC went to AI versus 25 % in Europe, leaving Europe with only ~12 % of global AI VC.

• 💸 Valuations keep rising: By mid-2025, the five largest U.S. deals (all AI) captured close to one third of total VC, more than double a year earlier.

• ⚙️ Enterprise AI is scaling: According to a16z’s CIO survey, corporate AI budgets are projected to rise ~75 % YoY, moving from pilot spend to core IT investment, and big-tech is in the race.

• 🩻 Healthcare AI is in the spotlight: Adoption jumped from 3% (2023) to 22% (2025), now 2× faster than the overall economy. Hospitals and insurers are deploying domain-specific AI at scale, proving how fast deep-vertical use cases can commercialize once ROI is visible.

Just Launched 🚀: Pension Funds and VC Flagship Report

We have just launched our new first-of-its-kind study “Mapping Pension Funds’ Attitudes to Venture & Growth in Europe” developed by Venture Connections, European Women in VC and Pensions for Purpose. This report explores why the connection between pension funds and venture capital is weak today. And, most importantly, how to change it.

🌟 We have partnered with the most relevant voices in the ecosystem to deliver the pulse of the topic of the hour.

A huge thank you to our Report Partners: Atlantic Vantage Point (AVP), Eurazeo, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), European Circular Bioeconomy Fund (ECBF), Climate-KIC, EIT Digital, EIT Urban Mobility, perfORM Due Diligence Services and Siemens Energy Ventures for your strong support of our work and the agenda, and thank you to European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research & Innovation for the supportive collaboration!

Join the conversation here

Report in the news:

Financial Times | Pitchbook | IPE | Institutional Money | Fundview | Agefi | PensionsAge | European Pensions | SustainableViews | Pensions & Investments … and more

🙌🏼 People who inspired us lately

Stephanie Hospital

Stephanie Hospital

In celebration of her fantastic journey, she has just received the Legion d’Honneur recognition!

👉 Find more about her here.

🤑 Latest Fund News

HighVista’s new $270M fund-of-funds renews optimism for VC emerging managers.

The Boston-based alternative asset manager, has raised $270 million for its latest fund-of-funds focused on emerging venture managers. The past couple of years have been difficult for emerging managers as limited partners have focused their stretched budgets on established bets. But some recent signs suggest the market is warming back up to them.

👉 Read more here.

Asymmetric Capital Partners raises $137 million second fund! 😁

Asymmetric Capital Partners has just raised Fund II at $137 million, surpassing its $125 million target. The fund attracted strong support from return investors in Fund I, alongside new family offices and institutional LPs who share conviction in the firm’s differentiated approach. This brings Asymmetric’s total AUM to over $240 million.

👉 Read more here.

Iris Ventures has just closed a new €100M fund to back growth companies 🫆

Barcelona and London-based, Iris Ventures, founded by Montse Suarez, closes a €100M fund to back growth stage companies in beauty, wellness, nutrition, longevity and conscious living.

👉 Read more here.

Jennifer Dungs new General Partner at Climentum Capital! 🌟

With over 25 years across mobility and energy , including senior roles at Porsche, BMW, and Ford, and six years leading deep-tech investments at InnoEnergy, Jennifer brings significant industrial and technical depth to the partnership 🚀.

🔵 She’s built and managed a portfolio of 40+ hard-tech climate startups, with a strong focus on batteries, grid infrastructure, and industrial decarbonisation. Combined with leadership roles at MIT and Fraunhofer, and her cross-border experience between Europe and the US, she’s a unique addition at a critical time for Europe’s climate and industrial agenda.

👉 Read more here.

Funding news⚡

🇩🇰 Dreamdata raises a new round!

Industry: B2B SaaS | Location: 🇩🇰 Denmark | Funding: $55M

Dreamdata has just raised $55 million in Series B, led by PeakSpan Capital. Crowberry Capital has also participated in the round, having been an investor since 2020. This funding accelerates their mission to build the leading go-to-market platform B2B.

👉 Read more here.

SheMed has just raised €43M! 🩻

London-based SheMed, founded by Chloe Ferro and Olivia Ferro, lands a €43M round led by HealthTech for its personal healthcare platform.

👉 Read more here.

📈 Exnaton’s new Series A

Swiss Exnaton, co-founded by Liliane Ableitner and Anselma Wörner, has just raised a Series A round (undisclosed amount), co-led by 4impact Capital and Elevator Ventures for its digital energy transition platform.

👉 Read more here.

Dexory raises $165M!

Dexory has just raised $165 million in a Series C round led by Eurazeo’s Growth team, with participation from LTS Growth, Endeavor Catalyst and other existing investors such as DTCP, Atomico, Lakestar, Elaia, Latitude Ventures and Wave-X

👉 Read more here.

🎧📚 What are we reading and listening to?

🔵 Women-led venture funds reshaping Silicon Valley.

After decades of systemic barriers, from exclusionary hiring and networking practices to investor bias, a new generation of women-led VC funds is reshaping the capital landscape.

👉 According to All Raise, more than 280 such funds in the U.S. have raised $12.6 billion since 2022, a fraction of the $76.8 billion raised by U.S. firms in 2024 but a sign of accelerating progress.

Funds like How Women Invest aim both to back women-founded startups and to grow a community of women investors; its own record includes 24 investments, 4 exits, and 140 new LPs.

Yet women still hold under 20% of decision-making roles in VC and remain underrepresented as GPs. Structural hurdles persist, from limited access to networks to ongoing bias in deal-making, but initiatives such as the documentary Show Her the Money are helping to educate and mobilize a growing base of female investors.

“Forget waiting for a seat. We’re building our own table” - Lata Setty, Silicon Valley venture capitalist who helped launch the How Women Invest Fund in 2020, via Axios.

👉 Read more here.

🔵 The gender gap in IPOs: “Why Pre-IPO Leadership Remains a Boys’ Club and How Executive Search Can Fix It”

The journey to an Initial Public Offering (IPO) is a clear milestone for any company. Yet, recent data reveals a troubling and persistent imbalance in the leadership teams and boardrooms set to guide these newly public entities.

A recent analysis of 61 companies that filed IPO-related documents in early August paints a stark picture 💥:

• Nearly 88% of these firms had one or no women on their board of directors

• A 93% had one or no women in their C-suite

• In total, women comprised a mere 12% of directors and 11% of executives

According to Key Search:

❌ “The data from recent IPO filings serves as a critical wake-up call. The persistent gender gap in the C-suites and boardrooms of emerging public companies is not an abstract issue—it is a direct threat to their long-term value creation, governance, and ability to innovate. The excuses of the past, from a ‘pipeline problem’ to a ‘focus on speed,’ no longer hold water. The pipeline of talented, experienced female executives exists, but accessing it requires a deliberate and strategic shift away from the comfortable, insular hiring practices that created the imbalance in the first place”.

👉 Read more here.

🔵 Tamara Savic is the new EIFO Investment Director!

After 7 years with EIFO, she has been promoted to Investment Director. Moreover, she has recently participated with her thought leadership in our VC and Pensions Report.

👉 Read more here.

🔵 100 Women in Tech in Europe 2025

List of remarkable women shaping tech scene in Europe, featuring our wonderful member Auxxo. Congratulations Gesa & Bettine!

👉 Read more here.

Join our flagship event at SLUSH!

European Women in VC, LP-GP Breakfast | Women & Men Allies in VC
19 November, 🇫🇮 Helsinki

The event is organized by Venture Connections/European Women in VC in collaboration with ​Roschier, ​Adara Ventures, Butterfly Ventures, ​​European Investment Fund (EIF)

Register here: https://lu.ma/u0zjcjri

Attend one of our partners’ events 🎟️

• Venture Intelligence Day, October 30th 🇨🇿 Prague,

  • 30% discount code: EWVC30

• Mobility Startup Nexus 2025, November 3rd, 🇪🇸Barcelona

• SuperReturn Europe, November 04 - 07th 🇳🇱 Amsterdam

  • 10% discount VIP code: FKR3623EWVC

• Websummit, November 10th, 🇵🇹 Lisbon

  Apply for a free ticket - reach out to info@europeanwomenvc.org

• SuperVenture North America, November 19th, 🇺🇸 New York

  • 10% discount VIP code: FKR3637EWVC

• Venture Capital Winter Ball, December 4th, 🇬🇧 London

• CEE VC Summit, March 24th, 🇵🇱 Warsaw

  • Mail konrad.koncerewicz@vestbee.com and mention EWVC network to apply for an invite

• EU-Startups Summit, May 7th, Malta 🇲🇹

  • 20% discount code: EWVC20

We're a squad of over 1000 senior female venture capital wizards from all over Europe and beyond. We're here to flip the script and make things right.

Join us in shaking up the VC world! 🚀

Join us as member, partner or ally | Book a meeting

Take care!
European Women in VC
Follow us on LinkedIn

👉 If you are a pre-seed startup and would like to be listed on Morphais, feel free to register here.

The next wave of venture growth it’s being written in labs, greenhouses, clinical trials, and stealth-mode garages. Who is at the helm of many of these frontier ventures? Female founders who are blending scientific depth with commercial firepower.

Together with Morphais, we bring founders who are redesigning entire markets: From energy transition, to early disease detection.

💥 Meet female founders that are building the infrastructure of tomorrow:

🇬🇧 PlutosX

#B2B2C #AI #FinTech #SaaS

About the Company

PloutosX is a private limited company based in 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Wales, specializing in the development of a next-generation operating system for alternative investments.

👩🏽‍💻About the Founder

Female founder Natasa Kyprianidou brings 25 years of expertise in banking, product, and technology. Roles include Senior Director (ex-Alvarez & Marsal), Senior Director Product Management (ex-Publicis Sapient), Head of Digital Banking & Innovation (ex-Hellenic Bank), as well as Product Portfolio & Digital Delivery Director from top company (ex-Barclays UK). Holds an academic background in Economics and founding experience with Fintecher Stories, a fintech newsletter format.

🇩🇪 Insellar

#B2B #HealthTech #MedTech

About the Company

Insellar is developing a new class of brain interfaces that integrate with the body’s systems to enhance mental health.

🕵🏼👩🏼‍⚕️ About the Founders

Selina Greuel and Hamed Bahmani form a founding team with a PhD in Neuroscience and academic backgrounds from top universities (Max Planck Society, Charité, Cambridge). Previous founding experience with Dopavision, a medical device startup. Raised €14.7m in Series A from investors (including Seventure Partners and Novartis Venture Fund). Professional experience includes roles at different ventures as well as Project Lead at top research institute (ex-Max Planck Institute).

🇩🇪 Aury Care

#B2C #AI #Healtech

About the Company

Aury Care offers 24/7 psychological counseling through Aury AI on WhatsApp, providing structured sessions or casual conversations.

🧑🏽‍💻🙋🏼‍♀️🧔🏻 About the Founders

Saskia Fester, Robert Wasenmüller, and Maximilian Rank form a diverse founding trio with academic backgrounds in Mathematics, Psychology, and Economics from top universities (UC Berkeley, Humboldt University Berlin, LSE, LMU). Professional experience at a top company (ex-IBM) and previously held roles as Venture Builder & Head of Operations (ex-DocMorris), Venture Developer & Growth Manager (ex-Rocket Internet SE), and Psychologist.

🇬🇧 Stealth Founder: Mariza Fotiou

#FemaleFounder #FounderExperience #TopCompanyAlumni

👩🏽 About the Founder

Mariza Fotiou has an academic background in Finance and over 15 years of experience in Digital Transformation, Product Management, and Financial Services. Professional background includes senior leadership roles at top companies (ex-BP, ex-HSBC) as Vice President Digital Product Management, Chief Operating Officer Digital, and Senior Programme Manager. Previous founding experience with Curious IQ, a social enterprise focused on data analytics and digital education.

🇬🇧 Structured AI

#B2B #AI #SaaS #ConstructionTech

About the Company

Structured AI develops AI solutions for design engineers, aiming to reduce manual project documentation time by 30%.

👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍🏫🧔🏻 About the Founders

With backgrounds in Physics, Economics and Mathematics from top university (Oxford), Issy Greenslade, Raymond Zhao, and Brandon Abreu Smith form a young founding team. Internship and work experiences at top companies (ex-Goldman Sachs, ex-EY, ex-Octopus Ventures) and experience as Fund Directors at Europe’s largest student-led VC with £2.5m to invest (ex-Oxford Seed Fund).

That’s all for this month’s spotlight. At European Women in VC x Morphais, we believe in amplifying the talent and vision of women shaping Europe’s innovation.