Headline Raise: Proxima Fusion Sets a European Record
The single biggest announcement of the day came from the deep-tech world. Proxima Fusion, the Munich-based nuclear fusion company, closed a €411M round led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures, with strategic participation from RWE and Google. The raise values the company at €2.4B and marks the largest fusion investment ever recorded in Europe. It signals that patient, infrastructure-scale capital is willing to bet on fusion timelines that were once considered science fiction.
Late-Stage and Growth Rounds
- Norm, an AI legal platform, raised $120M in a Series C led by Khosla Ventures, crossing a $1.2B unicorn valuation. The raise reflects sustained investor appetite for AI applied to professional services.
- BIZAY, a Lisbon-based customised-products platform, secured $55M in a Series D led by Indico Capital Partners. The company is targeting US expansion and expects to surpass €88M in revenue while approaching profitability.
- Lovable, the AI-powered app-building tool, is reportedly in talks to raise $300M at a $13.2B valuation, according to Sifted. No close has been confirmed, but the figures would place it among Europe's most valuable private AI companies.
Series A Rounds
- Luffy AI, Oxfordshire, raised €9M (approximately £8M) in a Series A led by BGF, with participation from MIG Capital AG. The company builds neuroplastic AI for real-time adaptive control in industrial systems.
- HIVE, London, closed a €13M pre-Series A led by SuperSeed to develop its physical AI platform described as a "silicon brain" for industrial machines.
Seed Rounds
- Aardaia, Wageningen, raised €5M in a seed round led by Point Nine to develop new crop varieties sourced from wild plants.
- Whering, a UK digital wardrobe platform with 10M users, raised $7M in a seed round led by eBay Ventures and Google AI Futures Fund.
- Panora, a French AI platform for insurance brokers, raised $5M in a seed round led by Isai.
- Whispp, Leiden, raised €5M in a follow-on round led by LUMO Labs to scale its on-device voice reconstruction technology globally.
- ARC Intelligence, Berlin, raised €4M in a seed round led by 42CAP for its AI-native enterprise finance platform.
Pre-Seed Rounds
- Respiro Diagnostics, UK, raised £1M in a pre-seed led by Zinc Venture Capital and SFC Capital to advance breath-based lung diagnostics.
- 8Layers, Madrid, extended its pre-seed to a €2.5M total, with new investors Criteria Venture Tech joining to support European cybersecurity commercialisation.
- Porelio, Germany, raised €2.4M in an oversubscribed pre-seed for advanced materials used in industrial water treatment.
- Auxilius, Germany, raised €1.3M in a pre-seed to build AI-powered governance, risk, and compliance automation.
- Display.dev, Tallinn, raised €470K in pre-seed funding to build a document collaboration layer for AI agents.
Fund-Level News
Senegal launched a $50M national fund to back innovative local startups, a notable signal of state-led ambition to formalize and accelerate its startup ecosystem.
Editorial Perspective
The day's deals, taken together, tell a coherent story. Fusion and industrial AI attracted the largest checks, suggesting that investors are moving up the risk curve toward hard-tech with decade-long payoff horizons, not just software. At the same time, the volume of sub-€5M pre-seed rounds across Europe, spanning diagnostics, compliance, water treatment, and voice AI, points to a healthy early-stage pipeline that did not collapse despite macro pressures. The near-confirmation of Lovable's $13.2B talks is the most eye-catching data point of the week and, if closed, would further compress the timeline between product launch and mega-valuation in the AI tooling category.