Headline Raise: Defence Technology
The day's largest announced round came from the UK defence sector.
- Cambridge Aerospace, a UK-based maker of low-cost interceptor missiles for European and allied militaries, closed a $300M Series C at a $3.4B valuation. The capital will fund manufacturing expansion and support delivery of existing and new contracts.
Defence continues to command outsized valuations as European governments accelerate procurement outside traditional channels.
Growth-Stage and Series A Rounds
A handful of mid-stage companies across Europe and India closed notable rounds.
- Bakingo parent FA Gifts raised approximately $12M (nearly Rs 100 crore) in a Series B round led by Faering Capital, with funds raised via compulsory convertible preference shares.
- Edgify, a London-based edge MLOps platform protecting physical retailers against in-store loss, raised $9M in a Series A+ round backed by Rank Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, bringing total funding to $25M.
Seed and Early-Stage Rounds
Earlier-stage companies also attracted capital today, spanning biotech, AI visualization, and enterprise software.
- East Ocyon Bio, a Gurugram-based biotech developing allogeneic CAR-NK cell therapies from healthy donor cells, secured a $4.2M seed round alongside a government grant, targeting resistant tumours and leishmaniasis.
- Visoid, an Oslo-based AI visualization platform for architects, raised $2.5M led by Skyfall Ventures, with participation from StartupLab, OBOS, Antler, Farvatn, and byFounders Angel Collective.
Strategic and Undisclosed Deals
Not every deal today came with a dollar figure attached.
- Sudolabs, a Slovakia-based provider of custom agentic AI systems and enterprise consulting, received a significant ownership stake acquisition from Eldridge, the global holding company backed by Todd Boehly. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Fund Closes
Beyond individual company raises, one new fund marked a meaningful first close.
- Aum Ventures reached a first close of approximately $27M (Rs 225 crore) for its India Innovation Fund II, which targets a total corpus of roughly Rs 750 crore. The fund focuses on early-stage Indian deeptech startups across space, semiconductors, AI, defence, and advanced manufacturing.
Trends and Editorial Perspective
Today's activity points to a few durable patterns worth noting. Defence technology is attracting growth-stage capital at valuations that would have seemed implausible three years ago, with Cambridge Aerospace reaching $3.4B on the back of real government contracts rather than speculative demand. The presence of Aum Ventures closing a deeptech-focused fund in India signals that institutional capital is beginning to treat the country's deep science ecosystem as a serious asset class, not just a software services hub. At the same time, the seed rounds for East Ocyon Bio and Visoid show that founders working at the intersection of biology and AI, or design and AI, can still attract early capital despite a broader squeeze on pre-revenue funding, especially acute in markets like Africa where early-stage deal volume has dropped sharply. The Eldridge investment in Sudolabs, terms undisclosed, is a reminder that strategic acquirers and holding companies remain active buyers of agentic AI capability even when public market sentiment is cautious. Taken together, today's raises suggest that capital is concentrating around hard-to-replicate technical assets, whether that is a missile interceptor, a cell therapy platform, or an AI layer built for a specific professional workflow.