Europe’s Top 10 Funding Rounds This Week (March 9-15)

From a record-breaking AI seed in Paris to Croatian drones and Lithuanian food tech, Europe’s startup ecosystem had a busy week.

The week of March 9 to 15 was, by any standards, exceptional for European venture capital. Just two operations, one in London and another in Paris, represented almost three billion dollars.

But beyond the headline numbers, what really illustrated the week was the current texture of European investor confidence: AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, healthcare technology, defense and cross-border trade secured significant rounds.

The geography stretched from Vilnius to Zagreb and the Swiss Alps. The themes, however, seemed unmistakably of this moment.

Here are the ten largest financing rounds in Europe this week.

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1. Nscale – 1.7 billion euros Series C | London, United Kingdom

Let’s start with the figure: 1.7 billion euros, or 2 billion dollars. This is not only the largest European funding round of the week; It is, according to the company itself, the largest round of capital ever raised by a European startup.

The list of investors alone communicates the magnitude of the ambition: Nvidia, Citadel, Dell, Nokia, Jane Street and Point72, along with major backers Aker ASA and 8090 Industries.

Founded in 2024, a year ago, to underline how quickly this has advanced, Nscale is building a vertically integrated AI infrastructure, from GPU computing and networking to data services and orchestration software.

Series C values ​​the company at $14.6 billiona more than four-fold jump from the $3.1 billion valuation it achieved in its Series B in September 2025. That September round was described as a record.

This round follows a €1.1 billion Nscale debt instrument signed in February. The company is being built at a speed that has few precedents in the European technology ecosystem.

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

The largest seed round ever raised by a European company, and quite possibly anywhere. Advanced Machine Intelligence, AMI, pronounced the French word for “friend,” announced its Increase of 1.03 billion dollars on March 10, just four months after its founding.

The company is chaired by Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning computer scientist who spent 12 years at Meta before leaving in November 2025 to build something he believes the broader AI industry is unwilling to build.

The founding team includes former Meta AI researchers Saining Xie, Pascale Fung, and Michael Rabbat. Strategic investors include Nvidia, Samsung, Toyota Ventures, Jeff Bezos and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

AMI has no products or revenue. LeCun said the first year will be dedicated entirely to research. The fact that investors handed over $1 billion on those terms reflects both the credibility of the team and the large amount of capital now seeking the next paradigm shift in AI.

3. Isembard – £37.5m Series A | London, United Kingdom

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

The round was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from Tamarack Global, IQ Capital, Notion Capital and CIV. Angel investors included Deel founder Alex Bouaziz and former Wise CFO Matt Briers.

Isembard’s model is unusual in the manufacturing space: It owns and operates its own facilities and also manages a network of franchise-operated sites built around MasonOS, its proprietary agent operating system for factory management.

4. Exemption: $33 million | Paris, France

Waiv is a spinoff of Owkin, the French-American biotech company, launched as an independent entity this week along with a $33 million funding round.

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

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

The company maintains partnerships with pharmaceutical groups and counts leading hospital systems among its clients. Transformation as an independent entity aims to accelerate business development without the constraints of a parent company’s strategic priorities.

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

Security operations centers face a problem that is, by now, well understood: too many alerts, too few analysts, and too much time per investigation.

The average alert at a large enterprise takes between 32 and 61 minutes to manually investigate. Qevlar AI claims its platform does this in less than three minutes. On March 10, investors decided it was worth $30 million.

The Paris-based startup, founded in 2022 by Ahmed Achchak, has created an agent AI platform that connects to existing security tools (SIEM, EDR, CTI) and automates the entire Level 2 and Level 3 deep investigation workflow. Instead of simply classifying alerts, the system creates a graph-based understanding of the attack surface.

The round was co-led by Partech and Forgepoint Capital International, with EQT Ventures also participating. Forgepoint had led the company’s previous $14 million raise, a sign of continued conviction.

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

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

The food distribution sector in Europe is fragmented, largely disconnected and resistant to modernization. Saltz, founded in 2022 by Oberlo and Shopify veterans Andrius Šlimas, Tomas Šlimas, and Reinis Štrodahs, is trying to do for professional kitchens what those platforms did for e-commerce merchants. He obtained 20 million euros in Series A financing on March 9.

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

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

7. Outpost: $17.5M Series A | London, United Kingdom

Cross-border sales have always been theoretically attractive and practically complicated: VAT registrations, payment infrastructure that doesn’t travel, and tax liability in jurisdictions a merchant has never visited.

Outpost, a London-based platform built by former Revolut executives, raised 17.5 million dollars on March 10 to resolve those issues at the infrastructure layer.

The round was led by Ribbit Capital, the venture firm behind Revolut, Coinbase and Stripe. Outpost’s platform handles payments and tax compliance for merchants who sell internationally, creating local legal entities and payment pathways in the markets they enter so that the merchant has no direct liability.

Context matters here: The 2026 trade tariff environment has made cross-border trade both more attractive and more legally treacherous. Outpost is preparing for exactly that tension.

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

Croatian drone manufacturer Orqa has been building first-person view drone systems since 2018, first for the enthusiast market and increasingly for defense.

On March 10, it raised €12.7 million in a Series A led by European security-focused early-stage investor Expeditions, which also includes Lightspeed Venture Partners, Taiwania Capital, Aymo and Radius Capital.

What sets Orqa apart in an increasingly populated drone landscape is its level of vertical integration: it designs and manufactures its own flight controllers, radios, motors, cameras and printed circuit boards, without Chinese-made components. Its facility in Osijek currently produces up to 280,000 NDAA-compliant drones per year.

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

9. Seprify – 13.4 million euros Series A | Freiburg, Switzerland

Seprify develops high-performance cellulose-based ingredients for industrial applications, targeting markets where synthetic materials face regulatory pressure or sustainability scrutiny.

Is 13.4 million euros Series Awhich closed this week, counts among its sponsors Inter IKEA Group, a prominent strategic investor for a materials company that works on sustainable alternatives to petroleum-derived inputs.

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

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

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

On March 11 he announced a €6 million seed round led by Galion.exe, and Criteo founder Jean-Baptiste Rudelle joined the board of directors.

The company already works with more than 60 brands in Europe and the United States, including Maisons du Monde, Cdiscount and Engie, and processes more than 100 million monthly interactions.

The round is small compared to the others on this list. But the question Lemrock is answering—what happens to commerce when AI agents become the primary product discovery interface—is a broad one that has barely been asked yet.