Roko Karanusic
Hey - welcome to the thirty-ninth edition of VC Angle Weekly Updates! We’re moving weekly briefings to Sundays from now on.
As always, we're keeping tabs on what actually matters across 🇪🇺 European tech, as well as relevant global tech news. If something broke the news this week and it's worth your time, it's probably below. Scroll on for the deals, reads, and reports you'll want on your radar.
In This Edition:Mistral’s revenue soars 20x to $400M
Station F unites AI giants for startups
Nscale raises $1.4bn GPU-backed debt
PitchBook: AI drives 35.5% of European deals
Dutch scaleups turn to US capital
⏱️ 3:43 Est. Reading Time
💥 Main Events Past Week
Mistral’s revenues increase 20x YoY
French AI startup Mistral’s annualized revenue (previous monthly sales multiplied by 12) hit $400M, up 20-fold from $20M a year ago, as European businesses seek alternatives to US tech. The company raised €1.7bn in September led by ASML and announced €1.2bn to build AI data centers in Sweden.
Station F launches F/ai program uniting major AI companies to back European startups
Station F launched F/ai, a program bringing together Microsoft, Meta, Mistral, Google, AWS, OpenAI, Anthropic, and VCs including Sequoia, General Catalyst, and 20VC to support AI startups. The program kicked off January 13th with 20 AI-native startups selected via recommendation-only process, targeting companies with paths to €1M revenue within six months.
Nscale secures $1.4bn GPU-backed debt to finance European cluster deployments
Nscale signed a $1.4bn delayed draw term loan led by PIMCO, Blue Owl, and LuminArx to finance GPU cluster deployments across Norway, Portugal, Iceland, and the UK. The debt raise follows the company’s $1.1bn Series B in late 2025 (the biggest Series B in European history) and $433M Pre-Series C SAFE, with Goldman Sachs acting as sole placement agent.
Von der Leyen: “If 27 states won't agree on Capital Market Union, I will move ahead with 9 states.”
📰 Other News
- Budapest-based robotics startup Allonic has raised a record $7.2m pre-seed round, the biggest even pre-seed round Hungary [See here]
- French AI startup Mistral announced it will invest 1.2 billion euros ($1.43 billion) into digital infrastructure in Sweden [See here]
- Alibaba enters physical AI race with open-source robot model RynnBrain [See here]
- The European Commission has sent a Statement of Objections to Meta, setting out its preliminary view that Meta breached EU antitrust rules [See here]