The early stage fundraising conversation right now is dominated by talk of tighter conditions and scarcer capital. Strip out AI from the European venture numbers and the non-AI market is actually shrinking – deal volume fell 40% year-over-year in Q1 2026, even as the headline figures told a rosier story. But that focus on traditional The post Why this could be the best time in history to build a startup appeared first on EU-Startups.

equipal, a FinTech funder of business equipment out of London, has secured €18.84 million (£16.25 million) in a combined investment in order to hire across business development, marketing, operations, credit and data where the team expects to grow to 12 in the next year. The funding includes a €1.4 million (£1.25 million) equity investment alongside The post British asset finance platform equipal secures €18.84 million to grow team and lending capacity appeared first on EU-Startups.

Astral Systems, a British DeepTech firm pioneering multi-state fusion (MSF) technology, has secured €26 million (£23 million) in Series A funding in order to bring critical medical isotopes to market by early 2027, scaling the production of its modular MSF reactors, and advancing fusion research. This first close investment was led by Mercia Ventures and The post Bristol’s Astral Systems secures €26 million Series A to support medical isotope commercialisation appeared first on EU-Startups.

TRIMTECH Therapeutics, a Cambridge-based BioTech company developing novel small molecule therapies that target and degrade protein aggregates associated with neurodegenerative diseases, has raised an additional €12 million ($14 million) in Seed funding to progress its proprietary platforms and differentiated portfolio. The financing was led by Johnson & Johnson’s corporate venture capital organisation, Johnson & Johnson The post Cambridge’s TRIMTECH Therapeutics brings Seed round to €41 million for neurodegenerative disease work appeared first on EU-Startups.

Talk to enough hiring leaders right now, and a pattern emerges. Companies say they’re hiring for AI fluency – rewriting job descriptions, adding AI questions to interviews, training managers to ask about prompt engineering and tool use – but keep ending up with people who can talk about AI confidently in an interview but can’t The post The AI hiring mistake that could quietly kill your startup’s momentum appeared first on EU-Startups.

VARM, a Berlin-based startup training and deploying insulation specialists, has raised €17.5 million in a Series A funding round to expand its scalable home insulation model across Germany and, eventually, Europe. The round was led by ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund and co-led by GET Fund, with participation from Aurum Impact and existing investors Emerge The post 14 million poorly insulated German homes: VARM raises €17.5 million to expand its installer network appeared first on EU-Startups.