The week's thread — 26 July

The week ending 26 July produced 19 rounds and approximately €237 million. Removing Humanoid's €133 million Series A from the total leaves €104 million across 18 rounds — a week that was, by the distribution standard of recent months, neither exceptional nor thin. The publication rhythm reflected the weekend pattern: Monday and Tuesday's editions cleared a Friday backlog from the prior week, Wednesday through Friday covered the week's main announcement cycle, and the Saturday edition caught two rounds from Thursday that had not yet indexed.

There is no single through-line this week. The honest description is three separate clusters, one giant, and a long tail. Forcing them together would be the wrong call.

Humanoid: the giant

Humanoid (London, $152 million / €133 million, Series A, Prime Movers Lab lead; Bosch, Schaeffler, Fubon Financial, Aglaé Ventures) was the week's defining round on scale alone, establishing what the company describes as Europe's first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn at a €1.1 billion post-money valuation. What is structurally notable — and more interesting than the headline number — is the cap table: Bosch as committed production partner and Schaeffler as precision components supplier taking equity positions means Humanoid enters mass manufacturing with industrial infrastructure already inside the syndicate rather than to be financed separately. Founded in May 2024, 160 people, commercial Beta deployments targeted for Q4 2026. The week's most consequential connection: four weeks ago, ProYarn covered Microagi, Munich's bet on first-person factory footage as training data for humanoid robots. Humanoid is the hardware layer that data companies like Microagi are building toward.

The technical specificity cluster

The week's most interesting non-Humanoid capital went to companies with narrow, defensible technical claims that must prove in controlled conditions before any scaling claim is credible.

deltaVision (Munich, €10.2 million, stage unstated; KT Ventures and Valemount Capital co-leads) makes the cryogenic valves, pressure regulators, and electromotive actuators that govern propellant flow in launch vehicles and satellites — hardware that the space industry cannot do without and that deltaVision claims to produce already profitably, before any VC funding. ORiS (Turin, €5 million, Pre-Seed; Earlybird and Pitchdrive co-leads) is developing laser-based wireless power transmission for in-orbit energy distribution: a directed beam from a power-rich spacecraft to a power-constrained one. Both companies are in space infrastructure. Neither is trying to launch a rocket; both are building the components and services that other space companies need. A terrestrial drone-charging platform — LOONA — gives ORiS near-term revenue ahead of its 2027 in-orbit demonstration milestone.

kausable (Heidelberg, €12 million, Seed; UVC Partners and Entourage co-lead, HTGF) is founded by Heidelberg University physicists building reasoning-first frontier AI — models that construct world models and forecast new situations from minimal data, without retraining, via a zero-shot architecture called TipPFN. The claim is distinct from application-layer AI: it is a systems-level bet on a different computational architecture. HTGF, which backed Pixel-Flo earlier this year, anchors the German deep-tech thesis in the round.

Remedy Metals (Illkirch-Graffenstaden, more than €2 million, stage unstated) is a CNRS / Strasbourg spinout working on a magneto-electrochemical process to separate neodymium and dysprosium from mining concentrates and recycled permanent magnets at over 99.5% purity. Europe's rare-earth dependency sits at the refining step; if the chemistry holds on heterogeneous feedstock at TRL 6 — the milestone the round funds — Remedy Metals occupies a supply-chain gap the EU Critical Raw Materials Act explicitly requires filling.

Biotech: designed for the patients no one else can reach

Two biotech bets shared the same structural logic without sharing anything else.

Brenus Pharma (Lyon, €11 million, Series A extension; bringing total Series A to €33 million, total raised to €38 million) is advancing its Stimulated Ghost Cell platform through Phase I for STC-1010 in microsatellite-stable metastatic colorectal cancer — the 95% of mCRC that checkpoint inhibitors cannot touch. The entry of Korea Omega Investment Corp into a French clinical-stage immuno-oncology round is the week's most pointed international capital signal: Asia-Pacific money following European oncology into an indication the broader field has not yet moved.

Immitra Bio (Plan-les-Ouates, CHF 2.4 million / €2.58 million, Pre-Seed; Backbone Ventures lead, OCCIDENT co-lead) is an ETH Zürich spinout with a mutation-agnostic non-viral in-vivo gene editing platform. The commercial argument: one formulation across a broad patient population, without the per-patient cost structure that caps ex-vivo gene therapy's economics. Preclinical proof in inherited anaemia — the indication chosen because mutation diversity makes agnostic design matter most — is what the pre-seed funds.

AI, interfaces, and the enterprise

telli (Berlin, $15 million / €13.1 million, Seed; redalpine lead, Mutschler Ventures, Y Combinator, Cherry Ventures) builds AI voice and chat agents for B2C customer operations — enterprise clients include Sky, Viessmann, Enpal, and Vaillant. The test is whether the AI coworker model holds at full deployment rather than in controlled pilots.

Two later-announced rounds extend the week's AI-interface thesis. Scape (Stockholm, $3.2 million / €2.9 million, stage unstated; Y Combinator, General Catalyst, FundersClub) rebuilds the email inbox from scratch for a world where AI acts on behalf of the user. PageMind (Barcelona, €1.2 million, stage unstated; 4Founders Capital lead) structures e-commerce product content for AI-powered discovery systems — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity — that recommend products rather than returning links. Both bets share a premise: that AI does not augment existing interfaces but replaces them. General Catalyst — which backed Tsuga and Lucis from ProYarn's earlier coverage — appears again in Scape's cap table.

The rest of the week

France contributed three rounds. Womed (Montpellier, more than €7 million, stage unstated) is a CNRS spinout addressing post-operative uterine adhesions and building toward 2027 clinical trials for fibroids and acute bleeding — the crowdfunding overshoot (over twice the initial target on Lita and Capital Cell) is a demand signal from patients before physicians have adopted the device at scale. Brenus Pharma is covered above.

The climate cluster added Circular Materials (Italy, €11.8 million, SAFE; CDP Venture Capital lead, EIC Fund, EIT RawMaterials, 360 Capital), recovering dissolved critical metals from industrial wastewater via its SWaP™ electrochemical process, and Deutsche Sanierungsberatung / dsb (Berlin, over €10 million, Series A; Simon Capital and VERBUND X Ventures co-leads), a renovation advisory network of 300-plus certified energy consultants targeting over €15M in 2026 revenue. The cybersecurity pair — Xentra (Leeds, £2.7M / €3.18M, subscription managed cybersecurity for SMEs) and Ossprey (UK, $2.65M / €2.41M, Pre-Seed, automated scanning for malicious open-source code) — both addressed the same regulatory and pace-of-development pressure on different sides. Aampere (Munich, €4.2 million, used EV resale platform; Trind Ventures lead) reported revenue quadrupling year-on-year, with Vend Marketplaces ASA — parent of FINN.no, Blocket, and Bilbasen — as a new strategic investor. Nernst Electric (Ireland, €1.7 million, Seed; Hatch Blue) generates high-purity oxygen on-site via ceramic membranes for aquaculture, funded by the same investor across two consecutive rounds. Sensesbit (Lugo, €1 million, stage unstated) applies AI to food sensory analysis with Paraíso Natural Ventures — the VC arm of a major Spanish dairy producer — as a strategic cap-table anchor. Cascade (London, $3.5M / €3.24M, Seed; Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun lead) surfaces pre-bid construction project signals for AEC firms.

The week in numbers

~€237 million across 19 rounds. Germany led by country with five rounds and approximately €39 million (telli, kausable, Aampere, deltaVision, dsb) — concentrated in Berlin and Munich. The United Kingdom contributed four rounds and approximately €141 million, overwhelmingly from Humanoid. France added three rounds — Womed, Remedy Metals, and Brenus Pharma — totalling at least €20 million. Italy had two rounds: Circular Materials and ORiS (€16.8 million). Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, and Ireland each contributed one.

Earlybird and Y Combinator were the most active named investors by deal count, each appearing across two rounds. General Catalyst appeared for the third time in recent ProYarn coverage — Tsuga, Lucis, and now Scape — making it the week's most consistently present transatlantic name in the ProYarn archive.