Last month saw 200 VC investments across Europe, with $2.8 billion invested in total – a 6% increase in funding volume compared to August last year.
Number and volume of announced funding rounds over the past 12 months*
- Number of funding rounds
- Invested volume in $bn
Leading Industries and Investors
According to the number of conducted investments, AI leads with 75 investments, followed by Health Care with 43 and FinTech with 38, each ahead of the next industry, Energy (38).
Antler and Norrsken Evolve were the most active investors with 4 investments each. Followed by YZi Labs, Vento and Spintop Ventures with 3 investments each rounding out the top five most active investors.
Top 10 Industries of Financed Startups
- AI
- Health Care
- FinTech
- Energy
- Manufacturing
- BioTech
- Gaming
- Marketing
- PropTech
- Web
Top 5 Investors with the highest number of deals
- Antler
- Norrsken Evolve
- YZi Labs
- Vento
- Spintop Ventures
Notable funding rounds across Europe
In August, the largest funding round was a $400 million Series C by Lovable, a Stockholm-based Venture which provides an AI-driven platform enabling users to generate and deploy web applications and websites from natural language prompts. Founded in 2023 in Swedem, Lovable raised the investment mainly to fund its push from a build-an-app tool into the platform businesses actually run on.
Seed Rounds made up the largest share of rounds (38%). Despite that, the largest volume of $830mn was invested in 4 Series C Rounds.
The largest Seed Round was secured by Callosum, a London-based company provides data analytics, artificial intelligence, and digital engineering services for data management and use. Founded in 2025 in the UK, Callsoum raised $100 million (€86 million) in August.
Number and total volume of financing rounds per stage
- Number of funding rounds per stage
- Volume of financing rounds per stage in $mn
Detailed overview by stage
European VC Industry Hotspots
In August, London remained the leading hotspot for European VC by number of investments (51), followed by Copenhagen (7), Stockholm (6), Berlin (5) and Istanbul (5).
The most investments by country were in the UK (72), followed by Germany (23) and Sweden (14).
When ranked by investment volume rather than the number of investments, Cambridge ($302mn) with two investments, Zurich ($209mn) with five investments and Basel ($152mn) with one investment join London and Stockholm in the top 5 cities.
VC Exit Overview
In August, 27 exits including one IPO took place.
With 14 exits, Health Care companies were the largest exit industrie, followed by AI (5) and Marketing (4) companies.
Most companies exited are based in the UK with 9 exits, followed by Germany with 3 exits.
- Number of Acquisition Exits
- Number of IPO Exits
PE Acquisitions Overview
In August, 29 PE acquisitions (13% of all VC and PE investment rounds) were conducted, a decrease of 3pp compared to last month.
With 12 acquisitions, the UK saw the highest number of companies acquired in August.
Software (14), FinTech (8) and PropTech (5) were the top acquisition industries mentioned.
The standout deal was Apollos’s €$~7.7 billion acquisition of EasyJet, a low-cost airline that provides passenger air transportation across European and other international destinations.
- % of all investment rounds
- Number of PE acquisitions
*All data from CrunchBase, as of September 1, 2026.
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