Last month saw 321 VC investments across Europe, with $4.1 billion invested in total – a 45% decrease in funding volume compared to October 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 144 investments, followed by Health Care with 90 and FinTech with 57, each ahead of the next industry, BioTech (31).
SFC Capital, Antler, Creandum and Bpifrance were the most active investors with 6 investments each. Followed by British Business Bank with 4 investments rounding out the top five most active investors.
Top 10 Industries of Financed Startups
- AI
- Health Care
- FinTech
- BioTech
- Web
- Manufacturing
- Energy
- Marketing
- PropTech
- Retail
Top 5 Investors with the highest number of deals
- SFC Capital
- Antler
- Bpifrance
- Creandum
- British Business Bank
Notable funding rounds across Europe
In October, the largest funding round was a $771 million Series C by Fractile, a London-based Venture which develops specialized semiconductor hardware and computing systems for advanced AI models. Founded in 2022 in the UK, Fractile raised the investment mainly to bring its first inference chips into volume production ahead of data-centre deployment in 2027 and to scale its hardware and software teams across London, Bristol, San Francisco and Taipei.
Seed Rounds made up the largest share of rounds (42%). Despite that, the largest volume of $1.23bn was invested in 5 Series C Rounds.
The largest Seed Round was secured by Flow Games, an Istanbul-based fast-rising mobile game developer that became one of the breakout stars of the hybrid casual puzzle market. Founded in 2025 in Turkey, Flow Games raised $46 million (€41 million) in October.
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 October, London remained the leading hotspot for European VC by number of investments (64), followed by Paris (18), Barcelona (10), Stockholm (10) and Copenhagen (9).
The most investments were conducted in the UK (108), followed by France (31) and Spain (29).
When ranked by investment volume rather than the number of investments, Oxford ($470mn) with four investments, Basel ($145mn) with two investments and Valencia ($121mn) with three investments join London and Paris in the top 5 cities.
VC Exit Overview
This month, 40 exits without an IPO took place.
With 16 exits, FinTech companies represent the largest exit industry of the month, followed by Health Care (9) and AI (7) companies.
Most exited companies are based in the UK with 9 exits, followed by Germany with 7 exits.
- Number of Acquisition Exits
- Number of IPO Exits
PE Acquisitions Overview
In October, 50 PE acquisitions (13% of all VC and PE investment rounds) were conducted, an increase of 2pp compared to last month.
With 12 acquisitions, the UK saw the highest number of companies acquired in October.
Food & Beverage (16), Manufacturing (12) and Health Care (10) were the top acquisition industries mentioned.
The standout deal was EQT’s €~10.8 billion acquisition of Qiagen, a company which provides technologies and products for preanalytical sample preparation and linked molecular assay solutions.
- % of all investment rounds
- Number of PE acquisitions
*All data from CrunchBase, as of November 2, 2026.
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