AI Funding Surges 84% to €3.9B Across 93 Deals, Leading All European Sectors
European AI startups raised €3.88B across 93 deals in the most recent 90-day window, up from €2.11B across 61 deals in the prior period, placing AI at the top of all tracked sectors by capital raised.
AI Tops the Sector Table by a Wide Margin
At €3.88B, AI claimed the largest share of any sector in the recent 90-day period, ahead of Cloud at €3.0B, Healthtech at €2.78B, and Fintech at €2.43B. The 84% quarter-on-quarter rise in capital — from €2.11B to €3.88B — was accompanied by a 53% increase in deal count, from 61 to 93 rounds. Both the capital and deal-count gains outpaced the broader market, where total funding rose roughly 11% and deal count edged up by 11 transactions over the same comparison.
Mega-Rounds Dominate the AI Capital Stack
The top four AI rounds alone — Ineffable Intelligence (€936M), Mistral AI (€723M), Recursive Superintelligence (€555M), and ElevenLabs (€471M) — account for a substantial portion of the period's €3.88B total, underscoring the degree to which a small number of large transactions shape the headline figure. The broader 90-day window recorded 37 megadeals across all sectors, and AI contributed several of the largest. Readers should note that the sector figure is sensitive to the inclusion or exclusion of any single top-tier round.
UK Dominates AI Deal Flow; France and Germany Also Feature
Six of the eight largest AI rounds in the recent period were raised by UK-headquartered companies, including Ineffable Intelligence, Recursive Superintelligence, ElevenLabs, PhysicsX, and Fractile. France's Mistral AI, with €723M, and Germany's Taktile, with €95M, were the most prominent non-UK entries in the top eight. Across all sectors, the UK led the recent 90-day country rankings with €11.34B across 206 deals, well ahead of Germany at €3.47B and France at €2.86B.
Annual AI Funding Has Grown Sharply Since 2022 Trough
Annual AI funding in Europe stood at €1.1B in 2022 before recovering to €2.23B in 2023 and €3.16B in 2024, then reaching €5.35B across 235 deals for the full year 2025. With €5.99B already recorded across 154 deals through mid-2026, the current year is on pace to exceed 2025, though the 2026 figure covers only a partial year. The all-time cumulative AI funding total tracked in the database is not separately stated, but the broader European startup database records €694.4B across 51,458 total rounds.
Early-Stage Activity Remains Active Beneath the Mega-Round Layer
Across all sectors in the recent 90-day period, Seed-stage rounds totalled €1.73B across 128 deals and Series A rounds totalled €1.63B across 92 deals, indicating continued early-stage activity alongside the large late-stage transactions. Pre-Seed rounds added €211M across 113 deals. Within AI specifically, the €936M Ineffable Intelligence round was classified as Seed-stage, an unusually large amount for that stage label and a figure that warrants attention when interpreting stage-level averages.
Recent AI Exits Add Context to Sector Momentum
On the exit side, Eigen AI was acquired by Nebius for €547M on 1 May 2026, the only AI-identified company among the six largest recent exits tracked in the dataset. The five larger exits in the same window — including Aegon UK at €2.3B, Kobalt at €1.25B, and IDEMIA Public Security at €1.2B — spanned financial services, music rights, and identity security rather than AI, illustrating that exit value in the current period is distributed across multiple sectors.
AI-generatedWritten by an AI model from Tech.eu Funding Explorer data (2026-06-29). Figures are checked against the underlying data and each draft is reviewed by an independent second model before publishing; anything unverifiable is held back. Not investment advice. Labelled for AI transparency (EU AI Act Art. 50, applicable from 2 Aug 2026).