A Bristol startup repurposes nuclear physics for cancer medicine, a London vegan pet food brand doubles down after Dragons' Den, and an AI firm takes aim at the $350bn certification bottleneck.
Here are the biggest deals in European impact investing this week that you need to know.
Isometric – $40M Series A
The London company certifies carbon removal credits using AI and is now expanding the platform into wider industrial sectors, where it says certification typically takes 12 months.
Investors: AVP (lead), Lowercarbon Capital, Plural, Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr, Walter Kortschak.
Astral Systems – £23M Series A
The Bristol deeptech firm uses compact fusion reactors to produce medical isotopes for cancer diagnosis and treatment, in a market where supply is concentrated in a handful of ageing reactors worldwide.
Investors: Mercia Ventures (lead), Tees River, Daphni, Blast Club, Speedinvest, Playfair.
FINN – €140M Series D
The Munich car subscription platform crossed the unicorn threshold with the raise, reporting €300m in annual recurring revenue. ProSiebenSat.1's investment arm took equity in exchange for advertising inventory as part of the deal.
Investors: Portage (lead), UVC Partners, Planet First Partners, Korelya Capital, White Star Capital, HV Capital, Picus Capital, BC Partners Credit, Runway Growth Capital, SevenVentures.
VARM – €17.5M Series A
The Berlin startup trains career-changers as insulation installers and coordinates them through an AI platform, targeting Germany's residential retrofit market.
Investors: ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund (lead), GET Fund (co-lead), Aurum Impact, Emerge Partners, Pale Blue Dot, noa.
Leyden Labs – €40M
The Dutch biotech is advancing a pan-influenza nasal spray through clinical trials. The Gates Foundation joined as a new investor with a mandate to support access in low- and middle-income countries, bringing total funding past $336m.
Investors: Gates Foundation, EIC Fund, Invest-NL, ClavystBio.
Flease – €13M
The Lyon startup leases reconditioned vehicles to enterprise fleets on flexible contracts of one to 50 months, operating in a French corporate fleet market of 1.3 million vehicles.
Investors: Partech Impact (lead).
Omni – £11M Series A
The UK plant-based dog food brand closed a Series A a year after appearing on Dragons' Den, where it secured backing from Deborah Meaden, who increased her stake in the new round.
Investors: IW Capital (lead), Redrice Ventures, RootBridge Capital, Digitalis Ventures, Lever VC, Deborah Meaden.
EQON – $6M seed
The Norwegian company makes industrial heating systems more energy-efficient using intelligent controls.
Investors: Azolla Ventures (lead), Wilstar Impact Investing (co-lead), Climentum Capital, GAIN Venture Capital.
Grid.online – €4M
The Czech startup runs a shared courier network that parcel carriers can access via API to handle delivery overflow, and surpassed one million deliveries in its first year of operation.
Investors: DFF Ventures (lead), Movens Capital (co-lead), Reflex Capital, J&T Ventures, Wolt angels.
Ora Computing – €3.5M seed
The Austrian startup develops software to compress large AI models, reducing their size and the compute required to run them. It was founded by two researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.
Investors: Constructor Capital (co-lead), Greencode Ventures (co-lead), XISTA Science Ventures.
Pictured: Talmon Firestone (Astral Systems); Christian Grüner (VARM); Eamon Jubbawy (Isometric); Koenraad Wiedhaup (Leyden Labs); Shiv Sivakumar (Omni); Constantin Eliard (Flease)