This week in pre-seed AI, crypto and deep tech

Every week our raise watch reads the European funding tape, every pre-seed and seed announcement in AI, crypto and deep tech, plus all the noise around them. This is the first public edition of what it found.

The week by the numbers. About sixty announcements crossed the watch between Monday and Friday, and exactly one cleared our bar, a fresh European pre-seed or seed, in our lanes, from a technical founding team. We passed on all the others, mostly for being past the early stage, off our lanes, outside Europe, or old news dressed as new.

The one that cleared it is a good one. Aylight, a Zurich photonics company built on ETH research, announced a 4.5 million euro pre-seed on Monday, co-led by Elaia and Swisscom Ventures with Verve Ventures and Plug and Play joining. The team makes chip-scale multiwavelength lasers for the optical interconnects inside AI data centers, one chip doing the work of many lasers, and the round carries the science from research result to first foundry prototypes. It says something about this market that the week's surest early conviction sits in the hardware underneath AI rather than the models on top.

Crypto gave us nothing in lane this week. The fresh names were trading and stablecoin products, and the big numbers were treasury plays and acquisitions rather than new teams. Deep tech supplied the week's only qualifier and most of its gravity.

One pattern worth keeping. Labels are inflating and the tape runs late. This week we watched an eight million euro round call itself a pre-seed, and a seven million pound seed that quietly closed back in December surface as fresh news. If you benchmark your own raise against the headlines, subtract the label and check the date.

And if your round just landed, the first grown-up question is how long the money lasts. Our Runway Scan answers it in three minutes, free, in the Founders Lab.

This is the first edition of the weekly tape. A new one lands every Friday, and all of them live here.