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 the noise around them. This is the second edition of what it found.

The week by the numbers. Just over 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. The rest fell where they usually fall, past the early stage, off our lanes, outside Europe, or old news in fresh clothes, this week including a round that turned out to be eleven months old. And in fairness to everyone we graded, the watch itself missed Thursday morning and read a double window on Friday to catch up. The tape lost nothing but our punctuality.

The one that cleared it. NextGO Epi, a Berlin spinout from the Leibniz institute for crystal growth and, by its own description, Europe's only producer of gallium oxide epiwafers, announced a two million euro pre-seed on Tuesday, its first institutional round, led by Vireo Ventures with Ultratech Capital Partners, IBB Ventures and an angel investor joining. Gallium oxide is a material that lets power electronics handle more voltage with less loss than silicon can, and the wafers point at the places the power bill now lives, EV charging, renewable inverters and the data centers behind AI.

Crypto stayed quiet in lane a second week. What moved was stablecoin infrastructure, clearing, payments and treasury products, most of it American, much of it already at Series A, none of it a new European team at pre-seed.

One number worth keeping. Two editions in, this tape has read about one hundred and twenty announcements and passed on all but two, and both of the two build hardware for the layer underneath AI, last week the lasers that carry its data, this week the wafers that will manage its power. However crowded European early stage looks from the headlines, truly early, truly technical rounds in our lanes are running at about one a week.

If one of them is yours, or will be, our Raise Checklist walks through what the other side of the table will ask to see, free, in the Founders Lab.

A new tape lands every Friday. Last week's edition is one click back, and every note lives here.