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 third edition of what it found.

The week by the numbers. About a hundred names crossed the watch this week, the widest read yet, and three cleared our bar, a fresh European pre-seed or seed, in our lanes, from a technical founding team, one of them sitting at the very edge of those lanes. 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 announced this month that had actually closed last November. And one honesty note on our own net: one of the three reached us about a week after its announcement, caught by the trailing review rather than the daily sweep. We grade our own coverage the way we grade the tape.

The one we can name. ORiS, a Turin company founded by four aerospace engineers, announced a four and a half million euro pre-seed on Tuesday, led by Earlybird with Pitchdrive, Galaxia, Vento and Piemonte Next Fund joining, plus a regional grant of half a million that takes recent funding to about five million. They build laser based wireless power transmission, beaming energy to drones in the near term and between satellites later, with a first demonstration in orbit planned for next year. The idea is easy to state and hard to build: a drone or a satellite today carries every watt it will ever use, as battery or as panel, so power that arrives by beam changes what the machine can be.

Crypto stayed quiet in lane a third week. What moved was stablecoin infrastructure, clearing and treasury products, mostly American, mostly past the early stage. The counterweight is timing: the largest crypto builder weekend of the summer runs in Lisbon as this note goes up, and if new European teams come out of it, next Friday's tape reads them.

One number worth keeping. Three editions in, this tape has read north of two hundred announcements and passed five through, one a week for two weeks and then three at once, and all five build hardware for the layer underneath computing, first the lasers that carry data, then the wafers that manage power, now beamed energy, new silicon and the links between machines. From the headlines, European early stage reads as a software story. At the truly early end, in our lanes, it is a hardware story, and the first thing these teams meet after the wire lands is not scale, it is capital expenditure, grant paperwork and a first board budget.

If a raise is on your horizon, our Dilution Scan shows in two minutes what the round you are planning costs you in ownership, free, in the Founders Lab.

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