Europe Business Briefing: The ‘Europe fights back’ edition

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(Editor’s note: This edition of the Europe Business Briefing is part of Dispatches’ Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are founders and investors. See more Europe Business Briefings here.)

When it comes to tech in Europe and to the end to American tech hegemony, what do we all wish for? More capital, of course. And more talent. We want to see a Europe that can stand toe-to-toe with the United States when it comes to innovations in hardware and software, medtech, robotics military technology and artificial intelligence. Even with dominating Europe-based companies such as ASML, there’s Silicon Valley and everyone else.

But we see indications that’s changing.

Last week, French-born Yann LeCun, chose Paris – not The Valley – for AMI Lab’ headquarters, calling Silicon Valley “LLM-pilled.” The former Meta AI researcher has raised more than $1.3 billion to fund AMI’s effort to develop a self-supervised artificial intelligence that learns from reality, not just from language. We had to dig a bit to understand the fundamentals, but at the heart of AMI’s technical strategy is Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). JEPA differs from generative models such as ChatGPT by “predicting the future in an abstract representation space,” according to Humanoids Daily. (We know, but this a legit source.) This allows the model to ignore “pixel noise”— irrelevant details — and focus on the underlying physics of a scene.

Oh-kay!

AMI’s systems will target manufacturing, robotics, wearables, healthcare and other technologies.

A lot of people who matter believe LeCun is on to something. Private investors include the biggest names in computer science and investing: World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, VC Jim Breyer, Mark Cuban, Station F founder Xavier Niel and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Oh, and American VCs such as NYC-based Greycroft.

Croatia breaks out

For years, we’ve been dazzled by the progress Croatia – the unlikeliest of tech hubs – is making across categories from robotics to advanced autos.

• Toyota Industries Corp. made a strategic investment in Croatia’s Gideon, which produces industrial robots.

• Nuqleus in Zagreb is recognized as one of the top tech startup hubs.

• Croatia’s Orqa just raised 12.7 million euros to increase production to 1 million units per year.

• Venture capital firm/fund manager Fil Rouge Capital has invested in 170 startups, with 11 exits.

• RIMAC founder Mate Rimac now controls some of the most exclusive auto brands in the world including Bugatti.

• Split-based Daytona reached $1 million in annualized revenue in a mere two months, making it the fastest-growing cloud infrastructure company in history, significantly faster than well-known cloud companies such as Cloudflare or AWS.

Cutting ribbons, cutting edge

Closer to home, High Tech Campus Eindhoven and TNO started construction of its new photonics production line. This will be the first industrial factory for the production of Indium phosphide photonic chips on a 6-inch wafer scale. By connecting R&D with scalable production, this facility accelerates the route from concept to concrete solutions for the market. Photonic chips use light to transfer data faster using less energy.

This paves the way for a new generation of energy-efficient AI data centers, 6G networks, medical innovations and supercomputers.

Xeltis moving to High Tech Campus

Eindhoven-based MedTech company, Xeltis, which has developed advanced regenerative vascular implants, is moving to High Tech Campus Eindhoven. Cleanroom construction is beginning at HTC 7, with full relocation scheduled for September.

Xeltis’s proprietary Endogenous Tissue Restoration platform uses advanced supramolecular polymer materials electrospun into microfibres to create conduits. The conduits generate the patient’s own tissue before gradually being absorbed, leaving living permanent vessels. Xeltis’ most advanced product under clinical development, aXess, is a vascular access conduit for patients with end-stage kidney disease requiring hemodialysis.

The move to HTCE comes at a pivotal moment for Xeltis as it prepares for the commercialization of aXess.

Brief briefs:

• Impact-focused VC fund LUMO Fund, managed by Eindhoven-based LUMO Labs, has secured 6 million euros from the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT), a public entity under Spain’s Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service. The investment will support startups across Spain and Europe. Founded in 2016 by former tech entrepreneurs Andy Lurling and Sven Bakkes LUMO Labs focuses on scalable, sustainable digital DeepTech platforms and infrastructure, including AI.

• Choice, a Prague-founded restaurant SaaS platform, has raised a $7.1 million Series A, led by Alea Capital with participation from Reflex Capital, Smartlink and J&T Ventures, bringing total funding to $11.6 million. The new capital will be used to expand across Southern and Western Europe and to further develop AI-driven tools that automate marketing, pricing and customer retention for independent restaurants, according to the media release we got.

Choice is building what it describes as an all-in-one operating system for independent restaurants — combining QR ordering and payments, direct online ordering with no commissions, reservations, loyalty programs, marketplace integrations and centralized customer data analytics in one platform. The company currently serves 30,000-plus restaurants, with 7,000 paying monthly, processing 1.5 million orders per month and generating around 35 million euros in monthly gross material value. Active in nine European markets, Choice has established itself as a market leader in Central and Eastern Europe and is growing 2× year-over-year.