North Raises $32M Series B Led by PeakSpan Capital

AI has opened the door to a market 6x larger than software: services. One of the largest service sectors, and the one most ripe for disruption, is accounting. Having been (unhappily) involved with this industry from multiple angles, I truly believe it will be one of the most exciting spaces for building new companies in the years ahead. Petter Reistad is a force-of-nature founder going after this humongous market with maximum momentum, backed by a fantastic team of accountants, engineers and SDRs. Proud to be co-leading Sanna’s seed round together with Alliance VC, joining great investors like Sondo, Wave Ventures and Tiny Ventures.

DIG Ventures just closed a massive $120M fund specifically targeting the plumbing of Europe's AI boom. While the spotlight usually stays on flashy AI applications, the smart money is quietly moving to the infrastructure layer. This new Fund III is backing pre-seed and seed startups building the foundational tech for AI-native enterprise software. Here is what stands out to me about this deployment: → The fund is backed by heavy hitters like Horsley Bridge, Sofina, and a major US university endowment. → The LP roster includes founders from Slack, Datadog, and Supercell, bringing serious operating DNA to the table. → DIG plans to deploy this capital across roughly 30 European companies, focusing on data, identity, compliance, and orchestration. → Founding partner Ross Mason, who sold MuleSoft to Salesforce for $6.5B, is betting that as software gets cheaper to build, the defensible moats will be in the infrastructure. This signals a major shift in how European venture capital is deploying money. We are moving past the initial hype cycle of wrapper apps and into the deep infrastructure phase. Expect to see a wave of European AI infrastructure companies scaling globally over the next 18 months, with DIG leading the charge on their US expansion. #AI #VentureCapital #EuropeTech #DigitalTransformation #TechFunding

When we set out to launch byFounders in 2018, we did it on the belief that the New Nordics was a region with massive potential, still what we are seeing goes above and beyond our wildest imagination. Founders today have a choice, founders today can build global companies in our backyard and out of Europe, and first and foremost founders today are NOT afraid to think BIG!! Hang on tight - this is going to go fast! 🚀

Arena just raised a $200M Series B at a $3.1B valuation. Co-led by our friends Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures, including a16z, AMP PBC, Felicis, Salesforce Ventures, 01 Advisors, Dell Technologies Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, The House Fund, and others. We're proud investors since the first round, and excited to double down into this round. Since the Series A: - $100M+ in annualized revenue - 350M sessions across the platform - 7M Agent Arena sessions in under five months - 62M votes across text, vision, code, search, image, and video - Users in 150+ countries Alongside the raise, Arena released its Alignment Index, built from real-world agent traces. It starts with three signals across 20+ frontier models: Unauthorized Action, False Attribution, and Deceptive Completion. It’s worth remembering where this started. Arena launched in 2023 as a research project out of UC Berkeley. It became a company in 2025. Today, it’s how the AI industry checks its own work. Congrats to Anastasios Angelopoulos, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ion Stoica, and the entire Arena team! Berkeley research, keeping AI honest. Go Bears!

Three exits already booked from Fund II, including Flock's $109m sale to Admiral, and 80% of portfolio companies raising follow-on capital within two years. That is the track record DIG Ventures is carrying into a $120m third fund, closed with institutional backers including Horsley Bridge Partners, Sofina and Granite, plus a US university endowment and a roster of founder LPs spanning Slack, Datadog and Nord Security. The firm, built around Ross Mason (MuleSoft founder), Melissa (Lester) Klinger and Rytis Vitkauskas, is planting roughly 30 flags across European pre-seed and seed, with a plan to lead most rounds rather than fill out syndicates. That last point matters more than it might first appear. Leading means DIG sets price and terms, which gives it more control over ownership but also concentrates risk; the fund's returns will hinge on how well it prices companies before larger multi-stage investors arrive with bigger cheques and more leverage. The investment thesis is essentially a bet that falling software development costs will hollow out application-layer differentiation and push value down the stack, into data, identity, compliance and orchestration. It is a credible read of where the AI economy seems to be heading, though it is also the thesis that every serious infrastructure investor is now running in some form, which means DIG will be competing for the same 30 or so breakthrough companies at the earliest stages. Deployment has already started, and the first named investments from Fund III will be the real signal to watch. Full analysis below. https://lnkd.in/eS4Ec_Hi

🚀🎉 Congratulations to Zeroset on its $5.2M pre-seed raise! Announced on 6 October, the round was co-led by Gradient and 2048 Ventures, with participation from Leblon Capital and others. 🧠 Zeroset is building Nebula, a system that helps AI agents understand how work happens inside a business, including its workflows, decisions and changing context. The funding will support research and engineering hires, early enterprise deployments and model training. 🔗 Funding announcement: https://lnkd.in/eyPCHa_D 🎯 For founders preparing a raise, the wider lesson is investor fit. I look for investors who match: ✅ Your stage and sector. ✅ Your geography and investment thesis. ✅ Your round size and their cheque size. 📄 That’s why I start with a one-pager. It gives relevant investors enough to decide whether they want the full deck. Their response is a useful signal before you commit more time to the next stage. 📩 Raising pre-seed or seed? DM me ONE-PAGER. I’ll test investor interest in your raise for free.

Verso raises $6M 💜 Today, we're proud to announce our $6M round, led by Angular Ventures, alongside Kima Ventures, 100IN, Olympe Capital, SHARPSTONE and Hexa. Our conviction from day one: brands don't lack data, they lack understanding. Qualitative research is still the best way to understand why consumers do what they do, but it's too slow, too expensive and too rare. At Verso, our AI runs in-depth voice and video interviews with consumers. The result: studies 10x times faster, 15x times more respondents, and customer knowledge that keeps growing instead of gathering dust in a report. More than 50 of the world's largest companies, all leaders in their industries, already work with us. Thank you to the whole team for their hard work, and to our customers for their trust. This is just the beginning.

A lot of the work at big companies happens in systems with no API: supplier portals, old ERPs, spreadsheets. So our agents use the screen, like people do. They handle the clicking and copying, and the decisions still go to the people who own them. My team's job is making that work in production at scale. Today duvo.ai announced a $32M Series A led by Balderton Capital. Hiring engineers who want to make agents work in the real world, not just in demos. DM me or check duvo.ai/careers

From the partner side, I keep hearing the same thing from consultancies, SIs and hyperscalers: clients don’t need another AI pilot. They need operations that actually change, and proof of what changed. That’s why Duvo is built as an Enterprise Execution OS, one platform where people and AI agents run operations together, process by process. Over $100M in annualised impact for clients so far, with the first process live in weeks. If your clients are stuck between AI strategy and real operational change, let’s talk. Tomáš Čupr Michael Green Spencer Insolia Balderton