Fusion Cash and Bank Debt Define Europe’s €2.8 Billion Tech Week

European startups pulled in more than €2.8 billion across over 70 funding deals last week, and two checks did most of the heavy lifting. One was a €411 million bet on nuclear fusion. The other was a $900 million bank loan for artificial intelligence data centres.

Add the money up by country and the UK topped the table, followed by Germany and France. Look closer at what the two biggest checks actually are, and the leaderboard reads differently. One is a bank loan, arranged with a syndicate of Wall Street lenders. The other is worth four fifths of an entire country’s total, on its own.

Two Checks Do Most of the Heavy Lifting

The week’s tally, tracked by Tech.eu, split unevenly across industries. Cloud computing led with €790.8 million, extending a run that put several European hyperscalers among 2025’s biggest cloud funding recipients. Fintech followed at €660 million, and energy took third at €471.4 million.

By country, the UK finished first with €1.7 billion, more than triple Germany’s €511.9 million and nearly seven times France’s €258.4 million.

Two single deals explain most of that gap. London hyperscaler Nscale closed a $900 million revolving credit facility. Munich-based Proxima Fusion closed a €411 million financing round. Neither one is a typical venture raise, and together they change what the week’s headline number actually means.

Deep Tech’s Slice of the Pie Keeps Growing

Neither deal happened in isolation. Money going into European deep tech, the hardware, energy and physical-science startups that take longer and cost more to build than software, has grown almost tenfold in five years.

Deep tech funding reached $20.3 billion across Europe in 2025. Startup data provider Dealroom projects a full-year 2026 total near $43.1 billion, a 112% jump from the year before.

The money is also getting more concentrated. Data provider Crunchbase found that Europe just posted its strongest venture quarter in four years in the second quarter of 2026. Artificial intelligence startups alone raised more than $10 billion of that total, the largest quarterly AI haul on record. And 65% of everything raised went to just 42 companies writing checks of $100 million or more.

• $43.1 billion – Dealroom’s projected full-year 2026 total for European deep tech, up 112% from 2025.
• $42 billion – total European startup funding in the first half of 2026, up 50% year over year.
• $10.4 billion – what UK startups alone raised in the second quarter, near the country’s 2021 peak.

Last week’s numbers fit that pattern almost exactly. A handful of oversized deals, not broad participation, pushed the continent’s total past €2.8 billion.

Proxima Fusion Turns a Retired Nuclear Site Into Its Biggest Bet

Munich-based stellarator company Proxima Fusion announced a €411 million financing round on July 7. The deal pushed its valuation to €2.4 billion and made it Europe’s best-funded fusion company. The firm was spun out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics.

XTX Ventures and East X Ventures led the round, with Google and German utility RWE joining as strategic investors. State-backed KfW Capital and SPRIND also joined. Returning backers included Plural, Balderton, Cherry Ventures and Lightspeed.

East X Ventures’ fusion-only fund, Starmaker One, counts the UK Atomic Energy Authority among its backers. The firm also co-led a $125 million round for UK rival Tokamak Energy, giving it stakes in two of Europe’s competing reactor designs.

It is Google’s first investment in a European fusion company. The tech giant has separately backed American rival TAE Technologies since 2014.

RWE’s stake comes with a construction plan attached. The utility will help Proxima build what the company calls the world’s first commercial stellarator power plant, on the site of a decommissioned nuclear fission plant in Gundremmingen, Bavaria. A stellarator confines plasma using twisted magnetic coils, an alternative to the donut-shaped tokamak design most rival reactors use.

The round closed three months after Proxima signed a memorandum of understanding with the state of Bavaria, RWE and the Max Planck Institute. It exceeded the private capital Proxima needed to match Bavaria’s own €400 million public pledge. In under three years, the company has now raised more than €650 million, including €95 million in grants.

Europe is racing with the United States and China to get to the first fusion power plant. Investors recognise both the urgency and the opportunity of what we’re doing and are backing us to develop a generational energy technology company.

Francesco Sciortino, Proxima’s co-founder and chief executive, said in the announcement. The company is targeting an early 2030s demonstrator called Alpha, with a commercial plant, Stellaris, planned for later in the decade.

Germany’s fusion pipeline runs deeper than one company. Rival developer Focused Energy closed its own $240 million round earlier this year, and Munich-based Marvel Fusion has raised more than $160 million pursuing a different reactor design.

Is a Bank Credit Line the Same as a Funding Round?

No. A revolving credit facility is a loan a company can draw down, repay and redraw as needed, arranged with banks rather than investors buying equity. It adds debt to a balance sheet without selling a stake in the company or setting a new valuation.

Nscale’s $900 million facility was syndicated across 12 banks, including J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank. The company said the money will fund data centre construction across the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

“The closing of this revolving credit facility with key global investment banks reflects real institutional confidence in our platform, capital structure and team,” said Josh Payne, Nscale’s chief executive and founder.

The facility caps a fast run of fundraising. Nscale raised $2 billion in a Series C round in March that valued the company near $15 billion. It then added a separate $790 million in debt specifically to build an AI data centre in Norway.

The company had already pledged to invest £2 billion in the UK’s data centre industry, with a first site in Loughton due to go live late this year. Former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg joined Nscale’s board the same month as the Series C.

Nscale’s roughly £670 million facility is, by face value, larger than every deal Germany’s startups closed last week combined. On its own, it comes close to half of the UK’s entire weekly total.

Europe’s Fusion Money Still Trails America’s

Proxima’s €2.4 billion valuation makes it Europe’s fusion leader, but the transatlantic gap stays wide. American rival Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised nearly $3 billion to date, including an $863 million round in August 2025, according to MIT’s Energy Initiative.

Globally, the Fusion Industry Association counts 53 private fusion startups that have attracted a combined $9.7 billion in investment to reach today’s stage. Those same companies estimate another $77 billion is needed before any of them hit commercial scale. An optimistic scenario laid out by the association pegs fusion’s eventual market at $40 trillion if the technology works at scale.

Not everyone reads the momentum the same way.

• Optimists point to Proxima’s investor roster, the Bavaria-RWE construction plan and Google’s first European fusion bet as proof the sector is shifting from lab science to industrial financing.
• Nuno Loureiro, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, calls Commonwealth Fusion Systems “very serious” but says it remains an “open question” whether commercial fusion is realistic by the early 2030s.
• Investors at April’s Fusion Fest in London worried that rivals TAE Technologies and General Fusion are moving to go public before either has hit a core technical milestone.

That milestone is scientific breakeven, according to reporting from the same London conference.

• Scientific breakeven – the point at which a fusion reaction produces more energy than it took to ignite it. No fusion startup has reached it yet.

Proxima has not set a public listing timeline. Its near-term goal stays on the demonstrator.

Skello, Kraken and a Chess Champion’s Battery Startup

Where the Money Actually Landed

Proxima’s round alone accounts for roughly 80% of everything German startups raised across the entire week.

The Rest of the Week’s Notable Raises

• Skello (France) raised €200 million to build out AI tools for frontline workforce management.
• UK maritime defence startup Kraken Technology raised $175 million and crossed into unicorn territory.
• Oxylabs (Lithuania) raised €113.6 million at a €3.1 billion valuation, ending a run without outside investors.
• BIZAY (Portugal) raised $55 million to fuel US growth and industry consolidation.
• Thought Machine (UK) landed $40 million from a bank and said it has passed $100 million in annual revenue.
• UK battery materials startup TaiSan, founded by a chess champion, raised £4.65 million.

Fintech’s €660 million and energy’s €471.4 million show up across most of that list, but neither category produced anything close to Proxima’s single check.

Seven Deals Closed the Loop This Week

Funding rounds were half the story. The week also logged seven exits and acquisitions, several of them cross-border.

Portuguese drone maker Tekever acquired Cloudsweep to expand its artificial intelligence work. Irish fintech Wayflyer bought data platform Conjura. German package holiday startup Tourlane acquired travel platform Lambus.

Rocapine bought French startup Unchaind after it reached €875,000 in annual recurring revenue. Munich-based vacation rental scale-up Holidu acquired Dutch peer Gites.com. In Switzerland, US software consolidator Banyan Software took a majority stake in Geneva fintech WIZE.

American buyers showed up across several of the week’s exits, extending a pattern that has run through much of European tech’s acquisition market this year.

Nscale’s first UK data centre, the one its new credit line will help equip, is scheduled to go live in Loughton before the year is out.