The VC Notebook

14 deals caught my eye this week, among them: @shieldaitech $2B Series G @harvey__ai $200M Series G Xona $170M Series C Dash0 $110M Series B Doss $55M Series B Full breakdown 👇

Here's what caught my eye this week in startup funding @cloaked — $375M Series B @Xbow — $121M Series C @upvest — $90M Series D @latent_health — $80M Series A Standard Template Labs — $49M Seed @hanoverpark — $27M Series A Parallel — $20M Series A Full breakdown 👇

This week has been one of the craziest weeks of fundraising in 2026 so far: The biggest rounds: → @nscale $2B Series C (AI Infra) → @amilabs $1.03B Seed — largest ever in Europe → @WeAreLegora $550m Series D → Mind Robotics $500M Series A (Rivian spinout) → Quince $500M Series E at $10.1B → @Replit $400M Series D at $9B Also: @grafana $250M · EF $200M · @wonderful_ai $150M · Alan €100M · Qevlar AI $30M · @qdrant_engine $50M · @AgentHub_AI $50M Full breakdown 👇

Is SaaS dying ? Not so fast. @TheEconomist recently argued that AI could be a boon to incumbent SaaS giants, who have deep pockets and extensive tech expertise. As for in-house, vibe-coded software, the publication notices an interesting trend: "For most companies, building software is a distraction from their core business. The trend for decades has been in the opposite direction. In the mid-1990s American firms kept about 30% of their software investment in-house; the figure today is half that" If SaaS companies manage to retain and keep on attracting the best tech talent out there, AI breakthroughs will accrue to them.

The 50 European Funding Rounds that caught my eye in 2025, pt. 2

The 50 European Funding Rounds that caught my eye in 2025, pt. 1

A few weeks ago, @getserval raised a $75m Series B at a $1b @Redpoint just published the summary of their Series A investment memo. In it, they underline Serval's bold strategic choice to build a unified platform from the start to compete with incumbent systems of record I wrote about how this choice was relevant in the current platform shift software is undergoing with AI and how it can set it up to compete with incumbents in the future (substack.com/@thevcnotebook/…) Congrats again to Serval on hitting unicorn status!

2025's largest tech acquisitions, pt. 2

2025's largest tech acquisitions, pt. 1

The largest tech funding rounds of December:

This year's top 10 tech IPOs

2025 was quite the year for French VC Firms, which raised new funds across growth, early, deeptech and multi stage Congrats to AVP @Cathayinnov @eurazeo @SofinnovaVC Jolt Capital @Revaia_Cap @daphnivc Serena @Ventech_VC @OmnesCapital @c4ventures

5 Series A/B Rounds that caught my eye last week: @Lovable @valeriehealthHQ @SequenceHQ_ Ankar AI @FINNYAI

A few weeks ago on @uncapped_pod, Thomas Laffont claimed that the System of Record was dead Pointing to a Workday press release in which the company announced partnerships with Snowflake and Databricks to make data in its systems more easily accessible, Laffont predicted that: "For Workday, its future is about building the best Fortune 500-grade agents for HR and finance." In the same vein, @a16z partner Sarah Wang stated in the firm's 2026 prediction that the System of Record would lose ground, as more value will accrue to the agentic layer, which will increasingly be able to run end-to-end processes autonomously How value creation shifts for systems of record will be the big question in software for the decade to come

Menlo Ventures Posted its third State of Generative AI in the Enterprise report and it is packed with insightful data: - In 2 years, Enterprise AI spend has grown from $1.7b to $37b - 50 products are generating $100m in ARR and 10 are generating $1b - 76% of AI use cases are purchased vs. built internally - AI products are 4x more likely to go through PLG motions than traditional software (27% vs. 7%) - At the application layer, startups are distancing incumbents in AI spend, commanding 63% of market share - In Vertical AI, the rift is even larger, with 88% market share for AI-native startups - Anthropic is estimated to hold 40% of Enterprise LLM market share and 54% in coding - Incumbents remain dominant at the infrastructure level

European companies were also off to a strong start this week, here are 7 noteworthy rounds (Seed through Series B) @bfl_ml @GradiumAI #TitanOS @SokinGlobal #ImperAI @duvoai @bitstack Congrats !

Full Recap: