reaching the summit

Dear Reader,

As global markets enter a steady phase of growth, the Summit Fund continues to back ideas and teams shaping the industries of the future. This quarter marked a period of growing momentum for the Summit Fund portfolio. With Klarna’s IPO, Mistral AI’s new valuation milestone, and advances across drug discovery, enterprise software, and fusion energy, our portfolio shows ongoing strength and adaptability across sectors.

The venture landscape continues to shift, but innovation remains constant. Explore all the latest market insights and portfolio updates from Q3 2025.

summit fund news

 A brief wrap-up of the latest news from our Summit Fund portfolio:

• Klarna (Stockholm) - Klarna successfully completed its landmark NASDAQ IPO on September 10th, marking one of the most notable fintech listings in recent years. We backed in Klarna in 2024 through a tactical secondary investment at a time when sentiment had diverged from fundamentals. That conviction paid off: Klarna has evolved from a global BNPL leader into a full-scale fintech and shopping ecosystem, trusted by partners including Walmart, IKEA, and DoorDash. The Summit Fund was built for moments like this: flexible, decisive, and long-term. Read more in Reuters.

  
  

• Mistral AI (Paris) - Europe’s generative AI champion reached a new milestone, becoming the continent’s most valuable AI company after raising €1.3 billion from ASML at a valuation near €12 billion. The partnership links two of Europe’s most strategic tech players and underlines the growing alignment between AI and semiconductor leadership. Mistral continues to expand its model suite, including its newly launched reasoning model, Magistral, as it cements its position at the forefront of Europe’s AI ecosystem. Read more in Reuters.

• 9fin (London) - We first invested in 9fin’s Series A round in 2021 via our early-stage fund RAC VI and have doubled-down on our commitment by participating in every round since. This strong early partnership enabled us to recently increase our stake by investing via the Summit Fund, making us 9fin’s largest shareholder. Today, 9fin serves more than 170 institutional clients, including all top 10 global investment banks. With its recent acquisition of Bond Radar, the company has added two decades of proprietary data and expanded into Asia and LatAm. 9fin is on track to become the leading AI-native player in the $135 trillion debt capital markets.

  
  

• Taxfix (Berlin) - Making financial participation more accessible remains Taxfix’s north star. In a recent interview, CEO Martin Ott shared his journey from Meta to Taxfix and why reducing financial fear through user-friendly tax tools matters now more than ever. With continued momentum across Europe, Taxfix is helping millions of users take control of their finances with clarity and confidence. Read more in Business Punk.

new RAC VII investments

                       To underscore its diversified approach and capitalize on early-stage opportunities in the tech world, the Summit Fund invested in our early-stage fund, RAC VII. The fund targets the most promising upcoming software and science startups across Europe. A brief wrap-up of our recent RAC VII investments:

Synthesized 

Testing remains one of the biggest bottlenecks in enterprise software, consuming up to 80% of delivery time and 40% of QA budgets. Synthesized tackles this challenge head-on with its AI-native, agentic platform that generates lifelike, regulation-safe test data and environments in minutes instead of weeks.

We recently led Synthesized’s $20 million Series A round, joined by IQ Capital, Mercia Ventures, UBS, and Seedcamp. Founded by Nicolai Baldin, the company is redefining how global enterprises such as UBS and Deutsche Bank manage software quality, releasing applications twice as fast, cutting QA spend by 40%, and halving compliance workloads.

By automating one of the hardest problems in software engineering, Synthesized is becoming a cornerstone for reliable, faster, and more compliant enterprise development. Read more in Fortune.

DaltonTX

Drug discovery today is fragmented. Today, hundreds of models are used across a multitude of siloed platforms, departments, and individual use cases. In order to unlock the full potential of today's drug discovery AI models, this needs to change.

That’s why we were delighted to lead DaltonTx's £4M seed round together with IQ Capital and joined by Seedcamp. DaltonTx is developing an adaptive, horizontal AI platform integrated deep into the operations of pharma, biotech, and CROs, improving with every interaction in order to accelerate R&D and bring breakthrough medicines to patients faster.

Founders Garry Pairaudeau, Adrian Rossall, Anthony Bradley, and Charlotte Deane combine decades of experience from AstraZeneca, Exscientia, and Oxford with deep expertise in software engineering and machine learning.

As a next step, the founders will expand the team and deepen partnerships with pharma, biotech and CROs. Read more in Tech.eu.

RAC VII updates

                            To showcase the momentum across our VII portfolio, we’re sharing recent updates from selected portfolio companies. From scientific breakthroughs to commercial milestones, these highlights reflect the strength and diversity of the fund’s investments in Europe’s next generation of software and science startups:

Proxima Fusion 

Accelerating toward commercial fusion energy

Proxima Fusion (RAC VII) extended its record-breaking Series A by another €15M to reach €200 million in total funding, reinforcing its position as Europe’s leading fusion-energy startup. Spun out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Proxima is developing the first commercially viable stellarator power plant, combining simulation-driven, AI-enabled engineering with world-class plasma research.

The extended round welcomed new investors including CDP Venture Capital SGR, the EIC, and Brevan Howard Macro Venture Fund, marking another major milestone on Proxima’s path from lab to grid.

venture market developments

Venture activity moderated in Q3 2025 as investors continued to prioritize quality and capital efficiency. Global volumes eased slightly from earlier in the year, reflecting selective deployment in a high-rate environment, while artificial intelligence remained the dominant investment theme across all regions.

In Europe, venture capital investment reached €43.7 billion year-to-date, compared with €45.1 billion in 2024 and €48.4 billion in 2023 during the same periods. This represents a modest decline that underscores the market’s stabilization after almost twice the activity in the years 2021 and 2022. Around 7,700 deals were completed, with dealmaking focused on defensible business models and capital-efficient growth. Fundraising reached €8.3 billion across 111 funds, reflecting a more selective environment as investors focus capital on established managers and high-conviction strategies.

Exit activity remained steady, totaling €52.9 billion across roughly 780 transactions. Acquisitions and buyouts accounted for almost all liquidity events as public listings stayed scarce, just 14 IPOs so far this year - with Klarna’s IPO being one of them. Notably, AI-related exits surged to €24.3 billion, representing nearly half of Europe’s total exit value, underscoring the sector’s central role in driving venture returns.

Despite subdued fundraising, sentiment across the ecosystem continues to improve. The normalization in valuations, expanding secondary market liquidity, and ongoing strength in AI, climate technology, and deeptech suggest that venture capital is entering a more sustainable growth phase. Europe’s ecosystem, ten times larger than a decade ago, remains firmly on a long-term upward trajectory, offering robust opportunities for innovation and investment.