welcome to our june newsletter

June has been a bumper month for redalpine and our portfolio! We saw a record-breaking Series A funding round for Proxima Fusion, welcomed new investments on board (hi team DejaBlue and Lyceum!), and celebrated milestones for Apaleo, Basecamp Research, Klarna, Knowunity, Magdrive, and Mistral AI. Read on for all of our news and highlights this month... 

portfolio funding

proxima fusion raises €130m series a to make commercial fusion a reality

We’re proud to share a major milestone from the redalpine portfolio: Proxima Fusion (RAC VII) raised a record-breaking €130M Series A, the largest private fusion round in Europe to date. Spun out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Proxima is developing the first commercially viable stellarator fusion power plant. Today, their simulation-driven, AI-enabled engineering approach allows Proxima to handle the stellarator design, solving one of fusion’s most complex engineering challenges and creating a path to clean, safe, and reliable fusion energy.

We pre-empted Proxima’s seed round in 2023, recognizing early that stellarators were crossing a critical inflection point. Since then, we’ve worked closely with the team to support their bold vision of making Europe the global leader in fusion energy. More about our investment hypothesis here.

With over €185M raised to date, Proxima is not just building a power plant - they’re building what could become Europe’s first trillion-dollar deep tech company. Read more about the latest funding in Bloomberg.

knowunity raises €27m series b to accelerate global expansion

Knowunity (RAC VI) is reimagining how students learn. Today, more than 20 million learners across 15 countries rely on their hyper-personalized, AI-powered app - designed to make high-quality education more affordable and accessible than ever. Now, with a €27M Series B investment (one of Europe's largest EdTech funding rounds), Knowunity is set to accelerate its global growth, with a focus on Europe, the U.S., and Asia, and further enhance its AI learning companion.

The round was led by XAnge, with participation from Portfolion, Isomer, Project A, Educapital, and we doubled-down on our support. When we first invested in their Series A round, Knowunity was just a small team of ambitious (and very young!) founders with a bold vision - today, they are one of the fastest-growing EdTech companies in the world. Read more in German in Handelsblatt or English in Tech.eu.

lyceum raises €10.3m pre-seed to build europe’s sovereign gpu cloud

Today’s breakthroughs hinge on massive GPU power. Yet for many of Europe’s developers, researchers, and startups, cloud infrastructure remains slow, complex, and controlled outside the region. Our new portfolio company, Zurich and Berlin-based Lyceum (RACVII), is changing this by delivering Europe’s first sovereign, user-centric GPU cloud. With instant deployment, intelligent workload scheduling, and transparent pricing, the platform strips away complexity while anchoring all infrastructure in EU-based, renewable-powered data centers. 

We're proud to lead Lyceum's €10.3M pre-seed funding round, with participation from 10x Founders, and to welcome co-founders Magnus Grünewald and Maximilian Niroomand on board with their deep experience in AI, infrastructure, and systems engineering.

Read more in Tech.eu. 

dejablue raises $8m seed funding to transform the energy market

DejaBlue (RACVII) is building a vertically integrated platform that connects EV charging, solar, and energy retail - turning energy flexibility into a strategic asset for commercial real estate and fleet operators. We're delighted to welcome DejaBlue to the redalpine family by leading their $8M seed round, with participation from Zeno Ventures and Bpifrance.

Based in Paris and founded by Parker Spielman and Baptiste Richard, who have deep operational experience at Uber, Google Fi, and Lyft, DejaBlue helps businesses reduce costs and stabilize the grid by shifting loads to times of abundant renewable energy. With a growing footprint and highly efficient team, DejaBlue is uniquely positioned to reshape the energy market through load optimization, demand response, and a seamless end-to-end customer experience that no other provider offers today.

Read more in French in Les Echos or English in Tech.eu. 

portfolio news

The latest updates from our portfolio, in no particular order:

• Apaleo (RACIII) was named the winner of Phocuswright’s Innovation Platform program Launch: EMEA. As the world’s leading travel research authority, Phocuswright recognizes companies driving meaningful innovation in travel and hospitality. This award highlights Apaleo’s industry-leading API-first, open platform approach that brings flexible, modern infrastructure into hospitality. Read more in PhocusWire.

  
  

• Basecamp Research (RACVII) unveiled BaseData™, the world’s largest biological sequence database - containing 9.8 billion new protein sequences and expanding the known tree of life by over 10x. To put this into perspective: each month, BCR adds twice as many genes to its database as exist in total across all of humanities public gene databases combined. In partnership with NVIDIA, Basecamp is now training generative foundation models on this unique dataset that promise breakthroughs in drug discovery, synthetic biology, and beyond. Read more in the FT. 

  
  

• Klarna (Summit Fund) is taking its next big step as a digital financial assistant with the launch of its own mobile phone service in the US, powered by Gigs and AT&T’s network. The US is just the beginning, Klarna has plans to launch in the UK and Germany soon. Read more in The Verge.

  
  

• Magdrive (RACVII) is taking flight - literally. This month, Magdrive launched its first plasma thruster, Rogue, into orbit. Backed by the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency, this in-orbit demonstration marks the culmination of four years of dedicated development. Rogue uses solid metal to generate powerful bursts of plasma thrust - a novel approach that promises to transform how we power spacecraft. Read more in the BBC. 

  
  

• Mistral AI (Summit Fund) launched Magistral, their first reasoning model. Magistral is designed to excel in mathematics, coding, and multilingual logic, especially in European languages. The release marks another strong step in Europe’s growing momentum in generative AI. Read more in CNBC.

what we're reading

What’s next in AI: Beyond scaling and into systems-level breakthroughs - Nathan Lambert on Interconnects

Why it matters: The piece highlights an important shift in how AI progress is being defined. With fewer major model releases, attention appears to be moving away from sheer scale and toward advances in systems-level design. OpenAI’s o3, for instance, seems to suggest that real-world performance can be significantly improved through reinforcement learning and infrastructure refinement, rather than just increasing parameter counts. Similarly, agent models like Claude Code demonstrate how post-training iterations may lead to notable gains in reliability and functionality. While scaling has historically dominated the narrative, we’re observing a growing emphasis on orchestration, adaptability, and grounded use cases.