Venture Geopolitics Issue 51
09 June 2026
On Monday, Bending Spoons - Italy’s most valuable tech company - filed to list on the Nasdaq at around $20 billion. This is what success looks like. It’s the good outcome! But it is also worth slowing down on - because the under-discussed question isn’t why the company chose New York (that’s obvious), it is what that means for Europeans.
Luca Ferrari, CEO and Founder of Bending Spoons, built the business from Milan deliberately. He says on the Invest Like the Best podcast that he wanted it to be “a beacon for European talent,” proof that such a company “could exist here.” And he proved it: fifty acquisitions, generating revenue of $601 million in Q126 alone (+132% YoY), profitable. The company thrives here. Europe is increasingly building extraordinary companies. The problem is European citizens are not benefitting from owning a share in them.
When an American saves for retirement, money comes out of their paycheck and buys shares. The 401(k) system quietly pipes part of every payslip into the stock market - tens of trillions of dollars, automatically, every two weeks.
Europeans, in contrast, receive their pensions primarily from the state, which funds them directly from taxes, without that intermediary, investable pot.*
And so, the natural buyer of any great company’s shares is an American retirement account. Very soon, a dental hygienist in Ohio will own a slice of Italy’s best tech company, and a nurse in Milan won’t.
Right now, America is wiring even more of its citizens into the upside. SpaceX closes its books this week at a $1.8 trillion valuation, with Musk pushing to hand up to 30% of shares to retail investors, triple the norm. OpenAI, which filed its own confidential S-1 on Monday, has proposed a sovereign-wealth-style fund into which AI companies would contribute equity for distribution to American citizens, drawing support from Trump to Bernie Sanders. Trump has separately floated government stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. Squint past the politics for a moment, and notice the shape of the debate at least: America is arguing about how to give its people more equity in the AI age.
Play this forward and the implications for the two economies are not subtle. If the AI boom pays out the way the $3.6 trillion listing pipeline implies, the gains will arrive as capital returns, not wages. America has plumbed its households directly into those returns. Europe has plumbed its households into state promises.
That is to say: the US is funding its pensions on capital and Europe is funding its pensions on labour. On a nation state level, there is a capital class and a labour class. In the age of AI, that may not be a trade Europe wants to make.
*Yes, this is simplified. America has Social Security, Europe has funded schemes, and Norway is Norway. But directionally, the point holds.
IPOs / Publics
Last week saw Nasdaq tumble 4.2% as chip & memory stocks sold off after stronger-than-expected US jobs data triggered Fed rate hike bets. Nvidia fell 6% & Intel 11%. On Monday, chipmakers rebounded sharply with Intel up 11.1%, Micron 9.9% & Marvell 9.6%. Analysts warn positioning remains vulnerable to volatility amid upcoming mega-IPOs (incl SpaceX) (here & here)
Goldman Sachs projects SpaceX’s AI revenue will surge 100-fold to $322B by 2030 from $3.2B in 2025, as the company targets a record $75B IPO at $1.75T valuation - though Morningstar values it at just $780B amid questions over AI unit economics (here)
SpaceX is preparing for up to 30% to be allocated to retail investors - the largest retail allocation ever attempted in a megacap listing - reflecting Musk’s preference for individual over institutional investors whilst leveraging his 240M X followers (here)
OpenAI filed confidentially for IPO just over a week after Anthropic’s filing - secondary markets value Anthropic at $1T vs OpenAI’s $880B (here)
Bending Spoons filed for US IPO after acquiring AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote & Vimeo for $3.3B, doubling revenue to $1.3B in 2025 whilst swinging to $120M operating profit in Q1 2026 (here)
Quantinuum raised $1.68B at $15.6B in upsized US IPO, pricing above range at $60/share amid 20x oversubscription (here)
Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky stands to build a £76B fortune if the fintech giant achieves its target ~£200B IPO valuation within 2 years, making him the UK’s richest person at £20.4B already (here). Meanwhile, Revolut weighs secondary share sale at $115B valuation (up from $75B in November) (here)
Google will pay SpaceX $920M monthly for AI compute capacity through June 2029, using 110,000 Nvidia GPUs housed in SpaceX’s data centres to support surging demand for Gemini Enterprise - marking SpaceX’s second major infrastructure deal (along with Anthropic) as it monetises xAI assets ahead of its IPO (here)
Meta is considering tens of billions equity raise to fund AI infrastructure, following Google’s $85B share offering, as capex set to hit $145B this year (here)
Big Dogs
Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, its most capable public model, alongside Claude Mythos 5 - the same underlying system but with safeguards lifted for vetted cybersecurity partners. Fable 5 uses classifiers to route risky requests to Opus 4.8, affecting <5% of sessions, whilst showing state-of-the-art performance on coding, science & finance benchmarks (here)
Anthropic expanded Claude Mythos access to 150 organisations across 15+ countries including critical infrastructure operators in power, healthcare & communications (here)
Anthropic has embedded engineers inside the NSA to deploy its Mythos AI model for offensive cyber operations (here)
Anthropic reports 80% of its new production code is now written by Claude, triggering an 8x increase in code output per engineer (here)
Anthropic called for global AI labs to consider pausing development, warning that models are approaching ‘recursive self-improvement’ capability where AI systems could enhance themselves without human oversight (here)
OpenAI has proposed a sovereign-wealth-style fund where AI companies would contribute equity stakes for distribution to American citizens, drawing unexpected bipartisan support from Trump to Bernie Sanders amid growing public anxiety about AI’s impact on jobs (here)
OpenAI is preparing the biggest ChatGPT overhaul since launch, transforming it into a ‘superapp’ combining coding tools & AI agents as the company pivots toward business customers ahead of its planned IPO - with executives declaring ‘chat is dead’ & viewing ChatGPT as a gateway to higher-value products like Codex (here)
DeepSeek is raising $7.4B in its maiden funding round at $52-59B valuation from investors including Tencent ($1.4B), CATL ($700M) & China’s national AI fund, marking China’s push for AI self-sufficiency amid US export constraints limiting access to frontier silicon (here)
Venture Capital & Finance
A viral X thread sparked founders sharing VC horror stories, with Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince naming Sequoia for rejecting his company over gender bias & alleging Vinod Khosla suggested he fire co-founders, whilst multiple founders reported VCs sleeping through pitches then still offering term sheets (here)
Coatue’s Thomas Laffont reveals $100B ‘centacorns’ have a 31% chance of reaching $1T valuations, dramatically higher than the 8% odds for unicorns reaching decacorn status, as AI acceleration drives unprecedented value creation speed with multiple companies hitting $1T in weeks rather than years (here)
Benchmark raised $2B across two funds, including its first $1.25B growth vehicle, breaking from its traditional $425M fund ceiling to compete in capital-intensive AI markets where its small cheques have left it sidelined from OpenAI, Anthropic & other foundation models (here)
Kindred Ventures raised $355M across new funds, driven by strong AI sector performance that helped grow their previous $200M fund to nearly $960M gross fair market value (here)
Merantix Capital closed a €103M fund to invest in 40 early-stage AI startups across Europe, targeting logistics, manufacturing, energy & healthcare - backed by Union Investment, Jungheinrich & corporates seeking AI transformation partnerships (here)
Version One Ventures raised $108M across Fund V ($78M) & Opportunities Fund III ($30M) to back pre-seed & seed startups in AI, robotics, deep tech & biology (here)
Eurazeo closed its largest direct lending fund at $4.5B, despite challenging private debt fundraising conditions that saw fund count & capital decline globally in 2025 (here)
Cliffwater’s $31B private credit fund capped redemptions at 5% after investors sought to withdraw 17% of shares, highlighting ongoing liquidity pressures across the $1.8T private credit market (here)
Blackstone’s $79B flagship private-credit fund capped redemptions at 5% after investors requested $4.4B withdrawals (10% of fund) in Q2 (here)
Regulation
Trump proposes new tariffs of at least 10% on 60 trading partners under Section 301 investigations, citing forced labour concerns - Canada, Mexico, EU, Taiwan & UK face 10% levies while China, India, Japan & South Korea get 12.5%, marking his biggest protectionist move since earlier tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court (here)
Police.AI centre halted use of AI systems for court statements at multiple UK forces after accuracy concerns, warning that criminal justice applications must meet ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ standards before deployment (here)
New York lawmakers passed a 1-year moratorium on new large data centres (20+ megawatts), the first statewide ban of its kind if Governor Hochul signs by December. The law requires environmental impact studies & public hearings for future projects, reflecting growing opposition to data centre expansion (here)
Federal judge struck down Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee as unlawful taxation, ruling the administration lacked Congressional authority to impose what amounted to a tax on skilled worker visas (here)
Venture Geopolitics
Trump floated taking US government equity stakes in major AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic & xAI as polling shows mounting voter concerns about AI within his Maga base ahead of November midterms (here)
Americans show lowest support for AI data centre construction among 15 major economies (26% vs 74% in Nigeria), as grassroots opposition blocks $156B+ in US projects since 2025 (here)
European Commission unveiled the European Technological Sovereignty Package, including Chips Act 2.0 & Cloud and AI Development Act, aiming to triple EU data centre capacity over 5-7 years whilst reducing dependency on third-country suppliers for semiconductors, cloud & AI infrastructure (here)
UK unveiled a £1.1B AI hardware plan including £750M for a national supercomputer & £400M for next-generation chips, plus record £150M British Business Bank commitment to Playground Global’s UK AI hardware fund (here)
Cosine secured backing from BT, Lloyds, NatWest, BAE Systems & other UK institutions to co-design Lumen Sovereign, Britain’s first sovereign frontier AI model trained entirely on Isambard-AI supercomputer using £500M government compute allocation, targeting deployment by end-2026 for air-gapped environments in defence & regulated sectors (here)
EU to release €16B in frozen funds to Hungary following Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat & replacement by Péter Magyar, who supports equality & has allowed Budapest Pride to proceed after last year’s government ban drew 200,000 defiant marchers (here)
UK Government Digital Service replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen for GOV.UK Pay processing across local authorities, police & armed forces - a £25.3M contract covering 17% of payments but 70% of organisations using the service (here)
In a notable shift from its "American Dynamism" messaging, a16z has published a run of articles centring on "global" & "allies," whilst restructuring operations to help portfolio companies scale internationally & court sovereign partners. The pivot tracks European capitals increasingly seeking to diversify away from US tech dependence (here)
Xi Jinping visited North Korea for the first time in 7 years, seeking to reassert China as Kim Jong-un’s primary partner amid Pyongyang’s strengthening ties with Russia following their 2-year-old mutual defence pact that has revived North Korea’s economy through weapons & troop exchanges (here)
Secret Cabinet Office report reveals £28B of UK taxpayer funds were wrongly given to terrorists, criminals & hostile states between 2015-2021, including Covid relief to Islamic State & grants to Russian-linked companies - buried by previous government to avoid political embarrassment (here)
Pentagon added Alibaba, Baidu, BYD & Unitree to its military-linked Chinese companies list, bringing total to 188 entities & potentially restricting US business ties; Alibaba & Baidu strongly contest inclusion, calling it baseless & threatening legal action (here)
ASML employees threaten to boycott internal event where Elon Musk is invited to speak about AI & semiconductors, citing concerns over his perceived Nazi sympathies & anti-European stance conflicting with company values - ASML defends the invitation as relevant to its Terafab chip factory project collaboration with Tesla, SpaceX & Intel (here)
Strategic Sectors
AI
AMD committed £2B over 5 years to UK AI infrastructure & research, partnering with Imperial College London, Cambridge University & Oriole Networks on quantum computing, AI supercomputers (Zenith & Sunrise), & photonic networking - aligning with UK’s AI sovereignty strategy as government pushes domestic compute capacity (here)
Mercor (AI training startup valued at $10B) now spends more on AI tokens than employee salaries across functions like recruiting & project management, with CEO predicting most enterprises will spend more on compute than headcount within 5 years (here)
According to Pär-Jörgen Pärson (Northzone), European AI startups face three critical vulnerabilities: dependency on subsidised US compute that won’t last, risk of being made redundant as OpenAI & Anthropic expand capabilities, and disproportionate exposure to capital market corrections given reliance on US funding - with ‘nice-to-have’ applications most at risk whilst deeply embedded sector-specific tools may survive (here)
BCG study shows 74% of white-collar workers now use AI regularly (up 23 points year-over-year), with 40% saving 1+ work days weekly, but companies struggle to convert efficiency gains into measurable value as workers spend more time managing AI than doing actual work (here)
Cloudflare reports automated agents now generate 57.5% of internet traffic vs 42.5% human traffic, crossing this threshold faster than CEO Matthew Prince expected (had predicted end of 2027). The shift represents AI agents handling tasks like price comparison, flight booking & web scraping, though humans still dominate actual engagement time (here)
Notable deals:
Stockholm-based Lovable (AI app/website generation) in talks to raise funding at $12B valuation, nearly doubling from $6.6B in December after hitting $400M ARR in under 2 years - part of fierce competition in AI coding with Cursor (SpaceX acquiring for $60B), Replit ($9B), & Anthropic’s Claude Code ($2.5B ARR) (here)
Moonshot AI is seeking up to $2B in new funding at $30B valuation, marking a seven-fold increase from December’s $4B - the Beijing startup’s third financing in 6 mo as Chinese AI labs race for capital with $200M+ annual revenue from its Kimi chatbot (here)
PhysicsX raised $300M led by Temasek at $2.4B, more than doubling its valuation from $1B in under a year - the London-based AI start-up uses physics simulation for manufacturing & defence applications, expanding rapidly amid data centre infrastructure demand (here)
Cybersecurity
US federal commission recommends establishing a dedicated military cyber branch with 11,000 personnel (5,000 National Guard, 6,000 civilians) at $11B startup cost, requiring congressional approval to become the 7th uniformed service alongside Space Force (here)
Five Eyes intelligence alliance warns Chinese military operatives are increasingly using LinkedIn & professional networks to pose as recruiters from consultancies & think tanks, targeting Western military & government personnel for espionage recruitment (here)
Russia temporarily shut down surveillance systems protecting Putin after Israel used AI to analyse Iranian traffic cameras & pinpoint Khamenei’s location for assassination - demonstrating how new AI tools can rapidly search millions of hours of footage to identify behavioural patterns & turn surveillance networks into espionage vulnerabilities (here)
Defence
Palantir won a £9M UK government contract to manage firearms licensing systems across England & Wales, handling gun, bomb & poison records for 43 police forces - adding to its growing portfolio of controversial UK public sector deals worth over £500M (here)
UK Chief of Defence Staff warns threats are at Cold War levels as Russian aircraft increasingly breach British airspace, but the Government’s defence investment plan remains unpublished after multiple delays despite a £28B budget shortfall - welfare spending now exceeds defence spending by 5x (here)
Starmer plans £15B defence spending boost funded by 1% capital budget cuts across Whitehall departments, with energy & transport facing largest reductions - highlighting trade-offs between infrastructure investment & military readiness as NATO summit approaches (here)
Trump requests record $1.5T defence budget for 2027 (40% increase), offset by $73B domestic cuts including programmes serving minorities & the poor, as Iran war drives military spending to highest level since Korean War at 4.5% of GDP (here)
HMS Prince of Wales, the Royal Navy’s £3B flagship carrier, broke down again in Norwegian waters due to recurring propeller shaft issues, forcing emergency docking in Stavanger during a NATO Arctic deployment meant to deter Russian aggression - the latest in a series of mechanical failures since 2021 (here)
Germany withdrew from the Franco-German-Spanish €100B Future Combat Air System fighter jet programme, with Chancellor Merz proposing to continue only the ‘combat cloud’ software architecture connecting aircraft & sensors - undermining Europe’s largest defence project as the continent seeks to re-arm against Russia (here)
Switzerland considers Franco-Italian SAMP-T air defence system as alternative to US Patriot deliveries delayed until 2032, with officials prioritising European interoperability whilst maintaining strong US ties (here)
Notable deals:
Iceye (Finnish-Polish satellite imagery) raised €1B led by General Atlantic at €10B valuation, 4x its December round, as European defence tech attracts massive investment - company shifted from civilian to military focus after Ukraine invasion & now builds synthetic aperture radar satellites for European defence ministries (here)
Allen Control Systems (autonomous turret maker) raised $200M Series B at $2.2B from Disney veteran Kevin Mayer’s Smash Capital, which hired Trump advisor David Urban as operating partner - ACS has $120M+ US contracts for its Bullfrog drone-killer platform (here)
Crypto / Stablecoins
Sam Bankman-Fried, serving 25 years for fraud after FTX’s collapse, formally applied for a Trump pardon despite the president stating he has no intention of pardoning the former crypto exchange founder (here)
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned that allowing crypto firms to pay high yields on stablecoins without bank-level regulations could harm the US economy, saying ‘if you want to be a bank, become a bank’. The comments come as Coinbase pulled support for a stalled crypto market structure bill over restrictions on stablecoin yield programmes (here)
JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America & Wells Fargo plan to launch a tokenized deposit network in 2027 via the Clearing House, connecting traditional payment rails with digital asset infrastructure to compete with crypto firms gaining ground under Trump’s presidency (here)
Robotics
Notable deal:
Agile Robots (German humanoid & warehouse robotics) in talks to raise $800M with SoftBank contributing $300M+, as global robotics investment tripled to $27.6B in 2025 amid AI-physical world convergence (here)
Quantum
Microsoft unveiled Majorana 2, a new quantum chip designed with AI that uses lead instead of aluminium, claiming 1,000-fold performance improvements & targeting commercial quantum systems by 2029 - matching IBM’s timeline as tech giants race China in quantum supremacy (here)
Notable deal:
Oxford Quantum Circuits raised £260M ($350M) Series C led by Bullhound Capital, marking Europe’s largest private quantum computing round & the continent’s fourth quantum megaround this year as the sector attracts commercial interest from finance & defence customers (here)