Vsquared Ventures

🚀 Want to build AI tools that get used every day by deep tech founders and a deep tech VC? Then this is for you. We are looking for a Data & AI Engineer Intern to join Vsquared Ventures at our T55 deep tech hub in Munich and work directly with our Head of Data & AI, Christian as part of his team. You will help build the systems behind how we invest and support our portfolio: connecting new data sources, improving internal tools, building AI agents and workflows, and turning ideas from our team and founders into things people actually use. Expect to work across Python, SQL, data pipelines, LLMs, agents and full-stack development, while getting a front-row seat to how deep tech companies are built, how a VC fund operates, and how AI can make both better. So if you have recently graduated or are currently studying Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering or a related field, or something similar and have real coding experience (side projects, thesis, research, open-source work), this is a great opportunity for you. Some hands-on experience with data engineering, whether from internships, working-student roles, your thesis or personal projects, and having built with LLMs and agents (you have used model APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI or similar)) would be the perfect foundation. We are especially excited about people who already love building. 📍 Munich ⏳ 6 months, full-time 📅 Rolling start 🇩🇪🇬🇧 German & English Interested? Check out the role and apply here: https://lnkd.in/dT_5ehW6 Know someone who should see this? Then send it their way.

StandardX raises £10m seed to build the world’s first isotope refinery. ⚛️ Some of the most important advances of our time depend on some of the rarest materials on Earth: isotopes. They underpin modern medicine, are a critical input for fusion energy and power a growing range of industrial applications. Yet across all of these fields, supply has not kept pace with demand. Nowhere is that more urgent today than in medicine. Isotopes are essential to cancer diagnostics and treatment and increasingly critical to the development of next-generation therapies. But production relies on a fragmented network of ageing facilities and capacity-constrained machines, and some isotopes are already so scarce that clinical trials for new cancer treatments have been delayed or paused. StandardX is building the infrastructure to change that. Founded by nuclear engineers Richard and Ross, the company is developing a proprietary accelerator-based isotope refinery: a flexible platform capable of producing a broad portfolio of isotopes at commercial scale, rather than relying on infrastructure built around individual isotopes. That flexibility becomes increasingly important as radiopharma develops. The isotopes needed for the next generation of cancer treatments will not necessarily be the ones hospitals rely on today, and production infrastructure needs to be able to move with scientific advances. The same flexibility extends well beyond medicine. StandardX’s platform is designed to produce isotopes for fusion energy, including tritium, one of the sector’s most critical and scarce inputs, as well as for other advanced industrial applications. The same underlying platform could therefore become critical infrastructure across several frontier industries, not just one. As our General Partner Lise puts it: “Radiopharma is approaching an extraordinary inflection point, but isotope supply simply hasn’t kept pace. StandardX is building a fundamentally flexible production platform that can move with the science.” We are excited to lead StandardX’s £10m seed alongside East X Ventures, with firstminute capital, UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund [UKI2S], Brevan Howard Macro Venture and Geometry joining the round. The first isotopes are expected to reach a medical research partner in 2027, ahead of industrial-scale production from 2029. Starting from its first site in London, StandardX has the potential to become critical infrastructure for the next era of radiopharma, and ultimately for industries far beyond it. Congratulations to Richard, Ross and the entire team. We are looking forward to building this together. Watch the launch video to find out more about StandardX: https://lnkd.in/ep4pTq-e

A new factory and a major next chapter for ABZ Innovation and production capabilities right here in Europe. 🛸 Last week, our portfolio company ABZ Innovation, a European developer and manufacturer of heavy-duty drone systems, officially opened its new production facility in Szentendre, Hungary. The new facility will eventually have the capacity to produce 3,500 drones per year in two shifts a significant step as ABZ scales its agricultural and industrial drone platform to meet growing international demand. And their ambition goes well beyond Europe, the company is scaling across the globe. The U.S. is already one of ABZ’s largest market, accounting for more than a third of the 600 drones the company plans to sell this year. Next up: establishing production in the U.S. as ABZ builds out its international manufacturing footprint. Vsquared GP Thomas was on the ground to celebrate the milestone with founders Károly Ludvigh, Gyula Adam Torok and the entire ABZ team. Congratulations! Full write-up in Bloomberg: https://lnkd.in/dTNx8xGe

20 people. 6 products built. A group of VC operators that came together to turn ideas into real products during the second edition of our VC Builders Circle - a joint initiative from our Data & AI Manager Christian Hennings and Aliénor Bossé from Speedinvest. The builds focused on three areas: data-driven deal sourcing, portfolio pulse, and network intelligence. The results: → An expert discovery tool searching five years of academic publications and ranking researchers by citations and journal quality, surfacing experts that standard search would miss. → A deal flow filter processing 300+ weekly signals against a fund’s hard and soft thesis criteria, sending only relevant opportunities to the CRM and tracking which contacts generate the strongest deal flow. → A pre-founder identification tool scanning university subdomains to classify deep-tech researchers and detect role changes and research pivots before anything is announced. → A portfolio pulse dashboard flagging companies that may need attention and surfacing three potential pathways — follow-on financing, strategic M&A, or distressed sale — alongside signals on relevant buyers. → A network intelligence tool mapping connection strength, finding the warmest path to a contact, and answering questions like: “Who do we know in the deep-sea mining space?” → A deal-source scoring tool learning which contacts consistently generate the highest-quality opportunities. But the conversations went beyond what can be built and also focused on data quality, GDPR and responsible data use, and why the logic and structure behind a tool matter more than building something simply because AI makes it possible. A takeaway from edition #2: better VC tooling starts with better thinking, about the workflow, the data, and the decisions the tool is actually meant to improve. A special thank you to our fitting sponsor AMD and Victor Seidler for supporting the Builders Circle and providing prizes for the teams taking the top three spots. 🏆 And a big thank you to everyone who joined, built, challenged assumptions, and shared what they learned and to Christian and Aliénor for bringing the second VC Builders Circle to life. More building to come very soon, so if you are a VC operator looking for a community to build with, reach out!

THE DEEP BRIEF I “Every single step you take is just one more piece of the puzzle.” (Chris Hadfield, Astronaut) I Isar Aerospace is in orbit. Now comes the bigger opportunity. On 5 September, Isar Aerospace launched Spectrum from Andøya, Norway, and successfully reached orbit on its second attempt. For the first time, a European commercial launch company has reached orbit from continental Europe. Everything worked end to end, from launch and MaxQ through stage separation and second-stage ignition to orbital insertion and payload deployment. Vehicles 3–7 are already in production at Isar’s 40,000 m² factory near Munich, designed to assemble up to 40 vehicles per year. The focus now shifts from proving the system to scaling it and the opportunity goes beyond launch capacity alone. Europe has the chance to turn space sovereignty into an export. We think of this as sovereignty as a service: launch technology developed in Europe, but deployed locally, with infrastructure assembled and operated in the customer’s own country. In July, Isar signed an agreement with Maritime Launch Services to establish a dedicated Spectrum launch complex at Spaceport Nova Scotia, with the first launch targeted for as early as 2028. Canada could become a blueprint for other allied nations looking for sovereign access to space without having to develop a launch system from scratch. The timing matters. Satellites have become smaller and more diverse much faster than the launch industry has adapted, creating an underserved payload class and pushing the market towards greater segmentation. Spectrum was built for precisely this gap. For Europe, this creates an opportunity that is much larger than building another rocket: to develop the launch capacity Europe itself needs while exporting a strategic capability to partners around the world. We first backed Isar in 2018, at the very beginning. Eight years later, they’re in orbit. Reaching it was a major piece of the puzzle; what comes next is scaling the industrial capacity, launch cadence and infrastructure around Spectrum. We explore what this milestone means for Isar, European launch and sovereignty as a service in our latest Deep Brief: https://lnkd.in/eFvtH3Cx

Arlequin AI raises €28m Series A to build a fundamentally different architecture for AI, based on topological neural networks, for real decision-making, 🧠 Most of the capital in AI today is chasing the same architecture, hoping that more parameters, more data and more compute will keep moving the frontier. Arlequin AI is taking a different path. Hugo Micheron and Antoine JARDIN are developing topological neural networks (TNNs), models designed to learn from the structure and relationships within data and capture complex, multi-way interactions at scale. This is AI for environments where getting an answer isn’t enough, such as governments and enterprises where decisions need to understand why a system reached a conclusion and trace it back to the underlying evidence, while removing bias. The applications are already very real: security and defence, criminal and terrorist network investigations, fraud and money laundering, information integrity, cybersecurity and AI system security. In a counterterrorism investigation, for example, Arlequin can analyse millions of data points across seized devices to surface connections between people, locations, communications and events that would otherwise be extremely difficult to identify. Arlequin’s technology is already being used by governments and large organisations across Europe. Fundamental science is directly powering a product with real-world traction, a combination that remains rare in European AI. Congratulations to the entire Arlequin AI team on their €28m Series A, co-led by redalpine and OTB Ventures, with Vsquared joining after we led the seed round last summer, and Bpifrance’s Defence Innovation Fund, 10x Founders, and Xavier Niel also joining the round. We are excited to continue working with them as they build one of them and are looking forward to seeing it applied even more! Europe’s opportunity in AI is not to replicate architectures developed elsewhere, it is to invent new ones.

Ground A raises €9.1m pre-seed to scale Europe's new generation of counter-drone defence.🛡️ Founded only early this year, the team has within six months closed more than €9m in funding and moved its software- and laser-based counter-drone system, the GA 1000, from prototype into testing and validation. Next step: scaling. This speed matters. Drones have fundamentally changed the economics of modern warfare. Europe needs counter-drone systems that are not only technologically superior, but cost-efficient and mobile, especially when geopolitical uncertainty is only growing. Ground A has developed an industrial, highly scalable solution to this. The GA 1000 brings together radar and sensors, computer vision, proprietary AI and precise laser effects in a compact, mobile system. Its open architecture means it can integrate into existing air-defence and command-and-control systems rather than becoming another isolated solution. It is only the first product, as Ground A is building a broader counter-drone and air-defence platform, with modular series production in Germany already being prepared. We are proud to lead the round, joined by Quantum Systems, Global Resilience Innovation Fund (GRIF), Elephant Lake Capital, Robin Capital, ABACON, Leblon Capital and OVNI Capital. Deep tech only matters when it gets deployed. Ground A has the technology, the ambition and the execution speed to build a critical part of Europe’s future defence infrastructure. Congratulations to Dr. Tobias B., Daniel Hariri, Roland Spiegelhalder and the entire Ground A team on these incredible milestones and we are looking forward to all that comes next.

We made history. On just our second flight, we became the first commercial space company from Europe to deliver satellites into orbit. Today marks the beginning of a new chapter for European spaceflight. Mission 'Onward and Upward' lifted off from our dedicated launch complex at Andøya Space in Norway at 10:12 p.m. CEST and deployed payloads into orbit. Read more: https://lnkd.in/efKCt4e7