Sifted: European chip startups raise €3.25 billion this year, nearly four times last year's total

TechFlow news, November 12: According to Sifted's data-based statistics, European chip startups have raised €3.25 billion in equity funding year-to-date in 2026, nearly four times the €827 million raised in all of 2025 and the highest level on record for Sifted. This wave of funding has mainly flowed to startups competing with NVIDIA in the inference segment. For example, UK-based photonic chip company Olix completed a $312 million Series B round in August at a $3.3 billion valuation, the largest chip funding round in Europe to date. Its approach replaces traditional HBM and copper interconnects with photonic interconnects and other methods to reduce large-model inference costs. Sifted noted that European chip funding had long been depressed, with only €827 million raised in all of 2025; as model deployment scales up and inference becomes a major expense for cloud providers and enterprises, capital is returning to the sector.

Source: TechFlow