Europe

Agile Robots, a Munich maker of industrial robot arms, hands, mobile and humanoid robots and the AI models that run them, said on November 12 it closed a $500 million Series F at an $8.5 billion valuation. SoftBank Group led, with Nvidia, Hitachi Group and T.Capital among other investors, taking total funding to $2 billion. The company says it will use the money to expand in the United States and add production capacity, including in Germany. Quartz, citing Bloomberg, reports that about $800 million had been under discussion in June.

Helsing unveiled Clarity on November 11, an agent-based intelligence platform that combines sensor feeds, drone and satellite imagery, written reports and open sources to identify military assets and prepare the information needed to engage them, with an operator approving each step. Helsing says it runs on customer-owned infrastructure and was built in Europe. Reuters reports the launch puts Helsing into a market led by Palantir's Maven and that Helsing did not say whether any military already uses Clarity.

Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics 2.5 on November 10, a vision-language-action model it says achieves 30% to 100% higher task success than previous baselines and runs 20% to 30% faster, and that let Apptronik's Apollo 2 humanoid sort automotive brackets on Mercedes-Benz production lines with a 96% success rate in a proof of concept. It also released ASIMOV-Jailbreak, an open benchmark for robot jailbreaks. The model is rolling out to partners only, and all figures are DeepMind's.

In the first generative AI case at the EU's top court, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar said on November 3 that a chatbot such as Google's Gemini can infringe press publishers' rights when it reaches articles unlawfully, for example past a paywall, or reuses their wording so closely that readers no longer need the original. He said training on such content is, as a rule, allowed under the EU's text and data mining exception. The opinion is not binding.

Meta raised $15 billion in a five-part U.S. dollar bond sale on November 3, Reuters reported, its first debt sale in six months. Orders reached about $58 billion, but the 30-year bond priced 2.2 percentage points over Treasuries, close to 0.9 points more than a similar bond in April, according to reports. Meta's first euro-denominated notes could follow as soon as November 4, taking the deal above $20 billion. The sale comes days after S&P moved Meta's outlook to negative over its AI spending.

Documentation platform GitBook says it was hit by 'a sophisticated, highly targeted attack using AI agents' that gave an attacker access to some of its infrastructure credentials on November 2. It took its app offline, revoked all personal API tokens and says integration tokens, Git Sync secrets, API tokens and visitors' questions to GitBook Assistant may have been accessed. It has found no evidence that customer content was modified.

Apple said on November 3 that any developer can now connect an app to Siri AI through App Intents, in a Developer Preview in the iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, macOS 27.3 and visionOS 27.3 betas. Siri AI can use personal context, onscreen awareness and natural language to run an app's custom actions, and developers can build 'skills' that combine several actions. It reaches customers in a few months, App Store submissions open in spring, and Siri AI remains unavailable in the EU on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

OpenAI and Google said on October 30 that they will honor a shared robots.txt policy token, __usage_ai-training, that lets a site state one AI-training preference for every participating provider. The Verge reports that Microsoft and Anthropic have also committed, with Anthropic already supporting it. The token comes from an individual IETF Internet-Draft by Anthropic's Kevin Kelley that has no formal standing yet, and the draft says it is not a directive for crawling. OpenAI says it will implement it in the coming months; Google aims for 2027.

Cohere announced the initial close of a Series E round targeting up to C$7 billion at a C$35.7 billion valuation, led by Germany's Schwarz Group. Canada's government will invest up to C$1.6 billion in stages, tied to commitments that Cohere create 1,000 Canadian jobs, spend C$1.7 billion on Canadian compute by 2030 and keep its headquarters in Canada. Cohere has not said how much is committed so far.

Mistral released a Responses API in public preview on October 28 for building agents on its hosted chat models, including Mistral Large 4. Its documentation says the API uses the OpenAI Responses format and returns the model's answer, reasoning and function calls as separate output items. It is stateless: the developer's application keeps the conversation history and resends it with each request. Function calling in the preview covers functions the client runs itself.

From Monday, October 26, staff at Sweden's Government Offices, which include the Prime Minister's Office and the ministries, can no longer open the browser versions of ChatGPT and Claude on work computers. Staff are directed to Microsoft Copilot, which the office says it reviewed and secured further, and staff can still reach both models through an internal platform called Intric. Its director of digitalisation warned that using AI services without an agreement can affect information security, and the internal route runs through a Swedish-hosted platform.

OpenAI and Poland's NASK National Research Institute have signed an agreement to explore joint AI safety and security research through NASK's AI Safety Research Center, which serves as Poland's AI safety institute. Both sides point to earlier work: CERT Polska, which sits inside NASK, used OpenAI's cyber-capable models through Daybreak to help find six vulnerabilities in MikroTik RouterOS. The agreement's terms, funding and model access were not published.

Updated Nov. 8: Meta has paused planned updates to its Commercial Terms and three related sets of terms, so they will not take effect on November 20, a spokesperson told Reuters on November 6; existing terms remain in effect while Meta consults stakeholders, and no new date was given. Earlier: Britain's Competition and Markets Authority opened a Competition Act investigation into the terms on Oct. 30, which Meta says has no grounds, after Meta had pushed the start date from October 30 to November 20 following publisher objections.

Legal-AI company Legora raised a $550 million Series E at an $8.8 billion post-money valuation led by Atreides Management, up from $5.6 billion at its previous round, and says annual recurring revenue is above $200 million, from $100 million in April. TechCrunch notes rival Harvey raised $550 million at $15.5 billion a month earlier. Growth figures are Legora's.

Jensen Huang said at GTC Berlin that running Nvidia's agent software on AI factories costs "for example" about $2,000 per GPU per year, Tom's Hardware reports. Nvidia has not said which software that covers or when it would apply, and its AI Enterprise platform is listed at $4,500 per GPU a year. At the same event Nvidia introduced DSX POD container-built Vera Rubin AI factories and the OpenShell Reference Architecture for containing AI agents.

Mistral released Voxtral 3 on Oct. 20: speech-to-text models covering 50+ languages, Voxtral Speech 3 (Mini TTS 3) for 35+ languages and 50+ dialects, and a LiveKit-based voice-agent SDK. Listed prices include $0.0035/min for Mini Transcribe batch and $0.04/min for the agent API with Mistral Small 4. Benchmark wins are Mistral's own.

Amnon Shashua's doubleAI announced a $200M Series A co-led by Lightspeed and Bessemer, with Dell Technologies Capital, Greenfield, NVIDIA, Pitango and BRM participating. It unveiled Maxwell, which it calls a Code Execution Model that optimises running binaries. Speed-ups are company claims; valuation and GPU-spend figures are second-hand.

Estonia-based Blackwall raised a $100M Series C at a $2.2B valuation led by AVP, with Dawn Capital, MMC and Tera Ventures, TechCrunch reported on Oct. 20. The company sells web-traffic security mainly through hosting providers and says it distinguishes legitimate AI agents from malicious bots. TechCrunch says the valuation has quadrupled since 2025.

Germany's economics and research ministries signed a Joint Declaration of Intent with NVIDIA on Oct. 19 at the Invest in Germany summit, covering physical-AI models and the Industry 4.0 platform, NVIDIA and the federal government said. The government gave no investment figure, Tagesschau reported; Handelsblatt had reported a three-digit-million-euro sum before the signing.

Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen said on Oct. 14 that the AI Office has sent requests for information on security, external evaluation and monitoring, which Euronews reports concern OpenAI's Hugging Face incident and Anthropic's eval incidents. Legal experts dispute whether the AI Act covers testing.

Cohere announced a proposed agreement to acquire AI vulnerability-research startup AISLE on Oct. 15 — a letter of intent, Reuters reported — and plans to form Cohere Cyber with a Prague hub. AISLE's founders take leadership roles. Terms were not disclosed.

CERN and Mistral signed a statement of intent on Oct. 15 for a long-term partnership on foundation models for science. Its first aim is a single pretrained 'Large Physics Model', which CERN calls the first foundation model for collider physics, trained on billions of simulated LHC collisions. No budget or timeline was given.

Oxford spin-out Salience Labs raised a $125 million Series B led by Bullhound Capital, with AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, SBI Group, Hudson River Trading and a £10 million investment from the British Business Bank. Proceeds go to volume manufacturing, U.S. expansion and denser switches after an ECOC 2026 64-port all-optical demo.

NVIDIA said on Oct. 12 it plans new investments in Doctolib, Entalpic, Genesis AI and Pigment. Les Echos reported on Oct. 13 that Jensen Huang announced the stakes at a Paris reception alongside Economy Minister Roland Lescure. Neither source gives amounts or stake sizes.