Europe Produces 12 ‘Unicorn’ Startups Thus Far in 2025
How many new “unicorns” will Europe produce for the remainder of 2025?
If the first six months of the year is any indication, it could be in the dozens, TechCrunch wrote Thursday (Aug. 28).
As that report notes, “mega-rounds” aren’t as prevalent these days as they were in 2021. Still, at least 12 European startups have reached “unicorn” status so far this year, meaning that they achieved valuations of more than $1 billion, which bodes well for the rest of the year.
The report also contends that the funding trends so far this year provide a good indication of the sectors popular among investors, including biotech, defense technology and especially artificial intelligence (AI).
Among the startups to pass the $1 billion mark was “vibe coding” company Lovable, which raised $200 million in July at a $1.8 billion valuation.
As PYMNTS has written, “vibe coding” is a new, more intuitive way for people to write computer code using natural language, as if having a conversation with a friend.
Rather than writing complex code in a particular syntax, users simply describe what they want the software program to do, and an AI model helps turn that into working code.
In June, Zama raised $57 million in a Series B funding round at a $1 billion valuation to expand its end-to-end encryption solutions for public blockchains.
The company said it plans to use the funds to support its mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption and research efforts to make financial transactions built with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scale to thousands of transactions per second.
FHE allows data processing without decryption, maintaining encryption during both transit and processing, which means “all online activities can now be truly end-to-end encrypted,” the company said in an article on its website.
And in April, Isomorphic Labs, a drug development AI startup founded by Google DeepMind Co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis raised $600 million in its first external funding round. While the company did not disclose its valuation, the TechCrunch report notes that the size of the round places the startup “firmly” inside unicorn territory.
Isomorphic Labs uses advanced AI models to accelerate drug discovery in different therapeutic areas. The company was built on AlphaFold, which won Hassabis a Nobel Prize for predicting the structure of virtually all known proteins, “solving a half-century biology challenge,” as PYMNTS wrote at the time.
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