Hey 👋
Two months of news, one digest. We were away. The market wasn’t.
Join the AI Summit in the Big Apple
On September 17, Sigma Software USA holds the summit in New York for a full day with senior executives, technology leaders, and AI practitioners — speakers talk about building, deploying, and scaling AI across an enterprise. If you’re anywhere near New York, come. And bring the founders and friends who should be with us. Claim a seat.
Europe’s €3B Answer to OpenAI
Mistral, the French AI lab, is now worth more than €21 billion after what the company calls the largest equity round ever completed by a EU tech company. Samsung, BlackRock, Nvidia, and a16z led the round. It buys compute, 1GW in Europe by 2030, and sovereignty over where client data is processed. Read the details
Somebody Actually Did Go Back to School
Daria Yaniieva spent two weeks at Stanford in August on a scholarship, in Cohort #13 of VC Unlocked: Silicon Valley — 500 Global’s invite-only program for fund managers. Two weeks of fund formation, portfolio construction, valuations, and exits, alongside investors from 240+ funds. That’s the experience shaping how Labs identifies and backs the next generation of startups. See the photos.
50 Founders Grill Together
We co-hosted an AI founders’ barbecue with Challenger Accelerator, one of Forbes Ukraine’s top 25 accelerators, in a Kyiv garden, with people from the top of Ukraine’s IT ecosystem and tech universities, talking about what it actually takes to build a startup — and where AI helps, where it just adds noise. See how it went.
And two of our companies made the kind of noise that travels.
Fifth-Biggest Ukrainian Round of the Year
Ukrainian defense tech raised $129M in 2025, up 119% year over year, half of it from foreign investors. Vestbee, the CEE venture platform, now ranks our portfolio company Buntar Aerospace’s $10.4M round — Axon Enterprise among its backers — the fifth-largest disclosed in Ukraine this year. Know a Ukrainian startup worth backing? Send them our way. Refer a startup.
The Agent That Fixes Its Own Campaigns
The AI sales agent market is worth $3.4B. Ami, from our portfolio company AiSDR, starts from a website, works out who to sell to, runs the campaign, then corrects itself — killing what underperforms, cloning what works. $697M of pipeline in beta. If you build agents for clients, this one owns a whole process. Meet Ami.
One last thing.
$3,000 for the Best AI Product Idea
Forty-five ideas are already in for the AI Product Ideas Contest: Season 2. We asked our teams for a recurring AI problem — one that shows up across clients and projects, not a one-off feature. The strongest idea takes $3,000 and a shot at becoming a real product. Submissions close on September 16, and we’ll tell you what came out of it.
That’s August and September. Next month: portfolio updates, contest results, and whatever the market does while we’re not looking.
