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Lakestar Defense Close, SAP's €1B AI Exit & Anthropic's IPO Risk
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
European defense VC hits a new milestone as Lakestar closes its €262M Resilience I fund, while SAP acquires Prior Labs for over €1B and Anthropic files a confidential S-1 shadowed by three active lawsuits. Today's briefing covers dual-use infrastructure, the Fireworks $1.5B inference bet, Wonder and Fora's IPO signals, and the unresolved legal weight on Suno's $5.4B valuation.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Lakestar just closed a two hundred and sixty-two point two million euro defense fund, and the LP base tells you everything you need to know about where European venture is heading. This is Lakestar Resilience I, the largest dedicated dual-use VC vehicle Europe has seen.
The fastest large exit in European AI right now belongs to Prior Labs. SAP acquired the German frontier AI lab for over one billion euros, roughly eighteen months after it was founded.
Fireworks just raised one point five billion dollars at Series D for its open-model inference platform. Atreides, Index, and TCV led the round.
Two raises this cycle say something about where platform scale is heading in the physical world. Wonder closed a six hundred and fifty million dollar Series D, bringing total funding to over three billion dollars.
Two of the most talked-about valuations in frontier AI right now carry serious unresolved legal weight. Suno raised four hundred million dollars and reached a five point four billion dollar valuation, up from two point seven billion seven months ago, despite active copyright suits from Universal and Sony.
The real watchpoints going forward are narrow. For Anthropic, it's whether the S-1 discloses customer concentration risk and gives any clarity on those lawsuits.
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