European VC funding in Q1 2026 rose nearly 30% YoY to $17.6B, AI claimed over 50% of all European funding for the quarter, and deal volume dropped 40% YoY (Gené Teare/Crunchbase News)

Gené Teare / Crunchbase News: European VC funding in Q1 2026 rose nearly 30% YoY to 17.6B, AI claimed over 50% of all European funding for the quarter, and deal volume dropped 40% YoY — European venture funding reached 17.6 billion in Q1 2026, Crunchbase data shows. That's up nearly 30% year over year and marks the second consecutive quarter of growth.

Asia's startup funding rose 93% YoY to 27.4B in Q1, the highest quarterly total in 3+ years, with Chinese startups raising 16.5B and Indian startups $3.8B (Joanna Glasner/Crunchbase News)
AI cloud infrastructure company Parasail raised a 32M Series A led by Touring Capital and Kindred Ventures, bringing its total funding to 42M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)
Sources: Upscale AI, which builds AI networking infrastructure, is in talks to raise 180M to 200M at a $2B valuation, its third funding round in seven months (Bloomberg)
AI labs are buying Slack, Jira, and email archives from defunct startups to build 'reinforcement learning gyms' and train AI agents in simulated workplaces (Anna Tong/Forbes)

Source: Techmeme | 2026-04-15

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