The week of 16 to 23 October delivered a clear split-screen for the European tech ecosystem. On one side, early-stage investors kept writing cheques for defence, cybersecurity and industrial resilience, with Lisbon, Berlin and Amsterdam all producing notable rounds. On the other, the global capital markets sent repeated warnings that the boom-era pricing of 2021 and the current AI frenzy may both be due for a correction, from an Indian IPO facing pushback to a pointed critique of a proposed $2 trillion listing. Funding & Investments The largest European round of the week came from Portugal. Beyond Vision, a Lisbon-based manufacturer of unmanned aerial systems and vehicles, announced the completion of an investment round of more than €28 million, according to EU-Startups. The round was co-led by Índico Capital Partners and Lince Capital, with a follow-on investment from ActiveCap, an existing shareholder. Beyond Vision builds AI-enabled drones for both civilian and defence markets, and the size of the raise reflects how the dual-use category has moved from the margins of European venture to one of its most reliably funded segments. For a Portuguese hardware company to pull in a round of this scale from domestic and regional investors is itself notable, and it adds to a growing cluster of Iberian deep tech companies that are scaling without relocating to the United States. Portugal appeared twice in this week's funding news. Intuitivo, an EdTech startup that helps teachers reduce their administrative workload, raised €1.35 million in Seed funding, EU-Startups reported. The round was led by Caixa Capital and the Impact Innovation Fund, which is managed by 3xP Global under the Venture Capital Programme of the Capitalisation and Resilience Fund. The company plans to use the capital to expand into Brazil, a natural step for a Portuguese-language product serving a market with tens of millions of students and a chronic teacher capacity problem. The involvement of a state-linked resilience fund in an EdTech seed round is a useful reminder that public co-investment remains a meaningful part of the early-stage funding mix in southern Europe. Cybersecurity was the other dominant theme in European early-stage dealmaking. In Amsterdam, Indurex raised €7 million for its AI-native platform for securing cyber-physical systems, less than nine months after emerging from stealth, according to EU-Startups. The round was led by Contrarian Ventures, the European early-stage firm focused on energy and industrial technology. Indurex is targeting the convergence of operational technology and IT security, a space that has become increasingly urgent as utilities, manufacturers and grid operators digitise physical infrastructure. The speed of the follow-on, coming so soon after the company's public debut, suggests strong early traction with industrial customers or at least strong investor conviction that the category is undersupplied in Europe. In Berlin, Cygrid exited stealth with a €2.66 million pre-Seed round for an identity-enforcement platform designed to stop AI agents from accessing confidential company data, EU-Startups reported. The round was led by Atlantic, the pan-European pre-Seed fund, with participation from D11Z and others. Cygrid's thesis is timely: as enterprises deploy autonomous agents that can read documents, query databases and take actions on behalf of employees, the question of which agent is allowed to see what has become a live security problem rather than a theoretical one. The company is essentially applying identity and access management principles to non-human actors, and the fact that a pre-Seed fund backed it at this scale indicates investors see agent governance as an emerging category rather than a feature of existing security suites. Across the Atlantic, Crunchbase News reported exclusively that Slingshot Insurance, a Minneapolis-based AI-native embedded insurance startup, emerged from stealth with a $27 million seed round co-led by Rally Ventures and Skyward Group. Slingshot aims to build an insurer for the small policies sold at checkout, the kind of product protection, travel cover and shipping insurance that consumers encounter at the point of purchase. The $27 million figure is large for a seed round in any sector and particularly so for an insurance carrier, which will need capital reserves as well as technology. While the company is American, the embedded insurance model has deep roots in European fintech, and several European players in the space will be watching how a well-capitalised, AI-first entrant approaches the US market. Taken together, the week's European rounds were modest in absolute terms compared with the mega-deals of 2021, but they were concentrated in sectors where Europe has genuine structural advantages: industrial security, defence hardware and regulated markets where domain expertise matters as much as growth velocity. Exits & M&A The exit side of the ledger was dominated by caution rather than celebration. Bloomberg Markets reported that Oravel Stays, the SoftBank-backed parent of travel platform OYO, is facing investor pushback over the valuation for its planned initial public offering in India, according to people familiar with the matter. Bloomberg described Oravel as the latest Indian startup to encounter scepticism over pricing, which places the company in a pattern that has repeated across several high-profile Indian listings in recent years. For SoftBank, which has already marked down its OYO stake multiple times, a lower-than-hoped IPO valuation would be another chapter in a long and expensive relationship. For European observers, the story matters because Indian public markets have become a bellwether for how retail and institutional investors in growth economies are pricing venture-backed companies, and the signal this week was that patience with aggressive valuations is thin. Crunchbase News added a broader structural observation with its report that acquirers are snapping up boom-era startups that have not raised funding in years. The piece noted that several companies whose names would feature on a playlist of 2021 unicorns have sold to acquirers in recent months, including one-time high-fliers Airtable, Headspace and Miro. In many cases, Crunchbase News reported, these companies are selling a