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This Week
Sakana AI released Fugu on Monday. A Tokyo lab, no frontier model of its own, matching Anthropic on benchmarks by routing queries across existing models and coordinating their outputs. Most coverage was about the sovereignty angle but in reality it’s rather a closed-source orchestrator on (mostly) closed-source models.
What’s actually interesting though: a small research lab proved you can reach frontier-level performance by learning to coordinate models rather than training them first-hand. It’s hard for European labs to “out-compute” the US and China. But coordinating and applying models better than anyone else is a different problem to solve. There is no reason why the next version doesn’t come out of Zurich, London or any other European hub.
Hit reply and let us know what you think.
Funding & Other News
mkind just closed a €3M pre-seed led by Lucid Capital to build intelligent robots for high-mix manufacturing in Europe. The Munich-based team of Michael, Christoph, Gabriele and Paul built on years of robotics research: scan a part and get a working robot program in under 30 minutes, no expertise needed, versus 4-6 weeks for a specialist to program manually.
Tsuga just closed a $35M Series A led by Singular and General Catalyst, with DST Global, Quantumlight, Picus, and Databricks also participating. The Paris-based startup deploys observability tooling inside your cloud, so telemetry and AI built on top stays in your environment. Six months in from launch, already millions in ARR with customers including Le Monde and Black Forest Labs.
FINN just closed a €100M Series D led by Portage, plus €40M in debt financing, valuing the Munich-based car subscription platform at over €1B. 50,000+ subscribers in Germany, €300M+ ARR, and a total of €140M raised.
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