🎯 Lead, Follow, or Fund

Legora 🇸🇪, the Stockholm start-up selling lawyers an AI that searches case law, combs through contracts and drafts documents, has raised €490m at a €7.8bn valuation. Atreides Management, a Boston fund, led the round with Fidelity, Capital Group and JPMorgan, and not one of the new investors is European. On the same day Pigment 🇫🇷, whose software helps finance teams build budgets and forecasts, raised €223m at €2bn. Its lead was the Scaleup Europe Fund: the European Commission set it up, EQT 🇸🇪, the Swedish investment group, runs it, and it has more than €3bn committed towards a €5bn target. Iconiq, IVP and Meritech, American growth funds already on Pigment's register, followed. Besides the Scaleup Europe Fund, Europe has barely any investor able to head a software round of that size.

In 2024 Iconiq led Pigment's Series D, and this time it followed a Commission-backed fund. Europe's private growth investors are missing from that picture, as they usually are at this size. In 2025 more than half the growth capital raised by European AI start-ups came from abroad, mostly from America. In space, of nine European growth rounds, private investors ran four, all of them American funds, and European public bodies headed the other five. When a European does take charge of a round this large, public money is often behind it.

Atreides is paying close to 44 times Legora's €178m of annual recurring revenue, the Scaleup Europe Fund around 23 times Pigment's roughly €90m. That premium is no proof that Europe is prudent and America reckless. Legora doubled its recurring revenue in under six months, adding €89m, roughly Pigment's entire book, while Pigment took a year to do the same. Paying more for the company growing twice as fast is hardly irrational.

Leading Pigment's round did not mean funding it alone. The Scaleup Europe Fund has not said how much of the €223m it put up, and its €3bn has to stretch to tickets of about €100m across AI, space, biotech and energy. The first went to ICEYE 🇫🇮, the Finnish satellite maker, whose €1bn round it co-led. Faced with a founder who also holds an offer from Boston, EQT has two options: match the American price, or let the deal go.

With a second and a third lead of that calibre in Europe, a founder could play one term sheet from the continent against another, and the price would be set by competition at home as well as by the American bid. Legora will remain free to raise in America, and should. What Europe lacks is a market in which a Pigment, or its equivalent in London or Amsterdam, can say no to EQT without having to look to Boston for a lead.