European VC Atomico closes $1.24B across two funds for early and growth-stage startups
Atomico has announced new funds totalling $1.24 billion, as the VC giant targets early- and growth-stage startups across Europe.
As European startups continue to look for signs of sustained market confidence beyond the hype around AI companies, Atomico — one of the region’s more iconic, largest venture capital firms — has raised more money to make investments that might indicate how the market is really moving. The VC has closed new funds totalling $1.24 billion to back early- and growth-stage startups across the region.
London-based Atomico is describing this as its “largest ever fundraise,” although technically it is across two pots of money. “Atomico Venture VI” weighs in at $485 million for mostly Series A-stage companies (with some reserved for seed), and a separate $754 million fund — dubbed “Atomico Growth VI” — is for Series B through pre-IPO.
Raising and allocating money from separate funds is typical of many venture capital firms today, but that Atomico closed two separate funds, led by separate teams, is notable. The firm has historically leaned toward earlier funding rounds while dipping into later stages where it made sense. Now it’s setting itself up to focus just as much on the later stages of a startup’s journey with a dedicated fund.
This move could also point to a trepidation among some in the investor fraternity who are hesitant to put money into fledgling pre-profit companies. By setting things up this way, it becomes easier for Atomico to bring contributions from more risk-averse limited partners (LPs) into the fray by enabling them to channel their cash into tried and tested businesses, rather than backing a single fund that may span anything from seed to Series F.
The news also comes amidst a downturn in the global venture capital sphere, a trend to which Europe has not been impervious.
Among the things on which Atomico has built a reputation is its annual research reports on the state of the European technology ecosystem, which focus on how the venture capital end of the market is faring. Its most recent report made for grim reading, noting that amid an ongoing downturn, European startup funding halved in 2023, driven by factors such as geopolitical events, inflation, and interest rates. It also determined that the market, and investment data, had been skewed by 2021 and 2022 because of the global pandemic
Writing on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Musk said he hadn’t read the WSJ story, but he described a post summarizing the report as “not accurate.”
“Tesla has learned a lot from discussions with engineers at xAI that have helped accelerate achieving unsupervised FSD, but there is no need to license anything from xAI,” he wrote. “The xAI models are gigantic, containing, in compressed form, most of human knowledge, and couldn’t possibly run on the Tesla vehicle inference computer, nor would we want them to.”
Musk founded xAI as a competitor to OpenAI (which he co-founded but eventually left). TechCrunch reported earlier this year that as part of the pitch for xAI’s $6 billion funding round, the startup outlined a vision where its models would be trained on data from Musk’s various companies (Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X), and its models could then improve technology across those companies.