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European Startups Draw Fresh Capital Across AI, Quantum and Web Infrastructure

Daytona, Blackwall and Coherence Quantum each closed new funding rounds, spanning AI agent cloud infrastructure, web traffic management and quantum hardware.

AfroEuropa Newsroom

AfroEuropa desk

Oct 20, 2026 2 min read 13

Three technology companies have announced new funding rounds spanning AI infrastructure, web traffic management and quantum hardware.

Daytona reaches $1 billion valuation

Daytona, which builds cloud infrastructure for AI agents, has raised $60 million in a Series B round at a $1 billion valuation. The investment brings its total funding to $91 million. FirstMark led the round, with participation from a group of technology founders and executives including Patrick Collison of Stripe, Adam D'Angelo of Quora, Brendan Foody of Mercor, Tobi Lütke of Shopify, Olivier Pomel of Datadog, Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity and Eric Yuan of Zoom. Other backers included Alumni Ventures, Evergreen Fund, Okta Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next and Torch Capital. Existing investors raised their commitments, with Pace Capital doubling, Upfront Ventures tripling and E2VC quadrupling their investments.

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Blackwall raises $100 million

Web traffic management platform Blackwall has raised $100 million in a Series C round at a valuation of $2.2 billion. Tech.eu reported that the company reached a €1 billion valuation last month and placed fifth in TopTech 2026, the annual ranking of Estonia's 30 most valuable tech companies. AVP led the round, joined by existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures.

Blackwall is deployed within web hosting providers' own infrastructure, distinguishing legitimate visitors and automated traffic from malicious bots and attacks, and filtering billions of requests each day. Its services cover bot mitigation, DDoS protection, web application firewall, load balancing, server-side encryption and the management of agentic AI traffic. Co-Founder and CEO Nikita Rozenberg told Tech.eu that the web is becoming more automated, distributed and complex while the infrastructure behind it remains fragmented, and that the company aims to build a traffic management ecosystem connecting those elements.

Coherence Quantum closes €2.78 million seed

Espoo-based Coherence Quantum has raised €2.78 million in seed funding to develop cryogenic infrastructure for solid-state quantum processors. The company is building an integrated cryogenic signalling and control platform for future quantum computers. Helsinki-based Lifeline Ventures led the round, with participation from technology entrepreneur Mårten Mickos.

Founded in 2026 by Aashish Sah (CEO), Suman Kundu (CTO) and Erkki Soininen (CPO), the company originated from research at Aalto University's Quantum Computing and Devices group and is supported by founding advisor Mikko Möttönen, a professor of quantum technology at Aalto University. Petteri Koponen of Lifeline Ventures said the quantum industry has shown that increasingly capable processors can be built and that the next challenge is building infrastructure that lets them scale, adding that the architecture around qubits must scale alongside them.