Good morning there,

As I told a VC over text yesterday, this week I am freezing in Berlin, not Helsinki. But my colleagues Eleanor Warnock and Amy O'Brien are braving the cold to give us the latest dispatch from the Slush conference — and Eleanor got to chat with a rising Finnish entrepreneur whose experience volunteering at the conference years ago sparked her interest in the startup world.

Elsewhere, we dig into Robinhood's second go at launching its trading services in the UK, fresh funding for a Danish startup building the world's first molten hydroxide energy storage plant and which semiconductor startups VCs say should be on your radar.  

— Anne Sraders, senior reporter

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🏹 Robinhood takes a second stab at launching in Europe. The US-based trading platform launched in the UK yesterday and will look to target a mass market, with users needing just $1 to begin investing.

• The company has had to rethink how it monetises its platform in the UK, as the trading mechanism at the core of its US business model was banned by regulators in the country in 2012.
• It's the fintech's third attempt at expanding into a new market. It first planned a launch in Australia in 2015, which never happened, and then scrapped a previously planned launch in the UK in 2020.

☀️ Xlinks landed fresh funding to bring solar power from Morocco to the UK via a 3,800km cable along the seabed. The UK-based startup raised $25m from French oil and gas titan TotalEnergies to build its cable. 

• The project, which could contribute 8% of the UK's power needs, should cost £20bn, Xlinks’ CEO Simon Morrish told Sifted earlier this year.
• Including the new investment, the startup has raised £50m — and, Morrish tells Sifted, has an extra £5bn of equity financing lined up.

🧂 Hyme, a Danish startup which stumbled upon a molten salt storage solution that could halve the cost of storing green energy, raised nearly €8m in funding.

• Heartland A/S, Nordic Makers and North-East Venture have so far participated in the round, which is expected to close in mid-December. 
• The company is in final innings of building the first molten hydroxide energy storage plant. It could be a huge cost-saver for industrial companies if it works out — and dramatically decrease their reliance on fossil fuels. 

⚡️ UK founders building businesses in areas like AI, semiconductors and quantum have a problem. Their companies need bucketfuls of data centre capacity and power but, they tell Sifted, Britain’s old electricity grid, power generation shortages and a lack of understanding from local authorities hold them back.

• Connecting up to the main grid is leaving some out of pocket. It took semiconductor startup Paragraf — which moved into its second facility knowing local infrastructure needed a significant upgrade — a year and £1m to achieve connectivity.
• “After significant requests for support, we eventually had to pay the significant cost ourselves to ensure our production capacity expansion and hence overall growth of the company could happen on time,” CEO and cofounder Simon Thomas says.
• Energy infrastructure problems are most acute in London, where demand is highest. And unless power constraints are tackled, tech startups may be forced to relocate to other parts of the country where they can meet their energy demands, or look to move their data stateside.

🏃‍♀️ Meet the 30 European deeptech startups picked for the Nato accelerator. They're doing some cool shiz.

👀 13 semiconductor startups to watch, according to investors.

🤔 Why that employee equity deal might not be as lucrative as you think it is.

🙏 How to safeguard your customers.

🪂 Meet the startups using alternative materials to save the planet (sponsored by New Energy Challenge)

Deeptech bad news. Investment into novel energy startups in Europe plummeted by 50% in 2023, from $1.3bn in 2023 to $656m last year, with the UK, Germany and Estonia attracting most of that funding since 2018, according to the third annual report on European deeptech published by Dealroom, Lakestar and Walden Catalyst.

• The other area reporting falling investment levels is computational biology and chemistry, with capital going down by another 50% from $404m in 2022 to $288m this year.
• The report also warns that the share of funding coming into European deeptech startups increases to nearly 50% at late-stage, posing risks to Europe's tech independence from the US and China.

EIF funding goes AWOL, unicorns nosedive and more layoffs come along

On this week’s episode of the Sifted podcast, Amy and Mimi find out about a chunky pot of EU money that hasn’t yet made its way to VCs, discuss the top findings from Atomico’s annual State of European Tech report and pontificate on what news of layoffs at e-scooter company Tier mean for 2024.

Listen here! 

London-based Mytos, a developer of a platform that enables life sciences companies to automate human cell manufacturing, raised $19m in Series A funding. Buckley Ventures led the round and was joined by IQ Capital and Wing VC.

Helsinki-based Enfuce, which provides payment and card issuing services for companies, raised €8.5m in extended Series C funding. Vitruvian Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Maki.vc and Visa.

Paris-based OncoVITA, an Institut Pasteur spinout which is developing therapeutic and prophylactic vaccines, was awarded €4.5m from Bpifrance and raised €3.5m in funding from private investors. 

London-based Keyless, a developer of a passwordless authentication platform that uses biometric technology, raised €5m in funding. Rialto VC led the round.

Paris-based BioFluff, which is developing plant-based fur for the luxury clothing market, raised $2.5m in seed funding. Astanor Ventures led the round.

Dublin-based Cytidel, a cyber risk management platform that predicts and prioritises cyber threat levels for companies, raised €1.4m. Elkstone Ventures and Enterprise Ireland led the round.

Lausanne, Switzerland-based Brightside AI, which is developing a cybersecurity platform to help companies prepare their employees to fend off phishing attacks, raised $1m in funding from Social Links.

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