Founders of Wise and Skype raise $436 million to build tech giants in Europe
The partners of European venture capital firm Plural, from left to right: Ian Hogarth, Taavet Hinrikus, Carina Namih, Sten Tamkivi and Khaled Helioui.
Plural
The founders of Wise, Skype and Songkick have raised 400 million euros ($436.4 million) for a new fund to back technology startups in Europe. It seeks to compete with established funds like Atomico, Balderton Capital and Creandum with its founder-led focus.
Plural Fund II, the firm’s second to date, arrives just 18 months after the firm raised its last fund, a 250 million-euro vehicle. Its co-founders include Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of fintech firm Wise, Ian Hogarth, co-founder of concert discovery service Songkick, Sten Tamkivi, co-founder of communications platform Skype, and Khaled Helioui, former CEO of Bigpoint Games.
Hinrikus told CNBC that Plural could serve as a better partner to startups in Europe than most venture capital funds, given that it was started by people with the “scar tissue” of proven entrepreneurs. Only 8% of VCs in Europe are former founders, he says, much lower than the 60% in the United States.
“If we look at a lot of VC funds, you have lots of people who have done great work with spreadsheets, not with startup life,” Hinrikus told CNBC in an interview. “In our case, it is seen as a core criteria for choosing our partners that they’re totally unemployable.”
“It feels like it’s world war three, and we’re in the trenches together as one of the founders. So, if we look at the track record, and our ability to get the deals done, I think that all seems to say that this is really missing in Europe,” Hinrikus added.
Plural raised the funds from a mix of limited partners, including British and American university endowments, U.S. foundations and insurers, strategic family offices in Europe and the United States. The firm said it saw “significant appetite” from LPs — limited partners, the institutional backers of venture funds — for its new fund and exceeded its own fundraising target, despite being in the “toughest environment” for raising a fund.
“The fact that, in a difficult fundraising environment, we’ve been able to raise a fund of this scale, with a huge amount of appetite from LPs, just shows you that some of the most sophisticated investors in the world are really recognising the opportunity in Europe, and really want to see a fund the shape of Plural,” Carina Namih, partner at Plural, told CNBC in an interview.
“I think it’s a real testament against the sort of macro backdrop that we’ve raised a fund of this size and scale so quickly,” she added.
The ‘unemployables’
Plural plans to invest at a pace of two to three investments per investor per year with its new fund. The firm has five partners in total, whom it dubs the “unemployables,” owing to the fact that they wouldn’t readily join a VC firm, or be employable at a startup. Each of the partners is an active angel investor.
Plural has made 27 investments in total, backing companies including law-focused artificial intelligence firm Robin AI, nuclear fusion power plant developer Proxima Fusion, and most recently drug discovery platform Sano Genetics. Its largest sectors by investment are AI (31%), frontier technology (16%), and climate and energy (14%).
Hinrikus said Plural isn’t interested in finding the next major software-as-a-service name in Europe, referring to companies that make software for businesses to ease the burden of storing data, accessing infrastructure, and carrying out data analytics. It’s more interested in deep tech, focusing on founders looking to solve fundamental scientific problems around energy, unlock AI “superpowers,” and make groundbreaking progress in health care.
Building tech giants in Europe
Plural says it wants to build technology giants in Europe, identifying winners in emerging categories that other funds may tend to ignore, such as deep tech and clean tech.
Carina Namih, a biotechnology entrepreneur-turned-partner at Plural, said she wouldn’t be surprised to see major technology names on a par with U.S. and Chinese giants start to emerge in Europe in the not-too-distant future.
She noted technological breakthroughs are happening much faster now, boosted by key developments around AI and more established pools of capital.
“Look at how quickly OpenAI burst onto the scene with ChatGPT,” she said, adding it’s taking shorter amounts of time for new technologies to hit major milestones. “Clearly, the big tech companies have a lot of advantages and are entrenched in many ways. But I think now is a time more than ever, where new players and emerging players can come in and dominate entirely new spaces that didn’t exist a year ago.”
Namih previously worked on applying AI to mRNA-based medicine at her former startup HelixNano.
Plural’s new fund launch adds to the wave of startup activity that’s been happening in Europe in the last decade or so.
A report from venture capital firm Accel late last year showed that $1 billion-plus unicorn firms often serve as catalysts for startup creation, with 1,451 new startups being founded by former employees of European and Israeli unicorns.
Of that new batch of startups, a great deal of them tend to come from fintechs, according to the report, with 70 fintech unicorns producing 423 startups.
“In the last 10 years, the whole ecosystem really has become an ecosystem, whereas before, we were just wild game hunting,” Harry Nelis, partner at Accel, told CNBC. “There was one here, one there, there was no ecosystem.”
“It’s a lot easier to start a company than before. The engineering has been done before, the marketing has been done before,” he added. “That is a flywheel that we have never had in Europe, that we now do have.”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is seen through glass during an event on the sidelines of the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Feb. 11, 2025.
Aurelien Morissard | Via Reuters
Elon Musk tried to derail a major artificial intelligence infrastructure deal in the Middle East after learning that his startup, xAI, would be excluded from the initiative, CNBC has confirmed.
Earlier this month, OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and Emirati firm G42 announced plans to build a sweeping Stargate AI campus in the United Arab Emirates. Musk was frustrated that OpenAI, led by personal rival Sam Altman, was tapped for the deal, and he intervened in an effort to get xAI involved, said a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named in order to speak freely.
Musk argued that President Donald Trump would not approve the deal, the person said. The announcement was delayed by several days as stakeholders, including the White House, dealt with blowback from Musk, who has been engaged in a public and legal spat with Altman and OpenAI.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that Musk attempted to block the deal.
In a statement to CNBC, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt didn’t mention the dustup.
“The United States and the UAE signed a groundbreaking framework agreement establishing the first AI acceleration partnership,” Leavitt said. “The framework advances the buildout of AI infrastructure in the United States and the UAE. This was another great deal for the American people, thanks to President Trump and his exceptional team.”
Musk wasn’t in the UAE when the deal was signed, but was with the president in Saudi Arabia during an earlier part of the Middle East trip, according to a senior White House official. The official said Musk has relayed his concerns about the government fairly treating all AI companies.
OpenAI declined to comment. Musk didn’t respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is a complicating character in Trump’s effort to solidify U.S. leadership in AI. Musk spent close to $300 million to send President Trump back to the White House, and has since been leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), slashing the size of the federal workforce. His time as a special government employee is coming to an end this month.
When it comes to AI, Musk has in recent years been a vocal critic of Altman, a former friend and colleague. The pair helped form OpenAI as a research lab in 2015, but Musk later had a public break with the project and has consistently criticized its structure and close alliance with Microsoft.
While xAI has been building its commercial efforts, acquiring Musk’s social media company X in March and this week partnering with Telegram to roll out its Grok chatbot, Musk has been trying to thwart OpenAI’s effort to convert into a for-profit entity.
Musk has sued OpenAI for breach of contract and to try and stop the conversion, and a Musk-led investor group made an unsuccessful bid to buy control of the startup for $97.4 billion in February.
It’s also not the first time Musk has been critical of Stargate.
In January, Trump unveiled the Stargate project, with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank committing an initial $100 billion, and up to $500 billion, of investment in AI infrastructure in the U.S. over four years. Musk was quick to cast doubt on the financing behind the project.
“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote in response to an OpenAI post on his social platform X. He later added that SoftBank had “well under” $10 billion secured.
Two months later, SoftBank led a $40 billion investment in OpenAI at a $300 billion valuation.
— CNBC’s Eamon Javers contributed to this report.
WATCH: Elon Musk tried to block Sam Altman’s big AI deal in the UAE
A Dell Technologies sign is seen in Round Rock, Texas, on June 2, 2023.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
Shares of Dell Technologies rose on Thursday in extended trading after the company raised its full-year earnings forecast and issued a stronger-than-expected forecast for the current quarter.
However, Dell’s adjusted earnings per share came up short versus LSEG estimates on in-line revenue.
Here’s how the computer maker did versus LSEG consensus estimates:
- Earnings per share: $1.55 adjusted vs. $1.69 estimated
- Revenue: $23.38 billion vs. $23.14 billion estimated
Dell said it expects $2.25 in adjusted earnings per share for the current quarter, with between $28.5 billion and $29.5 billion in revenue. That was significantly higher than LSEG expectations.
Company officials attributed the strong guidance to $7 billion in artificial intelligence systems that are expected to ship during the quarter, which are higher-margin than other Dell systems.
For the full year, Dell still expects about $103 billion in revenue, in line with LSEG expectations, but it raised its forecast for full-year adjusted earnings to $9.40, which was a 10 cent increase from the company’s prior outlook.
Dell is one of Nvidia’s primary vendors that builds systems around the chipmaker’s AI graphics processing units. Dell said on Thursday that it was seeing “unprecedented demand” for AI systems, especially for second-tier cloud providers, such as Coreweave.
Texas-based Dell said that it has $14.4 billion in confirmed orders for AI systems in its backlog that will ship in the coming quarters. It recorded $12.1 billion in confirmed AI orders during the first quarter, the company said. These numbers will turn into recorded revenue when Dell ships the system to its clients. In February, Dell said it expected $15 billion in AI server sales during its fiscal 2026, up from $10 billion last year.
Overall, Dell’s revenue grew 5% on an annual basis. It said it expects revenue to grow 8% during the fiscal year.
Dell’s server business is reported as part of its Infrastructure Solutions Group, which had $10.3 billion in sales during the quarter, a 12% rise. Of that, $6.3 billion was sales for servers and networking, and $4 billion was for computers that store data.
The company’s laptop and PC business, its Client Solutions Group, recorded $12.5 billion in sales as the global PC market is expected to recover this year after several slumping years.
The computer maker also said it significantly stepped up its shareholder capital return during the quarter, spending $2.4 billion on share repurchases and dividends during the period. It spent $2.58 billion on share repurchases for all of its fiscal 2025, which ended in January.
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