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.”
Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk appears on a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, on Sept. 23, 2025.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle on Friday pushed back against a report that said the company will complete data centers for OpenAI, one of its major customers, in 2028, rather than 2027.
The delay is due to a shortage of labor and materials, according to the Friday report from Bloomberg, which cited unnamed people. Oracle shares fell to a session low of $185.98, down 6.5% from Thursday’s close.
“Site selection and delivery timelines were established in close coordination with OpenAI following execution of the agreement and were jointly agreed,” an Oracle spokesperson said in an email to CNBC. “There have been no delays to any sites required to meet our contractual commitments, and all milestones remain on track.”
The Oracle spokesperson did not specify a timeline for turning on cloud computing infrastructure for OpenAI. In September, OpenAI said it had a partnership with Oracle worth more than $300 billion over the next five years.
“We have a good relationship with OpenAI,” Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two newly appointed CEOs, said at an October analyst meeting.
Doing business with OpenAI is relatively new to 48-year-old Oracle. Historically, Oracle grew through sales of its database software and business applications. Its cloud infrastructure business now contributes over one-fourth of revenue, although Oracle remains a smaller hyperscaler than Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
OpenAI has also made commitments to other companies as it looks to meet expected capacity needs.
In September, Nvidia said it had signed a letter of intent with OpenAI to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia equipment for the San Francisco artificial intelligence startup. The first phase of that project is expected in the second half of 2026.
Nvidia and OpenAI said in a September statement that they “look forward to finalizing the details of this new phase of strategic partnership in the coming weeks.”
But no announcement has come yet.
In a November filing, Nvidia said “there is no assurance that we will enter into definitive agreements with respect to the OpenAI opportunity.”
OpenAI has historically relied on Nvidia graphics processing units to operate ChatGPT and other products, and now it’s also looking at designing custom chips in a collaboration with Broadcom.
On Thursday, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan laid out a timeline for the OpenAI work, which was announced in October. Broadcom and OpenAI said they had signed a term sheet.
“It’s more like 2027, 2028, 2029, 10 gigawatts, that was the OpenAI discussion,” Tan said on Broadcom’s earnings call. “And that’s, I call it, an agreement, an alignment of where we’re headed with respect to a very respected and valued customer, OpenAI. But we do not expect much in 2026.”
OpenAI declined to comment.
WATCH: Oracle says there have been ‘no delays’ in OpenAI arrangement after stock slide
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