European venture capital keeps stacking up records this year, and the latest belongs to one of the continent’s oldest firms.
Creandum, founded in Stockholm in 2003, closed Creandum VIII at €668M ($750M). It is the firm’s largest vehicle, up from the €500M raised in 2024, and will fund roughly 30 early-stage companies over the next two years from pre-seed through Series A.
About 30 institutional backers committed, spanning university endowments, pension funds and charitable foundations across Europe and the United States.
The firm stays generalist by design, but its recent portfolio has tilted hard toward AI infrastructure and software. Creandum backed Spotify, Klarna and Bolt early, and its newer bets include Lovable, Black Forest Labs, Modal and Rillet. Partner Peter Specht points out that about one in six companies the firm has backed has crossed a $1B valuation.
The transatlantic shift is the more interesting signal. Creandum has tripled its San Francisco team and now argues that the strongest founders no longer belong to a single geography. For European founders, that means a local term sheet increasingly comes with a US go-to-market playbook attached.
The fundraising wave is broad. QuantumLight closed €432M, Earlybird secured €360M, Seedcamp raised €279M and Turbine Capital finished a €54M deeptech vehicle this year. Disclosed European fund sizes tracked by EU-Startups now top €2.31B, with Creandum included.
There is a harder read underneath the headline number. Fund sizes are climbing while European exit activity stays thin, which puts pressure on these managers to prove returns before the next cycle asks them to raise again.
Creandum’s thesis is that the largest companies get founded when the ground shifts. The firm is betting that AI is the biggest shift yet, and that Europe’s universities and engineering base can supply the founders to exploit it.
