This week, we tried something new at EUVC.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been reading (and agreeing with) Eleanor Warnock’s excellent Sifted piece — “The funding round announcement is dead.” She argues founders deserve better than templated PR blasts nobody reads. What resonates much more?
Authentic, founder-led stories that explain why a round matters and what it unlocks.
Short, fast, honest conversations with founders at the exact moment something big drops - recorded with zero fluff, zero edits and published immediately to help them reach the European ecosystem directly.
And this week, we have two perfect examples to kick off the series.
Donna Raises $4.8M to Bring AI Agents to Field Sales
We sat down with Nicolas Christiaen, co-founder & CEO of Donna, right as they announced their $4.8M seed round.
This is one of the most underserved categories in tech: field sales - the millions of reps who spend their day in cars, shops, medical practices, pharmacies and factories, not behind screens.
Donna is building a voice-native, proactive AI agent that:
briefs you before meetings
coaches you on the road
calls you after a meeting
captures all your notes
updates the CRM
drafts follow-up emails
and keeps you on top of your pipeline
All in 40+ languages.
All completely hands-free.
All powered by multimodal AI.
The founders are second-time operators with deep experience in field automation and the problem is so real you can feel it in the recording.
Prior Labs Hits a World First in Tabular AI
We also went live with Sauraj Gambhir, co-founder of Prior Labs, literally at the moment they announced that Tap-PFN can now handle datasets of 10 million rows - the first time a tabular foundation model has crossed that threshold.
To put it plainly:
If your company runs thousands of ML models on structured data (banks, insurers, telecoms, healthcare, marketplaces), this is one of the biggest step-changes you’ve seen in a decade.
Eight months ago, Prior Labs could handle 10k rows.
Four weeks ago: 100k.
Now: 10 million, with more on the way.
This is the beginning of the LLM moment for tabular data, and Sauraj breaks it down in clear terms.
Founders, big news coming up? We’ll amplify it.
We are strong believers in the power of founder-led communication and are committed to amplifying the stories of Europe’s most promising companies.
We’re testing a new format to better serve the European venture ecosystem. Not with PR noise, but with actual founder stories that matter.
If you (or someone in your portfolio) have a meaningful announcement coming up: a raise, a milestone, a major launch, send us a line at 📩 hello@eu.vc.
This is not PR.
This is community.
This is builders talking to builders.