European AI ecosystem funding and scale-up dynamics

European AI startups $23B H1 2026; Scaleup Europe Fund €5B first investment in ICEYE. CEE Q2 funding down 40% headline but up 13% excluding outliers; US funds moving to seed/Series A in Poland. Austria's Startup & Scaleup Fund €100M anchor. SAP and Fraunhofer launched ApeiroRA open-source edge cloud under IPCEI-CIS to counter US hyperscaler dominance. Nathan Benaich warns compute needs are not ambitious enough. Enterprise Ireland AKTS 2025 shows research commercialisation progress. Chinese open-weight AI models are gaining foothold in Europe, framed as a sovereignty tool, challenging the binary narrative and raising supply-chain dependency questions under the AI Act.