Newsletter | January 2026

2026 is off to a fast start. Our portfolio becomes agentic!

30 January 2026

2026 is here, and it is already moving fast. Q4 closed out with $113B in global VC investment, early-stage deals up by 20%, and North America pulling ahead with 64% of the world’s capital. Even with fewer deals overall, momentum is holding, exits are climbing, and the early signals for this year are looking sharp.

January also brought a new addition to the portfolio in mobility, product milestones across our companies, and one date to keep: the TheVentureCity Summit is back on 28 May.

Quarterly global VC deal value by region, 2020 to Q3 2026SEE OUR REPORTS

The moment we have all been waiting for: after the success of our fifth Summit, we are bringing it back to Madrid on 28 May 2026. Save the Date invitations go out shortly, so keep an eye on your inbox.

The venue stays a secret for now. All we can say is that it is an iconic one. Scroll down for the full update, and welcome to 2026.

News from our portfolio

Big news! We started 2026 strong with Argo

Argo CEO Praveen Arichandran and an Argo on-demand transit vehicle

We have invested in the first tranche of the round of Argo Corporation, the AI-native public transit company. It is a full-circle story: Laura González-Estéfani and Argo CEO Praveen Arichandran know each other from their Facebook days.

Argo is live in Toronto with a vertically integrated, AI-native transit system: intelligent routing that groups riders in real time, next-gen transit vehicles and operations, and a model built to scale to other cities.

It is the kind of company we like to back: a hard problem, a technical team and a product already running in the real world. Congratulations to Praveen Arichandran and the whole Argo team.

Learn more

Analytics un-boxed: Count’s new AI agent

Count CEO Ollie Hughes and the Count Reasoning Chains product

Most AI analytics tools hand you an answer and no way to check it. Count, the collaborative data canvas, just launched Count Agent to kill that black-box problem. It works out in the open on the canvas, with logic and visualisations you can edit.

The perk: most AI asks you to trust it blindly, Count lets you audit, edit and riff with it in real time. Congratulations to CEO Ollie Hughes and the whole Count team.

Learn more

Tonic Easy Medical leading the era of agentic clinical AI

SimpliRoute CEO Álvaro Echeverría and the SimpliRoute platform

A win for the team in Portugal: Tonic Easy Medical took the Prémio Tecnologias da Saúde 2025 at the Portugal Ventures Awards.

Tonic is an agentic AI co-pilot for doctors and a Class IIa-certified medical device. It automates medical reporting and supports pharmacological decisions, so clinicians spend less time on admin and more time with patients.

Congratulations to founder and CEO Daniela Seixas and the whole Tonic team.

Learn more

The future of logistics with SimpliRoute’s agentic suite

1DOC3 CEO Javier Cardona and the 1DOC3 app

SimpliRoute is expanding into a full AI-powered logistics suite: SimpliTMS for centralised transport management, ADA, its AI agents handling delivery incidents and real-time queries, and NetZero for carbon footprint tracking.

Fewer manual tasks, fewer errors and better operational decisions. You can book a demo with the team to see the suite running.

GET THE DEMO

The WealthTech blind spot: Sidekick

Tonic Easy Medical CEO Daniela Seixas, the Tonic app and Sanofi

A podcast episode worth your time: Matthew Ford, founder of Sidekick, sits down with Griffin to talk about the HENRY paradox: high earners who are not rich yet.

They dig into the gap between robo-advisors and private banking, and what it takes to build wealth products for the people stuck in between. Worth a listen if you are building for that segment.

LISTEN HERE
Recommended reads
Dario Amodei, Anthropic

Machines of Loving Grace

The Anthropic CEO’s essay on what could go right with AI has aged like fine wine. Worth reading again now that agents are everywhere.

Crunchbase News

Global VC finishes 2025 strong

$425B invested globally in 2025, the third largest year on record, with the rebound concentrated in fewer and bigger deals.

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HeadingThe Infant Restore Study

Babies who got personalised microbiome support showed 83% lower odds of eczema. Early data, but a good example of what gets possible when you measure the gut instead of guessing.

TheVentureCity highlights

Last Tuesday we ran an online session on Data & AI, focused on where AI actually creates value inside workflows rather than on the hype. Thanks to Ollie Hughes, João Guichard, Garoe González Parra and Juan Pablo Treviño for making it a good one.

Tools we love (and built)

Growth Scanner

A private report that benchmarks your retention, engagement and revenue against companies like yours, so you know where your growth stands before your next board meeting or raise.

Growth Scanner on a phoneGrowth Scanner

The Watchlist

The latest early-stage rounds across Europe, Latin America and North America, in one database updated every week, plus a short weekly digest of the deals worth knowing about.

The Watchlist on a phoneThe Watchlist
Open roles across our network

Our job board keeps growing, now featuring over 560 opportunities across the network.

Browse through these and 560+ more on our job board.

Explore roles

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