Universities and research labs have long been Europe’s deep tech treasure trove. Now, academic spinouts have consolidated into a solid startup funnel worth $398 billion — and VC money is following.
According to Dealroom’s European Spinout Report 2025, 76 of these deep tech and life sciences companies have either reached $1 billion valuations, $100 million in revenue, or both. These include unicorns like Iceye, IQM, Isar Aerospace, Synthesia, and Tekever, which are now inspiring more funds to back university spinouts.
Just this month, two new funds emerged that will bring more funding to talent emerging out of European tech universities, while adding breadth to a pipeline currently topped by Cambridge, Oxford, and ETH Zurich.
PSV Hafnium, out of Denmark, recently closed its inaugural fund at an oversubscribed €60 million (approximately $71 million), with a focus on Nordic deep tech. With offices in Berlin and London, but also in Aachen, U2V (University2Ventures) is targeting the same amount for its first fund, of which it recently completed the first closing.
These two newcomers join the growing ranks of European venture firms that have university spinouts as a core part of their investment thesis. Pioneered by the likes of Cambridge Innovation Capital and Oxford Science Enterprises, which have now fully matured, this category has also diversified.
While it still mostly consists of funds backed by one or several universities and institutes, it now includes independent firms that simply see spinouts as potential fund returners — and rightly so. Oxford Ionics, acquired by U.S.-based IonQ, was one of the six spinouts out of Switzerland, the U.K., and Germany that delivered exits of more than $1 billion to their investors in 2025.
These exits come alongside increased amounts of funding. According to Dealroom, European university spinouts in deep tech and life sciences are on track to raise a near all-time-high $9.1 billion in 2025. This contrasts with overall VC funding in Europe, which is down nearly 50% from its 2021 peak.
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Large rounds closed in 2025 also reflect appetite for spinouts in sectors as varied as nuclear energy — Proxima Fusion — and dual-use drones — Quantum Systems, now valued above $3 billion. In many cases, these startups leverage research from specialized labs, which also explains why there is a long tail of European locations capable of producing spinouts.
Building relationships with hubs outside of Oxbridge and leading countries can also be a way for newcomers to differentiate themselves and find deals. “The Nordic’s research institutions hold extraordinary, untapped potential,” PSV Hafnium’s partners stated in a press release.
PSV Hafnium itself is a spinout from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), but is also making early-stage investments in other Nordic countries. One of its nine checks to date went to SisuSemi, a Finnish startup leveraging a decade of research at the University of Turku to bring new surface cleaning tech to the semiconductor industry.
It is good news for teams like SisuSemi that there is more funding available to them. It also comes in addition to grants, commercialization support, and improved deal terms that contribute to an encouraging environment for Europe’s spinouts. However, one pain point remains: growth capital.
As the report’s authors note, this gap “is not a unique trend to spinouts, but something impacting the entire startup ecosystem in Europe.” Still, it is quite striking that nearly 50% of late-stage funding for European deep tech and life sciences spinouts comes from outside Europe, mainly from the U.S.
While this share has decreased over the years, Europe won’t be fully reaping the benefits of its investments in talent and research unless this changes more substantially — but that’s a broader issue to be solved.
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![Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D](https://i1.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/cobol-fps-1280x853.png?ssl=1 "Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D")
![Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/cobol-fps-1280x853.png "Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D")
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