January was such a long month that it has already brought us five fresh European unicorns: from Belgium to Ukraine, several tech startups raised funding at valuations above the $1 billion threshold.
But before we take a closer look at who joined the club, two caveats.
First: This count includes startups that may be incorporated elsewhere but have their roots or a large part of their team in Europe. Until a pan-European corporate structure exists (often called “EU Inc”), this split will remain common — and we’ve decided to overlook it. Take Lovable, which is incorporated in Delaware but cannot be dissociated from Stockholm’s startup scene.
Second: valuation doesn’t equal commercial success, and it is too early to tell whether all of these companies will achieve the kind of traction that Lovable has, with the company recently crossing $300 million in annual recurring revenue. But in the current climate, the fact that VCs were willing to invest in them at unicorn valuations is a strong signal of where the appetite is.
With these caveats out of the way, let’s dive in.
Aikido
Belgium-based cybersecurity startup Aikido Security reached unicorn status with its $60 million Series B funding round. Valuing the company at $1 billion, the round was led by DST Global, with participation from PSG Equity, Singular, Notion Capital, and others.
According to a press release, the funding will help Aikido enhance its platform, which was built to unify security across the entire software lifecycle and is already used by more than 100,000 teams globally. The company also reported “five-times revenue growth and nearly three-times customer growth” over the last year.
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In a blog post, the startup celebrated this milestone and its significance. According to its team, “in an industry dominated by Palo Alto and Tel Aviv heavyweights, Aikido shows that Europe can build a world-class software security company and win globally.”
Cast AI
Cloud optimization company Cast AI is headquartered in Florida, but has Lithuanian roots and a major office in Vilnius — which explains why many now consider it to have become Lithuania’s fifth unicorn.
Cast AI’s valuation now exceeds $1 billion following a strategic investment from Pacific Alliance Ventures (PAV), the U.S.-based corporate venture arm of Korean conglomerate Shinsegae Group. In April 2025, Cast AI raised a $108 million Series C that had reportedly already brought the company close to unicorn territory.
Alongside its latest funding round, the company also introduced OMNI Compute for AI, which aims to help users deploy more AI workloads on fewer GPUs and remove regional capacity constraints.
Harmattan AI
French defense tech company Harmattan AI was only founded in 2024, but is already worth $1.4 billion, according to its latest funding round. The $200 million Series B was led by Dassault Aviation, maker of the Rafale fighter jets, and also ties into a broader partnership.
Before securing this key partner, Harmattan AI had already signed agreements with the French and British ministries of defense and with Ukrainian drone maker Skyeton, amid growing appetite for autonomous defense aircraft.
Osapiens
German ESG software firm Osapiens raised a $100 million Series C led by Decarbonization Partners, a joint venture between BlackRock and Temasek, which valued the company at over $1.1 billion.
Founded in Mannheim in 2018, Osapiens now has more than 2,400 customers worldwide, including large multinational companies that rely on its platforms and tools for sustainability reporting and data compliance, but also to mitigate supply chain risks.
Preply
The 14-year-old language learning marketplace Preply is now a unicorn valued at $1.2 billion — a milestone that also embodies Ukrainian resilience. The edtech company was founded in the United States, but its founders are Ukrainian and supporters of their home country, where Preply has a team of 150 employees.
According to its CEO, Kirill Bigai, who believes in AI-enhanced learning, proceeds from the $150 million Series D round will help the startup hire more AI talent across its four offices — now located in Barcelona, London, New York, and Kyiv.
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![John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper](https://i2.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/john-grisham-1280x853.jpg?ssl=1 "John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper")
![John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/john-grisham-1280x853.jpg "John Grisham’s New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube
There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4IQSvi3pXU[/embed] What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app (Libby, perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this?
Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck, it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow, and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
As the New York Times points out, 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights holders manage and control their copyrighted content — investing continuously to make sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” Jack Malon, a YouTube spokesperson, wrote to the Times.
If you’ve ever had a YouTube video flagged for a copyright violation, it may have been because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to crawl YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. At times, Content ID has been a valuable moneymaking scheme for copyright holders, who were able to zero in on incidental—or even accidental—uses of copyrighted material, especially music, and by making a claim, monetize other people’s videos. It can’t do this anymore, but this is the sort of thing YouTube’s copyright system has been designed to support. As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t great at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher owns, which makes it tricky to know what to even scan for. The author holds a copyright on the text, which can be slightly changed by the creator of the YouTube video while still leaving the book largely intact—good enough for casual listeners anyway. This leaves publishers and authors to navigate the takedown process manually, which seems, judging from the fact that the Widow is still up, to just not be happening.
That’s a pity. And I don’t mean because it’s robbing John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the gravest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening to such horrible garbage just because it’s available. And they really, truly, don’t have to. #John #Grishams #Legal #Drama #Real #Life #Fight #Audiobooks #YouTubeArtificial intelligence,Audiobooks,Books,intellectual proper")
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