GapMinder VC

03/09/2026

The underlying technology is becoming more powerful while access to that technology is becoming less differentiated.

If multiple companies can build on similar foundation models, improvements at the model layer can quickly compress differentiation at the application layer.

For AI startups, defensibility increasingly comes from what competitors cannot easily reproduce by accessing the same models: proprietary data, workflow ownership, distribution, customer integrations, trust, and accumulated product knowledge.

This also changes how we should think about speed. Shipping quickly is useful, but speed itself is not a moat.

Its value comes from what it allows a company to accumulate before competitors do:
👉usage
👉data
👉distribution
👉integrations
👉customer dependency

The strongest AI businesses may therefore be those where the product becomes progressively more valuable to the customer, and more difficult for a competitor to replace.

We explore these new sources of defensibility and what they mean for AI startups in our latest article 👇

AI makes building software easy, but defending it is harder than ever. Learn how moats are evolving and what it takes to build a lasting AI company. For a long time, building great software was hard. You needed time, capital, and a strong technical team just to get something off the ground. That fri...

02/09/2026

A major milestone for Rayscape! 🚀

Rayscape, a company in the GapMinder portfolio, has secured EUR 1.5 million in EU funding to develop Rayscape TAP-CT, an AI-powered platform for oncology CT imaging.

The new solution marks an important step in Rayscape’s evolution – from AI models focused on specific regions and pathologies to an integrated approach capable of analyzing the entire thorax-abdomen-pelvis CT examination.

Rayscape TAP-CT will support the detection and longitudinal tracking of oncological lesions, helping advance AI-powered imaging for the diagnosis and monitoring of cancer patients.

“Rayscape TAP-CT represents a natural next step in our evolution and in our mission to bring artificial intelligence to the areas where it can have the greatest impact. At a time when oncology cases are becoming increasingly numerous and complex, we want to provide radiologists with a trusted tool that supports them in diagnosis and monitoring and, ultimately, contributes to better decisions for patients,” says Stefan Iarca, CEO of Rayscape.

Congratulations to the entire Rayscape team on this important achievement!

👉 Read more in the Business Review article:

https://business-review.eu/business/healthcare/rayscape-secures-eur-1-5-million-in-eu-funding-to-develop-oncology-ct-ai-platform-299930?fbclid=IwY2xjawUF-4VwZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkDDM1MDY4NTUzMTcyOAABHpVnN2A03X2NmtYTsEH-pnDWhx1HcvK8wAjZoEZrJo3xe5ozwJcRMHJuCPmc_aem_r8cLnaegy61acCl22oyuVQ

Healthcare - Edgefront Technologies, a company within the same group as Romanian healthtech company Rayscape, whose technologies are already in use across more than 20

02/09/2026

CEE continues to earn a bigger place on Europe’s VC map.
In Q2 2026, median VC deal value across Central & Eastern Europe reached €1.4M, up 25.9% YoY from €1.1M. Median pre-money valuations going up to €10M, up 25.2%.
Across Europe, median deal value increased 25% to €2.5M, with pre-seed and seed deal values up 28.9%. AI also remained active, with median deal value rising 17.3% to €2.5M.
For us at GapMinder, the signal is encouraging: more early-stage capital, stronger momentum in CEE, and continued appetite for AI. Additionally, investors are putting more money to work without necessarily pushing valuations higher.

The differentiator will be the founders who can turn that opportunity into durable companies.

01/09/2026

Canva’s path to product-market fit started with a broad ambition: make design accessible to everyone.

After launch, the team closely followed user behavior and feedback. Social media managers who needed to produce large amounts of visual content but often lacked the time or budget for professional designers became the hot spot. They became Canva’s first strong community of advocates and helped drive early word of mouth.

The numbers grew gradually: around 500 visitors on day one, more than 5,000 by the end of the first week, and 20,000 by the end of the first month. Canva kept refining the product around what users needed rather than treating launch as the finish line.

Today, Canva has grown to 260M monthly users, but its path there started with finding the users who truly loved the product and building from that signal.

This is a case study from First Round, worth reading for founders working through product-market fit and thinking about what early traction actually looks like.

27/08/2026

If you’re building an AI startup, $407B of AI funding doesn’t mean there’s $407B competing to fund companies like yours.

PitchBook reports that AI startups raised more than $407B in H1 2026, compared with $264B across all of 2025. But more than half went to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Look one layer deeper and the concentration becomes even clearer. Horizontal platforms captured 70.8% of AI deal value.

Vertical AI applications tell a different story. They represented 62.9% of deal count, yet attracted only 12.9% of capital.

It suggests that while massive amounts of capital are being concentrated in the largest horizontal platforms and frontier model companies, there’s a much broader market of companies being built on top of them.

For most AI startups, the pool of capital is therefore much smaller than $407B, but there’s still plenty of opportunity to create value on top of the infrastructure that capital is funding.

(c) Q2 AI Report by Pitchbook 👉 https://lnkd.in/drppqiRN

26/08/2026

AI is becoming part of a broader question for founders: how should a company be designed as the cost and speed of ex*****on change?

Hiring is one part of that discussion.

We wanted to look beyond predictions about jobs and understand what this shift means in practice for growing companies. So we spoke with founders from Finqware and Druid AI about how AI is influencing the way they think about teams, roles, and organizational design.

We brought those perspectives together with recent research from BCG, Microsoft, Deloitte, and Gartner in our latest article.

The carousel below draws some of the practical implications for founders, and on our blog you can find the full analysis. We left the link in the first comment below.

25/08/2026

Fundraising continues to concentrate around less, but better deals. This is also visible at pre-seed level according to the latest report by Carta.

In the last quarter the same amount of capital was invested as a year ago, so founders need to make it easy for an investor to understand why this company deserves. And if you’re raising, it’s worth knowing what “normal” looks like in today’s market:

→ More than 90% of SAFEs now use post-money valuation caps.
→ Only 25% of pre-seed SAFEs issued in 2026 included a discount.
→ SAFE valuation caps increased year over year across every round-size category.
→ Raising $1M–$2.4M on SAFEs implies roughly 16% expected dilution

(c) Data from State of Pre-Seed by Carta 👉 https://carta.com/data/state-of-pre-seed-q2-2026-full-report/

20/08/2026

A big TAM is not enough to make a company venture-scale.

Founders often lead with market size: “This is a €20B opportunity.” But investors are doing a different calculation.

Venture returns follow a power law. That means we also need to understand what the company could realistically be worth at exit, how much ownership the fund can maintain, and whether that outcome can meaningfully impact fund returns.

Can this realistically become a €500M+ company?

A company can operate in a huge market and still not have a venture-scale outcome. And the opposite can also be true: a focused starting market can lead to a much bigger opportunity over time.

For founders preparing to raise, understanding this math is just as important as knowing the size of the market.

19/08/2026

Dilution is part of building a venture-backed company. But how founders manage it can make a big difference over time.

A useful piece from TDK Ventures looks at how priced rounds, SAFEs, warrants, and employee option pools affect founder ownership, and why dilution should be considered alongside control, governance, and the strategic value an investor brings.

The right capital can help a company reach key milestones faster, attract stronger talent, shorten the path to market, and ultimately build a much larger business.

For founders, the goal shouldn’t simply be to minimize dilution. It should be to understand what you are giving up, what you are getting in return, and how today’s fundraising decisions affect future rounds.

Read the article on TDK Ventures blog. 👇

Dilution is inevitable in venture-backed growth — but loss of control doesn’t have to be. By understanding how equity is distributed across…

18/08/2026

As AI makes ex*****on faster and cheaper, critical thinking becomes more valuable.

As Cosmin Cosma, Co-Founder & CEO of Finqware, one of our portfolio companies, says: the best people know how to navigate ambiguity, make trade-offs, and understand when the technically elegant answer isn't necessarily the right business answer.

This is also changing how companies think about hiring.

The advantage is moving away from simply having more people to having teams that can use AI effectively while applying judgment, context, and critical thinking.

We explore this trend in our recent article. We left the link below in the comments section.