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Good morning, VC enthusiasts. Today we’re looking at Revolut hitting mass adoption in the UK, Europe’s push for 48-hour company formation with EU Inc., TikTok securing its US future, and a busy week in VC and fundraising. Let’s jump in.
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In today’s Inside/VC edition:
REVOLUT
Image Source: Seb Johnson
The Inside: Revolut just surpassed 13 million customers in the UK, meaning roughly 1 in 4 UK adults now uses the app, a scale that puts it among the largest consumer financial platforms in the country.
The details:
The UK remains Revolut’s largest and most mature market, with user numbers now comparable to incumbent high-street banks rather than digital challengers.
Growth across Europe continues in parallel, with 7 million customers in France and 6 million in Spain, making Revolut one of the most widely adopted consumer finance apps across multiple EU markets at once.
Globally, Revolut serves ~65 million customers and is targeting 100 million users by 2027, reinvesting heavily into licenses, compliance, and core banking infrastructure.
What began as a foreign-exchange card has evolved into a broad financial platform covering payments, cards, retail banking, business accounts, wealth products, and crypto, increasingly used as a primary account.
Why it matters: At this level of penetration, Revolut is no longer competing for early adopters. It is competing for default status, and that changes both the competitive dynamics in European banking and the ceiling on how large the company can become.
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Europe
Image Source: WirtschaftsWoche
The Inside: European Union is launching EU Inc., a new pan-European company structure designed to give founders what Delaware C-Corps already provide in the US: one legal vehicle to scale across an entire market.
The details:
EU Inc. was announced by Ursula von der Leyen in Davos and aims to enable fully digital incorporation within 48 hours under one EU-wide rulebook.
The goal is to remove fragmentation by letting startups and scale-ups expand across borders without repeated legal restructurings or re-incorporations.
EU Inc. is expected to be a private limited company with no minimum capital, multiple share classes, and an EU-wide ESOP, closely mirroring the mechanics of a Delaware C-Corp.
Incorporation would happen via a centralized EU register with setup costs expected to be below €100, while taxation remains national under a “28th regime.”
Why it matters: EU Inc. is Europe borrowing directly from the US playbook. If implemented well, it removes one of the biggest structural frictions for founders and VCs and turns Europe into a single, scalable startup market rather than 27 separate ones.
SHORTS
TikTok has finalized a deal to form a majority US-owned joint venture, ending a six-year political standoff and allowing the app to continue operating in the US.
The new entity is backed by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX, each taking a 15% stake, with TikTok committing to US-based data controls, algorithm safeguards, and independent governance to address national security concerns.
Substack is rolling out a TV app for Apple TV and Google TV, letting subscribers watch video posts and livestreams from creators directly on their televisions.
The app features a TikTok-style “For You” row for video discovery, with plans to add audio posts, read-alouds, paid previews, and deeper publication pages, as Substack continues pushing beyond newsletters to compete with platforms like YouTube and Patreon.
Tesla has discontinued Autopilot and is pushing customers toward Full Self-Driving, now sold only as a $99 monthly subscription, as Elon Musk needs FSD adoption to hit the milestones tied to his $1 trillion compensation package.
With only ~12% of Tesla owners currently paying for FSD, autonomy is shifting from a feature into a recurring revenue engine central to Musk’s robotaxi and software-first thesis.
FUNDRAISING
📰 Everything else in VC & fundraising today
Capital One acquires Brex for $5.15B, a steep discount to Brex’s $12.3B 2022 peak valuation, but an outstanding outcome for early backers like Ribbit Capital, whose initial Series A investment reportedly returned ~700x despite dilution.
LiveKit raised a $100M round at a $1B valuation, just 10 months after its last fundraise, led by Index Ventures, as demand for real time voice AI infrastructure accelerates with customers including OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce and Tesla.
Harvey acquired Hexus, a seed-stage startup backed by Pear VC and Liquid 2, as Harvey doubles down on product velocity while scaling at an ~$8B valuation following $760M raised in 2025 led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Inferact raised a $150M seed round at an $800M valuation, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, as the creators of the open-source vLLM project commercialize AI inference infrastructure amid surging demand for cheaper and faster model deployment.
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That's it for today!
See you soon,
Jannis & Felix — the humans behind Inside/VC