🇧🇦 Bosnia & Herzegovina
- Techstars Startup Weekend Sarajevo (Nov 28–30) marked the first Techstars-branded event in the country, catalysing the local early-stage startup ecosystem.
- Early-stage founders focused on outsourced product development, AI services, and SaaS for EU SMEs.
- Increased participation of local founders in global startup acceleration networks, signalling ecosystem maturity.
🇨🇿 Czech Republic
- Flowpay, a Czech fintech startup, expanded into the Netherlands with €30 M backing to address SME financing gaps across Europe.
- Czech startups showed strength in fintech infrastructure, embedded finance, and compliance automation.
- A growing trend of startups designing products EU-first but global-ready, rather than domestic-only solutions.
🇬🇭 Ghana
- Ghana Startup Week 2025 (Nov 27–28) focused on ecosystem inclusion, startup visibility, and founder–policy dialogue.
- Rise of startups working on financial inclusion, agritech platforms, and SME digitalisation.
- Entrepreneurs increasingly building pan-African business models rather than country-specific solutions.
- Strong emphasis on mobile-first products addressing informal economies.
🇮🇳 India
- Global Startup Summit 2025 (Chennai) brought global founders, investors, and corporates together to discuss scaling and cross-border expansion.
- Google for Startups India – “Prompt to Prototype” program launched to help founders rapidly build AI prototypes.
- Mundhe Banni Startup Meetup (Hubballi) strengthened grassroots entrepreneurship in Tier-2/3 cities.
- India continued to be one of the top startup-creation hubs globally, especially in AI, climate tech, and fintech.
- Indian startups focused heavily on AI-native products, not just AI features—especially in:
- Developer tools
- Customer support automation
- Supply-chain intelligence
- Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities saw growth in manufacturing-tech, agri-input platforms, and vernacular SaaS.
- Founders showed a clear shift toward profitability, capital efficiency, and exports over hypergrowth.
- Increased experimentation in climate tech, especially waste-to-value, bio-inputs, and circular economy models.
🇳🇱 Netherlands
- Became a key expansion market for European fintech startups, including Flowpay, reinforcing its role as a European fintech hub.
- The Netherlands reinforced its role as a European entry market for SaaS and fintech startups.
- Startups focused on cross-border payments, SME credit tools, and sustainability reporting platforms.
- Strong culture of design-led B2B products with global scalability.
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia
- Builtop, a Saudi prop-tech startup, raised $11 M, highlighting strong momentum in the Kingdom’s construction and real-estate technology sector.
- Continued government-backed support for startup formation under Vision 2030.
- Saudi founders built startups aligned with Vision 2030, particularly in:
- Construction tech
- Smart cities
- Prop-tech and asset management
- Rapid growth of local-first solutions tailored to GCC regulatory and cultural needs.
- Increasing participation of women and first-time founders.
🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates
- IIMA Ventures Startup Showcase (Dubai) showcased high-growth Indian startups to Middle-East investors, strengthening India–UAE startup collaboration.
- Continued rise of Dubai as a gateway market for Asian and African startups.
- Dubai continued to position itself as a scale-up hub for Asian and African startups, especially in fintech, logistics tech, and AI-enabled services.
- Growth in B2B SaaS startups targeting regional enterprises and government digitisation.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
- Imperial College London won international recognition for excellence as an entrepreneurial university, highlighting strong academia-startup collaboration.
- UK startups leaned into deep-tech commercialisation from universities (AI, biotech, materials science).
- Strong momentum in regtech, climate compliance tools, and health data platforms.
- Founders increasingly targeting US and Middle East markets early in their lifecycle.
🇺🇸 United States
- Cursor, an AI coding startup, raised a $2.3 B Series D, one of the largest AI rounds of the year.
- Project Prometheus, backed by Jeff Bezos, launched with multi-billion-dollar funding, signalling strong investor confidence in frontier AI.
- University of Minnesota Startup Generator reported record startup commercialization activity.
- The US remained the largest contributor to global VC funding, especially in AI, biotech, and developer tools.
- US startups doubled down on AI-native companies, especially:
- Developer productivity
- Autonomous agents
- Vertical-specific AI (legal, healthcare, finance)
- Strong revival of university spin-offs translating research into commercial startups.
- Clear founder focus on defensible IP, moats, and long-term value, not just speed to market.
🌍 Global Developments
- United Founders €80 M Fund launched to back AI and deep-tech startups across Europe.
- Global Entrepreneurship Week 2025 ran throughout November across 180+ countries, promoting startup culture and innovation.
- Global VC investment crossed $39 B in November 2025, driven by AI mega-rounds and late-stage deals.
- Pittsburgh named “2025 Startup Ecosystem of the Year” for strengths in AI, robotics, and industrial policy.
- Regional Developments
United States
- The US continued to dominate, with 79% of AI funding ($159 billion) going to US-based companies in 2025 . 70% of U.S. venture capital went to $100 million-plus rounds .
Europe
- Europe showed mixed signals. Through Q3 2025, €43.7 billion ($52.3 billion) was invested across 7,743 deals , roughly matching 2024 levels. However, European VC firms raised only €8.3 billion through Q3, on track for the lowest yearly fundraising total in a decade .
- Positive developments included:
- U.S. investor participation in European deals rose from 19% in 2023
- Successful exits like Klarna’s $6.2 billion IPO in September
- Lovable (vibe-coding platform) reached $200 million in annual recurring revenue within one year
Asia
- Corporate Venture Capital: Around 57 corporations created new startup investment arms in 2025 , with most large new CVC units coming from Japan, China, and Korea
- Japan: Mitsubishi created MC Global Innovation with $700 million
- India: Startups raised approximately $10.5 billion, a 17% decline from 2024 , but early-stage funding grew to nearly $3.9 billion
East Asia Challenges
- South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan face significant talent shortages, with Japan projecting a 590,000 IT talent shortage by 2030 and 81.7% of Korean AI companies citing talent shortage as a major challenge .
Major Funding Trends
November 2025 was an exceptional month for venture capital, with global startup funding reaching $39.6 billion, up 28% year-over-year from $31 billion. The month marked a significant milestone with 14 companies raising rounds of $500 million or more—the largest number of such megarounds in a single month in the past three years, representing 43% of all venture funding.
- AI-led dominance: AI startups captured over half of venture dollars, with mega-rounds hitting a 3-year high. Sectors like healthcare AI, cybersecurity, and automation saw selective but significant investments.
- Anthropic reportedly captured nearly 29% of all global VC funding for the month.
- Cursor (AI coding assistant) stunned the market by raising $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation.
- Project Prometheus (AI infrastructure) raised a record $6.2 billion.
- Overstory (Amsterdam-based climate tech for wildfire prevention) secured $43 million Series B.
- Numeric (AI accounting automation) closed $51 million Series B.
- Flexion (humanoid robotics autonomy) raised $50 million Series A.
- Wispr (voice-dictation AI) garnered $25 million growth round.
- Tenzai (AI-native cybersecurity) launched with $75 million seed.
- Aggregate disclosed funding in spotlighted rounds exceeded $984 millionearly in the month.
- The biotech sector saw approximately $1.3 billion in private funding. Braveheart Bio led the pack with a $185 million raise for cardiovascular disease research.
- Regional notes: U.S. led, but Europe (e.g., Overstory) and Israel (Tenzai) featured prominently. Indian startup funding dipped to $969 milliondespite IPO momentum.
📉 Significant Shutdowns & Failures
- Conversely, 2025 was a brutal year for startups that failed to reach profitability, with November seeing the final “winding down” for many.
- BluSmart Collapse: Once a major challenger to Uber in India, BluSmart suspended operations following a massive ₹262 crore fraud investigationinvolving its founders at Gensol Engineering.
- Sector Burnout: Several startups shuttered due to a capital crunch, including Otipy (agritech), Blip (quick commerce), and Log9 Materials(deeptech), which collapsed under high debt and technical missteps.
- Acquisition Failures: Flipkart “pulled the plug” on its SaaS platform ANS Commerce, signaling a retreat from non-core business assets.
Sources
Chat GPT
Claude
Grok
Gemini
Perplexity
