London-based GoCanopy has raised €2.1 million in seed funding to support the development of its AI-powered operating system for institutional real estate investors. The round was led by ISAI, with participation from BNP Paribas Développement, Yellow, and a group of angel investors. Institutional real estate investors manage large volumes of deals, tenant, and financial data that are often fragmented across emails, documents, spreadsheets, and teams. This fragmentation can limit the creation of a unified system of record and reduce the ability to systematically leverage historical information for investment and asset management decisions. GoCanopy addresses this challenge through a centralised, AI-driven platform that extracts and structures data from internal documents such as offering memoranda, rent rolls, and asset management reports. Using human-in-the-loop AI workflows, the platform consolidates unstructured information into a shared institutional knowledge base that evolves as new data is added. Founded in 2023 by William He and Yash Pabbisetti, GoCanopy develops institutional-grade AI tools for real estate investment teams. The platform supports core investment workflows, including deal screening, underwriting, and investment committee preparation, while also enabling asset management functions such as lease expiry monitoring, rent review tracking, and identification of leasing opportunities. All insights remain traceable to source documents to support transparency and governance requirements. WilliamHe, Co-founder and CEO of GoCanopy, said his experience in real estate investing showed how fragmented data limits value creation, and that advances in AI now make it possible to consolidate institutional intelligence and unlock additional revenue opportunities. The new funding will be used to further develop the enterprise platform and support international expansion, including opening an office in London alongside Paris and growing the company’s commercial and engineering teams.

Today, Luminance launched the largest update to its Legal-Grade AI platform in the company’s ten-year history. The new architecture retains negotiation history and legal decision-making across all enterprise contracts, addressing a long-standing gap in contract systems that captured outcomes but lost the context behind decisions. Luminance’s platform now connects the context for contract negotiations, workflows, and analysis across the entire enterprise portfolio.   Founded in 2015 and developed by AI experts from the University of Cambridge, Luminance’s Legal-Grade AI redefines enterprise decision-making, turning contracts from an administrative burden into strategic intelligence. The value of specialisation I spoke to Graham Sills, co-founder and Director of AI, last year at Web Summit, who told me, “I’m very glad we specialised early.  “Our advantage is that we’ve spent a decade building deep legal expertise and domain-specific models.  This means that if your entire product depends on a general model whose licensing or capabilities change, it creates real business risk.  Specialisation gives us a much stronger foundation.” The problem that started it all: Highlighters in law firms Regarding the impetus for the founding of Luminance, he recalled,  “Some of my friends had studied law and were very excited to go and work in big law firms. They’d spent a huge amount of money and effort on their education, and in their first few years they were basically given a highlighter pen and told to read contracts all day, every day.” He thought it was a “terrible waste of talent and time”, and it felt like a problem that technology could solve.  “At the time we wouldn’t even have called it AI, but that’s how we ended up building a company focused on specialised legal AI.” The ‘legal brain’ of the organisation Luminance’s multi-agent platform automates entire workflows, from creation and negotiation to risk review and compliance. It understands clauses, evaluates legal and commercial impact, takes action,  and learns from every negotiation, becoming increasingly attuned to your business.  Today, Luminance is used by over a thousand organisations worldwide.  Sills shared:  "We think of it as the ‘legal brain’ of the organisation — everything you would normally go to your general counsel for, you can now access through AI agents, supported by humans.” For example, if you want to understand how something like Trump’s tariffs affect your business, traditionally that would take weeks — reading different contracts, working with analysts, pulling everything together. With Luminance, it can take minutes.” There’s also negotiation. For simpler agreements like NDAs or service contracts, Luminance has shown that two AI agents can actually negotiate with each other.  “We’re not quite ready as a society to remove humans from the loop entirely, but a huge amount of the work can already be automated.” Sills shared a customer anecdote: a customer returned from holiday and realised he was supposed to review a master service agreement, with a deadline in 2 hours. Normally, that would have taken four or five hours at least. According to Sills: “He put the document through Luminance, checked it against his company’s risk criteria, and within about five minutes had enough confidence to make a decision and sign. That kind of time saving is transformative.” For a decade, Luminance has cut contract negotiation time by 70-80 per cent. With this relaunch, that jumps to 90 per cent.  Further, these capabilities have expanded with the new upgrade. With institutional contract knowledge now available throughout the enterprise, legal teams can regain over 30 per cent of their time. Solving ‘enterprise amnesia’ According to Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance: “Enterprise amnesia is real, and it's costly. Whenever it’s time to renegotiate a contract, executives ask: Who agreed to this, and why?  Current AI systems are helpful at the moment, but become disconnected over time. Our new platform remembers, reasons, and stays with the work in perpetuity, which distinguishes it from anything else on the market.”  In 2025, the company's global revenue doubled for the second year, with North America growing 127 per cent YOY, including its first eight-figure enterprise deal.  To support this growth, Luminance’s headcount grew by over 40 per cent across the  UK, Europe, Australia, and the United States. Over the past 12 months, Luminance analysed 18M+  contracts across jurisdictions and industries. Luminance’s new Legal-Grade AI launches in beta to design partners, with broader availability from  February 25.

When four engineering students at TU Delft shared a simple idea in 2013, they had no clue it would change how millions of students study worldwide. Marnix, Lucas, Sander, and Jacques noticed something unfair: students with lots of friends could easily swap great study notes, while others struggled alone. They started by carrying external hard drives from room to room, sharing notes with classmates. That small act of helping each other became Studocu, a platform that now serves 60 million students every month across more than 100 countries. From Dorm Room to Global Impact Studocu started with a clear mission: to make education accessible to everyone. The founders believed quality education helps you excel in life, but only when everyone has access to the same resources. What began as a handful of lecture notes from one Dutch university has grown into a massive library of over 50 million study documents from more than 120,000 schools worldwide. Students upload around 50,000 new notes every day, about one new document every second. From 15 million users in 2021 to 60 million monthly users today, Studocu proves that students everywhere want to learn together and help each other succeed. The Library That Never Sleeps Studocu is built around student-shared study materials. When you search by your school and course, you can find notes, summaries, and practice problems that match what you're learning. One person's summary can save someone else hours, and seeing a topic explained differently can make it click. But a big library can feel overwhelming. That's why Studocu also offers AI tools to help students pull out key ideas faster. Study Smarter, Not Harder: The AI Revolution A recent survey by Copyleaks showed that 90% of students are turning to AI to help manage their schoolwork. Studocu recognized this need and integrated powerful AI tools directly into its platform. Instant Summaries: Upload a dense 40-page textbook chapter, and Studocu AI breaks it down into a clear, organized summary in seconds, extracting key points so you don't have to re-read the same paragraph three times. Study Assistant: Think of this as a tutor who's always awake. As you read through a document, you can ask the Study Assistant to explain a concept, simplify a definition, or provide an example. Active Recall with Quizzes: Studocu AI turns your notes into interactive quizzes, scanning your uploaded content and generating multiple-choice questions to test your knowledge immediately. Mock Exams: Practice Like It's the Real Thing The most anxiety-inducing part of school is the exam itself. Studocu's Mock Exam feature lets you generate a tailored practice test based entirely on your course materials. Upload your lecture slides or notes, click "Mock Exam," and the AI creates a balanced test with multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions. You take it under a timer, simulating real exam pressure. After you submit, you get detailed feedback showing what you missed and why, so you know exactly what to study next. Trusted by Students and Recognized Globally Studocu was recently named one of the World's Top EdTech Companies of 2025 by TIME and Statista. The platform currently holds a 4.2-star rating on Trustpilot based on nearly 10,000 reviews, with students consistently citing the quality of shared resources as a major factor in their academic success. Grow Smarter Together Studocu is built around a simple idea: students learn better when they support each other. Shared notes can save time, and AI tools help you turn messy materials into something you can actually review. If you feel stuck, you don't have to start from zero. Summary Studocu is a massive online study group where millions of students share lecture notes, summaries, and practice problems for specific courses. Unlike ChatGPT, Studocu AI focuses exclusively on student-shared documents and your files, keeping answers tied to real academic material. The platform is mostly free and works for all subjects, from engineering to physics, with real-time collaboration support. If you don't have notes to upload, search the library by your university and course to find materials from students who've taken the same class.

Evaro, an NHS-licensed digital healthcare platform, has closed a $25 million Series A funding round led by AlbionVC, with participation from Simplyhealth Ventures, Exceptional Ventures, Cornerstone VC, and BBI. Founded by medical professionals, the company provides embeddable prescribing and pharmacy infrastructure that enables consumer brands to offer regulated digital healthcare services directly to their customers. The platform supports treatment across more than 80 conditions and has served over two million patients to date, working with a range of consumer brands. Evaro’s infrastructure includes asynchronous consultations, remote diagnostics, prescribing, dispensing, and aftercare, and can be integrated into existing digital platforms within a short timeframe. For partners, the model enables the addition of healthcare services with limited implementation effort, while supporting new revenue streams and deeper customer engagement. Dr Thuria Wenbar, CEO and co-founder of Evaro, explained that the company has developed infrastructure that allows trusted consumer brands to offer safe, regulated healthcare for common conditions without building their own systems. The funding comes amid increasing pressure on primary care in the UK, driven by extended waiting times for GP appointments. Evaro aims to help address this demand by expanding access to regulated digital healthcare services. Looking ahead, the company plans to broaden its reach and further develop its healthcare-as-a-service offering in the UK market.

Paraglide, an agentic AI product for accounts receivable (AR), has raised a $5 million seed round co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and DN Capital, with participation from Born Capital and The Nordic Web Ventures.  Built for high-volume B2B finance teams, Paraglide deploys AI agents that automate two-way billing communication across the AR lifecycle. The agents respond to customers’ billing questions, chase overdue invoices, and take action across the financial stack to reduce Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and improve cash flow.  Unlike traditional AR tools that rely on one-way, templated payment reminders that customers often ignore. Paraglide’s AI agents manage full two-way conversations with customers, replying and following up on existing threads in a personal and contextual way at scale.  Paraglide was founded by the former CFO and Head of Engineering of GetAccept (YCW16), which raised more than $30 million across its Series A and B rounds, Rasmus Areskoug, and Andreas Åström. Having experienced the operational burden of accounts receivable firsthand, the founders set out to modernise one of finance’s most persistent pain points.  Paraglide is already seeing strong early traction among mid-market and enterprise companies, with customers such as Choco, Ardoq, and Spiideo, and partnerships with the revenue automation company Chargebee. Initial customers report a 34 per cent reduction in DSO and achieving financial inbox-zero within the first week of onboarding.  Rasmus Areskoug, Co-founder and CEO of Paraglide, commented:  “As a former CFO, I’ve seen finance teams drowning in billing queries and tirelessly chasing invoices with reminders that customers ignore. AI agents have already transformed customer support by automating high-volume, conversational work. That same shift is now coming to accounts receivable, where agents can handle billing conversations end to end and help businesses get paid on time.”  According to Alex Ferrara at Bessemer Venture Partners: "Paraglide's AI agent helps reduce DSOs and frees the finance team up to work on more valuable, higher-level strategic projects."  According to Thomas Rubens at DN Capital, this is the year of the 'System of Action,' where AI agents move beyond observation to execute complex workflows with high-level context.  “Paraglide is defining this category by solving a critical organisational pain point, reducing DSO, and we are thrilled to back a team that combines unparalleled experience with technological velocity to fundamentally change how companies unlock cash and drive growth.”  The funding will support Paraglide’s expansion across Europe as demand for agentic automation in finance operations grows. 

ZOHO.VC, the venture capital arm of ZOLLHOF – Tech Incubator, has completed the first closing of its inaugural fund, securing 70 per cent of its target volume ten months ahead of the final closing. The fund’s limited partners include entrepreneurial families and startup founders. The fund focuses on pre-seed and seed investments in technology-driven startups and combines capital with technical expertise and access to ZOLLHOF’s network of corporate partners, technology experts, and co-investors. Its investment strategy targets early-stage companies connected to the ZOLLHOF ecosystem, including startups emerging from its incubation programme, designated a “Startup Factory” by the German Federal Government, as well as selected co-investment opportunities. ZOHO.VC places a particular focus on deeptech companies and university spin-offs across both software and hardware. Alongside the fundraising process, the team has already completed five investments, including Merge Labs. The fund’s current volume of approximately €7 million represents an initial milestone. In response to ongoing demand and a growing pipeline, partners Benjamin Bauer and Dennis Kirpensteijn, together with Principal Nicolas Sievers, plan to expand the fund beyond its original target in 2026, with the objective of supporting teams addressing significant technological and societal challenges.

Estonian-founded project management platform Scoro has acquired the Estonian AI-driven expense and bill management company Envoice.  Professional services firms have long managed time and costs in separate, siloed systems. This fragmentation often forces businesses to rely on month-end reporting to understand their margins. By combining Scoro’s control over projects, budgets, time, and resources with Envoice’s control over spend, companies can bridge this visibility gap and capture every project cost as work is done, avoiding month-end surprises that impact the bottom line. Visibility and real-time insights are vital in an era of razor-thin margins and heightened competition as AI disrupts the very services these firms sell.  The acquisition brings together two complementary solutions: Scoro’s comprehensive project management capabilities and Envoice’s world-class AI-powered bill and expense automation. While Scoro and Envoice will continue to operate as separate products, together they offer professional services firms a significantly more efficient way to manage project-related expenses, with real-time insights into profitability. Integration is already live between the two products. Receipts get automatically linked to both projects and purchase orders at the point of capture, making project cost reporting faster and more reliable. Further enhancements will be rolled out over the next two months to fully automate data exchange. Fred Krieger, Founder and CEO of Scoro, said: "Service businesses live and die by their margins, and yet external expenses are not always accounted for in project tracking because they sit in disconnected systems. Envoice has built a truly innovative solution for automating bookkeeping, bill capture and expense approvals. Together, we ensure no cost goes unlogged, fulfilling our vision of an AI-powered future where repetitive manual tasks are outsourced to AI and automation is applied across the full project lifecycle, from planning and delivery to financial control.” According to Jaanus Põder, Founder and CEO of Envoice: " Scoro is the perfect match for our next chapter. For our customers and partners, business will continue as usual, but with the backing of Scoro, we can now accelerate our roadmap and bring new capabilities to market much faster."

Radiant (formerly Neamine) has been selected to participate in Hexa’s Carbon Zero acceleration programme and has closed a €2 million funding round, with minority participation from the business angel networks Tiresias Angels and Selim Cherif. Industrial heat accounts for more than 70 per cent of total industrial energy consumption, yet it remains largely dependent on fossil fuels. One of the main reasons is the limited economic competitiveness of low-carbon heat solutions, which often requires industrial operators to balance cost pressures with decarbonisation objectives. Radiant is addressing this challenge by developing a solar thermal solution tailored to industrial applications. Its system integrates next-generation heliostats, a proprietary receiver, and thermal energy storage to deliver configurations adapted to specific industrial needs. The technology is capable of supplying heat at temperatures between 200°C and 1,000°C, with thermal power outputs ranging from 2 to 50 megawatts, while maintaining a high degree of operational control. According to Alexandre Meurisse, CTO of Radiant, the company’s core technology builds on 15 years of research and development conducted at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and enables the production of hot air at temperatures exceeding 1,000°C, above current industry standards. Thomas Delhon, CEO of Radiant, added that the solution offers heat-intensive industries a practical way to reduce emissions while maintaining stable energy costs. In practice, Radiant’s technology replaces fossil-fuel-based equipment such as gas burners and oil-fired boilers with a solar-based heat source adapted to industrial processes. Companies in sectors such as asphalt, glass, and cement have expressed interest in applying the solution to equipment, including kilns and dryers. The new funding will support the construction of Radiant’s first industrial demonstrator in Le Mans, intended to validate the scalability of the technology and the company’s ability to deploy the solution efficiently at industrial sites. Participation in Hexa’s Carbon Zero programme will also provide Radiant with additional support as it continues to develop its industrial solar thermal solution. Over time, the company plans to expand its activities internationally and scale the deployment of its technology to support the broader decarbonisation of industrial heat production.

Stockholm-based Brickanta, an agentic AI platform for the construction industry, has closed an $8 million seed funding round led by Northzone. The round includes participation from global sports figures, founders of Lovable and Tandem Health, angel investors affiliated with OpenAI, Google, and Meta, as well as continued backing from Y Combinator and SSE Business Lab. Brickanta is developing an AI-native operating system for construction, initially focused on pre-construction workflows such as bid analysis, cost estimation, and procurement, processes that play a central role in project outcomes. The platform combines AI with industry-specific data, standards, and documentation to help construction teams identify gaps, assess risk, and prepare procurement materials more efficiently than traditional tools. The company has onboarded hundreds of users and introduced its platform to construction teams across eleven countries on four continents. Customers connect their internal data to generate AI-driven analyses, with users reporting that early identification or accurate pricing of change orders can significantly influence project viability. Procurement teams are also able to generate category-specific RFP packages in minutes rather than days. Lucas Otterling, co-founder and CEO of Brickanta, noted that while the construction sector is often perceived as slow to adopt new technology, the company has seen strong engagement from a new generation of builders seeking AI tools designed around real-world construction workflows. Commenting on the investment, Pär-Jörgen Pärson, Partner at Northzone, said that productivity growth in the construction industry has lagged for decades and that AI has the potential to help manage the complexity of planning and execution, which often involves large volumes of critical documentation. Looking ahead, Brickanta plans to expand across Europe, leveraging shared building standards such as the Eurocodes. The company also intends to continue growing its engineering, product, and delivery teams, while maintaining close ties to Silicon Valley through Y Combinator, US-based angel investors, and partnerships with large language model developers.

Lunar, the Nordic digital challenger bank, has raised €46 million in fresh funding, with the funds geared towards growing its business customers and supporting the launch of a suite of new lending products.   Lunar, which has over one million users across the Nordics, has raised the funding from existing investors Heartland and Orbit Alliance and new investor 100A, a London-based fintech investor. Lunar did not disclose a valuation following its new funding, when asked by Tech.eu. Lunar was last valued at $2.2 billion in 2022. The latest funding round means that Lunar has raised €537m in total, according to Pitchbook. Ken Villum Klausen, founder and CEO of Lunar, said the funding would be used to grow its business customers, which currently stands at 40,000 users, in Denmark, Sweden and Norway.   On a target number for business customers by the end of 2026, he said: “I think we would be aiming for 100,000, that is one of the core ambitions for 2026."   He said business customer growth was currently stronger in Sweden than in Denmark. He added: “We can see that our strategy is working. More users are choosing paid subscriptions, and we are seeing strong momentum in our business customer base, reaching 40,000 business users in January."   The funding will also support the launch of a suite of lending products, including credit cards and overdrafts, in the second quarter of this year, said Villum Klausen. He said expansion would continue to focus on the Nordics, not beyond into wider Europe. In 2022, Lunar launched its Lunar Block in-app crypto platform in 2022, allowing users to buy and sell crypto coins directly.   In October last year, Lunar secured a crypto licence under the EU’s MiCA regulation. Villum Klausen said crypto was “doing OK”.   Last year, Lunar was hit by a string of executive departures including its co-founder and CTO, as it looks to cut management costs and become profitable in the long term.   Peter Andreasen, Lunar’s co-founder and chief investment officer, and Kåre Kjelstrøm, the CTO (chief technology officer) of Lunar, have both left. The two executives are understood to have left in the past few weeks.

London-based Flowla, a platform developing AI-assisted automation for sales and customer success teams, has closed a $2.5 million seed funding round to scale its buyer journey automation engine. The round was led by Revo Capital, with participation from AI Startup Factory, Türkiye Development Fund, APY Ventures, Sharks & Partners, and angel investors, including Salesforce operators. Despite significant investment in CRM and sales tools, many revenue teams continue to rely on manual processes to manage complex B2B deals. Sales representatives spend a large share of their time on non-selling tasks such as drafting emails, coordinating stakeholders, and tailoring materials, which can slow follow-ups and contribute to deal delays or customer churn, particularly during handoffs from Sales to Customer Success. Founded by Erdem Gelal (CEO) and Oguz Gelal (CTO), Flowla transforms the digital sales room from a simple content-sharing link into a no-code automation layer that standardises the buyer journey across Sales and Customer Success. The platform provides revenue teams with a single, branded digital workspace that evolves from a sales proposal into an onboarding hub, consolidating documents, communication, and next steps in one place. Teams can design predefined journeys using templates, AI-assisted personalised content, and communication rules, with subsequent actions triggered automatically based on real-time buyer behaviour. For example, when a buyer views pricing information, Flowla can identify the viewer’s role, analyse their activity, prepare a relevant email draft, notify the sales representative, and queue the message for review. Erdem Gelal, co-founder and CEO of Flowla, noted that sales enablement is shifting from coaching representatives toward building more structured approaches to revenue execution, adding that managing complex B2B deals can no longer rely on human memory without creating execution gaps. Flowla provides the customer-facing layer where revenue execution runs on autopilot, ensuring that every follow-up and stakeholder alignment happens instantly and consistently, Gelal said. By reducing reliance on manual execution, Flowla helps minimise missed follow-ups and inconsistent handovers, enabling teams to manage the full customer journey more predictably and build a repeatable approach to revenue execution. The new funding will be used to scale Flowla’s automation engine and content generation capabilities, as well as to establish a dedicated US-based go-to-market team to support its expanding international presence.

The construction and real estate sector is Europe’s largest industry, yet it remains largely dependent on manual and disconnected processes. This inefficiency is becoming critical as the sector faces a massive wave of activity, driven by a €584 billion requirement for power grid upgrades and an estimated €500 billion in transport infrastructure modernisations across Europe by 2030.  From large-scale residential developments to the repair of ageing bridge networks, the increasing complexity of these projects is pushing traditional administrative systems to a breaking point. German startup Arctis AI has raised $1M+ to provide the technological shift required for the sector to evolve. Arctis AI is building AI agents that help construction companies structure, access, and work with contracts throughout the project lifecycle. Instead of treating contracts as static documents, the platform structures them into one central hub where obligations, risks, payment terms, and dependencies are transparent and usable for commercial and project teams. I spoke to CEO  Dila Ekrem to learn more.  Ekrem explained that in construction, document and contract processes begin as early as the tendering phase and continue through a complex chain of workflows until project completion — from drafting and contract review to change-order handling, claims management, and more. It is a broad and fragmented landscape. “Construction remains a highly traditional industry with deep structural inefficiencies,” she said. “Our vision is to build an end-to-end platform for general contractors and project developers that embeds AI across daily workflows, enabling them to run projects faster, more accurately, and at lower cost.” Arctis AI provides the digital infrastructure to manage the administrative complexity of large-scale construction and infrastructure projects. By replacing fragmented files with a connected workflow for project delivery, the platform enables teams to align faster, reduce friction between parties, and maintain consistency from tender through close-out. The company focuses on resolving the industry’s most demanding administrative bottlenecks, allowing general contractors and developers to execute Europe’s critical building projects with higher precision and reduced operational overhead. From fencing champion to founder Before founding her own company, Ekrem spent her teenage years in fencing halls and on planes between competitions, eventually ranking #1 in Turkey and winning 35+ national & international medals. The daughter of a custom shirtmaker, she grew up in her father’s shop, watching him build a business with his hands. Early on, she knew she wanted to build something of her own, too. Two years ago, Ekrem moved to Germany to study at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). She found her way into Munich’s startup ecosystem. From TUM classmates to first Pilot in three months Ekrem is joined by co-founders Duc-Trung Nguyen and Leon Stawowiak, both of whom she met at TUM. Nguyen arrived in Munich from Vietnam and worked as a Flink delivery driver to support his computer science studies before breaking into the software industry and working most recently as an AI engineer at SAP. Stawowiak rounds out the trio, having previously worked on AI applications at Bain & Company and KPMG. Ekrem admits: “When we were friends at university, we always knew that we wanted to found a startup. We were really active in the startup ecosystem and at the same time, we all have an immigration background. We didn’t know many people here, so we always thought a good programme and a good community are very essential." The team consolidated their business solution through extensive market research and speaking with over 150 contract managers in the construction field. Once they identified their significant painpoints, they started building in parallel.  The team started Arctis AI in August 2025 and deployed their first pilot project in Germany just three months later —impressive speed.  Winning trust in a conservative sector When asked about attaining that critical initial pilot, Ekrem shared, “What’s really important in this industry is personal relationships. Warm introductions and being able to reference trusted names made a big difference in getting people onto calls. Once we had their attention, we could clearly demonstrate the problems they were facing and show that we had the technical capability to solve them.“ From there, it was about building trust. The team invested heavily in onboarding — sometimes spending an entire day with a client, explaining the product in detail, answering questions, setting up access, and carefully walking them through every step. “Most of them are not used to modern software; for many, SAP is the only system they know, " shared Ekrem.  2It takes time at the beginning, but after the first one or two weeks, the product becomes very intuitive and largely self-explanatory.” Ushering in a new era for Europe’s largest industry Ekrem said that most existing contract management tools still treat each document as a standalone, static file — an approach that simply does not work in construction, where every contract must be understood in the context of technical specifications and the wider web of project agreements. “In construction, you can’t review a contract in isolation,” she explained. “You can’t sign an agreement with your door supplier before the wall has even been built. Every document is connected, and those connections really matter.” Arctis’ approach, she said, is to build AI agents that understand and reason across these interdependencies, allowing teams to interact with their full set of project documents and contracts as a connected system. “You can talk to your documents and your project contracts and see everything in relation to each other,” Ekrem said. “It gives you a holistic view of the entire contract ecosystem.” The company is starting with pre-signature workflows and building its platform on top of this agent-based infrastructure, while also turning past and present contracts into a reusable knowledge base. “A huge amount of valuable knowledge is hidden in the contracts companies have already signed and are currently negotiating,” she said. “Project developers often build the same types of assets in different geographies or work with the same subcontractors again and again. When senior people leave, a lot of that institutional knowledge disappears. Our goal is to make this knowledge a core, living part of the product, so it can be reused and built on over time.” From 150 incoming investor calls to a strategic lead in PT1 The round was led by PT1 (Berlin/London), with participation from EWOR, Superangels, and a prominent group of angels from the European construction and tech ecosystems, including Alexander Schwörer (Owner of PERI), Sebastian Johnston (Founding Partner at La Famiglia), Christian Vollmann (Founder of C1 Green Chemicals), Daniel Bronk (Founder of B+V Union & Real Estate Developer), Christian Marquart (Director Legal at Marvel Fusion). According to Ekrem, the company’s fundraising journey began with the UnternehmerTUM Ideation Fellowship, which later invited the team to pitch and opened the door to a long and intensive investor process. “After that, I ended up doing around 150 investor calls,” she said. From the outset, the team was clear that they did not just want generalist capital, but investors with deep roots in the construction sector who could actively help with market access and credibility. “We specifically wanted an investor from the construction industry,” Ekrem explained. “It was important for us that our backers could make introductions and help us build trust with customers.”PT1 was very important for us because they really understand the industry and have strong connections. We also brought industry angels on board whose names carry a lot of weight when talking to customers and opening doors.” To support the company’s growth, Arctis AI has already made its first technical hires, recruiting engineers with experience from AWS, Snowflake, and Palantir. With the new capital, the company plans to further strengthen its technical team, develop additional modules, and expand its customer base across Europe.

The Footprint Firm has completed the final closing of Footprint Fund I, an Article 9 €76 million venture fund. The fund focuses on early-stage deeptech companies in the green transition in Northern Europe. Footprint Fund I is the first fund in The Footprint Firm’s venture platform and has already invested in 20 startups, including Reel Energy,  Kvasir Technologies, Nordic Salt Cycle, FoodOp, and Rock Flour Company. Footprint Fund I invests in areas such as biotechnology, energy, AI and climate technology, circular manufacturing, the built environment, CO₂e reduction, and food systems. The fund is supported by The Footprint Firm’s team of 45 specialists, who work actively with the portfolio companies in areas including commercialisation, regulation, scientific validation, scaling, and partnerships. “The synergies between our advisory business and The Footprint Fund I are already visible. "Our business model allows us to invest significantly more hours and expertise into all investment stages than the traditional VC-setup. That is exactly what is needed in the sustainable innovation space, which adds deep environmental, regulatory and transformational requirements to the classic investor toolbox. We are confident that that’s the way to ensure both vital impact and healthy returns”, adds co-founding Partner Christian Sparrevohn. The fund is backed by a group of leading Danish institutional investors and family offices, including North-East Family Office, EIFO, Realdania, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, TryghedsGruppen, Lauritzen Fonden, Nordea-fonden, Novo Holdings, and Velliv Foreningen. The fund invests in early-stage companies that address key sustainability challenges while also having the potential for competitive financial returns. The completion of the fundraising marks an important milestone in The Footprint Firm’s development as an investment platform. “The closing of Footprint Fund I reflects a strong alignment with investors who value disciplined investing, deep sustainability expertise and long-term partnership. The dialogues we’ve had throughout the fundraising process have helped sharpen both our platform and our ambitions. This positions us well as we continue to scale our investment activities and prepare for future funds built on the same integrated model” said Jakob Mathias Wichmann, co-founding partner and Managing Partner of the Footprint Fund. “With Footprint Fund I, we are doubling down on our mission to accelerate what is necessary,” said Anna Søndergaard, co-founding Partner and CEO at The Footprint Firm. “The future worth building will not arrive by chance; it must be ventured into. Europe has the talent, research depth, and industrial base needed to build category-defining climate solutions, and we want to contribute to the success of these teams with funding, ecosystem support and our expertise and network.”

UK-based Vennre, a wealth creation platform, has raised $9.6 million in a pre-Series A funding round through a hybrid equity and debt structure. The round was co-led by Vision Ventures and anb seed Fund, with participation from Sanabil 500, Ace & Co, Plus VC, and a group of strategic individual investors from the private banking, technology, and entrepreneurship sectors. Vennre is designed to give high-earning professionals access to curated investment opportunities traditionally reserved for institutional investors and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. The platform offers vetted deals across asset classes, including real estate, private equity, venture capital, and private credit, with investment minimums starting at around $5,000 and options that include Sharia-compliant opportunities. It combines financial expertise with technology to streamline access to alternative investments, with an emphasis on due diligence, transparency, and a user-friendly experience. The company aims to reduce traditional barriers to private market investing, such as high minimums and complex structures, and enable so-called HENRYs (High Earners, Not Rich Yet) to build diversified portfolios and pursue long-term wealth creation with greater confidence. Ziad Mabsout, CEO and co-founder of Vennre, noted that many high-earning professionals in the region have achieved financial success but lack effective tools to compound it. He added that Vennre is focused on long-term wealth creation rather than transactional investing, starting with curated private market opportunities and evolving into a comprehensive wealth platform built on discipline, trust, and alignment. Vennre plans to use the capital to expand its client base, launch new platform features, and strengthen its presence in Saudi Arabia, in line with ongoing financial sector liberalisation and fintech growth.

Rainbow Weather, a next-gen climate tech startup specialising in hyper-localised short-term weather forecasting, announced it has raised $5.5M Seed funding round.  Rainbow Weather has developed a real-time, AI-driven weather intelligence platform that fuses satellite imagery, radar, meteorological stations, and even smartphone sensor data to deliver highly precise, minute-level forecasts and severe-weather detection. The company now sells its data both through a consumer app and directly to enterprises and other weather providers, positioning itself as an infrastructure layer for a world of increasingly volatile climate conditions. The company was founded in 2021 by Belarusian serial entrepreneurs Yuriy Melnichek and Alexander Matveenko. Melnichek previously built AIMatter, a neural-network platform later acquired by Google, as well as video app Vochi (acquired by Pinterest) and fashion tech startup Wanna (acquired by Farfetch). Matveenko, meanwhile, founded AI mapping company MapData, which he sold to Mapbox in 2017. I spoke to the co-founders to find out more.  From colleagues to the hailstorm that exposed the limits of traditional forecasting Melnichek and Matveenko have known each other since childhood and have worked together previously. Throughout, they kept the shared ambition to eventually build a startup together as co-founders. Melnichek recalled, “Some time later, I approached Matveenko and said: “How about we finally do it?” They started thinking about something at the intersection of maps and weather." For Melnichek, it was personal.  “I was living in Switzerland and hiking in the Alps, using an app called RainViewer, which I really liked. I was literally hiking behind a rain cloud. The app showed that the cloud would keep moving and I would stay dry. But then I suddenly felt something hitting my head. It was hail, about the size of grapes. The rain cloud reached the mountains, stopped, intensified, and started hailing. The app didn’t account for elevation. It didn’t know there was a mountain, so it relied only on past observations, not on how the terrain would affect the cloud.” That was the moment he realised: existing models don’t really understand how weather systems evolve in real time in complex geography.  S o the idea to use machine learning, elevation data, and multiple sources of real-time input to predict how rain and other weather phenomena actually develop, not just where they were historically, was born. How Rainbow builds forecasts from space, radar, and smartphones Rainbow Weather’s core product is a hyper-accurate minute-by-minute weather forecasting app powered by AI and machine learning. It delivers four-hour precipitation reports tailored to the exact moment a request is made.  For instance, if a user checks weather at 3:51 am, the app will provide precise predictions through 7:51 am. The platform updates every 10 minutes. It also offers spatial resolution down to a single square kilometre (0.62 mi²). All of these features set the product apart from major competitors, including The Weather Company (formerly owned by IBM) whose forecasts refresh every 15 minutes and extend up to 7 hours ahead.  The team started with rain prediction, and then expanded to other weather parameters. Initially, Rainbow was built as a consumer weather app with AI-based rain prediction. But the team soon discovered that the forecast's quality is limited by the quality of the input data.  “If you put garbage in, you get garbage out,” shared Melnichek. “So we started investing heavily in data acquisition and data fusion. We work with satellite imagery, which captures cloud systems from above across multiple infrared and visible spectral bands. You can roughly detect where precipitation is happening, but it’s not very precise. Then there are meteorological radars – the big round radomes you often see near airports. They work like microwaves: they emit radio waves that bounce back from water particles, so they detect rain extremely well, but only what is already falling, not what is forming behind the front.” Rainbow.ai also gathers ground weather station data, and started collecting air-pressure data from smartphones.  “Modern phones have barometers, originally introduced to measure altitude changes for fitness tracking, like counting how many stairs you walk, explained Melnichek. But these sensors are very accurate, and pressure changes are highly correlated with weather dynamics. Rainbow Weatehr currently ingests data from more than 1,000 meteorological radars worldwide, multiple satellites, ground stations, and mobile sensors. Each source has its own processing pipeline. One central system then blends the outputs using neural networks. Why Rainbow replaces batch forecasting with continuous atmospheric streaming I wanted to understand why real-time data was possible with such a large data set. According to Melnichek: “Crucially, we do not operate in batch mode but as a continuous stream: as soon as a new satellite frame, radar scan, or pressure update arrives, it is immediately ingested and processed. Each data source has its own pipeline feeding our neural networks, which continuously blend these inputs to produce the most accurate real-time representation of the global atmospheric state, updated every few minutes.” Beating legacy models on timing, not probabilities Although there are a number of prominent players in the market, including AccuWeather, Apple Weather, and The Weather Company, Rainbow Weather asserts that the current forecasting methods are outdated.  “Many legacy forecasting providers rely on optical flow for short-term precipitation forecasting. That’s a fast but simplistic method that treats clouds as shapes in motion, without any understanding of atmospheric physics,” explained Matveenko. “A second category of services uses large-scale mathematical models that do incorporate physical principles, but they’re so cumbersome and slow that they can’t respond quickly to real-time weather changes.” Rainbow Weather, by contrast, uses advanced machine-learning models to merge a vast array of high-resolution data to generate predictions. “Mixing heterogeneous data allows us to eliminate the typical errors inherent to each individual source. This, in turn, helps us to feed cleaner and more accurate data into our models and achieve a much more precise forecast. And thanks to the optimised performance of our AI models, we can make this forecast much faster than our competitors,” Matveenko added. From rain app to real-time environmental intelligence Specifically, Rainbow.ai focuses on timing: the exact start and end of precipitation events.  “On the consumer side, we deliberately do not show probability distributions, because most people do not understand them correctly,” shared Melnichek. “There was even a Stanford study showing that users misinterpret “30 per cent chance of rain” in completely different ways – some think it means 30 per cent of the hour will be rainy, others think it means it will rain in 30 per cent of the area.”  For B2B clients, the company, of course, provides full probabilistic fields, confidence levels, and uncertainty bands.  “But our competitive advantage is very precise nowcasting – what will happen in the next minutes and hours, not in seven days.” The company has also expanded into fire detection, a move inspired in part by the severe wildfires Melnichek has witnessed in Cyprus, where he lives. “We realised that we already process satellite imagery for the whole planet every few minutes, so why not extend our pipeline to detect thermal anomalies and smoke patterns that indicate fires?” he says. “We don’t need to build a completely new infrastructure — we just add another model on top of the same data streams. The philosophy is the same: fast detection, continuous monitoring, global coverage. “With climate change, wildfires, heatwaves, and extreme weather are becoming more frequent. We want Rainbow to become a general real-time environmental intelligence system, not only a rain app.” The ‘wow moment’ driving organic growth As of today, Rainbow Weather has reached over 1 million installs and over 100,000 active users. The app's strongest growth driver is word of mouth. According to Melnichek:  "When people experience that the rain starts exactly when the app says it will start, and stops exactly when it says it will stop, they remember it. They compare it with the default weather apps on their phones, which can sometimes show sunshine while it is already raining outside. This “wow moment” creates very strong recommendations to friends and family.” Opening the black box to transparent analytics The team also runs weatherindex.ai, an open-source tool that evaluates the accuracy of short-term precipitation predictions from providers like AccuWeather, Vaisala, and The Weather Company in real time. It pulls live data from public APIs and compares forecasts with verified airport weather reports using standard metrics such as accuracy and F-score (a measure of predictive performance). Melnichek says the decision to build an open benchmarking platform was driven by a belief that weather forecasting, like AI, should be judged through transparent, comparable, and publicly verifiable performance metrics. "In the AI world, we are used to open benchmarks. Everyone compares models — GPT, Claude, Gemini, open-source LLMs — and you can see how they perform on standard datasets. In weather, it is very different. Many providers explicitly forbid you, in their license agreements, from comparing their data with competitors’ data. That felt very outdated and very defensive to us.” So the company decided to do the opposite. It built Weather Index to compare different weather providers against verified ground truth, mainly using airport meteorological stations. Airports have high-quality instruments and human meteorologists who validate observations, so this gives a very reliable reference. “We buy data from different providers, run the same evaluation across all of them, and publish the results openly. You can see which provider is more accurate in which country and for which forecast horizon. For example, for one-hour rain timing, we perform best in much of Europe — the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, the Baltics, and Turkey. In North America, The Weather Company performs extremely well. In Japan, AccuWeather is very strong. In Southeast Asia and Australia, we are again among the leaders. We believe weather data is critical infrastructure, and critical infrastructure should be evaluated transparently.” The startup was backed by a syndicate of investors, including Yuri Gurski, founder and president of Flo Health, the first purely digital consumer women’s health app to achieve unicorn status. With the new funding, the startup plans to go beyond precipitation forecasts by incorporating additional weather parameters, extend the forecasting horizon from 4 hours to 24 hours, and grow its presence in the B2B segment of the weather-forecasting industry, which is projected to reach $4.07 billion by 2030.  In the long term, Rainbow AI wants to build the most accurate real-time environmental intelligence platform in the world. Not just a weather forecast, but a continuously updating digital representation of what is happening in the atmosphere and on the ground – a system that helps people and businesses stay safe and make better decisions in an increasingly unstable climate.

Madrid-based STAMP has raised €4 million in a funding round led by Dozen, with participation from EBISU Digital, Barça Innovation Hub, and several international business angels, including Andreas Mihalovits and Thibaut Courtois through his investment arm NXTplay. In addition to private capital, the company has secured public grants from the Spanish Ministry of Industry and Tourism, the City of Valencia, the Community of Madrid, and the City of Madrid, reflecting alignment with public initiatives focused on digitalisation, tourism, and the modernisation of commerce. STAMP addresses long-standing inefficiencies in traditional VAT refund systems, which are typically based on post-purchase reimbursements, intermediaries, and complex processes. Its technology applies tax benefits directly at the point of sale, digitally integrating them into the payment experience in compliance with European regulations. The model adapts to each country’s fiscal framework. In markets such as Italy, where regulation allows, purchases can be made VAT-exempt at checkout. In others, including Spain, VAT is included on the invoice, but customers receive an immediate discount equivalent to the VAT amount at the moment of payment. STAMP then validates transactions, ensures traceability, and manages tax recovery, including fraud scenarios, enabling merchants to reimburse tax authorities without assuming fiscal risk. By reducing payment friction and simplifying access to Tax Free benefits, the platform allows merchants to use Tax Free as an effective commercial tool, supporting higher conversion rates, larger basket sizes, and improved shopping experiences for international customers. Through its integrated Tax Free and payments platform, STAMP connects European retailers with global travellers and acts as a strategic marketing and payments partner for WeChat and Alipay. “Tax Free, as applied until now, has operated more as an administrative procedure than as an automatic consumer right. When that friction is removed, customer behaviour changes, and merchants regain control over both the shopping experience and their margins,” said Abel Navajas, CEO of STAMP. STAMP delivers, for the first time, a real Tax Free model that does not require regulatory change, provides maximum security and prevents fraud. According to Navajas, the funding round strengthens the company’s ability to execute its roadmap and advance its mission of enabling merchants in Southern Europe to better serve international customers by streamlining payments and turning Tax Free into a tangible purchase incentive. The funds will be primarily used to support expansion in Spain, Italy, and Portugal, and to further develop the company’s product portfolio, with a focus on advanced international payment solutions and the launch of a new AI-based product.

One of the UK’s most hyped AI startups has nearly doubled its valuation to $4bn in just 12 months, following a $200m funding round. The $200m Series E funding round in Synthesia was led by existing investor Google Ventures, Google's VC arm, with participation from Evantic, the venture fund founded by former Sequoia partner Matt Miller, and Hedosophia.  Other existing investors NVentures, Nvidia’s VC arm, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), PSP Growth, Air Street Capital, and MMC Ventures, also participated. As part of the deal, Synthesia, which makes AI-powered corporate videos, is allowing employees to sell a percentage of their shares through a partnership with Nasdaq. Synthesia, founded in 2017, has become something of a talismanic company in the UK’s burgeoning AI scene. It was last valued at $2.1bn in January last year, following a $180m funding round. The startup develops digital avatars which are deployed for corporate clients, such as to help explain health and safety in the workplace. The startup plans to use the funds on building new interactive AI agents for companies to use for employees and marketing videos, according to The Times. Synthesia's customers include SAP and Microsoft. Headquartered in London, Synthesia also has offices in New York, Munich and Zurich. Victor Riparbelli, Synthesia’s co-founder and CEO, said: “Synthesia was founded on two core beliefs: first, that AI will bring the cost of content creation down to zero. And secondly, that AI video provides a better, more engaging way for organisations to communicate and learn. “This funding round is about scaling that vision. We see a rare convergence of two major shifts: a technology shift with AI Agents becoming more capable, and a market shift where upskilling and internal knowledge sharing have become board-level priorities. "We intend to build the defining company at that intersection, by combining our know-how in AI video with our ability to build and integrate AI technologies into products and services that solve real business needs.”

London-based MyARC, a platform that enables fitness creators to train their communities at scale, has secured more than $2 million in funding, with participation from Araya Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Techstars, and G Fund. Alongside the funding, the company has launched a next-generation version of its platform aimed at supporting the operation, monetisation, and growth of creator-led fitness businesses. Founded by Peter Monteza, together with co-founders Nikhil Shah and Arohan Subramonia, MyARC seeks to address structural limitations in the fitness industry, where creators have traditionally relied on static programmes or one-to-one coaching models that are difficult to scale. The platform is designed to help creators deliver personalised training and nutrition plans that adapt to individual user goals, lifestyles, and preferences while remaining scalable. The platform supports this approach through tools that automate the personalisation of training programmes, recipes, and nutrition plans, enable the launch and management of branded fitness applications without coding, and support subscription-based monetisation models that combine challenges, workouts, and meal planning. Automation features are also used to facilitate ongoing community engagement and operational efficiency. The traditional online fitness model has left creators trapped between low-value generic products and unsustainable personal coaching. With this platform, they can scale their impact and income without sacrificing quality, explained Monteza. Over the past two years, MyARC reports that creators using the platform have generated material revenue, with several reaching seven-figure earnings and average annual creator income in the high six-figure range. The platform supports a global user base with thousands of daily active users, who together have completed hundreds of millions of minutes of training. The funding will be used to support continued product development, expand creator tools, and advance the company’s global growth plans.

Copenhagen-based AI SaaS company Kime has raised €2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by PSV Tech, with participation from Nordic Makers and a group of angel investors based in Copenhagen and Stockholm. As user behaviour shifts away from traditional search engines toward AI assistants that provide a limited number of direct answers, brand visibility is increasingly shaped by how large language models select and prioritise information. Recent research from McKinsey indicates that AI-based search is becoming an important entry point to online decision-making and is expected to influence a substantial share of consumer spending. Despite this change, many companies have limited insight into whether their brands are mentioned at all when users ask AI assistants for recommendations, comparisons, or purchasing advice. Kime aims to address this gap by tracking how brands are represented across major AI platforms, including which brands are cited, their relative positioning, associated sentiment, and the sources used to generate responses. The company refers to this emerging discipline as generative engine optimisation (GEO), reflecting a shift from ranking in traditional search results toward visibility within AI-generated answers. According to founder and CEO Vasilij Brandt, marketers are increasingly focused on understanding how their brands appear in AI assistants, and Kime’s objective is to make that visibility measurable and actionable. Since launching, the company has seen early commercial traction. In November, Kime conducted more than 60 product demonstrations, primarily with senior marketing leaders and executive teams. It has also expanded its product to include an agency-focused module that enables agencies to analyse AI visibility across their client portfolios. The platform is currently used by brands across multiple industries and is also deployed through agency partnerships. In its current phase, Kime is focused on analytics, offering dashboards that show brand visibility across prompts and AI platforms, competitor benchmarking, sentiment, share of voice, and the domains and publications informing AI responses. Looking ahead, the company plans to develop the platform into a broader layer for AI marketing, giving teams a centralised way to manage and optimise their presence across multiple AI assistants as the LLM landscape continues to fragment.

Last week, we tracked more than 70 tech funding deals worth over €2.7 billion, and over 10 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe.Click to read the rest of the news.