London-based Thema has secured $6.2 million to address gaps in how private equity firms assess portfolio risk and plan expansion strategy amid shifting software market valuations. The total includes $4.5 million in pre-seed funding from a round led by Stride.vc, with participation from KDX, Capital Allocators, and angel investors with backgrounds in private equity, investment banking, and enterprise software, including the former chair of KPMG. In addition, Thema received a $1.7 million UK government grant, in partnership with the University of Cambridge, to advance trustworthy AI. A repricing of software markets has exposed weaknesses in how private equity firms evaluate portfolio exposure and expansion opportunities. As valuations compress, these assessments often remain fragmented and manual. For investors building platform companies, expansion strategy drives much of the value created, yet decisions are still frequently made using disconnected tools and individual judgment. Thema is building what it calls Portfolio Expansion Infrastructure, a system designed to help PE investors determine where to expand, originate opportunities, and assess risk across a portfolio. Existing sourcing tools typically focus on identifying companies rather than analysing markets, often lacking broader context. Thema aims to replace fragmented consulting reports and sourcing tools with a continuously updated view of market structure. Thema’s AI infrastructure provides versioned representations of companies and market structures that track how markets evolve over time. Using proprietary AI techniques developed by co-founder Dr Dimo Angelov, the platform processes web-scale data to identify how companies cluster into markets, what adjacencies exist, and how those structures change. The result is a continuously refreshed map of market structure intended to highlight adjacencies, competitive dynamics, and potential expansion paths that conventional databases may miss. Developed in collaboration with tier-one private equity firms and as part of a UK government-backed programme with the University of Cambridge, Thema aims to help investors build conviction more quickly, define clearer platform theses, and support investment cases grounded in market structure. With the new funding, the company plans to expand R&D and commercial operations and is actively onboarding customers.

Grodi, a company focused on autonomous robotics and computer vision for intensive agriculture, has secured a €2.5 million investment round led by Swanlaab Innvierte Agri FoodTech, with participation from Axon Desarrollo Andalucía and Innvierte, SICC del CDTI. Founded in 2022 in Almería by Samuel Ruíz, Natalia Gálvez, and Ana Molina, Grodi has built a multidisciplinary team spanning engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, and agronomy. The company develops technology tailored to the specific needs of Mediterranean intensive agriculture, enabling growers, cooperatives, and seed companies to work with objective, standardised, and continuous data to reduce uncertainty and improve decision-making. At the core of its offering is VEGA 11, an autonomous robot designed to operate independently in Mediterranean greenhouses while delivering full plant visibility through advanced computer vision. The system combines proprietary hardware, machine-learning algorithms, and large-scale data analytics to help growers optimise agronomic management, anticipate plant health issues, and estimate crop yields with high precision. Grodi’s digital platform centralises this information in real time to support safer, more efficient, and more sustainable operations. Providing practical tools that simplify farmers’ day-to-day production management remains a central objective for the company. As CEO Ana Molina noted: The sector needs solutions that reduce costs, improve resource-use efficiency, and standardise processes. VEGA is demonstrating that automation and computer vision can radically transform daily crop management. Grodi is now in a key growth phase, focused on scaling the commercial deployment of VEGA 11 while expanding its broader technology portfolio with additional products designed for real-world agricultural use. The new funding will support the industrialisation of the VEGA 11 robot, strengthen the company’s commercial presence across Spain’s main horticultural regions, and advance its international expansion strategy in a market increasingly demanding productivity, efficiency, and sustainability gains.

London-based BeyondMath, a deeptech company that has developed a novel generative physics model, has raised a $10 million seed extension led by Cambridge Innovation Capital, with participation from existing investors including UP.Partners, Insight Partners, and InMotion Ventures. This brings total seed funding to $18.5 million. Engineering and industrial companies are under increasing pressure to design more complex systems faster and more sustainably, yet many still rely on legacy simulation tools that struggle to keep pace with modern hardware and AI-driven workflows. BeyondMath aims to address this gap with a foundational AI model trained directly on first-principles physics. The platform enables engineering-grade simulations to be produced in minutes rather than hours or days, delivering results up to 1,000 times faster than traditional supercomputing methods. Founded in 2022 by AI industry veterans Alan Patterson and Darren Garvey, BeyondMath has built what it describes as the world’s largest foundational physics model, capable of simulating complex physical phenomena ranging from aerodynamics to thermal management. The company’s customers include major automotive, aerospace, and electronics manufacturers, and it has established partnerships with NVIDIA and AWS. Speaking about the market need, BeyondMath CEO Alan Patterson said engineering teams require faster and more flexible simulation capabilities but currently lack the technology to meet these demands: Generative physics introduces a fundamentally new approach to engineering, unlocking innovation across fields ranging from aerospace and automotive to data-centre design. We now have the capital and investor support to accelerate our research roadmap and scale commercial adoption. This could be the ChatGPT moment for physics. BeyondMath’s technology has potential applications across sectors, including automotive, aerospace, electronics, data centre design, and semiconductor manufacturing. The new funding will be used to scale commercial deployment of BeyondMath’s generative physics technology and expand its research capacity. The company expects to double its headcount this year and grow its customer base across Europe, the United States, and Japan.  

Ai for autonomous driving company Wayve today announced it has raised $1.2 billion in a Series D investment round, bringing its post-money valuation to $8.6 billion.  The funding accelerates the company’s shift from AI research leadership to scaled commercial deployment of its end-to-end AI platform. The round was led by Eclipse, Balderton and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and brings in new investment from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Baillie Gifford, British Business Bank, Icehouse Ventures, Schroders Capital and other global institutional investors. Microsoft, NVIDIA and Uber participated in the round, reflecting support for Wayve's embodied AI as a foundational software layer for deploying autonomy at a global scale. Leading global automotive manufacturers Mercedes-Benz, Nissan and Stellantis also invested, in support of advancing Wayve's unified AI platform spanning L2+ “hands off” through L3/L4 “eyes off” driving across vehicles, brands and markets. Wayve pioneered the application of end-to-end AI to autonomous driving in 2017 and has since industrialised its safety-by-design architecture into a production-ready autonomy platform. From 2026, consumers will experience Wayve-powered robotaxis through commercial trials with Uber. From 2027, they will be able to buy passenger vehicles equipped with Wayve’s AI Driver, starting with L2+ “hands-off” capability that allows the vehicle to steer, navigate and respond to traffic under driver supervision. Wayve licenses its AI Driver directly to automakers, providing tools to customise driving models for specific vehicles and brands. The system runs entirely on onboard vehicle compute and embedded sensors, and doesn’t rely on high-definition maps or location-specific engineering. By partnering with automakers and mobility platforms rather than vertically integrating, Wayve enables autonomy to scale globally with lower capital intensity. In the past year, Wayve became the first and only AV developer to drive zero-shot in more than 500 cities across Europe, North America and Japan, meaning without city-specific fine-tuning before deployment. That performance is enabled by Wayve's foundation model trained on globally diverse data spanning over 70 countries and a wide range of vehicle platforms, creating unmatched data diversity that allows autonomy to generalise to new markets. Robotaxi deployment with Uber Uber participated in the Series D and has committed additional capital to support multi-year deployments of Wayve-powered robotaxis on the Uber network, with plans to scale to more than 10 markets globally. The companies plan to launch their first service in London in 2026, with broader international rollout to follow. Under the partnership, Wayve will deploy its AI Driver in L4-capable vehicles from participating automakers, while Uber will own and operate the fleet, creating a scalable model for autonomous ride-hailing using mass-produced vehicles. Alex Kendall, Co-Founder and CEO of Wayve, said: “With $1.5 billion secured, we are building for a total addressable market that spans every vehicle that moves. Autonomy will not scale through city-by-city robotaxi deployments alone. It will scale through a trusted platform that automakers and fleets can deploy globally and improve continuously. This investment accelerates our path to widespread commercial deployment and positions us to build the autonomy layer that will power any vehicle everywhere.” Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft: "Wayve is pushing the frontier of embodied AI for autonomous driving, and Azure supports the scale, reliability, and safety needed to bring that innovation into the real world. Through our partnership and investment, we’re helping accelerate the path from breakthrough research to scaled commercial deployment with automakers worldwide." Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber, said: “We are very proud to continue to deepen our partnership with Wayve, with plans to deploy together in more than 10 markets around the world. Wayve’s powerful end-to-end approach is purpose-built for scale, safety, and effectiveness, and we’re excited to work with them across multiple OEMs and geographies, which we’ll share more about soon.” tion.” Antonio Filosa, CEO, Stellantis, said: “Wayve’s embodied‑AI approach and end‑to‑end learning architecture represent an important innovation in autonomous driving technology." Their work aligns well with Stellantis’ platform‑driven strategy and our focus on scalable, safety‑first vehicle intelligence. We see strong potential for collaboration as we advance our autonomy roadmap, including our driverless AV Ready Platforms™, with the clear objective of delivering safer and more intuitive driving experiences for customers worldwide”. Suranga Chandratillake, General Partner at Balderton, commented: "We've been proud to support Wayve since the early days, backing Alex and his team as they pursued an ambitious - and at the time rather contrarian - vision for embodied AI. The technical achievements are extraordinary, but what's more impressive is how this team has taken cutting-edge research out of the lab and deployed it in complex, real-world driving environments - turning breakthrough science into commercial reality. Born out of a tiny lab in Cambridge and now a global leader in its field, Wayve represents the very best of European innovation: world-class technology, global ambition and real-world deployment at scale."

Munich-based Secfix, an end-to-end security compliance platform, has closed an oversubscribed $12 million Series A round led by Alstin Capital, with participation from Bayern Kapital and existing investor neosfer, an early-stage investor of the Commerzbank Group. The funding will support the company’s expansion across Europe and the further development of its AI-native capabilities and CISO-as-a-Service offering. European companies have traditionally faced lengthy and resource-intensive certification processes, often requiring months of manual work and delaying commercial opportunities. Secfix was founded to address this challenge by automating compliance across standards, including ISO 27001, the EU AI Act, NIS2, GDPR, and SOC 2, helping small and mid-sized businesses reduce manual effort and streamline certification. However, certification often proved to be only the first step. As customers achieved initial certifications, many encountered growing security and compliance demands as their organisations scaled, creating demand not only for automation tools but also for ongoing expert support. In response, Secfix expanded its offering into an end-to-end security compliance platform that combines automation with an AI-native CISO-as-a-Service model. The platform provides continuous monitoring, incident management, security questionnaires, gap assessments, policy reviews, access management, cloud security scanning, penetration testing, and broader security leadership support. Fabiola Munguia, CEO and co-founder of Secfix, said the company initially focused on helping businesses achieve certification more efficiently and is now expanding its role to support customers as a broader security and compliance partner beyond the certification phase: Our vision is to solidify Secfix as Europe's leader in end-to-end security compliance - one that grows with companies from their first ISO 27001 certification through their entire security and compliance journey. With regulatory requirements such as ISO 27001, NIS2, DORA, and the EU AI Act increasing the compliance burden on European organisations, Secfix positions its platform as a combined automation and AI-driven solution informed by audit experience, customer feedback, and extensive cybersecurity expertise. The Series A funding will support Secfix’s continued European expansion, further product development to enhance its AI-powered automation capabilities, and the scaling of its CISO-as-a-Service offering to meet growing mid-market demand.

UK challenger business bank Allica Bank is to become the latest UK fintech unicorn, following a $155m (£111m) Series D funding round, according to a report.   Allica is expected to announce tomorrow that its new valuation will hit $1.2bn (£890m), following the Series D round, Sky News says.   It will mean that Allica will join the likes of Revolut, Monzo, Starling and Zilch in being valued at more than $1bn, giving it unicorn status. Allica targets the established SME sector (between five and 250 employees), offering them lending, such as commercial mortgages and equipment loans, and current and savings accounts.   The Series D round includes investment from Ventura Capital and existing investor, the US fund TCV. Allica last raised in 2022, raising a £100m Series C round. The funds are understood to be earmarked for expansion in Northern Europe, where it is considering buying a bank, as well as developing its AI offering.   Allica is headed up Richard Davies, a former Revolut executive.   Davies said: “We are building the category-defining digital bank for established small and medium businesses, and are excited to be taking our proprietary platform into new markets.   “This Series D investment is a major vote of confidence in Allica’s strategy and performance.” Image: Allica Bank

UK scaleup Radiant today announced its merger with Ori Industries, combining Ori’s distributed AI infrastructure platform with Radiant’s global infrastructure capabilities and marking the company’s transition into full operations. Radiant is a vertically integrated AI infrastructure company combining utility-scale powered land, long-term capital, and a proprietary AI infrastructure software platform. Radiant builds and operates AI factories for enterprises, telecommunications providers, and sovereign institutions, delivering scalable compute with utility-grade economics, operational resilience, and planning horizons aligned to the long-term demands of the AI economy. Ori provides sovereigns, telcos, & corporates with the software stack to build, manage, and deploy AI cloud. Through this merger, Ori will be the 'spark' that fires up Radiant -- it will be the software & team layer sitting on top of its compute + physical data centres.  As part of the merger, Radiant enters its operating phase as the first compute deployment vehicle and second seed investment for Brookfield’s AI Infrastructure Fund (“BAIIF”). BAIIF provides Radiant with a direct pipeline to a $100 billion investment program for AI Infrastructure, ensuring the company has the long-term capital required to deliver a fully integrated, utility-scale ecosystem that unites proprietary software, sovereign compute, and powered land into a single, global AI utility. Radiant’s infrastructure will be based on the NVIDIA DSX reference design, offering AI compute infrastructure for sovereign governments, select global enterprises, and telecommunications providers under long-term contracts.  Mahdi Yahya, Founder and CEO of Ori and President of Radiant, said: “We could not be more excited to continue the Ori journey through Radiant. For more than seven years, our team has been building toward this moment - designing software that could enable infrastructure for AI at scale. It was immediately apparent that Brookfield was the ideal partner for Ori.  Through Radiant we can challenge the supply-demand imbalance that has defined AI since the release of advanced LLMs in 2023. With deep, structural advantages in capital costs, powered land, compute, and software, Radiant is building the infrastructure to enable a global age of abundance for AI." Radiant will continue to grow and operate the Ori Global AI Cloud for customers who need on-demand capacity and rapid deployment.

French foodtech startup Verley has raised €32 million in a Series A financing round, only four years after its inception.  Verley develops functional whey protein ingredients, more precisely beta-lactoglobulin (BLG), designed to deliver the nutritional and functional performance expected by food and nutrition manufacturers. Verley has built its approach to integrate seamlessly into existing food value chains, responding to concrete industrial and market requirements.  Verley’s ingredients made through precision fermentation use only a fraction of the natural resources required by conventional production, addressing a growing demand from manufacturers and consumers for reduced-impact products.   The company focuses exclusively on B2B ingredient solutions, supporting manufacturers developing high-protein, clean-label and digestible products across multiple applications.  Its portfolio, marketed under the FermWhey™ range, consists of functionalized whey proteins engineered for performance in real-world formulations (high-protein yoghurts,  protein shots etc), combining high purity, advanced solubility, emulsification, gelling properties and optimised nutritional profiles.  High-protein nutrition has become a mainstream expectation, while demographic growth, evolving dietary habits, and the rapid expansion of GLP-1 treatments (1 in 8 adults in the US were taking a  GLP-1 drug in 2025) are further increasing demand for high-quality, digestible protein ingredients. At the same time, conventional whey protein production is facing structural constraints, limiting its ability to meet these needs at scale while reducing environmental pressure.  Since its creation, Verley has followed a methodical development path, combining rapid execution with industrial discipline. In less than four years, the company has secured key regulatory milestones, including a self-affirmed GRAS status in 2024, followed by an FDA “No  Questions” letter in 2025, validating the safety and robustness of its approach for the US market.  Beyond regulation, Verley has built a strong intellectual property portfolio around both fermentation and proprietary protein functionalisation technologies. These technologies do not aim solely to replicate dairy proteins but to enhance their performance, unlocking new formulation possibilities for manufacturers.   Stéphane Mac Millan, CEO and co-founder of Verley, said:  “Verley’s mission is to address the growing global demand for high-quality nutrition while preserving the planet’s natural resources. Verley is now ready to help alleviate the pressure the dairy industry is facing. We are very proud to be building a European champion  leveraging decades of know-how in the dairy industry.” The round brings together top European players: new investors, including Alven, leading the round, Blast, and the French Tech Seed fund, managed on behalf of the French government by Bpifrance as part of France 2030, and historical investors Sofinnova, Sparkfood, Captech and Founders Future. With additional non-dilutive support from Bpifrance, this funding round supports Verley’s next phase of industrial execution and market deployment.  The proceeds of the round will primarily support Verley’s US market entry, including  commercial deployment and early customer scale-up, alongside a ramp-up of production  capacities. The company will also continue investing in R&D to further strengthen the performance, efficiency and sustainability of its technologies. Following the US launch,  Europe and the Middle East will be priority regions for expansion. 

A Dutch chipmaker which designs and manufactures chips for AI inference use has raised more than $250m, with backing from new investor BlackRock. Innovation Industries, the European VC fund, is the lead investor in the round in Axelera AI. The round also features new investors BlackRock and SiteGround Capital as well as existing investors, including Bitfury, CDP Capital, the European Innovation Council Fund and Samsung Catalyst Fund. The startup has raised more than $450m in total to date. Axelera AI makes chips and software for inference, the computing process of running an AI model, as opposed to training an AI model, which has become increasingly important as more enterprises embrace AI. The startup's chips are designed for use locally on edge devices, such as mobile phones, as it looks to make AI more energy efficient by processing data directly on devices rather than in the cloud.   The startup said the funding represented the largest ever by an EU AI semiconductor firm. It said it had 500 customers across industries such as defence, agritech and robotics.   Describing its approach, it said: “Axelera AI’s success is rooted in a fundamental insight: to deploy AI at scale, the industry must first solve for energy consumption and cooling requirements.    “The company’s edge-first architectural approach delivers uncompromising AI inference performance that fits within the power and thermal envelopes of real-world deployment environments to drive real business value." Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI, said: “Data centres are hitting power and cooling limits, and as analytics move closer to where data is being created, edge AI solutions must operate within strict energy and bandwidth constraints.     “We designed our architecture from the ground up to overcome these obstacles. Our edge-first approach isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about making AI deployment economically viable at scale for real-world applications while protecting data and privacy by processing customer information locally.”

Glasgow-based Quantcore has secured £2.5 million in seed funding to develop a sovereign supply chain for quantum hardware, as the UK seeks to strengthen domestic capacity in technologies linked to national security and economic competitiveness. The round was co-led by PXN Ventures, Blackfinch Ventures, and Scottish Enterprise, with additional backing from Quantum Exponential and STAC. Founded in 2025 by Dr Jack Brennan, Dr Valentino Seferai, Wridhdhisom Karar, and Prof Martin Weides as a spin-out from the University of Glasgow, Quantcore designs, manufactures, and tests superconducting processors, resonators, and sensors that underpin quantum computers and advanced sensing systems. Quantcore manufactures niobium-based components, a material that can operate at higher temperatures than aluminium, which is widely used by global competitors. By leveraging niobium, the company aims to help customers, including UK national laboratories, reduce energy consumption while improving the scalability and performance of quantum components. Beyond computing, Quantcore’s quantum sensors support secure communications and high-precision medical imaging beyond the capabilities of classical technologies, with potential applications in neuroscience, early disease detection, secure infrastructure, and fundamental physics. Highlighting the strategic implications, Quantcore CEO and co-founder Dr Jack Brennan said quantum computing’s code-breaking potential makes domestic manufacturing increasingly important, arguing the UK must build sovereign capability as classical computing approaches its limits. The investment comes amid geopolitical uncertainty and follows the UK government’s commitment to invest £670 million in quantum computing as part of its 10-year modern industrial strategy. Following the funding, Quantcore plans to expand its team with new engineering roles across design, manufacturing, and cryogenic testing, alongside commercial hires.

The New Era of Shopping today announced the close of a $1.4 million Pre-Seed round to help traditional brands become discoverable, trusted, and purchasable inside AI assistants and agent-driven shopping experiences. ​ The investment was co-led by a European VC firm Presto Ventures, and an NYC-based AI accelerator Alliance, with participation of a16z Scout Fund, a super angel and a founder of ZFellows Cory Levy, AI-focused fund Davidovs VC, Ukrainian VC hi5 Ventures, Japanese Rokubunnoni, early-stage Typhon VC, and a group of angels: Greg Tkachenko (Unreal Labs), Guillaume Roux-Romestaing (Wordware), Kacper Kielak (Magic), Andrei Nenadov, Quinn Campbell, Urvit Goel, Evgeny Yurtaev, Nicole Buss, Matthieu Tissot, and Zituo Chen. ​ The storefront is moving into the chat window Today, millions of shoppers are abandoning traditional keyword searches in favour of direct answers from AI assistants, and the storefront is moving into the chat window. ​ Roughly 5 per cent of consumers ask AI chatbots what to buy instead of browsing online stores. ​ Industry projections suggest that figure will reach 15 per cent by 2027 and could exceed 50 per cent within two years after that. ​ When AI agents become the buyer Agentic shopping describes a new shopping lifecycle in which AI agents — acting on user preferences, history and explicit prompts — discover products, request checkout authorisation, and complete purchases on behalf of people. ​ The Agentic Commerce Protocol and related platform tooling are lowering the bar for both agents and merchants to transact programmatically, and instant checkout inside assistant experiences is already live in early platforms. ​ Era is an agentic commerce platform that helps brands make their product catalogues discoverable, trusted, and purchasable inside AI answer engines — including ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. ​ By combining catalogue sync, AI visibility analytics, competitive intelligence, and prompt-level demand research in one platform, Era gives merchants the infrastructure to compete in the next generation of e-commerce. ​ “If you’re not optimised for AI, you don’t exist” I spoke to Era co-founder and CEO Oleksii Sidorov, who told me that in the old era, being on the second page of Google was bad. In the new era, if your product metadata, content, and flows aren’t optimised for AI agents, you don’t exist. ​ “We built Era so that every brand, not just the ones with large engineering teams, can be present and purchasable wherever consumers are asking to buy. The future of commerce is being written right now, and we are here to make sure our merchants are in it.” ​ Key features of Era’s platform include two-way catalogue syncing with PIMs/ERPs, SKU-level intelligence to measure AI visibility and product ranking in LLM responses, user prompt analysis for trend and volume insights, and automated content optimisation to improve how products rank in conversational answers. ​ The product is already integrated with all major eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Wix, etc., as well as the main AI discovery platforms: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. ​ The company is currently running pilots with the first cohort of brands and will use the Pre-Seed to expand pilots with the Enterprise segment, scale data infrastructure, and integrate new platforms. ​ Why brands aren’t moving fast — yet ​ Pilots so far have revealed that, even though this seems like an obvious edge, not every brand is rushing to capture it. Sidorov explained: ​ “E-commerce brands especially are still conservative — they're busy with channels that already work, and a lot of them genuinely have no idea what's going on in AI search. Enterprises are particularly slow-moving. Where it's been easier is with tech startups and software companies. They're more AI-literate; they use LLMs themselves to find tools and write code, so they immediately understand the value. We've broadened our focus as a result — we don't limit ourselves to e-commerce anymore. Any brand that benefits from online traffic is a potential client.” According to Sidorov, there are already companies that exist almost entirely on AI traffic — they happened to be well-indexed by accident, and now that's where most of their traffic comes from. ​ Two YC alumni bet on agentic commerce ​ The company was founded by a team with deep experience at the intersection of AI, eCommerce, and advertising. Between them, the two co-founders have been through Y Combinator twice — and sold two companies. Ukrainian-born Sidorov previously conducted AI research at the University of Oxford and Meta AI Research before pivoting into entrepreneurship. He first founded Suggestr, an AI-driven e-commerce startup accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort. ​ He later launched two additional ventures — Slise (advertising analytics) and Dise (an AI-native CRM) — both of which were acquired. Much of this was built while relocating across Europe after fleeing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and supporting family back home. Sidorov studied in Ukraine, then continued his education across Europe through Erasmus, moving from physics into computer science and eventually AI. He worked in Belgium and Oxford, built a research track record, and then joined Facebook AI Research right after my master’s. He moved to Silicon Valley and followed a very academic path — conferences, papers, internal research. “But when COVID hit in 2020, I realised I wanted to build something tangible. I had deep expertise in AI, but I wanted to apply it in the real world — not just write papers. Being in Silicon Valley definitely reinforced that instinct.” His first startup, Suggestr, sat at the intersection of AI and e-commerce. “We joined YC Winter ’22, which was an incredible experience. Suggestr was an AI recommendations engine that brought Amazon-level personalisation to smaller e-commerce brands. We worked with more than 100 brands and generated over half a million dollars in additional sales for customers. But ultimately, we felt the market was too small to scale to the level we envisioned. So we made the hard decision to shut it down and start again.” The next venture was Slise, a Web3-based media analytics company built on blockchain data, which was acquired in a full exit, including IP and clients. While building Slise, Sidorov identified another gap — this time in Telegram-based sales infrastructure. “In crypto, especially, a lot of deals happen on Telegram, but there wasn’t proper tooling for sales teams. So we built Dise, an AI-native CRM for messenger-based sales. It gained traction, but by 2025, we stepped back and asked ourselves: Why are we building a niche SaaS for Telegram when AI is reshaping the entire internet? We sold it and redirected our focus toward what we believed was a much larger opportunity — AI-driven search and product discovery. That became ERA.” His co-founder and CTO, Sergey Drozdkov, is a serial founder and CTO with more than 12 years of experience in software development and AI. As CTO of Sensorium, he built one of the first AI chatbots two years before ChatGPT's release, and later went through Y Combinator’s W23 cohort with one of the first AI sales agents, Intently AI. ​ Hype vs reality in AI commerce Given his research background, I was curious how Sidorov sees AI platforms changing the way people shop. He admits, “I'm genuinely sceptical of the hype. What's already happening is real but still early. You can now buy products directly through ChatGPT in the US without ever visiting a merchant's website. The orders still flow to the merchant on the back end, so they receive the data and fulfil it — but the customer experience is increasingly detached from the brand's storefront.” He asserts that there are good arguments that, in five to ten years, as we now ask AI assistants questions instead of Googling and exploring links, people will also use them to find and buy products. “Especially when you consider that ChatGPT already stores your payment information and remembers your address — it's becoming a one-click experience. But this varies a lot by category. Food and beverage, you don't think much about. But supplements, personal care, health-related products — you want to compare specific ingredients, formulas, dosages, pricing. You don't care what the packaging looks like. That's where chatbots are genuinely efficient.” Reputation as a ranking signal In terms of customer brand relationships, the retail shift represents a substantial change. Sidorov contends that when someone buys through ChatGPT or Google Shopping, they're not really thinking about which brand or store they're choosing. “So the traditional levers — beautiful storefronts, brand storytelling, direct customer relationships — become less powerful. What matters now is your internet footprint: your reviews, your content, your references, what AI crawlers can find and interpret about you.” However, the upside is that once you build that reputation, it's more durable than paid ads. But the downside is you can't change it overnight, and the ranking factors shift constantly. “Six months ago, Reddit was enormously influential on LLM outputs,” explained Sidorov. “Then it dropped off. Now, HTML structure and other signals matter more. It's nearly impossible for one marketing manager to keep up with all of that — which is why we exist.” In the AI era, discoverability is no longer about search rankings — it is about being legible to machines that decide on behalf of humans. Era is betting that brands will need infrastructure, not intuition, to compete in that world. ​

London-based Power Protocol, a blockchain infrastructure platform for gaming and digital entertainment, has secured a $3 million investment from BITKRAFT Ventures, bringing total ecosystem funding to $15.4 million. Power Protocol is a Web3 gaming ecosystem designed to connect games, studios, players, and digital assets through shared infrastructure. Powered by the $POWER token and developed by Pixion Games, the platform is built to support multiple game titles, in-game economies, and live service features while enabling digital asset ownership and long-term player engagement. The protocol is designed to scale economic systems across multiple titles rather than a single game. It supports multi-game interoperability, progression systems, reward distribution, live service functionality, and on-chain asset tracking. BITKRAFT’s investment targets the protocol layer, enabling third-party studios to integrate into the $POWER ecosystem and use shared infrastructure instead of building standalone token utilities. The ecosystem is anchored by Fableborne, a mobile-first action role-playing game from Pixion Games that is currently in global open beta. Early performance data shows more than 400,000 players have participated across open playtests. Previous beta phases reached a peak daily active user count of 108,000 and generated $21.5 million in NFT presale revenue ahead of the POWER token listing. These results indicate early interest in Fableborne’s hybrid ARPG and base-building gameplay and align with Pixion Games’ view that skill-based mobile design combined with optional on-chain features can support competitive gaming experiences at scale. Commenting on the investment, Kam Punia, founder and CEO of Pixion Games, said: Capital in gaming and Web3 is selective right now, which makes their belief in what we’re building even more meaningful. The response to our open beta and the $POWER launch showed us there’s a strong foundation to grow from.This investment helps us keep moving toward that vision and develop an ecosystem built on progression, competition, and lasting engagement. BITKRAFT’s support gives us confidence to keep improving thoughtfully for the benefit of our players and partners. The new funding will be used to accelerate product and ecosystem development, including content expansion, competitive season design, new progression systems, and deeper integration of the $POWER economy across gameplay loops.

An Estonian defence startup building what it says are “affordable, mass manufacturable” missile defence systems has raised €30m in Series A funding. Frankenburg Technologies, founded in 2024, is headed up by CEO Kusti Salm, the former permanent secretary of Estonia’s defence ministry. The startup, which touts its sovereign credentials, says it was founded in response to a structural shift in Europe’s security environment, namely that modern aerial threats can now be produced cheaply and at scale, while missile manufacturing has historically prioritised performance over speed, cost and regeneration. Its latest funding round comes four years after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It says that it can build “affordable missile systems designed for mass production”, which addresses Europe’s air-defence bottleneck. It says it will use the funding to build sovereign missile-manufacturing capacity in Europe, with a focus on production, resilience and regeneration. According to the FT, one of its priorities is to set up two EU-based “mass production sites” to make more than 100 missiles per day per site. The funding round was led by new investor Plural, the Estonian fund founded by Wise's Taavet Hinrikus and other high-profile investors, with participation from another new investor, the Estonian investor SmartCap. The startup has now raised €40m in total. Salm said: “Europe’s deterrence problem is not just about budgets, it’s about availability. You cannot deter with systems that are too scarce, too slow to replace, or too expensive to use at scale. Frankenburg was built to restore speed, scale and sustainability to missile defence. "This funding allows us to put real industrial capacity behind that mission and build missile systems Europe can actually afford to fire and produce at scale.”

Today, Marathon VC is leading a €1.1 million Seed round for Straion, the rules layer built to turn the current chaos of AI coding into governed,  production-grade engineering. We have entered the "Prompt-and-Pray" era of software development. Tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor have turned every developer into a high-speed generator, but for engineering leaders at scale, this velocity is creating a new kind of crisis. We are seeing more code than ever before, but it often lacks the "organisational DNA" required to survive in a complex enterprise environment. The current struggle with AI-first coding is the constant need for manual course correction. An AI agent might suggest a brilliant piece of logic that technically works, but it doesn't know your company’s specific Kafka naming conventions or your PII masking protocols. This leads to an exhausting trial-and-error loop where senior engineers spend their days "babysitting" the AI’s work to ensure it doesn't break architectural patterns. Straion helps teams centralise engineering standards in a single rule hub, dynamically select the right rules for each task, and validate plans before implementation — not just after code generation. It integrates seamlessly with existing workflows such as Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot. The goal is simple: move faster, reduce drift, and increase confidence in the reliability of generated code. "The industry has spent the last two years obsessed with making AI faster.  But in an enterprise environment, speed without alignment is a liability,"  says Lukas Holzer, co-founder of Straion. "We built Straion to give AI  the organisational context it was missing—moving it from a trial-and-error  tool to a precision instrument that understands how your company actually  builds software." Straion solves this by transforming static documentation into active,  machine-readable guardrails. It doesn't just wait for a mistake; it provides the AI with the right context at the right millisecond. Most importantly, it validates the AI’s plan before implementation begins.   This shifts the process from reactive "cleanup" to proactive precision. By building a platform that uses machine learning to dynamically retrieve only the rules relevant to a specific task, they have enabled true, governed autonomy. It’s about giving the AI the steering wheel it was missing. According to  Marathon VC, to understand why Straion is the missing piece of the modern dev stack,  you have to look at the founders' roots in Linz, Austria. This isn't a group of "vibe coders" chasing a trend; they are seasoned operators who have spent a decade in the trenches of enterprise software. Lukas Holzer, Fabian Friedl, and Katrin Freihofner were colleagues at Dynatrace, the observability giant. While at Dynatrace, they noticed a recurring friction point: as teams grew, the "invisible rules" of the organisation—architectural standards, security mandates, and naming conventions—became increasingly difficult to enforce. These rules usually lived in "rotting" documentation: Confluence pages that no one read and 300-page PDFs that were updated once a year. When AI agents began generating code at superhuman speeds, this  "documentation gap" became a canyon. The AI could write a function in milliseconds, but it had no idea how that function fit into the broader organisational architecture. "Most investors are looking for the next AI code generator. We were looking for the guardrails," says Panos Papadopoulos, Partner at Marathon  VC. "Lukas, Fabian, and Katrin aren't just building a tool; they are building the governance layer that makes the autonomous future possible for the enterprise. They have the technical pedigree from Dynatrace to solve what we believe is the most critical bottleneck in modern engineering. We are proud to back this team as they build the governance layer that will define the next decade of software engineering." The funding will accelerate three priorities: deepening the product’s capabilities in rule governance and plan-stage validation, expanding integrations for scaled engineering workflows, and hiring mission-driven builders across AI engineering and full-stack development.

London-headquartered payments fintech Checkout.com today said it upped headcount by double digits last year to 2,000 staff, and pointed to the diversity of its merchant partners to indicate the robustness of its business, as it released selected financial figures.   In Checkout.com’s 2025 annual letter, penned by Guillaume Pousaz, founder and CEO, the fintech disclosed some financial figures for 2025 while Pousaz declared his long-term commitment to the startup he has been running for 15 years. He said: “As I close my first 20-year chapter, I can confidently declare that Checkout will be my life-long journey. I want to dedicate all my energy to compounding every learning, to further our mission and create value for our merchants.”   Checkout.com, valued at $12bn last year following an employee share sale, said it had grown headcount by 15 per cent year-on-year to 2,000 staff, opening new hubs in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Sao Paulo last year, despite fears AI was curtailing recruitment in fintech.   The fintech, whose merchant partners include Vinted and eBay, said that its top ten merchant partners account for 18 per cent of its revenues, indicating the diversity of its revenues. Other figures disclosed by Checkout.com were that it processed over $300bn in total payment volume last year, a 64 per cent increase on 2024, and that revenue grew by over 30 per cent for the second consecutive year.   It also said it was EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) profitable for the full year in 2025. Last year, it was revealed that Pousaz, who is Swiss and has been running Checkout.com since 2011, has quit the UK as his country of residence for Monaco, amid changes introduced by the Chancellor to crack down on non-doms.

Celebratix, an Amsterdam-based ticketing startup, has raised €2.2 million in growth capital from Airbridge Equity Partners, following a €1.1 million investment round at the end of 2024. Founded in 2022, Celebratix develops a blockchain-powered ticketing platform for events, clubs, and festivals. The platform provides organisers with tools to manage ticket sales, resale, guest lists, loyalty features, and real-time data through a single dashboard. It is designed to give organisers greater control over revenue and customer data throughout the event lifecycle while offering attendees a secure way to buy, sell, and store tickets. By using blockchain infrastructure, the company aims to reduce fraud, streamline access, and improve transparency. The opportunity is significant in Europe’s highly fragmented ticketing market, where a large number of local providers operate. According to Celebratix, around 300 companies are active across the region, many of which have built loyal customer bases but face limited opportunities to scale. Founder and CEO Frank Roskam said many local ticketing providers have reached their growth limits and that Celebratix’s strategy is to acquire these companies and migrate their customers onto its platform. The company is focusing on smaller providers with strong regional positions as it works to build a unified European ticketing platform capable of competing with larger players. We acquire these companies and transition their customers onto our platform. This gives organisers one system for sales, access control and resale, with less manual work and more data insights, explains Roskam. Over the past year, Celebratix completed one acquisition in the Netherlands and, according to founders Frank Roskam and Hans-Jochem Dijk, plans to add nine more European ticketing companies in the coming year. The new investment from Airbridge is intended to support this strategy and position the company for a Series A funding round in 2027.

London-based Tewke, a company focused on energy optimisation and home automation, has closed its second funding round of £1.5 million. The round included participation from JamJar Investments, Cur8 Capital, Energy Mix Ventures and Project Ventures, as well as angel investor Vlad Yatsenko, co-founder and CTO of Revolut. Read our earlier interview with Tewke co-founders Piers Daniell and Rowan Dixon. Founded in 2020 by Piers Daniell and Rowan Dixon, Tewke develops smart home technology designed to simplify energy management. Its flagship product, Tap, is designed and engineered in the UK and requires no rewiring. It works in homes without a neutral wire, making it compatible with more than 90% of UK housing. The company positions the device as an alternative to more complex, installer-led smart home systems. Beyond lighting control, Tap is designed to support household energy optimisation by helping users shift electricity use in line with time-of-day tariffs to reduce costs and emissions. It forms part of Tewke’s broader strategy to improve home energy efficiency through contextual, AI-driven intelligence. The company develops its core technology in-house, including patented hardware and firmware as well as its proprietary operating system, Tewke OS. Piers Daniell, co-founder and CEO of Tewke, said the company’s goal extends beyond energy optimisation to creating a more intelligent, sustainable, and user-centred living environment. Building next-generation electronics and AI in the UK has been a monumental technical challenge. Seeing people install Tap in minutes and start saving energy immediately is a powerful reward. This funding enables us to scale what we’ve proven works and double down on engineering excellence, added Rowan Dixon, co-founder of Tewke. In 2025, Tewke also introduced TewkeAI alongside Google, a contextual AI framework that uses data from Tap’s nine onboard sensors to analyse behaviour, movement, air quality, and temperature patterns within the home. The funding will support go-to-market execution and the expansion of Tewke’s engineering team, including the development of neuro-symbolic AI systems to improve residential energy performance. The company’s growth is also supported by non-equity funding from Innovate UK.

Munich-based VoiceLine, a voice AI platform for enterprise frontline teams, has closed a €10 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Alstin Capital and Peak, with participation from existing investors Scalehouse Capital, Venture Stars, and NAP. Field sales and service teams spend much of their time with customers, travelling between appointments, conducting visits, and coordinating follow-ups. As a result, documentation, CRM updates, and back-office handovers are often delayed or deprioritised, leaving teams to spend several hours each week on administrative work instead of customer-facing activities. This can lead to incomplete reports, missed follow-ups, and customer insights that never reach enterprise systems, limiting real-time visibility for managers and disrupting continuity between interactions. VoiceLine addresses this challenge with a voice-first AI assistant designed for the daily workflows of field sales and mobile service teams. After a customer interaction, employees can record a voice memo on the go or call the assistant by phone. The platform then automates key frontline workflows in real time, converting spoken inputs into structured visit reports, CRM entries, follow-up tasks, and visit preparations, which are synchronised with existing CRM, ERP, and other enterprise systems. For managers, this creates access to structured frontline data that was previously difficult to capture, improving visibility into field activities, customer needs, and market signals, and enabling faster, more informed decision-making. Field sales continues to be the backbone revenue driver for many industrial or services organisations. With VoiceLine, we are revolutionising the end-to-end reality of frontline work, from visit preparation and documentation to follow-ups, analytics, and insights – using voice as the most natural interface, said Nicolas Höflinger, CEO and co-founder of VoiceLine. Unlike traditional CRM projects, VoiceLine can be deployed within days, enabling customised voice AI rollouts with minimal IT involvement while meeting enterprise security requirements. VoiceLine is already in use among mid-market and enterprise customers, including DACHSER, ABB, Knauf, KSB, and Elis, supporting deployments across multiple countries and thousands of frontline users. The new funding will be used to expand VoiceLine’s team and further develop its AI platform. The company plans to significantly increase headcount this year, with a focus on product development, sales, customer success, and partnerships. In parallel, VoiceLine intends to extend its platform to additional frontline use cases and grow its international presence.

On the fourth anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Tech.eu remains committed to amplifying Ukrainian founders and investors — not merely as a gesture of solidarity, but as recognition of their ongoing impact in innovation, creating front-running tech for international scale. Ukraine’s tech ecosystem is not paused by war. It is evolving — faster, harder, and with a clarity of purpose that much of Europe would do well to study. ​ Europe — and much of the global tech ecosystem — still underestimates and fails to grasp what Ukraine represents. ​ I often hear Ukrainian startups described as resilient. It’s a phrase I struggle with because it describes the kind of people who can bounce back, shake it off, and keep going. It makes us feel better, not them and implicitly suggests that adversity can simply be absorbed, as though anyone who struggles under these conditions is an exception rather than human. ​ No founder should have to pitch between air-raid sirens or hesitate to tell customers and investors they have teams in Ukraine — fearing that blackouts and disrupted infrastructure might make them harder to reach. ​ I’ve visited Ukraine three times since Russia’s full-scale invasion, and interviewed dozens of startups and ecosystem builders. It hits different when you visit a co-working space that has been hit by a missile attack / or talk to a founder who casually mentions they are homeless because their apartment burnt down. Founders are operating under pressures most of us will never fully comprehend — air-raid sirens at all hours, rolling blackouts, and the grinding toll of chronic sleep deprivation. I’m a chronic insomniac myself, but imagine being jolted awake night after night for nearly four years by the sound of an air-raid alert. You check the app and your local Telegram group. What kind of missile is it? Is it serious enough to warrant shelter — again — or can you cautiously try to sleep? But now you’re awake in fight-or-flight mode. And the next morning, you have a company to run. A pitch to deliver. A stage to stand on. Recently, Ukrainians experienced what became Ukraine’s harshest winter since the full-scale invasion. Temperatures plunged to –20°C in many regions as sustained Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure — actions that constitute war crimes under international humanitarian law — left entire areas without electricity, heating, or running water. And, there's the reality that family, friends, and colleagues have been killed. The editorial team at DOU, the largest Ukrainian IT community and portal for software developers and tech professionals, created a powerful digital memorial in honour of fallen IT professionals. The structural barriers Ukrainian founders face are rarely understood outside the region. Most Ukrainian men aged 18–60 are not permitted to leave the country under martial law. Yet I have heard investors say they will only invest if they can meet founders in person — as though geography were a preference rather than a wartime restriction. I’ve also had quite a few early-stage Ukrainian founders ask me not to mention they have co-founders and management in Ukraine in case it deters investors who see the blackouts as a particular liability for customer retention. Ukraine’s airspace has been closed to civilian flights for more than four years. A trip to a conference, pitch event, or board meeting in London, Berlin, or Lisbon can involve a 15-hour journey each way — train to the Polish border, border crossing, flight onwards, then the same again in reverse. And for those who got out. displacement brings its own invisible tax: navigating a new language, unfamiliar bureaucracy, housing insecurity, and rebuilding professional networks from scratch. These are not minor inconveniences. They are structural friction layered on top of war. And yet, Ukrainian startups continue to launch, raise capital, and scale internationally. But in the last four years, we’ve seen airSlate, Unstoppable Domains, Creatio, Preply, and mono become unicorns. Since 2020, the estimated value of the Ukrainian startup ecosystem has tripled to more than $25 billion. According to Digital State UA , there are approximately 2,600 startups in Ukraine, of which around 2,100 were founded by Ukrainian crews and more than 500 foreign startups that have opened offices in Ukraine. Further, the exodus of Ukrainian talent across the US, UK, and Europe has created unlikely dividends — new networks, new markets, new paths to scale. Has Europe done enough? Definitely not. Ukraine is holding the line — not just for itself, but for Europe’s security. ​ It’s been bizarre for me to see the investors go from anti-defencetech to scrambling for a foothold. Ukraine did not “pivot into defence tech” as a trend. It had to. And what began as an urgent, frontline necessity is increasingly translating into exportable dual-use technologies with broader European relevance, especially for startups. building autonomous counter-UAS systems, battlefield communications platforms, AI-enabled targeting software, logistics optimisation tools, and space-enabled capabilities. What started as survival is becoming strategic capability. Russia’s invasion has underscored a stark strategic shortcoming for not only Ukraine but neighbouring Europe: its reliance on systems like Starlink, owned by an American company headed by one of the most megalomaniac people in tech, to power satellite communications infrastructure in times of conflict. It has also highlighted the need for an expansion of localised, decentralised energy systems — from microgrids to renewables and storage — capable of withstanding sustained attacks on centralised infrastructure. ​ And, where to from here on? The rebuilding of Ukraine will be one of the largest infrastructure and governance challenges Europe has faced in generations.   But startups are focused on rebuilding, demining, and creating the necessary digital infrastructure. ​ Once the war ends, I predict cities like Lviv and Kyiv will become beacons for founders abroad looking to find a place to found their companies. A single state portal, Diia, developed over the last few years, offers over 70 digital services — you can become an entrepreneur in Ukraine in just 2 seconds and found a limited liability company in 30 minutes. Over 1,000,000 private entrepreneurs and more than 14,000 companies have already used the service. Ukraine is not waiting to be rebuilt. It is already being built. The question is whether the rest of Europe is ready to build alongside it. Lead image: Freepik.