INXM, a Berlin-based startup developing AI-powered process automation technology for enterprise and industrial operations, has raised €5.7 million in a pre-seed funding round as it emerges from stealth. The round was led by Cherry Ventures and Redstone, with participation from Angel Invest, Linden Capital and other business angels. Many organisations continue to face challenges when deploying AI within operational workflows. While AI systems can generate useful outputs, they often lack the consistency, auditability and reliability required for business-critical processes, particularly in environments that depend on complex workflows, legacy software and strict compliance requirements. INXM was founded by Alex Oelling, Matthias Kainer, Jesper Bylund and Kamil Klüber to address the gap between AI-generated insights and reliable operational execution. The founding team previously worked on enterprise systems in sectors including aerospace and deep technology, where they experienced the operational challenges associated with deploying AI in complex environments. We founded INXM because we've seen first-hand how enterprise AI projects fail: years of implementation, armies of engineers, and AI systems that break more than they fix. Knowledge workers still copy-paste between ERP, PLM, Excel, email, and approval workflows to close a month. We have set out to build AI that finishes the work for you. We’re building the system that turns AI from a productivity tool into the operational backbone of European industry and its processes, said Alex Oelling, CEO of INXM. The company has developed what it describes as a Process Execution Engine based on a concept it calls "Compiled AI." Rather than relying on large language models to interpret and execute every task in real time, the platform uses AI to design and refine operational workflows, which are then executed through deterministic processes intended to deliver repeatable and auditable outcomes. The platform’s orchestration layer coordinates activities across enterprise systems, employees and workflows, enabling organisations to automate processes while maintaining greater predictability and oversight. At its core, Compiled AI means you use LLMs to generate deterministic, enterprise-ready code. You then run the code to achieve your outcome. This gives you the flexibility of natural language from AI models, but the testability of deterministic code, explained Matthias Kainer, CTO of INXM. According to the company, the platform is designed to integrate with existing enterprise infrastructure rather than replace it, helping organisations automate processes without large-scale system overhauls. INXM says its approach is particularly suited to industrial operations, where process complexity, limited engineering resources and compliance requirements often make AI adoption more challenging. Built and deployed in Europe, the platform is designed to support the data governance, compliance and deployment requirements of European enterprise customers. The funding will support INXM’s initial enterprise deployments and the continued development of its platform, which is designed to automate and execute complex business processes across industrial and enterprise environments.

The boss of an Oxford University quantum computing spinout today declared its £260m funding round as a “coming-of-age” moment, indicating that British companies can play a leading role in the field. Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) said its £260m Series C was Europe’s largest-ever private quantum computing funding round. The round was led by Bullhound Capital, with investment also coming from the British Business Bank, Fynveur, Cofides, Alpha Edison, Fulcrum Asset Management, Pentland Ventures and Magdalen College Oxford among others. Existing investors, including Oxford Science Enterprises, SBI, and Chevron Technology Ventures, also participated in the round. OQC, which was spun out of Oxford University in 2017, develops quantum computing hardware and software, with a focus on developing quantum computers that can be used for research, and commercial applications. Its target customers are businesses and governments, it says. The Reading-based startup is developing "superconducting" quantum computers which use quantum bits (qubits) rather than conventional computer bits. It deploys its tech via data centres, offering its tech to companies and researchers as a cloud service, meaning they can access the tech remotely without owning the hardware. It says that financial services, defence and security companies are driving demand for its tech, as they look for "secure" quantum tech to tackle problems beyond classical computing. The funds will be used to boost OQC's presence in key markets and speed up its path to "commercially useful" quantum computing. Gerald Mullally, CEO of OQC, said: “This is a coming-of-age moment for British quantum computing. It shows that British companies can play a leading role in a technology that will shape all our futures. Globally, it represents a clear shift in the market - from long-term promise to near-term delivery in quantum computing. For OQC, this gives us the capital to scale internationally, advance our technology roadmap, and meet increasing demand from customers seeking secure, scalable access to quantum computing infrastructure.” Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, said: “OQC’s £260 million funding round is a major vote of confidence in the UK’s quantum sector and shows that the UK continues to be the place where the industries of the future are being created.”

SolarDew, a Dutch developer of innovative solar-powered water purification technology, recently raised €800K in funding from Connect the Drops, a Dutch investor in early-stage startups in the water sector, and Oost NL, the regional development agency of the Dutch provinces Gelderland and Overijssel, which invested for the second time. The company’s goal is to provide one million people with access to clean drinking water by 2035. The scarcity of clean drinking water is a growing global issue, particularly in rural areas, where 80 per cent of the population lacks access to safe drinking water (CFR). In addition, water sources are becoming increasingly saline and polluted.  “Our market forecasts show that by 2030, more than 100 million people will be in need of an alternative source for clean drinking water,” said Alexander van der Kleij, CEO of SolarDew. Current solutions, such as purchasing bottled water or transporting water over long distances, are unsustainable and fail to provide a long-term solution to water scarcity. In addition, existing water purification and desalination technologies are often designed for large-scale applications, making them complex to operate and maintenance-intensive.  As a result, these technologies are less suitable for smaller communities, schools, medical clinics, and businesses in remote, coastal, and arid areas (JPHE). SolarDew has developed a water purification technology that uses evaporation and condensation through a membrane to purify polluted water or seawater and safely produce high-quality drinking water.  Because the technology operates solely on solar thermal energy and gravity, it is an extremely simple solution that requires no high pressure, electricity, or chemicals. In addition, the water stations require very little maintenance. Depending on solar irradiation, a station comprising approximately 32 units can produce about 100 litres of clean drinking water per day. Following several successful pilots, SolarDew started industrial production last year. The company manufactured 150 units and established a strong supply chain with European manufacturers. The company also secured a patent for its technology in the Netherlands, with European and international patents expected by the end of the year. The funding will be used to further scale up its industrial production, which started earlier this year.  The first two projects have been realised in Chile, in collaboration with a local hydroponics entrepreneur (growing plants in water), and in Greece, together with the Technical University of Crete. SolarDew aims to install the next commercial projects before the end of 2026. According to Van der Kleij:  “Over the past year, we have built a strong foundation with our scalable technology, strong partnerships, and the first projects that demonstrate the necessity of our solution. Our goal now is to continue to scale and create lasting impact by providing clean drinking water to communities and businesses worldwide - thereby contributing to improved living conditions and economic growth.” “SolarDew has developed a proven, scalable solution to one of the world's most underserved markets. This is a natural addition to Connect the Drops' mission to deliver water solutions across the globe,” said Jan Otto Ooms, Founder of Connect the Drops.  SolarDew is currently raising additional funding through a crowdfunding campaign on Republic Europe.

Flok Health, an AI-operated digital care platform, has raised $12.5 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round led by Albion VC, with participation from existing investors Eka VC and Form Ventures, as well as new investor Mercia Ventures. The funding will support the expansion of Flok’s AI-operated physiotherapy services across the UK, the development of new clinical pathways and entry into international markets. Founded by former medic and athlete Finn Stevenson, technologist Ric da Silva, and a team of physiotherapy and AI specialists, Flok Health has developed an AI-operated digital physiotherapy clinic for musculoskeletal (MSK) care delivered through a mobile application. The platform simulates a live consultation experience using real footage of a physiotherapist and responds in real time to a patient’s inputs during an appointment. The company says its platform is capable of autonomously delivering complete physiotherapy care pathways without clinician oversight. Flok is approved as a healthcare provider by the UK’s Care Quality Commission and has received Class IIa medical device certification for the autonomous delivery of full care pathways. The service is currently available to more than 2.4 million NHS patients across eleven regions in the UK, providing on-demand access to back pain treatment without waiting lists. According to the company, deployments within the NHS have reduced waiting lists while helping healthcare providers save clinical time and resources. During a recent NHS rollout, more than 80 per cent of patients reported that the AI clinic was as good as or better than traditional in-person physiotherapy. The same deployment generated significant clinical time savings, allowing clinicians to focus on patients requiring more complex care. Healthcare providers continue to face growing demand for musculoskeletal services, while limited clinical capacity and long waiting lists create challenges for timely access to care. Commenting on the funding, Finn Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of Flok Health, said: The most fundamental problem in healthcare today is supply-demand mismatch. Billions of people around the world suffer unnecessarily from treatable conditions, and it’s just never going to be possible for traditional clinicians to solve this one patient at a time. AI is a generational opportunity to close that supply-demand gap and ensure that anyone, anywhere, can get the best possible care whenever they need it. We’re particularly proud to already be scaling our AI MSK clinic in the NHS, and seeing incredible results for patients and services. Flok plans to use the funding to scale its current back pain service and launch new AI-managed pathways for hip and knee pain, as well as women’s pelvic health conditions. Together, these services address some of the highest-demand treatment areas within the NHS and significantly expand the scope of conditions that can be managed through the company’s platform.

Paypercut, a European fintech company providing payment infrastructure for online merchants across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), has raised €5 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Concentric, Passion Capital and Araya Ventures, with participation from SMOK Ventures, Portfolio Ventures, BrightCap Ventures, BlackWood, SABAH.fund, MFG Invest, Main Set and payments entrepreneur Matt Doka. The financing brings the company’s total funding to €7 million. Founded to simplify payments across a fragmented regional landscape, Paypercut enables merchants to access a full payments stack through a single integration. The platform allows businesses to accept card payments and local payment methods, offer Buy Now Pay Later options, send payment links and QR codes, and manage billing, payouts and settlements across multiple currencies through a single dashboard. The platform is designed around the requirements of commerce in Central and Eastern Europe, including local payment preferences, multi-currency settlement and digital onboarding. For merchants expanding across the region, it aims to simplify market entry and cross-border operations. Since raising its pre-seed round in 2025, the company has expanded from a Buy Now Pay Later aggregation service into a broader payments platform, serving more than 200 merchants across eight CEE markets. Commenting on the funding, Stoil Vasilev, co-founder and CEO of Paypercut, said: CEE has always been treated as an afterthought by the payments industry, seen as too fragmented, too many local specifics, too complicated. We built Paypercut to fix that. This round gives us the resources to go further and faster: more markets, more payment options for merchants, and the infrastructure to move money across the way it should have always worked, instantly and at a fraction of the cost. As part of its product expansion, Paypercut is launching Express Checkout, a new feature that enables one-tap payments through Apple Pay and Google Pay directly from the product page. The company says the feature is designed to reduce friction in mobile checkout experiences and improve payment completion rates. The new capital will support Paypercut’s expansion across CEE, strengthen its presence in existing markets, accelerate product and infrastructure development, and support the company’s application for an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence in Ireland.

Paris-based startup Upstream  today announced the general availability launch of its AI-native inbox platform, alongside a $3 million pre-seed funding round backed by Y Combinator, Connect Ventures, and more than 30 founders and operators from companies including Framer, Algolia, Asana, Alan, and Webflow. Following months in invite-only beta, Upstream is now publicly available, positioning itself as “the first inbox designed for humans and agents.” The company has rebuilt email infrastructure from the ground up to support AI agents that can read, write, organise, and act on behalf of users, rather than layering assistants onto traditional email clients originally designed only for human interaction. I spoke to Upstream CEO and co-founder  Louis Lecat to learn more — and I gave it a try myself. So much for the death of email  Lecat asserts that people have been predicting the death of email for decades, but it never happens.  “Email remains one of the most deeply embedded communication systems in work. It’s where work arrives, where work gets delegated, and where decisions happen.  We believe the inbox is still the natural interface for collaboration between humans and AI agents.”  From Asana and Algolia to Upstream Lecat was born and raised in France, studied at Stanford, and spent about 10 years in the US before moving back to Paris. Prior to founding the company, he was an early member of the product team at Asana, where he helped drive growth and adoption as the company scaled toward $100 million in annual recurring revenue. He later joined Algolia (YC W14), where he led the product organisation through the company’s Series B and C growth stages as Head of Product, building and managing a team of more than 20 product professionals while helping grow ARR 2.5x to more than $100 million. He recalls:  "The idea for the company really started during my time at Asana before the IPO. We had a way of working together that felt incredibly efficient because everything was structured. We relied heavily on asynchronous communication, which meant less constant chatting and fewer things getting lost in Slack or Teams." Later, when he moved into another role, he returned to an environment where communication was nonstop chat messages, and he realised how inefficient it felt. "I became convinced that nobody was really solving that problem properly, and that’s what pushed me toward building this company. At the same time, AI was becoming mainstream. What originally started as a vision to improve structured communication evolved into something bigger — enabling humans and AI agents to collaborate effectively."   According to Lecat:  “We’re not just helping someone write replies faster. We’re trying to create a system where humans and AI agents can work together seamlessly — sharing context, handing tasks off, collaborating across teams, and making sure important information doesn’t get lost.” Putting the platform to the test To be transparent, I rarely get time to test products these days, but given the woes of my email box, which receives at least 160 emails daily, I had to give it a try.  The product looks familiar to anyone who already uses Gmail, but adds layered intelligence and collaboration directly into the inbox experience. AI-powered prioritisation and drafting- For example, the system identifies which emails genuinely require a response and surfaces them separately from low-priority messages. It can draft replies automatically, prepare follow-ups if someone hasn’t responded, and organise workflows into collaborative “channels” where teams can work together around email threads. Importantly, all AI-generated drafts still require user approval before being sent. This is an important distinction — I’m sure I’m not the only person who gave Gmail text prompts a whirl with less-than-stellar consequences — in my case, it ended more than one “thanks for your email” sentence offering people an interview slot, which I only realised after clicking send.  Even better, with Upstream, users can also customise how the AI behaves through editable prompts and communication preferences. To do this, the system analyses previous writing styles and communication habits to adapt responses to the user’s tone, language preferences, formatting style, and even the types of emojis they use. That’s a “cheers” send-off from me.  Search, scheduling and collaboration features The platform’s AI agents can sort inboxes, draft replies in a user’s writing style, schedule meetings, retrieve information such as receipts — If you’ve ever spent an age searching through your email for a plane ticket receipt, you know how helpful this is — and also follow up automatically, and integrate with external knowledge sources including meeting notes and calendars. User control and privacy  Not gonna lie, I was concerned about privacy. But Upstream users retain control over what agents can access, draft, and send with emails private and accessible only to the user and the people they intentionally choose to collaborate with. Lecat explained: “We do not train AI models on customer data. The system may analyse previous messages temporarily to help generate contextually accurate drafts, but none of that data becomes part of a training dataset. The AI essentially operates using prompts and contextual analysis at the time of the request, rather than permanently learning from user information.” Perhaps one of the biggest ways Upstream stands apart from more standard agentic email drafting is its power as a collaboration tool. Lecat contends that while people assume AI collaboration will happen primarily in chat windows, that's not where most work actually happens. "People live in their inbox. Email was never built for teams of humans and agents working together. Upstream is.” The system also supports external AI tools and workflows through MCP compatibility, allowing users to connect services such as Claude or Codex or bring their own agents into the platform. Early traction and user engagement Thousands of users have already tested the platform during its private beta period, with the company claiming strong engagement from professionals. Lecat sees time saving as the clearest return, detailing that many users claim they’ve reduced inbox management from over an hour a day to around 15 minutes “because the product filters noise, prioritises important messages, prepares drafts, and surfaces follow-ups automatically.” “But we’ve also found that the productivity gains become even more powerful when teams use the platform collaboratively. Instead of email being siloed inside individual inboxes, teams can work together around conversations in real time. For example, an engineer can begin troubleshooting a customer issue before the account manager has even opened the email. That kind of asynchronous collaboration dramatically speeds up response times and reduces bottlenecks.” Shared context as a competitive advantage As always, when you’re dealing with a product that aims to solve the pain points of existing platforms like Gmail, I wondered about defensibility. What’s to stop Google creating a competing product?  Lecat isn’t concerned, pointing out that traditional email platforms were built long before AI collaboration was part of the equation, and their systems are fundamentally designed around solo inbox management. “We rebuilt the inbox with shared collaboration, AI agents, and unified context at its core.   For example, our system creates a unified thread view across collaborators, so everyone sees the same context and conversation history. Large incumbents also face the challenge of supporting billions of users with wildly different workflows. Even relatively small interface changes can create friction at that scale. That gives startups like us room to innovate much faster around specific professional workflows.” The funding round includes institutional backing from Y Combinator and Connect Ventures, alongside angel investors including Framer founders Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk, Algolia founders Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, Webflow CEO Linda Tong, Alan founders Jean-Charles Samuelian and Charles Gorintin, and entrepreneur Xavier Niel through Kima Ventures. The new capital will be used to continue developing a high-quality, design-focused email experience inspired by products such as Linear, Arc, and Granola. Upstream is also working on Android support and Outlook compatibility, in response to user requests. The platform is currently available on the web, desktop (Mac and Windows), and iOS, with Gmail support available at launch and additional providers planned. Upstream offers both a free tier and a paid Pro plan that includes expanded AI usage and team functionality. 

Gigaton, a London-based AI company developing control software for energy-intensive industries, has raised $26 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Plural, with participation from 2150, Semapa Next, and existing investors Planet A Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, UCL Technology Fund managed by AlbionVC with UCL Business, and Clean Growth Fund. The financing brings the company’s total funding to more than $35 million. Energy-intensive industries are facing growing operational pressures driven by rising energy costs, evolving fuel sources and market volatility. At the same time, many industrial facilities continue to rely on legacy control systems that require significant manual intervention and were not designed to manage the complexity of modern operations. According to Josh Vernon, CEO of Gigaton, many industrial operators are facing increasing pressure to adapt existing facilities to more complex operating conditions: The underlying software infrastructure most plants run on today was never built to manage the complexity plants are forced to deal with today. We have built Gigaton to deliver real cost and carbon savings now while building the AI infrastructure these industries need in a fully autonomous future. Gigaton develops AI-driven control software that continuously optimises plant operations. The technology was developed over five years of work alongside plant operators and control-room teams, with a focus on addressing the limitations of existing industrial control systems. Its platform operates within existing plant infrastructure, using simulations and predictive models to evaluate operational decisions before they are implemented. The system can autonomously adjust parameters such as fuel mix, kiln speed and oxygen levels, while providing operators with visibility into the reasoning behind each action. Unlike conventional optimisation tools that sit on top of existing systems, Gigaton’s platform is intended to replace the underlying control stack. The company says this approach can help reduce energy and fuel consumption, lower emissions, and improve process stability. The platform continuously adapts to changing operating conditions by retraining on live plant data. The new funding will support the continued development and deployment of Gigaton’s AI platform, which is intended to replace traditional industrial control software used across sectors such as cement, steel, glass and chemicals. The company is currently developing the next generation of the platform with a select group of partners and plans to use the capital to support broader deployment across industrial facilities as it enters its next phase of growth.

Quobly, a French quantum computing company developing silicon-based quantum computers, has raised €115 million in a Series A financing round to accelerate the industrialisation of its technology and support the launch of its first commercial product. The round was led by Bpifrance, SEALSQ and STMicroelectronics, with participation from the European Innovation Council (EIC), Blast, Air Liquide Venture Capital (ALIAD) and existing investor Innovacom. Existing shareholders also include the CEA, CNRS, Quantonation and Supernova Invest. This Series A follows Quobly’s seed phase, during which the company developed its silicon-qubit technology and system architecture integrating hardware, control and software components. Maud Vinet, CEO and co-founder of Quobly, said the financing marks a transition from technology validation to industrial deployment: With this Series A, we are accelerating the deployment of our first commercial systems and building a quantum computing platform designed to integrate into existing computing infrastructures. Our objective is to make quantum computing deployable, scalable and usable within real industrial environments. Quobly’s approach is based on FD-SOI technology manufactured on 300 mm wafers, leveraging established semiconductor processes to address challenges related to scalability, yield and reproducibility. The company develops silicon qubits designed for dense integration and compatibility with industrial fabrication standards. The first system in Quobly’s Alloy product line, Alloy Pioneer, is expected to be available through the cloud in 2026 via Alloy Forge, the company’s quantum application development platform. The system will subsequently be deployed in high-performance computing (HPC) environments. Quobly’s quantum computers are designed for integration with existing HPC and data centre infrastructures, supporting deployment within established computing environments. As part of its industrialisation efforts, Quobly works with partners across the semiconductor ecosystem to support the development and manufacturing of its technology, including process control, materials engineering, cryogenics and yield optimisation. The funding will be used to improve the performance and scalability of Quobly’s quantum computing platform, advance the industrialisation of its silicon quantum processors and support the deployment of the first Alloy systems in cloud and HPC environments. These efforts will be supported by the continued development of the company’s hardware, control electronics and software stack through its system-level co-design approach.

Factorial, a Barcelona-based workforce management software company, has raised $150 million in Series D funding at a $2.5 billion valuation. The round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from existing investors including Atomico and Four Rivers. Alongside the equity investment, General Catalyst has committed up to an additional $540 million through its Customer Value Fund, bringing the total capital committed to more than $700 million. The funding is intended to support Factorial’s continued expansion and product development across Europe. Founded in 2016, Factorial provides software for workforce operations, covering functions across HR, finance and IT. The company serves more than 16,000 businesses in over 90 countries and has spent the past decade building a platform designed to centralise business operations for small and medium-sized enterprises. The latest investment comes as Factorial expands its focus on artificial intelligence. The company has transitioned from a traditional software-as-a-service model toward what it describes as an AI-first workforce operations platform, integrating AI agents into business workflows and processes. Commenting on the funding, Jordi Romero, CEO and co-founder of Factorial, said: Ten years ago, we built Factorial as a SaaS company. Today we are an AI-first company, building agents for our customers, and we are doing it for over 16,000 businesses, from Europe, with the discipline that has defined our first decade. We have reset the product, the architecture, and the way our customers run their work around AI agents. General Catalyst's partnership gives us the conviction and the capital to turn that reset into a category-defining business. This round does not close a chapter. It opens the one that matters. At the centre of the company’s AI strategy is Factorial One, a unified workspace that combines organisational and employee-facing AI agents. According to the company, the platform is designed to help businesses manage policies, workflows and operational tasks across HR, finance, and IT functions through a single system. General Catalyst’s investment follows its previous engagement with Factorial through the Customer Value Fund. They said the company’s operational performance, product development and growth trajectory contributed to its decision to make its first direct equity investment in the business. A significant portion of the new capital will be invested in Germany, which Factorial has identified as a key growth market. The company plans to open a new office in Munich and expand hiring across sales, customer success, product, marketing and engineering roles. Beyond Germany, Factorial plans to continue expanding across France, Italy and Portugal while growing its international team and investing further in its AI-powered workforce operations platform.

Third-party risk management (TPRM) has become one of the most critical challenges facing modern enterprises. As organisations rely on more vendors, SaaS tools and technology partners, they face less visibility, more scrutiny and growing pressure to prove that third-party risk is being managed effectively. Every new vendor introduces another potential point of failure, while security teams are spending hours each week on manual reviews, evidence gathering and questionnaires. Customers, leadership and regulators now expect clearer assurance, but traditional vendor reviews can slow teams down without giving them a continuous view of risk. In Europe, regulations like NIS 2 and DORA are accelerating this pressure by raising the bar for how organisations manage supply chain and vendor security. As vendor ecosystems expand and new technologies are adopted, risk and the pressure to manage it are increasing. Risk is increasing – and changing in nature According to Vanta’s State of Trust Report, more than two-thirds of security leaders (72%) say overall risk has never been higher. This shift is being driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Threats are becoming faster, more scalable and harder to detect. Attacks can be executed in hours, while AI-generated phishing, malware and fraud are growing both in frequency and sophistication. At the same time, organisations are operating in increasingly complex ecosystems, with 56% reporting a vendor-related breach in the past 6-12 months. The importance of trust Trust is critical. Stronger security and compliance directly impact customer trust, and 77% of organisations report that stakeholders now demand verified proof. But there is a gap between confidence and reality. While 80% of organisations are confident their vendors would disclose a breach, businesses cannot afford to assume vendors are secure; they need verifiable and continuous assurance. Plus, across Europe, trust is linked closely to privacy. This means that supplier due diligence is about how vendors process, store, transfer and use data – not just whether they suffer a breach. Privacy becomes even more relevant when AI is involved – which, these days, is across a growing share of vendor products and workflows. Vendors are embedding AI into products and workflows at speed, often without clear governance models. And AI adoption is moving faster than understanding, with around 59% of organisations reporting that AI-related security threats are outpacing their team’s expertise. To earn trust, organisations must do more to demonstrate privacy, including scrutinising and doubling down on their data handling and privacy obligations. The assurance tax Teams are working harder than ever to manage this, but their efforts are often misdirected. Security and compliance teams are buried in manual work, with many gathering evidence, completing questionnaires and responding to vendor reviews. This growing ‘assurance tax’ – the time spent proving security rather than improving it – is becoming a meaningful operational burden. For enterprises, the issue is no longer whether vendors have been reviewed once. It is whether vendor risk can be assessed, monitored and evidenced continuously – without adding more manual work to already stretched security teams. Why leading enterprises choose Vanta as their TPRM solution Security teams are evolving, moving away from point-in-time reviews toward continuous visibility and AI-driven workflows. Vanta's third-party risk management solution is combining agentic AI, continuous monitoring, and deep GRC integration into a single platform that transforms vendor security from a static, check-the-box exercise into an always-on, intelligent process. Vanta’s AI-powered TPRM solution automates the most time-consuming parts of vendor risk management. Its AI Agent collects vendor evidence, analyses security documentation against questionnaires, flags risks, and produces prioritised summaries – cutting review cycles by up to 50% and reducing evidence-gathering time by 62%. For vendors, AI pre-fills most questionnaire responses using existing documentation, speeding up turnaround times. Beyond assessments, Vanta enables continuous risk monitoring by scanning vendor assets and surfacing threats in real time, replacing point-in-time reviews with always-on visibility. It also helps identify unapproved tools through Shadow IT/AI Discovery and streamlines collaboration via Vanta Exchange. Vanta integrates third-party risk into broader GRC programmes, feeding vendor insights into compliance and risk registers. This creates a single source of truth, simplifies audits, and ensures evidence remains current and aligned with frameworks like ISO 27001, SOC 2, and NIS 2. What customers say about Vanta Vanta customer Pigment has been able to operationalise vendor risk at scale, embedding security into its growth without adding unnecessary complexity. With Vanta’s Vendor Risk Management solution, Pigment’s team gets a continually updated overview of the security status of all their vendors. They can respond quickly to security requests, speeding up the sales cycle. As Quentin Berdugo, Chief Information Security Officer at Pigment, explains: “Vanta alleviated a lot of tedious work … so I could focus on building our security programme and raising our posture.” Similarly, Duolingo has streamlined the vendor review process through Vanta’s Vendor Risk Management solution. Mandy Matthew, Lead Security Risk Programme Manager, at Duolingo adds: “Everything is in Vanta – automated tests, manual tests, policies, vendor security assessments and more. It helps us express our posture to external parties and communicate our programme internally.” A new baseline for TPRM In a world of expanding ecosystems, accelerating AI adoption and rising stakeholder expectations, organisations can’t rely on static approaches to vendor risk. TPRM is becoming a continuous function that monitors, verifies and improves security across the vendor network over time. By reducing friction in vendor reviews, improving supplier oversight, and helping teams manage trust and privacy continuously, TPRM gives organisations a more reliable way to scale their third-party ecosystems.

Traveltech company Entravel Group has acquired Moca Traveltech Group, a Barcelona-based B2B travel startup. The deal accelerates Entravel Group’s expansion into Spanish-speaking markets, where much of the existing infrastructure still relies on decades-old technology. Launched in January 2025, Moca Traveltech Group connects underserved markets with hotel inventory through senior industry relationships and direct contracting expertise.   Led by travel veteran Alex Pedret, formerly Global Director of B2B Hotel Distribution at Trip.com Group, the company has built over 100 API integrations in under two years. Its Spanish-language, regionally focused model gives the company direct access to hotel partners and travel buyers across Spain and Latin America."This is exactly the kind of acquisition we look for," said Mathias Lundo Nielsen, founder and CEO of Entravel Group.  "Alex brings hard-to-replicate market expertise, contracts that take years to build, and deep relationships in markets we couldn't meaningfully reach before. We bring the technology to finally let him serve the clients he already has. Together, we're building a more capable, more localised distribution platform for Spanish-speaking countries." For Entravel Group, the acquisition addresses a key barrier to growth in Spanish-speaking markets: access. Moca brings a network of buyer relationships and direct hotel contracts that, by nature, cannot be replicated quickly. For them, the limiting factor was its dependence on third-party technology. Entravel Group’s infrastructure is designed to handle high query volumes and deliver the precision required by large-scale distribution clients — capabilities that were previously out of reach. With Entravel Group’s platform, Moca Traveltech Group will now be able to serve these clients at scale. AI-driven automation, including intelligent room mapping that reduces duplicate listings and content inconsistencies, will further strengthen the combined offering across both supply and distribution. “Joining Entravel Group gives us the technology and operational scale to unlock our next phase of growth,” said Alex Pedret, CEO of Moca Traveltech Group. “We’ve put a lot of effort into building direct contracts and strong industry relationships. With Entravel’s infrastructure and AI systems behind us, we can take those partnerships global and deliver a significantly stronger product to both hotel partners and buyers. We’re targeting a 10x increase in direct hotel contracting and sales in the months ahead.” Following the acquisition, Moca Traveltech Group will rebrand as MocatravelX and operate as the fourth division of Entravel Group, alongside Entravel, Ratestellar, and a division currently in stealth mode. Pedret will continue to lead the business as CEO and spearhead the planned expansion across the broader Latin American region.  Lead image: Magnific.

A startup whose tech allows enterprises to connect sensitive data to AI agents has raised $10m in a seed funding round, led by Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, a new investor in the startup. The funding round in London-based Archestra.AI also includes investment from Visible Ventures and Tenacity Capital. Angels investing in the round include Olivier Pomel, CEO and co-founder of Datadog, and Kieran Flanagan, CMO, Hubspot. Archestra.AI, which was founded in 2025 by Grafana Labs, the open-source analytics and visualisation web application, alumni, has raised a total of $13.5m to date. Currently, enterprises are deploying AI agents for basic tasks, amid concern about agents touching sensitive data and talking to people outside the enterprise, due to concerns agents could hallucinate and go rogue. Archestra.AI is an open-source platform aiming to remedy this, with its tech enabling enterprises to connect sensitive data to AI agents securely, it says. Matvey Kukuy, CEO and founder, said: “We address this problem. We bring guardrails so employees can spin agents inside them.  “Archestra.AI lets agents do more. It lets agents work with legal data, with HR data, to talk to counterparts from outside the enterprise and make sure no sensitive data will be leaked.” Kukuy said that Fortune 500 companies don’t feel comfortable relying on LLM companies like Anthropic and OpenAI solely to ensure AI agents are scaled safely across different business verticals, with concerns about vendor lock-in. He said: “Enterprises are looking for solutions, especially solutions engaging their data and managing their agents which will be independent.” The seven-strong team has already bagged four Fortune 500 company clients, the CEO said. The startup will use the funding to expand its GTM (Go-to-Market) and engineering teams and look to speed up enterprise deployments.

NP Company (NP Co.), an AI-native simulation software company serving the aerospace, defence, energy, electronics, data centre, and automotive industries, has raised a €6 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by Partech, with participation from the Peugeot family office and several prominent angel investors, including Guillaume Lample and Cédric O, co-founders of Mistral AI, Florian Douetteau, founder of Dataiku, and Vincent Luciani, founder and CEO of Artefact. Founded in 2025 by Emmanuel Menier and Matthieu Nastorg, both PhD researchers specialising in AI for simulation at Paris-Saclay University, NP Co. emerged from Inria, the French national research institute that has played a key role in the development of several leading European AI companies, including Mistral AI. The company is developing a new generation of physics simulation technology powered by transformer models pre-trained on industrial physics data. By adapting the architecture behind modern large language models to physical simulation, NP Co. aims to dramatically accelerate engineering workflows. Unlike traditional simulation software, which can require days or even weeks to resolve a single design iteration, NP Co.’s technology delivers results in seconds while maintaining the same level of fidelity across entire assemblies. The company says its technology has demonstrated speed improvements of up to 1,000 times on industrial benchmarks and is continuing to develop the technology for larger-scale assembly simulations. Emmanuel Menier, co-founder and CEO of NP Company, believes the next major breakthrough for AI will come from engineering applications rather than conversational systems: For decades, the bottleneck in industrial design has been the simulation step. We’re removing that bottleneck, so engineers can spend their time solving humanity's most urgent challenges, not waiting for a simulation to resolve. A key differentiator of NP Co.’s approach is its use of pre-trained foundational models. Unlike earlier generations of AI-based simulators that require extensive customer-specific training before deployment, NP Co.’s models are designed to deliver value from the moment they are deployed within a customer’s infrastructure. We didn’t set out to make a faster version of what already exists. With a pre-trained foundational model, you can explore thousands of designs in the time it used to take to run one. That makes a different kind of engineering possible, said Matthieu Nastorg, co-founder and CTO. The newly raised capital will be used to expand NP Co.’s research team and accelerate the development of its foundational simulation models. Over the longer term, the company plans to extend its technology toward automated design systems and real-time operational simulators for industrial infrastructure.

Swedish cybersecurity startup Oplane has raised €4.5 million in seed funding to help engineering teams address the security risks emerging from AI-assisted software development. The round was led by Seed Capital, with participation from angel investors Emil Eifrem, Robert Lagerström, Joakim Nydrén, and existing investor Icebreaker.vc. Founded in Malmö by Emil Kvarnhammar, Oscar Andersson, and Anders Söderling, Oplane is building an agentic security platform for teams developing software with AI. As AI coding tools become increasingly embedded in engineering workflows, organisations are able to build and deploy applications faster than ever before. However, the speed of AI-assisted development is making traditional security reviews and manual threat modelling increasingly difficult to sustain. Oplane addresses this challenge by embedding security directly into the software development process. The platform automatically maps codebase architecture, identifies system-level security requirements, and provides contextual remediation recommendations within developers' existing workflows. By combining expert-level threat modelling with automation, Oplane aims to help organisations identify and address risks before they become vulnerabilities. As AI-assisted coding becomes mainstream, security risks are growing alongside development speed. Oplane embeds security directly into AI-driven development workflows, helping teams identify and address potential risks before they become vulnerabilities. Oplane is already working with a growing number of customers and continues to expand adoption of its platform across software development teams. The company is also conducting additional pilot projects as it broadens its customer base and market presence. With the new funding, Oplane plans to expand across Europe, deepen integrations with AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, and grow its team across engineering, cybersecurity, quality assurance, and go-to-market functions.

UK-based Poindexter Labs, an AI data company focused on producing expert-level training data for advanced AI models, has raised £2 million in an oversubscribed seed round. The round was led by Episode 1, with participation from Yvonne Bajela’s Evertrue Capital and Octopus Ventures' First Cheque Fund, alongside other notable angels. The round also included investments from several of Poindexter's own contributors, including mathematicians and scientists who work on the platform. As AI models become increasingly capable of tackling complex reasoning tasks, demand is growing for high-quality training data created by domain experts. However, much of the industry's existing data infrastructure was built for simpler annotation tasks such as image labelling and text classification. Advanced AI systems require something different: detailed expert reasoning, professional judgement, and domain-specific knowledge across fields such as mathematics, science, law, medicine, finance, and engineering. Poindexter has translated its methodology into a proprietary platform, currently in beta, that supports both its data production services and organisations developing their own AI systems. Through the platform, enterprises and government departments can access collaborative workflows designed to help subject-matter experts generate and validate training data more effectively. According to Jocelyn D'Arcy, Founder and CEO of Poindexter Labs, many of the workflows still used to generate AI training data prioritise scale over collaborative knowledge creation. As a result, a huge chunk of training data is discarded not because it is wrong, but because adversarial review processes actively incentivise discarding tasks rather than improving them. This is a workflow problem, and we built Poindexter the way academics build knowledge: collaboratively, transparently, with peer review at every step. Poindexter Labs plans to use the funding to scale its team, deepen relationships with frontier AI labs, and bring its platform to a broader range of enterprise and public-sector organisations developing AI systems.

Deep Science Ventures (DSV), a UK-based deeptech venture creator, and Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC), a life sciences service dedicated to turning drug discovery into commercial breakthroughs, today announced a strategic collaboration to address challenges in delivering medicines into the brain.    While recent scientific breakthroughs have identified numerous targets for neurological conditions, the difficulty of effectively transporting these treatments across the blood-brain barrier and into the central nervous system (CNS) remains a primary challenge for global health.   According to the World Health Organization’s Global Status Report on Neurology, over 40 per cent of the global population is living with CNS diseases, making them a leading global cause of ill health and disability.    Developing new solutions could unlock access for rare neurological disorders and expand treatment to large or underserved patient populations, including those with diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and various brain cancers.  Directly addressing critical gaps in healthcare means these innovations have the potential to improve patient outcomes while creating clinical and commercial opportunities for biotech and pharma companies.   The first phase of the partnership will see an in-depth review of the current medicines landscape conducted to identify opportunities for innovation.  This information will then be used to identify systemic gaps in brain-entry technologies. The long-term ambition is for novel approaches that meet the partners' investment criteria to be spun out into new ventures focused on high-impact solutions, with pre-seed funding provided.   A core part of DSV’s approach involves building future founding teams to form new companies that will address challenges across multiple sectors. Future founders will work on opportunities pre-scoped by DSV, de-risking the standard founder proposition.       "The blood-brain barrier remains one of the most complex issues in modern medicine and with over 40 per cent of the world's population facing neurological conditions, it’s imperative that we find an optimal solution to this problem,” said Adam Tomassi-Russell, Senior Director, Deep Science Ventures.  By pooling our venture-creation expertise with MDC’s discovery capabilities, we can offer the right founders a frictionless environment in which to tackle the CNS delivery gap.  If we can solve the 'how' of brain entry more effectively, we can unlock a new frontier of CNS therapeutics and address the huge unmet need in these diseases."   Dr Nicola Heron, Chief Strategy Officer at Medicines Discovery Catapult, said: "At MDC, we are committed to transforming bold ideas into better treatments. This collaboration presents an opportunity to discover new technologies that could have a significant impact on patients and society." Lead image: Magnific.

Spanish proptech company Zazume has raised €2.5 million in a new funding round to support its expansion strategy and accelerate the acquisition of residential property management portfolios across Spain. The round was led by Nordstar and GTV Capital, with participation from existing investors including Sabadell Venture Capital and several family offices. Founded in Barcelona, Zazume has developed a platform that digitises the residential rental lifecycle by combining proprietary technology, artificial intelligence, and financial services. The company works with property owners and real estate agencies to streamline rental management, offering tools designed to improve operational efficiency and enhance the rental experience. Zazume currently manages around 3,500 properties and expects to exceed 5,000 by the end of the year as it expands across Spain. The funding comes after Zazume reached financial break-even, giving the company the option to pursue growth from a position of operational sustainability. According to the company, the new capital will allow it to pursue a more ambitious growth strategy while strengthening its position in Spain's residential rental market. A significant portion of the funding will be used to acquire property management portfolios from smaller real estate agencies in provincial capitals. Zazume is targeting a highly fragmented market where many agencies focus primarily on property sales and often lack the resources, scale, or technology needed to manage rental portfolios efficiently. According to the company, the investment will help accelerate growth through acquisitions while creating new opportunities for smaller real estate agencies looking to monetise their property management portfolios. Zazume has already begun executing this strategy through the acquisition of Zaragoza-based Landa Propiedades, a regional property management company. The company expects to complete several additional agreements this year as it expands its presence in key Spanish markets. Beyond acquisitions, part of the funding will support sales and marketing activities as Zazume seeks to grow its customer base and strengthen relationships with real estate agencies. Through a combination of technology, financial services, and acquisitions, Zazume aims to build a larger and more digitalised rental management platform while contributing to the professionalisation of Spain's residential rental sector.

Munich-based startup Bayshore has raised $8 million in seed funding led by Earlybird Venture Capital, with participation from Lucid Capital, Booom, Heliad, and a group of strategic angel investors. As regulatory obligations grow increasingly complex, many organisations struggle to translate legal requirements into operational processes, leaving compliance teams burdened with manual reviews and slowing down business operations. Bayshore addresses this challenge by converting legal and compliance rules into machine-readable code that provides clear guardrails for AI agents. These agents can continuously apply legal logic to compliance processes while maintaining auditability and consistency across jurisdictions, compliance programmes, and business operations. According to Paul F. Welter, Chief Legal Engineering Officer at Bayshore, organisations need AI systems that can deliver the consistency and auditability required for legal and compliance processes: For any legal and compliance review, organisations need full auditability to prevent liability, so AI reduces risks instead of introducing new ones. We achieve this through lawyers who create deterministic and machine-readable guardrails for AI to act on. The Bayshore platform acts as a central entry point for legal and compliance requests, enabling business units to receive guidance without lengthy review cycles. AI agents can automatically clear low-risk cases or escalate more complex matters to human experts, providing pre-reviewed information that reduces manual workloads and speeds up decision-making. Multiple Global 2000 companies are already implementing Bayshore’s platform to embed legal and compliance requirements directly into business processes. The new funding will be used to further develop the platform, expand the team, and support custom deployments for customers operating in highly regulated industries. Bayshore is currently hiring across AI engineering, legal engineering, and go-to-market functions.

Contentful, the German-founded content management company, is to be acquired by US software giant Salesforce, the companies announced today. Contentful, founded in 2013, has developed an API-first all-in-one hub for developers and content creators to curate, manage and distribute content across different channels, such as blogs, websites, and social media platforms. It has offices in Berlin, London and the US. It works with over 4,800 brands to deliver “personalised digital experiences at scale," it says. Salesforce says the acquisition will beef up its AI agent platform Agentforce, giving it a content layer that will mean agents can autonomously deliver personalised, AI-driven content at scale across every channel for enterprises. Jujhar Singh, president, C360 Applications & Industries, Salesforce, said: “Every meaningful customer interaction depends on three things working together: the right data, the right AI-driven content, and a modern, effortless experience. "With Contentful, we complete that picture by adding a native, headless, composable content layer that lets Agentforce dynamically assemble and deliver personalised experiences across every channel, at the speed and scale the AI era demands." Karthik Rau, CEO of Contentful, said: “Joining forces with Salesforce accelerates our mission of enabling modern enterprises to dynamically assemble and deliver rich digital experiences across every channel. "Our API-first architecture and deep domain expertise fit perfectly into the Salesforce stack.  “Together, we will redefine how brands interact with customers by giving Agentforce the content layer it needs to make every interaction truly engaging." Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Contentful closed a $175 million funding round in 2021, at a valuation of over $3 billion. The round was led by Tiger Global with Base10 Advancement Initiative and Tidemark participating. Earlier backers of Contentful include European investor Balderton, which backed it first in 2012.

UK AI procurement platform Vertice, today announced its acquisition of US software pricing platform Vendr.  By uniting agentic workflows,  AI-powered insights, and expert buying talent, Vertice enables finance and procurement teams in 100+ countries to operate with precision, speed, and impact.   Its platform is used to review, analyse and negotiate purchases with greater confidence.  Vertice processes over $75 billion in spend, with a proven track record of delivering 20 per cent+ savings and accelerating procurement cycles by 2x.  Vendr provides procurement and finance teams with trusted benchmarks and market insights, while also helping streamline negotiations and drive more informed software purchasing decisions.  The deal creates a large procurement intelligence dataset, as Vertice will integrate Vendr’s software insights with its own. The combined data represents more than $75+ billion in global indirect spend  across 32,000 vendors, including real-world pricing and human-to-human interactions from 250,000  negotiated contracts, ranging from software to services.  Customers, including ARM, Brex, Duolingo, Twilio, and Santander, will be able to access the data directly within the Vertice platform. Insights will be surfaced at the point of decision to help finance and procurement teams evaluate vendors, manage renewals, and plan negotiations.  Roy Tuvey, Founder and CEO of Vertice, said:  “Vertice and Vendr have shared a vision for AI in procurement: to build purpose-designed AI agents trained on real-world data and tailored to specific procurement use cases. By bringing these teams together, we can accelerate everything - from the breadth of agents we can build, to the commercial impact we deliver for customers. We are setting a new benchmark for what procurement teams should expect from AI  procurement platforms." According to Ryan Neu, CEO of Vendr: “Vendr was founded on a simple observation: buyers were making million-dollar purchasing decisions with only a fraction of the information available to the vendor across the table. We spent years closing that gap, building the data, tooling, and negotiation expertise to rebalance that dynamic.  I’m proud of what we  built independently, and even more excited about what our two organisations can build together.”