European tech investment reached €72 billion in 2025, making it the second-strongest year of the past three, despite a slight decline from 2024. Deal activity remained stable, with more than 3,740 transactions completed, indicating continued investor engagement across the ecosystem. Investment was concentrated in a core group of sectors, with fintech, software, healthtech, energy, and artificial intelligence accounting for the majority of capital deployed. Fintech led all industries, attracting €11.1 billion across 397 deals and reinforcing its position as Europe’s primary investment driver. Software followed with €8.1 billion across 692 transactions, reflecting both its breadth and consistent deal flow. Healthtech (€7.7 billion) and energy (€7.5 billion) formed the next tier, while artificial intelligence secured €5.3 billion, emerging as a strategically significant growth sector. Beyond these leading sectors, several additional industries contributed to the overall investment landscape. Telecom attracted €4.8 billion, followed by cleantech with €3.1 billion, cloud with €2.5 billion, transportation with €2.3 billion, and semiconductors with €1.7 billion. Together, these ten industries represent the primary areas of capital concentration within the European tech ecosystem. Quarterly trends indicate relatively balanced investment across the year, with sector leadership shifting over time. Fintech maintained consistent funding levels throughout the year. Software demonstrated steady growth, particularly toward the final quarter. Healthtech experienced stronger activity in the first and last quarters, while energy peaked in the third quarter, reflecting heightened investment in the energy transition. Artificial intelligence also gained momentum mid-year before moderating toward year-end. Overall, the European tech landscape in 2025 was shaped by investments in digital infrastructure, financial services, artificial intelligence, energy, and healthcare, with capital continuing to concentrate in large, strategic sectors rather than consumer-focused markets. This article highlights the largest deals from each of these top 10 industries. In the coming weeks, we will take a closer look at the biggest funding rounds within each sector individually. For more detailed analyses of the European technology ecosystem, see Tech.eu’s annual report, European Tech 2025 – The Big Picture. Amount raised in 2025: £1.5B Propel Finance is a UK-based fintech lender providing technology-enabled asset finance solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Through its proprietary digital platform, Propeller, the company delivers fast and flexible funding for business-critical equipment, vehicles, and technology. Working with a network of brokers, vendors, and partners, Propel Finance enables seamless, point-of-sale financing across sectors such as healthcare, construction, and manufacturing. In 2025, Propel Finance secured a £1.5 billion funding round to expand its support for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across the UK. Amount raised in 2025: €1.1B Bending Spoons is an Italy-based technology company that develops, acquires, and operates digital products and software platforms. The company focuses on improving and scaling established applications, including Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup, and Remini, using proprietary technology and data-driven optimisation. Its products serve hundreds of millions of users globally, and its strategy centres on long-term ownership and continuous enhancement of digital services. In 2025, the company raised approximately €1.1 billion across two corporate financing rounds to support the continued expansion of its product portfolio. Amount raised in 2025: $900M Oura Health is a Finnish company that develops the Oura Ring, a smart wearable designed to continuously monitor sleep, physical activity, heart rate, and other biometric indicators. Through its connected mobile application, the device provides personalised insights to support users’ health and wellness. In 2025, Oura secured more than $900 million in a funding round, valuing the company at approximately $11 billion. The proceeds will be used to advance AI-driven capabilities and product innovation, expand global distribution, and introduce additional health-focused features. Amount raised in 2025: €600M IONITY is a Germany-based company that develops and operates a network of ultra-fast charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs) across key European transport corridors. Its high-power charging infrastructure supports long-distance EV travel by reducing charging times and ensuring reliable access to renewable energy. The company serves both individual drivers and fleet operators. In 2025, IONITY secured €600 million in financing to accelerate the expansion of its high-power charging network. The investment will enable a significant increase in the number of charging points and support the broader deployment of renewable energy solutions across Europe by 2030. Amount raised in 2025: €1.7B Mistral AI develops advanced generative artificial intelligence models and tools that enable organisations to build, customise, and deploy large language models, AI assistants, and autonomous agents for applications such as search, software development, automation, and data processing. The company raised €1.7 billion in funding, more than doubling its valuation to approximately €11.7 billion. The capital will be used to accelerate research and development, expand computing infrastructure, and support the global scaling of its AI platform. Amount raised in 2025: £2.3B CityFibre is a UK-based telecommunications infrastructure company that designs, builds, and operates one of the country’s largest independent full-fibre broadband networks. Its gigabit-capable fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) infrastructure serves homes, businesses, public sector organisations, and broadband service providers. In 2025, the company secured £2.3 billion in financing to support the continued expansion of its full-fibre network across the UK. The funding will be used to increase the number of residential and commercial connections and to explore potential acquisitions of additional fibre network assets. Amount raised in 2025: €810M Enpal provides integrated renewable energy solutions for households, including solar panel systems, battery storage, heat pumps, and wallbox chargers. Through flexible purchase and rental models, the company enables homeowners to generate and manage clean energy while reducing costs and increasing energy independence. The company raised €810 million to expand its installation capacity and further scale its clean energy platform. Amount raised in 2025: $1.53B Nscale develops and operates high-performance AI infrastructure, providing scalable, GPU-powered cloud and data centre solutions for the training, fine-tuning, and deployment of artificial intelligence workloads. The company emphasises a vertically integrated approach, combining compute, networking, and software tools to support advanced AI development and large-scale implementation. The company secured approximately $1.53 billion across two funding rounds to expand its AI data centre capacity and support the global growth of its infrastructure. Amount raised in 2025: €1B FINN provides a flexible car subscription service through all-inclusive monthly plans that cover insurance, maintenance, taxes, and delivery. The platform enables customers to select, order, and receive a vehicle entirely online, offering access to personal mobility without the need for long-term ownership commitments. The company secured €1 billion in funding to expand its vehicle fleet and support its international market expansion. Amount raised in 2025: €1B NXP Semiconductors designs, develops, and manufactures a wide portfolio of high-performance semiconductor solutions, including microcontrollers, processors, sensors, and secure connectivity technologies. These products are used across automotive, industrial, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, and communications applications, enabling smart and embedded systems to connect, sense, and operate intelligently. The company secured €1 billion in funding to support ongoing research and development, advance product innovation, and expand its manufacturing capabilities.

Outcraft AI, an agentic AI platform focused on autonomous revenue execution, has raised €2 million in pre-seed funding from Practica Capital. The company also received early backing from venture builder Lost Astronaut. Businesses frequently miss revenue opportunities due to delayed or inconsistent customer engagement. Leads may go cold, free users fail to convert, declined payments remain unresolved, and early signs of churn are often overlooked. Rising customer acquisition costs and expectations for immediate, personalised responses further intensify pressure on sales and lifecycle teams. Outcraft AI introduces a new category of system - autonomous AI agents for sales and revenue execution. These agents engage customers in real time across voice, SMS, email, and WhatsApp, determining the optimal next action when triggers such as inbound leads, abandoned checkouts, or failed payments occur. Continuous, context-aware interactions ensure seamless follow-up and minimise lost opportunities. The platform integrates with widely used business systems, allowing it to respond immediately to real-time customer behaviour. By focusing on execution across the full customer lifecycle, Outcraft AI enables organisations to achieve measurable outcomes while reducing reliance on manual processes. Will Nauseda, CEO and co-founder of Outcraft AI, commented: We’re not building another sales tool or engagement platform. We’re developing autonomous AI agents that execute customer engagement end to end, enabling companies to respond instantly across multiple channels and drive measurable revenue outcomes. Outcraft AI is emerging at a time when technological advancements in real-time voice and decision-making capabilities are converging with market pressures to operate more efficiently. Together, these factors are enabling a transition from tools that support sales teams to systems that can independently perform key revenue-generating activities. Looking ahead, the company aims to enable fully autonomous revenue execution, where AI agents manage the entire customer lifecycle, from lead capture and qualification to engagement, retention, and revenue recovery. The newly secured funding will be used to further enhance the platform’s capabilities and support its expansion into additional markets.

Audrey AI, a Dublin-based startup developing AI solutions purpose-built for financial auditors, has raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Sure Valley Ventures (SVV) and Delta Partners, with participation from Enterprise Ireland, Donnchadh Casey (former CEO of Calypso), Conor Jones (former Chief Business Officer at Wayflyer), and several former Big Four auditors. Financial auditing remains highly manual, with auditors spending much of their time on spreadsheets and evidence collection, areas where general-purpose AI tools have struggled to provide effective solutions. Founded in 2025 by Ryan Loughran and David Burke, Audrey AI addresses this gap by developing an agentic AI platform designed specifically for the audit process, automating key workflows such as intelligent data requests, evidence gathering, transaction testing, and automated review. By orchestrating these tasks end-to-end, the platform enables auditors to focus on professional judgment and client relationships rather than administrative processes. The solution adapts to each firm’s methodology, increasing its effectiveness over time as it learns from continued use. Ryan Loughran, co-founder of Audrey AI, commented: We’re building AI that understands auditing deeply enough to raise the bar on quality, not just speed, freeing auditors to focus on the judgment and oversight that matters most. The platform has already been piloted with top-10 and top-20 audit firms, demonstrating significant efficiency gains, including more than 85 per cent time savings in client data collection, validation, and tests of detail, alongside measurable improvements in audit quality. The newly secured funding will be used to expand Audrey AI’s engineering and audit specialist teams and to support the company’s growth as it scales deployments with audit firms across Ireland, the UK, and additional international markets.

Openlaw, a European platform for digital legal and notary infrastructure, has closed a $3.3 million seed round for its platform beglaubigt.de.  The round includes YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim (via Y Ventures), Moonfire Ventures (founded by Atomico co-founder Mattias Ljungman), Zeno Ventures, Combination VC, Orange Collective and a group of prominent angels, including numerous Y Combinator alumni and founders with successful exits. Openlaw was accepted into Y Combinator F24 Batch. In the US, incorporating a company can take as little as 24 hours. In Europe, the reality is very different: founders face 27 national legal systems and more than 60 different corporate forms. In many of the continent's largest markets, including Germany, Spain and France, company formation requires notarisation.+ In Germany, setting up a GmbH typically takes six to eight weeks. For founders, that means navigating a maze of agencies, forms and procedures with little clarity on what needs to happen when or where. Germany’s startup problem isn’t just incorporation — it’s everything after Nearly 60 per cent of founders are dissatisfied with Germany as a business location according to the DIHK Report 2025, and three-quarters are calling for faster, simpler regulation, as intended in EU-Inc’s 28th regime. The EU Inc. proposal aims to make company formation across Europe faster and less bureaucratic.  But what comes after incorporation, tax registration, commercial register entries, business addresses, and ongoing administration remains complex and fragmented across jurisdictions. This is where Openlaw steps in: not to replace existing institutions, but to serve as the digital infrastructure that supports founders from first incorporation through to running their business, starting in Germany, Europe's most bureaucratic market, via the platform beglaubigt.de, with the long-term ambition of expanding into additional European markets. In Germany, the company is already leading the way with beglaubigt.de: the platform digitises the entire formation process, from incorporation documents and notary appointments to commercial register entries and transparency register filings. What used to take eight weeks, beglaubigt.de reduces to as little as three days.  The platform works with around 300 notary offices on behalf of its customers, handling administration, scheduling, document preparation and register filings, while legal counsel and notarization remain with the notaries. Less than a year after launch, beglaubigt.de counts established names like neobank Qonto, Holvi and Sevdesk among its partners and has served over 25,000 customers on its platform.  With Germany's first fully automated incorporation API, founders can start the entire company formation process directly from their Qonto account, without ever leaving the platform. From unicorn exit to legaltech Openlaw was built by two founders who experienced Germany's bureaucratic formation process firsthand. Through Y Combinator in San Francisco, they also learned how it should work. CEO Alexander Sporenberg was part of the founding team at Razor Group, which reached unicorn status with a $1.7 billion valuation in just 15 months. Across hundreds of M&A deals, he saw firsthand how notary appointments, registration processes and red tape became the real bottleneck. CPO Felix Gerlach began his career in the Rocket Internet ecosystem before founding Passbase, a global identity verification platform backed by Lakestar, Cowboy Ventures and Costanoa Ventures. Passbase was acquired by Parallel Markets in 2023. "Europe doesn't lack innovation, and it certainly doesn't lack talent. What it lacks is efficient infrastructure. At Razor, we built a unicorn in 15 months, but waiting for notary appointments nearly derailed us. In the US, it would have taken days. That's exactly what we're solving with Openlaw, so European founders don't fail because of bureaucracy," says Alexander Sporenberg, CEO and co-founder of Openlaw. “For us as Europe's leading finance management solution, the incorporation process is the starting point to accompany entrepreneurs along their journey." "With beglaubigt.de integrated into our product, customers can go from opening an account to incorporating their company seamlessly. It saves founders precious time and makes starting a business significantly easier," says Malte Dous, Managing Director Central Europe at Qonto. With the fresh capital, Openlaw plans to expand the product offering of its German platform beglaubigt.de: beyond GmbH, UG and GbR formations as well as tax-optimised holding structures, additional register processes and ongoing bookkeeping will be fully available on the platform. Openlaw is starting with beglaubigt.de in Germany and plans to expand across Europe.

The UK–Ukraine TechBridge has officially launched a new phase of its Investment Accelerator project for 2026, offering Ukrainian technology startups a structured pathway to expand into the UK market and connect with leading investors.  This builds on the success of previous phases of the Investment Accelerator, which has generated over £10 million in new investment and business deals for Ukrainian tech startups. Supported by the UK Government and the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, and led by Blue Lake VC https://www.bluelakevc.com/, the project will work with 20 high-growth Ukrainian tech companies (Late Seed–Series A), providing investment readiness support, practical workshops, and a cohort-based programme of support in a hybrid format throughout May- culminating in an in-person pitching showcase at London Tech Week in June 2026.A key focus of this year’s programme is direct 1-1 access to investors, enabling founders to build meaningful relationships with UK Venture Capital and to navigate fundraising in a new market.The programme is delivered by Blue Lake VC, an early-stage London-based Venture Capital firm founded by two Ukrainian entrepreneurs – Lyubov Guk and David Gilgur, investing in exceptional international entrepreneurs to grow in the UK.According to Lyubov Guk, Founding Partner, Blue Lake VC:  “Entering the UK market is not easy, and fundraising without an existing network is even harder. This programme is designed to remove those barriers - giving founders direct access to investors and helping them build real, long-term relationships.” Nataliia Denikeieva, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, shared:  “We are proud to launch the Investment Accelerator for the third time as part of UK-Ukraine TechBridge. Even in wartime, Ukraine remains a dynamic tech ecosystem, home to more than 2,000 startups, over 300,000 tech professionals, and ranked 42nd globally in StartupBlink’s 2025 index.  For Ukrainian founders, this is a pathway to international growth. For the UK, it is access to strong talent, new technologies and high-potential partnerships.” UK-Ukraine TechBridge forms a part of the 100 Year Partnership agreement between the two nations.  Applications are now open until 27 April 2026.

Stendr, a Norwegian defence technology company, has raised $5.4 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round to advance its AI-native platform. The round was co-led by RainFall, ACME, and SkyFall, with participation from Sisyphus, Antler, StartupLab, Off Piste, and Andøya Ventures, alongside a syndicate of global technology founders and investors. Headquartered in Oslo, Stendr is developing a vertically integrated technology stack that combines hardware and software with artificial intelligence at its core. The company’s initial focus is on drone defence, leveraging AI-driven multi-sensor systems embedded in cost-efficient hardware platforms to support detection, tracking, and situational awareness in modern operational environments. Aleksander Leonard Larsen, co-founder and CEO of Stendr, noted that modern warfare has evolved significantly, with the widespread availability of low-cost, autonomous drones outpacing the capabilities of traditional defence systems. At Stendr, we are building the technology to find them, track them, and give defenders the information to act, fully sovereign to Europe. The founding team brings extensive experience across technology, artificial intelligence, and hardware development, with backgrounds in scaling technology companies and delivering complex engineering projects. The newly secured funding will be used to accelerate the development of Stendr’s AI-driven multi-sensor technology, expand its engineering and hardware capabilities, and support the deployment of its platform for defence applications. Through these efforts, the company aims to contribute to the advancement of sovereign and adaptable defence technologies in Europe.

In a world of finance, where automation, AI and chatbots are becoming more commonplace, Germany’s most valuable startup is taking the opposite path.  Trade Republic, which is valued at €12.5 billion, is ditching its customer service AI chatbots and replacing them with more than 1,000 human customer service agents to ensure that customers can speak to real people.  The Berlin-based stock trading app says it has invested a double-digit million euro sum to provide new infrastructure, product development, and the training of more than 1,000 customer service agents who provide direct assistance to customers in eight languages.  Christian Hecker, co-founder and CEO, Trade Republic, said: “Our goal is to be the long-term home for our customers' entire assets. Our customer service has been completely redesigned. At its core are trained agents who can provide personalised assistance to customers.  “Within the next twelve months, we aim to offer the best customer service of any bank in Europe. That is our ambition.”  The move is in response to criticism from users in its domestic market of Germany and Austria to its customer service offering with customers complaining about poor accessibility, long waiting times, and poor support, according to reports.  The new human-led customer service is replacing its hybrid approach, which uses a mix of AI chatbots and human agents, which only offered a standard chat function, with no live chat or telephone hotline.  The new customer service is available 24/7, free of charge, in the Trade Republic app, where customers can call and chat with human customer service agents.  If questions are not resolved immediately, customers can track the status of their request live in the app, Trade Republic said. Trade Republic is working with an external provider that is supplying the customer service agents.  Many fintechs and banks are investing heavily in AI to improve their customer service offering. In the UK, Starling Bank and Revolut have recently rolled out AI financial assistants to help improve their offerings to customers.  But last year, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski admitted that its focus on cost-cutting through AI across customer service had led to lower quality and Klarna went on a recruitment drive to ensure customers had the option to speak to a real person.

Brix, a fintech platform focused on bringing emerging market financial assets on-chain, has raised $5.5 million in a funding round. The round included participation from global financial institutions and Web3 investors, including FRWRD Ventures, Circle Ventures, ConsenSys, Webrazzi Ventures, Borderless Capital, and Paribu Ventures. Angel investors Kemal Kaya, Fevzi Güngör, and Sertaç Özinal also participated. Brix aims to broaden access to investment opportunities in emerging markets by tokenising real-world assets such as stocks, funds, and bonds. Through this approach, the platform enables investors to access assets that have traditionally been available primarily to institutional participants. In addition to direct investment, these tokenised assets can be used as collateral and integrated into decentralised finance (DeFi) applications, supporting the creation of new on-chain financial structures. The company collaborates with banks and brokerage firms across emerging markets to facilitate the issuance, custody, and management of underlying assets. These partnerships enable scalable market-making activities and provide the regulatory and operational infrastructure required to support global investor participation. Alp Ergin, co-founder and CEO of Brix, explained that the company’s approach combines partnerships with established financial institutions in emerging markets with its experience in developing new markets within decentralised finance, adding: Large players in emerging markets want to tokenise and distribute their assets, while capital in DeFi is searching for real-world yield. Brix is the point where the two meet. Commenting on the investment, Kemal Kaya, Advisor at Blackstone and former CEO of Yapı Kredi, highlighted that this development signals the early stages of deeper integration between traditional and decentralised finance. As part of its roadmap, Brix plans to launch its first asset, a digital instrument backed by tokenised Turkish lira-denominated money market funds, with further asset offerings expected to follow. All underlying assets on the platform are managed, regulated, and custodied by established local financial institutions, ensuring compliance and operational integrity. By connecting decentralised finance capital with real-world assets from rapidly growing economies, Brix seeks to enhance accessibility and liquidity in emerging market investments while enabling new forms of programmable and transferable yield within the DeFi ecosystem. The newly secured funding will be used to expand Brix’s portfolio of market-specific assets and strengthen its network of institutional partners across key regions, including Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Mexico, Brazil, and South Korea, providing unified access to these markets through a single platform.

Gizmo, a London-based AI-powered learning platform, has raised $22 million in Series A funding to support its international expansion and further development of its technology. The round was led by Shine Capital, with participation from Ada Ventures, Seek Investments, GSV, and NFX, which previously led the company’s $3.5 million seed round. Founded by Petros Christodoulou (CEO), Robin Jack (CTO), and Paul Evangelou (CPO), all graduates of the University of Cambridge, Gizmo aims to enhance the learning experience by applying engagement techniques commonly used in consumer technology. The platform enables students to transform their notes, documents, and web content into personalised study materials, including interactive flashcards, adaptive quizzes, and gamified challenges. Social features allow learners to collaborate, compete, and track progress, fostering a more engaging and interactive study environment. Petros Christodoulou, co-founder and CEO of Gizmo, commented: We’re not fighting for less screen time — we’re fighting for better screen time. People aren’t addicted to their phones; they’re addicted to progress, novelty, social connection, and reward. Gizmo redirects that energy toward something that builds their future. Gizmo is used by more than 13 million learners across over 120 countries, serving a diverse audience that includes secondary school students, university learners, and professionals seeking to upskill. The platform addresses a longstanding gap in education, where traditional study methods have remained largely unchanged despite the widespread adoption of smartphones and digital technologies. By leveraging artificial intelligence to personalise and gamify the learning process, Gizmo seeks to make studying more engaging and accessible. The company’s long-term vision is to broaden access to effective education and support learners worldwide through technology-driven solutions. The newly secured funding will be used to expand Gizmo’s engineering and AI teams, support growth in the US college market, and accelerate product development to deepen engagement across its global user base.

Europe’s push for technological sovereignty is reshaping even the most overlooked parts of the stack—including how systems are cooled. Data centres and compute platforms are essential infrastructure for both the civilian digital economy and modern defence operations. They demand high energy efficiency, robust reliability, and low dependency on local environmental resources such as water or a stable power supply. Calyos, a Belgian thermal technology company founded in 2012, designs, develops and manufactures fully passive, two-phase cooling systems that can be manufactured entirely in Europe and deployed across mobility, defence, and high-performance computing. Calyos’s technology was selected by NATO DIANA last year to help address this challenge by enhancing energy efficiency, sustainability, and resilience in both fixed and deployable data centre environments. I spoke to Antoine de Ryckel, CEO of Calyos, and Sebastien Lewy from A6K, a multidisciplinary innovation hub in Wallonia bringing together industry, startups, research, and public partners, to find out more. Born from satellite engineering Calyos was founded as a spin-off from space-related company Euro Heat Pipes. According to de Ryckel, the company’s technology was first developed for the space industry. “When you want to cool electronics in satellites, for example, you obviously don’t want to send people to do maintenance. The European Space Agency funded development with a university in Belgium, and then the first company was created to develop this technology. That company is now fully mature and has been acquired by Airbus. When that acquisition happened, Calyos was spun off to focus on ground applications —  everything that is not space.” How two-phase cooling works Two-phase cooling underpins Calyos’s passive thermal management system that moves heat by exploiting a fluid’s ability to change state. At the heat source — such as a processor, battery, or power electronics — the working fluid absorbs heat and evaporates into vapour, capturing a large amount of energy in the process. This vapour then naturally travels through a sealed loop to a cooler area of the system, where it releases the heat and condenses back into liquid. The liquid is then returned to the heat source via capillary action, often through a wick structure, allowing the cycle to repeat continuously without pumps or moving parts. This makes the system highly reliable, silent, and efficient compared to traditional air or liquid cooling. By leveraging phase change rather than mechanical force, Calyos can transfer heat more effectively and deploy cooling solutions across demanding applications, from electronics to mobility and data centres. de Ryckel explained: “Overall, it’s passive, reliable, and high-performance, which makes it interesting for dual defence applications." Designed for resilience and sovereignty ​ The lack of a pump in two-phase cooling makes it suitable for operation in harsh environments. Further, de Ryckel explained: “We don’t rely on electronics or rare materials — it’s primarily metal. That means the entire system can be manufactured within Europe, strengthening supply chain resilience and supporting technological sovereignty.” This comes at a critical moment, as companies seek to shift away from non-European supply chains amid rising geopolitical tensions and growing demands for digital and industrial sovereignty. ​ Real-world use cases take shape Today, Calyos focuses on cooling electronics across three main markets: e-mobility, computing, and energy. It cools batteries, processors, and power electronics. In battery cooling, Calyos integrates very small channels within an aluminium plate, filled with a working fluid that evaporates to efficiently extract heat. This approach is already used in motorsport applications, where precise thermal control is critical to prevent battery degradation. In the automotive industry, Calyos is also working with a German manufacturer on cooling for onboard chargers. Whereas conventional systems require the full water loop to operate even when the vehicle is stationary, Calyos’ solution enables more targeted, energy-efficient cooling. The company recently joined the CoolBatt project to develop a new passive thermal architecture for e-bike battery packs, using its two-phase cooling technology to improve safety, extend battery lifetime, and enhance overall performance. In defence, the company applies its technology to transfer heat from electronic components directly to the vehicle chassis in a fully passive manner, eliminating the need for active cooling systems and also collaborates with Airbus across both its commercial and defence divisions . While the company has a small factory in Belgium, it focuses on production partnerships to scale across Europe and other regions, including a partner in Taiwan for computing, Automotive Tier 1 suppliers, and an Italian factory for energy and defence. De Ryckel admits that the company's biggest challenge is finding the right use case and partner. “When that’s clear, everything becomes easier. Without it, projects struggle.” Further, integration also takes time — typically around 18 months from concept to deployment. But once the first integration is done, scaling becomes faster. Inside NATO’s DIANA programme The NATO DIANA (Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic) Challenge Programme is a transatlantic initiative designed to identify and accelerate dual-use deeptech solutions for defence and security. Through a series of annual challenges, DIANA selects startups working on critical technologies — such as energy resilience, secure communications, sensing, and autonomous systems — and supports them with non-dilutive funding, access to a network of test centres across Europe and North America, and mentorship from both military and commercial experts. The programme is designed to help early-stage companies validate their technologies in real-world defence environments, bridging the gap between civilian innovation and operational military needs. Each year, around 100 companies are selected to help make their technologies defence-ready. de Ryckel explained: “We work with accelerators to define a roadmap covering technology, commercial strategy, governance, and financing. Our goal is to identify defence use cases and new opportunities. It also gives us access to events and potential customers.” Calyos’ technology is initially tested in certified centres that simulate military conditions, before progressing to operational experiments in the field. Ultimately, the aim is to secure partnerships with defence primes and develop long-term deployment roadmaps. ​ Navigating defence as a startup In terms of advice for companies considering applying to the NATO DIANA programme, de Ryckel emphasised the value of getting assistance from experienced ecosystem builders: “Don’t hesitate to ask for expert advice. Getting input from people who understand the defence market can make a real difference when reviewing your proposal. I built much of the application myself, but the most valuable insights came from external feedback. The A6K review, for example, offered several small but important tips that significantly strengthened the proposal. That kind of external perspective is critical.” For Lewy an important aspect is cultural. He detailed: “When applying to NATO programmes like DIANA, you’re not operating purely within a European context. The reviewers are international, often including Americans, and their expectations differ. European teams tend to be more reserved, but in this setting, you need to be assertive and ambitious — both in written applications and when pitching. You have to present with confidence and clearly demonstrate the strength of your proposition.” De Ryckel concluded:   “You need to be professional, but also bold in how you present yourself. It’s a different mindset." The company also received support from Lewy through a colleague with direct experience in the defence sector — an entrepreneur who had already built and exited a company and is now launching another venture. "That kind of hands-on expertise was extremely helpful.” With validation from programmes like DIANA, the next step is turning technical promise into deployed systems through partnerships with defence primes and the ability to integrate into real-world platforms at scale.

The UK’s largest crowdfunding platform reported a “hard-fought” full-year profit last year, driven by a rise in secondary liquidity and cutting costs across the business, says one of its CEOs. Matt Cooper, Crowdcube co-CEO, says: “The change has been dramatic. Two to three years ago, we didn’t do any secondaries. We were a primary-only fundraising platform. This year, we could be getting up to 50 per cent of our entire business through secondaries." Crowdcube has seen some high-profile startups, such as Monzo and Revolut (in their early days), carry out primary raises on its platform, which was founded in 2011 as the UK’s first equity crowdfunding platform. Over £1.5bn has been invested in private companies through Crowdcube. Successes have included Nutmeg, the financial advice startup, backed by 2,000 Crowdcube users, which was bought by JP Morgan for £700m in 2021. Last year, Freetrade, which raised around £30m on Crowdcube, was sold to online investing platform IG Group, albeit at a discounted valuation. Hitting profitability  Crowdcube has not yet published its 2025 accounts at Companies House. In 2024, it made a loss of £6.2m on revenues of £9.8m but Cooper says it made a full-year net profit in 2025. Along with the rise in secondary activity, Crowdcube’s swing into the black has also been driven by cutting costs across the business, he says. Cooper says: “We worked very, very hard at being as efficient as possible. We are using AI in parts of our business and processes that we haven’t previously, which has enabled us to be more efficient.” On any headcount reduction in 2025, Cooper says that there has been “natural attrition” from the around 80 people employed in 2024. On the importance of being profitable, Cooper says: “Getting to profitability is an important metric. It shows that the unit economics of the business are working. It shows that you don’t have to be reliant on external capital.” Rise in secondary market In recent years, secondary share activity has become more commonplace, as startups free up cash for employees or VCs sell up amid an arid IPO market. High-profile examples of recent secondary sale activity include Revolut, ElevenLabs and Trade Republic. Crowdcube, which is mainly known as a platform allowing small private startups to sell their primary shares to the public, has expanded into the secondary market, acquiring secondary dealmaking startup Semper in 2023. Cooper says secondaries have been a “boon” for Crowdcube, which has processed around $100m of secondaries through its platrorm in the past 18 months. Crowdcube’s tech offers companies various secondary opportunities, including early-stage investor secondary sales to retail investors, employee secondaries to retail investors, and secondaries offered to Crowdcube investors from those startups that sold primary shares on Crowdcube. In 2025, Crowdcube carried out secondary share sales for investment platform Chip, challenger bank Atom Bank, and Estonian ride-hailing startup Bolt.  A secondary share sale in French AI startup Mistral was carried out on Crowdcube this year. Cooper says: “What we are focused on is giving UK and European retail and high net worth investors the chance to access shares in some of the best private businesses on earth.” Some of these secondary deals are not direct. For example, the Bolt deal is for Bolti UK Holding Ltd, a UK-registered Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV)- a type of investment fund- that holds thousands of shares in Bolt Technology OÜ, Bolt’s parent company. Bolt is not involved in the transaction. Likewise, the Mistral sale was done via an SPV. Secondaries through PISCES Another secondary share opportunity for investors offered by Crowdcube is through a partnership with the London Stock Exchange to enable investing in private company shares through the new PISCES (Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System) framework. There has been much fanfare accompanying the launch of PISCES, which the UK regulator, the FCA, hopes will boost UK growth and competitiveness. Revolut, Octopus and OakNorth were amongst businesses considering joining the new private stock market after being courted by the London Stock Exchange last year, according to CityAM.  But Octopus boss Greg Jackson has since said the utilities giant had “no plans” to use the exchange. Oxford Sciences Enterprises, an early-stage VC fund which has invested in Oxford Ionics, was the first company to trade on PISCES. Addressing the slow start of PISCES, Cooper says “it’s not something that happens overnight”. Cooper says: “We’ve got an incredibly strong pipeline of companies that are considering using the private securities market, like real household names. The thing everybody was focused on was proof of concept.” Primary listings Last year, Chip, the investment platform, raised £8.9m on Crowdcube, one of Crowdcube’s largest-ever primary funding rounds, while Nothing, the UK-based smartphone disruption, also raised on Crowdcube. This year, Cooper says primary fundraising has been hit by the war in the Middle East. Cooper says: “This has had an impact on institutional investment rounds and companies closing institutional investment rounds on the primary side. We tend to ebb and flow as the market ebbs and flows.” But he adds: “We feel like we have a really nice hedge, which is that if companies aren’t raising primary capital either because they don’t want to or because they are profitable, they will be looking at how to provide liquidity to shareholders in the absence of raising primary.” One recent primary fundraiser has been French bitcoin savings app Bitstack, which raised nearly €4m from over 8,000 investors. Crowdfunders lose out on Freetrade deal Over the years, Crowdcube has been hit with complaints of misleading pitches, sometimes in relation to companies that closed shortly after securing funds. Last year, IG Group acquired the trading app Freetrade for £160m, which was a near 30 per cent valuation discount on its last valuation of £225m. Freetrade was a big user of Crowdcube, raising around £30m across 10 rounds, but some crowdfunding investors lost more than 80 per cent of their stake, according to The Times. Cooper said: “Whilst this was disappointing for all investors involved, not just Crowdcube investors, we are very, very clear when we offer an investment opportunity to investors that this is a high-risk asset class."

UK SME lender Allica Bank today reported its third consecutive year of profit, while the UK business of another UK fintech, ClearBank, also reported its third consecutive year of profit. Pre-tax profits at fintech Allica were up 23 per cent year-on-year to £36.9m in 2025, on the back of increasing its loan book by 23 per cent year-on-year to £3.7bn, while customer deposits increased by 29 per cent to £5.7bn. Revenues were up 27 per cent to £371.3m. Allica also said that uptake of its business current accounts had more than doubled in the year to over 14,000. The fintech recently completed a $155m funding round. Allica is considering international expansion and is considering buying a bank in Northern Europe. The UK fintech also said it was deploying AI agents across its tech, which it said would deliver a “step change" in its SME lending proposition. Richard Davies, Allica CEO said: "2025 was our strongest year yet. In a year when we’ve been investing deeply in tech and proposition enhancements, we’ve delivered a 34 per cent increase in underlying pre-tax profit – and the number of established SMEs choosing to make Allica their primary bank has more than doubled, showing the demand for our full-service established SME model." Meanwhile, ClearBank, which provides clearing services and banking infrastructure to financial clients including challenger banks such as Tide and Revolut, said UK profits rose 53 per cent year-on-year to £12.2m in 2025. But group losses at ClearBank increased from £10.2m to £16.7m amid international expansion. The performance of its UK business was driven by demand across embedded banking, FX and multi-currency services, it said. ClearBank said it added 61 new clients to its portfolio in 2025, including its first corporate embedded banking partner, PayCaptain. Mark Fairless, Group CEO of ClearBank, said: “2025 was a year of significant growth, but also one of investing for the future success of the group as we expand our propositions and geographic footprint for 2026.”

French Agriodor, an agritech company developing crop protection solutions based on natural plant scents, has raised €15 million in Series A funding to accelerate its international expansion and the deployment of its olfactory biocontrol technology. The round was led by the Environmental and Solidarity Revolution Fund, financed by the societal dividend of Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale and managed by Crédit Mutuel Impact. Additional participants included Région Sud Investissement, CAAP Création (Crédit Agricole Alpes-Provence), and existing investors Capagro, CapHorn, and SWEN Capital Partners. Founded in 2019 by Alain Thibault and Dr Ené Leppik as a spin-off from INRAE, Agriodor develops a new class of crop protection solutions using semiochemicals to influence insect behaviour. This approach offers a sustainable and scalable alternative to conventional pesticides, addressing increasing pest resistance, regulatory constraints, and biodiversity loss. Agriodor’s research and development platform combines high-throughput chemical ecology and reverse chemical ecology to replicate natural plant scents and adapt them to diverse cropping systems. This enables the attraction, repulsion, or disruption of pest insects while preserving beneficial species. Compared with conventional insecticides, this method allows for substantially lower development costs and faster time to market, while supporting resistance management and environmental sustainability. Alain Thibault, co-founder and President of Agriodor, noted that the company’s technology enables farmers to safeguard crop yields while supporting environmental sustainability and protecting human health. Agriodor recently achieved a global first by successfully deploying a semiochemical (allomone) in row crops, with an initial application in sugar beet fields in France. The company’s first commercial product, targeting sugar beet aphids, is distributed through an exclusive agreement with Syngenta, supporting growers in managing yellows virus. Building on this milestone, Agriodor is expanding its portfolio to additional crops and insect families, including fruit flies, whiteflies, and thrips, representing significant global market opportunities.

The Tech.eu Summit London 2026 is set to take place on 21–22 April 2026 at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London. With the event now just days away, this is the final opportunity to secure a ticket before pricing moves to its last tier. Ticket pricing will be updated on 17 April 2026 Ticket pricing for the Tech.eu Summit London 2026 will be revised on 17 April 2026. From that date, the Regular Price ticket will be priced at £700 + VAT. Joining with colleagues or friends? A discounted group rate is available for purchases of three or more tickets, with Regular Price (3+ People) passes priced at £630 + VAT per person. The Tech.eu Summit London 2026 will bring together founders, investors and technology professionals from across Europe and beyond, with speakers confirmed from organisations including OpenAI, Notion Capital, PolyAI, Oxa, Wise, NATO Innovation Fund, Upvest, 2150, Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, Mollie and many more. Discover the agenda The full programme, published this week, offers a detailed look at the sessions, speakers and key themes set to shape this year’s event, spanning areas such as artificial intelligence, fintech, climate tech and deeptech. You can explore the full programme here and start planning your summit experience in advance. Make the most of your summit experience with the Tech.eu Events App Attendees can download the Tech.eu Events App via the App Store and Google Play to begin connecting ahead of the summit. Through the app, participants can browse attendee profiles, arrange meetings in advance, explore the agenda and manage their personal schedule. The app will also be used for on-site access via QR code check-in. Grab your ticket before prices rise Secure your ticket before prices increase on 17 April. Join us at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre on 21–22 April for two days of discussions, networking and insight from some of the most influential figures in European technology and investment. We look forward to welcoming you in London. Partners Pavilion Partner Gold Partner   Silver Partners   Supporting Partner Community Partners             

SolvaPay, a Stockholm-based AI payments platform, has raised €2.4 million in pre-seed funding to develop payment infrastructure for the emerging era of agentic commerce. The round was led by European fintech venture capital firm Redstone and Silicon Valley-based MS&AD Ventures, with additional participation from Antler and Greens Ventures. As digital services continue to evolve, existing payment systems remain largely confined to closed ecosystems, limiting interoperability and preventing AI agents from freely interacting and transacting across platforms. SolvaPay addresses this challenge by enabling AI agents to discover, access, and pay for digital services seamlessly, supporting autonomous economic activity across the emerging agentic economy. The company’s infrastructure is designed to integrate directly into workflows, APIs, and applications, allowing payments to occur seamlessly within the user experience. Through a single integration, SaaS providers, API developers, and digital service companies can make their products discoverable, consumable, and payable across AI ecosystems such as Claude and ChatGPT, as well as future agent-based environments. ViggoStenseth, CEO and co-founder of SolvaPay, commented: Every major technological shift has needed a financial layer before it could become a real economy. The internet needed it. E-commerce needed it. Now, we’ve reached the same point with the agentic economy, but naturally the transaction types, the speeds, and the compliance required for this are impossible within the existing infrastructure. We’ve built what was missing. The timing is not early, it is exactly right. SolvaPay’s founding team brings more than five decades of combined experience across financial services and technology companies, including Spotify, FIS, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, and Handelsbanken. The newly secured funding will be used to accelerate the development of SolvaPay’s machine-native payment rails and agentic revenue infrastructure, expand the engineering team, and support early adoption among businesses seeking to participate in the emerging agentic economy.

Mission Control Games, a mobile game studio focused on the casual puzzle genre, has announced its launch alongside the close of a $4 million pre-seed funding round. The investment was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Arcadia Gaming Partners and e2vc. The studio was co-founded by Kıvanç Okutur (CEO) and Murat Gürel (CTO), both veterans of the team behind the casual gaming title Merge Dragons. Headquartered across London and Istanbul, Mission Control Games aims to create engaging puzzle experiences that balance familiarity with innovation. Kıvanç Okutur, co-founder and CEO, noted that while casual gaming attracts the largest audiences, it still offers significant untapped opportunities for innovation, drawing inspiration from concepts like Conway’s Game of Life, where simple rules can lead to complex and engaging outcomes. We want to move fast using emerging capabilities of AI and build games that feel alive. Our ambition is to become the largest mobile gaming company with the smallest team, Okutur adds. Operating within the casual gaming segment, the studio seeks to explore new design approaches and develop original sub-genres rather than replicate existing formats. Speed and iteration are central to its development process, enabling the team to rapidly test and refine game concepts while leveraging emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence. The company will use new funding to grow the team and accelerate development of the studio’s first title.

Today at the European Data Summit of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation in Berlin, Cubbit, SUSE, Elemento Cloud, and StorPool Storage unveil Europe’s first fully sovereign disaster recovery pack.  The system is designed to guarantee business continuity for organisations in the face of uncontrollable, catastrophic external events, including a potential foreign vendor kill-switch. It also safeguards European enterprises’ data and operations while protecting them from dependencies on foreign technology infrastructure.The initiative gives European organisations a fast, concrete answer to an increasingly urgent question: which critical workloads should move to a fully sovereign European IT software stack — and how companies can start doing so immediately, without disruption.  The initiative addresses a growing gap in Europe’s digital infrastructure market, where sovereign digital solutions still face both demand- and supply-side challenges. Demand is rising, driven by geopolitical uncertainty, stricter regulation, and the need for greater control over critical data and services.  Many organisations still face the same issue: credible European solutions exist across the stack, but they are not always available as one integrated option ready to deploy. Focused on addressing the specific need to handle disaster scenarios, this pack also represents a practical first step towards data repatriation and regaining control of workloads from foreign vendors. Addressing IT managers’ concerns about the maturity of European alternatives and the risks of shifting operational workloads, the package approach bundles existing market products with established, proven quality to offer a credible, fast, and focused solution for the most critical business use cases.In the spirit of the EuroStack concept, the Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack is designed to help close that gap. It combines complementary technologies spanning from storage and multi-cloud orchestration to network, identity, observability, and management, bringing together European open-source and proprietary components in a single deployable stack designed to reduce fragmentation and accelerate adoption. In a few hours, the Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack enables organisations to implement a practical approach to reducing reliance on non-European cloud infrastructure without replacing everything at once. Additional integrations are expected to follow as further integrated use cases are made public. Disaster recovery is a natural starting point. If a critical cloud dependency puts services or data at risk of becoming unavailable, inaccessible, or strategically unsustainable — for example, in a kill-switch scenario that disrupts access overnight — the recovery path matters as much as the production environment itself. The Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack enables organisations to identify critical services, build and validate a sovereign recovery setup, and progressively extend it across other workloads through synchronisation and migration. It also provides a practical route to support compliance with stringent frameworks such as NIS2, DORA, GDPR, and regional laws, while preserving full European sovereignty across the technology stack.  In this way, disaster recovery becomes not only a resilience measure, but also a practical first step towards a broader sovereign cloud strategy. The technologies combined come from companies born in and based across Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and Bulgaria, marking a successful collaboration among European companies listed in the Tech Sovereignty Catalogue , in the spirit of the EuroStack manifesto and vision.The Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack has already been deployed by an Italian IT service provider and, thanks to its open architecture, can be integrated by any organisation, including through direct deployment on customer premises across Europe. Over the coming weeks, additional partners of Cubbit, SUSE, Elemento Cloud, and StorPool Storage are aiming to integrate the solution into their operations.According to Alessandro Cillario, co-CEO and co-founder of Cubbit, European digital sovereignty will only scale when it becomes practical to adopt.  “The Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack starts from a concrete operational need already being raised by some of Europe’s largest enterprises — disaster recovery — and turns it into one deployable solution. It gives organisations a realistic way to strengthen resilience, retain control over critical data and services, and begin building a sovereign alternative over time.” Andreas Prins, Global Head Sovereign Solutions at SUSE, said: “By integrating SUSE’s enterprise-grade open-source foundations with the specialised expertise of our partners, we are proving that Europe doesn’t just have the components, we have the complete, mission-critical stack.” Gabriele Fronzé, CEO and co-founder of Elemento Cloud, said: “This initiative turns sovereignty into an operational reality, enabling a concrete exit from dependency on non-European infrastructure. Elemento empowers this through the first vendor-neutral control plane, Electros, and our hypervisor, AtomOS, unifying fragmented environments into a single, resilient system.” Boyan Ivanov, CEO of StorPool Storage, said: “The existing alternatives are few and sparse, and we are now improving that with the introduction of the Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack initiative.”

Today Germany signed a cooperation agreement with Ukraine to enable the Auterion Airlogix Joint Venture GmbH to execute its first production contract for thousands of mid-range, heavy AI-guided autonomous strike systems. The contract turns a February 2026 announcement at the Munich Security Conference into fully funded, large-scale production in Germany of thousands of systems per year from German production lines, and is the largest German production order for heavy autonomous strike drones to date.  Scaleup Airlogix is a Ukrainian defence technology company specialising in the development and production of unmanned aerial vehicles for military applications. Founded in 2020 and defence-focused since 2022, Airlogix has become a leading supplier to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and special operations units, with combat-proven systems deployed across the front lines.  Auterion develops open, vendor-agnostic operating systems for autonomous drones and robotic systems with customers including the US Department of War, UK Ministry of Defence, German Bundeswehr, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The mass production drives per-unit costs down fast. The result is production-rate munitions designed for contested, GPS-denied environments, built on combat-tested Ukrainian airframes and powered by Auterion's combat-tested AI guidance, autonomous navigation, and electronic warfare resilience software.  For Ukraine, a reliable European-manufactured supply of autonomous strike coordinated through the German Federal Ministry of Defence. German industrial depth behind every unit. For the Bundeswehr, the fastest path to fielding autonomous strike at scale: combat-proven systems shipping with Auterion's Skynode flight computer and Nemyx autonomy stack, integrating into western command architectures on day one.  For allied nations, the production line is open for scale-up beyond Germany. Vitalii Kolesnichenko, CEO, Airlogix, shared:  "Our engineers built these systems under fire. Now, German industry is producing them at a scale that changes the equation on the battlefield. Every unit that rolls off this line carries years of real combat learning."  According to Dr Lorenz Meier, CEO, Auterion: "This contract proves that Europe can move at scale. We are enabling Airlogix to manufacture thousands of autonomous systems on German soil, drawing on Ukrainian combat expertise and the best autonomy software in the world. This is what allied defence industrial cooperation looks like."  Lead image: Auterion CEO Dr Lorenz Meier, Airlogix CEO Vitalii Kolesnichenko, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz with an Airlogix autonomous strike system at the contract signing ceremony. 

Modern Relay today announced a $3 million funding round from Point Nine, Emerge, Amino Collective, Common Magic, and angels, including Charlie Songhurst (board member at Meta), Michael Boehler (former BioNTech executive), and Thomas Clozel (co-founder of OWKIN).  Employees are already running multiple agents to draft research, ship code, and handle day-to-day operations. The moment those agents touch anything cross-functional, they hit the same wall: organisational context is scattered across documents, chats, legacy databases, and knowledge that was never written down. Without a shared layer where people and agents can work from the same facts and rules, every department automates in isolation.  Modern Relay is building the infrastructure to fix this. Its system gives organisations a shared foundation for how the company actually works (its people, policies, data, and decisions) so that software and teams coordinate from the same reality. That makes it possible to route the right information to the right actor at the right time, while governing what changes, who approves it, and how work evolves over time.  “Every company will soon rely on a growing number of agents across all departments,” said Ragnor Comerford, co-founder of Modern Relay. “Without a shared foundation connecting them, those systems create more fragmentation than leverage. We’re building the layer that lets organisations preserve context, coordinate work, and stay in control.” “We backed Modern Relay because Ragnor and Aaron understood the fundamentals of this new reality early,” said Ricardo Sequerra, Partner at Point Nine. “The bottleneck has moved from model capability to organisational infrastructure. They're building the operational backbone for how AI actually works inside a company.” As AI embeds deeper into enterprise operations, that foundation becomes the most valuable asset a company has. Nothing this central to how a company operates should live inside someone else's platform, which is why Modern Relay runs entirely on infrastructure the customer owns. Founded in 2025 by Ragnor Comerford and Aaron Goh, the company is headquartered in San Francisco and Barcelona.  The company just released its first open-source product, Omnigraph - a Git-style graph database built for a world where agents are first-class operators. It lets people and agents branch, propose changes in parallel, and merge approved updates back into a canonical graph. 

UK biotech manufacturer Clean Food Group (CFG) has raised £4.5 million in investment led by Clean Growth Fund and New Agrarian.  CFG has also successfully secured a £700,000 non-dilutive grant from Innovate UK, which further improves the Company’s financial position.  Clean Food Group enables a more sustainable and resilient global food system by  producing essential oils and fats through fermentation, using food waste feedstocks and scalable  microbial production.  Founded in 2022 after eight years of pioneering research, CFG manufactures its oils and fats from food waste, leveraging scalable yeast strains and fermentation technology to deliver sustainable alternatives to traditional oil and fat ingredients.  With the manufacturing process now validated at scale and significantly bolstered by the transformational acquisition of a 1 million litre fermentation facility in Knowsley, Liverpool, in 2025, CFG has strategic and industrial collaborations in place with leading global FMCG and ingredients manufacturers and has a strong demand pipeline for its products.  In 2025, its  CleanOil™ 25 product received approval to be used as a cosmetics ingredient in the UK, US and  Europe.  According to Tom Ellen, Chief Financial Officer of Clean Food Group, the capital raised will enable  the Company to bring on-stream the world’s largest yeast-derived oils and fats facility and "to deliver on our long-term vision for sustainable food manufacturing.”  Rodrigo Hortega de Velasco, Managing Partner at Döhler Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Döhler Group, commented:  “CFG has  consistently demonstrated both the strength of its technology and the commercial potential of  its sustainable oils and fats platform.” According to Jim Mellon, Chairman and Founder of New Agrarian, supply chain fragility is one of the defining risks of our time: “War, climate volatility, and trade disputes are presenting a huge challenge to manufacturers; the ingredients we assumed would always be available are no longer guaranteed. Clean Food Group uses scalable science and technology to build genuine resilience and sustainability into how we produce and source key ingredients for everything from food to cosmetics.  For me, this sits at a rare intersection: a  compelling investment case and a genuine solution to one of the most pressing challenges of our  generation."