Here in Europe, a new generation of defence startups is emerging far outside the traditional military-industrial complex. Across weekend hackathons, engineers, software developers, drone builders, researchers, soldiers, founders and investors are coming together to prototype technologies for the modern battlefield — many of which are already finding their way to Ukraine. At the centre of that movement is the European Defence Tech Hub (EDTH). I sat down with co-founder Benjamin Wolba to learn how a grassroots initiative became one of Europe's fastest-growing defence innovation communities. From physicist to accidental defence founder Wolba has no background in defence and has never served in the military. He admits his path into defencetech happened almost by accident. He studied physics and completed a PhD in condensed matter physics, researching why materials are magnetic. He admits, “I loved science, but towards the end of my PhD I realised I wasn't going to become a professor, and I didn't want to work for a large corporation. I wanted to build technology with real-world impact, so entrepreneurship felt like the natural next step.” After graduating, he joined Entrepreneur First, although he didn't find the right co-founder at the time, so he later spent two years working as an associate at Lunar Ventures. Following that, he started doing what every good investor tells founders to do — customer discovery. “I explored lots of ideas and spent time figuring out what problem I wanted to solve.” In February 2024, Wolba was in Silicon Valley, networking and trying to understand the startup ecosystem there. At the same time, in El Segundo, near Los Angeles, a defence hackathon was taking place. He admits, “ I was simply fascinated by the idea." He messaged his friend Jonatan Luther-Bergquist, who’s also a physicist and partner at VC firm Inflection. “We looked at what was happening in the US and thought, "Maybe we could organise something like this in Europe. So we organised the first European Defence Tech Hackathon.” ​ Just four months later, that idea became reality. Building a movement from scratch EDTH’s first hackathon took place in Munich in June 2024. Around 150 people attended and built 34 projects covering everything from air defence to demining technologies. Wolba recounts: “We received incredible support. We worked with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, Quantum Systems became one of our partners, and many other organisations came on board. Looking back, what surprises me most is that we were complete outsiders. We had no reputation, no previous experience organising anything like this and, honestly, no real reason to expect people would come. Yet the response was overwhelming.” The momentum continued: “After the event, people kept calling me. They'd ask, "Benjamin, do you know an investor?" or "Can you introduce me to someone in defence?" or "Can you help us connect with potential customers?" That was the moment someone said to me, "You're not organising an event anymore—you're building an ecosystem." They were right,” shared Wolba. Today, EDTH has organised 35 hackathons across Copenhagen, Paris, Kyiv, Berlin, London, Prague, Brussels and Tallinn, involving more than 400 teams, with around 40 going on to form companies. inside an EDTH weekend Image: EDTH. Participants register individually — even if they intend to compete as a team — to facilitate security screening, which is a necessity for a defence-focused event. The weekend begins with hands-on technical workshops rather than traditional conference talks, covering topics such as machine learning for defence, data fusion, FPV drone building, battlefield medicine, demining, and electronics. Armed (excuse the pun) with new skills, participants form teams of two to six and spend the next 48 hours designing and building prototypes with few formal interruptions. At the hackathons, there’s huge momentum around drones, autonomy, navigation, target recognition, mesh networking, software-defined radios, and counter-drone technologies, as well as manufacturing automation, logistics, battlefield medicine, and many dual-use technologies. The common theme is solving real operational problems. Organisers provide equipment including 3D printers, soldering stations and electronic components, while many attendees bring their own tools. By Sunday afternoon, teams present working prototypes rather than slide decks, ranging from software applications to drones, sensors, communications systems and other hardware. “That's something I really love about these events. People are incredibly hands-on,” shared Wolba. Investors regularly attend our hackathons as mentors and judges to see promising companies at a very early stage. For founders, it's an opportunity to receive feedback long before they're raising a funding round. The prototypes are then judged by military experts, defence companies and investors. “We always make sure there's Ukrainian representation on the judging panel because operational feedback is incredibly valuable. Afterwards, we send every team detailed written feedback so they can continue improving their projects. For us, Sunday isn't the end of the hackathon. It's the beginning of what comes next.” Image: EDTH. From weekend projects to venture-backed startups While EDTH is not a venture studio, it aims to help founders succeed by connecting teams with investors, testing opportunities, suppliers and defence organisations. “It's intentionally decentralised. Unlike a structured accelerator, founders choose their own path while we help the strongest teams make the right connections.” Unlike traditional events, numerous participants regularly attend several hackathons across Europe and Ukraine as they refine ideas, meet new collaborators and eventually launch companies. Wolba admits this was unexpected. “We thought Munich would be a one-off. Then people asked us to come to Paris, Copenhagen, Warsaw and beyond. The community created the series itself.” Around half of the companies that have emerged have already completed some form of operational testing in Ukraine. Zero Industries is perhaps the best-known success story to emerge from EDTH: “The founders met through our hackathons, worked closely with Ukrainian operators, raised funding and built a real company,” recounts Wolba. The startup develops AI-powered navigation technology that enables autonomous drones to operate reliably in GPS-denied environments. Its proprietary Visual Positioning System (VPS) combines computer vision, advanced mapping, and onboard AI inference to maintain precise positioning even when GPS signals are jammed, spoofed or unavailable. But it is far from the only one, as more companies are being created through the hackathon community, with roughly half of those already completing some form of operational testing in Ukraine. Europe’s capability gap: learning from Ukraine According to Wolba, Europe underestimates the extent to which warfare has changed. “Take Germany as an example. The overwhelming majority of defence spending is still going towards legacy systems. Those systems absolutely have a role, but if you look at where the battlefield is evolving, it's clear we also need to invest much more heavily in entirely new capabilities. We need systems that can defend against drone swarms. We need autonomous systems. We need new approaches to air defence. There are still many things we're getting wrong. It's not just about buying new technology — it's also about understanding how to use it.” Much of that understanding comes directly from Ukraine, where EDTH has now organised three hackathons. The latest became part of Defence Tech Valley and was hosted inside the National Aviation University hangar. Wolba describes Kyiv as the “Champions League” of European defence tech. “Founders build locally, then come to Kyiv to demonstrate their progress and receive direct feedback from operators with frontline experience.” One of the biggest lessons from Ukraine is that tactics evolve incredibly quickly. For example, Ukrainian operators understand exactly how Shahed drones behave. They know the flight profiles, how they approach targets and how to position defensive systems accordingly. “A Shahed drone can fly very low to avoid radar detection or very high to stay out of range of machine guns. Understanding those tactics is just as important as understanding the technology itself. That's why working closely with Ukraine matters so much. They're generating operational knowledge that every European military should be learning from." A movement anyone can join Wolba encourages everyone to get involved: “Come along. Attend a meetup. Join one of our webinars. Come to a hackathon. One of the most important messages we're trying to communicate is that everyone can contribute. You don't have to be an engineer building drones. You might organise events. You might introduce founders to customers or investors. You might write software. You might contribute operational expertise. There are countless ways to help strengthen Europe's defence innovation ecosystem. Our movement has always been built from the bottom up. We haven't waited for governments or relied on government grants. People have simply started building, collaborating and helping one another. That's something everyone can do.” "Europe needs a thousand defence technology startups." In terms of Europe’s capability gaps, Wolba cites air defence as one of the biggest, especially as warfare has shifted from a small number of costly assets to huge numbers of inexpensive autonomous systems. “Europe needs affordable, intelligent systems with better communications, onboard computing and coordination across air, land and sea." Wolba believes that Europe can't afford to wait: “If we're relying entirely on governments or the large defence primes, progress will simply be too slow. What Europe needs is thousands of founders tackling thousands of different problems. We need a thousand defence technology startups. That's how we'll build the capabilities Europe needs for the future.” This week, EDTH is hosting a hackathon in Rome. Next week, EDTH hosts Berlin Defense Tech Week, bringing together founders, engineers, investors, policymakers and military operators for a packed programme of events, including the Berlin Defense Tech Forum, a defence hackathon, meetups, legal and counter-drone forums, and networking sessions across the city.

European semiconductor companies attracted strong investment in 2025 as governments and investors doubled down on technologies underpinning AI, high-performance computing, next-generation communications, and energy-efficient electronics. Funding flowed into companies developing AI chips, photonics, advanced memory, semiconductor materials, chip cooling, and power electronics, reflecting Europe's ambition to strengthen its position across the semiconductor value chain. The Netherlands emerged as the year's leading hub by funding value, driven by NXP Semiconductors' €1 billion European Investment Bank loan and major rounds for Axelera AI, EFFECT Photonics, and Eyeo. The UK also recorded strong activity, particularly in compound semiconductors, photonics, and chip design, while Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, and France all produced sizeable funding rounds across specialised semiconductor technologies. Debt financing played a significant role alongside venture capital, particularly for established manufacturers and capital-intensive businesses. At the same time, investors continued to back early-stage deeptech startups, with large seed and Series A rounds supporting innovations in optical interconnects, graphene electronics, chip cooling, satellite communications, and semiconductor manufacturing. The year's largest transactions underscored Europe's growing focus on building strategic semiconductor capabilities amid rising demand for AI infrastructure and supply chain resilience. From AI accelerators and memory chips to silicon photonics, advanced cooling systems, and power semiconductors, investors continued to support companies developing the hardware technologies expected to power the next generation of computing and communications (for more detailed analyses of the European technology ecosystem, check out Tech.eu’s annual report: European Tech 2025 - The Big Picture). Here are ten semiconductor companies that raised the most in 2025. Amount raised in 2025: €1B NXP Semiconductors is a Dutch company that develops semiconductor solutions for automotive, industrial, mobile and communications markets. Its portfolio includes microcontrollers, processors, connectivity chips, secure identification technologies, and analogue and power management solutions for applications ranging from connected vehicles to the Internet of Things (IoT). The company works with OEMs and technology providers to support digitalisation, electrification and secure connectivity across multiple industries. In 2025, NXP Semiconductors secured a €1 billion loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB) to support research, development and innovation across its semiconductor portfolio, including power electronics, microprocessors and microcontrollers, at facilities in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Romania. Amount raised in 2025: €100M Ferroelectric Memory Company (FMC) develops non-volatile ferroelectric memory technologies designed to deliver faster, lower-power and more durable memory solutions. The company commercialises ferroelectric memory IP and semiconductor technologies for AI, edge computing, IoT, automotive and industrial applications. Its technology aims to improve memory performance while reducing energy consumption in next-generation electronic devices. In 2025, Ferroelectric Memory Company (FMC) raised €100 million to accelerate the commercialisation and global rollout of its DRAM+ and 3D-CACHE+ memory chips and system solutions for AI data centres and edge applications. Amount raised in 2025: €61.6M Axelera AI builds hardware and software for AI inference at the edge. Its platform combines purpose-built AI accelerator chips with software tools to enable high-performance, energy-efficient computer vision and generative AI workloads across manufacturing, robotics, retail, healthcare and smart cities. The company focuses on making AI deployment more accessible by delivering high performance with lower power consumption and cost. Axelera AI raised up to €61.6 million in funding in 2025 to develop Titania, a scalable, high-performance, energy-efficient AI inference chiplet for data centres, high-performance computing, and Europe's DARE supercomputing initiative. Amount raised in 2025: $55M Paragraf is a UK company that produces graphene-based semiconductor materials and electronic devices. Its portfolio includes graphene Hall-effect sensors, magnetic sensors and advanced materials for electronics, quantum technologies and industrial applications. The company aims to unlock the commercial potential of graphene in next-generation semiconductor and sensing technologies. Paragraf raised $55 million in a Series C round in 2025 to scale its manufacturing capabilities and increase production capacity, accelerating the mass-market adoption of its graphene-based electronic devices. Amount raised in 2025: $49M Corintis focuses on developing microfluidic cooling technologies for high-performance semiconductor devices. The solutions are designed to integrate directly with chip packages, enhancing thermal management for AI processors, high-performance computing and data centre infrastructure while improving performance and energy efficiency. By tackling one of the industry's key thermal challenges, it aims to enable the next generation of advanced semiconductor systems. In 2025, Corintis raised $49 million across two rounds to scale its microfluidic chip-cooling technology, expand manufacturing, and accelerate deployment for AI data centres and next-generation semiconductor chips. Amount raised in 2025: €33M Swave is a Belgian company that develops holographic display technology based on semiconductor photonics. Its Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR) platform uses diffractive photonics chips to create true holographic images for applications including spatial computing, augmented reality, virtual reality and digital twins. The technology is designed to deliver more natural three-dimensional visual experiences without the need for complex optical systems. In 2025, Swave Photonics raised €33 million across two rounds to commercialise its holographic display technology for augmented reality smart glasses and heads-up displays. Amount raised in 2025: £25M CamGaN Devices designs gallium nitride (GaN) power semiconductors for energy-efficient power conversion. Its technology is intended to improve efficiency, reduce power losses and shrink the size of power electronics used in data centres, electric vehicles, consumer electronics and industrial systems. The company's solutions are designed as drop-in replacements for conventional silicon-based power devices. In 2025, GaN Devices raised £25 million in a Series C round to scale its gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductor technology, expand operations internationally, and accelerate the deployment of energy-efficient power devices for industrial, data centre, and automotive applications. Amount raised in 2025: $30M Salience Labs is a UK company that develops photonic computing technology for AI infrastructure. Salience Labs designs optical interconnects and photonic systems that improve data movement and energy efficiency in AI accelerators and high-performance computing, helping address bandwidth and power constraints in next-generation data centres. The company focuses on enabling faster and more scalable AI computing through integrated photonics. In 2025, Salience Labs raised $30 million in a Series A round to accelerate the development and commercialisation of its silicon photonic optical switches for large-scale AI data centre connectivity, enabling higher bandwidth, lower latency, and reduced power consumption. Amount raised in 2025: €25M CamGraPhIC develops graphene-based silicon photonics technologies for high-speed optical communications. These solutions combine graphene with silicon photonic devices to improve data transmission, reduce energy consumption and enable faster optical interconnects for AI, data centres and telecommunications. The company aims to overcome performance limitations of conventional silicon photonics using graphene-based components. CamGraPhIC raised €25 million in a Series A round in 2025 to scale its graphene photonics technology for AI and data communications. Amount raised in 2025: £18M IQE is a supplier of advanced semiconductor epitaxial wafers used in compound semiconductor devices. Its materials support applications across wireless communications, photonics, power electronics, quantum technologies and advanced sensing, supplying semiconductor manufacturers worldwide. The company specialises in engineered wafer technologies that enable high-performance electronic and optoelectronic devices. In 2025, IQE raised £18 million through convertible loan notes to provide short-term liquidity and working capital while completing its strategic review.

The AI industry has spent the past several years learning a critical lesson: better data often matters as much as better models. While advances in large language models have been powered by increasingly sophisticated datasets and data pipelines, robotics has yet to undergo the same transformation.  Robotics teams are working with vast quantities of video, sensor data, and demonstrations, but much of the infrastructure needed to process, annotate, and improve that data remains immature. Macrodata Labs believes that closing that gap could become one of the most important challenges in robotics AI. Macrodata Labs recently emerged from stealth, launching Refiner, an open-source framework and cloud platform for processing robotics datasets.  The company raised $4 million in pre-seed funding in June this year to build infrastructure for the robotics data loop. The round was led by Air Street Capital, with participation from Drysdale Ventures, OPRTRS club, Kima Ventures, YG (Alex Yazdi), >commit, Thomas Wolf, and business angels from some of the world’s leading AI labs and technology companies.  Macrodata Labs builds infrastructure for the robotics data loop. Its first product, Refiner, is an open-source framework and cloud platform for robotics data processing, helping teams turn raw physical-world data into better training datasets.  I spoke to the CEO and co-founder, Guilherme Penedo, to find out more. From  building LLM datasets to building robotics infrastructure Macrodata Labs was founded by Guilherme Penedo and Hynek Kydlíček, who formed the core team behind several of Hugging Face's largest open LLM dataset efforts. They created widely used datasets such as FineWeb, FineWeb2, FinePDFs, and FineTranslations, which have been used by teams at NVIDIA, Google, AI2, and Z.ai, and contributed to large-scale training projects such as Open-R1 and SmolLM. Penedo was part of the team behind Falcon, one of the strongest open-source models at the time of its release. After that, he joined Hugging Face, where he focused on building large-scale datasets for training AI models. “That's where I met my co-founder, Hynek Kydlíček. We worked together on projects such as FineWeb, which processes large portions of the internet and turns the data into high-quality training datasets. FineWeb became one of the most widely used open datasets for language model training, and we later expanded that work into other areas, including PDFs and multilingual datasets.” The common theme throughout their work was figuring out how to take massive amounts of raw data and transform it into something that can produce significantly better AI models. While building large-scale datasets at Hugging Face, the founders saw that progress was not only about model architectures or compute, but also about the infrastructure needed to collect, transform, inspect, and iterate on training data at scale.  After seeing how better data infrastructure helped unlock progress in LLMs, the founders believe robotics is approaching a similar inflection point.  Why better data, not better models, could unlock robotics While advances in LLMs and vision-language models (VLMs) are making robots increasingly capable, the data layer underpinning robotics remains underdeveloped. Physical-world data is larger, messier, more fragmented, and far more difficult to transform into useful training datasets than text. Penedo explained: “In language models, we learned how difficult it is to transform raw data into datasets that consistently produce high-quality results. We realised that robotics is facing many of the same challenges, but on an even larger scale.” According to Penedo, the key difference is that many data-processing tasks in language models can be handled with relatively simple rules, whereas robotics requires far more interpretation. “You might have hundreds of hours of video showing humans performing tasks, but before that data becomes useful for training robots, you need to understand what is happening in the scene,” he said. “For example, if someone is washing dishes, you need to identify individual subtasks: picking up a plate, applying soap, rinsing, and so on. You may also need to estimate hand positions, infer actions, and map human movements to robotic equivalents.” The challenge extends beyond understanding actions. Robotics datasets combine video, sensor streams, trajectories, and other multimodal inputs, creating large, complex datasets that are difficult to store, process, and standardise. Different robotics companies often use their own data formats and workflows, while many questions about what data should be collected and how it should be annotated remain unresolved. “We believe robotics is the next major frontier for AI,” said Penedo. “The progress we've seen in large language models and vision-language models is now enabling a new generation of robotic systems. At the same time, robotics is increasingly benefiting from the same scaling principles that transformed language models: better data leads to better models.” As a result, a significant amount of work is required to label, annotate, filter, and enrich data before it becomes useful for training. “These constraints make data work in robotics especially important,” Penedo said. “Teams need scalable, reliable tooling so they can process demonstrations, test new annotations, and iterate on datasets without rebuilding their data stack every time they change embodiment, sensors, data format, or labeling method.” Penedo cautions that the industry is still very early, with many companies investing heavily in collecting more data, improving model architectures, or building better hardware.  “Those things are important, but comparatively little attention has been paid to improving the quality of existing data. Many teams still rely on manual processes for annotation and data preparation, even though modern AI systems can automate much of that work. The data you collect today will likely remain valuable across multiple generations of models and architectures. That's why we think infrastructure for data processing is one of the most important pieces of the stack.” Refiner: infrastructure for the Robotics data loop Robotics companies are often hardware-first organisations, but Macrodata Labs believes that the software laye r— and specifically the data layer — is what will ultimately determine how capable these systems become. Refiner offers an open-source framework for processing robotics datasets. It enables robotics teams to ingest data, process demonstrations, and run workflows such as hand-tracking, subtask annotation, and reward model scoring. The framework supports a wide range of robotics data formats and can process multimodal robot episodes — including trajectories, camera streams, sensor data, and annotations — within a single pipeline. Designed to work directly with cloud storage, it allows teams to work with large datasets without first downloading them locally. Penedo explained: “Users don't need to download terabytes of data locally before they can start working. Refiner can stream data directly from cloud storage, process it efficiently, and run workflows across distributed infrastructure.” Refiner also supports GPU-based processing, which is increasingly important as robotics data pipelines rely on AI models for tasks such as annotation, understanding, and evaluation. The broader goal is to make robotics data infrastructure more accessible and scalable while giving teams the flexibility to work across different robots, sensors, and workflows. Through the hosted Macrodata Labs platform, users can scale the same pipeline from local Python execution to managed cloud compute without rewriting their workflows. The platform handles orchestration, scheduling, CPU and GPU workers, data traceability, failure recovery, and observability, while customers pay only for the compute resources they use. Right now, the company is focused on robotics companies that train models and build robotic systems. Over time, Penedo predicts the market will expand: “As robotics models become more capable and accessible, we expect more organisations to buy robots off the shelf and fine-tune them for specific tasks. At that point, we can help those customers understand what data they need to collect and how to adapt models to their environments. But today our primary customers are the teams building the underlying robotics systems.” Building a robotics startup in stealth I was curious what it was like for the team building a company in stealth.  Penedo admits that there were definitely challenges. “When you're operating in stealth, people can't easily look you up online or validate what you're doing.  That means introductions and personal networks become much more important because potential customers and partners don't have much public information to work with. That said, we never intended to remain in stealth for long.  The goal was simply to give ourselves a few months to build the first version of the product, validate the core ideas, and begin working with early users before going public.” Why Europe can lead the next wave of robotics Macrodata is technically structured as a US company, largely for fundraising reasons, but based in France and would love to see Europe become a major force in robotics. Europe is frequently cast as trailing the US in AI, but Penedo believes robotics is one area where Europe remains highly competitive. “You see strong clusters around Zurich, driven by ETH Zürich and the companies emerging from that ecosystem. Munich is another major centre. More broadly, Europe remains highly industrialised and has a large manufacturing base, which creates real demand for innovation in robotics. That gives Europe an opportunity to play a significant role in this next wave of AI.” Macrodata Labs' immediate focus is helping users adopt Refiner and gathering feedback from the robotics community, while investing heavily in research into how better data pipelines can improve model performance. “We want to go beyond making robotics data processing more efficient and explore how better data pipelines can actually improve model performance. That means testing new approaches, training models, running experiments on real robotic systems, and continually measuring whether our methods produce better outcomes,” shared Penedo. 

Last week, we tracked more than 75 tech funding deals worth over €2.1 million and over 5 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe. ? The top three industries that raised the most were fintech (€502.9 million), security (€500 million), and semiconductors (€349.7 million). At the country level, ?? Germany took first place (€806.8 million), followed by ?? France (€625.2 million) and ?? the Netherlands (€372.7 million). Last week, we announced the launch of the Tech.eu Funding Explorer, now free and open to everyone. Built for founders, investors, analysts, journalists and others following the European tech ecosystem, the platform provides access to funding data, investor activity, company profiles and market trends. As the Funding Explorer is currently in beta, we welcome your feedback through the dedicated feedback section within the platform. Your input will help us refine and improve the product as we continue to develop it. ❗ Now, let's get you up to speed on everything that happened last week, including your handy.csv file, allowing for an even more in-depth analysis. Have a great week! Funding deals by amount GERMANY: Stark bags €500M in new funding FRANCE: Health insurance outfit Alan agrees €480M funding round NETHERLANDS: Chip gear maker Nearfield Instruments raises $380M GERMANY: Car subscription company Finn becomes a unicorn after a €140M Series D funding round GERMANY: Taktile receives $110 million in a Series C FRANCE: Tissium raises €30M in equity funding, €30M in debt NETHERLANDS: Leyden Labs secures €40M to develop intranasal protection against influenza and coronaviruses UK: Isometric raises over £30M to expand AI certification platform FRANCE: Tsuga lands €30M to expand AI agent platform UK: Astral Systems raises £23M to tackle the global shortages of medical radioisotopes SPAIN: a16z backs Prosper AI with $30M as healthcare providers seek fewer admin tools UK: Tech firm Seat Unique secures £20M investment SWEDEN: Sportway raises €20M as AI reshapes sports broadcasting UK: equipal raises £16.25M in funding UK: Superlight raises £15.9M to boost commercial EV truck manufacturing GERMANY: VARM bags €17.5M to scale insulation across Europe UK: HICX secures £15M to close supplier data gap FRANCE: AlpSemi raises €17M to advance solid-state circuit breaker technology GERMANY: Almetra secures €16.3M Series A to drive smarter manufacturing GERMANY: JUPUS raises €13M to power the next generation of AI-driven law firms FRANCE: Flease secures €13M to expand sustainable fleet leasing across France UK: New funding takes Trimtech Therapeutics’ seed round to £35.6M BELGIUM: Timefold raises $13M Series A to scale scheduling optimisation infrastructure IRELAND: Ubotica raises $11M to scale real-time maritime intelligence from space SPAIN: FOSSA raises €9.25M to accelerate the deployment of secure communications satellites FRANCE: Linc raises €8.5M with 100+ angels to crack world's most complex payroll market FRANCE: Wheere raises €8.5M to launch its first satellite IRELAND: TensorX raises €8M in seed funding FRANCE: Sopht raises €7.5M to reduce companies' IT bills SPAIN: H2SITE raises €6M in second close of Series B funding UK: Silveray secures £5M to expand X-ray technology into healthcare NORWAY: Eqon raises $6M in seed funding AUSTRIA: Graph Therapeutics brings total funding to over $10M to advance precision immunology CZECH REPUBLIC: Logistics startup Grid.online lands €4M after growing deliveries 10× in a year GERMANY: Maple Aviation secures a €4M investment AUSTRIA: Fintech Talentir secures €4M for international expansion GERMANY: Mona AI secures a €3.8M investment as part of a seed extension SWEDEN: Fika Jobs raises $4M for AI-powered video resumes AUSTRIA: Ora Computing raises €3.5M to build the efficiency layer of the AI stack GERMANY: Companisto, Prolimity Capital Partners, and others are investing €3.3M in Innok Robotics ITALY: Compri secures €3.2M to build AI-powered procurement teams GERMANY: Kyrok secures €3.1M to bring AI to pharma and chemical supply chains GERMANY: mkind receives a €3M investment GERMANY: Zelara lands €3M to bring continuous learning to customer engagement SPAIN: Kalipso raises $3.2M to scale regulatory compliance platform DENMARK: Acodyne secures €2.5M to develop next-generation autonomous logistics aircraft SWEDEN: Wayout raises €2.42M to scale decentralised drinking water infrastructure platform REPUBLIC OF SERBIA: SuperPlane secures $2.6M to turn production operations into an AI-native workflow layer GERMANY: Wakeline lands €2.1M to bring continuous learning to AI SPAIN: Floox closes a €2M funding round to consolidate its position as a European leader in the electric mobility sector UK: Ademen has secured £1.6M investment UK: Adtech Covatic raises £1.5M IRELAND: HR Duo secures £1.4M to scale and accelerate UK expansion DENMARK: Serpier raises €1.4M to help online retailers improve digital visibility TÜRKİYE: Ideasets received a $1.25M investment from Gelecek Holding, based on a valuation of $10M UK: AI company Unloqs secures £900,000 funding SPAIN: WAIIS raises €1M to boost its shared mobility super app GERMANY: CoTrainer closed €1M investment round SPAIN: Naturr closes an investment round of €620,000 LITHUANIA: Superpal raises €500,000 for AI coworker platform built inside Slack UK: LabCycle secures £430,000 to commercialise lab plastic recycling system and cut incineration waste SWEDEN: MiMove secures €450,000 to expand real estate platform across Southern Europe SWEDEN: Waveium raises €470,000 pre-seed round SWITZERLAND: Isospec Analytics was awarded a €434,000 Tech Growth loan from FIT SWITZERLAND: Backbone received a €433,000 FIF Growth Award TÜRKİYE: Revogo, a sustainable e-commerce platform, has received a $300,000 investment SPAIN: SegurosIA raises €150,000 from Eoniq.fund to boost its artificial intelligence technology for insurance companies SWITZERLAND: Crìa Technologies received a €108,000 FIF Seed Tech Award SWITZERLAND: Skilder received a €22,000 Digital Grant by FIT SWITZERLAND: MYSTONES received a €22,000 Digital Grant by FIT PORTUGAL: Coalex.ai secures funding to scale ‘decision firewall’ for AI in production UK: URUNN app secures seven-figure raise AUSTRIA: TradersYard raises fresh capital SWEDEN: Anferra receives investment TÜRKİYE: Cypien AI, having completed its pre-seed follow-up investment, has reached a valuation of $4.5M POLAND: Talkin’ Things lands Orbit Capital financing amid growing traceability demand GERMANY: Backed by Lakestar, Seedcamp and EWOR, SE3 unveils spatial AI platform for autonomous systems GERMANY: lingomatch received an undisclosed sum of investment Exits and M&A activity POLAND: LiveKid acquires Aldea to expand in Latin America GERMANY: House of Gaia Group is acquiring Codio Impact GERMANY: The young Munich-based legal tech company beglaubigt.de is acquiring the insolvent company firma.de FRANCE: Withings acquires the Rennes-based medtech company Biosency UK: Edtech Pastest acquires financial platform Medics’ Money UK: PayPoint acquires Aperidata NETHERLANDS: Backbase buys agentic banking platform Kasisto

This week, we tracked more than 75 tech funding deals worth over €2.1 billion and over 5 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe. If email is more your thing, you can always subscribe to our newsletter and receive a more robust version of this round-up delivered to your inbox. Either way, let's get you up to speed. ? Notable and big funding rounds ?? Stark bags €500M in new funding ??  Health insurance outfit Alan agrees €480M funding round ?? Chip gear maker Nearfield Instruments raises $380M ??‍?? Noteworthy acquisitions and mergers ??  LiveKid acquires Aldea to expand in Latin America ?? House of Gaia Group is acquiring Codio Impact ??  Withings acquires the Rennes-based medtech company Biosency ? Interesting moves from investors ? Revolut and Synthesia early backer Seedcamp raises $320M, invests in US ?  Main Capital doubles down on enterprise software with €5.25 billion fund close ? New €34M Nucleo Ventures fund targets startups and SMEs across Central and Eastern Europe ? Blue Lake VC closes in on first fund with British Business Bank backing for immigrant-led startups ? ARX Robotics and Roboneers form ARX Industries to scale unmanned ground vehicle production ? European tech startups to watch  ??  SuperPlane secures $2.6M to turn production operations into an AI-native workflow layer ?? Wakeline lands €2.1M to bring continuous learning to AI ?? Serpier raises €1.4M to help online retailers improve digital visibility ?? Superpal raises €500,000 for AI coworker platform built inside Slack ?? LabCycle secures £430,000 to commercialise lab plastic recycling system and cut incineration waste

As an enthusiastic proponent of AI, one might expect the UK’s AI minister to be a keen user of ChatGPT or other popular AI chatbots in the course of his ministerial duties- perhaps to make his days more productive or to stay abreast of the latest technological advancements. But Kanishka Narayan has not used ChatGPT, which has over 1bn active users, Claude, or any other popular AI chatbots for ministerial business since he became AI minister in September last year, according to a Freedom of Information (FoI) request. The request also reveals that Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has not used ChatGPT or other AI chatbots for ministerial business since being appointed to the role in September 2025. The FoI was requested on April 23. Narayan, a former VC who has worked in Silicon Valley, however, does use ChatGPT for “core research” and background information for personal use, the Telegraph has previously reported. Narayan has urged MPs to stop writing their parliamentary speeches with ChatGPT, following analysis showing that MPs were using the OpenAI-made chatbot to write speeches increasingly frequently. Like Narayan, Kendall also uses AI outside work. “Well, I use AI personally rather than at work, I’ve got to be honest,” Kendall previously told the BBC. Peter Kyle, Kendall’s predecessor, used ChatGPT for policy advice and ask what podcasts he should appear on. While Narayan and Kendall might be shunning AI chatbots for ministerial business, government officials are expected to use AI. The government is also deploying AI to modernise public services and increase civil service productivity. The government says its AI tool Consult, designed to speed up public consultation, has sped up analysis of over 50,000 responses to a government-commissioned review of the water sector. A government spokesperson said: “The Secretary of State and AI minister do not personally use chatbots in the course of their ministerial business, but we are using a range of AI tools to support the work that they direct. AI has the potential to save time on routine tasks and cut through admin for civil servants. Ministers are focused on steering that work, and making the final decisions- as the public would expect."

The CEO of UK-based spacetech investor Seraphim Space says Europe is “catching up” to US spacetech, powered by the SpaceX IPO, increased deal sizes, and European spacetech startups pivoting to defence applications, helping drive up investment.   Speaking on the Tech.eu podcast, Mark Boggett, co-founder and CEO of Seraphim Space, discusses the recent SpaceX IPO, its impact on the European spacetech sector, as well as the investment landscape, and European sovereignty.   Boggett also talks about Seraphim's portfolio, which includes its biggest holding in aerospace company Iceye, which is likely eyeing an IPO, and Hawkeye 360, the signal intelligence company.   Boggett said around 80 per cent of Seraphim's portfolio revenues were now coming from defence, as spacetech startups pivot to defence. While still lagging behind the US in terms of the size of the investment deals, Europe is catching up, he said, as witnessed by some big-ticket spacetech deals this year.    Iceye raised over €1bn in a funding round valuing the company at around €10bn, while German rocket developer Isar Aerospace announced a €270m funding round. On the impact of SpaceX's IPO on the broader sector, Boggett said it will bring a wider range of investors to the sector, such as big institutional investors.   He also said a key driver of optimism in the sector was Starship, SpaceX’s new launch vehicle, which he said was a “game-changer”, making it easier to launch infrastructure into space.   He said: “The price and scale of launch are now changing. It is now opening up the market for mega infrastructure in space because previously it has been cost-prohibitive to put large infrastructure into the space environment.” Image: NASA on Unsplash

Louise Ballard, co-founder and CEO of Atheni AI, has a mission — to ensure that when it comes to AI, nobody gets left behind. “As AI becomes embedded across every profession, we don't want to create a two-tier society where only those who can afford expensive tools or specialist training are able to benefit. Everyone should have access to the knowledge and confidence they need to use AI well.” When it comes to AI startups, Atheni AI is an outlier. Its female founders, Louise Ballard and Mackenzie Howe, aren’t postdoc academics or 20-something men vibecoding their way to customers.  Ballard spent three decades in corporate communications before selling her PR agency to Huntsworth in 2009. After recovering from two cancers, she reconnected with future co-founder Mackenzie Howe, an entrepreneur and former institutional investment consultant. Together they realised the biggest challenge around AI wasn't the technology—it was helping people use it effectively. And what they’ve created is Atheni.ai, a UK startup focused on successful AI adoption rather than AI model development. It helps organisations ensure that employees actually integrate AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot into their daily work in ways that improve productivity and decision-making.  The AI adoption problem Ballard contends that “Anyone can open ChatGPT and ask it a question. The real question is whether they know if the answer is good. Can they provide the right context? Can they challenge the output? Can they connect different tools together? Can they build simple automations? Those are skills anyone can learn, but only if they have the confidence and support to explore them." Talking to former clients across a range of industries,  everyone described the same challenge. Ballard explained that they'd bought AI licences, rolled them out across the company and expected people to use them, but adoption was low. “Those who did use the tools often weren't using them effectively, while many simply reverted to the way they'd always worked." That experience reflects a broader industry trend. A global study released this week by CambrianEdge.ai, which surveyed 775 AI users across 104 organisations, found that 55 per cent of professionals see isolated individual use of AI and the lack of structured human-AI workflows as the biggest barrier to adoption. The study found that more than a quarter of organisations still lack basic collaboration infrastructure, such as shared prompt libraries, training, and quality standards, while 18 per cent have already scaled back AI initiatives due to poor adoption and inconsistent results. The findings mirror research from BCG, which found that although 96 per cent of 300 global CMOs say AI is driving business transformation, almost half still use it only for isolated tasks rather than embedding it across workflows. Organisations with comprehensive AI infrastructure — including shared tools, training, prompt libraries and governance — were dramatically more likely to report significant business impact. “We quickly realised that real transformation doesn't happen because you have one or two AI champions. You need the whole team developing confidence together,” shared Ballard. Why training isn't enough Ballard argues that experienced workers often become the strongest AI users because they bring judgment that AI cannot replace. Some of the biggest barriers to adoption are fear of being replaced, habit — “If you've completed a task the same way for 10, 15 or 20 years, changing that workflow takes cognitive effort—especially when you're already busy.” and, importantly, relevance. Ballard contends that traditional training, like workshops and demos, is too generic because you attend or watch something and think, "That's interesting." Then you return to work and immediately go back to your existing processes. AI is different because it's deeply personal. Even two people doing almost identical jobs will use it differently. "We saw this repeatedly. We'd run workshops, everyone would leave enthusiastic, and six weeks later, clients would tell us very little had actually changed. That's when we realised this wasn't primarily a training problem — it was a coaching problem. People need ongoing guidance while they're working.” Coaching people while they work Atheni sits alongside people while they're working, understands their role and guides them through what the company calls the Atheni capability scale — from Curious through to Pathfinder. Rather than delivering generic lessons, it coaches individuals based on how they're actually using AI, the quality of their prompts, the workflows they're building and the opportunities they're missing. Through a browser-based assistant and analytics dashboard, the platform provides personalised coaching, tailored learning missions and practical recommendations based on an individual's role, helping teams progress from basic AI adoption to more advanced, strategic use.  It also gives organisations visibility into team-wide AI capability and adoption, enabling them to build AI literacy and drive meaningful behavioural change rather than simply measuring tool usage. Success for clients of Atheni is ultimately adoption. For example, one client realised some people were using free AI tools independently and potentially exposing confidential information, so they wanted a proper strategy, while others described themselves as technophobes. “Over three months, we worked with them consistently. By the end, they'd reached around 90 per cent adoption, with roughly a third of employees progressing into our highest capability tier. What changed wasn't simply that they were using AI more often. They understood what good usage looked like. They realised AI wasn't replacing their expertise—it was extending it. They could stress-test ideas, explore scenarios, analyse information and solve problems they simply couldn't have tackled manually.” Access doesn't equal adoption Atheni works with organisations before, during and after AI rollouts, helping them move beyond simply distributing licences. “The biggest misconception is thinking that access equals adoption. Giving someone a Copilot or ChatGPT licence doesn't automatically change the way they work.” Ballard contends that it's critical to think about how the work gets done in the first place. For example, a client may want to use AI to free their people to spend more time thinking, solving problems, and working with customers, rather than getting buried in repetitive processes. “One corporate finance client redesigned a monthly spreadsheet process rather than simply automating it. That's the real shift. It's not just efficiency — it's redesigning work.” She contends that the companies that struggle are often those that have simply rolled AI out across the organisation and assumed adoption would happen naturally. “They find themselves asking why everyone has a licence, but nothing has really changed, or why they're suddenly generating lots of AI-written emails that don't actually communicate anything particularly well.” AI is like "driving a Ferrari to the supermarket" Ballard likes to compare AI to "driving a Ferrari to the supermarket". People own incredibly powerful technology but use only a tiny fraction of its capabilities. "Success isn't measured by how many prompts someone writes every day. It's measured by how deeply AI becomes integrated into the way they think and work. Someone who uses AI only twice a day but has built sophisticated workflows creates far more value than someone who spends the day asking it to rewrite emails." That's the difference between depth and volume, and that's what Atheni is designed to develop. Building AI around how people actually work Ballard believes that company expertise is essential to successful AI adoption: “I've spoken to organisations that have brought in sophisticated AI systems designed entirely by external technology teams, only to find they don't reflect how the business actually operates. They end up rebuilding everything because the people designing the workflows didn't understand the day-to-day reality. Increasingly, every professional will need two complementary skill sets. One is their domain expertise—whether that's journalism, finance, marketing or law. The other is enough AI literacy to build and adapt the tools they need themselves. Rather than relying on a central technology team to solve every problem, people should be empowered to create solutions that fit their own workflows.“ Preparing for an agentic future Of course, the risk is that AI systems become so intuitive that workers no longer need a platform like Atheni. Ballard admits it's a question the company considers often and asserts that the skills people need will continue to evolve alongside AI. “Today, we spend a lot of time helping people write better prompts and understand how to work effectively with AI. In a few years, prompting may no longer be the key skill. Instead, people may be building increasingly sophisticated AI agents or orchestrating multiple systems together. The underlying challenge doesn't disappear — it simply changes. You could use Atheni Ai in the future to coach negotiation skills, leadership, intergenerational communication or any workplace capability where people benefit from ongoing, contextual guidance while they're actually doing the work.” Closing the credibility gap Atheni.ai raised £350,000 in May this year. Ballard admits fundraising was one of the hardest parts of building the business. She admits that when they first started raising, the founders assumed investors would immediately understand the problem they were solving. "Instead, many questioned whether the problem even existed. The reaction was often, 'AI is easy to use. Why would anyone need coaching?'" The team paused fundraising, raised a small friends-and-family round and focused on building the product. Ballard admits: "As a female founder in my fifties, I realised we weren't just facing a funding gap—we were facing a credibility gap. We're two women who don't fit the stereotype of AI founders, despite years of experience building businesses and working with technology. That meant people often underestimated both the problem and our ability to solve it. "I'd built and sold a business and advised CEOs throughout my career, yet suddenly we were having to prove our credibility in ways I'd never experienced before." Finding the right investors changed everything. Once they connected with people who understood the opportunity, Atheni closed its round in around six weeks. "Because we're already generating revenue through our consulting work, we've been able to validate the problem before scaling the software platform. Traditionally, there was a clear distinction between consulting and software businesses. Today, particularly in AI, that distinction is becoming much less relevant. If you're solving complex human problems, you need deep domain expertise, and that expertise often comes from working directly with customers before it's embedded into software. That's exactly what we've done." Ballard hopes that, as AI reshapes the workplace, humans remain at the centre. "We have an opportunity to shape what the future of work looks like, and I'd like that future to be one where humans remain firmly at the centre." Lead image: Louise Ballard and Mackenzie Howe.

Spatial AI company SE3 Labs today emerges from stealth. SE3 builds foundational spatial intelligence technology for the next generation of autonomous systems. As autonomous systems operate in increasingly complex and contested environments, the ability to perceive, reason, and act in three dimensions becomes the defining capability.  SE3 provides the spatial intelligence layer that sits between raw sensor data and meaningful action.  The company is backed by Lakestar and Seedcamp, alongside EWOR, the Sequoia Scout Fund, UnternehmerTUM Funding for Innovators, SDAC, Magnetic, TwinTrack Ventures, Plug and Play, the founders of Flixbus and Ascending Technologies, and strategic angel investors.  Teaching autonomous systems to understand the physical world Today's unmanned aerial vehicles can fly a pre-programmed route or follow a beacon, but they cannot reason about the world around them. SE3 closes that gap.  Its stack operates as a single platform and domain-agnostic system across aerial, ground, and mixed swarms, and is already under contract with the German Bundeswehr.  The stack is hardware-agnostic, modular, and runs on-edge. Customers can integrate SE3 as a standalone capability into an existing platform or have SE3 cover the full software stack for UAVs    "Advances in AI have enabled machines to understand language. The next step is enabling them to understand the physical world," said Lukas Köstler, CEO and co-founder of SE3.  "We’re building the category leader in Spatial AI. Our technology unlocks a new generation of autonomous systems that can operate reliably in real-world conditions across defence, public safety, and industrial applications." According to Dr Klaus Hommels, Founder and Chairman of Lakestar,  Europe’s sovereignty depends on its ability to build and scale the critical capabilities that will define the next era of defence.  “SE3 is developing one of those capabilities, and we believe it will be essential to Europe’s security, resilience and technological independence.” Spatial autonomy turns raw sensor data into shared understanding  SE3's navigation system delivers precise, continuous autonomous navigation in GPS-denied terrain and under active electronic warfare.  Onboard visual-inertial odometry and real-time map matching replace the satellite link: each platform builds and updates its own spatial picture as it moves, and paths adjust dynamically as the environment evolves, without operator intervention.  On top of the resilient navigation foundation, the perception stack turns raw visual data into a continuously evolving 3D understanding of the operating environment. Terrain, elevation, and points of interest are reasoned across in real time, and objects are localised in three-dimensional space to sub-metre accuracy. That spatial picture is shared across the swarm, so every platform converges on the same target. For the operator, it forms a live 3D common operating picture of the environment. The operator interacts with that picture in natural language: spoken intent reaches directly into the 3D space and is translated into action across the swarm. AI agents run continuously on top of the same picture, analysing the real world in real time and conducting advanced reasoning over what they see.   From that shared 3D picture, one operator commands the swarm. This turns a single operator into a force multiplier: mixed aerial and ground platforms are directed in natural language, and operator intent is interpreted spatially and distributed as behaviour across the swarm, so the size of the force scales with the mission rather than with the headcount available to fly it.  “Perception alone doesn't make a system autonomous. The harder problem is discernment: knowing what matters, separating the urgent from the merely important, and ranking intentions against the mission and the environment. Without that layer, more sensors just produce more noise. SE3 is building the discernment layer for physical AI.” said Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Managing Partner at Seedcamp. Built on world-class research from the leading institutions in computer vision and AI  SE3 was founded by Lukas Koestler, Simon Klenk, and Daniel Cremers, bringing together expertise in robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and defence technology. The founding team has produced more than 400 scientific publications with over 87,000 citations, combining frontier AI research with experience from organisations including Nvidia, Tesla Autopilot, Boston Consulting Group, Skydio, and Isar Aerospace. Cremers, who holds the Chair for Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence at the Technical University of Munich, is president of the European Computer Vision Association, Director of the Munich Centre for Machine Learning, a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and a recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.  The company is committed to putting cutting-edge spatial AI in the hands of the German Bundeswehr and allied forces operating in modern conditions. SE3 participates continuously in military exercises across Europe, and in recent exercises has reduced the sensor-to-shooter timeline by an order of magnitude. The technology is also being validated in real operational settings today. The company has won multiple defence contracts and is operational with the Bundeswehr.  “Many teams excel either at frontier research or at operational deployment. SE3 is unusual because it brings both together in one culture. The team is deeply technical, close to the customer and unusually low-ego, yet the ambition is enormous: to build technology that becomes a core part of how autonomous systems operate in the physical world,” said Enrico Mellis, who co-led Lakestar’s investment in SE3. 

German company ARX Robotics and Ukraine's Roboneers today announced the formation of ARX Industries, a joint venture to industrialise the mass production of unmanned ground vehicles. The new entity will produce the Rys Pro UGV at scale, delivering software-defined ground capabilities to the Ukrainian Defence Forces.   The joint venture brings together ARX Robotics and Roboneers' proven expertise in unmanned ground vehicle production, industrial scale, and operational deployment, forming a partnership designed to meet the urgent and growing demand for UGVs on the modern battlefield. The partnership directly supports Ukraine’s target of supplying 50,000 UGVs to the military in 2026.   ARX Industries will produce the Rys Pro UGV across facilities in Germany and Ukraine, combining industrial capacity with frontline proximity. This industrial complex will ensure both the scale and the agility to respond to evolving operational needs.   The joint venture aims to produce thousands of Rys Pro units within the first year of operation. Output is projected to scale progressively, reaching tens of thousands of units annually in subsequent years. The UGVs will be deployed across mission-critical roles covering casualty evacuation, frontline logistics - transporting supplies, medical aid, mission-specific modules including mining and demining - and combat configurations.   As part of this joint venture, ARX Industries will cover manufacturing, maintenance, and operational support, creating a long-term production base for sovereign UGV capacity. This will strengthen European partners' ability to design, manufacture, sustain, and deliver critical unmanned ground systems at scale.   The cooperation is supported by both the Ukrainian and German governments, underscoring the strategic importance of the joint venture for European defence sovereignty. Established under the Build with Ukraine initiative, the partnership accelerates the delivery of battle-proven UGVs directly to the Ukrainian Defence Forces, strengthening Europe's defence posture.   At ARX Industries, operational knowledge and frontline experience feed directly into each production cycle. Every new batch reflects the latest lessons from active deployment. This feedback loop between the battlefield and the factory floor is what sets this partnership apart.   Image: Maximilian Wied, Co-Founder and CFO at ARX Robotics and Anton Skrypnyk, Executive Chairman at Roboneers. Maximilian Wied, Co-Founder and CFO at ARX Robotics, shared: “Every week without the right equipment costs lives. ARX Industries is our joint answer of our partners and us to that urgency, a production engine built to deliver battle-proven UGVs to Ukrainian forces faster and at a scale that makes a real difference on the ground.”   Anton Skrypnyk, Executive Chairman at Roboneers, says:   “Ukraine has proven that robots win battles. Now, ARX Robotics and Roboneers are bringing that power to scale - delivering battle-proven UGVs to Ukrainian soldiers faster than ever. This is what 'Build with Ukraine' looks like in practice.” ARX Robotics launched an office this week in Berlin, to complement its new manufacturing facility in Munich and growing operations in London and Kyiv.

Danish martech startup Serpier has raised €1.4 million in funding from True Collective and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO) to expand its AI-powered marketing platform for e-commerce businesses. Founded in Aarhus in 2024 by Steffen Sørensen, Simon Holm, Søren Fuhr and Thomas Grástein, Serpier helps online retailers improve their visibility across both traditional search engines and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, as consumers increasingly rely on large language models for product discovery and recommendations. Its first AI agent, Navi, already manages visibility optimisation end to end by identifying opportunities to improve a customer's online presence, creating content and publishing it. The company plans to extend Navi's capabilities to include building landing pages, running marketing campaigns and automating additional marketing workflows. We've proven that our platform can create visibility for e-commerce businesses across both Google and AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Now we want to let our own AI agent Navi take on more of the marketing work itself — analysis, content and advertising — so marketing teams can focus on steering the direction instead, said co-founder Søren Fuhr, adding that Serpier sees marketing evolving towards a model where AI agents handle analysis and execution, allowing marketers to focus on strategy, prioritisation and key decision-making. The company says it generated more than €2.5 million in revenue in its first financial year and reached profitability. Serpier will use the new funding to develop its platform into an AI-powered marketing workspace where autonomous agents can automate a broader range of marketing tasks.

N26, one of Europe’s most well-known challenger banks, has reached its first full-year profit, new figures show, amid a difficult period for the German challenger bank, which saw a management shake-up and investor unrest. N26 has reported net income of €1.6m in 2025, compared to a €42m net loss in 2024. Revenues came in at €501.6m, a 13 per cent increase on the year previous. A rise in card transaction volumes, an increase in subscriptions, and cost-cutting were cited as reasons for the improved performance. New CEO Mike Dargan heralded surpassing €500m in revenues as a “milestone” achievement. N26 said net fee and commission income increased 21 per cent year-on-year to €184.2m, accounting for 53 per cent of gross profit, driven by growth in subscriptions and card transaction volumes. Customer deposits surpassed €10.5 billion in the year. Like other challenger banks, N26, which has 5.6m paying customers, has a focus on increasing primary bank customers, which can be defined as those who get their income paid into their account. Direct costs- which relate to money transfers, subscriptions and insurance- were down 17 per cent on the year. N26 said headcount, which stood at 1,500 at the end of 2025, had remained broadly stable. It now employs around 1.600, it said. Dargan was appointed in December last year, drawing to a close the leadership of co-founders Maximilian Tayenthal and Valentin Stalf, who founded the challenger bank in 2013. The pair served as its co-CEOs until Stalf stood down as co-CEO in 2025, following a reported dispute with some of N26’s investors over the handling of regulatory issues by the founders. Tayenthal has also stepped away. Last year, N26 was hit with new sanctions by the German financial regulator relating to compliance issues. Arnd Schwierholz, CFO, N26, added: "Revenue growth, disciplined cost management, and a diversified earnings profile contributed to the company's first full year of profitability and continued growth of gross profit.”

UK-based Blue Lake VC has secured a cornerstone commitment from the British Business Bank,  the UK’s largest institutional investor in venture capital. Ukrainians David Gilgur and Lyubov Guk, founding partners of Blue Lake VC, are backing exceptional immigrant founders in the UK. Immigrants are behind more than half of the UK's fastest-growing companies. But according to proprietary survey data from Blue Lake of over 1,200 immigrant founders, more than 90 per cent say they can't access the networks or capital they need at the earliest stages. Gilgur and Guk know this exact problem firsthand as immigrant entrepreneurs and see a gap and an opportunity that Blue Lake VC is addressing. Over the past six years, David Gilgur and Lyubov Guk have been laying the foundations of Blue Lake VC. What started as angel investing and the Blue Lake Syndicate, with hands-on support for founders, has grown into Oasis, the largest international founder community and hub in London. The fund brings it all together. Blue Lake VC was born out of its founders' first-hand experience of the outstanding opportunities the UK tech scene offers and the importance of support and networks at the early stage. It writes the first institutional cheque for early-stage international founders building global products. Both partners are originally from Ukraine. Gilgur ’s unlikely VC career began when he came to the UK as a child to study at a Jewish Orthodox school, which led to a career in Economics and Data at Bloomberg. In 2014, as the revolution and the first Russian invasion of Ukraine began, he founded a consultancy to build bridges between Eastern European businesses and the UK market.  Guk’s hometown in Donbas, Ukraine, where she studied and started her career in corporate finance, has been under occupation since that same year. She was Gilgur ’s first hire in Ukraine before becoming the head of the Ukrainian office and moving to London five years ago on a Global Talent visa. Blue Lake VC was the next thing they built together. Building community first Gilgur and Guk started by building the community, forming a foundation for the future fund. In 2022, they launched International Office Hours - a programme that has since connected over 600 international founders with more than 70 UK investors, putting Blue Lake in the room with talent long before the rest of the market notices it.  Later, they opened Oasis: a physical hub in London that has become a ‘home away from home’ for over 600 immigrant founders and investors, hosting curated events, workshops, international delegations, and AMAs with leading VCs in the market. When David and Lyubov first arrived in London, they were looking for a place they couldn’t find, so they built it.  Over the past four years, they proved their thesis by investing in startups they met through International Office Hours and Oasis via a Blue Lake Angel syndicate, which made 11 investments in early-stage companies founded by immigrants. Now, they are building on this foundation to launch Fund I and execute on their strategy with speed and scale.  According to  Lyubov Guk, co-founder and General Partner, Blue Lake VC: “I have lived experience of coming to the UK with no network and access to capital, building here, and facing the same challenges and gaps as the founders we invest in. We launched Blue Lake VC fund to address these challenges and build the proof that immigrant founders, backed at the right moment, can scale and generate outsized returns.” David Gilgur, co-founder and General Partner, Blue Lake VC, shared:  “Lyubov and I have worked together for over 10 years, building a consultancy, launching and investing through the Blue Lake angel syndicate, and building an international start-up community. These experiences have shaped Blue Lake VC’s values, sourcing approach, and investment strategy. Commitment from the British Business Bank is a testament to our thesis and the hard work that has gone into getting to where we are today.’   Anchored by the British Business Bank, private investors, and family offices, the fund is scheduled to close in September 2026. The investment comes under the British Business Bank’s new £400 million Investor Pathways Capital programme. Blue Lake VC is one of just ten funds selected for the programme’s inaugural cohort out of more than a hundred that applied. 

French health insurance company Alan says it has reached an agreement on a €480m funding round, valuing it at €5.5bn.   The new Series G funding round follows just months after Alan announced a €100m funding round at a €5bn valuation. Paris-based Alan has raised more than €1.2bn in total.   The latest funding round is being led by tech investing giant Prosus, a new investor, alongside existing shareholders Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG) and Index Ventures, as well as new investor Dara Holdings.  According to the FT, Prosus's investment includes fresh capital and buying up secondary shares. Digital health app Alan, founded in 2016, provides health insurance and wellness insurance to businesses, public service organisations, and freelancers. It has more than 1.1 million customers, it says. Employing 850 people, it operates across France, Spain, Belgium and Canada. This year it struck a deal with French football star Kylian Mbappé who has invested in Alan and is a brand ambassador.   It says in Q1 2026, it hit more than €800 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). The Paris-based company says it’s the first company to “bring insurance, prevention and care together in a single integrated experience - combining health coverage, care navigation, wellbeing services and AI-powered health assistance”.   Alan, which leverages AI in its products, says it will use the funds to speed up the expansion of its model in new countries, deepen its presence in existing markets, including France, Belgium, Spain and Canada, pursue acquisitions, and invest in AI healthcare services and product innovation.   Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, co-founder and CEO, Alan, said: “For ten years, we have shown that technology can turn healthcare from reactive to proactive, helping people act early instead of reacting late. That is what prevention insurance is, and it's the category we are building. We selected Prosus for their very deep expertise in international expansion.”

Wayout International, the Swedish developer of Distributed Drinking Water Infrastructure, today announced the successful closing of a €2.42 million (SEK 26.6 million) Series A extension. The round was oversubscribed by €956,000 (SEK 10.6 million), reflecting strong support from both existing shareholders and new strategic investors with significant industry expertise. Wayout has developed a proprietary infrastructure platform that enables safe drinking water to be produced locally from virtually any water source through an integrated ecosystem of advanced purification, controlled mineralisation, reusable logistics, smart dispensing and digital monitoring. The platform is designed to address some of the most significant challenges facing the global water industry, including water stress, ageing infrastructure, increasing transportation costs, single-use plastic waste, carbon emissions and growing consumer demand for transparency and quality. According to Ulf Stenerhag, CEO and Founder, Wayout International, the financing marks an important milestone for Wayout. We are moving from proving the technology to deploying it at scale. "The strong support from both existing and new investors reflects growing confidence in our vision and in the market opportunity ahead. We believe the world needs a new model for drinking water infrastructure, one that is local, resilient, digitally connected and significantly more sustainable than traditional alternatives." Following several years of technology development and validation, the company is now entering a new phase focused on commercial deployment and scaling. First commercial orders are expected to be signed shortly, while the sales pipeline continues to strengthen across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The company has recently strengthened its leadership team by appointing Matthias Riehle, former Chairman and CEO of Nestlé Waters Middle East and Asia, as Working Chairman. Given ongoing commercial discussions across multiple markets, Wayout believes it is well-positioned to accelerate the global deployment of its platform. According to Rodrigo Verduzco, Deputy CEO, Wayout International: “As we enter this next phase, our focus is on building the partnerships and market presence required to accelerate deployment at scale. We believe Wayout is uniquely positioned to become a defining infrastructure platform for the future of drinking water, and this oversubscribed round is a strong validation of our vision, our team and the trust our investors and partners have placed in us.” The proceeds will support Wayout's transition from technology development to commercial deployment, including executing its first commercial projects, continuing the platform's industrialisation, expanding strategic partnerships, and accelerating international market activities.

Barcelona-based Kalipso, a regulatory technology platform built by lawyers and engineers to help organisations operationalise regulatory change, has raised $3.2 million in funding. The round was backed by Varsity, Lanai, Plug and Play, Kima Ventures and Vento. As regulatory obligations grow, organisations face increasing challenges in translating legal requirements into operational processes. In many cases, these workflows remain fragmented across disconnected tools and manual processes. Kalipso aims to address this challenge through a unified platform that operationalises regulatory change. It continuously analyses regulatory developments, identifies which obligations apply to each organisation, highlights gaps in existing compliance frameworks and generates implementation-ready recommendations with full source traceability. By bringing regulatory monitoring, remediation, ownership and audit workflows into a single environment, the platform enables legal and compliance teams to move from reactive compliance management to continuous regulatory oversight. Complementing the core platform is Kalipso Regulatory Radar, the company's real-time regulatory intelligence layer. It provides global coverage across the entire regulatory lifecycle, from early-stage legislative proposals and consultation papers to final rules, supervisory guidance and interpretive updates. Using agentic relevance matching, it prioritises developments based on each organisation's business model, jurisdictional exposure and operational footprint. Kalipso already works with organisations including Groupe Caisse des Dépôts in France and Alma, and is seeing growing demand from enterprise legal and compliance teams operating across multiple jurisdictions. The growing demand comes as organisations navigate an increasingly demanding regulatory environment, particularly in Europe, where the European Commission's regulatory agenda is placing greater operational pressure on legal and compliance teams. Virginia Debernardi, co-founder and COO of Kalipso, said many compliance teams still rely on fragmented collections of disconnected tools to manage regulatory change. She said the company was built to bring regulatory interpretation, policy implementation and compliance controls together within a single platform. Teams don't need another alert feed or another long report. They need infrastructure that turns regulation into action, and the peace of mind of knowing they are compliant. Pierre Ferran, co-founder and CEO of Kalipso, said his experience working across legal and engineering roles highlighted the gap between interpreting regulations and implementing them. He said Kalipso was built to combine both disciplines in a single platform that helps organisations put regulatory requirements into practice. The funding will support Kalipso's international expansion and team growth as demand for regulatory technology continues to increase. Looking ahead, Kalipso plans to expand its team throughout 2026 while strengthening its presence across key international markets, including the UK, France, Spain, Italy and the Benelux region.

Berlin-based manufacturing intelligence company Almetra, formerly known as Deltia, has raised €16.3 million in a Series A funding round led by blisce/, with participation from NAP, Merantix Capital, Robin Capital, Underline, Critical Ventures and a group of business angels. Manufacturers are facing growing pressure from labour shortages, rising costs and intensifying competition, while many factories still rely on manual observation and fragmented systems that make it difficult to identify inefficiencies and improve productivity. Almetra addresses this challenge with a platform that combines video, machine data, IT systems and operator knowledge into a single source of operational intelligence. AI-powered cameras installed above production lines process video locally, converting it into structured production data such as cycle times, output rates and equipment utilisation, without requiring IT integration. Maximilian Fischer, co-founder and CEO of Almetra, said many manufacturers know they are losing production capacity but lack the visibility to understand where inefficiencies occur. He said the platform helps factories identify optimisation opportunities within weeks, enabling teams to make decisions based on operational data rather than guesswork. Worker privacy is built into the platform. Video footage is anonymised, most data remains on-site, and only short, randomised snippets are retained for root-cause analysis. The company's proprietary models are trained for industrial production environments and adapt to each customer's manufacturing processes. The funding will support product development, the company's expansion into the US and the continued development of Almetra's platform into a comprehensive intelligence and automation layer for the shopfloor. Looking ahead, Almetra plans to expand its automation capabilities, including robotics applications in selected production environments.

Compri, a Milan-based startup developing AI-powered procurement software for industrial companies, has raised €3.2 million in a seed funding round led by Picus Capital, bringing its total funding to more than €5 million. The round also included participation from Shapers, Italian Founders Fund, DFF Ventures, and a group of private investors. Procurement remains one of the least digitised functions in industry, with many companies still relying on email, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems to manage suppliers, purchasing processes, and operational workflows. The lack of integration often leads to inefficiencies, limited visibility over spending, and increased operational costs. While the challenge is particularly pronounced among Europe’s manufacturing sector, the opportunity extends across thousands of industrial businesses that continue to operate with largely manual procurement processes. Founded in Milan in 2024 by Edoardo Arbizzi and Edoardo Gava, Compri aims to address this challenge through an AI-powered platform designed to operate as a digital workforce within procurement and supply chain teams. The company’s technology centralises data from ERP systems, emails, spreadsheets, PDFs, and external databases, enabling AI agents to automate tasks such as supplier follow-ups, document collection, compliance monitoring, and order confirmation checks. The platform combines large language models with procurement-specific training data to improve performance and accuracy over time. By automating repetitive administrative work and consolidating fragmented information, Compri enables teams to focus on higher-value activities such as supplier negotiations, strategic sourcing, and cost optimisation. The company says its platform is already used by more than 40 customers, helping procurement teams reduce operational workloads while improving visibility and control over spending. The new funding will support further product development, team growth, and expansion into key industrial markets across Europe and beyond.

Düsseldorf-based Wakeline, a deeptech startup developing continuously adaptive AI systems, has raised €2.1 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Aachen-based TechVision Fonds (TVF), with participation from Cologne-based venture capital firm neoteq ventures. Founded in 2025 by Tim Gülke, Jan Böggering, Simon Sprünker and Merten Tiedemann, Wakeline is building AI systems that learn during live operation rather than relying solely on historical data and periodic retraining. The company is developing an architecture designed to enable AI systems to continuously learn and adapt while they are being used. Most AI models today are trained on historical datasets, deployed, and then updated at fixed intervals. While this approach has driven significant advances in the field, it also means that models are unable to learn autonomously from new information as it becomes available. Wakeline’s technology seeks to overcome this limitation by integrating learning and deployment into a single, continuous process, allowing systems to remain connected to and adapt to their operating environment in real time. The company’s architecture is inspired by biological learning principles and has been designed to operate independently of proprietary AI models and hyperscale cloud infrastructure. According to Wakeline, this enables AI systems to respond more effectively to changing conditions while maintaining greater technological independence. The new funding will be used to further develop the platform, accelerate go-to-market activities, and expand the company’s team as it advances its technology across multiple industries.

Fortech Ventures announces the launch of a €34 million investment fund and its transition to a new public identity, Nucleo Ventures.   Developed in partnership with the North-West Regional Development Agency (ADR Nord-Vest), the fund will invest in startups and innovative companies across Romania and Central and Eastern Europe, with the goal of supporting a new generation of internationally scalable businesses and strengthening Romania’s North-West Region as a destination for entrepreneurs, investment, and technology talent. The fund, which benefits from a €23.5 million institutional commitment from ADR Nord-Vest, complemented by private capital and contributions from the management team, will support startups and innovative companies at various stages of development, from early-stage ventures to SMEs with international scaling potential. Through its investment strategy, Nucleo Ventures aims to finance 46 companies over the next four years, contributing to the development of a new generation of businesses built in Romania for global markets. The choice of the North-West Region, which includes the counties of Cluj, Bihor, Maramureș, Satu Mare, Bistrița-Năsăud, and Sălaj, as the focal point of the fund’s investment strategy is no coincidence. The region is home to some of Romania’s strongest universities and technology communities and is already recognised for its thriving IT sector and its ability to generate companies with international growth potential. In addition to supporting local businesses, the fund aims to attract entrepreneurs, startups, and innovative companies from other parts of Romania and from Central and South-Eastern Europe that are looking to use Romania and the North-West Region as a base for developing and expanding their operations. In addition to its venture capital investments, Nucleo Ventures will provide a dedicated €1.7 million grant facility designed to support the validation of early-stage ideas and technologies.  According to  Valentin Filip, Managing Partner at Nucleo Ventures, Romania and Central and Eastern Europe have exceptional technical talent, yet many founders continue to face a shortage of the early-stage capital needed to grow their businesses.  “Through this fund, we aim to help bridge that gap and support the creation of companies capable of competing globally. We want the North-West Region to become a natural destination for entrepreneurs seeking access to funding, talent, and growth opportunities in international markets.”  Beyond financing, portfolio companies will gain access to mentoring, recruitment support, commercial strategy development, international expansion expertise, preparation for future fundraising rounds, and connections to strategic partners.  To support these goals, Nucleo Ventures is building a regional collaboration network together with organisations such as Rubik Hub, Make IT in Oradea, LevelUP, and other key ecosystem players.