European tech activity in March 2026 eased slightly compared to February, while overall market conditions remained stable. The ecosystem recorded 292 funding deals and €7.5 billion raised, down marginally from 296 deals and €7.8 billion in February, reflecting declines of 1.4 per cent and 3.8 per cent respectively. At the country level, a more significant shift was observed. UK funding fell to €2.6 billion from €3.8 billion in February, a 31.6 per cent decrease, indicating lower capital concentration month-on-month. Sector trends also evolved, with AI leading in March at €1.8 billion, compared to transportation in February at €1.5 billion, signalling a rotation of capital toward artificial intelligence and related technologies. Tech.eu’s Cate Lawrence commented on the March numbers within the European tech investment landscape in our March Tech.eu Pulse, a compact version of the monthly report: European tech in March 2026 looked less like a market pulling back and more like one settling into a new rhythm. AI (albeit ubiquitous across sectors) attracted €1.8 billion and is overtaking other sectors as the primary destination for capital. At the same time, large rounds continue to account for a disproportionate share of total funding, pointing to sustained conviction in companies building core infrastructure, from compute to platforms that underpin entire industries. There are also some notable geographic shifts. The UK remains the dominant market despite a sharp drop in funding, while France, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands continue to form the backbone of European dealmaking. Beyond these, a broader mix of countries is starting to appear more consistently, suggesting the ecosystem is widening rather than further concentrating. For her more detailed review and more in-depth analyses of the European tech ecosystem, including industry and country performance, exit activities, and more, check out our March report. Here are the 10 largest tech deals in Europe from March, accounting for 62.7 per cent of the month’s total funding. Amount raised: $2B Nscale is a London-based AI infrastructure company that builds and operates vertically integrated GPU cloud platforms, combining data centres, high-performance computing, and software to enable large-scale AI model development, training, and deployment. It provides enterprises and governments with scalable, energy-efficient compute capacity and end-to-end tools designed to support the growing demands of advanced AI systems. In March, Nscale raised $2 billion in a Series C funding round, valuing the company at $14.6 billion. Amount raised: $1B AMI (Advanced Machine Intelligence) is a frontier AI research lab developing a new class of systems that understand and interact with the real world. It focuses on building “world models”, AI that can reason, plan, and operate safely across complex physical environments, with applications in areas such as robotics, healthcare, and industrial systems. Founded by a global team of leading researchers and engineers, the company aims to advance reliable, controllable AI and enable real-world intelligence beyond traditional language-based models. AMI raised more than $1 billion in what it describes as Europe’s largest-ever seed funding round. Amount raised: $830M Mistral AI is a Paris-based AI company founded in 2023 that develops high-performance, open-weight large language models and enterprise AI systems, enabling organisations to build, customise, and deploy advanced generative AI and autonomous agents. The company focuses on combining strong model performance with openness and efficiency, offering scalable AI solutions for both developers and large enterprises. Mistral secured $830 million in debt financing to acquire Nvidia chips for its initial data centre. Amount raised: $550M Legora is a Sweden-based legal AI company developing a collaborative workspace that helps lawyers automate tasks such as document review, research, and drafting, integrating both public and proprietary data to streamline legal workflows and improve productivity. The platform is designed to support legal professionals across law firms and in-house teams, enhancing efficiency while maintaining accuracy and control over complex legal processes. Legora raised $550 million in Series D at a $5.55 billion valuation to accelerate US expansion. Amount raised: $225M Kandou is a fabless semiconductor company that develops high-speed, energy-efficient chip-to-chip connectivity solutions used in advanced computing and data infrastructure. Its technology focuses on enabling scalable, cost-efficient AI and data centre systems by improving how processors, memory, and networks communicate, helping reduce power consumption while increasing performance. Kandou AI closed a $225 million Series A round to break memory bottlenecks in AI. Amount raised: €180M PLD Space is an aerospace company that designs, manufactures, and operates reusable rockets to provide reliable and cost-effective launch services for small satellites. Founded in 2011, the company develops its MIURA family of launch vehicles to enable flexible access to space, positioning itself as a key player in Europe’s emerging commercial space sector. PLD Space raised €180 million in Series C equity funding to scale satellite launch infrastructure. Amount raised: $170M 9fin is a fintech company that provides an AI-powered data and analytics platform for debt capital markets, combining real-time news, financial data, and predictive insights to help credit professionals analyse deals and make faster, more informed decisions. The platform is used by investment banks, asset managers, and law firms to streamline workflows and improve transparency across leveraged finance and credit markets. 9fin raised $170 million, reaching a $1.3 billion valuation. Amount raised: $150M Wonderful is an enterprise AI agent platform that enables organisations to build, deploy, and manage AI agents across customer-facing and internal workflows, helping integrate AI directly into core business operations. The platform provides a unified infrastructure for creating, monitoring, and optimising agents at scale, supporting complex, multilingual, and compliance-driven environments across global markets. Wonderful received a $150 million in a Series B funding round, reaching a valuation of $2 billion. Amount raised: €113.8M Iron Fuel Technology (developed by RIFT) is a cleantech energy solution that uses iron powder as a circular, carbon-free fuel to generate high-temperature heat for industrial processes and district heating. The system works like a rechargeable energy carrier: iron powder is burned to produce heat without CO₂ emissions, leaving iron oxide that is then regenerated using hydrogen and reused, enabling a closed-loop, scalable alternative to fossil fuels. RIFT has secured €113.8 million in combined financing (Series B and EU grant) to advance its Iron Fuel Technology from pilot projects to commercial deployment and to develop its first commercial production facility. Amount raised: $125M Upvest is a fintech infrastructure company that provides banks, brokers, and fintechs with a unified, API-based platform to build and scale investment products, including trading, custody, and back-office services. Its technology enables businesses to offer seamless, cross-border investment experiences, such as stock and ETF trading, savings plans, and fractional investing, while handling the underlying regulatory and operational complexity. Upvest secured a $125 million financing round to support the modernisation of legacy banking systems across Europe and the UK.

Handhold, an AI-agent platform that turns visitors into customers without sales reps, has raised €3 million Seed funding led by Entourage Capital, with participation from Inovia Capital and e2vc. Angel investors include: Markus Villig (founder of Bolt), Ott Kaukver (former CTO of Twilio), Harsh Sinha (CTO of Wise), and  Janer Gorohhov (founder of Veriff). Software buyers are more informed than ever and expect instant, personalised support. However, in reality, they often face unnecessary demo calls, generic onboarding flows and multiple handovers. When selling software, companies choose between product-led and sales-led motions. The choice comes down to setup complexity, product depth and price point. But when the factors don't align, neither approach works cleanly: product-led growth leads to low activation and high churn, while giving a dedicated sales rep to every SMB account isn't economically viable. Handhold automates the inbound customer journey, from first interaction to renewal, using AI account managers that qualify leads, run demos, and activate users around the clock. I spoke to Georg Vooglaid, co-founder and CEO of Handhold, to learn more. Why high-touch account management doesn’t work for most customers Originally from Estonia, Handhold co-founder and CEO Georg Vooglaid started his career at TransferWise, then moved to London to study and later joined Seedcamp. ​ But while advising founders, he realised he wanted operating experience of his own. He found it at identity verification company Passbase, where he worked across the revenue organisation as the business scaled across New York and Berlin. There, he built close relationships with the company’s largest clients and supported them from validation through retention and upsell. The model proved effective, but only for the top few accounts where the economics justified that level of personal attention. ​ He explained: “With our biggest client, I was available on WhatsApp 24/7. If we could’ve, we would’ve liked to give that level of attention to every customer, but there was no way we could afford to staff it.” ​ After leaving Passbase, Vooglaid reunited with his now co-founder to build a compensation benchmarking side project, which they later sold. ​ In May 2023, they launched what would become Handhold, initially as a conversation intelligence tool used by companies including Superhuman, Moss, and Katana. But after running into the limits of long sales cycles and relatively low pricing, they pivoted in late 2024. ​ The result was Handhold’s current product, shaped by customer feedback and his earlier experience. Turning every prospect into a managed account According to Vooglaid: “With AI agents, we can now replicate that one-to-one experience at scale because the economics work. You can give a ten-person startup a personal account manager that works around the clock, in any language, without actually growing headcount.” Each prospect or customer is assigned an AI account manager who validates use cases, runs demos, supports onboarding, and manages the relationship over time. From funnel to full lifecycle Handhold aims to manage the full customer lifecycle — from first website visit through activation, retention, and expansion. With Handhold’s agents taking care of advancing the top of the funnel and closing smaller clients, sales teams can fully focus on building relationships with mid-market and enterprise accounts. The buyer feels like they’re dealing with the same account manager, but behind the scenes, three agents actually split the work: ​ One handles text Q&A and lead qualification, Another runs voice demos tailored to the prospect, A third sits inside the product to tailor activation paths for new users. While you don’t have to use all three agents, context carries between them, and each following agent adapts to what the previous one has already discovered. Vooglaid explained: “We approach it from the customer journey. What does the user actually need at each step? If you have a quick question, text works best. If you want a deeper understanding, a demo agent works better. During onboarding, the agent might sit inside the product and guide you directly in the UI. From the user’s perspective, it’s always the same agent — in our case, “Holly” — but the form adapts to the context. The agent is there when needed and invisible when not.” Vooglaid contends, “If we can price based on the number of customers we manage end-to-end, that’s a strong signal that we’re delivering real value. It means we’re not just improving one part of the funnel, but actually driving outcomes across the entire journey.” This experience shaped his view on a broader problem: What human–AI interaction really looks like in practice I was interested in learning how people interact with AI agents. Vooglaid notes that people are initially very direct with agents — almost testing them. “Only once the agent proves itself does the interaction become more conversational.” Second, attention is critical. “You have five to ten seconds to engage someone — there are no social norms keeping them in the interaction. Third, active listening matters more than we expected. Giving users space to process and respond significantly improves the experience.” And finally, personalisation is powerful, but risky. He contends that good personalisation can close a deal, but if you get it wrong and make incorrect assumptions, it can completely break trust. Vooglaid explained that Handhold started at the top of the funnel — pre-sales, which enables the team to gather context early. “For example, if a user interacts with a Q&A agent first, that context carries into the demo. The demo is then tailored to what they’ve already asked. As we expand deeper into the journey, that context compounds. At the same time, users become familiar with the agent, which builds trust. So when the agent appears later inside the product, it doesn’t feel intrusive.” More agents, but one winner: the account manager layer ​ Agentic sales agents and tools are likely to become more commonplace, even with large players like Salesforce, which acquired Qualified. Vooglaid sees the real competitive battleground in building a persistent AI account manager that supports customers across the entire journey. “We’re particularly focused on SMB segments, where traditional sales models are harder to scale economically. That’s where this approach delivers the most value.” The core benefit for customers is conversion and efficiency. Vooglaid explained: “Some companies use us to handle inbound volume they can’t manage manually. Others use us for lower-priced segments where it doesn’t make sense to allocate a salesperson.” Handhold also sees strong demand from companies operating across time zones — the agent can handle traffic outside working hours. Ultimately, the goal is to convert more visitors into customers without compromising the experience. Where AI agents work today and gain the most traction Handhold soft-launched in September 2025 and grew to a strong six-figure ARR run rate by year-end. The platform is working with more than 15 customers, who are seeing strong early results. For instance, workforce management company Parim reported a 60 per cent reduction in bad-fit demos alongside double-digit month-over-month growth in sales-qualified leads since deploying Handhold. Vooglaid admits much of this is still trial and error. One advantage, however, is access to large volumes of sales call recordings and transcripts. “From those, we can extract best practices — how to handle objections, how to structure demos — and use that to improve the agent’s performance.” In terms of customer response, while people are already familiar with agentic Q&A and onboarding, the demo agent is more novel. Vooglaid admits that early on, there was concern around quality and whether the experience would feel polished enough. “We’re now seeing more success with 'reverse demos,' where customers experience the agent themselves first. Once they see it working well, they’re much more open to deploying it.” As for the hardest parts of the customer journey to get right, Vooglaid points to qualification and routing, detailing: “If companies position the agent as a core part of their brand experience, the quality bar is much higher." "They need it to perform really well. If the alternative is to enter new markets or cover gaps in availability, companies are more flexible. So a lot of this comes down to brand risk and how central the agent is to the customer experience.” From human sellers to hybrid sales models As for job displacement, Vooglaid asserts that Handhold is not directly replacing roles today. Instead, he sees that companies want their sales teams focused on mid-market and enterprise customers. “We help handle the lower-value segment more efficiently. For example, one UK customer reduced low-quality demo bookings by 60 per cent. That didn’t reduce headcount — it allowed their team to focus on higher-value opportunities.” Looking ahead, Vooglaid believes tools like his are fundamentally changing how software is bought and sold. AI enables more personalised, scalable interactions, which opens up new business models. It also shortens the sales cycle. “We may even move toward a world where agents are buying software on behalf of users, or where some purchases become nearly instant. Exactly how this evolves is still unclear, but the direction is toward faster, more efficient buying.” Handhold is already exploring use cases beyond SaaS, with clear applications across many industries. For example, the startup is piloting with a telecom company the use of agents to guide users through installing a Wi-Fi router. You scan a QR code, and the agent walks you through the setup step by step. According to Pieterjan Bouten, Partner at Entourage Capital, AI agents are fundamentally changing how we buy software. “From enabling new motions to becoming buyers themselves, Georg and Uku are building a system that opens up completely new business models and helps companies validate what’s working about their sales motion and what their customers need. The early traction is a sign that they're on to something, and we’re excited to help them redefine how software gets sold in the future.” The funding will accelerate go-to-market efforts and expand Handhold’s ability to move from converting leads to managing entire customer bases.

Verne today announced the launch of Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service, starting in Zagreb, Croatia. Beginning today, members of the public can now book and pay for a Pony.ai-powered autonomous ride through the Verne app. The service will soon also be available through the Uber app, following a recently announced strategic partnership between the three companies. The commercial service is the result of several years of development and close collaboration with regulators, positioning Verne among the leaders of autonomous mobility in Europe. “For the first time in Europe, there is a real commercial robotaxi service. People can use it and take real autonomous rides,” said Marko Pejković, co-founder and CEO of Verne. “We said we would launch in Zagreb in 2026. Today, we did. This is just the start.” Start of service in Zagreb The initial commercial deployment will use electric vehicles equipped with Pony.ai’s seventh-generation autonomous driving system. These vehicles ​will ​operate autonomously, with trained autonomous vehicle operators onboard during the early phase of the rollout. The initial service zone covers key districts of the Croatian capital, with plans to expand coverage across the city. The companies aim to transition to fully driverless operations as soon as possible, subject to regulatory approvals and the service meeting the required safety and reliability standards. From Zagreb and beyond Verne has begun permitting discussions with 11 cities across the EU, UK, and the Middle East, with more than 30 additional cities currently under consideration. Verne​​ ​​ will also eventually deploy the company’s purpose-built autonomous vehicle, a two-seat robotaxi designed specifically for driverless ride-hailing. From EasyMile to Einride, and now Verne: Europe’s autonomy stack evolves Image: EasyMile. Verne marks a shift from earlier paths to vehicle autonomy in Europe. Until now, one of the region’s most prominent players has been the French company EasyMile, which was the first to offer a fully driverless L4 autonomous shuttle, the 12-seater EZ10, across locations such as business parks, campuses, and commercial roads. EasyMile operates throughout Europe, including autonomous shuttles operational on public roads in Bad Birnbach, Monheim am Rhein, and Munich in Germany, as well as Toulouse, France. Earlier this year, the company announced a strategic pivot to heavy-duty applications for airports and industrial sites. The company is focusing on software licences for these markets, where it considers autonomy is commercially viable today, with growing deployments and a clear path to scale for heavy-duty vehicles that transport parts, goods, baggage, cargo etc. on airports and industrial sites. In parallel, German autonomous trucking company Fernride develops human-supervised autonomous trucking systems used in container terminals, industrial yards and defence logistics, retrofitting existing vehicles with AI, sensors and software to automate repetitive transport tasks. Its technology has already been deployed in real-world operations and, in 2025, it became the first company to receive TÜV approval for autonomous trucks in Europe. The company was acquired by Quantum Systems in late 2025 as part of a broader push to build a multi-domain autonomy stack spanning air and ground systems. Image: Einride. Meanwhile, Swedish-founded Einride deploys electric fleets and its driverless “Pod” vehicles, which can operate autonomously or be remotely controlled by human operators when needed. Alongside its hardware, the company runs a digital platform that plans routes, manages charging, and optimises deliveries, positioning itself less as a truck manufacturer and more as a software-driven freight operator. Already working with companies like Maersk and Oatly, Einride is part of a broader shift toward cleaner, more automated, and data-driven supply chains. In September last year, Einride completed the first successful European cross-border operation of a cableless electric autonomous vehicle without a human driver onboard. Against these efforts, in January, US company Waymo announced its intention to launch a fully driverless ride-hailing service in London by the fourth quarter of 2026. The company will soon begin conducting extensive trials of Waymo’s technology as part of our mapping and safety validation work across select boroughs in London. Testing hours typically run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to ensure its technology can safely handle all of London’s road conditions. Teledriving as an alternative path In commercial passenger transport, Estonia’s Elmo and Germany-founded Vay pioneered a different approach to vehicle automation, using teledriving to bring vehicles to users before switching to manual control for the trip itself. Using an app, users can request the delivery of an electric vehicle to their location. After the car arrives, the user takes over and drives it like a regular car.  At the end of the trip, the user ends the rental in the app, exits the car, and a remote driver takes over, eliminating the time-consuming search for parking.  Combined, these approaches highlight a fragmented but interconnected approach to vehicle automation in European mobility, which straddles controlled environments and industrial use cases against complex urban settings.

AI leads investment, with the UK and France dominating fundraising despite a marginal month-on-month dip.Click to read the rest of the news.

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Eilla AI has completed Europe’s first M&A deal executed by an AI-native advisory firm, advising on the acquisition of two Central and Eastern European digital marketing agencies, CreateX and Native Digital, by Swedish listed company White Pearl Technology Group. Its proprietary technology, built in-house over three years, combines AI infrastructure with experienced M&A advisors who oversee AI-generated work, manage transaction processes, and coordinate communication between both sides. I spoke to Petar Petrov, Chief Commercial Officer and co-founder of Eilla AI, to learn more. A shift driven by a lagging industry and an underserved market Eilla AI was founded in 2022. Initially, it was selling AI tools to the M&A industry. Over the past year its spoken to more than a thousand M&A firms and private equity funds. According to Petrov, two things became clear. First, the M&A industry is quite behind in terms of AI adoption — “even large boutiques were only just integrating tools like ChatGPT internally,” he shared. Second, the SMB segment is underserved. The team decided to combine the AI it has built with the expertise of experienced advisors. According to Petrov: “We partnered with our Head of M&A, Dmitry, a senior investment banker with over 13 years of experience at firms like Jefferies and Citibank.” Eilla AI’s customer is typically the founder or owner of an SMB business looking to sell.  What “AI-native advisory” means in practice Eilla AI’s technology enables it to reach hundreds of high-fit buyers across multiple countries within days, each with messaging built on in-depth research into what makes the acquisition compelling for that specific buyer.  Eilla AI runs a structured process similar to what top-tier investment banks use, but applied to the SMB market. The AI handles large parts of the workflow, but humans step in where full automation isn’t yet reliable — especially for customisation and judgement. First is preparation. It identifies a broad universe of potential buyers — often larger in SMB deals, where smaller companies attract a wider range of acquirers. “We use AI to identify these buyers. Eilla has built a large proprietary database with detailed information on companies, and uses AI to identify the right buyers from that database based on similar deals and synergies,” explained Petrov. Eilla uses its AI automations to build key materials, including the confidential information memorandum (CIM), the core document used to present the business to potential buyers.  “Traditionally, this process can take one to two months. We can do it in a few days.” Next is outreach. While the company utilises its existing relationships, it also deploys highly personalised outreach to new buyers. It built a database of around nine million companies, tracking their products, tech, and other signals. This enables it to send highly tailored messages at scale, resulting in higher response rates. “The goal is to create competitive tension — ideally by arranging five to ten meetings,” explained Petrov. Buyers then submit non-binding offers, which are reviewed with the client before moving into due diligence. Due diligence is usually the longest stage — one to two months — and depends on multiple parties. Where AI stops, and judgment begins Petrov emphasised that humans remain in the loop, particularly in judgment-heavy tasks such as responding to buyers. While AI drafts outputs based on available data, all materials are reviewed by humans and given final approval. “These are judgment calls — what to include, what to emphasise. AI can assist, but humans make the final decision.” Eilla AI is already seeing early traction in both deal speed and buyer reach. One recent transaction moved from outreach to non-binding offers in around 15 days, with the full process completing within a few months — despite involving multiple companies, shareholders, and a non-obvious buyer. According to Petrov:  “It was a complex deal — multiple companies, multiple shareholders, and a buyer that wouldn’t normally be identified through traditional relationships.” Rather than relying on existing networks, the firm identified the buyer through pattern matching at speed against previous acquisitions, surfacing a publicly listed Swedish company that would likely have been missed in a traditional process. Nikola Lazarov, CEO and co-founder, contends that this pace and depth would be impossible to replicate without the infrastructure it has built.  “Our work with CreateX and Native Digital is not just proof of concept. It is a completed deal.” The founders of both acquired companies credited Eilla AI with making the transactions possible. “Honestly, without Eilla, this deal would not have happened,” said Aleksandar, founder and CEO of CreateX. The reaction from Native Digital was similar. Early traction across deal speed and buyer reach Adoption of AI in M&A is still in its early stages, particularly in a sector long defined by relationships and traditional processes. For Eilla AI, client response tends to fall into two distinct categories, according to Petrov. The majority of its clients come through its automated sourcing using AI rather than referral.  “They typically need to see the technology — once they do, the reaction is generally very positive.” Some clients come through referrals and already understand the process.  “For them, we demonstrate how we’re different.“ While M&A remains relationship-driven, Petrov argues that this model has clear limitations, particularly in the lower and mid-market segments. “Relationships only take you so far. A typical advisor might know 10–20 relevant buyers. In SMB deals, the real buyer universe is much larger.” Instead of relying on a narrow pool of known acquirers, Eilla AI’s approach is designed to expand buyer discovery and increase competitive pressure within deals. “We focus on creating competitive tension, rather than running bilateral processes with just one buyer. That’s a key advantage.”  Eilla AI’s models are probabilistic, and the system does not rely on generic model outputs or training data alone. Instead, it works with structured context provided by the client, combined with data extracted from proprietary databases and licensed external sources — including a dataset built from tens of millions of scraped pages covering around nine million companies. Petrov explained: “Importantly, everything is reviewed by humans, and critical information is validated with the client. The goal is not to replace people, but to make one person as effective as a much larger team.” When software becomes the service Eilla AI’s model reflects a broader shift already underway in the US. Firms including General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Sequoia, a16z, YC, Blackstone and others have converged on a shared thesis: the next generation of category-defining companies won’t sell software to professional services firms — they will become them. Across legal, accounting, insurance and consulting, over a billion dollars has been deployed into companies that own the outcome rather than sell the tool. General Catalyst committed $1.5 billion to acquiring traditional service businesses and rebuilding them with AI. Sequoia and a16z co-led $108 million into Rillet, an AI-native accounting firm. Emergence Capital led a $47 million round into Harper, an AI-native insurance brokerage. Lawhive, an AI-native law firm, raised $60 million on the back of 7x year-on-year revenue growth.  Sequoia partner Julien Bek crystallised the thesis in a widely circulated essay earlier this month titled “Services: The New Software.” His core argument: for every dollar spent on software, six dollars are spent on services. He contends that the next trillion-dollar company, he wrote, will be a software company masquerading as a services firm. Scaling M&A for the long tail of businesses The deal executed by Eilla AI arrives at a moment of acute structural pressure on the European M&A market. The European Commission estimates that a third of EU entrepreneurs will exit their businesses over the coming decade, putting roughly seven million businesses and 30 million jobs at risk.  In Germany alone, 626,000 businesses plan to transfer ownership by 2027. Traditional boutique advisory firms cannot economically serve the vast majority of these transactions. A proper sell-side process requires hundreds of hours of work, and for deals below a certain size, the fees do not cover the cost of running that process properly. The result is a market where most business owners either cannot access quality advisory or receive a diminished version of it. Eilla AI’s cost structure is fundamentally different. Because AI handles the volume-intensive work, buyer sourcing, outreach and document creation, the firm operates on a success-fee-only basis with no retainers.  A model already proving out globally The pattern has a precedent. In Japan, Shunsaku Sagami built M&A Research Institute to address a similar succession crisis, using AI to compress deal timelines from over 12 months to an average of 6.2 months. The company is now publicly listed, and Sagami, at 33, became Japan’s youngest billionaire. In the United States, OffDeal raised $17 million to build an AI-native investment bank.  Eilla AI launched its advisory practice at the end of last year and now has around 20 active mandates, with a fee pipeline of approximately €20 million — up more than 15-fold from roughly €1.6 million at the start of the year. M&A advisory is inherently transactional, raising questions about how firms build sustainable businesses without recurring revenue. For Petrov, the answer lies in deal size, volume, and execution. Rather than relying on repeat subscriptions, the model is driven by the economics of individual transactions. “In our segment, average deal sizes are around €10–20 million, and we charge about a 5 per cent success fee. So a single deal might generate around €500,000.” Petrov argues that long-term strength comes not from recurring revenue, but from consistently generating and closing deals. “You don’t need recurring revenue to build a strong business — you need deal flow and execution.” AI plays a role not only in deal execution, but also in sourcing opportunities, while brand becomes increasingly important over time. Across its processes so far, Eilla AI reports that around 80 per cent of companies reach the stage of presenting to buyers, suggesting a higher level of early-stage engagement. “In one case, a company that previously secured one NDA with a traditional advisor reached nine NDAs using our process.” Although the M&A practice only launched at the end of last year, the company says momentum is building quickly as more deals move through the pipeline.  "We’re still early, but we’re already seeing strong momentum.”

A London-based startup which helps mitigate risks and vulnerabilities of businesses deploying so-called AI agents or AI tools that can complete specific tasks has emerged from stealth with a $13m seed round. The funding round in Trent AI was led by LocalGlobe and Cambridge Innovation Capital, with participation from leaders at OpenAI, Spotify, Databricks, and Amazon Web Services. The startup, founded in 2025, is tapping into the current trend of AI agent deployment, claiming its product is the first multi-agent security solution designed to secure agents as they evolve. AI agents and autonomous workflows introduce new security risks that traditional security tools were not designed to address, it says. Trent AI says its product secures AI agents with specialised AI security agents that continuously scan environments, judge risk, mitigate vulnerabilities, and evaluate overall security. The startup was founded by Eno Thereska (CEO), Neil Lawrence (chief scientist), and Zhenwen Dai (CTO), who are former Amazon/AWS and Spotify engineering leaders hailing from academia and research. Thereska said: “Organisations are deploying AI agents and autonomous workflows faster than their security can adapt, and most development teams using these agents and workflows have no security framework designed for their systems. “This is not an easy problem to solve. Trent AI is tackling these difficult and important problems, while building the necessary security foundations and frameworks for agentic systems now and through the next decade.” The startup pointed to Deloitte research showing nearly three in four (74 per cent) companies plan to deploy agentic AI within two years, but that only one in five (21 per cent) report having a mature model for governance of autonomous agents. Its product is built for developers and security teams that want to develop and ship agents fast without compromising security, it says. Companies with early access to its product include Canopy and Weblogic. Trent AI said: “These partners have reported: immediate visibility into their security posture, a security audit report, fast response time identifying and presenting vulnerabilities, a clean and well laid out remediation scope and adaptive feedback.” The seed funding will support continued development of Trent AI’s security agents, expansion of the engineering team and growth of the company’s design partner and customer bases, it said.

UK-based analytics startup WholeSum has brought its total Pre-Seed funding to $1.3 million, with an additional $335,000 new investment from Love Ventures, Beamline, and strategic angels, following its initial $965k raise led by Twin Path Ventures announced earlier this year. The round comes amid growing demand from enterprises in high-trust sectors, where organisations are increasingly finding that existing AI tools fail to deliver reliable, auditable insight from large volumes of text data. While most organisational data is unstructured, teams continue to struggle to analyse it at scale. In practice, many have turned to LLMs, only to encounter hallucinations, inconsistencies, and outputs that cannot be reproduced or defended – particularly in regulated environments such as healthcare, financial services, and defence. Founded by Emily Kucharski and Dr Adam Kucharski, WholeSum was born out of the founders’ frustration with existing AI tools while analysing large-scale qualitative datasets in a previous venture. The experience highlighted a systemic problem: organisations want to extract meaningful insight from qualitative data, but lack tools that are both scalable and scientifically defensible. “From talking to dozens of large organisations making high-stakes decisions, we’ve seen a clear pattern: teams are experimenting with AI for text analysis, but quickly hit a wall when outputs can’t be trusted or reproduced,” said Emily Kucharski, cofounder and CEO of WholeSum. “This funding allows us to move faster in building infrastructure for robust analysis at scale.” WholeSum addresses this gap with a hybrid AI and statistical inference platform that converts free-text data into uncertainty-aware, reproducible, and auditable insight. Designed as an API-first infrastructure layer, it integrates directly into existing analytics workflows, enabling organisations to extract nuanced signals and underlying drivers with the same rigour as numerical data. Since its initial raise, WholeSum has seen strong traction across enterprise organisations in high-trust sectors. Early work with universities, financial institutions and pharmaceutical companies has demonstrated that the most valuable early signals are often buried in unstructured text data rather than in lagged quantitative metrics. “Generic LLMs can’t deliver the consistent, reliable signals that high-trust industries need from unstructured data,” said Bill Corfield, Principal at Love Ventures.  “Emily and Adam are uniquely positioned to solve this, and we're delighted to be backing them as they scale across Pharmaceuticals, Financial Services and beyond.” The company is now rolling out pilots and enterprise integration for increasingly complex, large-scale datasets. The additional funding will be used for R&D, expanding the company’s world-class scientific and engineering teams, and scale enterprise deployments in sectors where methodological rigour is critical.

“All of us live in the dark most of the year, and we don’t have anything better to do than build,” says an organiser of one of a new wave of hacker houses which have cropped up in recent months across Scandinavia and the Baltics. This resurgence in hacker houses can be seen all across Europe. But across Scandinavia and the Baltics, the hacker house mentality, the esprit de corps, is particularly acute, given the relative smallness of the markets. Amid waning deal flow, particularly across the Baltics, investors see them as a quick-fire win to turbo-charge investment, while builders view them as a chance to showcase their talents. Latvia-based Shipyard, Estonia’s ruum, Lithuania’s Basedspace and Denmark-based Bifrost House are examples of the new breed to emerge. Hacker houses became popular in the early 2000s, particularly in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area startup ecosystem- in response to rising housing costs and the need for collaborative startup environments. They are now enjoying a resurgence, with a more explicit hacker house/ builder lab format. ruum Tallinn-based ruum is one of the new crop of hacker houses which launched last year. Helery Pops, ruum founder who is also a VC and angel investor, says ruum took inspiration from Basedspace, a neighbouring hacker space in Lithuania. Pops said: “When we started looking into it, it was like an avenue of green flags everywhere. There was really no reason not to do it.” The idea was to give free working space to builders just starting out in their careers, she says. Central to ruum's hacker house programme was a full-day hackathon, with 12 teams selected from 110 applicants, with the resulting progamme running for two and a half months. Pops said: “There have been many hackathons, there have been many accelerators, there are some that are still on-going in Estonia. But at this point, it seemed that the deal flow was not coming on as it had been maybe in the last five years. There was space for something new. People are seeing there is a problem with the early-stage companies. This just seems like a possibility to solve a little bit of it.” The programme was supported by €20,000 in funding, which came from Skaala, the family office of Skype alumni and Wise cofounder Taavet Hinrikus and his Skype colleague Sten Tamkiv, Startup Estonia, and a few angel investors.   The broader Estonian tech community helped out by offering their services for free. The winners, Bilt.me (a "Lovable" for mobile apps), a six-strong team with an average age of 21, were whisked off for a week in San Francisco. Pops says: “They work six days a week. If you are in the working space with them, and you start going home at 5pm, they are generally shocked. It is very cool to see how much energy and power they are putting into it.” Ruum might have started out as a hobby, but Pops said the future could see more programmes, with a slightly amended format. Shipyard Meanwhile, across the Baltics, in Latvia, another newish hacker house space is the AI-centred Shipyard. According to one of Shipyard’s founders, Marija Rucevska, who is also GP at a VC investing in the Baltics, Shipyard was created recognising the impact of AI on startups. Rucevska said: “This new movement is acknowledging that you can move a lot faster to market and understand if it’s worth building something longer term or maybe just something that you are building for yourself.” Like ruum, Shipyard’s admission programme was a 48-hour hackathon, with the programme then taking on 20 teams over three months, which is then whittled down further to a group of eight teams looking to get pre-seed funding. Part of the programme, designed to turn builders into founders who are building AI-native teams, demanded builders deliver weekly shipping cycles. “If you don’t deliver, you are out,” she says. She adds: “We want to cherish and nurture the building, energy and spirit and also witness some of those of new AI native founders.” Shipyard also helps Rucevska tap into her VC pipeline efforts, she said. She says: “We have really technically brilliant people here, a lot of very AI-savvy teams applying different types of tools.” On the broader emergence of hacker houses across the Baltics, she said: “That kind of comes from the fact that all of us live in the dark most of the year and we don’t have anything better to do than build.” She says the Baltics are also “very ecosystem driven” given the relative smallness of the countries, which means that individual countries are always rooting for each other. Bifrost House In Scandinavia, there is Copenhagen-based Bifrost House, which bills itself as “Copenhagen’s most ambitious startup community and co-working space”. It is a venture studio that builds startups from the ground up, with a hacker house mentality. Bifrost House raises capital, forms founding teams, and operates businesses across sectors, including defence technology, consumer goods, B2B SaaS, and financial data.  It is currently raising a €30m fund and has hitherto built 25 startups, with a mission to build 100 companies a year. Sophus Blom-Hanssen, who runs the operation, said there is nothing like Bifrost House in Europe, given the scale of its ambitions. He says: “The reason we are doing it, and the reason a lot of these type of spaces will emerge is that the whole modus operandi of a startup, of getting a startup to market quickly, that timeframe is compressing super-quickly. Both to build a product and the timeframe you are relevant in the market is also compressing.” On its fund, he said: "We look at what does the business case we are scoping around require from a funding perspective? And work together with the founder and entrepreneur to structure a cap table that works to actually reach the first or second milestone so that the business can raise more money." IMAGE: Bifrost House

Xoople, the data infrastructure company building a global system of record for physical change on Earth, has closed a $130 million Series B round. The round included investors such as Nazca Capital, MCH, CDTI (Government of Spain), Buenavista Equity Partners, and Endeavor Catalyst, bringing the company’s total funding to $225 million. Founded in 2019, Xoople has spent the past seven years developing its end-to-end system in stealth while building global partnerships to integrate its data into enterprise tools. The investment positions the company as one of the most well-capitalised players in its category, supported by a proprietary satellite-based system capable of generating high-precision, scientific-grade datasets. Xoople is now entering its commercial phase, with rollout beginning this quarter. As AI systems increasingly shift toward autonomous, agent-driven workflows, demand for reliable real-world data is expected to grow. Xoople’s platform provides this “ground-truth” layer, enabling applications across supply chain optimisation, infrastructure monitoring, insurance risk modelling, disaster response, and geopolitical analysis. The company refers to this infrastructure as the “Earth’s System of Record,” designed to connect digital systems with real-time physical-world intelligence. Every major computing era creates a new system of record; those that define that system become the economic centers of that era. CRMs gave companies a system of record for customers. Cloud platforms create systems of record for software and data. We are building the system of record for the physical world in the AI era with Xoople. After seven years developing our system in stealth, we are incredibly excited to begin commercialisation in Q2 and start scaling up that capability in the market, said Fabrizio Pirondini, CEO of Xoople. Early users include government agencies and Fortune 500 companies applying the platform to areas such as agricultural forecasting, urban planning, and scenario modelling. Xoople’s mission is to provide organisations with access to real-time physical-world intelligence, supporting the next generation of AI systems.

nFuse, an AI-powered B2B ordering platform that enables retailers and HoReCa operators to place orders through WhatsApp, Viber, and SMS using text, voice, or images, has raised $2 million in funding from Eleven Ventures and LAUNCHub. For the past decade, every major FMCG company has had the same idea: build a B2B eCommerce platform, get retailers to download it, and watch orders roll in digitally. The results have been almost universally disappointing. Adoption rates for B2B ordering apps in fragmented trade hover around 15 per cent. Implementation timelines stretch to 18 months. And the retailers these platforms were built to serve — millions of small shops, kiosks, and independent stores across emerging markets — largely ignore them. The lived experience that led to nFuse Stoyan Ivanov and Stefan Radov watched this pattern repeat for nearly 30 years combined at Coca-Cola, working across distribution, sales, and go-to-market operations. They didn't learn about fragmented trade from market research - they lived it, visiting thousands of small retailers and watching firsthand as digital initiatives repeatedly failed to gain traction. "We were the people being asked to make these B2B platforms work," Radov explains. "We sat in the meetings where adoption targets kept getting missed. We saw the gap between what headquarters wanted and what actually happened in the field. Eventually, we decided to build what we wished had existed." The digital gap in fragmented trade Fragmented trade - the network of independent retailers, small shops, and kiosks that dominate commerce in emerging markets - represents over $5 trillion in global value. And in regions like CESEE, Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, these outlets account for the majority of FMCG sales. They're not a niche. They're the market. Yet the industry's approach to digitising this channel has been remarkably consistent: build sophisticated B2B portals with product catalogues, order management, and analytics dashboards. Train sales reps to onboard retailers and wait for adoption. The waiting tends to last a while. "The fundamental assumption was wrong," says Stoyan Ivanov, nFuse co-founder and CEO. "The industry built and designed eB2B for headquarters - for the people who wanted dashboards and data. Not for the retailer standing behind a counter who just needs to reorder beer before the weekend rush." Industry analysts estimate 80–95 per cent of B2B eCommerce projects underperform or fail outright. The platforms work technically. They just don't work behaviourally. nFuse builds on how retailers actually communicate Ivanov and Radov’s insight came from watching what retailers actually did, not what platforms wanted them to do.  Across emerging markets, small retailers were already running their businesses through messaging apps — sending photos of empty shelves, handwritten notes on Viber or voice-messaging orders because typing was slower. nFuse is built on this observation. Retailers place orders via WhatsApp, Viber, or SMS using text, voice, or photos. No app to download, no login to remember, no interface to learn. A photo of an empty shelf becomes a confirmed order in seconds. “These retailers aren’t technology-averse,” says Stefan Radov, co-founder and COO.  "They're using technology constantly. Just not the technology we kept trying to give them. They don't want another app. They want to order the same way they message their family." nFuse hits 70 per cent where B2B platforms stall The numbers back the approach: while traditional B2B platforms struggle to reach 10–15 per cent adoption, nFuse reports 70 per cent+ adoption among enterprise clients. Revenue per outlet increases 15–30 per cent. Deployment takes eight weeks - not eighteen months. The economics shift too. Traditional B2B ordering - whether through sales reps, call centres, or underused portals - carries a high cost per transaction. nFuse drives cost per order targeting below $1, a 5x to 20x reduction that fundamentally changes the math on serving small, frequent-ordering retailers that were previously too expensive to reach efficiently. Early clients report ordering frequency jumping from monthly to weekly cycles. Retailers who previously waited for a sales rep visit now reorder whenever they need stock. For brands, this means increased volume, a direct channel to push more SKUs - including new launches - and faster feedback on what's moving. Outlets themselves are choosing nFuse as their primary ordering channel over portals, call centres, or waiting for a rep. The company is already working with category leaders across beverages, dairy, pet food, and wholesale distribution - validating the model across FMCG verticals, not just one category. According to Ivaylo Simov, Partner, Eleven Ventures, Stoyan and Stefan know the FMCG industry inside out and have set out an ambitious task to solve the broken model of B2B e-commerce solutions.  “Instead of asking retailers to change their behaviour, the advancements in AI have opened a new frontier of intelligent solutions that "speak" their language via the channels they usually use. This unlocks enormous opportunities for brands, as the tail of the market (i.e. all the fragmented hotels, small shops and restaurants) can now be served efficiently and at scale."   Rumen Iliev, Partner, LAUNCHub Ventures, shared that the B2B eCommerce graveyard is full of platforms that worked technically but failed commercially.  “Most portals force unnatural behaviour — buyers do not want to click through SKUs and quantities. nFuse makes ordering natural again via voice, text, or image, just like speaking or texting to a sales rep. With 30 years in distribution, the founders have seen exactly where adoption fails. We backed the insight as much as the product.”   The funding will accelerate nFuse's expansion across Europe, with plans to move into broader EMEA and American markets. But Ivanov sees the self-ordering flow as just the entry point. "Self-ordering is where we start because it's the most obvious pain point," he says. "But once you're the channel through which orders flow, you become the infrastructure for the entire relationship between brands and retailers. Trade marketing, promotions, inventory visibility, loyalty programs — it all runs through the same conversation." With the core model proven, nFuse sees payments and micro-lending as the next unlock: letting retailers pay through the same WhatsApp thread where they order, collapsing an entire workflow into one conversation. It's the same thesis applied to a bigger problem. Not "how do we build better apps?" but "how do we stop asking people to install them?" "The industry spent a decade trying to get retailers to come to us," says Ivanov. "We're just going to where they already are."

Last week, we tracked more than 60 tech funding deals worth over €1.2 billion, and over 5 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe.Click to read the rest of the news.

This week, we tracked more than 60 tech funding deals worth over €1.2 billion and over 5 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe. Alongside the week’s top funding rounds, we’ve highlighted key industry developments, as well as notable trends in European venture activity, investor moves and emerging sectors shaping the current funding landscape.  This week we shared the announcement of ? new speakers for the ?? Tech.eu Summit London 2026, taking place on 21–22 April at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London, featuring senior leaders, founders, and investors from leading organisations shaping technology across Europe and beyond. 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 ?? Mistral secures first debt raise of $830M to power its first data centre ?? 9fin raises $170M, reaching a $1.3B valuation ?? IQM secures €50M to accelerate global growth ??‍?? Noteworthy acquisitions and mergers ?? Online publishing company ZNEXT acquires a majority stake in Factanza Media, worth €5.1M ?? Afreshed acquires etepetete as food waste startups consolidate in DACH ?? Cafeyn acquires Readly’s non-Nordic operations to scale European press platform ?? Uber has acquired chauffeur-driven ride-hailing company Blacklane ? Interesting moves from investors ? Empirical Ventures secures £10M to back UK “venture scientists” building deeptech ? Ysios Capital launches InceptionBio, a €100M fund to boost the creation of biotechnology companies ? UK government-backed fund aimed at backing female founders reaches £130M first close ?️ In other (important) news ?? Estonia launches €10M push to cut business paperwork ? Building Europe’s deeptech backbone: Inside European Deeptech Week 2026 ? Nebius announces construction of one of Europe's largest data centres ? Recommended reads and listens ? The missing layer in Europe’s AI strategy: data ownership ?? From fragmented funding to growing maturity: the Italian tech ecosystem ? STV Group and Post-Quantum unveil quantum-safe drones ready for battlefield deployment ? Is university losing its edge? ELVTR bets on live, industry-led learning ? European tech startups to watch  ?? “Digital Brains” for experts as Pickmybrain raises $2.1M ?? Endform secures €1.5M for high-performance web testing tools ?? Test of Things raises €1.2M to automate cybersecurity testing for connected devices ?? Paparuda Studio lands €210,000 to launch Moldova’s next generation of game development talent

Wearable Robotics, an Italy-based company developing wearable robotics for neuromotor rehabilitation, has raised €5 million in a Series A funding round to support international expansion and product development. The round was led by CDP Venture Capital, with participation from MITO Technology, LIFTT, SIMEST, RoboIT, and Toscana Next, a co-investment fund managed by CDP Venture Capital. The company develops rehabilitation solutions that combine wearable robotics with augmented and virtual reality technologies, aiming to improve neuromotor recovery and support activities of daily living. Its flagship device, ALEX RS, is a bilateral upper-limb rehabilitation system with more than 50 units deployed internationally, forming the basis of the company’s current market position. Building on this foundation, Wearable Robotics is focused on expanding its product portfolio with modular and integrable robotic solutions that extend applications across additional rehabilitation areas. The company also plans to advance regulatory approvals in key markets, strengthen compliance processes, and accelerate the time-to-market of its technologies. At the same time, the company is working to expand its commercial capabilities and distribution network, with a focus on strengthening its presence both in existing markets and internationally. This includes the development of new partnerships and entry into key regions, particularly in North America. According to CEO Lucia Lencioni, the funding supports the company’s next phase of growth, with a focus on scaling operations, advancing product innovation, and expanding its global footprint: Our goal is to bring increasingly advanced and modular wearable robotics solutions, capable of generating a concrete impact along the entire rehabilitation continuum. The funding will be used to complete the company’s product portfolio, scale commercial development, and strengthen its competitive positioning across international markets.

Paris-based Omniscient, a decision intelligence platform for boards and senior executives, has raised $4.1 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Seedcamp, with participation from Drysdale, Plug and Play, MS&AD, Raise, Anamcara, and xdeck, alongside support from Bpifrance. As corporate reputation continues to represent a significant share of enterprise value, organisations face growing challenges from fragmented data sources, reactive workflows, and the limitations of manual monitoring. Founded by Arnaud d’Estienne and Mehdi Benseghir, both former McKinsey consultants, Omniscient aims to address these challenges by providing a unified intelligence layer for senior leadership. Its AI-driven platform aggregates and contextualises data from a wide range of sources, including media, social platforms, and internal systems, delivering real-time, actionable insights through a single interface. According to d’Estienne, a recurring pattern became evident across numerous engagements during his time at McKinsey. Organisations were sitting on vast amounts of data, but with no reliable way to turn it into decisions at the speed the market demands. The cost of that gap - in missed signals, missed opportunities, damaged reputations, and reactive crisis management - is enormous. Omniscient exists to close it. It gives executive teams the intelligence they need, and frees the operational teams around them to focus on what actually moves the needle, rather than manually chasing information. The C-suite deserves better than yesterday's news. At its core, the platform uses a network of specialised AI agents to analyse areas such as regulatory developments, supply chains, and competitive activity. Outputs are synthesised into concise, real-time briefings, enabling organisations to identify emerging risks and opportunities more efficiently. The system is designed to operate across multiple markets and languages, while continuously improving as it adapts to each organisation’s context. Omniscient is already working with global companies and is expanding its capabilities toward predictive and prescriptive analytics. The funding will be used to support engineering hires, further product development, and the expansion of commercial operations as the company scales its platform.

Generare, a Paris-based biotechnology company focused on generating molecular data for drug development, has raised €20 million in a Series A funding round. The round was co-led by Alven and Daphni, with participation from existing investors including Galion.exe, Teampact Ventures, and VIVES Partners. Drug discovery has historically been constrained to a relatively narrow chemical space, largely due to limited data availability beyond it. At the same time, microbial genomes contain a vast reservoir of molecular diversity developed over billions of years, much of which remains unexplored. Generare is focused on generating and characterising this previously inaccessible data at scale to make it usable for drug development. Founded in 2023 by Guillaume Vandenesch and Vincent Libis, the company is building a large-scale dataset of novel small molecules derived from microbial genomes. By decoding previously unexplored biological data, it aims to expand the chemical space available for drug discovery and address long-standing limitations in access to high-quality molecular data. The company specialises in small molecules, the class of compounds behind many widely used medicines, with each newly identified molecule contributing to an expanding dataset. Its platform combines high-throughput cloning and sequencing technologies to identify, express, and characterise bioactive compounds, generating structured data on their properties and potential therapeutic applications. According to co-founder and CEO Vandenesch, the lack of novel, high-quality molecular data remains a key constraint in drug discovery, limiting the effectiveness of existing approaches and models. Generare reports increasing adoption of its platform among pharmaceutical and research organisations, with newly identified molecules being used in early-stage drug development. The company is focused on scaling its dataset and expanding its capabilities to meet growing demand. The funding will be used to expand the company’s compound library, scale its discovery platform, and grow its multidisciplinary team as it continues to develop its data-driven approach to drug discovery.

Covalo, a Switzerland-based platform for ingredient discovery and data management in the personal care industry, has raised €3.5 million in a funding extension. The round was led by Hi Inov, with participation from existing investors HTGF and seed+speed Ventures. The company addresses challenges in managing ingredient data, which is often fragmented across multiple systems, formats, and stakeholders. Product development typically requires handling large volumes of technical, regulatory, and sustainability information, creating operational complexity for R&D, regulatory, and procurement teams. According to co-founder and co-CEO Yann Chilvers, inefficiencies in how product data is managed and shared contribute to delays and unsuccessful product launches, while limiting the industry’s ability to respond to regulatory changes and evolving market demands. Covalo provides a platform that connects suppliers and brands through structured, standardised data flows, replacing manual processes such as emails, spreadsheets, and PDFs. By integrating directly with suppliers’ product information management systems and brands’ internal workflows, it enables real-time updates and more efficient data exchange across the product lifecycle. The platform is used by a broad network of suppliers and brands across the personal care ecosystem and works with industry organisations to support data integration, regulatory processes, and sustainability initiatives. The funding will support the expansion of Covalo’s data platform and enterprise offering, including the development of AI-based tools for workflow automation, data processing, and regulatory compliance, as the company continues to scale its infrastructure for the personal care industry.

Former managers at Belgian legaltech scale-up Henchman are launching Backbone, an AI platform for real-time quality and compliance management in the food industry, with Seed funding from 100IN.  Backbone consolidates fragmented data, from supplier documents to lab results, giving quality managers the tools to detect risks before they reach production.  A recipe change at a food manufacturer triggers an immediate cascade of quality checks. Regulatory requirements around food safety have intensified sharply in recent years, and compliance now spans the entire organisation, from procurement and R&D to production and business development. Yet most of that oversight still runs on manual processes. In practice, every supplier switch, product launch or incoming raw material delivery means manually cross-referencing certificates and specs, typically across Excel sheets, Word documents and email threads. Without real-time visibility, mismatches can go undetected until a product is already in production or worse, on the shelf. Backbone's founders estimate that poor quality costs the food sector up to 15 per cent of revenue, excluding reputational damages. The culprit is rarely a single critical failure, but an accumulation of small deviations caught too late. The recent wave of baby food incidents has put a sharp edge on what those numbers actually mean in practice. Backbone addresses the problem by centralising and automatically analysing data already within organisations, from supplier documentation and lab results to internal procedures. "The data is usually already there, but scattered across systems or locked in people's heads," says co-founder Louis Opsomer. "We make that information usable for day-to-day decisions." "Many companies still operate reactively, treating certificates as their quality benchmark, but a certificate is just a snapshot," he adds. “Backbone goes well beyond audit: rather than verifying compliance after the fact, it surfaces risks continuously. Besides, the time saved on administration frees quality managers to focus on what actually moves the needle.” The platform is now operational across multiple production sites, and the team is handling inbound interest from both domestic and international prospects. Early customers include Zoutman, Greenway, Azingro and Euromeat. The capital will fund commercial expansion and continued product development. Backbone is also establishing partnerships with international standards bodies, including BRCGS, and technology partners such as Microsoft, with integrations into Copilot among the initiatives under development. "This is a global problem, and the inbound demand confirms that," says Siska Lannoo.  "The food industry is moving towards predictive systems that surface risks before they materialise. We are helping companies make that transition now. In AI, speed is a competitive advantage, but without deep domain expertise, you cannot build something that holds up at scale. That combination is what Backbone brings to the table."

The flagship fund of a UK government-backed initiative addressing the shortage of equity capital for women in the UK who are building businesses has reached a £130m first close of the fund, it said today. The “Women Backing Women” fund is aiming to raise £250m in total to invest in female fund managers to back female-led businesses. The initiative is a key part of the UK government-backed Women Taskforce, aimed at addressing the long-standing challenge of women struggling to secure investment capital. Just 2p of every £1 of equity funding in the UK goes to female-founded businesses. Today, Bootstrap4F, which is managing the fund of funds, said it had reached the £130m first close of its £250m raise, with investment from Barclays, the British Business Bank, M&G and Nationwide. Bootstrap4F said it will now begin investing in fund managers. Stephanie Heller, managing director at Bootstrap4F, said: “Securing £130m in commitments, with Barclays, the British Business Bank, M&G plc and Nationwide, is an exceptional outcome in this market. We have built the infrastructure to deploy capital efficiently, and the funds that have expressed interest so far are both strong and high in quality. We are committed to making every investment count.”  Minister for Investment Lord Stockwood said: "The UK is a thriving business hub, and this £130m investment into the Women Backing Women fund is a major moment in showcasing the power of government and industry in coming together to make a positive difference in our investment environment."

Press aggregation platform Cafeyn Group is acquiring Readly’s non-Nordic operations, marking a significant step forward in its European expansion.  Cafeyn offers unlimited access to over 2,000 national and international titles across multiple formats and devices, while Readly provides a single subscription that gives users access to over 8,000 magazines and newspapers. Following the transaction, Cafeyn will serve more than 2.5 million users and generate combined revenues of nearly €100 million, significantly strengthening its scale and position across Europe. Readly’s Nordic operations remain owned and operated by Bonnier News, while activities outside the Nordic countries (notably in Germany and the United Kingdom) are now joining Cafeyn. The original Readly application will continue to be owned and operated by Bonnier News for the Nordic markets. Laurent Kayser, CEO of Cafeyn, stated:  “This acquisition marks a turning point for Cafeyn. This will allow us to deliver greater value to users, more sustainable revenues for publishers, and to support quality journalism at a time when access to trusted information has never been more important.” Anders Eriksson, CEO of Bonnier News, added:  “This agreement enables both parties to focus on their respective growth strategies. We now look forward to further developing and growing Readly in the Nordic markets, as an important and integrated part of our business.” The integration of Readly’s operations will significantly expand the catalogue available to users, further enhancing the breadth and diversity of content accessible on the platform, while strengthening Cafeyn’s ability to deliver a compelling and comprehensive offering to its audiences.