Radiant (formerly Neamine) has been selected to participate in Hexa’s Carbon Zero acceleration programme and has closed a €2 million funding round, with minority participation from the business angel networks Tiresias Angels and Selim Cherif. Industrial heat accounts for more than 70 per cent of total industrial energy consumption, yet it remains largely dependent on fossil fuels. One of the main reasons is the limited economic competitiveness of low-carbon heat solutions, which often requires industrial operators to balance cost pressures with decarbonisation objectives. Radiant is addressing this challenge by developing a solar thermal solution tailored to industrial applications. Its system integrates next-generation heliostats, a proprietary receiver, and thermal energy storage to deliver configurations adapted to specific industrial needs. The technology is capable of supplying heat at temperatures between 200°C and 1,000°C, with thermal power outputs ranging from 2 to 50 megawatts, while maintaining a high degree of operational control. According to Alexandre Meurisse, CTO of Radiant, the company’s core technology builds on 15 years of research and development conducted at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and enables the production of hot air at temperatures exceeding 1,000°C, above current industry standards. Thomas Delhon, CEO of Radiant, added that the solution offers heat-intensive industries a practical way to reduce emissions while maintaining stable energy costs. In practice, Radiant’s technology replaces fossil-fuel-based equipment such as gas burners and oil-fired boilers with a solar-based heat source adapted to industrial processes. Companies in sectors such as asphalt, glass, and cement have expressed interest in applying the solution to equipment, including kilns and dryers. The new funding will support the construction of Radiant’s first industrial demonstrator in Le Mans, intended to validate the scalability of the technology and the company’s ability to deploy the solution efficiently at industrial sites. Participation in Hexa’s Carbon Zero programme will also provide Radiant with additional support as it continues to develop its industrial solar thermal solution. Over time, the company plans to expand its activities internationally and scale the deployment of its technology to support the broader decarbonisation of industrial heat production.

Stockholm-based Brickanta, an agentic AI platform for the construction industry, has closed an $8 million seed funding round led by Northzone. The round includes participation from global sports figures, founders of Lovable and Tandem Health, angel investors affiliated with OpenAI, Google, and Meta, as well as continued backing from Y Combinator and SSE Business Lab. Brickanta is developing an AI-native operating system for construction, initially focused on pre-construction workflows such as bid analysis, cost estimation, and procurement, processes that play a central role in project outcomes. The platform combines AI with industry-specific data, standards, and documentation to help construction teams identify gaps, assess risk, and prepare procurement materials more efficiently than traditional tools. The company has onboarded hundreds of users and introduced its platform to construction teams across eleven countries on four continents. Customers connect their internal data to generate AI-driven analyses, with users reporting that early identification or accurate pricing of change orders can significantly influence project viability. Procurement teams are also able to generate category-specific RFP packages in minutes rather than days. Lucas Otterling, co-founder and CEO of Brickanta, noted that while the construction sector is often perceived as slow to adopt new technology, the company has seen strong engagement from a new generation of builders seeking AI tools designed around real-world construction workflows. Commenting on the investment, Pär-Jörgen Pärson, Partner at Northzone, said that productivity growth in the construction industry has lagged for decades and that AI has the potential to help manage the complexity of planning and execution, which often involves large volumes of critical documentation. Looking ahead, Brickanta plans to expand across Europe, leveraging shared building standards such as the Eurocodes. The company also intends to continue growing its engineering, product, and delivery teams, while maintaining close ties to Silicon Valley through Y Combinator, US-based angel investors, and partnerships with large language model developers.

Lunar, the Nordic digital challenger bank, has raised €46 million in fresh funding, with the funds geared towards growing its business customers and supporting the launch of a suite of new lending products.   Lunar, which has over one million users across the Nordics, has raised the funding from existing investors Heartland and Orbit Alliance and new investor 100A, a London-based fintech investor. Lunar did not disclose a valuation following its new funding, when asked by Tech.eu. Lunar was last valued at $2.2 billion in 2022. The latest funding round means that Lunar has raised €537m in total, according to Pitchbook. Ken Villum Klausen, founder and CEO of Lunar, said the funding would be used to grow its business customers, which currently stands at 40,000 users, in Denmark, Sweden and Norway.   On a target number for business customers by the end of 2026, he said: “I think we would be aiming for 100,000, that is one of the core ambitions for 2026."   He said business customer growth was currently stronger in Sweden than in Denmark. He added: “We can see that our strategy is working. More users are choosing paid subscriptions, and we are seeing strong momentum in our business customer base, reaching 40,000 business users in January."   The funding will also support the launch of a suite of lending products, including credit cards and overdrafts, in the second quarter of this year, said Villum Klausen. He said expansion would continue to focus on the Nordics, not beyond into wider Europe. In 2022, Lunar launched its Lunar Block in-app crypto platform in 2022, allowing users to buy and sell crypto coins directly.   In October last year, Lunar secured a crypto licence under the EU’s MiCA regulation. Villum Klausen said crypto was “doing OK”.   Last year, Lunar was hit by a string of executive departures including its co-founder and CTO, as it looks to cut management costs and become profitable in the long term.   Peter Andreasen, Lunar’s co-founder and chief investment officer, and Kåre Kjelstrøm, the CTO (chief technology officer) of Lunar, have both left. The two executives are understood to have left in the past few weeks.

London-based Flowla, a platform developing AI-assisted automation for sales and customer success teams, has closed a $2.5 million seed funding round to scale its buyer journey automation engine. The round was led by Revo Capital, with participation from AI Startup Factory, Türkiye Development Fund, APY Ventures, Sharks & Partners, and angel investors, including Salesforce operators. Despite significant investment in CRM and sales tools, many revenue teams continue to rely on manual processes to manage complex B2B deals. Sales representatives spend a large share of their time on non-selling tasks such as drafting emails, coordinating stakeholders, and tailoring materials, which can slow follow-ups and contribute to deal delays or customer churn, particularly during handoffs from Sales to Customer Success. Founded by Erdem Gelal (CEO) and Oguz Gelal (CTO), Flowla transforms the digital sales room from a simple content-sharing link into a no-code automation layer that standardises the buyer journey across Sales and Customer Success. The platform provides revenue teams with a single, branded digital workspace that evolves from a sales proposal into an onboarding hub, consolidating documents, communication, and next steps in one place. Teams can design predefined journeys using templates, AI-assisted personalised content, and communication rules, with subsequent actions triggered automatically based on real-time buyer behaviour. For example, when a buyer views pricing information, Flowla can identify the viewer’s role, analyse their activity, prepare a relevant email draft, notify the sales representative, and queue the message for review. Erdem Gelal, co-founder and CEO of Flowla, noted that sales enablement is shifting from coaching representatives toward building more structured approaches to revenue execution, adding that managing complex B2B deals can no longer rely on human memory without creating execution gaps. Flowla provides the customer-facing layer where revenue execution runs on autopilot, ensuring that every follow-up and stakeholder alignment happens instantly and consistently, Gelal said. By reducing reliance on manual execution, Flowla helps minimise missed follow-ups and inconsistent handovers, enabling teams to manage the full customer journey more predictably and build a repeatable approach to revenue execution. The new funding will be used to scale Flowla’s automation engine and content generation capabilities, as well as to establish a dedicated US-based go-to-market team to support its expanding international presence.

The construction and real estate sector is Europe’s largest industry, yet it remains largely dependent on manual and disconnected processes. This inefficiency is becoming critical as the sector faces a massive wave of activity, driven by a €584 billion requirement for power grid upgrades and an estimated €500 billion in transport infrastructure modernisations across Europe by 2030.  From large-scale residential developments to the repair of ageing bridge networks, the increasing complexity of these projects is pushing traditional administrative systems to a breaking point. German startup Arctis AI has raised $1M+ to provide the technological shift required for the sector to evolve. Arctis AI is building AI agents that help construction companies structure, access, and work with contracts throughout the project lifecycle. Instead of treating contracts as static documents, the platform structures them into one central hub where obligations, risks, payment terms, and dependencies are transparent and usable for commercial and project teams. I spoke to CEO  Dila Ekrem to learn more.  Ekrem explained that in construction, document and contract processes begin as early as the tendering phase and continue through a complex chain of workflows until project completion — from drafting and contract review to change-order handling, claims management, and more. It is a broad and fragmented landscape. “Construction remains a highly traditional industry with deep structural inefficiencies,” she said. “Our vision is to build an end-to-end platform for general contractors and project developers that embeds AI across daily workflows, enabling them to run projects faster, more accurately, and at lower cost.” Arctis AI provides the digital infrastructure to manage the administrative complexity of large-scale construction and infrastructure projects. By replacing fragmented files with a connected workflow for project delivery, the platform enables teams to align faster, reduce friction between parties, and maintain consistency from tender through close-out. The company focuses on resolving the industry’s most demanding administrative bottlenecks, allowing general contractors and developers to execute Europe’s critical building projects with higher precision and reduced operational overhead. From fencing champion to founder Before founding her own company, Ekrem spent her teenage years in fencing halls and on planes between competitions, eventually ranking #1 in Turkey and winning 35+ national & international medals. The daughter of a custom shirtmaker, she grew up in her father’s shop, watching him build a business with his hands. Early on, she knew she wanted to build something of her own, too. Two years ago, Ekrem moved to Germany to study at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). She found her way into Munich’s startup ecosystem. From TUM classmates to first Pilot in three months Ekrem is joined by co-founders Duc-Trung Nguyen and Leon Stawowiak, both of whom she met at TUM. Nguyen arrived in Munich from Vietnam and worked as a Flink delivery driver to support his computer science studies before breaking into the software industry and working most recently as an AI engineer at SAP. Stawowiak rounds out the trio, having previously worked on AI applications at Bain & Company and KPMG. Ekrem admits: “When we were friends at university, we always knew that we wanted to found a startup. We were really active in the startup ecosystem and at the same time, we all have an immigration background. We didn’t know many people here, so we always thought a good programme and a good community are very essential." The team consolidated their business solution through extensive market research and speaking with over 150 contract managers in the construction field. Once they identified their significant painpoints, they started building in parallel.  The team started Arctis AI in August 2025 and deployed their first pilot project in Germany just three months later —impressive speed.  Winning trust in a conservative sector When asked about attaining that critical initial pilot, Ekrem shared, “What’s really important in this industry is personal relationships. Warm introductions and being able to reference trusted names made a big difference in getting people onto calls. Once we had their attention, we could clearly demonstrate the problems they were facing and show that we had the technical capability to solve them.“ From there, it was about building trust. The team invested heavily in onboarding — sometimes spending an entire day with a client, explaining the product in detail, answering questions, setting up access, and carefully walking them through every step. “Most of them are not used to modern software; for many, SAP is the only system they know, " shared Ekrem.  2It takes time at the beginning, but after the first one or two weeks, the product becomes very intuitive and largely self-explanatory.” Ushering in a new era for Europe’s largest industry Ekrem said that most existing contract management tools still treat each document as a standalone, static file — an approach that simply does not work in construction, where every contract must be understood in the context of technical specifications and the wider web of project agreements. “In construction, you can’t review a contract in isolation,” she explained. “You can’t sign an agreement with your door supplier before the wall has even been built. Every document is connected, and those connections really matter.” Arctis’ approach, she said, is to build AI agents that understand and reason across these interdependencies, allowing teams to interact with their full set of project documents and contracts as a connected system. “You can talk to your documents and your project contracts and see everything in relation to each other,” Ekrem said. “It gives you a holistic view of the entire contract ecosystem.” The company is starting with pre-signature workflows and building its platform on top of this agent-based infrastructure, while also turning past and present contracts into a reusable knowledge base. “A huge amount of valuable knowledge is hidden in the contracts companies have already signed and are currently negotiating,” she said. “Project developers often build the same types of assets in different geographies or work with the same subcontractors again and again. When senior people leave, a lot of that institutional knowledge disappears. Our goal is to make this knowledge a core, living part of the product, so it can be reused and built on over time.” From 150 incoming investor calls to a strategic lead in PT1 The round was led by PT1 (Berlin/London), with participation from EWOR, Superangels, and a prominent group of angels from the European construction and tech ecosystems, including Alexander Schwörer (Owner of PERI), Sebastian Johnston (Founding Partner at La Famiglia), Christian Vollmann (Founder of C1 Green Chemicals), Daniel Bronk (Founder of B+V Union & Real Estate Developer), Christian Marquart (Director Legal at Marvel Fusion). According to Ekrem, the company’s fundraising journey began with the UnternehmerTUM Ideation Fellowship, which later invited the team to pitch and opened the door to a long and intensive investor process. “After that, I ended up doing around 150 investor calls,” she said. From the outset, the team was clear that they did not just want generalist capital, but investors with deep roots in the construction sector who could actively help with market access and credibility. “We specifically wanted an investor from the construction industry,” Ekrem explained. “It was important for us that our backers could make introductions and help us build trust with customers.”PT1 was very important for us because they really understand the industry and have strong connections. We also brought industry angels on board whose names carry a lot of weight when talking to customers and opening doors.” To support the company’s growth, Arctis AI has already made its first technical hires, recruiting engineers with experience from AWS, Snowflake, and Palantir. With the new capital, the company plans to further strengthen its technical team, develop additional modules, and expand its customer base across Europe.

The Footprint Firm has completed the final closing of Footprint Fund I, an Article 9 €76 million venture fund. The fund focuses on early-stage deeptech companies in the green transition in Northern Europe. Footprint Fund I is the first fund in The Footprint Firm’s venture platform and has already invested in 20 startups, including Reel Energy,  Kvasir Technologies, Nordic Salt Cycle, FoodOp, and Rock Flour Company. Footprint Fund I invests in areas such as biotechnology, energy, AI and climate technology, circular manufacturing, the built environment, CO₂e reduction, and food systems. The fund is supported by The Footprint Firm’s team of 45 specialists, who work actively with the portfolio companies in areas including commercialisation, regulation, scientific validation, scaling, and partnerships. “The synergies between our advisory business and The Footprint Fund I are already visible. "Our business model allows us to invest significantly more hours and expertise into all investment stages than the traditional VC-setup. That is exactly what is needed in the sustainable innovation space, which adds deep environmental, regulatory and transformational requirements to the classic investor toolbox. We are confident that that’s the way to ensure both vital impact and healthy returns”, adds co-founding Partner Christian Sparrevohn. The fund is backed by a group of leading Danish institutional investors and family offices, including North-East Family Office, EIFO, Realdania, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, TryghedsGruppen, Lauritzen Fonden, Nordea-fonden, Novo Holdings, and Velliv Foreningen. The fund invests in early-stage companies that address key sustainability challenges while also having the potential for competitive financial returns. The completion of the fundraising marks an important milestone in The Footprint Firm’s development as an investment platform. “The closing of Footprint Fund I reflects a strong alignment with investors who value disciplined investing, deep sustainability expertise and long-term partnership. The dialogues we’ve had throughout the fundraising process have helped sharpen both our platform and our ambitions. This positions us well as we continue to scale our investment activities and prepare for future funds built on the same integrated model” said Jakob Mathias Wichmann, co-founding partner and Managing Partner of the Footprint Fund. “With Footprint Fund I, we are doubling down on our mission to accelerate what is necessary,” said Anna Søndergaard, co-founding Partner and CEO at The Footprint Firm. “The future worth building will not arrive by chance; it must be ventured into. Europe has the talent, research depth, and industrial base needed to build category-defining climate solutions, and we want to contribute to the success of these teams with funding, ecosystem support and our expertise and network.”

UK-based Vennre, a wealth creation platform, has raised $9.6 million in a pre-Series A funding round through a hybrid equity and debt structure. The round was co-led by Vision Ventures and anb seed Fund, with participation from Sanabil 500, Ace & Co, Plus VC, and a group of strategic individual investors from the private banking, technology, and entrepreneurship sectors. Vennre is designed to give high-earning professionals access to curated investment opportunities traditionally reserved for institutional investors and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. The platform offers vetted deals across asset classes, including real estate, private equity, venture capital, and private credit, with investment minimums starting at around $5,000 and options that include Sharia-compliant opportunities. It combines financial expertise with technology to streamline access to alternative investments, with an emphasis on due diligence, transparency, and a user-friendly experience. The company aims to reduce traditional barriers to private market investing, such as high minimums and complex structures, and enable so-called HENRYs (High Earners, Not Rich Yet) to build diversified portfolios and pursue long-term wealth creation with greater confidence. Ziad Mabsout, CEO and co-founder of Vennre, noted that many high-earning professionals in the region have achieved financial success but lack effective tools to compound it. He added that Vennre is focused on long-term wealth creation rather than transactional investing, starting with curated private market opportunities and evolving into a comprehensive wealth platform built on discipline, trust, and alignment. Vennre plans to use the capital to expand its client base, launch new platform features, and strengthen its presence in Saudi Arabia, in line with ongoing financial sector liberalisation and fintech growth.

Rainbow Weather, a next-gen climate tech startup specialising in hyper-localised short-term weather forecasting, announced it has raised $5.5M Seed funding round.  Rainbow Weather has developed a real-time, AI-driven weather intelligence platform that fuses satellite imagery, radar, meteorological stations, and even smartphone sensor data to deliver highly precise, minute-level forecasts and severe-weather detection. The company now sells its data both through a consumer app and directly to enterprises and other weather providers, positioning itself as an infrastructure layer for a world of increasingly volatile climate conditions. The company was founded in 2021 by Belarusian serial entrepreneurs Yuriy Melnichek and Alexander Matveenko. Melnichek previously built AIMatter, a neural-network platform later acquired by Google, as well as video app Vochi (acquired by Pinterest) and fashion tech startup Wanna (acquired by Farfetch). Matveenko, meanwhile, founded AI mapping company MapData, which he sold to Mapbox in 2017. I spoke to the co-founders to find out more.  From colleagues to the hailstorm that exposed the limits of traditional forecasting Melnichek and Matveenko have known each other since childhood and have worked together previously. Throughout, they kept the shared ambition to eventually build a startup together as co-founders. Melnichek recalled, “Some time later, I approached Matveenko and said: “How about we finally do it?” They started thinking about something at the intersection of maps and weather." For Melnichek, it was personal.  “I was living in Switzerland and hiking in the Alps, using an app called RainViewer, which I really liked. I was literally hiking behind a rain cloud. The app showed that the cloud would keep moving and I would stay dry. But then I suddenly felt something hitting my head. It was hail, about the size of grapes. The rain cloud reached the mountains, stopped, intensified, and started hailing. The app didn’t account for elevation. It didn’t know there was a mountain, so it relied only on past observations, not on how the terrain would affect the cloud.” That was the moment he realised: existing models don’t really understand how weather systems evolve in real time in complex geography.  S o the idea to use machine learning, elevation data, and multiple sources of real-time input to predict how rain and other weather phenomena actually develop, not just where they were historically, was born. How Rainbow builds forecasts from space, radar, and smartphones Rainbow Weather’s core product is a hyper-accurate minute-by-minute weather forecasting app powered by AI and machine learning. It delivers four-hour precipitation reports tailored to the exact moment a request is made.  For instance, if a user checks weather at 3:51 am, the app will provide precise predictions through 7:51 am. The platform updates every 10 minutes. It also offers spatial resolution down to a single square kilometre (0.62 mi²). All of these features set the product apart from major competitors, including The Weather Company (formerly owned by IBM) whose forecasts refresh every 15 minutes and extend up to 7 hours ahead.  The team started with rain prediction, and then expanded to other weather parameters. Initially, Rainbow was built as a consumer weather app with AI-based rain prediction. But the team soon discovered that the forecast's quality is limited by the quality of the input data.  “If you put garbage in, you get garbage out,” shared Melnichek. “So we started investing heavily in data acquisition and data fusion. We work with satellite imagery, which captures cloud systems from above across multiple infrared and visible spectral bands. You can roughly detect where precipitation is happening, but it’s not very precise. Then there are meteorological radars – the big round radomes you often see near airports. They work like microwaves: they emit radio waves that bounce back from water particles, so they detect rain extremely well, but only what is already falling, not what is forming behind the front.” Rainbow.ai also gathers ground weather station data, and started collecting air-pressure data from smartphones.  “Modern phones have barometers, originally introduced to measure altitude changes for fitness tracking, like counting how many stairs you walk, explained Melnichek. But these sensors are very accurate, and pressure changes are highly correlated with weather dynamics. Rainbow Weatehr currently ingests data from more than 1,000 meteorological radars worldwide, multiple satellites, ground stations, and mobile sensors. Each source has its own processing pipeline. One central system then blends the outputs using neural networks. Why Rainbow replaces batch forecasting with continuous atmospheric streaming I wanted to understand why real-time data was possible with such a large data set. According to Melnichek: “Crucially, we do not operate in batch mode but as a continuous stream: as soon as a new satellite frame, radar scan, or pressure update arrives, it is immediately ingested and processed. Each data source has its own pipeline feeding our neural networks, which continuously blend these inputs to produce the most accurate real-time representation of the global atmospheric state, updated every few minutes.” Beating legacy models on timing, not probabilities Although there are a number of prominent players in the market, including AccuWeather, Apple Weather, and The Weather Company, Rainbow Weather asserts that the current forecasting methods are outdated.  “Many legacy forecasting providers rely on optical flow for short-term precipitation forecasting. That’s a fast but simplistic method that treats clouds as shapes in motion, without any understanding of atmospheric physics,” explained Matveenko. “A second category of services uses large-scale mathematical models that do incorporate physical principles, but they’re so cumbersome and slow that they can’t respond quickly to real-time weather changes.” Rainbow Weather, by contrast, uses advanced machine-learning models to merge a vast array of high-resolution data to generate predictions. “Mixing heterogeneous data allows us to eliminate the typical errors inherent to each individual source. This, in turn, helps us to feed cleaner and more accurate data into our models and achieve a much more precise forecast. And thanks to the optimised performance of our AI models, we can make this forecast much faster than our competitors,” Matveenko added. From rain app to real-time environmental intelligence Specifically, Rainbow.ai focuses on timing: the exact start and end of precipitation events.  “On the consumer side, we deliberately do not show probability distributions, because most people do not understand them correctly,” shared Melnichek. “There was even a Stanford study showing that users misinterpret “30 per cent chance of rain” in completely different ways – some think it means 30 per cent of the hour will be rainy, others think it means it will rain in 30 per cent of the area.”  For B2B clients, the company, of course, provides full probabilistic fields, confidence levels, and uncertainty bands.  “But our competitive advantage is very precise nowcasting – what will happen in the next minutes and hours, not in seven days.” The company has also expanded into fire detection, a move inspired in part by the severe wildfires Melnichek has witnessed in Cyprus, where he lives. “We realised that we already process satellite imagery for the whole planet every few minutes, so why not extend our pipeline to detect thermal anomalies and smoke patterns that indicate fires?” he says. “We don’t need to build a completely new infrastructure — we just add another model on top of the same data streams. The philosophy is the same: fast detection, continuous monitoring, global coverage. “With climate change, wildfires, heatwaves, and extreme weather are becoming more frequent. We want Rainbow to become a general real-time environmental intelligence system, not only a rain app.” The ‘wow moment’ driving organic growth As of today, Rainbow Weather has reached over 1 million installs and over 100,000 active users. The app's strongest growth driver is word of mouth. According to Melnichek:  "When people experience that the rain starts exactly when the app says it will start, and stops exactly when it says it will stop, they remember it. They compare it with the default weather apps on their phones, which can sometimes show sunshine while it is already raining outside. This “wow moment” creates very strong recommendations to friends and family.” Opening the black box to transparent analytics The team also runs weatherindex.ai, an open-source tool that evaluates the accuracy of short-term precipitation predictions from providers like AccuWeather, Vaisala, and The Weather Company in real time. It pulls live data from public APIs and compares forecasts with verified airport weather reports using standard metrics such as accuracy and F-score (a measure of predictive performance). Melnichek says the decision to build an open benchmarking platform was driven by a belief that weather forecasting, like AI, should be judged through transparent, comparable, and publicly verifiable performance metrics. "In the AI world, we are used to open benchmarks. Everyone compares models — GPT, Claude, Gemini, open-source LLMs — and you can see how they perform on standard datasets. In weather, it is very different. Many providers explicitly forbid you, in their license agreements, from comparing their data with competitors’ data. That felt very outdated and very defensive to us.” So the company decided to do the opposite. It built Weather Index to compare different weather providers against verified ground truth, mainly using airport meteorological stations. Airports have high-quality instruments and human meteorologists who validate observations, so this gives a very reliable reference. “We buy data from different providers, run the same evaluation across all of them, and publish the results openly. You can see which provider is more accurate in which country and for which forecast horizon. For example, for one-hour rain timing, we perform best in much of Europe — the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, the Baltics, and Turkey. In North America, The Weather Company performs extremely well. In Japan, AccuWeather is very strong. In Southeast Asia and Australia, we are again among the leaders. We believe weather data is critical infrastructure, and critical infrastructure should be evaluated transparently.” The startup was backed by a syndicate of investors, including Yuri Gurski, founder and president of Flo Health, the first purely digital consumer women’s health app to achieve unicorn status. With the new funding, the startup plans to go beyond precipitation forecasts by incorporating additional weather parameters, extend the forecasting horizon from 4 hours to 24 hours, and grow its presence in the B2B segment of the weather-forecasting industry, which is projected to reach $4.07 billion by 2030.  In the long term, Rainbow AI wants to build the most accurate real-time environmental intelligence platform in the world. Not just a weather forecast, but a continuously updating digital representation of what is happening in the atmosphere and on the ground – a system that helps people and businesses stay safe and make better decisions in an increasingly unstable climate.

Madrid-based STAMP has raised €4 million in a funding round led by Dozen, with participation from EBISU Digital, Barça Innovation Hub, and several international business angels, including Andreas Mihalovits and Thibaut Courtois through his investment arm NXTplay. In addition to private capital, the company has secured public grants from the Spanish Ministry of Industry and Tourism, the City of Valencia, the Community of Madrid, and the City of Madrid, reflecting alignment with public initiatives focused on digitalisation, tourism, and the modernisation of commerce. STAMP addresses long-standing inefficiencies in traditional VAT refund systems, which are typically based on post-purchase reimbursements, intermediaries, and complex processes. Its technology applies tax benefits directly at the point of sale, digitally integrating them into the payment experience in compliance with European regulations. The model adapts to each country’s fiscal framework. In markets such as Italy, where regulation allows, purchases can be made VAT-exempt at checkout. In others, including Spain, VAT is included on the invoice, but customers receive an immediate discount equivalent to the VAT amount at the moment of payment. STAMP then validates transactions, ensures traceability, and manages tax recovery, including fraud scenarios, enabling merchants to reimburse tax authorities without assuming fiscal risk. By reducing payment friction and simplifying access to Tax Free benefits, the platform allows merchants to use Tax Free as an effective commercial tool, supporting higher conversion rates, larger basket sizes, and improved shopping experiences for international customers. Through its integrated Tax Free and payments platform, STAMP connects European retailers with global travellers and acts as a strategic marketing and payments partner for WeChat and Alipay. “Tax Free, as applied until now, has operated more as an administrative procedure than as an automatic consumer right. When that friction is removed, customer behaviour changes, and merchants regain control over both the shopping experience and their margins,” said Abel Navajas, CEO of STAMP. STAMP delivers, for the first time, a real Tax Free model that does not require regulatory change, provides maximum security and prevents fraud. According to Navajas, the funding round strengthens the company’s ability to execute its roadmap and advance its mission of enabling merchants in Southern Europe to better serve international customers by streamlining payments and turning Tax Free into a tangible purchase incentive. The funds will be primarily used to support expansion in Spain, Italy, and Portugal, and to further develop the company’s product portfolio, with a focus on advanced international payment solutions and the launch of a new AI-based product.

One of the UK’s most hyped AI startups has nearly doubled its valuation to $4bn in just 12 months, following a $200m funding round. The $200m Series E funding round in Synthesia was led by existing investor Google Ventures, Google's VC arm, with participation from Evantic, the venture fund founded by former Sequoia partner Matt Miller, and Hedosophia.  Other existing investors NVentures, Nvidia’s VC arm, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), PSP Growth, Air Street Capital, and MMC Ventures, also participated. As part of the deal, Synthesia, which makes AI-powered corporate videos, is allowing employees to sell a percentage of their shares through a partnership with Nasdaq. Synthesia, founded in 2017, has become something of a talismanic company in the UK’s burgeoning AI scene. It was last valued at $2.1bn in January last year, following a $180m funding round. The startup develops digital avatars which are deployed for corporate clients, such as to help explain health and safety in the workplace. The startup plans to use the funds on building new interactive AI agents for companies to use for employees and marketing videos, according to The Times. Synthesia's customers include SAP and Microsoft. Headquartered in London, Synthesia also has offices in New York, Munich and Zurich. Victor Riparbelli, Synthesia’s co-founder and CEO, said: “Synthesia was founded on two core beliefs: first, that AI will bring the cost of content creation down to zero. And secondly, that AI video provides a better, more engaging way for organisations to communicate and learn. “This funding round is about scaling that vision. We see a rare convergence of two major shifts: a technology shift with AI Agents becoming more capable, and a market shift where upskilling and internal knowledge sharing have become board-level priorities. "We intend to build the defining company at that intersection, by combining our know-how in AI video with our ability to build and integrate AI technologies into products and services that solve real business needs.”

London-based MyARC, a platform that enables fitness creators to train their communities at scale, has secured more than $2 million in funding, with participation from Araya Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Techstars, and G Fund. Alongside the funding, the company has launched a next-generation version of its platform aimed at supporting the operation, monetisation, and growth of creator-led fitness businesses. Founded by Peter Monteza, together with co-founders Nikhil Shah and Arohan Subramonia, MyARC seeks to address structural limitations in the fitness industry, where creators have traditionally relied on static programmes or one-to-one coaching models that are difficult to scale. The platform is designed to help creators deliver personalised training and nutrition plans that adapt to individual user goals, lifestyles, and preferences while remaining scalable. The platform supports this approach through tools that automate the personalisation of training programmes, recipes, and nutrition plans, enable the launch and management of branded fitness applications without coding, and support subscription-based monetisation models that combine challenges, workouts, and meal planning. Automation features are also used to facilitate ongoing community engagement and operational efficiency. The traditional online fitness model has left creators trapped between low-value generic products and unsustainable personal coaching. With this platform, they can scale their impact and income without sacrificing quality, explained Monteza. Over the past two years, MyARC reports that creators using the platform have generated material revenue, with several reaching seven-figure earnings and average annual creator income in the high six-figure range. The platform supports a global user base with thousands of daily active users, who together have completed hundreds of millions of minutes of training. The funding will be used to support continued product development, expand creator tools, and advance the company’s global growth plans.

Copenhagen-based AI SaaS company Kime has raised €2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by PSV Tech, with participation from Nordic Makers and a group of angel investors based in Copenhagen and Stockholm. As user behaviour shifts away from traditional search engines toward AI assistants that provide a limited number of direct answers, brand visibility is increasingly shaped by how large language models select and prioritise information. Recent research from McKinsey indicates that AI-based search is becoming an important entry point to online decision-making and is expected to influence a substantial share of consumer spending. Despite this change, many companies have limited insight into whether their brands are mentioned at all when users ask AI assistants for recommendations, comparisons, or purchasing advice. Kime aims to address this gap by tracking how brands are represented across major AI platforms, including which brands are cited, their relative positioning, associated sentiment, and the sources used to generate responses. The company refers to this emerging discipline as generative engine optimisation (GEO), reflecting a shift from ranking in traditional search results toward visibility within AI-generated answers. According to founder and CEO Vasilij Brandt, marketers are increasingly focused on understanding how their brands appear in AI assistants, and Kime’s objective is to make that visibility measurable and actionable. Since launching, the company has seen early commercial traction. In November, Kime conducted more than 60 product demonstrations, primarily with senior marketing leaders and executive teams. It has also expanded its product to include an agency-focused module that enables agencies to analyse AI visibility across their client portfolios. The platform is currently used by brands across multiple industries and is also deployed through agency partnerships. In its current phase, Kime is focused on analytics, offering dashboards that show brand visibility across prompts and AI platforms, competitor benchmarking, sentiment, share of voice, and the domains and publications informing AI responses. Looking ahead, the company plans to develop the platform into a broader layer for AI marketing, giving teams a centralised way to manage and optimise their presence across multiple AI assistants as the LLM landscape continues to fragment.

Last week, we tracked more than 70 tech funding deals worth over €2.7 billion, and over 10 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe.Click to read the rest of the news.

Orbital, an AI platform for real estate law, has raised $60 million in a Series B funding round to support continued growth in the US and UK. The round was led by Brighton Park Capital and included participation from investors across the legal and real estate sectors, including REV, The LegalTech Fund, Moderne Ventures, and Grosvenor Group. Existing investors JLL Spark, Outward, and Seedcamp also participated. Orbital develops AI technology tailored to the specific requirements of real estate legal work, an area that has seen relatively limited coverage from broader legal technology platforms. By combining AI designed for real estate law with spatial visualisation, mapping, and property data, the platform automates document-intensive legal processes and supports more efficient transaction workflows. The company was co-founded in 2018 by Will Pearce and Ed Boulle. Its platform supports hundreds of thousands of residential and commercial real estate transactions each year for thousands of property professionals, including law firms, in-house legal teams, developers, title companies, and real estate investment trusts. Orbital’s customer base includes large international law firms and multinational companies across the real estate sector. Will Pearce, Orbital's CEO and co-founder, noted that although real estate is the world’s largest asset class, the legal processes that support it are still largely manual, fragmented, and opaque, with many practices having changed little for more than a century. Orbital is changing that with AI purpose-built for real estate, making transactions more transparent and reliable for all parties. With the new funding, the company plans to expand across the wider real estate ecosystem and increase investment in product development, with the goal of creating a single, secure workspace for real estate legal work across the full asset lifecycle. Following the opening of its New York office in 2025, Orbital plans to grow its team and establish additional US hubs to better support customers.

Venture firm 2150 today announced the final close of its €210 million second fund, bringing total assets under management to €500 million.  The fund remains focused on backing technology companies seeking to reshape our cities and the industries that power them.  I spoke to partner and co-founder Christian Hernandez to learn more.  Building a climate Fund around cities and industry 2150 is built on the belief that cities drive the majority of global prosperity and represent the greatest opportunity for sustainable progress. 2150 backs founders developing transformative solutions across energy, industrial decarbonisation, advanced manufacturing, mobility, and urban systems.  Why LPs re-committed in a tough climate fundraising market When asked what convinced limited partners to commit such a large amount in a difficult fundraising environment for climate funds, Hernandez points first to continuity. “Raising money for Fund I happened in a very different market,” he said. “We were lucky to have large institutional anchors back then, and the important part this time was getting those anchors to recommit.” The second fund from 2150 garnered a broad international participation from financial institutions and family offices. Investors include Viessmann Generations Group, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Novo Holdings, the Danish sovereign fund EIFO, Security Trading Oy,  Islandbridge Capital, Fund of Funds Carbon Equity, and the US-based Church Pension Group. Proving the investment model with a transatlantic portfolio Beyond repeat investors, a second group of LPs came in only after the firm could demonstrate a real operating track record. “In a first fund, you’re selling a vision and a team,” Hernandez explained. “People wanted to see that we could actually find deals, win deals, and that those deals could progress — with follow-on rounds of real scale. That validation matters.” Since Fund I, the firm has built a transatlantic portfolio despite having no permanent US presence, with companies now operating at meaningful scale. “We’ve proved that we can win deals in both Europe and the US. The portfolio has an aggregate run rate of around a billion dollars and about 4,500 employees. Some of these companies are already very significant businesses.” Demonstrating a deep, repeatable pipeline was also critical. By the time Fund II launched, the team had already completed seven investments. “That helped convince new groups that this wasn’t just one good vintage, but a sustainable platform,” shared Hernandez.  Those new backers include a Finnish family office; specialist climate investors such as Carbon Equity; and, for the first time, a major US institutional LP. “Our first US institutional investor is Church Pension Group, a $17.5 billion pension fund for the Episcopalian Church,” Hernandez noted. “They evaluated us first as a venture fund, and then on impact. They’ve been in venture for a long time and invest in many of the marquee names, but there’s also a strong moral compass behind how they deploy capital.” With just 34 limited partners in a €210 million fund, ticket sizes are unusually large for the sector. “We only have about 34 LPs,” he said. “So if you divide 210 by 34, the median cheque is pretty high.” The importance of backing scalable climate solutions 2150 backs founders scaling economically competitive climate solutions. Fund I portfolio companies include 1Komma5º, Vammo, and Blue Frontier.  Secondly, 2150 has always focused on the industrial side. According to Hernandez: “The first thing that never existed is going to be expensive. It’s literally cobbled together by hand. My partner Christian Jölck was in industry before, building stuff in factories. I worked in electronics. We always asked: at what point does this become price-competitive with what it’s replacing? Is it unit one? It might not be unit 20. Is it unit 100 or 1,000? How do they get there, and how much is it going to cost? Do they need to build their own factory or can they outsource manufacturing?” A third factor, Hernandez added, was demonstrating that the portfolio’s growth was not driven by equity alone. For every euro of venture capital raised, the companies have attracted an additional €0.75 in debt or other forms of non-dilutive financing. “That’s working capital, that’s factory build-out, that’s financing products for customers,” he said. Unlike pure software startups, capital-intensive climate and industrial technologies must be designed from day one to access these alternative funding sources. “If you’re doing hard tech, you have to think about this other type of capital from the start,” Hernandez explained. “It can’t just be venture equity.” That discipline also shaped how the firm positioned itself to investors. Rather than relying on the idea of a “green premium,” 2150 focused on backing technologies that win on fundamental economics. “There was no green premium in 2021,” Hernandez said. “Nobody was going to pay three times more for something just because it was better for the planet. It had to be cheaper, faster, better, or cheaper to own over time. That’s always been the core focus of the solutions we back.” Over the last year, Hernandez has seen software for commercial and industrial energy management as the fastest way to scale, noting, “We’ve probably seen two dozen companies in that space, many in Germany.”   These startups focus on optimising energy use across factories, logistics centres, and cold-storage facilities, often applying AI to fine-tune complex industrial processes. “It’s about how you use algorithms to make industrial systems run better, or to control robots and machinery more efficiently,” Hernandez explained. “That’s less the case for areas like cement, cooling hardware, or other deep industrial technologies,” he said.. 2150 often co-invests with firms like Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Energy Impact Partners, who are willing to go down the hard-tech path. 2150 is intentionally a Series A investor.  Hernandez explained: “It doesn’t have to be revenue, but it has to be a product we can touch, pilots deployed, maybe some ARR, and most importantly, the team: the PhD, the commercial lead, and often someone who can talk to banks for debt. Two brilliant minds spinning out of Imperial with something that might commercialise in five years is probably not for us. Our bias is to have an impact today with solutions that can scale today.” Investing for impact now 2150’s second fund is structured as an Article 9 fund under the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) — meaning every investment must qualify as environmentally sustainable under that strict regulatory regime.  Hernandez explained that it's an EU regulation to avoid greenwashing. “Article 8 is light green, Article 9 is dark green. Everything you invest in has to have a positive planetary or societal impact. You have to report annually. There are exclusions: no extractives, no weapons, no significant harm. It limits dual-use technologies. We were one of the first VC funds to choose Article 9, and it matched our mission.” In terms of sustainability priorities, cooling stands out as one of 2150’s biggest focus areas. By 2035, global energy demand for cooling is expected to exceed that of data centres, making it a critical and fast-growing source of emissions and infrastructure strain. Water is another major theme, spanning challenges from floods and droughts to contamination by PFAS and microplastics.  Further, “demand drivers like sustainable aviation fuel mandates, data centre energy costs, carbon pricing, and industrial partnerships are becoming very important,” shared Hernandez. 

This week, we tracked more than 70 tech funding deals worth over €2.7 billion, and over 10 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe. Alongside the week’s top funding rounds, we’ve also curated the most important industry stories you need to know. This week saw the launch of EU Inc at the World Economic Forum in Davos in response to months of lobbying and a policy movement backed by over 22,000 signatories, including Europe's leading founders, investors, and the broader startup community. Its co-initiator, Andreas Klinger, also launched his third investment fund at PROTOTYPE to back startups in robotics, automation, and physical or frontier AI. 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 ?? Cloover secures over $1.2B to develop an AI operating system for energy independence ?? Accounting software platform Pennylane raises $200M ??  Language learning edtech Preply hits $1.2B valuation with $150M Series D ??‍?? Noteworthy acquisitions and mergers ?? Tourmanagement BV acquires Beatswitch in live music software deal ??. AB Tasty merges with its Indian rival VWO ??  The American company ClickHouse is acquiring the Berlin-based startup Langfuse ??. IN4 Group makes swoop for Midlands apprenticeship provider ? Interesting moves from investors ? Vanagon Ventures closes €20M Fund I to back deeptech startups ? PROTOTYPE Capital launches Fund III and hits 5.6x returns by backing "crazy ideas" ?  Ananda Impact Ventures secures €73M first close for fifth Core Impact Fund ? Vi Partners marks 25 years with first close of €161M new venture fund ??. Metavallon VC launches €5m “Brain Gain” fund to reverse Greece’s tech talent exodus ?️ In other (important) news ??  The European Commission launches EU Inc., the long-awaited ‘28th regime’ for startups ??. Tech “trailblazers” to get visa reimbursement fees, as government says Britain is "haven of stability" for startups ??. The Estonian Startup Awards mark a milestone night for Estonia’s startup ecosystem ? Recommended reads and listens ??. Profile: The Danish fintech boss who says “no” a lot ??. Building a European digital stack: The alternatives to US big tech you should know ⚡.Soldera’s 10x growth story: building the Stripe for renewable energy ? European tech startups to watch  ?? Medtech Cancilico closes €2.5M round to advance AI in oncology ??  Anzen Industries raises $2.2M for chemical production innovation ??  Allocation Strategy secured £1.6M to advance asset allocation technology ??  Lovinn receives €300,000 investment

This week saw the  official launch of Cyber Alloy, an independent connecting network organisation designed to bring together companies, governments, knowledge institutions, venture capitalists, and security specialists in a unified effort to build a cyber-resilient ecosystem. It aims to transform the cybersecurity landscape by harnessing collective intelligence, shared insights, and collaborative innovation. In a world where digital threats evolve at an unprecedented pace, CyberAlloy exists to make organisations stronger together against digital threats by connecting knowledge, people, and technology within a trusted ecosystem.  It aims to relieve CISOs and their teams by bringing together insight, expertise, and solutions, enabling them to act faster, better, and with greater confidence. By enabling collaboration where it currently stalls, fragmented efforts are transformed into collective defence. “ Cybersecurity is no longer an individual battle; it is a shared mission,” said Aernout Reijmer, CEO of CyberAlloy. “We envision a connected, secure world where trust and collaboration drive cybersecurity innovation. By building bridges between all levels and sectors, we make cyber resilience accessible and achievable for everyone.” A defining feature of CyberAlloy is its role as a neutral, independent platform for trusted collaboration. “Data plays a crucial role in understanding and anticipating cyber threats,” says Lizzy Klijs, Trusted Data Advisor and Chief Data Officer at CyberAlloy. “When organisations collaborate and responsibly share insights, they gain a clearer, more complete view of risks. CyberAlloy creates the governance, trust, and structure needed to turn data and collective intelligence into faster decisions and real-world impact, in which the risk is mitigated faster.” By enabling organisations to share real-time threat intelligence and align people, processes and technology, CyberAlloy brings together the “good” network—making defence as fast, smart and scalable as attack. 

For more than a decade, Europe has relied on US Big Tech for the core layers of its digital economy — from cloud infrastructure and productivity software to search, social platforms, and, more recently, foundation models.  But as regulation tightens, geopolitics hardens, trade tensions and tariffs reshape global supply chains, and AI becomes strategic infrastructure, that dependence is no longer seen as just a commercial issue.   Last week, the European Commission launched a fresh consultation on open source, signalling its ambition for Europe’s developer communities to move beyond simply reinforcing US platforms and instead help build and maintain the core digital infrastructure on which Europe’s long-term technological independence will depend. Solutions built by Europeans for Europe are not just about innovation but also about representing local values around privacy, sovereignty, resilience, and industrial capability.  And when it comes to replacing Big Tech, many layers of the stack, Europe already has new and established credible players, ready to deliver efficient, responsible, and privacy-respecting digital services to European users. I’ve written this as a living guide that will be regularly updated. Many of the companies naturally span more than one category. Feel free to message me to add your company.  Core internet infrastructure and cloud (alternatives to AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, etc.) Crypt.ee (Estonia) DNS4EU (Czechia) a privacy-compliant DNS resolver alternative to Google Public DNS and Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 — keeping internet name resolution inside the EU. Evroc (Sweden) hyperscale cloud Exoscale (Switzerland) Hetzner (Germany)  IONOS Cloud (Germany) – enterprise + public sector Open Telekom Cloud (Germany) Public cloud computing service provided by Deutsche Telekom AG OVHcloud  (France)  Scaleway (France)  UpCloud (Finland) AI & Foundation Models (alternatives to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and more) Aleph Alpha (Germany) – enterprise + government-grade AI Dataiku (France) DeepL (Germany) – AI language models & translation eTranslation (European Union) Internxt AI (Spain) conversational AI LightOn (France)  enterprise GenAI Mistral AI (France) frontier LLMs, open and sovereign Noxtua (Germany) Europe's first sovereign Legal AI Silo AI (Finland, now part of AMD) Tilde (Latvia) an open-source foundational LLM with over 30 billion parameters designed for Baltic and Eastern European languages Developer and work platforms  Capacities (Germany) digital information management  Firebase (Armenia/US) GitLab (Ukraine-founded, now global) Lovable (France) Vibe coding   Infobip (Croatia)  CPaaS, messaging, voice, APIs, etc Krock.io  (Estonia) A cloud-based media review, creative collaboration, and project management platform for video production teams, agencies, and content creators. Collaboration and Chat (alternatives to Slack, Teams, Zoom etc.) Element (UK) decentralised secure messaging Jitsi (France) video conferencing Nextcloud Talk (Germany) Olvid (France) private text messaging) Wire (Switzerland) enterprise secure comms Email & Productivity (alternatives to Gmail, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365) Infomaniak (Switzerland) Full productivity and cloud Nextcloud (Germany) Self-hosted Workspace alternative OnlyOffice (Latvia) Proton (Switzerland) Mail, Calendar, Drive, VPN Tutanota (Germany) encrypted email Search & Browsing (alternatives to Google, Chrome etc) Brave (EU-founded, now global, privacy browser) Ecosia (Germany) – climate-focused search   Mojeek (UK) Qwant (France) Startpage (Netherlands)  Vivaldi (Norway) VPN Nym (Switzerland) Maps and Location (alternatives to Google and Apple Maps) OpenStreetMap (EU-led open infrastructure)  Organic Maps (Estonia) Consumer marketplaces (alternatives to Amazon, Ebay etc.  BackMarket preloved consumer electronics  Bought (Finland) pre-loved clothing BuyCycle (Germany)  e-bikes Codressing (Germany) buy, sell, and rent clothing Faircado (Germany) A browser extension that automatically suggests better second-hand alternatives when you shop online Liki24 (Ukraine) pharmaceutical, health and wellness products NOLD (UK) pre-loved clothing  OnBuy (UK)  retail marketplace  Swappie (Finland) refurbishes and resells iPhones and iPads.  Uphavin formerly El Green Mall) Germany ecofriendly marketplace Valyuu (The Netherlands) preloved consumer electronics Vinted (Lithuania) preloved clothing, goods and more Social & Content Platforms (altneratives to X, Meta, YouTube etc) Daily motion (France) YouTube alternative  Lemmy  Reddit alternative Mastodon (Germany) Open Vibe (Czechia)  PeerTube (France) YouTube alternative   Consumer hardware Nothing (UK) Smartphones, headphones, earbuds and more Murena (France)  Fairphone (The Netherlands)  Repairable smartphones and accessories Speaking of sovereign tech, I also want to do a call out to the open-source world’s most successful government interventions: the German Sovereign Tech Agency.  Through its Sovereign Tech Fund, a public-sector investment initiative launched in October 2022 and managed by the Agency as a subsidiary of SPRIND under the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Germany has created a blueprint for how states can strategically support digital sovereignty at the infrastructure layer.  Financed by the federal government and operating under public procurement law, the fund targets foundational open-source base technologies: the low-level libraries, tools, protocols, and frameworks that underpin most of today’s digital systems.  In its first two years alone, it invested €23 million across more than 60 projects worldwide, treating open digital infrastructure not as a by-product of innovation, but as a critical public good.

ClearScore, the London-based fintech that provides credit score services, has acquired UK mortgage platform Acre Platforms, as it looks to diversify its offering. The move marks ClearScore’s first move into mortgages and follows its move last year into secured loans with its acquisition of Aro Finance. London-based ClearScore also acquired Edinburgh-based online personal budgeting service Money Dashboard in 2022. Acre bills itself as an end-to-end mortgage platform for brokers. ClearScore says the purchase of London-based Acre, which has 47 staff, for an undisclosed amount, will mean it can route mortgage demand from its millions of users into Acre’s mortgage broker ecosystem. ClearScore says it will leverage Acre's tech across its businesses in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Justin Basini, co-founder and CEO of the ClearScore Group, said: "The acquisition allows us to accelerate our mortgage strategy with Acre technology powering our home lending business and helping us deliver compelling new experiences for our users.” Justus Brown, CEO, Acre, said: "Our data-driven approach has led us to building a platform that’s transformed brokers' businesses in the UK. Joining the ClearScore Group is an exciting next step in our evolution that allows us to accelerate our drive to become the leading tech platform for the mortgage industry."

The CEO of Danish payment unicorn Flatpay is not a "yes" man. Sander Janca-Jensen says: “We say 'no' a lot. We pride ourselves on saying ‘no’ internally.” Examples of Flatpay’s thumbs down mentality include saying “no” to new business opportunities, "no" to new distribution channels, "no" to potential new customers, and "no" to new tech. The 36-year-old father of two has also recently said “no” to eating candy (“one of the best decisions in my entire life”). It’s not that Janca-Jensen is a naysayer; it’s that he doesn’t want Flatpay to spread itself too thin because, as he says, everything comes with an opportunity cost. “We don’t try to be something for everybody,” he points out, speaking over video.  Flatpay becomes a unicorn Flatpay became Denmark’s latest unicorn last year (following the likes of Lunar, Pleo and Tradeshift) after landing $170 million in funding, reaching the $1bn valuation accolade in only three years. At the time Janca-Jensen pointed out that Flatpay was one of the few “non-AI” European startup unicorns.  Valuing Flatpay at $1.7bn, the funding round was led by AVP, the European and North American investor and Smash Capital, the backer of consumer internet and software firms, with other investors including Hedosophia, Seed Capital, and Dawn Capital. Flatpay’s offering Flatpay offers payment hardware and software for small and medium-sized merchants, such as retailers and restaurants, including payment terminals, all-in-one point of sale systems, and online payment solutions. As it says on the tin, Flatpay’s USP is the flat transaction rate it charges merchants for the use of its kit. It primarily targets brick-and-mortar merchants, which make up around 95 per cent of revenues, with online merchants the rest. Flatpay says it has around 70,000 customers (up tenfold from early 2024) and Janca-Jensen says Flatpay is adding between 10 and 15 per cent new customers each month. It operates across its native Denmark, which accounts for around 25 per cent of revenues, as well as Finland, Germany, Italy, France, the UK, the recently-launched Netherlands, and is planning one unnamed new market for 2026. Recruitment charge It employs around 1,500 staff, or “Flatplayers”, and, says the CEO, is now on a manic recruitment drive, employing nearly 200 people a month. Along with its flat fee, merchants are also enticed by its daily settlements, 24/7 customer service and “old school” in-person sales calls to sell its payment kit, he says. He says: “Ninety-nine per cent of the cases we are going there in person, having a meeting with the person who owns or manages the store, and then we sign a contract at that meeting, we then come back with the same person and install the physical product.” Moving into banking services and ambitious ARR targets Janca-Jensen, who lives in Copenhagen, reveres the metric du jour, ARR (annual recurring revenue), posting on LinkedIn last year that Flatpay had topped €1m ARR in one day.  In 2025, its ARR quadrupled from €35m to €135m, while a €400m ARR is the ambitious goal for 2026. How will Flatpay reach this target? He says: “The business is very stable. That means we don’t have to do much better than we are already doing. Of course, we will have to grow the sales force over the year. “This year is about basically three things: making sure we get the Netherlands off well and we open our eighth market successfully. Then it’s about scaling in the market where we are. And we want to go out and build the product." Soon-to-launch “light” banking services for merchants, such as business accounts, cards and expense management, as well as software to help merchants build their brands, could provide fresh revenues. Managerial style and relationship with co-founders Flatpay has four co-founders: Janca-Jensen, Rasmus Hellmund Carlsen (head of marketing), Peter Lüth (CTO), and Rasmus Busk (head of international), all of whom have worked together in the past co-founding startups. He says: “There have never been any founder-related issues. It also means we run the business together. I am obviously the CEO, but it doesn’t really matter too much that I have the title of CEO, because we try to be aligned on the direction of the company.” Janca-Jensen says the co-founders are keen to push autonomy down through the startup. He says his strengths are on the commercial side of the business and scouting talent. Being self-critical, he says he can be a “pain in the arse” and can micro-manage too much. Focused approach Fundamental to Flatpay’s success has been eschewing a scattergun approach, launching multiple products, going after new markets willy-nilly, and being wooed by new tech. Janca-Jensen says: “We try to limit the number of things we do at the same time." Likewise, the startup does not like to get too far ahead of itself. “I don’t spend too much time on building the vision for the next five years,” he adds, pointing out that there are too many variables to think that far ahead. Competitors and challenges Flatpay has a big opportunity, playing in a multi-billion-dollar market in Europe alone, where many merchants are locked up with legacy players which dominate the market. That said, it is going up against hyper-competitive businesses like Square, SumUp and Dojo. One recent big deal in payments has been Mollie buying GoCardless. “I don’t know who got the better end of that deal,” he rues. Other challenges facing Flatpay include a possible cyber-attack and, says the CEO, a Covid repeat, which would “really suck”. Virtues of being a Danish startup The advantages of being Denmark-headquartered are that the Danes are digitally savvy, with a strong pool of talent, he says. However, looking ahead, which is not the Flatpay way, he says that “Denmark is potentially not the most sexy stock market to list in”. Denmark has long been outshone by its neighbour, Sweden, AKA Silicon Valhalla, as a startup hub. Given the relative similarity in population sizes: Denmark, around six million, Sweden, around 10 million, Janca-Jensen says it’s not wrong to compare the two countries. He says: “The biggest difference between Sweden and Denmark is that they have been very successful in the past on building phenomenal companies. And there is a lot of very smart people there. “There is also a lot of capital from people who have been successful over the past that can be put back into the ecosystem.” Outside work Janca-Jensen, who lifts weights three times a week and looks ripped, is something of a fitness fanatic, clocking up 10,000 steps a day, wearing and sleeping with his Oura ring. “If you don’t measure stuff, you can’t manage stuff,” he opines. And why was cancelling candy such a good move? It helped with both weight loss and controlling his energy levels, he says.