UK biotech iFAST Diagnostics has closed a £5 million funding round. iFAST is addressing the $4 billion (and growing) Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (AST) market. It has developed a test delivering results in under three hours from a positive blood bottle or 3 to 4 hours from a raw urine sample, saving lives and reducing the spread of antimicrobial resistance.. The round was led by Meridian Health Ventures (MHV), with continued participation from almost all existing subscribers, including QantX, RAW Ventures, and OKG Capital, as well as members of Cambridge Capital Group, and included £2.1 million of non-dilutive loan funding from Innovate UK.   The over-subscribed round values the company at almost 5 times more than the previous funding just 18 months ago and brings the total investment to date to £12 million. Tim Irish, General Partner at Meridian Health Ventures, said: “We are exceptionally proud to be partnered with iFAST Diagnostics. Their breakthrough technology has the potential to transform clinical practice, improve patient outcomes, and significantly slow the spread of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). AMR is one of the defining public health challenges of our generation – and iFAST is taking that challenge head-on with a cost-effective solution already being placed in UK hospital laboratories. The iFAST rapid AST system is a game-changing innovation, delivering susceptibility testing in less than 3 hours, significantly faster than the current standard process which takes more than 40 hours.” Dr Toby King, iFAST CEO, said:  “We are hugely grateful and motivated by the continued enthusiasm and confidence from our investors to support our mission to meet the urgent global need for rapid, low-cost antimicrobial susceptibility testing. This investment is hugely significant as it allows us to continue our go-to-market strategy at pace, only three years after founding the company.” The funding will be used to expand the UK rollout, secure EU approval, and accelerate our clinical and regulatory programme for the company’s US regulatory approval through the FDA.

Mykor, a UK biotechnology company developing low-carbon construction materials from industrial and agricultural waste, has secured £4 million in funding to accelerate the scale-up of its industrial biofabrication technologies. The round was led by Clean Growth Fund, with participation from the British Business Bank’s South West Investment Fund via The FSE Group, Green Angel Ventures, and support from Innovate UK’s investor partnership programme. The construction sector remains a major contributor to global emissions, with growing pressure on developers and contractors to reduce both embodied and operational carbon in buildings. At the same time, many traditional insulation and construction materials remain carbon-intensive, non-renewable, and difficult to recycle. Founded in 2021, Mykor develops construction systems using engineered mycelium, green chemistry, and industrial manufacturing processes to create low-carbon alternatives to conventional building materials. The company focuses on converting agricultural and industrial waste streams into scalable construction products designed to meet mainstream fire safety, acoustic, and performance requirements. Rather than operating solely as a materials manufacturer, Mykor positions itself as a technology and process platform, enabling contractors and manufacturers to integrate biomaterials into existing production lines and construction systems. Its first commercial product, MykoSIP, is a prefabricated partition wall system designed to reduce embodied carbon while maintaining comparable thermal and acoustic performance to conventional alternatives. According to the company, the panels also use significantly less water and electricity during production compared to polystyrene-based systems. According to Olivia Page, the company was built around the idea that lower-carbon construction materials must remain commercially viable and practical for large-scale adoption. We’ve built Mykor around the idea that decarbonising construction cannot come at the expense of cost, performance or practicality. The challenge has never just been inventing a biomaterial - it’s been manufacturing these systems at an industrial scale and integrating them into real construction supply chains. The funding comes as tightening building regulations across the UK and Europe increase demand for lower-carbon construction materials and more energy-efficient building systems. Mykor is already working on active construction projects and has signed large offtake agreements with contractors across the UK and Europe, while the new funding will support production scale-up and expansion into additional markets.

A London-headquartered data centre firm today said it had secured $2.7bn in financing, with the funds earmarked to expand across Europe and the Middle East amid soaring AI workload demands.   Pure Data Centres (Pure DC), which is backed by Oaktree Capital, purchases land to build data centres, which are then leased out to hyperscalers to run AI and cloud workloads. Hyperscalers include the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon.   A big chunk of the $2.7bn loan was secured against Pure DC’s Dublin and Amsterdam data centre campuses. The fresh funds brings in new lenders SMBC, the Japanese multinational bank, Allianz Global Investors (the investment management arm of Allianz), and Dutch bank ABN AMRO.   Pure DC is investing over €1 billion in a giant data centre campus, which will support AI workloads, in Amsterdam. The 78MW campus is fully leased to Microsoft, according to Dutch media.    It says the site, which comprises three 85-metere towers, will provide over 1,000 jobs. There is no firm date on when the data centre will be fully operational. Pure DC, which also operates a data centre in Abu Dhabi, is looking to expand its presence in the Middle East, which it believes is a key AI growth market.   However last month, Pure DC told CNBC that it paused investment in AI infrastructure projects and data centres in the Middle East amid the Iran war. Pure DC CEO Gary Wojtaszek said: "Over the past 12 months, we have materially strengthened and diversified our financing platform, bringing in high-quality institutional partners and increasing available capital.    "The successful syndication of the $2.15 billion facility and the expansion of our corporate facility demonstrate both the depth of market demand and the confidence lenders have in our assets, structure and strategy."

RevEng.AI, a cybersecurity company focused on software supply chain verification, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by NATO Innovation Fund, with participation from Sands Capital, In-Q-Tel, IQ Capital, and Episode One. The company is building a binary-native verification layer for the software supply chain, helping organisations analyse compiled software to determine what is actually inside executables, firmware, and third-party applications without requiring access to source code. Software supply chain attacks are becoming a growing risk as organisations increasingly rely on third-party software, open-source components, and vendor updates. At the same time, AI-generated code is making it harder for security teams to verify that deployed software is secure and free from hidden vulnerabilities or malicious functionality. RevEng.AI aims to address this challenge through its foundational AI model, BinNet, which analyses software directly at the binary level. Trained alongside government cyber units and commercial security teams, the system is designed to automatically identify hidden vulnerabilities, backdoors, suspicious functionality, and abnormal changes in released software before it is deployed or purchased. According to James Patrick-Evans, PhD, Founder and CEO of RevEng.AI, as AI takes on a growing role in software development, executable binaries are becoming the most reliable way to verify what software actually does once it runs on machines. RevEng gives organisations an independent way to verify software at the binary level before it is released, bought, or deployed. This is critical because much of the software being built today is never reviewed or seen by a human, making it untrustworthy. It needs to be automated, and that’s exactly what RevEng delivers. Unlike traditional application security tools that primarily focus on source code and repositories, RevEng works directly on compiled executables, including closed-source and third-party software. The platform is designed to help organisations identify hidden or undeclared components, detect vulnerabilities and malicious behaviour, compare releases against trusted versions, and verify software before deployment or procurement decisions are made. David Ordonez, Senior Associate at NATO Innovation Fund, said modern economies and critical national infrastructure increasingly depend on software across sectors such as energy, transportation, healthcare, finance, and defence. RevEng.AI gives organisations the ability to understand what is actually inside the software they rely on, even when that software is closed-source or delivered by third parties. That closes a critical gap in software supply chain security and strengthens the resilience of the systems our societies depend on. The company says it is already seeing early demand from enterprise and defence customers, while continuing to integrate its technology into existing security and software delivery workflows to support more proactive software verification processes. The funding will be used to support the growth and deployment of RevEng.AI’s binary-level software verification platform as demand increases from enterprise and defence organisations.

Barcelona-based Publicit has raised €700,000 in a pre-seed funding round co-led by BStartup Banco Sabadell and Successful Fund, with participation from AticcoLab and several business angels from the Spanish technology and media sectors. Founded by former CERN engineer Gabriel García Asensio alongside Andrés Buendía and Jordi Orteu, Publicit is developing an advertising infrastructure designed to improve access to digital and omnichannel advertising for small and medium-sized businesses. The company is focused on addressing what it describes as a structural limitation within the advertising industry, where access to channels beyond platforms such as Google and Meta often requires manual negotiations, agency involvement, and large advertising budgets. This has historically limited access to formats such as connected TV, out-of-home advertising, digital audio, radio, and local press for smaller companies. Publicit is building an omnichannel advertising platform centred around an AI-powered media planning system capable of autonomously planning and activating campaigns. The platform enables businesses to launch campaigns across connected TV, out-of-home advertising, radio, digital audio, and press through a single interface without minimum spending requirements. The company has also developed its own European bidding infrastructure capable of processing advertising auctions in milliseconds while applying AI-based optimisation during campaign delivery. The funding comes amid continued growth in connected TV advertising and broader changes in the digital advertising market, with companies increasingly exploring alternative self-service advertising tools beyond major online platforms. Publicit plans to use the new funding to continue developing its advertising infrastructure, expand its AI capabilities, and further simplify access to omnichannel advertising tools for smaller businesses.

WeRoad, a European adventure travel company focused on group and social travel experiences, has raised $58 million in a Series C funding round led by Airbnb, with participation from existing investors including H14. The round brings the company’s total funding to $100 million. Founded in Italy in 2017, WeRoad organises group travel experiences designed primarily for solo travellers, combining curated itineraries with shared travel experiences aimed at fostering social connection. Since launch, WeRoad has taken more than 300,000 travellers across over 1,000 itineraries worldwide and built a network of more than 4,000 group coordinators across Europe and other markets. According to Paolo De Nadai, the company’s focus on in-person experiences reflects growing demand for genuine human connection in an increasingly digital environment. In a world increasingly shaped by AI and social media, genuine human connection is becoming both rarer and more valuable. At WeRoad, we’ve built our entire product around enabling real-world connections through shared travel experiences. People today are not just looking to visit new places, they’re looking to belong. Expanding into the US is a milestone we’ve been working towards for years, and having Airbnb alongside us is both a strong validation of what we’ve built and a powerful signal of the opportunity ahead. The funding will support WeRoad’s first major expansion outside Europe, with the company preparing to enter the United States market. As part of the rollout, WeRoad also plans to expand WeMeet, a platform launched in 2025 that organises local social events, including hikes, dinners, sports activities, and wellness sessions. The company positions WeMeet as part of a broader shift toward what it describes as the “IRL economy,” where technology is used to facilitate offline experiences and in-person social interaction rather than long-term online engagement.

Glasgow-based Go Swag, a technology platform focused on corporate gifting and branded merchandise, has raised $5 million in a funding round led by Mercia Ventures, with participation from Techstart Ventures and strategic angel investors. The latest round brings the company’s total funding to $6.2 million. The corporate gifting industry is projected to grow significantly over the coming years, but the market remains fragmented and heavily reliant on manual processes, disconnected suppliers, and low-quality merchandise. Companies operating international gifting programmes often face operational challenges tied to sourcing, logistics, customs, and recipient management, particularly when trying to maintain consistent brand standards and sustainability goals across multiple markets. Founded in 2019, Go Swag aims to address these challenges by helping companies manage and distribute branded gifts globally through a platform that combines AI-powered product curation, logistics management, warehousing, and international fulfilment. Its system is designed to streamline product selection and gifting programme management while reducing operational complexity. According to Conor McKenna, CEO and Co-Founder of Go Swag, the company was created in response to what it saw as an outdated corporate gifting market dominated by low-quality products and inefficient processes. The catalogue is dead and we're replacing it with smart AI-assisted curation and a better gifting process to match. The company’s platform includes tools such as its AI recommendation engine Sonny™ and Claim Pages™, a system designed to collect recipient information directly in order to reduce administrative work and improve fulfilment accuracy. Go Swag also operates warehouse infrastructure across the UK, the Netherlands, and the United States to support international distribution and inventory management. The new funding will be used to accelerate international expansion, particularly in the United States, establish a warehouse in Southeast Asia, expand the company’s workforce, and continue investing in automation and product development across quoting, account management, and recommendation systems.

The boss of Tide, a British fintech which offers banking services to SMEs, says he is not one for showing off.   “I am quite a humble person, maybe too humble to be in our industry,” says Oliver Prill, its CEO, speaking over video.   You are unlikely to get a “war story” about Tide’s latest funding round from Prill, who says that Tide’s recent elevation to unicorn status was an achievement he “personally didn’t need”.   This might make the 55-year-old UCL economics graduate sound dour, a party pooper even, but it’s more that he talks in facts, not hyperbole.   “I am a very straight talker. I am never impolite, but I am to the point; maybe it’s a bit my German heritage,” the Hamburg-born Prill says. That said, Prill, as is de rigueur in 2026, is not immune to at least some social media strutting. On his LinkedIn page, where he goes by the honorific doctor, courtesy of his Oxford University philosophy doctorate, Prill has posted images of himself in elevated circles.   In one post, he can be seen grinning outside Number 10 Downing Street while another post sees him dressed to the nines sporting a white dickie bow, pictured next to fintech leaders at a banquet for German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier.   Two million customers   One achievement Tide and Prill are talking about is Tide today crossing two million customers, or “members” as Tide calls them, less than 10 years after its 2017 launch.   “It’s an important metric,” says Prill, saying it shows Tide has product-market fit and the unit economics work.   The two million “milestone” is a far cry from 2018, when Prill joined a “very very tiny” startup with just 30 employees, which had “all the potential in the world”.   Prill, with a background in financial services and working with SMEs, was drafted in to “scale it”, anchored by a seed round investment from Eileen Burbidge’s Passion Capital.   He says: “It was quite exciting. A true early startup at this stage. The business was at a level where it had early proof points, but it needed someone to scale.”   What does Tide do?   Tide, like a raft of digital-only fintechs, is looking to shake up the sedate world of traditional finance.    It describes itself as a “business financial platform”, which is aimed at small businesses, freelancers and sole traders.   It is not technically a bank, but an e-money institution which provides business current accounts in partnership with ClearBank, which is a licensed bank.   It also offers loans and services like expense management, invoice and accounting and, most recently, insurance.    It makes its money through plans and business tool subscriptions, interest earned on deposits, interchange and transaction fees, as well as lending and insurance products.   International expansion   One of the most eye-catching things about Tide is its unusual geographical split, with a presence in the UK, Germany, France and India, something of an outlier amid a roll call of British fintechs selling their wares stateside.   The London-headquartered fintech's core market is the UK, which makes up the “vast majority” of its revenues, and which is subsidising its international push.   Tide Holdings, the parent company, made revenues of £190m in 2024, on losses of £26m. Prill says: “The UK is structurally profitable, so what we are doing is we’re taking the money we are making in the UK and investing it abroad.”   The UK market   Tide has 900,000 customers in the UK, which equates to around 15 per cent of the small business market in the UK, helping businesses access over £1.75bn in credit.   However, a handbrake on its growth has been new rules on so-called “Authorised Push Payment” (APP) fraud, which has meant payment services providers like Tide must reimburse customers who fall victim to it. In a dig at the rules, Prill says: “The APP fraud regulation meant we had to direct a lot of investment into the technology that prevents APP fraud. Fraud has still increased net in the market, so not sure how successful that regulation was.” Probably “the biggest headwind", though, is the faltering UK economy, putting a lot of pressure on Tide’s core market of SMEs, he says.   India   Tide has boots on the ground in Germany and France, where Tide is “just beginning its journey”.    Like in the UK, SMEs are the spine of their economies, with the bounty being that the digitisation of financial services are five years behind the UK, says Prill.   Tide’s entry into the Indian market came via the circuitous route of it setting up an engineering hub in Hyderabad, as it scrambled for engineering talent post-Brexit, giving Tide a “strong conviction” about the market.   Tide’s India business now has 1.1m customers, its biggest in terms of customers, albeit this represents less than a paltry one per cent of the estimated 120m SMEs in India.   Prill says: “The Indian government has been very good at putting infrastructure in place, with UPI (United Payments Interface), the payment system for example.   “So a lot of things, in a bizarre sort of way, are digitally infrastructure-wise much more advanced than we have in Europe.”   The former McKinsey executive gets out to India at least twice a year, in a market where the “biggest competitor is cash”, trying to stay for a minimum of two weeks.   He says: “There is this thing about building social bonds, meeting government officials and so on.”    US investor-led funding round Last year, Tide raised $120m at a valuation of $1.5bn, in a funding round led by US private equity firm TPG and including Tide’s existing investor Apax Digital Funds.   That Tide received funding from a US investor amid a UK government push to increase homegrown funding of British success stories, with endeavours like the Mansion House Accord agreement and Sovereign AI, is a reminder of where venture power rests.   Prill said the priority of the funding round was less about capital raising and more about giving exits to angel investors and early employees.   On the funding round, he says: “We have a lot of angels that have made a lot of money and where looking for the ability to do secondaries.   “What we wanted to do is have more late-stage investors. We bought Apax in at the beginning of it, and we wanted TPG as a second late-stage investor.”   On reaching unicorn status, he says: “I didn’t personally need the unicorn status. But it is very meaningful for a lot of people.”   2026 agenda and IPO prospects   On a possible Tide IPO, Prill says: “It’s not anywhere near-term. We are not on a path to an IPO anytime soon.”   Instead, the focus is on scaling the business in the UK and overseas, which he says will be aided by its use of AI advancements.   Currently, Tide is leveraging AI heavily internally for product engineering, with a consumer-facing AI product soon to launch.   “Often we are not as vocal as others” on AI, says Prill.   Still enjoying the job?   Prill, whose wife is German, whom he met at Oxford University and who splits him time between the UK and Germany, says his strengths are that he’s a “strategic” thinker.   He says: “I am a very structured, organised person. I can really mobilise people to get a job done.”   A weakness is his brusqueness and impatience, he admits. Eight years at the helm of a fintech is a long tenure, but as Prill points out the role has not stuck in aspic.   He says his role has evolved from being hands-on to now dealing with big decisions, where there are “blockers”.   He adds: “Every year Tide is quite different. I like new challenges."

PacificoBiolabs, a mycelium fermentation protein company, has raised €7 million in a Series A funding round backed by Stray Dog Capital, TGFS, Sprout & About Ventures, Simon Capital, FoodLabs, and a regional brewery partner. Pacifico Biolabs develops protein ingredients using mycelium fermentation technology. Instead of relying on purpose-built bioreactors, the company uses standard beer brewery fermentation tanks, enabling it to leverage existing industrial infrastructure while avoiding the high costs typically associated with fermentation-based food production. The approach comes as breweries across Europe face declining beer and alcohol consumption, leaving fermentation capacity underutilised. Pacifico sees this as an opportunity to scale production more quickly and cost-effectively by repurposing existing brewery infrastructure rather than building new facilities. At the same time, Europe continues to rely heavily on imported feed protein despite producing most of its own meat, leaving supply chains exposed to environmental and geopolitical risks. Pacifico aims to provide a domestically produced protein alternative manufactured closer to where it is consumed, using regional industrial capacity. By using existing brewery infrastructure, the company aims to lower production costs and move closer to price parity with conventional meat products. The funding will support production scaling in Saxony, Germany, team expansion, and commercial launches across the DACH region and Nordic Europe ahead of planned retail launches by late 2026.

Traditional real estate investing has historically been difficult for most people to access, requiring large amounts of capital, complex legal processes, and direct property management.  Cross-border property investing can also be fragmented and difficult to navigate for retail investors.  InRento aims to solve this by making income-generating real estate investments more accessible through a digital platform that allows users to invest smaller amounts into professionally managed property projects. InRento is a European real estate crowdfunding platform that lets people invest in income-generating property projects — such as the conversions and retrofitting of existing buildings, often too small or not standard enough for bigger investors, as well as publicly listed companies, like the Alvernia Planet film studio in Krakow, Poland. The platform focuses on asset-backed, lower-risk real estate investments across European markets, including Lithuania, Poland, and Spain.  Investors earn returns through rental income and potential capital gains. It operates as an alternative financing platform that connects investors with medium-sized and large borrowers, including publicly listed companies, providing an alternative to traditional bank financing. That model has now financed more than €100 million worth of projects across Europe. I spoke to founder and CEO Gustas Germanavicius to learn all about it.  A €100 million milestone built during market turbulence For Germanavicius, what matters is not just the number €100 million but that it represents projects in eight countries with zero defaults. That, he says, is the real KPI, demonstrating disciplined risk management and proving the model can scale across Europe. Germanavicius founded the company in his early 20s, which he admits was probably the worst possible time to launch a business focused on cash-flow-generating real estate assets. “We launched in the middle of COVID, then faced the impact of the war in Ukraine, followed by sharp interest rate increases. It felt like there was always another challenge around the corner. But we kept moving forward.” Those crises also reshaped the wider European financing environment. Why alternative real estate finance is growing across Europe In the real estate sector, alternative finance has become far more mainstream. Crowdfunding continues to grow rapidly, alongside private debt funds and bond financing. According to Germanavicius, this reflects a broader structural issue in European finance: traditional banks are often too slow and inflexible to meet the needs of modern real estate developers, particularly SMEs and more complex redevelopment projects. In some markets, even securing an initial meeting with a bank can take weeks, while financing decisions themselves can take months. “We’ve financed publicly listed companies with tens of millions of euros in assets because they needed financing within weeks and traditional banks could not move quickly enough,” he said. Those delays have wider consequences. Developers can spend two, three, or even five years navigating permitting and licensing processes while continuing to carry land and financing costs — expenses that are ultimately passed on to buyers and tenants. “Real estate lending has become significantly more expensive,” said Germanavicius. “Debt costs have increased substantially since we launched. At the same time, developers, particularly in Eastern Europe, have become much more sophisticated in how they source capital, with access to more options than ever before.” InRento positions itself as a faster and more flexible alternative. The platform focuses exclusively on projects that have already secured the necessary development approvals, removing permitting risk from the financing equation. “I believe this is one of the main reasons we’ve maintained a zero-default track record,” he said. The challenge of cross-border lending  Currently, InRento is focused on market traction in Poland and Romania. But one of the biggest problems in Europe when it comes to real estate financing  is that cross-border lending still does not work efficiently. InRento aims to build a genuinely cross-border financing platform. From the investor side, a single account should provide access to opportunities across Europe without having to navigate different local platforms, languages, or legal systems. For borrowers, financing should be accessible regardless of where they are located. “I believe no one has truly solved this at scale yet, and that is the opportunity we are pursuing,” shared Germanavicius. Faster financing, lower permitting risk While InRento’s financing can be more expensive than traditional bank loans, Germanavicius argues that speed creates significant value for developers. “Because developers avoid lengthy permitting delays, projects can move much faster,” he said. “Most of our projects are completed within five to nine months.” That acceleration, he argues, also has broader urban and housing benefits. “That speed allows developers to deliver more housing stock to the market, including more affordable housing,” he said. “Personally, this is important to me from an urban development perspective as well. In many cities, you still see neglected or outdated buildings sitting in prime areas. I want to help make cities more attractive, more liveable, and housing more accessible.” That opportunity is particularly visible in adaptive reuse projects. The opportunity in office-to-residential conversions One of InRento’s areas of activity is office-to-residential conversions. Older office buildings are increasingly inefficient and expensive to maintain, which Germanavicius contends creates a major opportunity for conversions. Instead of leaving outdated office buildings vacant, developers can transform them into residential lofts or apartments.  “In many of the projects we finance, the final price per square metre is lower than the surrounding market while still delivering newly refurbished housing. This is also where banks tend to underperform. Many banks simply do not understand these types of projects and lack the internal processes to evaluate them efficiently. A financing decision can take three to six months, which is often too slow for developers. That inefficiency creates significant opportunities for alternative lenders like us.” Choosing profitability over venture pressure Today, InRento has a 13-person team operating across Lithuania and its international markets. In April, the company opened an office in Bucharest and launched its first Romanian investment opportunity, marking its expansion into one of Europe’s more underpenetrated real estate markets. That focus on sustainable expansion also shapes the company’s financing philosophy.  Recently, Germanavicius bought back shares from an early-stage VC investor after becoming profitable, explaining: “Our long-term interests were no longer aligned. After becoming profitable, explaining: “Our long-term interests were no longer aligned. Venture investors typically want either rapid fundraising or an exit. I want to continue building a profitable, independent company. Our strategy has never been about chasing 10x growth in a single year. Instead, we focus on doubling or tripling steadily while maintaining profitability and operational discipline.” The “1 per cent better every day” philosophy Germanavicius  describes his management philosophy as “ improve by one per cent every day.” “We focus relentlessly on the few things that matter most to clients and continuously improve them. Most progress is incremental, so you do not notice dramatic changes day to day. But over months and years, those small improvements compound into significant growth.” Inherent to this is simplifying complexity. Early on, InRento had high employee turnover, which taught the importance of systems and onboarding. “ Today, we have a 120-page internal operations document that explains exactly how the company works, who is responsible for what, and how processes should run. It is a living document that the whole team contributes to.” As InRento expands across Europe, Germanavicius believes disciplined systems — rather than aggressive hypergrowth — will ultimately determine whether cross-border real estate financing can truly scale.

Certo, an AI-powered compliance platform for the beauty and consumer goods industries, has raised $4 million in seed funding to accelerate product development and support its international expansion. The round was led by Daphni, with participation from Entrepreneurs First, Motier Ventures, and Transpose Platform. The company is also supported by advisors, including Alexandre Godvin and Vincent Delacourt, co-founders of AQM, which was acquired by Eurofins Scientific. Consumer goods companies selling internationally must comply with regulatory requirements across dozens of jurisdictions, each with different rules and standards. New regulations around areas such as microplastics, greenwashing, packaging waste, and allergen classification have added further complexity, while many compliance teams continue to rely on manual reviews and fragmented systems. Certo develops compliance software designed for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies operating across multiple international markets. The platform helps regulatory teams manage increasingly complex product compliance requirements related to ingredients, formulations, labelling, packaging, and marketing claims. We built Certo because we saw firsthand that regulatory teams were buried under growing requirements with no tools designed for their actual workflows. Our platform gives them the ability to review a product across all their target markets in minutes instead of days, with full traceability and sourced regulatory reasoning. explains Bastien Deliège-Coste, CEO and co-founder of Certo. The platform covers several stages of the product compliance lifecycle, including ingredient and raw material validation, formula compliance, claims verification, labelling checks, and market entry documentation. Certo’s system is supported by a proprietary regulatory database covering major global markets, including the EU, US, China, South Korea, Japan, and Latin America. Certo uses AI agents to review products against regulatory requirements, company policies, and retailer-specific standards while providing traceable findings and regulatory source references to support auditability. We didn't start with a product and then look for customers. We started with the workflows of regulatory teams — sitting with them, understanding how they actually review products — and built the technology around those realities. That's why the adoption has been fast: the platform fits how they work, said Jean Duquenne, CTO and co-founder of Certo. According to the company, the platform is already being used by major beauty groups, speciality brands, retailers, and consumer goods companies across Europe and the United States. The funding will be used to expand Certo’s engineering and regulatory teams, expand regulatory coverage across international markets, accelerate product development, and scale commercial operations in Europe and the United States.

ReVision Implant, a Belgian neurotechnology company developing a cortical visual prosthesis for people with severe blindness, has secured €4 million in an oversubscribed funding round backed by private investors. The round included participation from existing investors as well as new backers, including European business leaders and medtech operators. The funding builds on ReVision Implant’s existing support from public programmes, including several highly selective European Innovation Council grants such as the €2.4 million FlairVision project. The company is also supported by the Plug and Play and imec.istart incubators. ReVision Implant is developing a brain-computer interface designed to restore functional vision in patients who cannot benefit from retinal or optic nerve-based therapies. By interfacing directly with the brain’s visual cortex, the system aims to bypass damage to the eye and optic nerve and enable patients to perceive and interpret visual information. The company began building its own cleanroom infrastructure several months ago as part of preparations for future clinical trials and greater control over manufacturing and quality processes. According to Frederik Ceyssens, CEO of ReVision Implant, the funding represents a key milestone as the company moves from development into the next phase of clinical and operational expansion. We are investing in our own cleanroom environment to bring important manufacturing steps in-house, while expanding our team and advancing our regulatory compliance and clinical programme over the coming years. At the same time, we are continuing product development and strengthening our collaborations with other medtech companies as we move closer to bringing our technology to patients. The company’s progress comes amid broader advances in neurotechnology and brain-computer interfaces, with growing interest in devices designed to help address conditions including blindness, paralysis, amputations, aphasia, and locked-in syndrome. With the new funding secured, ReVision Implant is preparing for the next stage of clinical development and operational scale-up.

Mycelium foodtech company InfiniteRoots has acquired Bosque Foods, integrating Bosque’s expertise in solid-state fermentation and whole-cut product development into its mycelium platform. InfiniteRoots is a research-driven biotech company based in Hamburg, Germany.  Since 2018, the company has been developing novel foods inspired by mycelium — the underground root network of edible mushrooms.  With an international team of experts across biotechnology, data science, food science, fermentation, and culinary development, the company blends biotech with natural fermentation processes.  The mycelium sector is moving beyond the experimental phase.   After years of technological proofs-of-concept, the category is increasingly defined by scalability, IP, process data and industrial reproducibility. With the acquisition of Bosque Foods, InfiniteRoots expands its platform with solid-state fermentation expertise, whole-cut texture development and additional process data — strengthening the technical foundation for scalable industrial mycelium applications.

Gary Lineker’s growing media and production company Goalhanger has launched a venture capital arm, as it looks to diversify its business and invest in creator-led media businesses. The maker of popular podcasts like The Rest is History and The Rest is Politics has launched Goalhanger Ventures. The VC unit is billing itself as an “investment and partnerships” business, which, it says, will back creator-led media businesses with strong potential across video, social, audio, live and commercial platforms.   Goalhanger Ventures has already struck two deals.   It has made an equity investment in Invisible Media, which is behind The Invisible Hand YouTube channel, which has a focus on “topics that will shape the future of the global economy with infographic videos” from markets to money in an accessible way.   Goalhanger Ventures has also struck a commercial deal with sports creator brand Backyard Cricket, founded by Yorkshire brothers James and Mark Wood.    The pair began making videos in their family garden during lockdown and have since built a significant following, travelling around the world to create cricket content that blends humour, personality and a passion for the game.   Goalhanger will provide funding and strategic support to help Backyard Cricket grow across production, longer-form video, commercial partnerships, sponsorship and merchandise, with both sides sharing in the commercial upside, Goalhanger said.   Jack Davenport, Goalhanger co-founder, said: “Goalhanger Ventures is about giving exceptional creator-led businesses the infrastructure to grow without losing what made them special in the first place.    "Invisible Media and Backyard Cricket are very different propositions, but they both have that rare combination of editorial clarity, audience trust and genuine momentum.    "Our role is to help them scale thoughtfully, commercially and creatively, while protecting the independence, personality and quality that their communities already respond to.”   Goalhanger’s new VC arms follow the launch of Goalhanger's incubator programme called The Accelerator, which launched earlier this year to support digital creators, providing training and mentorship and access to Goalhanger’s senior talent.   Goalhanger, which also produces The Rest is Money and The Rest is Football podcasts, was co-founded by Lineker, the former England striker, who went on to become a famous TV presenter, in 2019. It describes itself as “the world’s fastest-growing media and production company”.   It currently receives some 70 million full-length episode views per month across audio and video for its 14 regular shows and has more than 250,000 paying subscribers across its network of shows.   Lineker struck a deal with Netflix last year, which will see the US streaming giant carry The Rest is Football on its platform during the World Cup.

London-based voice biometrics and deepfake detection startup Voxmind, has closed a £546,491 pre-seed round led by Ascension Ventures. The round also includes participation from Mark McDermott (co-founder of ScreenCloud), lead angel Russell Hart, and members of the Cambridge angel network. The funding arrives at a structural inflection point in enterprise authentication.  Microsoft retired Azure Speaker Recognition in September 2025 and AWS ends support for Voice ID in May 2026, two of the three major cloud providers have now exited voice biometrics.  The hardware OEMs, contact centre operators, and enterprises that relied on those services are now without a long-term authentication layer, precisely as deepfake voice fraud accelerates against financial services, telecoms, and enterprise voice channels. Founded in January 2024, the company has developed a patent-pending phoneme-frequency extraction engine that analyses the biomechanics of the human vocal tract, physical signal characteristics governed by anatomy, not language. The result is voice authentication and deepfake detection that works across all languages by design, achieves 99.8 per cent deepfake detection accuracy in under 3 seconds, and runs in under 500MB of runtime memory with no GPU or cloud connectivity required. The architecture supports three deployment models out of the box: On-device OEM SDK for hardware manufacturers. Platform-native integration for CCaaS and UCaaS operators via WebSocket, gRPC, SIP/SIPREC, and AudioHook. Cloud API for enterprise and fintech deployments. According to Jai Keerthi, founder and CEO of Voxmind, every major enterprise that relies on cloud voice APIs is now exposed precisely as AI voice fraud accelerates.   “We built for this architecture before the gap existed, physics-based, on-device, deployable anywhere. Now we just need to fill it.” The company has already signed an OEM agreement with a major unified communications hardware provider, embedding its voice biometric SDK directly into enterprise IP phone hardware. Additional commercial pipeline spans community banking in the US, telecoms in Europe, and strategic partnership conversations across global IT services and contact centre operators. Toyosi Ogedengbe, Principal, Ascension Ventures, shared:  “Voice is the last unencrypted frontier in enterprise security, and generative AI just made the stakes existential.  Voxmind’s physics-based approach, on-device deployment, and existing OEM footprint give them a structural advantage that’s very difficult to replicate.” The pre-seed capital will be deployed across commercial sales into financial services, telecoms, and contact centre operators; model optimisation for edge deployment; and ISO 27001 certification on an eight-month delivery timeline.

DeFi intelligence company Otomato has raised $2 million from Improbable. Active DeFi users today manage positions across multiple protocols and chains, constantly switching between dashboards, missing critical events such as liquidations, rate spikes, and depegs (when a stablecoin or currency loses its fixed value against the asset it is meant to track), and drowning in noise from generic alert tools. Otomato solves this problem. Its customers provide their wallet addresses, and Otomato automatically detects every on-chain position - lending, tokens, NFTs, prediction markets - monitors them in real time across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, and HyperEVM, and surfaces only the alerts that actually matter. The product has grown entirely on organic traction. Launched initially as a Telegram bot, Otomato has attracted more than 2,000 users, with 1,500+ actively receiving alerts and integrating 10+ protocols, including AAVE, Pendle, Uniswap, Morpho, Euler, and Hyperliquid.  According to Herman Narula, Co-Founder and CEO of Improbable, DeFi is becoming the back-end of a larger AI-powered economy, and the first team to build the intelligence layer that understands what users actually hold and tells them what matters has the potential to win an entire category.  “Otomato gives customers agency and full control of their positions, something that they were lacking before. What convinced us to back Clement, Dylan, and the team was their drive. They shipped a product users genuinely love, grew it virally with no paid spend, and they are moving faster than almost any team I have seen at this stage. That is exactly the kind of founder we set out to build with.” “We chose Improbable because they are builders that bring more than a passive check. From day one we have had hands-on support on go-to-market, product, and scaling decisions from an executive team that has done this before. That is what moves a company like ours from 2,000 users to millions, and it is what made the decision easy. We look forward to building together as we scale Otomato”, said Clement Hecquet, CEO and Co-Founder, Otomato. The funding will be deployed into product development, expanded multi-chain and multi-vertical coverage, and go-to-market.  

The countdown to Nexus Luxembourg 2026 has entered its final phase. As 10,000 innovators prepare to descend on the Grand-Duchy’s capital, the release of the Official Agenda confirms that this is not just an event - it is a strategic briefing for the leaders of the European digital economy. In an era defined by rapid AI integration and the pursuit of technological autonomy, Nexus Luxembourg has curated a program that moves past surface-level trends to address the core challenges of scale, regulation and technological impact. Agenda highlights: Where Strategy meets Execution The lineup for this year’s edition features over 150 international experts, including pioneering founders, policy architects and top innovators. The program is designed to deliver actionable intelligence across the four dedicated zones: The Intelligence Forum: dedicated to applied AI, autonomous systems, cybersecurity, sovereignty and productivity-boosting technologies across industries. The Fintech Sphere: bringing together financial players, digital leaders, founders and regulators to decode the future of European finance. The Launchpad Arena: where 250 handpicked startups and scaleups from around the world will pitch and compete for a €100k grand prize. Luxembourg Makes It Happen: positioned at the heart of the Summit experience, bringing together institutions, EU policymakers, national champions and keynote speakers. Your last opportunity to join Nexus Luxembourg is a "boutique" experience on a grand scale -prioritizing the quality of connections and the depth of the discourse. As the final seats are filled, the opportunity to engage with this high-density gathering of C-suite executives and public-sector visionaries is closing. Don't observe the future of European tech from the sidelines. Be in the room where the decisions are made. Explore the Full Agenda & Secure Final Tickets

An array of music-industry veterans and operators, including the co-founder of online music pioneer Last.fm and the CEO of cloud app hosting startup Vercel, are backing a Swedish AI-generated music platform designed to shake up the staid world of retail background music, which is emerging from stealth today.   Tonada was founded by Juan Manuel Serruya, previously engineering lead at Spotify, and Jonathan Andersson, previously head of sales at Wolt, with a plan to overhaul the world of retail and hospitality background music. Tonada says that physical spaces still run on intuition when it comes to background music, like a licensed playlist someone picked once, set to shuffle, looped forever, identical to the place down the street.   It points to research showing that the tempo of background music in a physical space can move sales by more than 30 per cent.   Tonada has built a proprietary AI generative-music engine that works with each brand to define its "sonic identity", which then produces a unique catalogue of original tracks, it says.   Because every track is generated specifically for the customer, the catalogue is fully owned and 100 per cent royalty-free, it says.   Tonada says its tech integrates with the systems that already run in a physical space such as point-of-sale and foot-traffic signals, while also factoring in things like time of day, weather, and local events, so the sound reacts in real time to what is happening in each location.      Serruya, co-founder and CEO of Tonada, said: "For decades, ambience has been the most under-engineered part of the physical world. Brands have a CMS for their website, a POS for their checkout, a CRM for their customers, and nothing for how their spaces actually feel.    “We're building the infrastructure layer that sits between AI-generated audio and every physical space on earth. Music is the first surface. It is not the last."   Tonada says it has paying customers across Scandinavia, the DACH  region, and Singapore, spanning restaurants, hotels, nightlife and retail. Investors in the funding round, for an undisclosed amount, include Guillermo Rauch, founder & CEO, Vercel, Last.fm co-founder Michael Breidenbrücker, RTP Global, Karaoke Club, a16z scout Dora Palfi Osika, Norrsken Launcher's Erik Engellau-Nilsson, and Tony Beltramelli, head of AI product at Miro. IMAGE: PIXABAY

European telecom companies raised €4.8 billion in 2025, with funding activity largely concentrated around network infrastructure, connectivity expansion, and next-generation communications technologies. Fibre broadband and satellite connectivity attracted the largest rounds. Debt financing played a major role across the sector, particularly among mature infrastructure operators expanding fibre coverage and digital connectivity. The largest deals focused on scaling fibre networks and improving broadband access, including in rural and underserved areas. At the same time, investors showed growing interest in satellite and space-based connectivity, reflecting broader momentum around satellite-enabled 5G, IoT connectivity, and defence-related communications infrastructure. AI and advanced networking technologies also emerged as key investment themes throughout the year. Geographically, funding activity was spread across Europe, with notable deal volume in the UK, France, Spain, Italy, and the Nordic region. However, the market remained highly concentrated, with a small number of large infrastructure financings accounting for most of the capital deployed, while earlier-stage startups raised smaller rounds focused on specialised connectivity, AI, IoT, and satellite applications. Overall, the sector’s funding activity suggests investors increasingly view telecom not only as core infrastructure, but also as a strategic foundation for AI deployment, industrial digitisation, IoT expansion, and Europe’s broader digital resilience (for more detailed analyses of the European technology ecosystem, check out Tech.eu’s annual report: European Tech 2025 - The Big Picture). Here are ten AI companies that raised the most in 2025. Amount raised in 2025: £2.3B CityFibre builds and operates one of the UK’s largest independent full-fibre broadband networks, delivering gigabit-capable FTTP infrastructure to residential, business, public sector, and wholesale customers. CityFibre secured £2.3 billion in financing in 2025 to expand its fibre network across the UK, add new residential and business connections, and explore acquisitions of additional fibre infrastructure assets. Amount raised in 2025: $1B Nokia develops network infrastructure, connectivity solutions, and digital technologies that support secure, high-performance communication across fixed, mobile, and cloud environments. In 2025, Nokia secured a $1 billion equity investment from NVIDIA as part of a strategic partnership focused on bringing AI capabilities into telecom networks and advancing data centre infrastructure. Amount raised in 2025: €350M INWIT is an Italian telecommunications infrastructure company that develops and manages digital and shared network infrastructure, including telecom towers and indoor coverage systems, supporting mobile connectivity and wireless communication services across Italy. In 2025, INWIT secured a €350 million loan from the European Investment Bank to support digitalisation and connectivity across Italy, including improving mobile coverage in rural areas. Amount raised in 2025: €346.2M Netomnia is a UK broadband infrastructure company that designs, builds, and operates full-fibre broadband networks, providing high-speed fibre-to-the-premises connectivity to homes and businesses across the UK. In 2025, Netomnia secured €346.2 million to expand its fibre network in the UK. Amount raised in 2025: £125M GoFibre is a broadband provider that builds and operates full-fibre broadband networks, delivering high-speed internet connectivity to homes and businesses across rural and underserved communities in Scotland and northern England. In 2025, GoFibre completed a £125 million funding round that will support its delivery of two Project Gigabit contracts in the South and North East of Scotland. Amount raised in 2025: £100M TalkTalk is a UK telecommunications provider offering broadband, fibre internet, mobile, and home connectivity services to residential and business customers across the UK. The company focuses on delivering affordable connectivity solutions and expanding access to high-speed fibre broadband services. TalkTalk secured a £100 million funding injection in 2025 from Ares to strengthen its financial position and support the broadband provider’s ongoing operations and refinancing efforts. Amount raised in 2025: €70M Sateliot is a Spanish satellite telecommunications company developing a low Earth orbit satellite constellation that provides global 5G NB-IoT connectivity for IoT devices, enabling mobile network coverage in remote and underserved areas. The company works with telecom operators to extend terrestrial cellular connectivity through satellite infrastructure. Sateliot raised €70 million in Series B funding to expand its satellite constellation and strengthen global 5G-IoT connectivity services for remote, defence, and cybersecurity applications. Amount raised in 2025: €57M CAILabs is a company developing photonics and optical communication technologies for telecommunications, aerospace, defence, and industrial applications. The company focuses on improving the performance and efficiency of high-speed optical data transmission networks. In 2025, Cailabs raised €57 million to accelerate its industrial expansion and global growth. Amount raised in 2025: €50M Asteo is a Spanish telecommunications infrastructure company focused on developing and operating neutral fibre optic networks to improve high-speed connectivity for operators, businesses, and public institutions. The company supports digital infrastructure projects aimed at expanding broadband access and improving regional connectivity across Spain. Asteo secured €50 million in financing in 2025 from Allianz Global Investors to expand its rural FTTH fibre network across multiple regions in Spain. Amount raised in 2025: $12M Roamless is a mobile connectivity company offering global eSIM and roaming services that allow users to access mobile data across multiple countries without changing SIM cards or contracts. The platform is designed to simplify international mobile connectivity for travellers through app-based data access and pay-as-you-go pricing. Roamless raised $12 million in 2025 to further develop its mobile connectivity platform and expand features, including local numbers, B2B integrations, and AI-powered services.

Preventive health platform Lucis has raised $20 million Series A, led by Singular, with participation from General Catalyst, Y Combinator, and angels including investors behind Runna, Céline Lazorthes (Resilience), and Manu Lecomte. The round follows Lucis’s $8 million seed raised four months ago, bringing total funding to $28 million. Founded in 2025 by Maxime Berthelot and Baptiste Debever, Lucis provides individuals with a comprehensive, data-driven view of their health. The platform analyses more than 110 blood biomarkers across key systems, including metabolic health, hormones, cardiovascular risk, inflammation, and nutrient levels. These results feed into an AI-powered health companion app, alongside longitudinal data and medical context, to deliver personalised guidance spanning nutrition, supplementation, lifestyle changes and follow-up testing . Recommendations are continuously refined as new data becomes available and are reviewed by physicians, helping users understand what actions to take, not just what the data shows. According to Maxime Berthelot, Co-founder and CEO, Lucis: “We’ve seen the devastating impact of late-stage diagnosis first-hand. The science is already there; what’s missing is a system designed to act before symptoms appear. This is why we built Lucis. By combining biomarker data and AI-driven clinical insights, we can catch what the system misses. Europe deserves a healthcare model that doesn’t wait for people to get sick. We are making prevention the default, rather than a privilege.” Early data from Lucis’s growing user base of over 10,000 shows both meaningful health outcomes and sustained engagement. Among users who completed a six-month follow-up, 75 per cent improved at least three biomarkers without medication. More than 80 per cent opted to retest, suggesting continued engagement with the platform and their health data. At initial testing, 99.9 per cent of users had at least one biomarker outside optimal ranges, often without prior awareness, highlighting how easily potential health risks can go unnoticed without regular monitoring. Today, Lucis is powered by a team of 20 across engineering, clinical, growth, and operations, supported by a medical board and a growing network of 10+ physicians providing clinical oversight. Jeremy Uzan, Co-Founder & GP at Singular, said:  “Europe’s preventive health category will be won by platforms that unite clinical credibility with AI at scale. Lucis has moved with remarkable velocity, reaching 10,000 users in under a year, delivering measurable outcomes and building a compounding data advantage that sets the standard for the category.  We see Lucis as a clear category winner in Europe and are excited to partner with the team as the product continues to evolve alongside customer needs.” Since launching in 2025, Lucis has grown to more than 10,000 users across France, the UK, Ireland, and Portugal, and has delivered over one million biomarker tests.  The company has also built a community of thousands members and established partnerships with laboratory groups including Eurofins and Randox. Lucis plans to expand into Spain, Germany, and Italy by the end of 2026, while continuing to invest in personalisation, longitudinal monitoring, and clinical safety.