Zerops, a Platform-as-a-Service startup redesigning cloud architecture, has raised a $2 million seed round led by Gi21 Capital.  Zerops removes the separation between development and production environments, a long-standing flaw in cloud architecture that causes deployment failures for developers and AI coding agents alike. It creates a unified environment where applications behave identically from development through to production, enabling reliable deployments from the start. On Zerops, there are no environment tiers; applications run within a single project where code behaves the same way, regardless of scale. This means developers build, test, and deploy in genuinely identical conditions, eliminating an entire category of deployment failures. Because the infrastructure is consistent from the start, deploying a production-ready system requires a single click, not weeks of configuration.Zerops is built on its own bare-metal infrastructure, with data centres across Europe and the United States, enabling cost efficiencies that make it up to four times cheaper than legacy platforms. It runs applications in full Linux containers, not restricted app containers, giving developers the same level of access as on their own machines, including real-time visibility and control over running processes. The platform also includes more than 15 built-in services such as databases, search engines, and messaging systems, reducing the need for external integrations compared to the typical two or three offered by most platforms. As applications grow, they remain within a single environment, removing the need to re-architect infrastructure at scale.Aleš Rechtorík, co-founder and CEO of Zerops, said:  “Most platforms ask you to trust that development and production are close enough. We removed the gap entirely by rethinking how cloud architecture should work from the ground up. That's the same guarantee we now give AI coding agents, and it's why the code they produce is production-ready from the first deployment. What works once continues to work as applications scale. Our goal is to make running software predictable, not something teams have to constantly debug.”The company is also introducing Zerops Control Panel (ZCP), a feature designed for AI-driven development. ZCP connects AI coding agents, like Claude, Codex, or Gemini, directly to real cloud infrastructure inside a Zerops project, allowing them to build, deploy, and debug applications in real conditions rather than isolated environments. Because AI operates in the same environment used for production, the code it produces works from the start. Developers can collaborate with AI within the same workspace, reviewing and modifying outputs using their own preferred tools.According to Damir Špoljarič, founder of Gi21 Capital, the market is reaching an inflection point.: "Rising cloud costs are forcing a shift, while AI is changing not just how software is written, but who is building and running it. We’re moving from millions of developers to millions of developers working alongside AI agents. Most platforms weren’t designed for either of these changes.  Zerops was. Its economics come from owning the full stack, and its architecture works because it never abstracts away the underlying infrastructure." The new funding will be used to expand Zerops’ global infrastructure in the US and Asia, accelerate product development, and grow its team.

DDD Invoices, a Ljubljana-based company building API-driven infrastructure for global e-invoicing compliance, has raised a €1.31 million seed round backed by Fil Rouge Capital, 500 Global, and experienced operators from the ERP and e-invoicing ecosystem. The company is also supported by angel investors and advisors from the e-invoicing and ERP ecosystem, including former executives and founders from IFS, Pagero, Tickstar, Arratech, and Docupath. As governments increasingly mandate real-time e-invoice reporting to local tax portals, businesses and software providers face growing compliance complexity. Different countries apply their own formats, validation rules, and submission requirements, creating costly and fragmented integrations for companies operating across markets. DDD Invoices is building an API-first infrastructure designed to simplify this process. Through a unified API, the company connects ERPs, accounting systems, and SaaS platforms to tax portals, Peppol networks, and real-time reporting systems worldwide. Its platform automates the issuing, receiving, and archiving of tax-compliant e-invoices across jurisdictions while ensuring compliance with local Continuous Transaction Control (CTC), e-invoicing, and fiscalization requirements. The company uses proprietary AI-driven logic to transform standardised invoice data into local formats, validate invoices against current regulations, route them to the relevant tax systems, and return status information to the originating application. For unstructured files such as PDFs, DDD Invoices also applies AI-based document processing to extract and structure invoice data automatically. Denis Vehovec Pondelak, CEO and co-founder of DDD Invoices, said modern software companies are increasingly challenged by local compliance complexity as they scale across markets. Compliance is already not the most exciting part of building a company, but now it is becoming increasingly more complex due to governments tightening the regulations and companies scaling globally from the get-go. We’re building the infrastructure to take that off their plate. Founded by a team with more than 30 years of experience building business software, including ERP systems for public and private institutions, DDD Invoices is already working with companies such as Access Group, Zenoti, Logitude, and WheelSys across multiple global markets. The platform also offers native integrations with systems including Stripe, Bitrix, Shopify, and Chargebee. With the new funding, DDD Invoices plans to expand its country coverage, accelerate deployment and integration capabilities, and grow its product, engineering, and go-to-market teams.

UK company Fractile has today raised a $220M Series B as it continues to build next-generation inference hardware for AI. The round was led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund, with participation from Conviction, Gigascale, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures and 8VC. Founded in 2022, Fractile is building next-generation inference hardware for frontier AI. Its thesis is that the next major limit on AI progress is the time and cost required to produce useful outputs at scale. As advanced AI systems take on harder, longer-running tasks that can require tens of millions of tokens to generate, Fractile is developing chips and systems designed to make faster inference economically viable, spanning AI research, chip microarchitecture, and foundry process innovation. According to a post by Walter Goodwin, CEO and Founder of Fractile, the company was founded on the bet that, eventually, the world’s most capable AI systems would be limited in their impact by the amount of time they take to produce useful outputs.  “We bet everything on the logical conclusion: that the only way to truly unlock this latent value, to make speed viable at scale, was to radically re-invent the hardware that we run our frontier AI models on. Ever since, we have been building chips and systems that tackle this problem.”   He contends that since then, raw AI capability has already reached the point where time from query to output is the key limit to frontier capabilities. As models have improved, so has their ability to be orchestrated over increasingly long output sequences. However, the unit economics of inference have become a brutal constraint. “Inference is both the revenue engine of the AI industry and the rate-limiting factor on expanding it.“ He further contends that today’s LLMs are already producing up to 100 million tokens in pursuit of tackling hard problems.: “At the ~40 tokens per second or so at which these models tend to run on existing chips, a single output of this length takes a month to complete. The technical and economic limits on inference speed, above all from memory bandwidth that has failed to scale on current architectures, are what is constraining progress. This is exactly the problem Fractile has been building from the ground up to tackle”.  Looking ahead, Goodwin sees value in not accelerating today's workloads, but rather in the entirely new workloads that hardware like Fractile will enable. The company is hiring across London, Bristol, San Francisco, and Taipei. 

A London-based AI startup set up just months ago, which believes it’s pursuing the fastest path to surpassing human intelligence, has today come out of stealth, having raised over $650m at a $4.65bn valuation. Called Recursive Superintelligence, the funding round was led by GV, Google’s VC arm, and US VC Greycroft, with participation from chip makers Nvidia and AMD. The disclosure of the funding round, follows previous reports about the expected raise. Recursive Superintelligence’s “bold bet” is that AI systems will improve themselves by analysing their own performance, without human intervention. The startup's co-founders include Richard Socher, its CEO, who was previously chief scientist at Salesforce, and Tim Rocktäschel, a professor of AI at London’s UCL and a former Google DeepMind scientist. Others who work at the startup, which has a team of less than 30, previously worked at Meta and OpenAI. The startup, which was incorporated in London and has offices in London and San Francisco, said a clear trend was emerging in AI. In a blog post on X, it said: "The fastest path to superintelligence will be realised by AI that recursively improves itself, and does so via open-ended algorithms that drive endless innovation. “We will first focus on the science of AI itself (by creating AI that improves AI), but the playbook we create will soon allow us to revolutionise every scientific discipline. The potential benefits for humanity of safely creating such an advance cannot be overstated.” Recursive Superintelligence is one of several new AI startups looking at new ways to make improvements in AI intelligence. These include Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and David Silver’s Ineffable Intelligence.

Glocalzone, the platform connecting travellers with cross-border delivery requests, has been acquired by MovitOn as part of a deal focused on expanding peer-to-peer logistics infrastructure and integrating decentralised delivery technology. Founded as a marketplace linking travellers with users seeking international deliveries, Glocalzone has built a network of more than 1.3 million registered users. The platform says it has facilitated over 600,000 delivery orders, with users regularly posting travel routes across destinations including Turkey, Brazil, Mexico and the United States. MovitOn said the acquisition gives it access to an established international user base while expanding the reach of its decentralised logistics network. The company is developing a delivery platform that combines AI-powered courier matching with blockchain-enabled payment and verification systems. Following the acquisition, Glocalzone’s platform and user community will be integrated into MovitOn’s decentralised physical infrastructure network (DePIN), which uses smart contracts, escrow systems and token-based transactions to coordinate deliveries and payments. Doğan Turan, co-founder of Glocalzone, said the integration would combine the company’s existing marketplace with MovitOn’s AI-powered delivery infrastructure. The synergy between our trusted marketplace and MovitOn’s AI-powered courier-matching system is nothing short of transformative. We’ve spent years building trust among travellers and senders alike, and now, we integrate our 1.3 million users into a DePIN framework powered by smart contracts to eliminate all the pain points of today’s logistics systems. This is the moment peer-to-peer logistics truly goes mainstream and provides a secure, transparent alternative to models of the past. The integration process will begin immediately, with existing Glocalzone users gradually onboarded into MovitOn’s courier-matching platform, where delivery assignments are determined using factors including route, schedule and user reputation. The platform will continue operating under the name “Glocalzone by MovitOn” as the companies transition users to the updated infrastructure. MovitOn said loyalty programmes and transition tools will be introduced to support the adoption of its MVON token and broader Web3 payment ecosystem.

Gyver, the Italian startup developing workforce infrastructure for Europe’s industrial and energy sectors, has raised €1.4 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Brighteye, with participation from āltitude, Vento Ventures, Zanichelli Venture and existing investor Antler, alongside several business angels. Founded by Francesco Defendi, Leo Acciarri and Mattia Zarrelli, Gyver is focused on addressing the growing shortage of skilled blue-collar workers across Europe, particularly in sectors linked to electrification, energy and industrial infrastructure. As Europe accelerates investment into renewable energy, data centres and grid modernisation, demand for skilled electrical workers continues to increase. While there are currently around 28 million skilled blue-collar workers across the EU, industry estimates suggest an additional 5.8 million workers will be needed by 2030. Gyver has developed an AI-powered conversational hiring platform designed to replicate the referral and word-of-mouth processes commonly used by electricians to find work, while helping employers identify and access skilled workers more efficiently. The company plans to expand the platform beyond recruitment into areas including upskilling, learning and workforce productivity tools for electricians. Gyver says its long-term goal is to provide modern technical tools for tasks such as electrical design and PLC workflows, helping improve productivity across skilled trades. Francesco Defendi, co-founder of Gyver, said: We want the job of an electrician to be as cool as being a VC or a famous entrepreneur. Electricians are the most important yet neglected workers category in the modern economy. They embody the combination of brain and manual craft that cannot be replaced by AI, yet they have been left behind by modern technology. The future of work in the AI age is the future of manual craft. Gyver’s broader aim is to become a workforce platform for electrical employers, supporting hiring, workforce management and worker enablement. The new funding will be used to strengthen Gyver’s technology platform, including its AI agents and workflow systems, and to support growth while improving the experience for both electricians and employers.

Bucharest-based DesignVerse, the enterprise software startup using AI to modernise complex legacy systems, has raised more than $5.5 million in seed funding as demand grows for tools that can safely accelerate software development in mission-critical industries. The round included investment from Begin Capital, Gapminder VC, Underline Ventures, and strategic angel investors from companies including Adobe, LSEG and UiPath. Prior to the seed round, the company raised $850,000 in pre-seed funding to build its core platform and begin working with early enterprise design partners. Founded by former Oracle product design lead Andrei Manolache and software engineer Robert Dragutoiu, DesignVerse develops AI-powered infrastructure for organisations operating complex software environments across sectors, including aviation, finance, cybersecurity and government. The company’s platform generates software using a customer’s existing design systems, component libraries, technical documentation and internal rules, enabling applications to be built in line with current architectures and engineering standards. The approach is intended to reduce the manual translation between design and engineering teams, a process that often creates delays and inconsistencies in large organisations. While general-purpose AI coding tools have made it easier to create prototypes and simple applications, many organisations continue to face challenges integrating AI-generated software into production environments that require reliability, compliance and security. DesignVerse says its platform was built specifically for enterprise and mission-critical environments, where software must integrate safely with existing infrastructure. Andrei Manolache, CEO of DesignVerse, said large organisations still spend significant time translating product design into production-ready software, often leading to inefficiencies between teams. DesignVerse removes that friction by allowing teams to generate functional enterprise applications directly from their design systems, validate behaviour earlier with stakeholders, and streamline the transition from design to production. The new funding will be used to expand DesignVerse’s engineering team and accelerate growth across enterprise markets in Europe and the United States.

This week, Nordic Compass launches, a new pan-Nordic industry alliance for resilience and competitiveness.  The ambition is to move faster than the current European process and turn Nordic industrial strengths into concrete initiatives, aligned between the business community and the Nordic governments.  Initiatives in four critical areas will be presented at the Nordic Compass Summit in Gothenburg on 4-5 November. At the first summit this autumn, the alliance will launch concrete initiatives aimed at the Nordic capital markets, deep tech, defence, and energy that can be implemented and scaled up quickly. Nordic Compass is chaired by former Prime Minister of Finland, Jyrki Katainen. The ambition is to strengthen Nordic and European resilience and competitiveness amid rising geopolitical tensions. The Nordic countries are individually small but are regarded among the best in capacity for innovation. Taken together, the Nordic Region ranks among the world's largest economies, yet industrial cooperation across the region remains underutilised, according to the alliance. Nordic Compass gathers more than 25 leading Nordic companies, foundations and organisations as partners in various capacities, including Aker ASA, Aker Solutions, Alfa Laval, atNorth, Carl Bennet AB, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Danfoss, Embla Medical, EQT, Ericsson, EY, The Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, KONE, Kromann Reumert, McKinsey & Company, Nasdaq Nordic, Nokia, Nordea, Nordic Innovation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, Nscale, Saab, SEB, Vattenfall, Wallenberg Investments, and Ørsted. An advisory board to Nordic Compass will provide national insights through eight representatives from the Nordic countries, including Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Åland, as well as the Secretary General of the Nordic Council of Ministers. Lead image: Markus Esselmark.

Healthtech startup Corti today announced the launch of the Startup Acceleration Program, a no-equity initiative providing healthcare AI builders worldwide with access to the same clinical-grade models that power AI for highly regulated systems across Europe and the US. The grant-funded program aims to help founders ship and scale at a moment when the regulatory bar for healthcare AI has never been higher. Check out our earlier interview with Andreas Cleve, CEO and co-founder of Corti. Copenhagen-headquartered Corti offers healthcare a frontier lab for clinical-grade AI. Symphony, its flagship clinical-grade AI model, powers clinical and administrative applications for EHR vendors, virtual care platforms, practice management systems, and life sciences organisations worldwide. It serves over 100 million patients annually across health systems, including the NHS.  Symphony has outscored OpenAI on HealthBench Professional, the company’s new healthcare benchmark. Healthcare AI builders now face tightening regulation in every major market - from the FDA's expanded AI/ML guidance in the US to new lifecycle accountability requirements in Canada and the UK. But Europe is the most acute case. In the past four weeks, OpenAI rolled out free clinical AI  to every verified American physician. One week later, OpenEvidence — a clinical AI platform used daily by 40 per cent of US physicians and valued at $12 billion — withdrew from the UK and European markets, citing regulatory uncertainty around the EU AI Act.  The high-risk system requirements that drove that decision will come into force for medical AI on August 2, 2026. Europe has emerged as the toughest proving ground for clinical-grade AI - and the asymmetry is sharpening. EU MDR certification alone now costs founders between €200,000 and €600,000 per device and takes 12 to 18 months. Capital is concentrating in larger, later-stage rounds, with investors increasingly favouring companies with proven clinical evidence and workflow integration. The structural difficulty is real enough to deter horizontal players - and the vertical products built on them - from competing in Europe, implying a narrower path for the next wave of healthcare AI builders to succeed there at exactly the moment they are needed most. But the reality is that the conditions making Europe hard for horizontal players are the same conditions that Corti was built for:"The future of healthcare AI won't be built by one company. It will be built by thousands of teams, each with deep knowledge of a specific care setting, workflow, or patient population," said Andreas Cleve, co-founder and CEO of Corti.   "Our job is to give those builders a head start: the leading clinical AI model, the evidence base behind it, and a path to production we've already navigated for regulated health systems. So they can focus on what only they can do - the workflow, the patient population, the problem they actually understand." Among the hundreds of development teams already building on Corti is Aisel Health, a European startup building AI for psychiatry. Check out our earlier interview with Augusta Klingsten Peytz, co-founder of Aisel.According to  Augusta Klingsten Peytz, co-founder and CEO of Aisel Health, Psychiatrists are a scarce and highly specialised resource.  “They should be focused on one thing only: making clinical decisions - everything else needs to go. Yet today, the majority of a psychiatrist’s time is spent not on clinical decision-making, but on the administrative and repetitive workflows surrounding it. By using Corti, we at Aisel can focus on delivering specialised psychiatric workflows that help clinicians regain capacity, rather than rebuilding the clinical-grade foundation underneath.” The Startup Acceleration Program includes: Up to $5,000 in credits across the full Symphony stack - Agents, Medical Coding, Speech-to-Text, and Text Generation - built on over 1.5 million hours of clinical audio. Support from Corti's clinical and regulatory team to navigate EU AI Act, MDR, and data residency requirements. Dedicated time with Corti's AI experts to scope product roadmaps and architect the right system before code is written. Founder-led webinars on industry developments and Corti's own roadmap. Invitations to Corti events in New York, Copenhagen, London, and Berlin Applications open today, reviewed on a rolling basis with a one-week turnaround. No pitching, no committee, no equity. Open to worldwide pre-seed through Series B companies building in healthcare, clinical workflows, or adjacent life sciences.

BioInnovation Institute (BII) is launching AI Lab, a new innovation platform designed to support the commercialisation of artificial intelligence research and accelerate the development of early-stage AI startups in Denmark. The initiative is backed by € 7 million (DKK 60 million) in funding from the Danish Industry Foundation and aims to strengthen collaboration between startups, researchers and industrial companies while helping bring AI-based technologies to market more quickly. AI Lab will be operated by BII, which, since 2018, has supported more than 140 startups across life sciences, quantum technology and biosolutions with funding, infrastructure and commercialisation support. Through the AI Lab, BII will expand its activities into artificial intelligence, focusing on helping startups develop scalable AI solutions and attract external investment. The programme will provide selected startups with non-dilutive financial support, access to datasets from Danish companies and institutions, computing infrastructure, technical guidance and connections to potential customers through BII’s industry network. AI Lab will also include an AI-focused accelerator programme designed to help startups become investment-ready and launch pilot projects more quickly. According to BII, the initiative is intended to address the gap between Denmark’s strong digital infrastructure and the slower adoption and commercialisation of AI technologies within the Danish industry. Jens Nielsen, CEO of BII, said Denmark has strong foundations for AI development due to its digital infrastructure, publicly available data, research environments and industrial base. With AI Lab, we at BII aim to create a hub where the right stakeholders can meet and collaborate to turn advanced AI into solutions that make a tangible difference in industry. The goal is quite simply to shorten the path from a good idea in an academic environment to implementation in the market. At BII, we have proven that we are good at this in other areas, and we hope the same will be true for AI. Thomas Hofman Bang, CEO of the Danish Industry Foundation, said AI is increasingly becoming a core part of how companies operate and compete, making stronger collaboration between academia, startups and industry increasingly important. The new platform forms part of BII’s broader efforts to support science-based innovation and help research-driven startups scale commercially across Denmark and internationally.

Sir Demis Hassabis has hailed a multi-billion-dollar investment in the startup he founded which was spun out of Google DeepMind and focuses on leveraging AI to help drug discovery as a “massive vote of confidence”.  Isomorphic Labs said it has raised $2.1bn in a Series B funding. The funding round was led by existing investor Thrive Capital, the US VC, with participation from existing backers Alphabet, Isomorphic's parent company, and its venture captial unit, GV.   New investors include Singapore's Temasek, Google’s growth fund arm CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund. Hassabis, CEO and founder of Isomorphic Labs, who also heads up Google’s AI offering, said: “This funding round is a massive vote of confidence from a diverse group of top-tier international investors in our AI-first approach to drug design and development. "Now that we have shown our approach is fundamentally sound, our focus is on scaling our technology to its full potential. This capital injection allows us to build out our drug design engine at scale, driving us forward in our mission to solve all disease." Isomorphic Labs is built on software that DeepMind developed, including its Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures. Isomorphic Labs is researching treatments for cancer and immune disorders. Isomorphic Labs said the new funds will be geared towards the development and deployment of Isomorphic Labs' AI drug design engine (IsoDDE), with the aim of speeding up and expanding its pipeline of therapeutic programmes. The funding would also be used to recruit top-tier AI, engineering, drug design, and clinical talent, it said. Isomorphic Labs raised $600m in May last year, marking its first external funding round.

N8n, the Berlin-based startup which helps businesses automate tasks, has more than doubled its valuation to $5.2bn in less than a year following a strategic investment from German software giant SAP, it said today. SAP’s investment in n8n comes courtesy of an n8n secondary share sale, which brings SAP to the n8n cap table for the first time. SAP was the only new investor taking part in the secondary share sale, which has led to a more than doubling of n8n’s valuation, from $2.5bn to $5.2bn in less than a year, n8n said.  N8n did not disclose further details about how much SAP had invested in n8n. N8n calls itself an “AI orchestration platform”. Its tech allows businesses to connect hundreds of different apps and services and automate many business tasks, including integrating large language models, as well as leveraging AI agents to simplify business tasks. Alongside the investment, n8n and SAP have struck a multi-year commercial deal. This will see n8n being available inside SAP’s AI agent offering, called Joule Studio, which allows users to create and manage their own AI agents. This will mean that instead of switching between different apps, developers can build complex AI workflows within SAP using n8n’s canvas. Jan Oberhauser, founder & CEO, n8n, said: "For n8n, securing SAP as a strategic investor marks a pivotal moment. As one of the world's largest enterprise software companies, its decision to back n8n and to embed us inside Joule Studio reflects genuine confidence in our platform and our vision." Christian Klein, CEO, SAP SE, said: "To provide accurate and secure business outcomes at scale, agentic AI must be grounded in deep process knowledge, reliable data, and enterprise-grade governance. By integrating n8n into Joule Studio, we're accelerating SAP's ability to help customers design, connect, and scale agentic AI across their core business processes."

Paymentology, the global issuer-processing platform for banks and fintechs, has secured a $175 million investment co-led by Apis Partners and Aspirity Partners. Founded to help financial institutions modernise payment issuing systems, Paymentology provides real-time card and payment processing technology for fintechs, digital banks and retail banks operating across multiple markets. The company says its platform addresses limitations associated with legacy issuer-processing systems, which continue to slow innovation and agility across parts of the global payments industry. Its multi-cloud platform enables clients to adapt payment programmes across different regulatory and market environments while managing card and digital payment experiences in real time. Jeff Parker, CEO of Paymentology, said legacy financial systems continue to create friction across the industry, adding that the company aims to help clients respond more quickly to changing market demands: We’ve built an issuing platform designed for growth, helping digital banks, fintechs and financial institutions launch, scale and expand their card programmes with confidence. By combining global capability with the flexibility to adapt locally, we enable our clients to compete more effectively with speed, control and efficiency, in an increasingly dynamic landscape. Paymentology has seen continued growth across digital banking, embedded finance, digital asset-linked card programmes and expense management platforms, alongside established financial institutions modernising legacy systems. The company’s customer base is geographically diversified, with significant exposure to growth markets across the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia-Pacific. The investment will support Paymentology’s international expansion, product development and team growth as demand increases for cloud-native issuer processing technology. The company said the funding will also support expansion into areas including credit, stablecoin infrastructure, tokenisation and AI-driven financial services.

The CEO of Sweden-based healthtech startup Tandem Health said it is “very difficult” for US competitors to compete against Tandem Health in Europe, amid a push from European healthcare providers to work with European businesses. Speaking on the Tech.eu podcast, Lukas Saari, Tandem co-founder, said: “We have very much taken the full European focus, we are a full-on European company. “Everyone is based here; we only have European-based investors. I think this has helped us a lot in many of the discussions and that it would be very difficult for the US-based competitors to come into Europe and compete.” Saari’s comments come amid a push from some European tech leaders and politicians to become less reliant on US tech amid fluctuating relations with President Trump. Saari has previously said that in procurement, European governments and public services increasingly prefer working with European businesses. Tandem, which is powered by LLMs, offers clinicians an AI co-pilot that generates medical notes during patient consultations. Tandem’s co-pilot has evolved from solving the niche use case of medical note taking, expanding to a full medical assistant, which now includes referral notes and patient communications before, during and after patient visits. In July last year, Tandem raised $50 million in a Series A round after a $10m seed round in 2024. Its investors include Kinnevik and Northzone. Tandem, which employs around 170 people, is focused on the European market, with the UK, where NHS clinicians use it, being its biggest market in terms of user numbers. Elsewhere in the podcast, Saari discusses Tandem’s use of LLMs, the possible threat from AI giants to its business, as well as Tandem’s future plans.

Ventory, the inventory management platform connecting enterprise ERP systems with field operations, has raised €2.65 million in a funding round led by KBC Securities, with participation from existing investors Finindus, Matterwave and delaware. Founded by Vishal Punamiya, Ventory develops software designed to help organisations manage inventory across field operations, including service vans, depots, consignment stock and customer sites. The platform integrates with enterprise systems, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Sage, providing companies with real-time visibility into inventory once it leaves the warehouse. The company says its platform replaces manual and disconnected inventory processes often managed through spreadsheets, paper-based workflows and fragmented tools. “From vans and trunk stock to consignment, field service depots and customer sites, Ventory replaces the Excel spreadsheets, Google Sheets, paper tickets and disconnected tools that have historically governed billions of euros of field inventory,” said Vishal Punamiya. The platform integrates natively with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Sage, and is newly ISO/IEC 27001 certified. Ventory now supports some of the most operationally complex organisations across multiple industries. Today, Ventory is used by organisations across seven countries, including healthcare providers, medical distributors, energy producers, asset managers, a national railway operator and a medical robotics manufacturer. The new funding will be used to expand Ventory’s AI product roadmap and ERP integrations, support geographic expansion across Western Europe, and grow its enterprise go-to-market team. The investment also forms part of KBC Group’s broader €100 million initiative announced last year to support the Belgian startup ecosystem through early-stage and follow-on funding programmes linked to Start it @KBC and KBC Securities.

Ghent-based Holmes, a technology company focused on reinventing software quality assurance for the AI era, has launched with €1.1 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Syndicate One, with participation from Aikido founders Roeland Delrue and Willem Delbare, Showpad co-founder Louis Jonckheere, and serial entrepreneur Thomas Van Overbeke. Investment funds NewSchool.vc, RDY Capital, and 100IN also joined the round. The investor base reflects the broader Ghent technology ecosystem behind companies such as Aikido and Henchman. Founded by Robin Praet, Robbrecht Delrue, and Sofie Buyse, Holmes is building an autonomous quality assurance (QA) platform designed for software teams operating at AI development speed. As AI coding tools accelerate software production, quality assurance has increasingly become a bottleneck, with engineering and product teams still relying heavily on manually written and maintained tests to ensure products function correctly. Rather than depending on predefined scripts and manual test maintenance, Holmes learns how a product works and how users interact with it. Based on those workflows, the platform continuously generates and updates tests that verify critical user journeys as the product evolves. At Henchman, I experienced firsthand how QA often becomes work that everyone knows is essential, but nobody truly owns. Testing frequently ends up on the plate of developers and product managers alongside their existing responsibilities. Holmes was built to automate that process and allow teams to continue shipping products with greater confidence, said Sofie Buyse, Product Manager at Holmes. Robbrecht Delrue, co-founder of Holmes, noted that most software companies do not invest heavily in QA teams early on. However, as products and development teams scale, manual testing increasingly becomes a constraint on release speed and growth, a challenge Holmes aims to address. In addition to its founding team, Holmes works with a group of experienced technology leaders advising the company on product development, including Dieter Wachters, Haroen Vermylen, Jaap Vergote, and Ivo Minjauw. The funding will be used to further develop the Holmes platform, expand the product and engineering teams, and support the company’s rollout beyond its current group of design partners.

Italian construction technology startup Pillar has raised €12 million in a seed funding round led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Base10 Partners, with participation from Italian Founders Fund. The round brings Pillar’s total funding to €15.2 million, less than eight months after its public launch. Existing investors, including Emblem, also participated in earlier financing rounds. Founded in 2025, Pillar is building a software platform designed to modernise construction operations and financial management. The company provides contractors with an AI-powered operating system that automates administrative and back-office processes, including quote generation, margin tracking, workforce management, and reporting while projects are underway. Construction remains one of the world’s largest and least digitised industries, with many companies still relying on fragmented workflows, manual processes, and disconnected data systems. Pillar integrates information from accounting software, bank feeds, and construction sites, including updates shared through WhatsApp, into a single interface designed to provide real-time operational visibility without requiring contractors to change existing workflows. Gabriel Guinea Montalvo, CEO and co-founder of Pillar, said the construction sector remains one of the few major industries that has yet to undergo a fundamental technological transformation. Every project runs on fragmented data, manual processes, and zero visibility - from the contractor's back office to the workers on site. We are building the default operating system this industry depends on, in Italy, in Europe, and everywhere construction still operates in chaos. The newly raised capital will be used to strengthen Pillar’s position in the Italian market, expand internationally, and continue developing its product ecosystem. The company plans to broaden its platform with additional modules covering procurement, tender management, subcontractor coordination, banking, and related construction services. The company’s long-term objective is to become a central operating platform for the construction industry, supporting the management of projects, payments, and workforce operations across the sector.

White Circle, the enterprise AI governance company helping organisations monitor, protect and improve AI systems in real time, has raised $11 million in seed funding from a group of prominent AI and technology leaders. Investors include Romain Huet (OpenAI), Dirk Kingma (Anthropic, formerly OpenAI), Guillaume Lample (Mistral), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), Olivier Pomel (Datadog), François Chollet (Keras), Mehdi Ghissassi (formerly DeepMind), Paige Bailey (DeepMind), and David Cramer (Sentry). As AI adoption accelerates, companies are facing increasing challenges around model reliability, safety and governance. The rise of “vibe coding” and low-barrier AI development has made it easier to launch AI-powered products quickly, often without full visibility into how those systems behave once deployed. White Circle helps companies test, protect, observe and optimise AI systems through a single API. Its proprietary models monitor AI inputs and outputs in real time to detect harmful content, hallucinations, prompt-injection attacks, model drift, and malicious users. The platform also provides analytics tools to help teams evaluate and improve model performance over time. In practice, White Circle can identify issues such as sensitive data leakage, attempts to manipulate AI agents into harmful actions, or signs of declining model performance. Teams can create custom policies and automate enforcement actions, including rate limiting or banning abusive users, while the system continuously improves through labelled user feedback. Denis Shilov, founder and CEO of White Circle, said the rapid pace of AI development is outstripping existing governance frameworks. Companies are increasingly relying on AI systems in areas that directly impact people, from healthcare and finance to hiring and security. At the same time, AI development has become significantly more accessible, making oversight more difficult. White Circle was built to give organisations visibility into how their AI behaves, help them respond when things go wrong, and provide a unified system for improving reliability, safety and compliance. Elena Iumagulova, Head of Design at White Circle, added that the company designed the product to make AI oversight more accessible for both technical and non-technical teams, giving organisations a centralised way to monitor performance, identify risks and optimise models through a single interface and API, regardless of deployment scale. The new funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand White Circle’s team across the US, the UK, and Europe, and support the continued growth of its global customer base.

Dutch healthtech startup Ditto has raised €7.6 million to support its European expansion and further develop its AI-powered patient communication platform. The funding round was led by Heal Capital, with participation from Optiverder and Rubio Impact Ventures. Since launching last summer, the app has been downloaded by nearly 100,000 users. Ditto was founded by Tobias Polak, Bart Voorn, and Merlijn van Breugel. The company aims to address a common challenge in healthcare communication: many patients leave medical consultations without fully understanding or remembering what was discussed. The app allows patients to record consultations or upload photographs of medical letters. Using AI, Ditto generates summaries that can be revisited later and translated into simplified language or other languages, including English, Turkish, and Arabic. Users can also securely share summaries with family members, while the company says no data is stored centrally. Tobias Polak, co-founder of Ditto, noted that medical consultations are often short, and patients may struggle to fully process or remember important information, particularly when receiving difficult news: We are trying to shift healthcare thinking away from institutions and towards the patient experience. Our ambition is to help people better understand their care journey during some of the most vulnerable moments in life. The company says the platform is designed not only to improve patient understanding and engagement but also to reduce repetitive follow-up questions and administrative pressure on healthcare professionals. The newly raised capital will be used to expand Ditto across Europe and develop additional patient support features, including tools designed to help users prepare for consultations and navigate treatment and care journeys together with family members.

Breathwork platform Regulate has closed a €1.4M Seed round.  The round is led by impact investor 4impact.vc and backed by an angel syndicate, which includes:   Hanno Renner (Co-Founder & CEO, Personio), Mike Wax (Co-Founder, Forto), Marlena Hien (Co-Founder, Bears with Benefits), and Felix Haas (10x Group, IDnow, Bits & Pretzels).  Founded in 2024 by CEO Peter van Woerkum, a certified breathwork coach and executive coach with over a decade of C-level advisory experience, and Paul Laechelin, former Product Lead for the BMW App, Regulate was founded on the conviction that breathwork is the most direct, science-backed way to improve focus, stress response and resilience. According to van Woerkum, breathwork is a proven way to shift from stress to clarity in real time.  “It’s accessible and it builds resilience that compounds over time. As pressures mount and AI raises the bar for what organisations can produce, expectations on professionals have never been higher. We’re building Regulate to help people meet these demands sustainably by embedding it into the way teams already work, not adding another source of stress.”  Regulate has developed an app with a library of over 60 science-backed sessions, ranging from 90 seconds to 60 minutes, developed in partnership with scientific advisor Prof Dr Hottenrott, a leading European authority on Heart Rate Variability and its role in human performance and recovery from Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. Rather than offering generic mindfulness sessions that sit unused in corporate benefits portals, the platform surfaces the right intervention at the right moment. This includes a focus protocol before a high-stakes meeting, a breathing exercise after an intense discussion, or a team session before a workshop. “What convinced me was the science. Breathwork has a direct, measurable effect on how people think and perform under pressure and Regulate has built the right product to bring that into the workplace. I introduced it at Personio because I know it works,” says Hanno Renner, Co-Founder & CEO, Personio This contextual intelligence is powered by wearables and workday systems. By reading physiological signals from connected devices and understanding the structure of the user’s workday, Regulate can recommend personalised sessions aligned to the user’s current state and demands of the workday, making it the first breathwork platform that functions as an on-demand performance tool. The platform also provides organisations with aggregated usage and impact dashboards, giving HR and leadership teams visibility into team-level adoption patterns and trends without compromising individual privacy. In under a year, the platform has completed over 50,000 sessions across organisations, and its enterprise pipeline represents over €9 million in ARR potential.   Regulate is already used by teams at leading organisations, including Raiffeisen Bank International, Vattenfall, Personio and others, including global enterprises and management consultancies. Victor Straatman, Partner at 4impact.vc, shared:   "We back companies where business model and positive impact align. Regulate improves how people perform and how they feel, allowing them to thrive in a fast-changing work environment. The data shows that at scale, this is a very compelling combination and solution for overall wellbeing.” The company will use the capital to accelerate growth, deepen product capabilities, expand its live-format offerings, and grow its team.