London-based Rightcharge, the startup that simplifies fleet EV charging payments, has raised £1.6 million in seed funding. The round was led by Soulmates Ventures, with participation from Blackwood Ventures, UnrulyCapital and Purple Ventures. In the UK, businesses purchase more than half of all EVs, but public charging remains fragmented and reimbursing employees for home charging is often slow and error-prone. Many fleet managers still use spreadsheets and driver-submitted paperwork, which increases the risk of inaccuracies. Existing payment systems, built for conventional fuel expenses, are not set up to handle EV home charging. Consequently, some companies rely more on public charging, which can be up to ten times more expensive than charging at home. These gaps in process and infrastructure are delaying fleet electrification at a time when adoption needs to accelerate. Rightcharge removes this barrier by automating reimbursements for home charging. The platform links directly to a driver’s energy account, allowing payments to be credited to their electricity bill instead of their bank account. This approach maintains accuracy even when energy tariffs change, minimises the risk of fraud, and provides a transparent audit trail for tax compliance, all while preventing drivers from being left out of pocket. Fleet vehicles can be connected as well, with AI-driven validation and anomaly detection to reduce fraud and improve accuracy. A paired public charge card gives drivers access to over 70 per cent of UK public chargers, while all costs are consolidated into a single HMRC-compliant monthly bill. Fleets using Rightcharge can reduce charging costs by up to 90 per cent and cut carbon emissions by roughly 30 per cent, while reducing administrative work for managers and giving drivers confidence that reimbursements will be accurate and fair. The Automobile Association (AA) and other major UK fleets already use Rightcharge’s technology to manage both home and public charging. Customers in sectors such as construction, healthcare, and government are adopting the service to cut administrative work, support drivers, and accelerate their EV transition. Rightcharge will use the funding to accelerate its expansion across Europe, supported by a new partnership with Octopus Electroverse.

Estonian startup MarkeDroid has raised €300,000 in bridge funding to scale its AI-based distributed energy orchestration platform across Europe. The round includes a €175,000 syndicate investment from the Estonian Business Angels Network (EstBAN), led by Jana Budkovskaja and David Clark. To support its expansion, MarkeDroid has appointed Kätri Kübar as Chief Operating Officer. Kübar previously served as Chief Product Officer at Funderbeam and held leadership roles at Wise and Bolt. MarkeDroid is developing an AI-powered orchestration layer that connects residential, commercial, and grid-level flexibility. Its technology coordinates distributed energy resources such as solar panels, batteries, EV chargers, and heat pumps by analysing real-time electricity prices, weather forecasts, and usage data. The platform enables homes and businesses to decide when to store, use, or sell electricity, helping reduce costs and improve grid stability. “Grid operators are suddenly dealing with millions of solar panels on rooftops that weren't designed to communicate with each other,” said Toomas Teesaar, co-founder and CEO of MarkeDroid. “MarkeDroid’s stands out not just for its technology but for its momentum, demonstrating clear product-market fit,” said David Clark, lead investor at EstBAN. The company plans to expand beyond residential energy management into energy retailer orchestration in partnership with Enefit, and into microgrid flexibility projects with national transmission operators.

Italian ocean technology company WSense has raised €10 million in a pre-Series B round to accelerate the development of its subsea Wi-Fi systems and expand its Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) platform internationally. The funding round saw new investors Indico Capital Partners and SIMEST join existing backers CDP Venture Capital SGR, Blue Ocean by SWEN, RunwayFBU, Axon Partners Group, Fincantieri, and Rypples. The new investment brings WSense’s total funding to over €25 million. Founded in 2017 and led by Chiara Petrioli, Professor of Computer Engineering at Sapienza University of Rome and CEO since 2022, WSense has developed patented underwater wireless communication technology that enables real-time, secure and cost-efficient transmission of ocean data. The company’s systems allow sensors and autonomous vehicles from multiple vendors to communicate, facilitating large-scale data collection to monitor marine ecosystems, infrastructure, and environmental conditions. “The entry of new investors such as Indico Capital Partners and SIMEST represents a strong recognition of the value of our technology and our international growth strategy,” said Chiara Petrioli, CEO of WSense. “We will accelerate the development of cutting-edge IoUT solutions for the energy transition, infrastructure security, and the protection of the oceans.” Stephan de Moraes, Managing General Partner at Indico Capital Partners, commented: “Wsense is a great example of Italy’s deep tech capabilities and the opportunities emerging in ocean-related technologies." WSense’s technology is being deployed across applications including underwater infrastructure monitoring, real-time environmental tracking, and autonomous robotic networks that support the energy transition. The company currently employs over 80 engineers and researchers, with offices in Italy, Norway, and the UK, and staff based in France and the United Arab Emirates.

Exnaton, a Swiss software company developing an AI-driven intelligence platform for utilities, has raised a Series A round to accelerate its European expansion and to deepen customer partnerships. Founded by Liliane Ableitner, Arne Meeuw, and Anselma Wörner, exnaton combines cutting-edge research from ETH Zürich, the University of St. Gallen, and TUM with deep industry expertise to empower utilities with digital tools for a cleaner, smarter grid. The firm’s technology sits at the intersection of digitalisation, helping utilities launch smart, data-driven sustainable energy solutions quickly and efficiently.  As the energy sector becomes more decentralised, intermittent, and complex, exnaton enables utilities to turn shifting customer expectations, regulatory challenges, and digitalisation into growth opportunities, all without costly IT overhauls.  exnaton’s modular white-label SaaS intelligence platform allows utilities to rapidly create and deploy sustainable energy products — including dynamic tariffs, energy sharing models, and smart EV charging — while seamlessly integrating with existing ERP systems. By leveraging AI, the platform automates complex processes across billing, energy consumption and production data analysis, to reduce operational costs, increase efficiency, and improve customer experience and engagement.   “AI is transforming the way we manage energy,” says Anselma Wörner, co-founder and COO of exnaton. “With this funding, we will accelerate our go-to-market strategy, enhance our customer-facing operations, and make our software even smarter — from fine‑grained personalised billing to intelligent management of decentralised flexibilities. Our goal is to build user‑friendly products that make investing in renewables so compelling that everyone participates and helps drive the transformation our society urgently needs.” Today, over 50 utilities spread across Europe rely on exnaton’s technology to bring flexibility, transparency, and innovation to the new energy system. This includes clients such as TotalEnergies in Belgium, eprimo and Bayernwerk (E.ON brands) in Germany, as well as Burgenland Energie in Austria — together driving the digital transformation of Europe’s energy sector. The round was co-led by 4impact Capital and Elevator Ventures, with participation from existing investors True Ventures and Übermorgen Ventures.  “exnaton’s platform is a key enabler of the digital energy transition. By combining deep research expertise with strong execution, the team has built technology that empowers utilities to innovate faster, operate more efficiently, and accelerate decarbonisation,” says Yasmin Venema, Principal at 4impact capital. According to Magdalena Chalas, Investment Manager at Elevator Ventures: “At Elevator Ventures, we recognise the role of energy communities and prosumers as a key trend shaping the future of the energy sector. We are glad to back a talented team through our investment in exnaton, that will drive innovation in flexible billing solutions for decentralised energy ecosystems." The new funding will be used to accelerate international expansion and further develop AI-driven features within its intelligence platform. 

Italy-based Sizable Energy, a developer of long-duration ocean energy storage, has raised $8 million in a round led by Playground Global, with participation from Verve Ventures and Unruly Capital. Sizable Energy is building gigawatt-scale storage using an offshore pumped-hydro approach. Founded by engineers across nuclear, mechanical, energy, and maritime disciplines, the company aims to deliver long-duration energy storage (LDES) for a more reliable and cost-effective grid. Its patented system applies proven pumped-hydro principles to a marine architecture designed for modularity and scale, storing energy by pumping saturated sea-salt brine from the seabed to a surface reservoir and leveraging ocean depth for efficiency. With the International Energy Agency estimating a need for up to 120 TWh of LDES by 2040, about ten times today’s capacity, Sizable targets and constraints are facing onshore pumped hydro (slow builds, geographic limits, environmental concerns) with an offshore solution that is modular, cost-effective, and designed for rapid deployment. Invisible from shore, the system targets a low levelized cost of storage, scales from single-digit to hundreds of GWh, and uses readily available materials that can be manufactured and installed at depths of 500+ meters using existing maritime infrastructure. The company has validated its core technology in wave-basin laboratories and open-ocean trials. Recent testing at MARIN indicated reliable operation in harsh ocean conditions, a key milestone ahead of a megawatt-scale pilot. A new sea trial off Reggio Calabria, Italy, will validate major floating components and the full assembly and deployment process, paving the way for a multi-MWh demonstration plant in the Mediterranean. The new funding will accelerate the development and deployment of Sizable Energy’s offshore pumped-hydro system to deliver economical, reliable LDES.

Fintech advice company Saturn has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by European VC Singular, with participation from Shapers, Y Combinator, and Zeno Ventures. The advice gap is one of today’s biggest societal challenges. Fewer than 1 in 10 people in the UK  received financial advice last year, according to the Financial Conduct Authority. That leaves millions of families without the help and expertise they need to secure their futures.   The problem? Delivering advice is too expensive. Advise professionals, whether they are financial advisers, paraplanners, or administrators, spend too much time bogged down in admin and compliance tasks.  The result: it costs on average £2,000 / year to serve just one client, making financial advice a privilege for the wealthy.   Founded in 2023 by Amal Jolly, Michael Ettlinger, and Rohit Vaish, Saturn’s mission is to make human-led advice accessible to one billion people. After uncovering the scale of the issue by reading an industry report, the founding trio saw how AI could transform the economics of advice and open access for everyone.   “Behind every financial plan is a human story,” said Amal Jolly, Saturn CEO. “Advisers and their teams quietly change lives, giving families confidence and peace of mind. Our job is to empower humans in the financial advice process. By doing the heavy-admin-lifting and  making compliance much more reliable and less painful, we can help financial advice  professionals offer their life-changing services to more people at a significantly lower cost.”   Saturn’s compliance-focused AI tackles the root of the problem by automating the most time-consuming administrative and regulatory work. Tasks that once took four hours of paraplanner time now take just 20 minutes of review - including client suitability reports, meeting documentation, onboarding, and pension transfer processing.  This frees advisers and their teams to focus on what they do best: delivering expert, human-led advice at scale. By giving firms full control of their data and reducing manual processes, Saturn eliminates inefficiencies, cuts risk, and helps strengthen client relationships. Built to be Compliant by Design, Saturn adapts to each firm’s internal policies and local regulatory requirements, ensuring every process, document, and workflow aligns with the regulations e.g., FCA and Consumer Duty standards, from the start. Its AI is purpose-built for  UK financial advice compliance - not a generic CRM or automation tool - and is continually refined in collaboration with Saturn’s in-house team of compliance experts and paraplanners.  All AI-generated documentation remains subject to mandatory adviser review before distribution, ensuring firms retain full oversight and regulatory accountability while benefiting from automated efficiency.  Saturn’s technology is trusted by over 600 leading advisory firms, consolidators, national firms, and advice networks, including Progeny, Hoxton Wealth, Perspective Financial Group, and Insight Financial Associates.  Jeremy Uzan, Co-Founder and GP at Singular, commented: “We have rarely seen such an ambitious, high-velocity founding team that combines deep technical expertise with real industry insight. They have built an exceptional group around them that moves fast, executes  with focus and attracts top talent - and their early traction already reflects their ambition.”   The new funding will accelerate the development of next-generation AI and tech that enable faster, more scalable and more compliant advice delivery. Saturn will also expand its AI, engineering, research, customer delivery, and partnerships teams to strengthen industry collaboration. 

Copenhagen-based CFO-services company, Scaleup Finance, has secured £3 million to launch Nume, an AI CFO positioned to address the financial leadership gap faced by 50 million SMEs globally.  While CFOs are standard in larger businesses, nearly 50 million SMEs globally lack a proper finance function, relying heavily on manual processes, spreadsheets, and limited access to financial expertise. Scaleup Finance aims to address this gap with Nume. which acts as a CFO for small and mid-sized businesses, answering complex financial questions, preparing reports, and proactively guiding founders on the health of their business through their familiar communication channels like Email, Slack etc. I spoke to CEO and co-founder Alexander Sonne Wulff to learn all about it. Sonne Wulff has been a founder throughout his whole career. He started back in 2010 with a deep tech company developing a new type of concrete material.  Of all things, they decided to reinvent concrete, and he recalled "everyone told us we would fail because I’m not an engineer. I studied at Copenhagen Business School. But the product turned out to be both greener and cheaper." "We used to joke that if we could sell a contractor a product that emitted 5 per cent more CO₂ but saved 20 per cent in cost, they would always choose it. The incentive structure was very much like that back then — and, honestly, it still is to a degree. Anyway, the company ended up doing really well. I was there for 11 years, scaling it into the US and across Europe." “I’m building the product I always wished I’d had as a founder” When he exited in 2021, he wanted to solve one of the biggest and hardest problems he’d faced personally — financial management. He teamed up with my two co-founders to start Scaleup Finance. Sonne Wulff recounts:  “Every time I met other founders at events, the same topic came up — managing finances was a recurring pain point. For many, the CEO or founder is effectively the CFO, even though that’s not their area of expertise.  That’s the problem we set out to solve when we started Scaleup Finance in 2021." “We’re six in total — three of us entrepreneurs and the others with finance and tech backgrounds. We’d all experienced the same challenge: managing our own company finances without the right tools." Inside the financial black box  The most common financial challenges faced by startups and SMEs are cash management and visibility — questions like “When will we run out of cash?” or “How accurate is our forecast?” Sonne Wulff admits, “I’ve probably had hundreds, maybe even close to a thousand meetings with founders, and so many have said, “I have no idea how we’re performing.” "When I ask, “Do you get a monthly report to see how you did last month?” they often say no. Their process is literally logging into their bank account to check the balance." He sees this as the biggest warning sign. “A lot of founders call finance a “black box.”They know they need to handle it but have no idea what to look for. If you map out how most early-stage companies operate, you’ll usually see one person — the founder or CEO — doing everything. Then they hire an outsourced bookkeeping provider or accountant to handle two things: bookkeeping and payroll, because they legally have to. Everything else is left to the founder.” Building investor trust starts with the numbers Significantly, for startups with external funding — grants, angels, or VCs — there’s another layer of reporting and accountability. Sonne Wulff often tells founders that “finance is like your internal steering wheel — you need a good grip on it to make decisions. "But it’s also what builds trust with investors. The external reporting component is huge. Investors need confidence that you’re managing their capital responsibly. Even if you’re not actively fundraising, maintaining that transparency with your current investors lays the groundwork for your next round.” Open banking created more complexity Scaleup Finance is a combination of service and technology. According to Sonne Wulff, when the team started in 2021, they saw that there were plenty of startups focusing on bookkeeping, payroll, expense management, and payments — all important but very operational.  According to Sonne Wulff, “Nobody was tackling the strategic side: budgeting, forecasting, and decision-making.” “When I started my previous company, my financial tools were very fragmented. I had a cloud accounting system, a payroll system, but also stacks of paper invoices because some clients still wanted them sent by mail. This was only about 10 years ago!” The rise of open banking in 2015 saw an explosion of fintech — expense management tools, corporate cards, payroll platforms. Everything moved to the cloud. But according to Sonne Wulff, “what happened was that I now had all my transactional data spread across multiple cloud tools, all with APIs, and I was exporting CSV files every month to rebuild a master spreadsheet just to understand performance." "It was ridiculous. I’d spend hours every month reconciling data manually in Excel — making mistakes, updating forecasts — and every founder I spoke to said the same. Everyone had “the spreadsheet.” So we decided to focus on that top layer: the strategic financial management part. It’s harder to build than a basic accounting tool because it requires deep accuracy and context.” Scaleup Finance was inspired by Palantir’s model — embedding domain experts deeply within the product.  “We realised that to succeed, we’d need financial professionals in-house to help build the technology. So we started as a tech-enabled CFO service, offering an end-to-end solution where human CFOs are supported by automation,” shared Sonne Wulff. Nume is built on four years of Scaleup Finance’s CFO-as-a-Service experience, including 40 CFOs working with more than 500 high-growth startups across Europe. The team has condensed thousands of hours of learning and knowledge into a tool for every SME to use. It connects directly to banking and accounting systems to deliver CFO-level insights in minutes - from liquidity forecasts to board-ready reports, and proactively surfaces risks and opportunities in real time. ​​ Over the past year, Nume has been tested in private beta with a select group of companies, refining its capabilities in real-world conditions. Already, more than 2,500 companies from 80 countries have signed up for the launch.  According to Sonne Wulff, “For larger companies or those with very complex audits, you still need a person involved. But for the long tail of SMEs, Nume delivers professional-grade financial management without the cost of hiring a CFO.” How Scaleup Finance hit €1M ARR without a single euro in marketing Scaleup Finance’s biggest source of growth has always been word of mouth. In our first year, it went from zero to €1 million in ARR without doing any marketing at all. “I remember coming back from summer vacation just a few months after we launched,” recounts Sonne Wulff. “We had automated the monthly reporting process, producing beautiful reports that clients could export as PDFs. These reports said “Powered by Scaleup Finance” at the bottom and looked like something out of a Fortune 500 board deck.” Clients started sharing them with their boards and investors — and then those investors started calling, saying, “I just received this report from one of my portfolio companies. It’s the best monthly report I’ve ever seen. Tell me more about what you’re doing.” That created a powerful organic flywheel for growth. Helping founders sleep better at night According to Sonne Wulff, “What we hear most is: “I finally feel on top of my finances.” “It sounds simple, but for many founders it’s transformative. Finance goes from being a source of anxiety to something under control. A lot of our clients talk about finally sleeping better at night because the “black box” has been opened. Even personally, when I was a founder, I took a master’s in finance and accounting — not because I loved it, but because I thought it would help me make better strategic decisions. Even then, I was never 100 per cent sure I was doing things correctly. That constant uncertainty is stressful. So when our clients tell us they finally feel confident about their numbers, it’s exactly why we started the company.” Global accessibility for SMEs and startups Nume brings the cost of professional financial management down tenfold, making it accessible to thousands of smaller companies. And it’s global from day one with a logical UX: onboarding takes about five minutes. You connect your bank and accounting systems, answer a few simple questions, and Nume immediately starts working. "The first thing it says is something like, “Hi, I’m your AI CFO. I’ve analysed your data and created a tailored financial plan and a list of tasks I’ll handle for you.” Then users can choose to communicate via Slack or email," shared Sonne Wulff. Nume proactively monitors finances, sends monthly reports, flags issues like growing receivables, and keeps everything running smoothly. “We’ve spent more than a year building what I call the most sophisticated financial brain for SMEs. The hardest challenge was accuracy — large language models are great with text, but when it comes to numbers, they tend to hallucinate,” shared Sonne Wulff. “We solved that by creating a multi-agent setup: splitting complex tasks across specialised AI agents, each with the right tools and validation processes. That’s how we achieved 100 per cent accuracy. Most AI adoption so far has been in text-based use cases — sales, customer support, legal — but not in numerical, data-driven work like finance. Our architecture finally makes that possible.” For Sonne Wulff, Nume's proactiveness stands out. "Most tools wait for users to ask questions, but most founders don’t even know what to ask. Nume behaves like a real CFO,” shared Sonne Wulff.  After onboarding, Nume immediately creates a plan and starts sending tailored updates — “Here’s your monthly report,” or “Hey, your receivables are climbing.” It’s an active financial partner, not just a reactive tool. Sonne Wulff asserts, “We’ve basically tried to mimic an entire CFO job description — and automate it. That proactivity is the key difference between a chatbot and an actual AI CFO.” The round was led by a syndicate of European investors, including Mainset (UK), Circlerock (Ireland), North Ventures (Denmark), Crowberry (Iceland), Inveready (Spain), and SeedX (Liechtenstein), alongside angels such as former Google UK Managing Director Dan Cobley. With the funding, Scaleup Finance is now bringing Nume to the global market making CFO-level support accessible to millions of SMEs for the first time. “SMEs are the backbone of the global economy, yet most still lack access to the financial leadership they need. With Nume, Scaleup Finance is opening up CFO-level capabilities to millions of businesses worldwide. With a proven founding team, we believe Nume can set a new standard for how SMEs worldwide run their businesses,” says Mikkel Rørvig, Partner at North Ventures.

Pharmaceutical company Ipsen has acquired ImCheck Therapeutics, a private French biotechnology company pioneering next-generation immuno-oncology therapies.  ImCheck was founded in 2015 based on the research of Professor Daniel Olive, Director of the Immunity and Cancer Laboratory at the Marseille Cancer Research Centre (CRCM).  The company has previously raised over €193 milion in funding. The anticipated acquisition is focused on the lead Phase I/II program ICT01 in first-line acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), for patients who are ineligible for intensive chemotherapy. ICT01 is a first-in-class monoclonal antibody targeting BTN3A, a key immune-regulatory molecule broadly expressed across cancer, and received Orphan Drug Designations from the US Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency in July 2025. Many AML patients are unable to tolerate intensive chemotherapy and must rely on lower-intensity options, which often deliver limited and short-lived benefit.2 This high-risk, unfit population continues to face a significant unmet medical need, highlighting the urgency for new therapies that can improve survival and quality of life. “At completion, the acquisition of ImCheck Therapeutics presents an opportunity for us to expand our pipeline in oncology and reinforces our commitment to deliver transformative therapies to the people who need them most,” said David Loew, CEO, Ipsen.  “We feel confident that with the ICT01 promising data combined with Ipsen’s global development and commercialisation expertise, we are well positioned to start a Phase IIb/III trial in 2026.”   “We are thrilled to become part of Ipsen, a company whose ambition for transformative care matches our commitment to bringing innovative treatments to patients. This transaction recognises groundbreaking science originating from French academia,” said Pierre d’Epenoux, CEO, ImCheck Therapeutics. “It also highlights the exceptional work the ImCheck team and our partners have achieved to advance the understanding of butyrophilns and gamma delta T cells. Joining Ipsen will help us accelerate ICT01 toward registrational studies and commercialisation. I remain grateful to the patients and investors for their contributions to furthering ImCheck’s pioneering science.” Under the terms of the agreement, through a wholly owned affiliate of Ipsen SAS, shareholders of ImCheck Therapeutics will receive a €350 million payment on a cash-free and debt-free basis at closing of the transaction, and deferred payments contingent upon the achievement of specified regulatory approvals and sales-based milestones, for a total potential consideration up to €1 billion. The transaction is expected to close by the end of Q1 2026, subject to the fulfilment of customary closing conditions, including the expiration or termination of any required regulatory and governmental approvals under French and US regulations.

The CEO of UK fintech industry trade body Innovate Finance has called on the UK fintech sector to be “properly supported” in the next budget, highlighting data showing UK fintech had dropped down the investment rankings. Janine Hirt, CEO of Innovate Finance, whose members include Revolut and Monzo, said: “Fintech is still a tremendous force for good, it is a story of growth, it is a story of inclusion and it is a story of democracy.“We need government and we need regulators to get behind us as well and support this sector. It is imperative that we see fintech properly supported in the budget. “This is how we are going to drive growth, it is how we are going to cement our leadership in financial services.”Hirt, speaking at an Innovate Finance conference, pointed to statistics such as fintech lenders providing more than 60 per cent of SME lending and fintechs “driving job creation” as indicators of its health.But Hirt also pointed to Innovate Finance figures showing the UK had been relegated from second to third place in the global fintech investment landscape, replaced by the UAE, in the first half of 2025.She added: “We have to grasp the opportunity that lies before us, because other countries around the world, they see that opportunity too and they are moving forward and they are moving forward at pace.”Innovate Finance is calling for several reforms in the Autumn budget to help incentivise fintech founders to build in the UK. She said: “We need to make sure the UK remains the place for entrepreneurs and founders to choose to build their business here both for the long term and the short term.”She called for a “rethink” of the tax environment, to better incentivise founders, and corporation tax holidays for companies that list in the UK, to reinvigorate the IPO market.She added: “In addition, we need to make sure that our highest growth companies are actually able to access the growth capital that they need.”Innovate Finance is backing the Mansion House Accord, which could see billions of pounds of pension funds invested in UK assets.Innovate Finance has also expressed concern about how the existing regulatory regime constrains the growth of challenger banks. IMAGE:PIXABAY

Vienna-founded refurbed, a marketplace for refurbished electronics, home, and sports goods, has secured £44 million in its latest funding round. The round was led by Alex Zubillaga (an investor in Spotify, Fever, and Wallapop) alongside Orilla, the Riberas family’s investment platform known for backing Vinted, Playtomic, and Cabify, with strong follow-on participation from existing shareholders Evli Growth Partners, Bonsai, Almaz, C4 Ventures, and Speedinvest. refurbed is an online marketplace for professionally refurbished products. Founded in 2017 by Peter Windischhofer, Kilian Kaminski, and Jürgen Riedl, its mission is to make consumption more sustainable by extending the life cycle of existing products, encouraging customers to “Rethink New.” To date, refurbed has processed 9 million devices and served 4 million customers across 12 European markets. A market leader in Germany and Austria, the company reports environmental outcomes of 350,000 tons of CO₂ avoided, 1,136 tons of electronic waste averted, and 116 billion litres of water saved. As it enters its next phase of growth, refurbed is focusing on the UK, one of Europe’s largest and more digitally mature markets, as a key step in its European expansion. In the UK, demand for sustainable technology is rising amid a limited supply of reliable, high-quality refurbished options. The re-commerce sector contributes over £7 billion annually. Yet, more than 100 million phones remain unused in drawers, with an estimated 33 million suitable for refurbishment, an opportunity that refurbed aims to address by returning more devices to the circular economy. With the UK advancing Net Zero objectives, Right to Repair measures, and e-waste reduction targets, refurbed plans to align with these priorities and support consumers in making more sustainable purchasing decisions as it prepares to enter the market.

Volta, a French–Italian startup, has raised €5 million in a round led by RTP Global. Pascal Houillon, former CEO of Cegid and Sage, joined the round alongside existing investors Emblem, Robin Capital, and Founders Future. Coming less than a year after an initial €6 million raise, Volta’s total funding now stands at €11 million. Over the past 15+ years, B2C commerce has moved to digital platforms that replaced paper catalogues and automated ordering, logistics, and payments, a shift accelerated during the pandemic. By contrast, B2B adoption has lagged: many firms still rely on manual processes (Excel/PDF orders, scattered emails or faxes, fragmented software), reducing efficiency and increasing errors, delays, and blind spots. As AI and automation reshape competitiveness, adoption remains limited, with only 10 per cent of companies, with more than 10 employees, reporting AI use. Volta aims to close this gap for SMEs and mid-market companies with an AI-powered platform that brings B2C-style simplicity to B2B. The software unifies catalogue, ordering, and customer relationship management in a single tool and integrates with existing ERP, CRM, PIM, and WMS systems. Built around three pillars, it unifies operations by centralising data and order channels in one stream, automates workflows to remove up to 90 per cent of manual tasks (from order entry to price updates), and amplifies outcomes with data-driven recommendations, opportunity detection, and AI-guided decisions. Paul Guillemin, CEO and co-founder of Volta, shared: We're building a new standard for B2B distribution players with Volta. Our AI platform integrates with existing systems (ERP, PIM, etc.), automates up to 90% of manual tasks, and gives sales teams back what really matters: time for their customers and growth for their business. The new funding will accelerate the commercial launch, advance Volta’s AI platform, and support team growth.

Allica Bank, the UK challenger lender for SMEs, has acquired UK business lender and embedded payments startup Kriya, as the challenger lender moves into offering payment services to non-financial services businesses.Allica, which offers lending, business banking and savings services to SMEs with over 10 employees, said the all-share deal for Kriya strengthens its lending offering and represented a “strong strategic fit”.Since it started lending in 2020, Allica has lent around £3.5bn to SMEs, and said it was now targeting £1bn in working capital finance to SMEs over the next three years, bolstered by the Kriya acquisition.Kriya offers its customers, which include retailer Halfords, embedded payments, which can be described as the integration of payments into non-financial services businesses, as well as business lending.Since launching in 2011, Kriya (formerly known as MarketInvoice and MarketFinance) has processed over £4 billion in invoice finance, SME loans and embedded finance. Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed. The acquisition marks Allica’s third to date, following the purchase of Allied Irish Bank's SME lending customers in 2021 and bridging finance specialist Tuscan Capital in 2024. Kriya will continue to operate under its own brand with CEO and co-founder Anil Stocker leading the business, with Kriya's 30 employees joining Allica's 680 employees. Allica last undertook a funding round in 2022, raising a £100m Series C led by TCV, with participation from investors Warwick Capital Partners and Atalaya Capital Management.Kriya is backed by investors including Northzone, Barclays, Santander, and Cogito Capital Partners.Richard Davies, CEO of Allica Bank, said: "Kriya has built an impressive business over more than a decade, and Anil and his team share our belief that SME finance needs reinventing, and that together we can offer something the market desperately needs."Our ambition is clear. We plan to lend £1 billion of working capital finance to SMEs over the next three years. This is our third acquisition but our first in the embedded payments space and it aligns well with our future potential international expansion.”Stocker said: “Combining forces with Allica gives us the right platform to scale what we've built. We share the same DNA – a genuine commitment to reinventing SME finance and competing with the big banks who've walked away from the SME market.”

Madrid-based Acoru, which develops technology to prevent AI-enabled fraud and money laundering, has raised a €10 million Series A led by 33N Ventures, with participation from existing investors Adara Ventures and Athos Capital. Generative AI–enabled schemes, deepfakes, voice cloning, and social engineering are driving up fraud losses, with global fraud and bank scams estimated at nearly $500 billion annually. Most existing tools are not designed to detect Authorised Push Payment (APP) fraud or capture intent signals, focusing instead on transactions, events, and sessions. Founded in December 2023 by cybersecurity veterans Pablo de la Riva Ferrezuelo and David Morán, Acoru addresses this gap with its Account Monitoring Platform. The platform classifies both first-party and counterparty accounts to predict APP fraud, prevent scams, and reduce losses, aligning with new regulations on shared scam reimbursements and enhanced reporting. Built by experienced fraud fighters and centred on intent and network behaviour, the platform links pre-fraud signals with context across channels within a bank and, via the Acoru Consortium, across participating institutions. It continuously monitors accounts and their counterparties, building evolving risk profiles to flag patterns such as clusters of micro-transactions or unusual interaction behaviours indicative of AI-driven automation. This enables fraud and financial crime teams to intervene early: blocking suspicious activity in victim and unwitting mule accounts, and freezing complicit mule and money-laundering accounts before funds move. Pablo de la Riva Ferrezuelo, CEO and co-founder of Acoru, said:  Scammers today have more powerful tools at their disposal than ever before. Our approach predicts future victims, money mules and accounts at risk of being laundered by detecting the earliest warning signals others can’t see. With our innovative consortium model, banks can finally exchange account classifications through a centralised network that creates a truly collective defence. This is a paradigm shift in how fraud is fought. The new funding will enable Acoru to advance its mission of helping banks predict and prevent AI-driven fraud and money laundering before transactions occur.

The teleoperation platform for medical technology roclub, has raised $11.7 million in a Series A to fuel its next stage of growth. The round was led by Smedvig Ventures and YZR Capital, with participation from existing investor Speedinvest and angel investors. roclub is a vendor-agnostic teleoperation platform that enables secure, remote access and control of medtech equipment, initially focused on MRI and CT, with expansion to other modalities. Its cloud- and AI-based architecture integrates with scanners from any manufacturer, allowing technologists to operate multiple machines across sites, maintain business continuity, and improve device utilisation while reducing downtime and operating costs. By easing staffing constraints and geographic barriers, roclub helps hospitals and imaging centres deliver consistent, high-quality radiological services and broaden patient access to advanced diagnostics. The smartphone-sized roclub connector can connect to any monitored medtech device, enabling remote access and control from anywhere and supporting direct video and audio between on-site staff, remote operators, and patients. With AI-assisted workflows, roclub helps reduce patient wait times and improve care outcomes, while giving technologists hybrid-work flexibility without requiring physical presence. Founded in 2022 by Dr Matthias Issing and André Glardon, who previously ran a large network of diagnostic centres in Europe and experienced technologist shortages and underused equipment firsthand, roclub now operates in 11 countries, serving major hospitals and outpatient imaging providers. Matthias Issing emphasised that the company’s goal is to establish itself as the global benchmark for teleoperation in medtech, providing seamless, secure, and intelligent remote access and control of medical devices worldwide. By unifying medtech, robotics, AI, and ultra-low-latency connectivity, roclub aims to empower technologists and clinicians to perform complex procedures with precision and collaboration across borders, transforming access to expert care into a truly global capability. The funding will advance AI-driven development of its teleoperation platform and a marketplace that connects healthcare organisations with remote technologists to operate connected medtech devices, helping hospitals and clinics address persistent access gaps. Building on this momentum, roclub will enter the US market, double its headcount in 2026, and strengthen its sales and customer success functions.

German deeptech etalytics has closed a €8 million Series A extension, bringing its total Series A funding to €16 million. The extension is led by M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, and includes continued support from existing investors Alstin Capital (Carsten Maschmeyer), ebm-papst, and BMH.  Built on research from TU Darmstadt, etalytics takes a software-first approach to industrial energy optimisation. Its platform, etaONE®, applies AI, digital twins, and predictive analytics to lower energy costs and emissions while maintaining system reliability and compliance in regulated, energy-intensive environments. Customers across sectors, including Volkswagen, Equinix, NTT, Digital Realty, and Merck, report up to 50 per cent reductions in energy use for cooling, heating, and ventilation, resulting in measurable carbon reductions and operating cost improvements. This latest funding round will fuel etalytics’ strategic expansion into North America and scale delivery capabilities across Europe and Asia. It will also enhance its flagship platform, etaONE®, which provides real-time, AI-driven energy optimisation for critical infrastructure in data centers, chemical and pharmaceutical production facilities, and automotive manufacturing sectors where increasing complexity and stricter energy regulations have surpassed the limits of traditional energy management systems.

In construction, even the smallest design error can have significant consequences — a ramp that’s too steep, a doorway that's too narrow, or a misplaced sensor that costs weeks to fix. Most of these are preventable mistakes, and now, Swedish startup AI-BOB is tackling that inefficiency head-on. I spoke to Elin Mårtensson, co-founder and CEO of AI-BOB to learn more. Mårtensson has a near 15-year background in the construction industry, initially as a property developer on large-scale projects like Mall of Scandinavia in Stockholm and also Fisketorvet here in Copenhagen, where she was responsible for the extension project. Accessibility errors are everywhere — and almost always avoidable Over time, she became an expert in accessibility and usability in buildings, as a result of working part-time as a student, helping a blind girl with navigation: “It was such an eye-opener. It made me realise how many unnecessary barriers we put in the built environment.” And when she worked as a property developer. She saw that accessibility and compliance issues were a recurring problem in every project — and they caused a lot of avoidable errors that had to be fixed later. She shared: “Many errors are so unnecessary. For example, ramps that are too steep, doors that need two hands to open — small things that make a building inaccessible for someone in a wheelchair or with low vision. I see these issues everywhere — and they’re almost always avoidable.” Mårtensson eventually started my own company reviewing projects for compliance with accessibility and usability regulations. She shared: “I worked closely with architects, reviewed hundreds of blueprints, and did final on-site inspections. After a while, I got so tired of seeing the same errors appear again and again. Most of these issues could have been avoided much earlier in the process." 70% of construction errors start in the blueprints Studies show that over 70 per cent of all construction errors actually originate in the blueprints — meaning it’s not the builders’ fault. They’re just working from wrong or incomplete information. Prior to AI-BOB there was no real tool to help architects or property developers properly check their blueprints. Most of the process still happens in Microsoft Word, Excel, or endless email threads — nothing automated. According to Mårtensson in one project alone, you can have tens of thousands of requirements — “BIM standards, environmental targets, national codes, accessibility, and EU-level regulations, plus all the project-specific ones. No tool helps coordinate all that. In a way, construction performs amazingly well given how much complexity they have to manage manually.” A 2018 Swedish government study found that around 25 per cent of all construction budgets in Sweden are spent on fixing errors. It's not only a waste of money but also materials, CO₂ emissions, and labour. “Every time you fix something, you need people who are delayed from another project,” shared Mårtensson. It's a waste on every level. Mårtensson started AI-BOB about a year and a half ago — right after I’d been on maternity leave with my second child.  “I finally had some time to think, and this was also when the big AI boom started. I read everything I could about AI and thought: maybe now we actually have the tech that can help this industry. So that’s when I started AI-BOB with my co-founders.” Pre-deployment testing for construction Construction is a €13-14 trillion industry globally — and 25 per cent of that goes to fixing mistakes. Mårtensson admits, “When I told our CTO — who had worked at Spotify setting up their transaction engine (every song stream is a transaction) — he said, ‘You’re kidding me, there are no automated checks before you start building?’ In tech, you’d never deploy software without automated checks. That’s exactly what we’re trying to bring into construction: automated pre-deployment testing for buildings." AI-BOB uses AI to automate compliance checks on blueprints directly in the BIM model.  “We can check if designs comply with building regulations and produce reports — even suggest corrections on how to fix detected issues,” explained Mårtensson.  Built to fit existing workflows The platform integrates directly into the CAD software.  “That was really important for me — in construction, everything is about mitigating risk,” admits Mårtensson. "You can’t just drop in some new standalone product and expect people to adopt it. Construction projects run for five to ten years. You need to fit into their existing workflow.” For architects, AI-BOB works like a spell-checker inside their CAD tools — they don’t need to change behaviour.  “For property developers — the company’s main customers — it integrates with their project platforms, giving them a dashboard view: do we have the most relevant requirements, do we meet them, who’s responsible, and when were decisions made? It’s about giving them data-driven control for the first time.” “Dream customers” and early traction From the start, AI-BOB has had what Mårtenssonwe calls “our dream customers" — White Arkitekter and CF Møller — on board as early collaborators. "They’ve given us continuous feedback: are we solving the right problems, does this actually make their work easier, is this something they’ll use? And now we’re also starting pilots with property developers.” Mårtensson contends that this sector represents one of the biggest opportunities in the built environment. Beyond efficiency, AI-BOB is very purpose-driven as a company.  “We want to reduce the number of errors, cut CO₂ emissions, and make high-quality, affordable buildings possible — schools, hospitals, housing. There should be no excuse not to build the best you can. If we can deliver buildings on time, on budget, and with less waste, we can really move the needle on sustainability and affordability,” shared Mårtensson. AI-BOB is currently active in Sweden but is looking to expand to new markets. Lead image: AI-BOB. Photo: uncredited.

Vilnius-based nexos.ai has raised €30 million in a Series A round to help enterprises adopt AI securely and at scale. The financing was co-led by Evantic Capital and existing investor Index Ventures, with participation from Creandum, Dig Ventures, and angel backers. The raise comes six months after the company’s January launch and amid growing concerns over “shadow AI,” where employees upload confidential materials to consumer tools, risking exposure to third parties. nexos.ai’s platform combines an AI Workspace for employees and an AI Gateway for developers, providing a unified control layer across 200+ models. This enables task routing to the most suitable model while centralising security, cost management, and compliance. The AI Workspace enables teams to interact with multiple LLMs within a single interface, featuring configurable guardrails and role-based access. Users can compare models side by side, work across file formats, and collaborate with built-in web search, while detailed logging and trace visibility help prevent data leakage. The AI Gateway offers a single endpoint for plug-and-play orchestration of models, intelligent caching to cut costs and latency, RAG grounded in company documents, smart fallbacks and load balancing for resilience, and private hosting options for sensitive workloads. The funding will scale the platform and tackle core barriers to enterprise AI adoption, security, observability, governance, and cost control. It will also accelerate advanced routing and private model deployment, support expansion across Europe and North America, and fund educational partnerships to help close AI skills gaps.

Yesterday was frustrating for many of us due to trouble accessing websites like Canva, Grammarly, Disney+, Duolingo, Reddit, Microsoft 365, Fortnite, Facebook, Zoom, Slack, Snapchat, Signal and Perplexity, as well as multiple UK national banks, and key public services. The problem has been attributed to Amazon’s AWS service, and triggered by a DNS resolution failure tied to the DynamoDB API endpoint in AWS’s US-East-1 (Northern Virginia) region, s with a flow on to thousands of services, including Amazon’s own services, such as Alexa, Ring and Prime Video, were experiencing problems, as well as big names from around the web. One thing is clear: when so much of Europe’s digital infrastructure runs on a handful of American cloud providers, resilience becomes as much a geopolitical issue as a technical one. It exposes the fragility of global digital supply chains and the UK’s growing challenge in ensuring digital sovereignty and resilience. Recent outages and policy debates have underscored just how dependent governments, businesses, and users have become on the “big three” cloud giants — AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure — and the urgent need for multi-region, multi-provider strategies to mitigate systemic risk. In the UK, criticism was raised that HMRC (His Majesty's Revenue and Customs) is a critical UK national infrastructure, but it's dependent on operational competence in another continent. Mark Boost, CEO of UK cloud provider Civo and an outspoken advocate for sovereign cloud, says this latest disruption highlights how dangerously exposed the UK is when it comes to digital resilience. He’s calling on government and regulators to rethink procurement, fund sovereign alternatives, and make resilience a baseline requirement. “We should be asking the obvious question: why are so many critical UK institutions, from HMRC to major banks, dependent on a data centre on the east coast of the US? Sovereignty means having control when incidents like this happen - but too much of ours is currently outsourced to foreign cloud providers. The AWS outage is yet another reminder that when you put all your eggs in one basket, you're gambling with critical infrastructure. When a single point of failure can take down HMRC, it becomes clear that our reliance on a handful of US tech giants has left core public services dangerously exposed." Scott Dew, Head of Technology at Loqbox, expressed his surprise on LinkedIn upon discovering that parts of the UK tax authority’s infrastructure run outside the country. “I’d assumed a British tax authority would run in British data centres,” he wrote. “Deploying to eu-west-2 (London) is no harder than deploying to us-east-1 (Virginia). Same API calls, same infrastructure-as-code.” He went on to note that while taxpayers have little say over government IT decisions — “roughly the same influence… as we do over road maintenance” — businesses don’t have that excuse. Dew argued that companies have a clear responsibility to care about where their data is stored and processed: “Data sovereignty isn’t just a compliance checkbox. It’s about control, resilience, and trust.” John Hankinson, Head of IT at Utility Aid, voiced his alarm on LinkedIn over what he described as a “lack of discussion” about the implications for local UK governance. “I highly doubt these organisations operate complex multi-region VPC architectures with cross-continent replication,” he wrote. “So I’m left to assume that some workloads were simply deployed with AWS’s default region — US-EAST-1.” Hankinson warned that hosting UK-facing services in the US not only raises concerns about performance and latency, but also about the location of sensitive government data. “Yes, GDPR and data-transfer frameworks technically allow this — so it’s unlikely to be illegal — but it does seem architecturally and strategically poor, especially for critical national or financial systems.” Chris Dimitriadis, Chief Global Strategy Officer at ISACA — an international association focused on IT governance — drew parallels between the latest cloud disruptions and the global IT outage caused by CrowdStrike in July 2024, which affected airlines, broadcasters, the London Stock Exchange, and businesses worldwide. “When CrowdStrike went down, I coined the term ‘digital pandemic’ — a situation where a single point of failure in the technology ecosystem triggers ripple effects across multiple industries,” he said. “More than a year later, we are witnessing a widespread outage through today’s Amazon Web Services disruption, which has already impacted critical sectors including communications, retail, and workplace productivity tools worldwide. It’s another stark warning of how interconnected and fragile our digital world has become." He predicts that fixing this one incident will not prevent the next and calls for investment in education, training, and “building a larger, better-equipped army of cybersecurity professionals who can envelope our supply chains in resilience.” He also connected the outage with the need for strong cyber legislation,  such as the UK Government’s forthcoming Cyber Security and Resilience Bill. “Whilst the root cause of today’s outage remains unclear, data centres like those affected today would fall under its scope, adding another layer of protection. It’s imperative that the legislation is implemented swiftly and applied broadly to cover the full digital ecosystem and the supply chains behind it.  Without stronger safeguards, there should be no doubt, these ‘digital pandemics’ will continue to threaten productivity, trust, and economic stability”. That said, Chris Street, DevOps Technical Lead at the UK Civil Service and an AWS Community Builder, pushes back against what he sees as misplaced panic around data sovereignty. “All the top-level CISSPs and security consultants shouting so loudly about data sovereignty clearly don’t understand how AWS actually works at the nuts-and-bolts level,” he wrote on LinkedIn. He criticised what he called “outrage over outages”, arguing that some commentators were more interested in fuelling fear than understanding infrastructure reality: “They don’t report the outage; they report the outrage — because fear sells. But AWS going down, while a monumental pain, has little to do with data sovereignty. That’s the least of the worries, to be honest.” Street asserts that AWS’s global architecture inherently depends on centralised control points — such as S3 bucket naming or Route 53 DNS — that must exist in a single region to ensure worldwide consistency. “If one of these central services suffers an outage — like S3 naming or Route 53 — it can affect services elsewhere,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean your data is stored where the problem occurred. Your data might still live entirely in the UK.”

Tallinn-based Yaga, an online marketplace for second-hand fashion, has raised €4 million in a pre-Series A round led by Specialist VC, with participation from H&M Group, Trind Ventures, Startup Wise Guys, and several angel investors. Resale platforms have moved beyond niche and are now mainstream shopping destinations. The global second-hand apparel market is projected to grow from $227 billion in 2024 to $367 billion by 2029, placing Yaga at the centre of this expanding sector. Founded in Estonia in 2017, Yaga operates the market-leading resale platform in South Africa and is expanding into new markets, attracting over 12 million monthly visits. Yaga’s platform offers a secure, user-friendly experience with escrow-based payments and localised logistics to protect buyers and sellers. Items are generally priced 50–80 per cent below new retail, improving accessibility and supporting more sustainable consumption. The company plans to strengthen its presence in Africa and the Middle East, creating economic opportunities for sellers while promoting more sustainable consumption. Aune Aunapuu, CEO and founder of Yaga, said that second-hand fashion is increasingly becoming the preferred choice for millions of consumers seeking both affordability and sustainability. Our growth in South Africa proves that this is a global movement, not limited to Europe or the US. With this funding, we will explore new expansion opportunities as we continue to build the sustainable fashion marketplace of the future, The new funding will support expansion opportunities in the Middle East and North Africa, team growth, and the development of existing markets.

German energy unicorn 1KOMMA5° has officially filed a complaint with the European Commission against the German government's planned power plant strategy.  The reason: the plans to expand fossil gas power plants by at least 20 GW by 2030 distort competition and unnecessarily drive up the costs of the energy transition. The complaint targets the proposed subsidies, which the EU must approve under state aid law. The German government has repeatedly commented on its plans over the past months. According to the government's plan, gas-fired power plants will be subsidised in two stages: first, during construction via tenders and second, during operation via a central capacity market – even when not in use. According to the government, this is justified by concerns over the security of supply.  However, under state aid law, subsidising new gas-fired power plants would only be allowed if there are no distortions to competition and the measures are technology-neutral, necessary and proportionate, i.e. if no better, subsidy-free instrument exists.  1KOMMA5° considers the power plant strategy not to meet the conditions of the state aid framework and has explained this to the Commission. With its complaint, the company officially intervenes in the ongoing state aid proceedings and positions itself as an ‘interested party’, according to EU law. Philipp Schröder, CEO and Co-Founder of 1KOMMA5°, says:   "The planned gas-fired power plants are intended to operate when solar and wind power are insufficient. Decentralised systems, like virtual power plants, can do precisely this. In the event of supply shortages, they reduce the electricity consumption by shifting it to different moments  or by providing additional  electricity from private batteries and electric cars when needed."  1KOMMA5° currently aggregates more than 600 MW of flexibility capacity, making it one of Europe's largest virtual power plants for residential customers. By 2030, the company aims to control a total of 20 GW of capacity, thereby bundling a capacity equivalent to that of the newly planned gas-fired power plants. The company considers the planned subsidies a market intervention that distorts competition in the energy market. Schröder adds:  "We need technology-neutral competition between centralised and decentralised power plants in which generators and flexibility solutions are treated equally and promoted on the same terms. The goal should be to ensure the best solutions for the lowest electricity prices and the most secure electricity system through more competition." Discrimination against dynamic alternatives and virtual power plants Both the tenders and the capacity market discussed would systematically and disproportionately discriminate against more cost-effective alternatives. Under these proposals, producers would not be remunerated based on their generated electricity, but simply based on the capacity they provide. Decentralised flexibility, which exhibits a more dynamic capacity, would thus be further pushed out of the market, and the price of electricity will continue to rise for consumers through additional levies. According to 1KOMMA5°, the Federal Government's plans are one-sided and unnecessarily harmful to virtual power plants, jeopardising jobs and “the innovative strength of numerous energy service providers, cleantech companies and startups.” Mandatory hedging offers a way forward 1KOMMA5° calls for fair competition and technology neutrality to ensure equal treatment of all market participants. It contends that security of supply can rather be maintained through alternative mechanisms such as a mandatory hedging obligation — requiring energy market actors to secure their anticipated demand ahead of time and thereby guarantee a certain level of availability of supply. Under this option, EU state aid approval is not required, and the solution could be introduced immediately. Philipp Schröder comments:   "The power plant strategy should not unilaterally reinforce old structures, but should prioritise the most economical and climate-friendly solutions.  A fair market will directly benefit consumers by reducing electricity prices. The planned combination of subsidies for new gas-fired power plants on the one hand and payments through the capacity market on the other is, in our view, an unacceptable intervention that will burden consumers with much higher costs. It also threatens billions of euros in investments from Europe's leading energy service providers and cleantech companies, as well as installers and startups." Lead image:  Philipp Schröder, CEO and Co-Founder of 1KOMMA5°. Photo: uncredited.