Three-quarters of UK fintech founders are using AI to identify candidates and speed up recruitment, says a new survey. But findings from the survey also show that human judgment remains critical to ensure founders are finding the right talent and mix of individuals to recruit. The survey gauged the opinions of early-stage fintech founders, with 45 founders responding to the survey, within which the survey spoke to six founders in depth on an array of questions, on areas such as recruitment, culture and leadership.These were founders from insurtech Loxa, data platform Hace, money management startup Munny, property tech firm Grand Bequest, financial planning AI assistant PlannerPal, and gifting platform GiftRound.The survey found that founders were curious enough to dip their toes into using AI-powered assistants and talent-matching platforms but were not ready to commit.Mark Whitcroft, CEO, co-founder, PlannerPal, said: “We’re trying AI-first hiring platforms, ike Cord and Jack & Jill,  to improve funnel speed at a fraction of recruiter cost.”Andy Lang, CEO, Munny, said: "I’m not from a technical background—an AI assistant helps describe the role we need.”Katherine Gunderson, CEO and founder, Grand Bequest, said: “We’ve opened an Asana ‘R&D opportunities’ board to universities to surface candidates."Gunderson added: "Onboarding still takes 8–10 weeks. That’s too long. I want tools and mechanisms to operationalise faster.” Other findings include that a company’s purpose is crucial in driving hiring and retention, with 21 per cent of new hires stating they joined a firm specifically for its purpose, while over half (53 per cent) said they would stay because of it. The report was compiled by Ninety Two Ventures, the advisory firm, media consultant Sam Shaw, accountancy firm EY and fintech trade body Innovate Finance.  IMAGE: PIXABAY

Automation platform creator Cast AI has announced an investment from Pacific Alliance Ventures (PAV), the US-based corporate venture arm of Shinsegae Group, an over $50 billion Korean conglomerate with leading businesses across retail, consumer, and digital platforms.  With this round of funding, Cast AI’s valuation exceeds $1 billion, marking the company as Lithuania’s 5th unicorn.  Unlike traditional solutions that merely monitor clusters and provide recommendations, Cast AI leverages advanced machine learning algorithms to continuously analyse and automatically optimise clusters in real-time, cutting cloud costs, improving application performance, and boosting DevOps efficiency. “Shinsegae Group’s investment, and our over one billion dollar valuation, underscore the market’s confidence in our platform vision and our ability to execute it globally,” said Cast AI Co-Founder and CEO Yuri Frayman. “Enterprises don’t just need cheaper infrastructure – they need infrastructure that adapts automatically as workloads and constraints change. That is what our automation agents were built to do, and this investment helps us scale that globally.” Cast AI also expands its platform with the introduction of OMNI Compute, which connects external capacity, including GPUs, as native compute, allowing workloads to run on the most appropriate resources, locally or across clouds, without code changes, reconfiguration, or operational changes. It enables organisations to run any workloads, starting with AI inference, without cloud lock-in, while maintaining control over where they execute, to meet compliance and regulatory requirements. Teams can scale services without pinning workloads to a single region or provider, while keeping infrastructure behaviour automated, governed, and predictable as demand increases.  It applies the same optimisation used across the Cast AI platform to this external capacity, including GPU sharing, monitoring, and rightsizing, ensuring AI workloads remain efficient and consistent at scale. “OMNI Compute makes GPUs fungible at the infrastructure layer so capacity isn’t trapped inside a single cloud or region,” said Cast AI President and Co-Founder Laurent Gil. “Teams can move, allocate, and run production workloads wherever compute is actually available, with control over cost and performance.” Global expansion has been a core pillar of Cast AI’s growth strategy following its Series C funding round. Since then, the company has significantly expanded its regional footprint by opening new offices in Bangalore, London, New York, and Tel Aviv, as well as subsidiaries in Canada, France, India, Korea, Lithuania, Singapore, and the UK. “Cast AI has built a category-defining automation platform that aligns with the needs of modern, cloud-first enterprises,” said Hyuk Jin Chung, Managing Partner at PAV. “We see strong demand for the company’s platform globally, and we’re excited to support the company’s continued expansion in Asia and help it realise its long-term Application Performance Automation platform vision.” “With Cast AI, we’ve automated continuous infrastructure optimisation on Amazon EKS – reducing operational overhead while improving application efficiency and cost control in real time,” said Kyotack Tylor Kim, Head of Next Gen Cloud Group at Samsung Electronics. “OMNI Compute’s unified control plane has the potential to change how enterprises like Samsung run AI infrastructure globally.”

Klarna is launching a service which allows its customers to send money to each other through its app, as it continues its shift to reposition itself as a bank. The Swedish fintech, best known as a BNPL fintech, is launching peer-to-peer payments across 13 European countries, including the UK. The feature means that Klarna customers can send money to other registered Klarna customers, such as splitting bills or gifting cash with friends and family, directly from the Klarna app. Klarna customers will have to have the required funds in their Klarna wallet to send the money. To send money, users choose a recipient using a phone number, email address, QR code, or a saved contact. After confirming the amount, Klarna runs fraud and eligibility checks before proceeding with the payment. Klarna, which has over 100m users globally, hopes to broaden the service to non-Klarna customers and cross-border payments. The launch forms part of a move by Klarna to reposition itself as a digital bank and shed its BNPL image. It has launched a debit card, which it says has registered four million sign-ups in four months and has bagged an Electronic Money Licence in the UK. Sebastian Siemiatkowski, co-founder and CEO of Klarna, said: “Customers are sick of the friction and fees of traditional banking, which is why millions signed up to Klarna Card within a few months of launch. "With peer-to-peer payments we’re making it even easier to manage all of your payments through Klarna, now including small transfers, making managing your money quicker, easier, and cheaper.” Siemiatkowski yesterday told Bloomberg that Americans are being ripped off by high credit card fees, amid President Trump’s calls for a one-year 10 per cent cap on credit card interest rates.

Spot Ship, the SaaS platform modernising global ship chartering, has raised £1 million in a round led by Ventures.eu, marking the Lisbon-based VC fund’s first investment from Fund I. The round included Improbable CEO Herman Narula, industry specialists, Tradeworks.vc and Marcel Kind. Spot Ship is a British cloud-based company focused on improving efficiency in maritime logistics. Its platform uses advanced AI and machine learning, combined with global fleet tracking and a continuously expanding data set, to provide brokers, charterers, ship owners and operators with high-quality, actionable data. By automating complex data processing and streamlining decision-making, the company reduces typical vessel chartering timelines from several days to a matter of hours. Its API-first technology addresses longstanding data and efficiency challenges across the shipping industry, enabling seamless integration for major market participants. Commenting on the investment, James Kellett, Founder and CEO of Spot Ship, said the company is focused on bringing faster, more modern processes to an industry that has traditionally moved slowly. He noted that Ventures.eu closely aligns with this vision and has already delivered strategic value by connecting Spot Ship with major players across the global shipping sector. Ventures.eu leveraged its corporate network to introduce Spot Ship to leading shipping companies and industry experts, bringing potential customers into the investment process. This approach provided early market validation and supported rapid commercial progress, with new customers onboarded and additional co-investors joining the round. The new funding will support continued product development, commercial expansion, and the scaling of Spot Ship’s AI-driven platform across global shipping markets.

A quantum startup based in the UK, Ukraine and the US has raised what it says is one of the largest seed rounds in quantum software, bagging $11m.The funding round in Haiqu was led by Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Qudit Investments, Alumni Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Silicon Roundabout Ventures and returning investors Toyota Ventures and Mac Venture Capital.Haiku is focused on building the software layer that can optimise the current state of quantum hardware. The startup said the funding will be used to support the upcoming launch of Haiqu’s operating system for quantum applications, which it says makes quantum more efficient and more resistant to errors. The funds will also be used to expand its team.Haiqu was co-founded in 2022 by Richard Givhan, a Stanford-trained engineer, and Mykola Maksymenko, a former quantum researcher at Max Planck Society and Weizmann Institute.Givhan said: “Quantum teams need to make empirical progress on hardware to close the gap toward industrially useful quantum applications. Today, too little experimentation happens because quantum cloud costs are prohibitive and hardware performance remains insufficient. "Our goal is to change that overnight with a software system that can run larger applications at a fraction of the cost. We are grateful to have found investors who recognise the ugly truth: middleware isn’t sexy, but it matters.”Brian Schechter, partner, Primary Venture Partners, said: “Quantum computing must demonstrate commercial advantage over classical compute in some domain in order to scale. The premise underlying our investment in Haiqu is that software is essential to realise this goal.“More specifically, quantum hardware needs to operate more noise-resiliently and at greater scale. Haiqu minimises hardware shortcomings to get the best of what quantum has to offer today and in the many years before we have fully fault-tolerant qubits." According to Crunchbase, Haiqu has raised $5.8m in total to date, prior to this funding round.

Istanbul-based Dataroid has closed a $6.6 million pre-Series A funding round led by the FinAI Venture Capital Fund of Tacirler Asset Management, with participation from the Tacirler Asset Management Future Impact Venture Capital Fund and Endeavor Catalyst. The company had previously raised $2 million in December 2023 from Koç Group’s Private Venture Capital Investment Fund and İşbank’s 100th Year Venture Capital Fund. Dataroid is a digital analytics and customer engagement platform that enables organisations to measure and analyse customer interactions across multiple digital channels. The platform integrates customer data, behavioural analytics, application performance monitoring, and data modelling into a single system, providing marketing, product, and technology teams with comprehensive insight into customer experience and performance. It is used by medium and large enterprises across sectors, including financial services, aviation, and retail. According to co-founder Fatih İşbecer, the company’s long-standing work with large banking customers in Turkey has helped establish a strong foundation for international expansion. He added: As the market-leading digital analytics platform for banking and financial services in Turkey, our platform today enhances the digital experience of more than 120 million users. We see expanding this value to new markets as a priority. With this new funding, we aim to strengthen Dataroid’s AI-focused capabilities in line with customer needs and accelerate our global marketing initiatives, particularly across EMEA and Europe. In 2025, G2, a B2B technology marketplace, recognised Dataroid as a leading digital analytics platform in the Middle East and awarded it top placement in the “Best Support” category for both product and customer journey analytics, based on user feedback. The company reported net revenue retention of 127 per cent by the end of 2025, with no customer or revenue churn. With the new funding, Dataroid plans to expand into additional geographies, strengthen its presence in EMEA, accelerate global marketing efforts, and further develop its AI-powered self-service analytics capabilities.

As we close the chapter on 2025 and look ahead to what 2026 may bring, we’ve released a special Tech.eu podcast episode that does something a little different. Instead of our journalists alone unpacking the biggest stories of the year, we turned to what you read most in 2025 — and invited the founders and investors behind those headlines to share their perspectives on the moments that shaped Europe’s tech and innovation landscape, and the forces they believe will define the year ahead. From defence tech and deeptech to venture capital, regulation, and Europe’s ambitions for global scale, the conversation brings together voices from across the ecosystem to reflect on what really mattered in 2025 — and what is now coming into focus for 2026. Watch or listen: ? Hosts Cate Lawrence, Senior Journalist, Tech.eu John Reynolds, Journalist, Tech.eu ?Guests Ricardo Mendes, TEKEVER Andreas Klinger, co-initiator of the EU-INC, former CTO, investor, and entrepreneur Simon Schaefer, Founder of Factory, angel investor, President at Allied for Startups, and co-initiator of the EU-INC Filip Dames,  Founding Partner, Cherry Ventures Jevgeni Kabanov, President, Bolt Gilles Retsin, co-founder of AUAR Riam Kanso, CEO, ConceptionX Jed Rose, Partner, Antler  Some of the stories you read most in 2025 TEKEVER becomes the latest unicorn in Europe's defencetech industry Inside Antler’s "Day Zero" strategy: backing founders before the first round Cherry Ventures launches $500M in funds to propel Europe’s first trillion-dollar company One year on from Draghi report: Europe’s innovation future hangs on the 28th Regime Conception X launches angel syndicate for Europe’s deeptech PhDs h Bolt sounds alarm over Lyft's €175M FREENOW acquisition: “We’re the last European  Construction tech startup AUAR raises £5.1M to expand robotic micro-factories

At 42 pages, Tech.eu's 2025 Annual Report is our largest to date and packed with a comprehensive review of topics including investments, geographic and industry performance, top M&A and exit activities, insights and predictions from startups and VCs, and much more. While there's plenty more information packed inside the full report, let's dive into some top-level items. Key findings €72 billion In 2025, European tech investment reached €72 billion, positioning the year as the second-strongest of the past three years and reinforcing the market’s long-term growth despite a modest 3.2 per cent correction from 2024’s peak. 3740+ deals 2025 saw a steady stream of investments both in terms of the number of deals and the total amounts raised month-over-month. UK on top From a geographic view, 2025 saw little change in the top countries funded, with the UK retaining its lead position. Fintech reins supreme in 2024 In 2025, fintech was the best-performing industry, with €11.1 billion raised over 397 rounds. 715 M&A and exit activities In 2025, the number of exits increases to 715, compared with 648 in 2024, indicating a moderate recovery in exit activity. While this is an improvement on the previous year, exit volumes remain below the 2023 level of 847, suggesting that 2025 reflects a stabilisation phase rather than a full return to earlier highs. Pre-Seed and Seed investors drive deal flow in 2025 In 2025, the European tech ecosystem was supported by a balanced mix of public institutions, early-stage specialists, and global venture capital firms, creating a resilient and scalable funding environment. Investors such as Bpifrance, CDP Venture Capital, and High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) played a central role in backing innovation, particularly at early stages, while specialised pre-seed and seed investors, including Antler, SpeedInvest, and Seedcamp, led overall deal activity. The entire Tech.eu 2025 Annual Report is now available for download. Gain a deeper understanding of the European tech landscape and make informed decisions for your business with data-driven analysis, exclusive reports, and valuable research. From all of us here at Tech.eu, we wish you a very happy, healthy, and prosperous 2026.

LIV4 an Italian startup applying generative AI to enterprise processes, has closed a €500,000 Pre-Seed funding round to accelerate the development of its platform, expand its team and strengthen strategic partnerships.  Today, quality management is often perceived as a complex, mandatory process, slowed down by repetitive manual activities and a high risk of human error. Feedback from companies involved in early pilot projects confirms the need for a concrete solution capable of reducing operational time, increasing accuracy and improving data analysis across internal systems. LIV4 develops a proprietary platform designed to query, analyse and generate complex technical documentation in a fast, intuitive and fully compliant way. It enables companies to interact with their quality data using natural language, automating activities that are still largely manual and time-consuming today: from information retrieval and regulated technical documentation to process traceability and validation. Founded in 2025 by Patricia Achinca and Matteo Giunchedi, LIV4 originally started in 2023 as a solution for intelligent information management in travel organisations, before evolving into industrial-quality processes. After years of research, experimentation and early prototypes, the founders identified a clear and unmet need in the industrial sector: simplifying and accelerating data management and documentation activities within quality processes. “Our vision is to help companies turn industrial quality into a truly strategic process through the use of generative AI,” said founders Patricia Achinca and Matteo Giunchedi. “We do this through a proprietary platform capable of understanding technical contexts, querying enterprise data and automatically generating documents that are already formatted and compliant with industry regulations. With this round, we will expand product features, strengthen the team and accelerate validation within the Italian industrial market”. LIV4 has already launched pilot projects with Nupi Industrie Italiane, as well as companies in the Food & Beverage and Earthmoving sectors. The team currently consists of seven people and plans to expand in the coming months, particularly in tech and product roles, to support platform development and scale the technology to additional regulated industries. The investment was led by a group of business angels with direct experience in the industrial, software and manufacturing sectors, including Bernhard Konzet (General Manager at Blulink), Claudio Ognibene (President and CEO of Ognibene Power), Sean Milloy (entrepreneur and senior executive with global experience at Cummins, now CEO of LHP Europe), and Giovanni Giunchedi (former executive at Bottega Veneta, Sergio Rossi and Richard Ginori – Kering Group). The round was also supported by Intesa Sanpaolo and Banca d’Imola, further validating the project's solidity and the relevance of applying generative AI to industrial quality processes. “We decided to invest in LIV4 after analysing its potential in an industrial context that is undergoing an inevitable transformation,” said investor Bernhard Konzet  “I am very familiar with the complexity of quality management and the amount of time required for documentation and analysis. LIV4’s approach is concrete, immediately applicable and built on a deep understanding of the industry.  Many organisations already rely on structured information systems: this is the ideal way to finally unlock the value of data that has been collected for years.”

Biotech company Nuclera has secured an additional $12 million in financing, bringing its total Series C funding to $87 million. The extension was led by Elevage Medical Technologies and Jonathan Milner, with participation from existing investors British Business Bank and GK Goh. Nuclera is focused on streamlining protein expression and purification workflows through its benchtop system, eProtein Discovery, with the aim of improving access to proteins for drug discovery research. By integrating cell-free expression systems, digital microfluidics, and comprehensive screening data, the platform helps identify promising protein candidates early, supporting more efficient development while reducing time, cost, and uncertainty. As part of its expansion into AI-enabled protein engineering, the company plans to extend eProtein Discovery with antibody-specific capabilities. This will enable researchers to perform end-to-end expression, purification, and binding validation of full-format antibodies within a single, integrated high-throughput system, while also supporting the generation of scalable, standardised, high-quality datasets for training advanced AI models in biologics research. According to CEO and co-founder Dr. Michael Chen, the new funding reflects the company’s momentum and its strategy to position eProtein Discovery within one of the fastest-growing segments of biologics R&D. He added: Scientists increasingly require scalable, high-quality datasets to power AI models in biologics discovery. We are positioning Nuclera to become a foundational platform for the future of protein and antibody engineering, ultimately accelerating therapeutic discovery timelines. The investment will further support the integration of antibody expression and binding validation capabilities into the eProtein Discovery system, enabling in-house multiplex protein screening, characterisation, and expression.

Touchwaves, a Dutch deeptech startup and spin-off from TNO, has raised €1.5 million in a pre-seed funding round. The round was led by SecFund, which supports startups, scale-ups, and innovative SMEs addressing the innovation needs of the Dutch Ministry of Defence, in collaboration with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Regional Development Agencies under ROM-Nederland. Additional participants include TNO Ventures, Brabant Startup Fonds, imec.istart, and Joanna Invests. The round also received support from NWO through its Take-off 2 program, which advances high-potential, research-based innovations. Founded by Charlotte Kjellander and Martin Romero, Touchwaves develops wearable haptics technologies designed to support human performance and situational awareness, enabling more intuitive interaction with complex systems in high-workload environments. Human factors remain a significant challenge in aviation, with research indicating that a large share of non-combat incidents are linked to human error. This highlights the need for innovation that places human performance at the centre of system design, particularly in military aviation. Touchwaves is currently working with the Dutch Ministry of Defence, including the Royal Netherlands Air and Space Forces and the Center for Man in Aviation, on the development of wearable haptics systems aimed at enhancing pilot performance in fighter jet operations. Charlotte Kjellander, co-founder of Touchwaves, noted that while much of the innovation in military aviation has focused on aircraft systems, the company’s approach prioritises human performance: By supporting pilots with intuitive, non-invasive haptic feedback, we help them operate more effectively in the most demanding environments. While military aviation is Touchwaves’ initial focus, the technology is designed for broader dual-use applications across other high-stress environments. Martin Romero, co-founder, added that the technology is intended to complement existing systems by improving situational awareness and supporting resilience under high workload and stress. Future use cases include elite sports ( where haptics can support breathing guidance, body awareness, and recovery), ground operations (where haptic alerts may assist with fatigue and workload management), and healthcare and wellbeing (where tactile guidance could help individuals develop focus, awareness, and resilience). These applications align with Touchwaves’ long-term objective of establishing haptics as a core interface for enhancing human performance in environments characterised by high cognitive load and stress. The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate the development of a next generation of dual-use wearable haptics technologies aimed at further improving human performance and situational awareness in high-stress environments.

Zurich-based Ahead Health has raised $6 million in funding led by RTP Global, with participation from Tiny.VC and Pareto 20. The round also included several entrepreneurs, among them Kai Eberhardt (Oviva), Stef van Grieken (Cradle), Sara Hürlimann (Zahnarztzentrum), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), Michiel Bakker (MIT, DeepMind), and Cody Gakpo (Liverpool FC). Early detection remains limited in many healthcare systems, which are often reactive, fragmented, and costly, despite advances in AI that now enable more precise identification of potential disease indicators from imaging and blood data. Founded in 2024 by former Google executives, medical professionals, and health technology specialists, Ahead Health was created to address this challenge by bringing preventive check-ups, including MRI scans, advanced blood tests, and CT scans, into a single AI-powered platform designed to expand access to preventive healthcare. The platform translates complex biomarkers into personalised, actionable insights, supporting earlier identification of conditions such as cancer, neurological disorders, endometriosis, and cardiovascular disease. The company’s full-body MRI and blood testing process is designed to be completed within 30 minutes, delivering a personalised health plan through a fully digital experience. Well-analysed data for preventative health purposes is already making a massive difference, with 25% of those who have used our services discovering a medical issue that was previously unknown to them. Next to that, we also uncover more longevity-focused insights – for instance when  our MRI analysis pinpointed the root cause of my own nagging lower back pain, which then allowed me to treat the issue, explained Nick Lenten, CEO and co-founder of Ahead Health. Ahead Health operates as a licensed medical practice through partnerships with clinics in Switzerland and Germany, combining clinically validated testing with an AI platform that continuously learns from both scientific research and individual health data. With established relationships among leading clinical providers in these markets, the company is expanding its European presence and further developing its platform. The new funding will support this expansion by enabling Ahead Health to add partner clinics in Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria, enhance the platform’s capabilities, introduce additional testing services, and grow its engineering team.

UK-based Verna has raised $4 million to support growing global demand for its nature recovery software. The funding round was led by Berlin-based NAP and Zurich-based Übermorgen, with participation from UK investors including Vanneck, Love Ventures, Concrete Ventures, and Climate VC. The accelerating degradation of natural systems is increasing risks for businesses and communities, making nature restoration a key factor for long-term growth and resilience. Although substantial capital is now being directed toward nature investment, turning these commitments into effective on-the-ground action remains challenging due to the complexity of measuring and improving biodiversity outcomes. Verna addresses this challenge by helping organisations translate nature-related commitments into practical, measurable results. Verna provides software that supports the planning, implementation, and long-term monitoring of nature recovery programmes. Its platform is used by more than 3,000 users across over 100 organisations. Rather than generating new environmental data, the company focuses on integrating existing data sources, enabling teams to make informed decisions and track progress over extended timeframes. Its AI-driven solutions are designed to move organizations beyond risk reporting toward verifiable action and delivery. According to Rafi Cohen, co-CEO of Verna, as environmental pressures increase, organisations that depend on land, either directly or through their supply chains, have an increasing need to invest in nature recovery to strengthen long-term business resilience. Verna initially focused on projects using the Biodiversity Net Gain framework, a methodology developed in the UK and now being adopted more widely. As the company expands, it plans to support additional nature recovery frameworks. The new funding will be used to further develop the platform, including expanding its AI capabilities to optimise nature recovery plans.

NetBird, an open-source network security platform built on product-led adoption, has closed a $10 million Series A round led by Pace Capital, with participation from Nauta Capital, InReach Ventures, and Antler. NetBird is a Berlin-based software company developing an open-source Zero Trust network security platform that enables secure and cost-effective private networking for organisations of all sizes. Since its launch on GitHub in 2021, the platform has been adopted by companies across multiple industries seeking modern solutions for connecting remote employees and distributed infrastructure. In a market largely shaped by traditional sales models, extensive marketing, and closed-source technologies, NetBird follows a more transparent and user-focused approach. Its growth is driven by open-source development, community engagement, and a strong emphasis on usability, particularly as organisations look for alternatives to VPN solutions that require frequent security updates and are associated with recurring security vulnerabilities. European digital sovereignty also remains an important part of NetBird’s long-term strategy, as demand grows for security infrastructure developed within Europe. The platform reduces the operational complexity of network management by eliminating the need for port configuration, centralised gateways, and complex firewall rules. This design philosophy also informs the company’s growth strategy. NetBird relies primarily on organic adoption, supported by engineers, DevOps teams, and security professionals who evaluate and deploy the platform within their environments and later advocate for broader adoption inside their organisations. Misha Bragin, co-founder of NetBird, noted that enterprise network security has traditionally been constrained by long sales cycles and extensive product demonstrations before teams can experience real value: At NetBird, the code name for our GTM strategy is ‘Proof of Concept Starts at Home’, meaning that users can try the product for free with minimal friction and experience its value first-hand in their private homelabs before rolling it out to production. Our community has become our strongest advocate, shaping the product far more than any traditional enterprise marketing ever could, NetBird’s customer base includes managed service providers, technology companies, large enterprises, and public sector organisations. Customers such as Sport Alliance, netgo, Signicat, and VIEW Group use the platform to manage secure connectivity across teams and infrastructure. The new funding will support continued investment in engineering and product development, expansion of use cases, and additional support for the company’s growing user community, as well as further global scaling of the platform.

AI-native internal tool builder Bricks.sh has raised €1.6 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Primo Capital, with participation from Octopus First Cheque Fund, Eden Ventures, Vesper Holding, and Vento. The round also included several angel investors, including Gianluca Cocco of Qomodo, Filippo Conforti of Commerce Layer, and the founding team of online operations automation company Smartness. The company also announced the launch of its public beta today. Bricks.sh provides an automated approach to building internal tools. The platform allows developers to generate an admin panel by connecting their APIs and databases to its AI system. With minimal setup, teams can create a ready-to-use admin panel for both technical and non-technical users, making it easier to interact with internal systems. The platform keeps admin panels synchronised with underlying APIs and databases. When changes occur, such as the addition of new fields, updated tables, or modified endpoints, the interface updates automatically, reducing the time developers spend on both initial development and ongoing maintenance. Dario Di Carlo, CEO and founder of Bricks.sh, said that a significant share of engineering time is spent building internal tools, often forcing teams to compromise between speed and customisation. This trade-off, he noted, frequently results in solutions that slow technical teams and fail to meet business needs. We built Bricks.sh to end this trade-off once and for all. The outcome: speed where developers need it, customisation where operators demand it—and a path out of the months-long grind of building internal tools that don’t drive revenue, but do drain time. The real, positive impact we’re seeing is on user bottom line, Di Carlo added. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its core team and continue developing the product.

Amsterdam-based Klearly, a payments platform for restaurants, bars, and clubs, has raised €12 million in Series A funding, bringing its total capital raised to €20 million. The round was led by PayPal Ventures, with participation from Italian Founders Fund and existing investors including Global PayTech Ventures, Antler Elevate, and Shapers. Although the payments market is highly competitive, many restaurants continue to rely on generic, legacy payment systems that are not specifically designed for hospitality operations, particularly during peak service periods. Klearly addresses this gap by providing a payments platform built for the restaurant industry, with a focus on performance and reliability in high-volume environments. By integrating with existing restaurant POS systems, the platform supports smoother service operations, increased revenue per guest, and improved customer retention. Klearly can be used as a standalone payments system and is compatible with existing hardware, allowing merchants to adopt the platform without replacing their equipment. For operators seeking deeper integration, Klearly also offers a payments layer that connects to current POS systems, enabling faster and more reliable transactions without requiring a new POS solution. Sam Koekoek, CEO of Klearly, said the company’s goal is to develop a leading payments system for restaurants, bars, and clubs across Europe, adding that Klearly is not a generic payments provider and does not require merchants to replace their existing POS systems. Instead, we provide a payment layer purpose-built for hospitality that supports leading operators and leading POS providers. Klearly has achieved significant adoption in the Netherlands, with thousands of merchants processing payments through its platform, and is now expanding its presence in Italy and Belgium in collaboration with restaurant groups and point-of-sale partners. The new funding will support this growth by strengthening local go-to-market capabilities in Italy, broadening the company’s partner network, and continuing investment in product development, POS partnerships, and team expansion across commercial, operations, partnerships, and engineering.

Tallinn-founded startup Flashka, an AI-driven study app for university students, has closed a €1 million Pre-Seed round led by Outlast Fund, a Nordic-Baltic early-stage VC. Additional investors in the round include UCP and Vento Ventures. The app helps university students master complex subjects through automated flashcards, quizzes, and personalised learning tools.  It has also reached 1 million users just one year after launch and has become the #1 on several major App Stores in Italy and Spain. Flashka has seen its recurring revenue triple over the past three months. The platform has gained popularity among university students in Italy and Spain, where it recently debuted at number one on the App Store, and is now rapidly increasing its user base in the DACH region.  ”Students are the reason we build this product. They message us every day with feedback, and they are the ones telling us what actually helps them learn,” said David Djokovic, co-founder and CEO of Flashka.  “For too many students, AI is currently used only as a shortcut. Flashka is a part of the countermovement where a new generation of students uses its features daily as a way to deepen their learning, not avoid it,” said Kristaps Prusis, Founding Partner of Outlast Fund.  The new capital will be used to expand Flashka’s technical team (remote) and accelerate product development. Upcoming features include advanced personalised analytics, social study features, and broader support for different learning modalities.

Corporate watchdog Ekō has today filed a formal complaint with the European Ombudsman, challenging the European Commission and other EU institutions over their systematic promotion of US-based social media platforms on official europa.eu websites, including Elon Musk’s “X”.   The complaint argues that prominent “Follow us” and “Share this page” buttons — accompanied by the logos and direct links of platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Meta services, and YouTube — amount to active endorsement of third-country commercial platforms whose data-processing practices have repeatedly been found incompatible with EU fundamental rights standards.    Logos of the problematic social media companies even appear on EU publications made expressly for children, including an “I colour in Europe” colouring book available on the europa.eu website.   The complaint highlights that EU institutions already operate a rights-respecting, EU-controlled alternative via Mastodon — which can be accessed anonymously and without exposure to unlawful international data transfers and AI manipulation. Despite this, US-based platforms receive far greater visibility and prominence on EU webpages.   According to Ekō, this practice undermines the EU’s own obligations under the Charter of Fundamental Rights, particularly the rights to privacy and data protection, as well as the principles of good administration and institutional neutrality.   “EU citizens should not be nudged into using invasive third-country platforms which are riddled with scams and illegal content, just to follow or share public information from their own government institutions” said senior campaign manager Eoin Dubsky, who submitted the complaint on behalf of Ekō. “And corporations which repeatedly violate law shouldn’t be rewarded with free advertising on EU publications.”    Ekō also raises specific concerns about children’s rights, noting that social media logos and links appear even on EU publications aimed at children, including educational materials. Conditioning access to public information on the use of platforms that pose documented risks to children’s privacy, safety, and wellbeing is, according to the complaint, incompatible with the EU’s obligations under Article 24 of the Charter.   In addition, the organisation points to indirect economic and promotional effects, including search-engine optimisation advantages conferred by outbound links from the highly authoritative europa.eu domain — links that are not marked with the keyword “nofollow” to prevent search ranking benefits. Ekō has asked the European Ombudsman to investigate whether these practices constitute maladministration and to recommend that EU institutions remove third-country social media links and logos from official EU webpages and ensure that all public communications published on external platforms are also made available on EU-controlled, rights-respecting channels. “It is deeply inconsistent for EU institutions to harshly criticise certain social media corporations on the one hand, while simultaneously promoting their platforms through their logos and links on official EU websites,” Eoin Dubsky added. “Governments shouldn’t encourage citizens to use harmful apps.”  

A UK startup aiming to solve key challenges in life sciences through AI has unveiled the “world’s first AI models for programmable gene insertion”, as it confirms Nvidia has invested in the startup. London-based Basecamp Research harnesses biodiversity to design new medicines. It does this by building its own AI models and today it has unveiled a family of AI models capable of programmable gene insertion, which it says offers a new way to replace faulty genes and reprogramme cells for therapeutic use. It is hoped the models can propel a new generation of treatments for cancer and other inherited diseases. John Finn, chief scientific officer, Basecamp Research, said: “We believe we are at the start of a major expansion of what’s possible for patients with cancer and genetic diseases. By using AI to design the therapeutic enzyme, we hope to accelerate the development of cures for thousands of untreatable diseases, potentially transforming millions of lives.” The models have been released with a paper, co-authored by Nvidia, Microsoft and academia, and are being unveiled at Nvidia's presentation at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in the US. The new AI models cost tens of millions of pounds to produce, according to Basecamp Research CEO and co-founder Glen Gowers, and have been built in collaboration with Nvidia, whose GPUs the models were trained on. Gowers said: “It is very similar to the GPT style of models. In fact, the scale of this model is roughly parallel to GPT4 in terms of the training data it has seen.” The models are trained on Basecamp Research's proprietary genomics dataset, which scientists have gathered from around the world. According to the startup, the models learn the language of DNA and patterns of evolution, allowing the algorithms to design new, programmable therapies for cancer and genetic disease. Gowers said: “In this model, what we test it on is multiple different disease types and multiple different types of medicine.” He added: “We can type in a pathogen that we want to kill and with about 97 to 100 per cent accuracy, it then produces a peptide that, currently kills in the lab, that pathogen.” On being able to build models on a much smaller budget compared to US AI labs, Gowers said: “You want to really carefully pair the amount of data with the right size of model. It’s not just the case that you throw larger and larger amounts of compute at it. “We ourselves built the training dataset and we trained the model, which means we can very, very tightly make sure that we have the optimal combination of both.” On the post-training of the models, it used lab-generated data, which helped keep costs down, Gowers said. The models are not being released as a chatbot, but will be used by the startup in partnership with pharmaceutical companies to design therapeutics. On applications, Gowers pointed to its advantages over CRISPR-based approaches. He said: “What we are showing in this paper is the ability to do large edits, large insertions, which opens the door to tens of thousands of genetic diseases that today wouldn’t be treatable by CRISPR.” Basecamp Research has also confirmed that it has secured investment from Nvidia’s VC arm NVentures, in a pre-Series C round, but did not declare how much the chip giant has invested. Basecamp Research was one of the UK startups named last year by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which he said Nvidia planned to invest in, along with others such as Revolut and Wayve, as part of a £2bn investment to support the UK AI industry.  Basecamp Research has raised around $85m to date. Its investors include VC firms Singular, True Ventures and Hummingbird Ventures and Paul Polman, the former Unilever CEO.

Finnish protein engineering company Avenue Biosciences has raised  $5.7 million in a Seed extension funding round co-led by Balnord and Tesi, with support from existing investors Voima Ventures, Inventure, University of Helsinki, and Dimerent. The funding aims to help scale its high-throughput protein engineering technology that accelerates the discovery of protein-based therapies and tools for the biotechnology industry. The financing brings Avenue Biosciences’ total funding raised to date since 2024 to $8.7 million. I spoke to Katja Rosti, co-founder and COO, to learn more. Avenue Biosciences is dedicated to accelerating the discovery and development of protein biologics – drugs made using living cells, designed to treat disease by targeting specific pathways in the body in a more complex manner than traditional drugs, but whose complexity also makes them difficult to manufacture at scale. Why modern biologics are so powerful — and so hard to make  Modern biologics have been available for several decades; typical examples include human insulin and antibodies for treating breast cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. However, much life-saving therapy goes unrealised because of production barriers, particularly the cell’s limited ability to correctly fold and secrete complex proteins. In response, Avenue Biosciences has developed what it describes as the first platform to measure and modulate the secretory pathway at scale.  It combines organic biology and machine learning to boost protein production through a proprietary approach grounded in years of scientific research at the University of Helsinki, Finland.  According to Rosti, several factors have held the field back from making this possible earlier.  She contends that although signal peptides — short amino-acid sequences that act as address labels, telling the cell where to send a newly made protein before it is removed from the mature molecule — were identified as early as the 1980s, this knowledge remained largely academic for decades. “These signal peptides operate within the secretory pathway: the cell’s internal machinery that transports proteins from their site of synthesis to their final destination, most often outside the cell, to the cell membrane, or to other organelles.  For therapeutic proteins, this pathway is critical, because this step often determines whether a biologic can be manufactured at all.” When the science was largely there, but lacked a platform For a long time, however, the biological understanding of this system was incomplete, and the tools needed to explore it systematically and at an industrial scale simply did not exist. Beyond technical constraints, Rosti also cites an organisational and cultural dimension. “Biotech development tends to rely on established workflows,” she shared. “Traditionally, companies have worked with a small set of well-characterised “safe” signal peptides, optimising expression through slow, sequential trial and error. The idea of screening thousands of signal peptide variants in parallel, early in development, was neither technically feasible nor part of standard practice.” In other words, until now, as with many breakthroughs, the pieces of the puzzle were already there — the biology, the industrial relevance, and the unmet need, ”but no one had yet assembled them into a scalable, integrated platform. While biology gets smart, the secretory pathway is still a black box. But even with today’s tools, the secretory pathway is still not fully understood, which, according to Rosti, makes it such a powerful frontier for innovation: “As biological insight deepens, new parameters can be mapped and exploited, allowing the technology to evolve in step with scientific discovery.” Novel protein-based biologics under development, for example, in cancer, rare diseases, or immunology, are becoming increasingly targeted and effective, performing several functions with a single therapeutic component: bringing immune cells to the right place, activating them, and recognising disease cells more specifically.  “However, this adds complexity to the protein structure, adding manufacturing cost, or in the worst case, preventing the development completely”, shared Rosti. “Ultimately, the signal peptides are removed from the mature protein, keeping the target essentially the same as the original, making this approach highly useful also in manufacturing biosimilars, the lower-priced versions of existing therapies.” How Avenue Biosciences is cutting years from protein development timelines To scale without slowing down or driving up costs, Avenue Biosciences has built its platform around massively parallel testing. Instead of trying to improve protein secretion one signal peptide at a time, the company screens thousands of variants in a single experiment, dramatically shortening development timelines. “When a customer gives us a target sequence, we combine it with a library of about 5,000 to 6,000 different signal peptides,” says Rosti. “These peptides act as the molecular ‘addresses’ that guide the protein out of the cell and into the culture medium, which is essential for large-scale manufacturing.” This high-throughput approach replaces what is still the industry norm: sequential trial-and-error. “Today, most teams test one signal peptide, tweak the conditions, then try another. It’s a slow, inefficient process,” Rosti explains.  “By screening thousands in parallel, we can identify the best-performing variants in a single experiment, which is where the real time and cost savings come from.” The economic impact is particularly significant for late-stage development, where expression problems can quietly derail years of R&D investment. “There is a lot of hidden cost in projects that fail simply because the protein cannot be produced at sufficient yield,” she says. “In some cases, we can step in late and actually rescue a programme by improving secretion without changing the therapeutic target itself. We’re effectively adding a booster to the molecule.” Where wet-lab reality meets machine learning While there’s plenty of noise around AI in biotech right now, Rosti holds close to her roots as a protein scientist, considering wet-lab biology as fundamental.  “AI-designed proteins may look promising in silico, but that doesn’t guarantee they can be produced in cells,” she shared.  "We use experimental data from large-scale screening to train machine-learning models. This helps us understand patterns, refine libraries, and improve prediction. At the same time, computational insights can guide future experiments. It’s a two-way relationship. A company may design a protein using AI and bring the sequence to us for real-world validation. But biology always has the final say.” From research to business Crucially, Avenue Biosciences has had the home advantage of being the company’s first customer, validating its own platform, meaning the technology was already well validated during the research-to-business phase.  “We came out of stealth at the end of 2024 and quickly gained customer traction,” explained Rosti. “We generated revenue in our first year, which is encouraging. Today’s customers are established CDMOs and pharmaceutical companies," because, according to Rosti, “They already understand the limitations of current secretion strategies and see the need for better solutions.Protein expression challenges vary widely, so collaboration is essential.“ Investors say Avenue is addressing one of the most fundamental and undersolved bottlenecks in biologics manufacturing,  “Avenue’s technology taps into some of the largest opportunities in biotech right now: it significantly lowers the costs of biologics and transforms therapeutic protein manufacturing with the use of AI. Their combination of wet lab and machine learning enables the development of high-quality prediction tools for therapeutic developers, targeting the biggest bottlenecks in the industry. The team has shown incredible execution, with really strong industry names as their clients”, comments Gabriele Poteliunaite, Investor at Balnord. “Many life-altering therapeutic innovations remain out of reach for most of the global population. We see significant growth opportunities for Avenue’s technology, which is deeply rooted in Finnish scientific discovery, and has the potential to become a gold standard in its field”, comments Investment Director Miia Kaye from Tesi. The funding will be used primarily to invest in people and scientific capability.  According to Rosti “We are hiring wet-lab scientists to work on core technology and customer projects. Knowledge building is our priority. Commercial expansion will follow, but the foundation is biological expertise.” Lead image: Avenue Biosciences COO Katja Rosti and CEO TeroPekka Alastalo.Photo: uncredited.