Deep Science Ventures (DSV), a UK-based deeptech venture creator, and Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC), a life sciences service dedicated to turning drug discovery into commercial breakthroughs, today announced a strategic collaboration to address challenges in delivering medicines into the brain.    While recent scientific breakthroughs have identified numerous targets for neurological conditions, the difficulty of effectively transporting these treatments across the blood-brain barrier and into the central nervous system (CNS) remains a primary challenge for global health.   According to the World Health Organization’s Global Status Report on Neurology, over 40 per cent of the global population is living with CNS diseases, making them a leading global cause of ill health and disability.    Developing new solutions could unlock access for rare neurological disorders and expand treatment to large or underserved patient populations, including those with diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and various brain cancers.  Directly addressing critical gaps in healthcare means these innovations have the potential to improve patient outcomes while creating clinical and commercial opportunities for biotech and pharma companies.   The first phase of the partnership will see an in-depth review of the current medicines landscape conducted to identify opportunities for innovation.  This information will then be used to identify systemic gaps in brain-entry technologies. The long-term ambition is for novel approaches that meet the partners' investment criteria to be spun out into new ventures focused on high-impact solutions, with pre-seed funding provided.   A core part of DSV’s approach involves building future founding teams to form new companies that will address challenges across multiple sectors. Future founders will work on opportunities pre-scoped by DSV, de-risking the standard founder proposition.       "The blood-brain barrier remains one of the most complex issues in modern medicine and with over 40 per cent of the world's population facing neurological conditions, it’s imperative that we find an optimal solution to this problem,” said Adam Tomassi-Russell, Senior Director, Deep Science Ventures.  By pooling our venture-creation expertise with MDC’s discovery capabilities, we can offer the right founders a frictionless environment in which to tackle the CNS delivery gap.  If we can solve the 'how' of brain entry more effectively, we can unlock a new frontier of CNS therapeutics and address the huge unmet need in these diseases."   Dr Nicola Heron, Chief Strategy Officer at Medicines Discovery Catapult, said: "At MDC, we are committed to transforming bold ideas into better treatments. This collaboration presents an opportunity to discover new technologies that could have a significant impact on patients and society." Lead image: Magnific.

Spanish proptech company Zazume has raised €2.5 million in a new funding round to support its expansion strategy and accelerate the acquisition of residential property management portfolios across Spain. The round was led by Nordstar and GTV Capital, with participation from existing investors including Sabadell Venture Capital and several family offices. Founded in Barcelona, Zazume has developed a platform that digitises the residential rental lifecycle by combining proprietary technology, artificial intelligence, and financial services. The company works with property owners and real estate agencies to streamline rental management, offering tools designed to improve operational efficiency and enhance the rental experience. Zazume currently manages around 3,500 properties and expects to exceed 5,000 by the end of the year as it expands across Spain. The funding comes after Zazume reached financial break-even, giving the company the option to pursue growth from a position of operational sustainability. According to the company, the new capital will allow it to pursue a more ambitious growth strategy while strengthening its position in Spain's residential rental market. A significant portion of the funding will be used to acquire property management portfolios from smaller real estate agencies in provincial capitals. Zazume is targeting a highly fragmented market where many agencies focus primarily on property sales and often lack the resources, scale, or technology needed to manage rental portfolios efficiently. According to the company, the investment will help accelerate growth through acquisitions while creating new opportunities for smaller real estate agencies looking to monetise their property management portfolios. Zazume has already begun executing this strategy through the acquisition of Zaragoza-based Landa Propiedades, a regional property management company. The company expects to complete several additional agreements this year as it expands its presence in key Spanish markets. Beyond acquisitions, part of the funding will support sales and marketing activities as Zazume seeks to grow its customer base and strengthen relationships with real estate agencies. Through a combination of technology, financial services, and acquisitions, Zazume aims to build a larger and more digitalised rental management platform while contributing to the professionalisation of Spain's residential rental sector.

Munich-based startup Bayshore has raised $8 million in seed funding led by Earlybird Venture Capital, with participation from Lucid Capital, Booom, Heliad, and a group of strategic angel investors. As regulatory obligations grow increasingly complex, many organisations struggle to translate legal requirements into operational processes, leaving compliance teams burdened with manual reviews and slowing down business operations. Bayshore addresses this challenge by converting legal and compliance rules into machine-readable code that provides clear guardrails for AI agents. These agents can continuously apply legal logic to compliance processes while maintaining auditability and consistency across jurisdictions, compliance programmes, and business operations. According to Paul F. Welter, Chief Legal Engineering Officer at Bayshore, organisations need AI systems that can deliver the consistency and auditability required for legal and compliance processes: For any legal and compliance review, organisations need full auditability to prevent liability, so AI reduces risks instead of introducing new ones. We achieve this through lawyers who create deterministic and machine-readable guardrails for AI to act on. The Bayshore platform acts as a central entry point for legal and compliance requests, enabling business units to receive guidance without lengthy review cycles. AI agents can automatically clear low-risk cases or escalate more complex matters to human experts, providing pre-reviewed information that reduces manual workloads and speeds up decision-making. Multiple Global 2000 companies are already implementing Bayshore’s platform to embed legal and compliance requirements directly into business processes. The new funding will be used to further develop the platform, expand the team, and support custom deployments for customers operating in highly regulated industries. Bayshore is currently hiring across AI engineering, legal engineering, and go-to-market functions.

Contentful, the German-founded content management company, is to be acquired by US software giant Salesforce, the companies announced today. Contentful, founded in 2013, has developed an API-first all-in-one hub for developers and content creators to curate, manage and distribute content across different channels, such as blogs, websites, and social media platforms. It has offices in Berlin, London and the US. It works with over 4,800 brands to deliver “personalised digital experiences at scale," it says. Salesforce says the acquisition will beef up its AI agent platform Agentforce, giving it a content layer that will mean agents can autonomously deliver personalised, AI-driven content at scale across every channel for enterprises. Jujhar Singh, president, C360 Applications & Industries, Salesforce, said: “Every meaningful customer interaction depends on three things working together: the right data, the right AI-driven content, and a modern, effortless experience. "With Contentful, we complete that picture by adding a native, headless, composable content layer that lets Agentforce dynamically assemble and deliver personalised experiences across every channel, at the speed and scale the AI era demands." Karthik Rau, CEO of Contentful, said: “Joining forces with Salesforce accelerates our mission of enabling modern enterprises to dynamically assemble and deliver rich digital experiences across every channel. "Our API-first architecture and deep domain expertise fit perfectly into the Salesforce stack.  “Together, we will redefine how brands interact with customers by giving Agentforce the content layer it needs to make every interaction truly engaging." Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Contentful closed a $175 million funding round in 2021, at a valuation of over $3 billion. The round was led by Tiger Global with Base10 Advancement Initiative and Tidemark participating. Earlier backers of Contentful include European investor Balderton, which backed it first in 2012.

UK AI procurement platform Vertice, today announced its acquisition of US software pricing platform Vendr.  By uniting agentic workflows,  AI-powered insights, and expert buying talent, Vertice enables finance and procurement teams in 100+ countries to operate with precision, speed, and impact.   Its platform is used to review, analyse and negotiate purchases with greater confidence.  Vertice processes over $75 billion in spend, with a proven track record of delivering 20 per cent+ savings and accelerating procurement cycles by 2x.  Vendr provides procurement and finance teams with trusted benchmarks and market insights, while also helping streamline negotiations and drive more informed software purchasing decisions.  The deal creates a large procurement intelligence dataset, as Vertice will integrate Vendr’s software insights with its own. The combined data represents more than $75+ billion in global indirect spend  across 32,000 vendors, including real-world pricing and human-to-human interactions from 250,000  negotiated contracts, ranging from software to services.  Customers, including ARM, Brex, Duolingo, Twilio, and Santander, will be able to access the data directly within the Vertice platform. Insights will be surfaced at the point of decision to help finance and procurement teams evaluate vendors, manage renewals, and plan negotiations.  Roy Tuvey, Founder and CEO of Vertice, said:  “Vertice and Vendr have shared a vision for AI in procurement: to build purpose-designed AI agents trained on real-world data and tailored to specific procurement use cases. By bringing these teams together, we can accelerate everything - from the breadth of agents we can build, to the commercial impact we deliver for customers. We are setting a new benchmark for what procurement teams should expect from AI  procurement platforms." According to Ryan Neu, CEO of Vendr: “Vendr was founded on a simple observation: buyers were making million-dollar purchasing decisions with only a fraction of the information available to the vendor across the table. We spent years closing that gap, building the data, tooling, and negotiation expertise to rebalance that dynamic.  I’m proud of what we  built independently, and even more excited about what our two organisations can build together.” 

An AI startup that has developed AI agents to help financial businesses eliminate repetitive tasks across customer operations has raised a fresh $13m in funding, doubling its Series A raise to $26m, it said today. Founded by executives from Monzo, Gradient Labs has developed a suite of AI agents to automate operations across areas like customer service and processes such as lending, disputes, and Know Your Customer (KYC) checks. The $13m Series A extension was led by new investors Octopus Ventures and CommerzVentures with follow-on backing from Redpoint Ventures and Exceptional Capital. It follows Gradient Labs' Series A $13m raise in April last year, led by Redpoint Ventures. Gradient Labs has raised around $30m in total. London-headquartered Gradient Labs said it will use the funding for its US expansion plans and on strategy and tech improvements. The startup currently works with US and European fintechs. Gradient Labs says its AI agents learn company-specific products and processes, enabling them to handle complex customer inquiries reliably and safely. It says it’s one of the few companies in financial services running voice AI in production at scale, saying that it handles hundreds of thousands of customer calls monthly across its lending deployments alone. Dimitri Masin, co-founder and CEO at Gradient Labs, said: “What we’re building is the agent layer that financial services need to run their customer operations autonomously.  “It has to work the way they do, connect to the systems they have already built, and handle the long-running work that has stayed manual until now.” On the reason for the extended Series A, Masin said: "We have met amazing investors who wanted to accelerate our journey before the next full round and get in early."

Today, Berlin startup Xavveo, a deeptech building perception technology based on a proprietary chip, is expanding to tap fast-growing drone-detection/C-UAV, infrastructure surveillance and perimeter security markets with its cutting-edge dual-use platform. Xavveo’s move follows direct demand from high-profile customers in the defence sector. Cheap, readily-available drones are becoming a central element in modern warfare, and a major threat to Western defences. For example, Russia is launching 200+ drones per day into Ukraine -  a record high. Many drones can evade layered air defence systems, slipping through a near-field gap that conventional radar leaves wide open. Xavveo closes that gap.  I spoke to Xavveo CEO, Dr Sven Otte, to learn more. Xavveo was founded in Berlin in 2023 by industry veterans and former founders of Sicoya, Dr Sven Otte (CEO) and Dr Stefan Meister (CTO), alongside Intel veteran Dr Ulrich Keil (VP Engineering). All brought extensive experience: Dr Otte previously held leadership roles at companies including Ametek, Amphenol, and MergeOptics, while Dr Meister previously served as head of silicon photonics at Technische Universität Berlin.  According to Otte, his background is rooted in optics and optical data communications. “I’m an engineer by heart, with a PhD,” he explains, describing a career that began in chip design for optical data communication systems before progressing through engineering management, business development and executive leadership roles at companies including Ametek, Amphenol and MergeOptics, where he eventually ran an entire business unit for a large US corporation. Building a new sensing architecture The origins of Xavveo can be traced back to an earlier attempt to push silicon photonics — optical signal processing using CMOS silicon — into the market. After being told the technology was “too early,” he co-founded Sicoya, where the team developed silicon photonic transceiver chips and modules for data centres. From there, Otte and his co-founders began exploring how silicon photonics and fibre optics could be applied beyond communications infrastructure. Together with Meister — formerly head of silicon photonics at Technische Universität Berlin — and Keil, the team developed the idea for a new perception architecture for autonomous systems. According to Otte, perception remains “one of the biggest problems in autonomous systems,” spanning robots, drones, unmanned vehicles and humanoid robotics, and the founders believed existing camera- and laser-scanner-based approaches could be fundamentally improved. A new architecture for autonomous perception Based on patented chip and system design, Xavveo offers a distinct perception architecture, rather than an incremental improvement to conventional radar. Built on proprietary photonic and fibre-based technology, it is not replicable from off-the-shelf components and delivers high-resolution, distributed sensing across any environment. But how does it work?  Otte describes the company’s sensing architecture as resembling a tree structure. In this model, fibre optic cables act as the “trunk and branches,” while distributed sensing elements function as the “leaves” connected throughout the system. At the root sits the central compute and signal-processing unit, allowing the entire assembly to operate as “one large sensor” rather than as multiple disconnected systems. The individual sensing components are simplified versions of traditional sensors. For example, instead of deploying full camera modules, the system uses only the underlying CMOS sensor chips. Additional sensing modalities — including radar, infrared and acoustic sensors — can also be integrated into the same fibre-optic architecture. “All signal processing happens centrally,” Otte explains, enabling the creation of “very large distributed sensing systems operating at very high frequencies.” Why Xavveo pivoted toward defence The company started initially focusing on autonomous driving. Otte explained: “We brought fibre optics into the car and attached radar sensors around the vehicle — front, rear and sides — creating one 360-degree sensing system. The resulting sensor was really 10 to 20 times better than anything else in the market. We achieved resolutions below 0.1 degrees, which is normally something only cameras or LiDAR systems can achieve.” This achievement is attributed to physics. “Existing systems force you to choose between large distributed architectures operating at low frequencies or smaller systems operating at higher frequencies. One limitation compensates for the other. What we do is combine large distributed sensing with very high frequencies. That combination creates a major performance boost.” In terms of price comparison, conventional autonomous driving stacks typically rely on a combination of multiple LiDARs, radars, cameras, extensive cabling and separate compute systems. When compared against that full legacy sensing and compute architecture, the company’s fibre-optic system is cheaper overall. However, the team realised it would take time to convince both the US and Chinese ecosystems to adopt an entirely new perception architecture while they’re all racing toward commercial autonomous driving deployment. So they expanded into defence-related applications — particularly autonomous transport, logistics and perimeter protection, where the team’s team and its providence provide a competitive advantage. As Otte shared, “Defence customers are very conscious about where technology is developed. They are much more hesitant to use US or Chinese technology.” A distributed sensor network for modern air defence Xavveo’s fibre-optic sensing architecture is designed to overcome limitations in traditional perimeter-security and air-defence systems, particularly for detecting small drones and low-altitude aerial threats. Otte contends: “We are not just building a radar company. This is a completely new perception architecture. We’re integrating additional sensing modalities and working with platform companies across transport, drones and autonomous systems. Xavveo’s fibre-optic architecture can combine radar, infrared sensors, cameras, and acoustic sensing into a single distributed system for perimeter protection.  “Traditional radar systems were designed to detect aircraft or cruise missiles approaching from long distances. They operate at low frequencies and have poor resolution for drones. They also tend to have blind spots close to the radar because they were never designed for small drones appearing suddenly within one or two kilometres.” Xavveo developed its PAIR-500 and PAIR-5000 systems to address this gap, enabling the detection of small aerial targets including Class 1 drones, FPV platforms and low-altitude surveillance aircraft within a 5–10km near-field range. “Most radar systems refresh once per second or slower,” he says. “Our systems update 20–30 times per second, allowing us to continuously track drones in real time. We can classify drones, identify drone types and distinguish drones from birds. We can also operate effectively in urban environments where many radar systems struggle to separate drones from surrounding buildings or infrastructure.” The platform’s distributed design allows it to scale across environments without introducing a single point of failure, while also reducing false alarm rates compared with conventional perimeter-security radar systems. Crucially, the system is far less vulnerable to conventional radar jamming because it operates at uniquely high frequencies that are not currently used by other systems in these applications. “Traditional radar technologies struggle at those frequencies because conventional printed circuit boards and copper interconnects cannot handle them effectively. Fibre optics can.” The ability to operate without GPS or 5G The system can continue to operate even in degraded communication environments. Otte explained:    “We are not dependent on GPS or 5G. If connectivity exists, that’s helpful because it allows multiple systems to share information and build a connected operational picture. It also helps retrain our neural networks in the cloud. But if connectivity disappears, the systems continue operating autonomously. They only need power.” Xavveo is currently in discussions with defence and aerospace organisations, including stakeholders seeking more effective means of detecting and classifying small unmanned aerial systems.   The company now employs ≃50 people and has raised funds from investors including Vsquared Ventures and imec.xpand.

Return Helper, a tech-first provider of cross-border ecommerce returns solutions, has closed a $4 million Series A funding. The round brings together a mix of strategic and financial backers with deep expertise in commerce and logistics. New investors Cathay Venture, MLC Ventures (CVC of Mitsubishi Logistics Corporation), and Jun Yue Investment Co. Ltd join returning investor, Colopl Next. MLC Ventures is excited to support Return Helper’s continued global expansion as the company builds critical infrastructure for the future of cross-border reverse logistics. Return Helper is a tech-first startup providing global cross-border e-commerce returns solutions. Its mission is to solve cross-border returns challenges and turn e-commerce losses into profit. Return Helper builds all of its products in-house, including a SaaS returns management platform — incorporating its Shopify Portal and Buyer Portal — for merchants and marketplaces; a proprietary warehouse management system with mobile applications for warehouse operations; and FlexForward, its forward logistics service covering cross-border shipping and warehouse fulfilment. According to Roy Wan, CEO of Return Helper: "The biggest leak in cross-border ecommerce happens after the return is initiated. We’re using AI to bridge those gaps by measuring, systemising, and fixing the chain where it usually breaks.” The company operates more than 20 overseas warehouses, partners with over 30 logistics and carrier providers, and supports e-commerce marketplaces and platforms including Shopify, Amazon, TikTok, and eBay. The company has offices in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. A milestone year: 60 per cent+ growth and profitability in 2025 The Series A follows a breakthrough year. Return Helper recorded over 60 per cent year-on-year revenue growth in 2025 and reached profitability in the second half of the year. The turnaround was driven by the strategic deployment of AI across the company's operations, which materially improved efficiency, shortened processing times, and raised service quality for merchants and marketplaces. AI has become the cornerstone of how Return Helper manages cross-border returns at scale across its network of more than 20 overseas warehouses. Building on that momentum, the company is channelling fresh investment into three growth pillars: international market expansion, with a focus on Europe and other high-growth regions; next-generation AI capabilities, including specialised AI agents for returns operations; and recommerce, helping merchants recapture value from returned inventory and convert e-commerce losses into profit. Europe emerging as a core growth engine Return Helper continues to show consecutive momentum in Europe, with regional revenue compounding sharply year over year.  Following a foundational 2024, EU revenue grew 215 per cent in 2025, surpassing internal targets. That trajectory has carried into 2026: first-quarter performance puts the company on pace for a projected 230 per cent full-year increase over 2025, marking another year of triple-digit growth on an already elevated base. Growth is being driven by a rapidly expanding network of nearly 100 European merchant partners who rely on Return Helper to manage their cross-border returns. The pace of adoption mirrors a broader shift across the region, as more brands turn to Return Helper to transform international reverse logistics from a cost centre into a competitive advantage. The capital will be deployed to expand into new international markets, deepen the company's investment in AI agents, and scale its recommerce capabilities — transforming returned merchandise from a cost burden into a recoverable revenue stream for merchants and marketplaces worldwide.

Last week, we tracked more than 60 tech funding deals worth over €3.1 billion, and over 5 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe.Click to read the rest of the news.

Swiss biotech startup hephaistos.bio has secured €161,000 (CHF 150,000) from Venture Kick to accelerate the development of custom enzyme solutions for pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing. Chemical manufacturing remains heavily reliant on energy- and resource-intensive processes that contribute significantly to emissions and expose manufacturers to fragile global supply chains. While enzymes offer a promising alternative by enabling more efficient production, reducing costs, and lowering environmental impact, suitable biocatalysts are not available for many industrially relevant reactions, particularly in the pharmaceutical sector. hephaistos.bio is addressing this challenge by combining computational biology, chemistry, machine learning, and structural biology to design custom protein catalysts tailored to specific industrial processes. The company's end-to-end enzyme design platform creates biocatalysts for chemical reactions that are difficult or impossible to perform efficiently using existing solutions, helping manufacturers simplify production while improving sustainability, resilience, and cost efficiency. Founded by Lukas Radtke (CEO), Lucas Merlicek (CTO), Jannik Neumann (Head of Operations), Moritz Ullhofen (Head of Lab), and Ilya Schneider (Head of Business Development), hephaistos.bio brings together expertise across chemistry, biotechnology, machine learning, and industrial applications to develop custom biocatalysts for industrial use. The startup is already demonstrating the potential of its technology through an industrial pilot project with Swiss contract research organisation SpiroChem. Building on this early commercial traction, hephaistos.bio aims to support pharmaceutical and fine chemical companies in reshoring production to Europe through more competitive and sustainable manufacturing processes enabled by custom-designed enzymes. With the new funding, hephaistos.bio plans to further advance its enzyme design platform and expand collaborations with industrial partners seeking more sustainable and economically viable alternatives to conventional chemical production.

Revolut, Mistral, Wayve and ElevenLabs are backing a six-figure “Built in Europe” advertising campaign, challenging the idea that European startups must move to Silicon Valley to scale. The campaign, the brainchild of VC Balderton, the European investor, is backed by more than 100 European founders and CEOs and calls for more people to build or join a tech startup in Europe. It comes amid long-standing concern that Europe is losing its top startup talent as they look to deep-pocketed US investors to scale up, as well as concern from European governments and investors that European founders feel they need to be in Silicon Valley to make it big. Suranga Chandratillake, partner at Balderton, which backs European founders and has invested in Revolut and Wayve, explained the genesis of the campaign. He said that Balderton had an "incredible" 2025, with notable exits and significant investments and that Balderton was broadly optimistic about the European tech ecosystem, a feeling that, he said, was not reflected on social media and in the media. He said: “Every time the team opened up our LinkedIn or opened up the newspaper, we would read all this negative stuff about ‘Europe is not doing this right, it needs more money, we’re losing people to this, we’re losing people to that’. "We thought, while there is obviously some truth in all that, actually why don't we sometimes sit back and say ‘well we have done a lot’. “There are people who read those headlines and think there is no funding for companies in Europe, so 'I am going to have to move to the US'. And it’s just not true.” He said the campaign was “trying to shift the conversation from Europe could be great to pointing out that it already is great”. The campaign, which launches today, runs on billboards and digital formats in London, Paris, Stockholm, Berlin and Munich. It is timed to coincide with London Tech Week, Founders Forum, SXSW (South By South West) Festival, Sommarminglet in Stockholm and will run throughout VivaTech in Paris. The campaign, which costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, also points to BuiltInEurope.com - home to a new jobs platform aggregating tech startup roles in Europe.  The site lists positions from the top 1,000 European tech startups, to connect founders with talent and help build on the sector’s momentum. Alex Kendall, CEO of Wayve, said: “If you think about what’s going to matter in the next 100 years, it’s the really hard, deep technology, and startups are where that’s built. It’s the most adventurous, exciting thing you could do - build or join a startup in Europe.” Anton Osika, CEO Lovable, said: "There has never been a better time to build from Europe than now. The talent is here, the capital is here, the ecosystem is here. And we have the ambition to match." The EU and UK governments are making moves to try to keep European talent in Europe. The EU’s €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund is investing in promising European startups while the UK government-backed Sovereign AI fund is aimed at keeping the UK’s best AI startups in the UK as they scale up.

Invisix, a semiconductor metrology company developing next-generation measurement tools for advanced chip manufacturing, has raised an oversubscribed €20 million seed round. The financing includes participation from Hitachi Ventures, Transition Ventures, imec.xpand, Doosan Investment Co., and a tier-one semiconductor manufacturer. As semiconductor devices become smaller and more complex, measuring the critical structures inside advanced chips is becoming increasingly difficult. Manufacturers must verify each layer before adding the next, yet conventional optical metrology tools can no longer resolve many of the buried features that determine device performance. As these chips power high-performance computing and AI, demand is growing for faster, non-destructive measurement solutions that can improve yields and accelerate production. Founded by ASML alumni and PhD physicists Christina Porter and Sietse van der Post, Invisix is developing a soft x-ray metrology platform designed to enable high-volume, non-destructive measurement of some of the most challenging semiconductor structures. According to Christina Porter, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Invisix, the growing complexity and three-dimensional nature of advanced semiconductors is driving demand for a new generation of metrology tools capable of inspecting critical internal structures without damaging devices. We are entering the market with technology that has been incubated inside ASML for more than a decade — a level of technical de-risking that is unusual for a seed-stage hardware company and gives our customers a faster path to deployment. The company's technology is based on High Harmonic Generation (HHG), a process rooted in scientific discoveries recognised by the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics. HHG uses a short-pulsed laser to excite noble-gas atoms into a high-energy state, causing them to emit soft x-rays across multiple wavelengths. This generates a richer three-dimensional signal than conventional single-wavelength laser systems. By combining HHG with proprietary reconstruction algorithms and machine learning, Invisix reconstructs detailed three-dimensional images of internal device structures without damaging the wafer. The system architecture has also been designed to deliver the throughput required for high-volume semiconductor manufacturing. Invisix applies to metrology the same principle that transformed semiconductor lithography: as device dimensions shrink, the wavelength used to measure them must shrink as well. By using soft x-rays, the company aims to provide visibility into buried nanoscale structures that are increasingly inaccessible to conventional optical inspection methods. The technology has already been validated through industry collaborations, including work with Intel and imec, and the company continues customer demonstrations from its new Eindhoven cleanroom facility. Invisix is now focused on bringing its first commercial system to market and enabling semiconductor manufacturers to measure the next generation of advanced devices at production scale. The funding will be used to expand the Invisix team, accelerate development of its first commercial system, and support customer demonstrations at the company's new cleanroom facility in Eindhoven.

This week, we tracked more than 60 tech funding deals worth over €3.1 billion and over 5 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe. If email is more your thing, you can always subscribe to our newsletter and receive a more robust version of this round-up delivered to your inbox. Either way, let's get you up to speed. ? Notable and big funding rounds ?? Focused Energy raises $240M ?? IQE plc has raised £81M ??  WeRoad lands $58M to scale real-world travel experiences ??‍?? Noteworthy acquisitions and mergers ?? TrueLayer acquires Dutch fintech In3 to offer credit at checkout ?? Finland’s Grundium acquires Denmark’s Visiopharm to build an end-to-end AI precision pathology platform ? Interesting moves from investors ?  Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger launches VC business ? Marvelous and Joachim Herz Foundation launch €20M deeptech fund to bridge Germany’s commercialisation gap ? Lovable owner raises 1.4 billion in new fund ? SwissVC repositions as a peer network for active venture investors ? Transition Ventures’ $150m fund to back ground-breaking founders ?️ In other (important) news ??  London topples Paris to regain European tech top spot ?? ICEX launches Desafía Ciencia to boost the internationalization of scientific spin-offs in the United Kingdom ?️  Nearly a third of European founders are considering transferring their headquarters to the United States. ??  Kyiv delivers: How Glovo scaled one of its fastest-growing markets in wartime Ukraine ? InRento crosses €100M in financing as European property developers look beyond banks ?️ Telecom: 10 companies that raised the most in 2025 ? Interview: Oliver Prill, CEO of London fintech unicorn Tide ? European tech startups to watch  ??  Kopa.ai raises €2M to build AI agents for end-to-end e-commerce operations ?? Perplant raises €1M to equip tractors with AI “eyes” to cut herbicide use and boost profits for farmers ??  Publicit secures €700,000 to reinvent programmatic advertising ?? Voxmind raises £546,000 pre-seed funding as cloud giants exit voice biometrics market ?? Atheni secures £350,000 to help teams use AI more effectively

MokN, a French cybersecurity company focused on protecting organisations from credential theft and identity-based attacks, has raised $15 million in Series A funding. The round was led by GV, marking Google Ventures’ first investment in a French startup, and included participation from Datadog, existing investors Moonfire and OVNI Capital, as well as angel investors. The funding follows MokN’s €2.6 million seed round announced in October 2025 and will support the company’s next phase of growth. The startup plans to expand its product portfolio, strengthen its presence in France and the United States, and launch operations in the United Kingdom through the opening of new offices. Founded to address the growing threat of credential theft, MokN has developed technology designed to proactively recover compromised identities before they can be exploited by attackers. The company currently protects more than one million users across large enterprises and mid-sized organisations. Its first product, Baits, is designed to combat phishing attacks by deploying highly realistic decoy access points that mimic corporate environments, such as VPN and webmail portals. When attackers attempt to use stolen credentials, they reveal those credentials to security teams, allowing organisations to identify and neutralise threats before the information is misused or traded on the dark web. The rapid adoption by major companies and the results achieved with our first solution have confirmed one thing: this approach must go further. Today, we are laying the groundwork for Active Identity Recovery by extending proactive recovery to all forms of identity, with the ambition of making it a new global standard for identity protection, said Gautier Bugeon, CEO and co-founder of MokN. MokN is positioning itself around the emerging category of Active Identity Recovery, which focuses on helping organisations regain control of compromised identities rather than relying solely on passive monitoring approaches such as dark web surveillance. The new funding will support increased investment in research and development as the company builds what it describes as the first multi-product platform dedicated to active identity theft protection. Upcoming products will focus on securing customer accounts, stolen browser cookies and compromised sessions - attack vectors that are becoming increasingly common but remain inadequately addressed by existing security solutions.

A London-based AI lab, founded by DeepMind, Microsoft and White House former staff, has come out of stealth, emerging with a $50m raise and a pledge to try to “write the playbook for AI-native science”. The $50m seed round in Inherent was co-led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures. The AI lab is building Faraday (named after the famous scientist Michael Faraday), an AI system that, it says, allows humans and self-improving AI to work together and tackle what it says are some of the hardest problems in science. Co-founders Tantum Collins, Edward Hughes and Louis Kirsch previously worked at DeepMind, while another co-founder Kaloyan Aleksiev worked at Reka AI and Microsoft.  Collins has also worked at the White House on AI policy under president Biden. Matt Clifford, the co-founder of Entrepreneurs First and former government AI advisor, is an advisor to Inherent. Clifford said the founders were some of the "most impressive, thoughtful founders" he'd met. Inherent says it “will explore the frontiers of scientific discovery and has set out to write the playbook for AI-native science”. Index’s Danny Rimmer said that Faraday was “a system designed to help humans and self-improving AI work together on genuine scientific discovery — not AI plugged into the same methods we've used for 400 years, but a reimagining of the scientific method from first principles”. IMAGE:PIXABAY

TrueLayer, a UK payments fintech looking to disrupt the dominance of card payments, has acquired a Dutch fintech, in a move to expand its offering to credit products.   Backed by Stripe and Tiger Global, TrueLayer leverages open banking technology to allow customers to make online transactions. These payments are called account-to-account payments or pay by bank and are an alternative to going through card giant intermediaries Visa and MasterCard. TrueLayer says its technology has transparent pricing, no hidden fees and eliminates fraud. TrueLayer has acquired 20-strong Dutch fintech In3, which specialises in consumer credit via bank payments. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. TrueLayer said the acquisition means it can offer consumers the option to pay by debit and now credit at checkout- saying it’s the only pay by bank network in Europe to offer the combination.  Until now, pay by bank has been focused on debit transactions. It says its first credit product launch will be a Buy Now Pay Later product, with longer-duration credit products to follow later this year. Pay by bank payments are still dwarfed by those of card transactions.  According to the FT, open banking powered a total of 27mn payments in the UK in March 2025, according to Open Banking Limited. By contrast, the Payments Systems Regulator recorded 1.92bn card transactions in February. But TrueLayer, whose merchant partners include Amazon, Just Eat Takeaway and Coinbase, pointed to figures showing pay by bank transactions now account for up to 17 per cent of European ecommerce transaction value. The fintech also pointed out the deal comes at a time of concerns about European reliance on US tech and financial institutions. TrueLayer, which operates across 22 countries, says it processes more than $150bn in annualised payment volume. Francesco Simoneschi, CEO and co-founder of TrueLayer, said: "With the addition of In3's team and their deep expertise in consumer credit, we now have the people, the network and the products to build a truly independent European payments alternative to the card networks."

Earlier this week, an image went viral in Ukraine. It features a dark and apocalyptic image of Kyiv, with a burning shopping and entertainment centre near Lukianivska metro station in Kyiv engulfed in flames, with thick black smoke billowing into the sky — the result of Russia’s massive missile strike on Kyiv on May 24. Image: Pavlo Petrov @petrovp.photo, DSNS Kyiv At the forefront of the image is a rider on an electric scooter, wearing the distinctive yellow Glovo food-delivery backpack.  Rest assured, the delivery rider, Vladyslav, wasn’t working at the time – he was, in fact, going to meet a friend at the train station — but it offers a stark snapshot of the reality of running a delivery service business during wartime.  In Kyiv, like the rest of Ukraine, life goes on. Shops, cafes, and restaurants are open, and meals, groceries, pharma, and flowers are ordered and delivered at a rapid pace.  And critical to that success is Glovo, with Ukraine becoming one of the company’s top five global markets in just a few years as business as usual persists despite the challenges of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  I sat down with Maryna Pavliuk, GM of Glovo Ukraine, on a recent trip to Kyiv to learn more. Ukraine became one of Glovo’s fastest-growing markets Pavliuk describes Ukraine as a “phenomenal” market for Glovo because, prior to 2018, food delivery in Ukraine was largely phone-based, and services like Glovo began to scale rapidly. At the same time, credit card adoption and digital payments accelerated, transforming consumer behaviour almost overnight.  In just three to five years, usage reached around 11 orders per person annually in Ukraine, compared to roughly 12 or 13 in Spain. According to Pavliuk: “It was just the right point because people were super ready. And it came really naturally when we showed them that this is possible.” Glovo Ukraine is now a standalone entity that operates across 40 Ukrainian cities, with continued expansion despite ongoing wartime challenges. Its ecosystem includes more than 12,000 partners, over 85 per cent of which are small and medium-sized businesses, reflecting Glovo’s strong integration into the local economy and SME sector. Since 2018, more than 80,000 couriers have completed at least one order through the platform. Pavliuk explained that, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian team played a much broader regional role across Central Asia and the Caucasus. “Ukraine was the first country we launched in the region, and from there the team went on to launch Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and Armenia. For around four years, Ukraine served as a major talent hub and operational centre for those markets.” However, the war significantly changed how the regional structure operated.  “After the war started, it became much harder to travel and maintain the same level of exchange between teams,” she said. Ukraine still remained an important regional centre, but the model evolved and started working differently. More than an on-demand delivery company Glovo describes itself as a tech company first and foremost because of the technology behind its three apps. “You have the app for customers, the app for riders, and a separate app for partners. Then you combine it all together, and it’s all powered by engines that in real time define who is driving to which restaurant and delivering to which customer. That’s all happening in real time,” explained Pavliuk. “We count every minute because every minute costs money, so we need to be incredibly efficient and fast. That’s why there’s so much technology behind the platform, including AI. We have a huge global engineering team constantly working on the product." At the moment, around 70 per cent of the business comes from food partners — from major restaurant chains to smaller local restaurants. Quick commerce is also growing fast. In Ukraine, for example, it increased from around 17 per cent of the business to 28 per cent in just over two years. According to Pavliuk, deliveries have increased over the four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion began. Factors such as nightly curfews, air raid alerts, and harsh weather conditions have all influenced consumers’ willingness to go out for meals or shopping. But she also attributes this to the company’s efforts building trust with customers: “Customers are more attached, they fully use the app, they discover new categories, and that’s why they are making more orders.” Blackouts forced Glovo to reinvent operations During the winter of 2025–2026, power outages in Ukraine became both widespread and frequent, particularly following large-scale Russian attacks on energy infrastructure. In some regions, residents experienced rolling blackouts daily, while more severe strikes triggered outages lasting several days. In Kyiv and other major cities, electricity was often available for only a few hours at a time during peak periods of the crisis. Businesses and households increasingly relied on generators and backup batteries to cope with repeated disruptions. The situation intensified during extreme cold spells in January and February 2026, when temperatures dropped below -20°C and electricity demand surged. Russian strikes on substations, thermal plants, and transmission lines further destabilised the grid, forcing emergency outages across most regions of the country. According to Reuters, around 80 per cent of Ukrainian businesses reported being affected by electricity outages during the winter period, with restaurants, cafés, salons, and retailers among the hardest hit due to heating costs and generator expenses. For Pavliuk, blackouts remain the biggest challenge facing the company — and they are no longer limited to Ukraine’s notoriously harsh winters. Any period of extreme weather that increases electricity demand can trigger outages. As blackouts intensify, they are reshaping how many businesses operate, forcing companies to adapt to rising energy costs and ongoing power instability. Image: During winter, Glovo also employs walking couriers due to heavy snow conditions. She explained:  “For us as a tech company in 2022, when the first blackouts appeared, the biggest issue was that we are super dependent on cell connection and the internet. If there is no electricity, nothing is there. And the infrastructure was not prepared at that time. There were no batteries available to power the cell stations. No UPS systems for Wi-Fi. Only small batteries that could support the internet for a short time.” She admits the situation created enormous challenges for the company’s operations. “For us as a tech company, it was super hard because our entire operating model and the way the engine works were never designed for blackouts,” she said. “It’ was not built for situations where a partner can suddenly disappear from the system. We keep receiving orders, but the partner may not be able to receive them or prepare the food. And even for restaurants, there’s huge uncertainty around planning shifts and ordering supplies.” But the country quickly went through an energy transformation. People started storing power at home, and businesses started rebuilding infrastructure to ensure they had cell service, Wi-Fi, generators, and batteries. However, this represents a major investment for restaurants in Ukraine. As Pavliuk explained, “It’s very hard to take out €50,000 to €150,000 for generators and backup systems.” And then you need fuel for the generator, someone to manage it, and to deal with the inconvenience of its noise and smell.  Pavliuk admits the local team had to become creative, realising that, as part of a large global company, no one would rebuild infrastructure or develop technology solutions solely for the local team’s needs. “My team is super creative, and we did a lot of ad hoc developments and integrations with city services that provide real-time blackout information on each street. It wasn’t easy, but I think we succeeded.” At the same time, the local team was dealing with the personal impact of the blackout. Glovo supplied each team member with a three-kilowatt EcoFlow battery – which provides enough charge to power their fridge, hair dryer, internet, and a lamp at home for 10 hours.  “It's just a small example of how we adapt.” While Ukraine’s brutal winter is thankfully over, Pavliuk admits that the summer won’t be easy, with many predicting rolling blackouts.  Building a wartime operating playbook Glovo Ukraine’s experience has become a reference point for operating under extreme disruption. Pavliuk shared that the CEO in the Middle East recently reached out asking whether the company had developed a manual for running operations during wartime because, according to her, “People simply couldn’t realise that war is there and that there are basic safety rules. You need a safety backpack, you need cash, you need water and food, and you need a plan because everything can be disrupted.” Delivering through air raids Back to delivery riders like Vladyslav, it's a job not without risk. Air raids in Ukraine can occur at any time, day or night, and often last for unpredictable periods.  Fortunately, Ukraine has become super advanced in early detection and understanding exactly what is flying and where. Pavliuk explained:  “We monitor everything closely in real time and manually close cities where we see a real threat of attack. Some partners automatically close operations depending on the level of threat or as soon as an air raid alarm sounds. Our ultimate position is that we don’t want couriers on the streets when there is a real threat. We also have local insurance for couriers — health insurance, third-party responsibility, and support.” That said, life in Ukraine does continue, even during air raids. During my trips to Ukraine, I rarely go to air-raid shelters during alerts because local apps let me assess the risk level in real time. In most cases, people remain on the streets or in the office, businesses stay open, and daily life carries on despite the constant backdrop of war. Why companies should enter Ukraine now — not later Pavliuk shares the sentiment I hear consistently about international companies scaling into Ukraine.  “It is better to enter Ukraine now, start building the business, understand the market, and establish relationships, rather than staying on the sidelines and arriving too late.” She admits that the challenges of operating in a country at war are real and numerous.  “But at the same time, if you look at us and at many other businesses operating here, companies are not just surviving — they are growing and thriving. I believe that once there is a ceasefire, or hopefully the war ends, the cost of entering the Ukrainian market will rise significantly.” ‘It doesn’t feel heroic — it’s simply our reality’ Image: Glovo delivery during sunnier weather. Pavliuk admits that at times exhaustion is unavoidable. “But if you look at the average Ukrainian, people are still living their lives,” she says. “New businesses are starting. Just yesterday we had a startup competition. We still have a lot of good talent.  And another thing that is very unique for Ukraine is that many people don’t want to leave.” Pavliuk and her team get offers and promotions to lead businesses in other countries. They reject them. “For a long time I was offered different countries and opportunities, but I really don’t want to leave until the war is over.” She reflects on how this period will eventually be remembered. “I’m curious what will be written in history books 10 or 20 years from now about this time — and about the phenomenon of Ukraine and its people. I think there will be many stories of heroism. But for us, it doesn’t feel heroic. It’s simply our reality and the way we live.” Glovo’s long-term bet on Ukraine: Glovo has invested a total of €120 million in Ukraine, including €55 million committed before the full-scale invasion.  The company has also been officially recognised as a “critical company to the economy in wartime” for three consecutive years. Early backing from the Ukrainian venture capital firm GR Capital https://gr.capital/ helped support its growth in the market.  Beyond its commercial operations, Glovo has contributed more than €1 million in donations and humanitarian support initiatives across Ukraine. Lead image: Rider delivering to a warm-up tent during winter 2026 during a blackout.

Geordie AI, a security and governance platform for AI agents, has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital. The round also included participation from Crosspoint Capital, alongside follow-on investment from existing backers General Catalyst and Ten Eleven Ventures, bringing the company’s total funding to $36.5 million. As part of the investment, James Wise, Partner at Balderton Capital, will join the company’s board. As AI agents become more widely deployed within enterprises, organisations are facing growing challenges around visibility, governance and operational control. Geordie AI is positioning itself as a central platform for understanding, securing and governing AI systems at scale. The platform provides enterprises with real-time visibility into which AI agents exist within their systems, what they can access, how they behave and the risks they may introduce across enterprise environments. Alongside this, Geordie’s runtime remediation suite, Beam, is designed to help organisations proactively shape and constrain agent behaviour without slowing deployment and innovation. The organisations today that can safely approve and deploy AI agents are the ones that are capturing a new competitive advantage in their space. Geordie enables teams to take a holistic, defence-in-depth approach so they can deploy their AI agent systems safely at scale, said Henry Comfort, CEO and co-founder of Geordie AI. The new funding will be used to expand Geordie AI’s platform capabilities for enterprise security and AI teams, as organisations continue adopting AI agents across their operations. The company also plans to grow its engineering and go-to-market teams, with a particular focus on expanding its presence in the US.

Atheni, an AI adoption company, has raised £350,000 to further develop its platform designed to help organisations use AI more effectively across their workforce. The company is backed by angel investors, including Alex Chesterman OBE and is supported by Innovate UK. Founded by Mackenzie Howe and Louise Ballard, Atheni was developed through two years of client work before raising external funding. During that time, the company refined a methodology focused on embedding AI guidance directly into day-to-day workflows rather than relying on standalone training sessions or workshops. The funding will support the rollout of the Atheni Accelerator, a browser-based platform that provides employees with personalised, role-specific guidance for using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot within their daily work. The platform is also designed to help organisations measure whether AI capability and practical adoption are improving across teams. Although access to AI has become more widespread, many organisations are still working to achieve meaningful adoption. According to the company, employees often remain limited to basic use cases and lack support in applying AI to improve decision-making, critical thinking and work quality. Over the past two years, Atheni has tested its approach across sectors including further education, executive education, manufacturing, financial services and private equity. The company says it has consistently achieved adoption rates above 90 per cent within 90 days of implementation. “Most AI startups are building better tools. At Atheni, we are building master craftspeople. Organisations can tell you how many people have access to AI, but not whether anyone is using it to think more clearly, challenge assumptions or do work they couldn’t do before. That is the gap. Atheni measures it and shows organisations how to close it, said Mackenzie Howe. Louise Ballard explained that while many organisations already have access to advanced AI tools, most employees are still using them in limited ways. She said Atheni is focused on helping people unlock the broader potential of AI within the work they already do. Atheni is currently rolling out the platform with existing clients ahead of a planned future funding round to support broader expansion.

Kopa.ai, an agentic AI platform for e-commerce teams, has raised €2 million in seed funding in a round co-led by XTX Ventures and Practica Capital, with participation from Inovia Capital and angel investor Etan Ilfeld. The company is building what it describes as an operating system for e-commerce businesses, designed to help teams delegate operational and analytical work to AI agents that can understand context, make decisions, and execute tasks autonomously. Founded by a team with more than a decade of hands-on experience in e-commerce, Kopa.ai is built around the idea that running a successful online business requires thousands of expert decisions every week. Rather than focusing solely on automation, the platform aims to enable merchants to delegate work to AI agents in the same way they would rely on experienced internal operators. Kopa.ai connects directly to a merchant’s existing tools and storefront, continuously analysing areas such as products, campaigns, inventory, customer behaviour and site performance. Based on this understanding, its AI agents identify opportunities to improve business performance and take action accordingly — including generating creatives, adjusting campaigns, reallocating budgets, or publishing updates across connected systems. The platform is designed to interpret intent rather than rely on prompts or predefined workflows. Teams provide high-level objectives, while the system determines how to execute them. Actions can run with human approval or autonomously, depending on customer preferences. According to the company, every action and outcome feeds back into the system, allowing the AI to improve its judgment and execution over time through a continuous cycle of analysis, decision-making, execution and learning. According to Donatas Benaitis, founder of Kopa.ai, many e-commerce businesses have the potential to scale significantly faster, but are often slowed down by increasing operational complexity: We’re building Kopa.ai to feel like handing work to your best expert - someone who understands what you’re trying to achieve from just a few words, makes smart decisions on your behalf, and delivers results that are often even better than you imagined. Unlike point solutions focused on individual functions such as advertising, analytics or inventory management, Kopa.ai takes a broader approach across the entire e-commerce operation. Under the hood, the company is developing proprietary systems for structuring business knowledge, managing operational context and orchestrating specialised AI agents at scale. The newly raised funding will be used to further develop the company’s core AI infrastructure, improve the intelligence and reliability of its agents, and expand its go-to-market efforts.