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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quanscient, a Finnish company focused on cloud-based multiphysics simulation technology and quantum algorithms, has raised €10 million in a Series A funding round to support its international expansion and further develop its simulation, quantum computing, and AI capabilities. The round was led by 55 North and B&C Group, with participation from existing investors Maki.vc, Crowberry Capital, QAI Ventures, and First Fellow Partners. While AI has reshaped many industries, hardware engineering continues to rely heavily on complex and time-consuming simulation processes. According to research conducted by Quanscient, many engineers simplify physics models to keep runtimes manageable, limiting the accuracy and effectiveness of simulations. At the same time, existing AI models struggle to accurately represent real-world physics due to limited access to high-quality multiphysics data. Quanscient aims to address these limitations by making physics simulation code-driven, cloud-scalable, and capable of generating the large volumes of data needed to train and improve AI systems for engineering. Its platform is designed to support faster product development, improve simulation quality, and shorten development cycles across industries, including energy, aerospace, and automotive. Quanscient co-founder and CEO Juha Riippi said AI’s impact on hardware engineering will remain limited unless simulation technology is redesigned to support it. By making multiphysics code-driven and cloud-scalable, we generate the volume of physics data that AI needs, turning simulation from a bottleneck into the engine of data-driven design. This brings to hardware engineering the same shift AI has delivered for software. Quanscient’s platform supports fully digital product development and testing, reducing reliance on physical prototypes and allowing engineers to evaluate multiple design options earlier in the development process. Its technology is designed to significantly reduce simulation runtimes, while AI integration helps identify optimal design trade-offs and improve engineering decisions. Industrial competitiveness depends on both speed and accuracy. The architecture we’ve built for cloud and quantum simulation is also the foundation for an entirely new category of AI and will enable the physics-aware AI models that hardware engineering has been waiting for, Riippi said. According to the company, its technology is already being used by industrial customers across Europe, North America, and Japan, including Fortune 100 companies. The new funding will be used to accelerate international growth and continue developing a unified platform combining simulation, quantum algorithms, and AI integration.

Avrea, a modern Continuous Integration (CI) platform built for the agentic AI era of software development, has emerged from stealth after securing $4.7 million in total pre-seed funding led by Earlybird. As AI tools generate an increasing share of software code, development teams are entering a new phase of accelerated output. However, the systems responsible for testing, validating, and shipping that code have largely remained unchanged, creating a widening gap between how quickly software can be written and how quickly it can be delivered. This imbalance has become a growing bottleneck for engineering teams and a persistent drag on developer productivity. Founded by Hannu Valtonen and Juha Valvanne, Avrea is addressing this challenge by rebuilding the software delivery layer for the AI era. The platform is fully compatible with existing CI/CD workflows and can be adopted with a single line of code, enabling teams to integrate it into their environments without changing established processes. Avrea is also designed to be directly accessible by AI agents, allowing automated systems to participate natively in how code is built, tested, and shipped. According to Avrea co-founder and CEO Hannu Valtonen, while AI has dramatically accelerated the process of writing code, the testing and delivery infrastructure behind it still scales in line with the growing volume of software being produced. If teams generate five times more code, they also need to run five times more tests, and the strain on CI/CD systems becomes impossible to ignore. Avrea removes that friction without requiring teams to change the way they work. In addition to improving delivery speed, Avrea provides full observability into pipeline performance, helping teams identify the root causes of flaky tests, stalled builds, and infrastructure bottlenecks that are often difficult to diagnose in traditional CI/CD systems. Juha Valvanne, co-founder and CSO of Avrea, added that software development is increasingly becoming a collaborative process between humans and AI, making it essential for AI agents to integrate directly with software delivery systems as they take on a more active role in development workflows. Avrea is designed for this new reality, with the goal of simplifying software delivery so developers can focus more on building products and less on managing tooling complexity. The new funding will be used to grow the engineering team, expand the platform beyond CI/CD runners, and accelerate go-to-market efforts as Avrea continues building the foundation for the next generation of software delivery.

Last week, we tracked more than 65 tech funding deals worth over €1.1 billion, and over 5 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe.Click to read the rest of the news.

Tequipy, a platform that ships, services, and retrieves employee IT devices in 180+ countries, has raised over €3 million in a round led by Smedvig Ventures, with participation from Manta Ray and Unfold.vc.  The company already works with more than 150 fast-growing tech companies, including Booksy, Connecteam, Gigs, ICEYE, RemoFirst, and Taptap Send, and has grown 7x in the last year. The company will use the funding to expand its platform beyond hardware into software and security operations. For globally distributed companies, an employee laptop is no longer a simple procurement item. It is the start of a cross-border operation that can run across 10, 30, 60 or 180 countries at once. Every device has to be purchased, configured to security policy, delivered on time, serviced, recovered during offboarding, and then routed back into circulation, storage or resale. That process is still largely manual. IT teams are left stitching together spreadsheets, local suppliers, couriers, customs brokers, warehouses and endless follow-ups. Global vendors solve parts of the problem, but often through long contracts, centralised warehousing and hardware markups that make the model too slow and expensive for fast-growing companies. According to Tequipy’s co-founder and CEO, Tomek Stawarski: “I’ve seen ambitious, talented IT specialists who should have been building scalable systems end up repacking boxes and wiping laptops with rags, while also trying to solve the problem of a device stuck at the border. Across thousands of companies, this is not an exception. It is an everyday reality. We built Tequipy so IT can supervise the process instead of executing every step of it by hand.” Customers come to Tequipy for one country and stay for many. They see one system — underneath, software coordinates several hundred local partners who source, configure, deliver, service and retrieve devices on the ground, in the country of employment. No central warehouse, no cross-border shipping, no customs to manage on the client side. Tequipy started with hardware because it is the hardest part of IT operations to automate. The company’s broader goal is to remove around 80 per cent of manual operational work from global IT teams. The next layer is software: employee accounts, licences, access, passwords, the processes around the full employee lifecycle, and security.  "Tequipy has unlocked exceptional operational efficiency in global IT hardware management driven by their back-end automation. For Tequipy’s customers, this means significant time and cost saved through a service and platform they can’t live without," says Freddie Kalfayan from Smedvig Ventures. According to  Lawrence Barclay, managing partner at Manta Ray;   "Distributed hiring is now the default, but the operational layer around it – devices, accounts, access – is still stitched together country by country.  Tequipy is providing the missing layer. This team is one of the best placed to solve this, having built this system inside Europe’s most valuable private company.”

This week, we tracked more than 65 tech funding deals worth over €1.1 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 ??  EOS-X Space raises $140M ??  Verdane is reportedly investing more than $100M in Eterno ??  Primer raises £75M to accelerate US expansion ??‍?? Noteworthy acquisitions and mergers ?  Mistral acquires Austria’s Emmi AI ??  Cosmico completed the acquisition of Flatmates ??  The Dutch bike rental company Swapfiets is acquiring the e-bike growth company Dance ?? Factorial acquires YepCode to drive a new generation of AI-powered HR integrations ? Interesting moves from investors ?  Mouro Capital secures $400M first close for latest fund ?  Skybound launches with $38M to back early deeptech founders ?. Ispania Growth Fund is launched, a €300M fund to support the green and digital transition in Spain ?️ In other (important) news ?? Dunia Innovations unveils €280M Berlin GigaLab to industrialise AI-driven materials discovery ?  Bliq.ai wins approval for fully driverless road operations in Estonia ? Monzo reports revenue and profits leap ?  After the hype, Europe’s foodtech sector is rebuilding around fundamentals ?  AI model "capability overhang" biggest challenge facing European businesses, says OpenAI revenue chief ?  AI: 10 companies that raised the most in 2025 ? European tech startups to watch  ?  Alcolase raises €1.5M to tackle alcohol intolerance with enzyme technology ?? NEX Health Intelligence secures €1M to tackle hospital infection spread ?? Overwatch AI secures $1.5M to streamline airline operations ??  Irish Better Futures raises €600K for AI-driven engineering documentation automation ?? Retailgrid targets retail spreadsheets with €358,000 pre-seed round

In March, Tech.eu reported on the story of “Rachel,” an AI voice agent created by AI engineer Matt Cortland to call more than 3,000 pubs across Ireland and ask a simple question: how much does a pint of Guinness cost? Using voice AI tools, Rachel successfully collected over 1,000 verified prices from pubs across all 32 counties, with most bartenders unaware they were speaking to an AI. The story went viral, demonstrating the real-life impact of voice AI. But beyond the price of Guiniess, voice technology is rapidly reshaping customer support infrastructure, replacing rigid phone menus and repetitive call centre workflows with conversational AI systems that can handle millions of interactions autonomously. Berlin-based startup Synthflow AI is part of a new wave of companies building this infrastructure layer for enterprise communication. Founded in 2023, Synthflow’s technology primarily automates high-volume customer phone interactions with AI voice agents that can hold natural conversations, route calls, schedule appointments, qualify leads, answer support questions, and update CRM systems in real time. Companies deploy the system across customer support, BPO operations, healthcare scheduling, telecom, utilities, sales qualification, and public services — often replacing rigid IVR menus with conversational AI that can escalate to human agents when needed. Its platform now handles more than 5 million calls per month for over 100+ enterprise customers globally, following a $20 million Series A led by Accel, bringing total funding to roughly $30 million. ​ I spoke to co-founder and CEO Hakob Astabatsyan to learn more. ​ The death of “Press 1 for support” Traditional IVR systems are the familiar automated phone menus most people associate with prompts like: “Press 1 for sales, press 2 for support.” Modern AI-powered IVR systems replace rigid menu trees with natural, conversational interactions. Instead of navigating keypad options, callers can simply speak normally: “I need to reschedule my appointment.” or “I’m calling about a payment issue.” The system uses speech recognition, large language models, and workflow automation to understand intent, respond conversationally, route calls, retrieve information, and complete tasks automatically. For example, in a healthcare clinic with multiple doctors, AI asks what you need and routes you to the right doctor. That alone saves several minutes per call. Multiply that across thousands of calls, and you have an industry change. Why AI voice agents are becoming the new front desk for business According to Astabatsyan, the emergence of LLMs has fundamentally changed what these systems can do: “With the emergence of LLMs, suddenly there’s an opportunity to make these conversations dynamic. You can interrupt the AI, change direction naturally, and flow through the conversation much more like you would with a person." The goal isn’t to trick people into thinking they’re speaking to a human. Quite the opposite — you should clearly disclose that it’s AI. The real objective is simply to create a better experience. For many simple tasks, people actually prefer speaking to AI. If it’s something straightforward — checking a number, rescheduling an appointment for Thursday at 2 pm, or resolving a basic support issue — it’s much faster and more efficient. "People are busy. They don’t want to wait through endless menus. The technology is now smart enough to handle appointment scheduling, troubleshooting, support queries, and information capture. It’s not there to give life advice, but it’s highly effective for structured, repeatable workflows.” Inside the rise of conversational IVR The automation potential extends beyond the conversation itself. AI systems can automatically transfer information into backend business software, update customer records, and trigger workflows without human intervention. Astabatsyan contends that what becomes really interesting is what happens after the call.  “ I think of it as RPA 2.0. The AI can take information from the conversation, update HubSpot or Salesforce, change CRM fields, and automate thousands of repetitive tasks at scale. I always try to demystify the AI side of this. People immediately jump to ideas like Skynet or Terminator, but the reality is much more practical. The technology still has limits. But there are specific tasks it’s extremely good at, and those are ripe for automation.” For Astabatsyan, it's about how you implement voice AI. You might say, “Hi, I’m the AI assistant. How can I help?” Then disclose it's recorded. And give the option to speak to a human. If someone insists, you transfer. He contends, however, that the biggest use case the company sees is still human transfer, where AI acts as the first line of defence. “There’s also a lot of noise in contact centres. People dial wrong numbers or departments. AI filters that out. In large centres with thousands of calls, even 20,000 might be misdirected. AI can deflect that.” Initially, many in call centres were sceptical about chatbots, online banking, or voice assistants like Alexa. Further, voice cloning is now ubiquitous. Astabatsyan shared: “Early on, we saw impersonation attempts. We built algorithms to detect and block them. But now the industry is professionalising." In 2023, the sector was the Wild West in terms of its lack of regulation. But now there are fines for unsolicited calls. Phone numbers require identity checks. “We also invested heavily in compliance — healthcare, GDPR, HIPAA, and penetration testing.” ​ Regarding the company’s success in fundraising and rapid expansion, Astabatsyan admits that speed creates challenges in hiring quickly and maintaining culture. “Your business can grow faster than your organisation.” “Voice is not a market — it’s a communication medium” In terms of the future for Voice AI, Astabatsyan adds: “Voice is not a market, it’s a communication medium. No one company will own it. The question is who you serve. For us, it’s contact centres. We want to disrupt that industry and free humans for more meaningful work.”

Driverless car startup Bliq.ai this week announced that it has received approval to operate its vehicles on public roads in Estonia without a driver behind the wheel.  The approval marks the first authorisation of its kind in an EU member state and enables Bliq to begin fully driverless road operations under remote supervision. With a dozen vehicles already in operation and further expansion underway, Bliq currently operates what the company believes to be the largest completely driverless vehicle fleet in Europe. The approval follows an extensive validation process, including rigorous test-track sessions and real-world testing in Tallinn city traffic with a safety driver onboard. “Europe has now crossed a major threshold for driverless mobility,” said Julian Glaab, CEO and Co-Founder of Bliq. “This approval shows that fully driverless vehicles can be developed, validated, and deployed in Europe today. Our goal is to bring this technology to consumers and businesses across the continent as quickly and safely as possible.” Bliq is building driverless cars for private and business use, starting in Europe. Rather than manufacturing purpose-built autonomous vehicles, the company upgrades existing software-defined vehicles with a fast-to-integrate sensor and compute stack, turning them into fully driverless cars. Its current product generation combines an AI-based Level 2 driving system with remote human supervision, enabling rapid deployment while maintaining robust safety oversight. The company’s platform has been developed with a strong focus on safety and regulatory compliance. According to Bliq, its system has undergone extensive real-world driving validation and has been assessed with involvement from technical services and Estonian authorities. The Estonian approval is also a key step in Bliq’s broader European expansion. The company says it is actively pursuing regulatory processes in several countries and plans to bring its driverless technology to multiple EU markets in the near future, with Germany positioned as an important next market.   “Driverless cars should not be limited to robotaxi fleets,” said Torgen Hauschild, CTO and Co-Founder of Bliq. “We believe the biggest opportunity is making autonomous mobility available in the vehicles people and businesses use every day. Our retrofit model, remote-supervised architecture, and shipping-focused engineering approach are designed to make that possible.”  Bliq is backed by investors including NEA and Atlantic, and operates from Berlin, Germany, and Tallinn, Estonia. The company’s team combines experience across autonomous driving, automotive engineering, regulation, functional safety, and transportation operations. In April, autonomous vehicle startup Verne announced the launch of Europe’s first commercial robotaxi service, starting in Zagreb, Croatia, enabling members of the public to book and pay for a Pony.ai-powered autonomous ride through the Verne app. The initial commercial deployment uses electric vehicles equipped with Pony.ai’s seventh-generation autonomous driving system. These vehicles operate autonomously, with trained autonomous vehicle operators onboard during the early phase of the rollout, covering key districts of the Croatian capital, with plans to expand coverage across the city. Lead image: Bliq founders Julian Glaab and Torgen Hauschild (left to right).

French fault-tolerant quantum computing company Alice & Bob has raised investment from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, that expands its €100 million Series B round.   The investment supports Alice & Bob's development of an architecture towards fault-tolerant quantum computing.   According to Théau Peronnin, CEO, Alice & Bob:  “We’ve been working alongside NVIDIA to connect our cat-qubit architecture with its full accelerated computing ecosystem, from hardware to software, in support of the first fault-tolerant quantum computers. NVentures’ investment marks a new phase in that relationship and reinforces our common view that the future of quantum will be hybrid, combining quantum and classical computing to solve real-world problems.”   “NVIDIA has built the platform the quantum ecosystem needs to develop and run hybrid quantum-GPU supercomputers, connecting quantum processors to state-of-the-art accelerated computing. Alice & Bob shares NVIDIA's vision for accelerated quantum supercomputing, and has worked closely with us to integrate their qubits with our quantum platform for advancing the scientific computing of the future,” shared Timothy Costa, Vice President and General Manager of Quantum at NVIDIA. Alice & Bob and NVIDIA have built close technical collaboration since 2024, including work with NVIDIA CUDA-Q, cuQuantum, and Dynamiqs, Alice & Bob's open-source quantum simulation library, as well as on NVQLink, NVIDIA's open architecture for hybrid quantum-classical computing.   Alice & Bob will continue to collaborate with NVIDIA to bring quantum computers to high-performance computing centres worldwide, integrating cat-qubits with their accelerated computing infrastructure and software stack, as integration projects are ongoing between the two organisations.   Financial details of the investment were not disclosed.

Tyrol energy generation startup REPS today announced a $23.6 million equity financing round to scale its Road Energy Production System, a patented “road power plant” that converts vehicle traffic into electrical energy.   Its core product is a patented road power plant that installs directly into existing road infrastructure and harvests energy from trucks and cars driving over it, without disrupting traffic flow or logistics operations. Every day, enormous amounts of energy are lost through motion, pressure, and vibration.  On roads, that loss is constant, predictable, and concentrated in the same places over and over again: entrances, exits, curves, speed-limited zones, loading areas, and any point where heavy vehicles naturally slow down. REPS was built to recover wasted mechanical energy and convert it into clean electricity at scale, using existing infrastructure.   The technology is particularly effective where vehicles naturally slow down or brake, or where slopes create additional force. REPS is initially targeting ports, logistics hubs, cities, industrial sites, and other high-traffic infrastructure operators that want to reduce energy costs while improving sustainability.   “Roads are everywhere. Traffic is everywhere. What was previously wasted energy can now be transformed into clean electricity through REPS,” said  Alfons Huber, Founder and CEO of REPS.  Most renewable energy has focused on generating new power through solar and wind. REPS takes a different approach by recovering energy that’s already being wasted. The company’s first application is roads, where the energy lost through traffic alone could theoretically cover around 5 per cent of global electricity demand. REPS says its converter delivers 254x higher efficiency than the next-best alternative currently on the market, and unlike weather-dependent renewables, the system operates independently of time of day and weather conditions.   The broader opportunity sits inside a category called energy harvesting, converting lost mechanical impulses into usable electricity. REPS believes the reason energy harvesting hasn’t become a major force in the energy transition is straightforward: existing mechanical converters have historically failed on efficiency and durability, which makes the economics fall apart.  REPS had to reinvent the energy converter itself to unlock a system that can operate under heavy traffic conditions for more than 20 years and amortise within years. The first commercial REPS system has been operating at the Port of Hamburg since November 2025. Since then, more than 115,000 trucks have crossed the system, generating over 6,700 kWh of electricity from real traffic conditions.  The Hamburg deployment has translated into strong international demand.  Following the launch, the company is engaged with over 90 parties from the port industry alone, spanning Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America, and it says interest has now expanded beyond ports to logistics hubs and cities. A rollout of around 230 systems across the Port of Hamburg’s public roads, excluding terminals, could generate approximately 10 GWh of electricity per year, enough to power around 2,800 households, and offset roughly 9.81 per cent of the CO₂ emissions caused by port traffic. The return on investment in that scenario would be below four years. On a city scale, the company estimates that deploying around 64,000 systems in a city the size of Dubai could recover approximately 3.2 TWh of electricity annually, equivalent to about 10.8% of the city’s total energy consumption today.    Justin Karnbach, CEO of Hamburger Container Service GmbH, said: "The installation at our facility demonstrates the potential of REPS: where vehicles have to brake anyway, clean energy is recovered and can be used directly where we need it. Without any interference with traffic and without additional space."       “We spent six years developing the technology. Now the scaling phase begins. The strong demand from ports and logistics operators worldwide confirms the need for our solution, and with this financing round we can now scale at the speed required by the energy transition,” added Alfons Huber. Longer term, REPS sees roads as the first proof point for a broader energy-harvesting platform. The ambition is to turn high-traffic infrastructure into decentralised power assets, capturing energy that’s already being wasted and making it economically meaningful at scale wherever large masses move frequently.    

Biotech company Efferon has raised €2.5 million in a seed funding round led by private investors from the DACH region to support the European commercial expansion of Efferon LPS, its hemoadsorption device approved for the treatment of sepsis and septic shock. Efferon develops multimodal hemoadsorption therapeutic devices designed to remove endotoxins and inflammatory mediators directly from the bloodstream. The company’s product portfolio includes Efferon LPS, a hemoadsorption cartridge combining endotoxin and cytokine adsorption, and Efferon NEO, a version developed for pediatric use. Use of Efferon devices can help reduce ICU treatment costs by supporting faster stabilisation of septic shock and reducing time spent on mechanical ventilation and intensive care treatment, according to the company. Systemic inflammation plays a role not only in acute critical illness, but also across a range of chronic and age-related diseases. Efferon says its hemoadsorption platform is designed to support future applications beyond intensive care and sepsis treatment. According to Dima Romashin, CEO and co-founder of Efferon, sepsis causes more than 11 million deaths annually worldwide, yet continues to receive significantly less research attention and funding than other major diseases such as cancer. We're not just bringing a product to market - we're fighting to put sepsis where it belongs: at the top of the world's medical agenda. Efferon recently received CE MDR certification for Efferon NEO, making it the first hemoadsorption device in Europe approved for neonatal and pediatric patients with sepsis and septic shock. The approval was supported by results from the multicentre LASSO NEO study, which evaluated targeted endotoxin and cytokine removal in patients aged between one month and 18 years. The company says its technology has already been used in more than 25,000 treatments across over 40 countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and Saudi Arabia. The new funding will support the construction of a new EU production facility for Efferon LPS and the expansion of the company’s manufacturing capacity to meet growing demand for its blood purification therapy for sepsis and septic shock.

Manchester techbio Imperagen has closed a £5 million seed funding round led by PXN Ventures with participation from Imperagen’s existing investors IQ Capital and Northern Gritstone. Established in 2021 by researchers from the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, Imperagen is focused on accelerating the process of enzyme engineering. Serving diverse markets, from pharmaceutical manufacturing and life sciences to sustainable fine chemical production and industrial applications, we work hand-in-hand with our customers to de-risk and streamline their product development and fast-track their path to market.   Enzymes are biological catalysts used to reduce waste, lower energy usage and decrease overall production costs in everything from pharmaceutical manufacturing and personal care to sustainable chemical production.  However, engineering an enzyme for practical application is a challenging and complex process. Traditional approaches rely on manual screening, a slow and expensive process with a low hit rate.  More recently, zero-shot methods have promised smart designs but often fall short when deployed in real world conditions.  Imperagen's proprietary platform combines three stages into a single closed-loop system: Quantum physics simulates millions of mutation combinations in silico, generating a rich dataset of predicted properties. Those outputs are used to train problem-specific AI models, not general-purpose ones, calibrated to the precise engineering challenge at hand.  Automated robotics then test the highest-performing predictions in the physical lab, producing high-quality experimental data that feeds directly back into the AI model,  so that it continuously evolves. That feedback loop is what sets the approach apart, with each round of experiments making the next round more targeted. The system learns from the wet lab as it goes, narrowing in on the highest-performing variants with each iteration. The result is a platform that gets smarter round by round. This is the future of biocatalysis, a recursive, self-improving AI platform to help rewrite chemical reactions. Imperagen’s AI-guided closed-loop system improved the productivity of two enzymes by 677x and 572x, respectively, in just five rounds.  Coinciding with the round Guy Levy-Yurista, PhD joins as CEO. An experienced technology and life sciences executive with two successful exits across the US and Europe, he brings a track record of scaling deep tech businesses from early stage to market leadership.  The company has already worked on a number of significant projects, including with a Fortune 500 personal care company looking to launch a new product line.  According to Dr Levy-Yurista:  "What I see right now is that the companies that will make a radical difference in this emerging AI-driven future are all AI-native, lean on real world data, have genuine impact, and are fundamentally deep tech. Imperagen has each of those characteristics, combining them with outstanding people, phenomenal technology and the undeniable swagger you only get from Manchester. It was a no-brainer to join the team and lead this next stage in its growth." The funds will be used to accelerate the core R&D platform, scale the wet lab operation, and grow the in-house AI team, both human and agentic. Imperagen will also invest in its go-to-market function to convert growing commercial interest into contracted revenue across its target sectors: pharmaceuticals, life sciences, personal care, sustainable fine chemicals, and industrial biotech.

Starling Bank has reported a drop in profits and revenues, but said revenues at its SaaS subsidiary surged, according to its latest set of financial results. The UK challenger bank, which has over six million customers, reported that pre-tax profits fell three per cent to £217m while revenues fell from £940m to £887m in the year ending March 2026. The fall in profits was attributed to a fall in interest income, which fell from £882m to £759m, on lower interest rates. The challenger bank said that transaction volume increased to £216.7bn from £197.1bn while average deposit balance per customer rose 7.9 per cent to £4,241. The number of customer accounts across the banking group grew from 5.3m to 6.2m in the year, it said. It said that 56 per cent of Starling’s SME customers and 32.5 per cent of its retail customers were using Starling as their main bank. Starling said Engine, its SaaS platform launched as a Starling subsidiary in 2022 and which employs around 300 people, had doubled its client base to four and its revenue grew 25 per cent on the year to £10.9m. During the year, Engine signed a new 10-year agreement with Tangerine, a subsidiary of Canada’s Scotiabank, marking Engine’s first client in North America. Raman Bhatia, CEO, said: “We have delivered a fifth consecutive year of profitability while continuing to invest in the business – from deepening UK customer relationships to scaling our technology platform globally.”