European AI companies raised over €5.3 billion during 2025, with capital heavily concentrated among a small group of companies led by Mistral AI, Helsing, Black Forest Labs, Synthesia, ElevenLabs and n8n. While foundation models, defence AI and generative media attracted some of the year’s largest rounds, the broader market also showed strong momentum across applied AI, with startups building sector-specific products for healthcare, manufacturing, aviation, legal services, logistics, customer support and enterprise automation. The UK, Germany and France emerged as Europe’s most active AI hubs by both company count and capital raised. France was driven largely by Mistral AI’s record financing rounds, Germany saw strong activity in defence, enterprise and automation AI, while the UK produced a broad mix of AI infrastructure, voice, biotech and industrial AI companies. Another notable trend was the number of startups raising multiple rounds within the same year, reflecting continued investor appetite for companies showing early commercial traction and growing demand for AI products across industries. The funding activity highlighted Europe’s growing ambition to build globally competitive AI companies across both foundational models and specialised industrial applications (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: €1.7B Mistral AI develops generative AI models and infrastructure designed to help organisations build and deploy AI assistants, automation tools and large language model applications across enterprise workflows. In 2025, the company raised €1.7 billion to expand its research capabilities, strengthen computing infrastructure and scale its AI platform internationally, reaching a valuation of approximately €11.7 billion. Mistral AI secured an additional $830 million in March 2026, in debt financing to support the development of AI infrastructure and data centres in Europe. Amount raised in 2025: €600M Helsing develops AI-powered software and operational intelligence systems for defence and security applications, focused on improving situational awareness, decision-making and mission planning. The company raised €600 million in a Series D funding round, bringing its valuation to approximately €12 billion. Amount raised in 2025: €350M Synthesia develops an AI-powered video creation platform that enables businesses to produce professional videos using digital avatars, AI voiceovers and text-based editing tools. The platform is used for corporate training, internal communications, customer support, marketing and localisation, allowing organisations to create multilingual video content without traditional filming or production workflows. In 2025, Synthesia raised approximately €350 million across two funding rounds, further strengthening its position within the UK AI sector. Amount raised in 2025: $300M Black Forest Labs develops generative AI models and visual intelligence technology focused on image generation, editing and multimodal AI applications. The company is best known for its FLUX model family, which is used by creators, developers and enterprises to generate and manipulate high-quality visual content through text and image prompts. In 2025, Black Forest Labs raised $300 million in a Series B funding round at a valuation of approximately $3.25 billion to support the expansion of its FLUX model family, team growth and the scaling of commercial partnerships globally. Amount raised in 2025: $180M ElevenLabs develops AI-powered voice generation and audio technology for speech synthesis, voice cloning, dubbing and conversational AI applications. The platform enables businesses, developers and creators to generate realistic multilingual voices, build voice agents and integrate AI audio tools into customer service, media, publishing and enterprise workflows. In 2025, ElevenLabs raised $180 million and later confirmed an additional undisclosed investment from Nvidia. ElevenLabs raised an additional

Spacetech company ICEYE today announces it has originated a €300 million 3-year committed revolving credit facility (RCF). ICEYE delivers persistent monitoring capabilities to detect and respond to changes in any location on Earth and owns the world's largest and most advanced SAR (synthetic aperture radar) satellite constellation.Its constellations serve customers in defence and intelligence, environmental monitoring, insurance and emergency management. We enable fast decisions that contribute to a safer future.Founded and headquartered in Finland, ICEYE operates globally with over 1,000 employees across Poland, Spain, the UK, Australia, Japan, the UAE, Greece, and the US. The company has previously raised over $760 The RCF will support the issuance of guarantees for customer contracts, enable continued business growth, and serve as a liquidity backstop. The seven-bank syndicate comprises Nordic, regional, and global relationship banking partners. “2025 was a defining year for ICEYE as we scaled revenue, profitability, and cash generation simultaneously,” said John Lauria, Global Head of Treasury, ICEYE. “The RCF origination reflects continued confidence in ICEYE’s business and demonstrates our ability to access diverse sources of capital to support rapid global growth. It also enhances our financial flexibility as demand for sovereign intelligence capabilities continues to grow exponentially.”

Norwegian imaging technology company Muybridge has closed an oversubscribed $16 million Series A funding round led by Investinor, Fairpoint, Idekapital and RunwayFBU, with participation from several Nordic technology founders and operators. The company develops a software-defined imaging platform designed to replace traditional broadcast camera infrastructure with compact arrays of 4K sensors and GPU-powered systems. Rather than relying on physical cameras, cabling and large production setups, Muybridge creates virtual camera perspectives digitally, enabling broadcasters to capture and generate new viewing angles in real time. The platform is designed to reduce the operational complexity and physical limitations associated with conventional broadcast production while allowing deployment in environments where traditional camera systems are difficult to install. During the past year, the company completed deployments across a range of global sports properties, including European football leagues, the US Open and ATP Tour tennis, the NBA, NHL, PGA Tour golf, rugby and Premier Padel. Beyond sports broadcasting, Muybridge sees potential applications across areas including live entertainment, security infrastructure, physical AI and autonomous systems, where real-time spatial sensing and flexible imaging capabilities are becoming increasingly important. The company’s commercial strategy is focused on partnerships with technology providers, managed service providers and system integrators. The new funding will be used to support international expansion across Europe and the United States, scale the company’s commercial organisation and further develop its imaging technology platform.

Paris-based Pivot, an AI-powered procurement and finance operations platform, has raised $40 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round led by Forestay Capital and Notion Capital, with participation from Greyhound, procurement industry executives and existing investors including Hedosophia, Visionaries Club and Emblem. The latest financing brings the company’s total funding raised since its founding in 2023 to $70 million. Pivot develops an AI operating system designed to help enterprises manage procurement and financial workflows across sourcing, approvals, purchasing, invoicing, payments, budgets, expenses and reporting. The company aims to address inefficiencies in enterprise procurement, where spending commitments are often managed across fragmented systems, spreadsheets, email chains and manual approval processes. Pivot positions its platform as an enterprise-grade system designed to give procurement and finance teams real-time visibility into committed spending before it creates reconciliation and reporting challenges during financial close processes. The platform integrates with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial systems while supporting complex multi-entity environments. The company says its AI-driven workflow automation and real-time integrations are designed to improve operational efficiency while maintaining financial controls and reporting accuracy. According to Marc-Antoine Lacroix, co-founder of Pivot, finance and procurement teams are increasingly looking for greater visibility into company spending commitments earlier in the procurement process. Pivot gives enterprises that visibility, reinforced by agentic AI that shifts the manual grind from a human burden to a machine burden, said Lacroix. Since launching, Pivot has expanded operations to more than 25 countries and currently processes approximately $3 billion in invoices annually. Customers include DoorDash, Lemonade and Flix. The new funding will be used to accelerate development of Pivot’s agentic AI capabilities, expand into additional enterprise markets and deepen integrations with ERP and financial systems across complex enterprise environments.

European businesses are shifting from pilot to deep integration of OpenAI’s technology, but there is a “little bit of a capability overhang” between the utility of AI models and what businesses can successfully deploy, according to OpenAI’s revenue lead. Ashley Kramer, OpenAI’s vice president, enterprise, said the biggest challenge European enterprises- typically defined as businesses with more than 1,000 employees-face when deploying OpenAI's technology was “extracting the value” out of AI models, given the speed at which AI models were advancing. ChatGPT developer OpenAI is competing with other AI labs like Anthropic and US tech firms like Google, with its own AI models, to attract enterprise customers. Enterprise customers currently make up more than 40 per cent of OpenAI’s revenues. OpenAI’s European enterprise customers include travel company Virgin Atlantic, Spanish bank BBVA and Danish pharma giant Novo Nordisk.  OpenAI says that businesses in Germany, France and the UK are amongst the top global adopters of its tools. Kramer said: “The biggest challenge is extracting the value of the fast-growing model capabilities, so there is a little bit of a capability overhang.” To help offset this overhang, OpenAI recently announced the launch of a new business unit which includes the acquisition of applied AI consulting firm Tomoro.  The OpenAI Deployment Company is a partnership with 19 investment and consultancy firms, including Bain, Goldman Sachs and SoftBank.  Tomoro employs around 150 forward-deployed engineers who will now be embedded inside businesses to help OpenAI’s models be more productive for them, Kramer said. Kramer said: “Where we’re really helping companies close the gap is the capability of models to the value that they can extract.” Kramer, who works across growth, product and go-to-market at OpenAI, said that, broadly speaking, European businesses were moving beyond the pilot stage. She said: “Mostly, companies in the UK and Europe have definitely moved beyond the pilot phase with AI into full AI transformation.  “Seeing it as more of the operating system of the future and deeply embedding intelligence into the future of the core of their business." On which European industries were most embracing OpenAI’s products like coding agent Codex and ChatGPT, Kramer said: “Digital native focused companies grokked onto AI the earliest. We see a lot of strength in  healthcare life sciences, finserve, retail, manufacturing, and automotive are seeing a lot of adoption.”

Quantum Bridge Technologies has closed a $8 million Series A funding round led by Primo Capital SGR to accelerate the global transition to quantum-safe cybersecurity infrastructure.  Founded in 2019 by Mattia Montagna and Hoi-Kwong Lo, Quantum Bridge emerged from one of the world’s leading quantum security research groups to deliver quantum-safe security solutions.  Quantum Bridge addresses the systemic threat posed by quantum computing to current cryptographic infrastructure. The company’s patented Distributed Symmetric Key Establishment (DSKE) protocol enables organisations to generate, distribute, and manage symmetric keys through a decentralised architecture, removing single points of failure, improving scalability, and strengthening long-term cryptographic resilience. Quantum Bridge brings advanced cryptographic security into practical deployment, grounded in well-established principles that have stood the test of time. Designed to work across existing infrastructure, vendors, and security layers, the company’s platform allows organisations to add quantum-safe protection from optical encryptors to application-level systems without disrupting existing operations. By making defence-grade security practical for commercial environments, Quantum Bridge helps customers advance their quantum-safe migration with greater scalability, flexibility, and confidence. “National security can’t wait for perfect conditions,” said Mattia Montagna, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Bridge Technologies.  “We build quantum-safe systems that work inside real networks today — systems designed to keep protecting sovereign communications as the threat landscape evolves. This funding means we can meet more organisations where they are, and get them protected faster.” The funding round was supported by a global syndicate of investors, including Wayra (Telefónica), Cadenza VC, Club degli Investitori angels, HPE, and Bacchus Venture Capital. Together with prior financing, the round brings Quantum Bridge’s total capital raised to $16 million.  “Leading this round represents a defining milestone for Primo Capital as we establish our footprint in the quantum technology landscape — a sector we view as the cornerstone of digital resilience for the coming decade,” said Mara Attardi, an investment professional at Primo Capital. “Quantum Bridge immediately stood out for the versatility of its architecture, but it was the team that clinched our conviction. The CEO possesses that rare, dual-threat leadership: the deep academic rigour required to build cutting-edge tech and the commercial acumen to navigate the complexities of global institutional markets. This is a team that doesn’t just understand the quantum future; they have built the bridge to reach it today.” Lead image: Mattia Montagna, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Bridge Technologies.

QuberTech, a UK biotechnology company developing sustainable natural rubber from specially engineered dandelions, has raised £3.4 million in combined grant funding and equity investment to accelerate development of its engineering biology platform and scale commercial operations. Natural rubber is one of the world’s most strategically important industrial materials, used across sectors ranging from automotive and healthcare to manufacturing and defence. Global supply chains are heavily reliant on imported rubber sourced from a narrow tropical growing belt that is increasingly exposed to climate pressures, disease, geopolitical disruption, and tightening environmental regulation. QuberTech has developed an alternative approach using advanced biotechnology to cultivate high-yield dandelions that produce high-quality natural rubber and other valuable bio-based compounds in controlled growing environments. Unlike traditional rubber trees, which can take years to mature and are limited to tropical regions, dandelions can be cultivated rapidly in scalable, localised systems closer to industrial demand centres. Alongside natural rubber production, QuberTech’s platform can also generate additional high-value bio-based materials, including compounds with applications across food, cosmetics, sustainable packaging and advanced biomaterials.The company has also received support through Defra’s Farming Innovation Programme, delivered in partnership with Innovate UK, recognising the potential for advanced biotechnology and precision breeding approaches to support more resilient and sustainable industrial supply chains. Dr Ofir Meir, Chief Executive Officer of QuberTech, commented:  “At QuberTech, we’re developing a new generation of sustainable biomaterials using engineering biology to create resilient, locally produced alternatives to imported natural rubber. This critical funding enables us to accelerate R&D, expand our team, and validate our platform at a small pilot scale as we move towards commercial deployment.” Oliver Sexton, Investment Director at UKI2S (managed by Future Planet Capital), added: “Natural rubber keeps the world moving, yet global supply chains remain reliant on imported sources that are vulnerable to disruption. QuberTech offers a compelling sustainable alternative. By applying engineering biology to cultivate high-yield dandelions in controlled conditions, the company is developing a more resilient, localised and scalable approach to natural rubber production.”

Zurich-based industrial AI company building 24/7 thermal monitoring for the world’s most fire-prone facilities, AVIAN, has raised a $2.6M pre-seed round, led by Founderful.  Insurance markets are tightening, and more sites are being treated as high risk as equipment ages and failure rates climb. The old approach to thermal safety still looks like periodic thermography, a technician walking the floor with a handheld camera once a quarter. That method misses the window that matters: the hours when a component starts running hot before it fails. Most thermal vendors also stop at the hardware, selling a camera and leaving operators to figure out setup, monitoring, and escalation on their own.  AVIAN takes a different approach: the sensor is one component of solving the problem, not the product. Customers are typically up and running in minutes, not months. AVIAN is built to run like an always-on reliability layer. Its thermal cameras continuously watch the critical components that most often become ignition points, motors, bearings, conveyors, presses, and electrical cabinets, and learn what “normal” looks like in that specific plant.   From there, the system focuses on drift, the early heat patterns that show up before failure. Smart alarms filter out routine heat sources so teams aren’t chasing noise, and alerts go to the right people with enough lead time to intervene before a hot component turns into downtime or fire.   AVIAN also generates automated predictive maintenance reports and backs the platform with 24/7 human support. Every alarm event is reviewed and fed back into the models, so detection keeps improving across the fleet and each new site benefits from what AVIAN has already learned in the field.  In several cases, the system has caught incidents at the point where they still looked small. A pellet press fire was detected early for a customer in Switzerland, avoiding millions in damage. In Germany, AVIAN flagged a small electrical fire next to a machine worth millions. Containing it early protected both the asset and the next 6 to 18 months of production that could have been lost waiting for a replacement. AVIAN is a 10-person team based in Zurich. The company was founded after one of Switzerland’s largest sawmills saw Hanover’s robotics and AI research in the Swiss media and reached out about escalating fires, downtime, and rising insurance pressure.  "Most operators don't need another camera. At 3 a.m., they need to know that a bearing is running hot before it ignites the dust around it," said Drew Hanover, Co-Founder and CTO of AVIAN.  "We bootstrapped the business for two years because we wanted to build something operators actually trusted. We raised with Founderful for one reason: to keep doing that, in more markets, faster, without changing what we are.  We spent zero minutes on a deck." Significantly, AVIAN was profitable and entirely bootstrapped for two years before raising. The company says it raised this round to go faster, expand engineering and deployment capacity, and scale beyond its stronghold in wood products into recycling, chemical processing, oil and gas, and maritime.  AVIAN is on track to surpass $1M in ARR in 2026.   Over the last two years, AVIAN has prevented $50M+ in damages from fires and equipment failures and is deployed in approximately 50 sites across 9 countries.         According to Alex Stöckl, Partner at Founderful. "Within a year of incorporation, the team at AVIAN already served dozens of manufacturing businesses in the US and Europe, preventing real fire incidents on a daily basis. With their thermal-vision technology, there's an immediate ROI and a new industrial intelligence layer that unlocks further use cases and value for customers over time - backing them to accelerate their go-to-market and product roadmap was a no-brainer."        

Neurosoft Bioelectronics, a neurotechnology company developing scalable and minimally invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), has raised $7.5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round led by Skybound Venture Capital, with participation from Protocol Labs, IAG Capital Partners and Connecticut Innovations, among others. The latest financing brings the company’s total funding to more than $20 million. Headquartered in Switzerland with operations in New York, Neurosoft Bioelectronics is developing a platform designed to provide access to the full cortex without penetrating brain tissue. Its proprietary soft and stretchable electrodes are significantly more compliant than conventional neural interfaces and are intended to support broader cortical coverage through minimally invasive procedures. The company says its long-term objective is to build a large-scale neural data platform capable of supporting foundation models of the human cortex. According to Neurosoft, data collected through its implantable devices could help improve the performance of both invasive and non-invasive brain-computer interfaces over time. Nicolas Vachicouras, PhD, said the company’s soft electrode technology and regulatory approach enable Neurosoft to collect neural data at a scale and quality that is difficult to achieve safely with existing alternatives, adding: That data is the foundation for improved clinical outcomes, and a cortical foundation model that will help shape the next generation of brain interfaces. The investor support we’ve seen in this round validates that we’re on the right path. To date, Neurosoft has tested its technology in 10 patients across two ongoing clinical trials at UTHealth Houston and UMC Utrecht, including a 64-channel soft brain interface study for epilepsy surgery guidance. The company says its technology portfolio includes more than 25 patents and over 25 peer-reviewed scientific publications. With the new funding, Neurosoft Bioelectronics plans to advance its clinical and commercial milestones, including demonstrating minimally invasive deployment in human patients and progressing toward US commercialisation of its first brain interface product.

French digital onboarding startup Prelude has raised $20m in a Series A funding round led by Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, which is investing in the startup for the first time. Other investors in the round include existing investors Singular, Seedcamp, Deel and FDJ Ventures. Angel investors in the round include Synthesia co-founder Steffen Tjerrild; Antoine Le Nel, Revolut CMO; and Cleo founder Barney Hussey-Yeo. Prelude has raised $27m to date. Founded in 2023, Prelude started by helping companies with user SMS verification but is evolving into a full-stack platform for digital onboarding, helping companies verify and protect users, from issues like fraud, during their time as customers. It says it’s fixing the “hidden tax" of broken onboarding that companies face, pointing to inflated SMS bills and fraud that slips through the net. It argues that legacy providers still charge extortionate rates, rely on outdated dashboards which lack any granularity, and offer limited customer support. To remedy this, Prelude has bundled a stack of discounted tools, including a verification provider, a fraud vendor, an identity layer, and a device SDK, which it says results in customers saving 40 per cent on verification costs on average, while also improving conversion rates. Prelude's raise also comes amid the arrival of AI agents, which are onboarding instead of humans, while advances in generative AI and fraud tooling, have made it significantly easier to impersonate real users. The startup two co-founders, Matias Berny, Prelude's CEO and Quentin Le Bras, Prelude’s chief product officer, met when they worked at Zenly, a location-sharing app that was acquired by Snap and later shut down. Berny said: "The old playbook is broken. CAPTCHAs don't stop bots anymore, and a single fraud signal won't tell you who's really there. Telling a real user from a fake one is now a business intelligence problem, not a checkbox. The phone number is becoming the strongest anchor we have, and with the Intel API, it carries more trust than any password or one-time code ever did." Prelude says its platform addresses this by combining telecom data, network signals, and behavioural patterns into a single trust profile per user - allowing companies to move from one-time verification to continuous trust decisions. Prelude has also launched two new products: Auth API and Intel API. Auth API, it says, enables continuous trust checks across the full user lifecycle; and Intel API, which, it says, brings real-time intelligence - such as SIM status and number reputation - directly into onboarding flows. Prelude will use the funding to expand telecom partnerships globally, invest in machine learning systems and grow its 50-strong team across engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market.

Skybound Venture Capital has announced the launch of its founder-led venture capital fund focused on deeptech startups, securing a $38 million oversubscribed first close anchored by the European Investment Fund. Based in Athens, Skybound was founded by Thaleia Misailidou, who previously worked at Marathon Venture Capital and has been active in the Greek deeptech ecosystem, alongside George Varvarelis, co-founder of Augmenta, which was acquired by CNH Industrial. Skybound invests in pre-seed and seed-stage companies developing technically complex software and hardware across areas including infrastructure, advanced computing, bioengineering and frontier technologies. The fund plans to write initial cheques ranging from $500,000 to $2 million while maintaining a concentrated portfolio strategy with significant follow-on reserves for selected companies. Skybound describes its investment approach as founder-led and operationally focused, targeting companies building defensible technologies with long-term industrial and societal impact, with the aim of supporting founders from the earliest stages of company formation. Commenting on the launch, Thaleia Misailidou said the team’s experience as both founders and investors shapes Skybound’s focus on backing technically ambitious founders developing original technologies before broader market adoption. Europe doesn't need another passive fund, it needs investors who understand the grind, move at founder pace, and go all-in when they believe. We back founders with a massive chip on their shoulder. The ones obsessed with atoms, not just bits, added George Varvarelis. The fund’s first investment was in Neurosoft Bioelectronics, a company developing scalable and minimally invasive brain-computer interfaces. According to Skybound, the investment reflects the fund’s focus on technically complex companies combining scientific research with scalable commercial applications. Looking ahead, Skybound plans to focus on founders developing technologies that could reshape industries over the coming decade, particularly across deeptech and frontier technology sectors.

Dublin-based AI startup Better Futures has secured €600,000 in funding from private angel investors and Enterprise Ireland through its High Potential Start-Up (HPSU) programme, bringing the company’s total funding raised to date to €1.1 million. Headquartered at NovaUCD, Better Futures develops AI technology designed to automate engineering documentation workflows in regulated industries. The funding announcement coincides with the launch of the next generation of EVA™, the company’s platform for generating trusted, structured and audit-ready engineering documentation. Engineering teams operating in sectors such as energy, aerospace, life sciences and advanced manufacturing often face complex documentation requirements involving regulations, standards, approvals and compliance processes. While generative AI tools can assist with drafting content, Better Futures argues they are not designed to reliably automate traceable and audit-ready outputs at scale. EVA™ enables organisations to automate engineering documentation workflows by embedding regulations, standards, templates and expert knowledge directly into the system. The platform is designed to help teams generate structured and traceable outputs while reducing manual review cycles and improving consistency across projects and workflows. Anthony Mc Loughlin, founder and CEO of Better Futures, said: The key challenge is trust. Teams need audit-ready outputs they can trust, approve and reuse at scale. That is why we built EVA™. It is not another chatbot and not another agent. It is a governed AI platform designed to bring trusted automation to complex engineering documentation workflows. The latest version of EVA™ builds on deployments with early customers, including ABB and Bausch + Lomb and is intended to support broader adoption across complex engineering environments. The new funding will be used to expand Better Futures’ product and go-to-market teams in Dublin, accelerate further development of EVA™ and support customer growth across regulated industries.

London-based cybersecurity startup Infrawatch has raised $3 million in a pre-seed funding round co-led by Outward VC and Triple Point Ventures, with participation from Portfolio Ventures and a group of fintech and cybersecurity angel investors. Founded by Lloyd Davies and built by a team of former employees from CrowdStrike, Recorded Future and Intel 471, Infrawatch is developing what it describes as an Internet Infrastructure Intelligence Layer for cybersecurity, fraud prevention and online investigations. The company’s platform is designed to help organisations identify and monitor the infrastructure underpinning cyberattacks, phishing campaigns, scams and online abuse. According to Infrawatch, while attackers frequently change accounts, payloads and tactics, the internet infrastructure they rely on leaves identifiable patterns that can be tracked and analysed before threats scale further. Its platform processes tens of billions of internet events each day, transforming internet-scale visibility into actionable intelligence. The system provides organisations with information about infrastructure behaviour, potential operators and trustworthiness, while enabling teams to create custom detection rules alongside pre-built threat monitoring capabilities. According to Lloyd Davies, founder and CEO of Infrawatch, infrastructure intelligence remains highly fragmented, with organisations relying on noisy data feeds and disconnected workflows that often fail to provide genuinely real-time threat detection: Enterprises cannot keep up by patching together narrow intelligence feeds while the internet changes beneath them. That is why we built Infrawatch from the ground up: to turn one of the most underutilised aspects of cybersecurity into a practical defence layer that empowers defenders to act earlier and stop threats before they reach their customers, users or systems. The new funding will support the company’s next stage of growth, including expansion of its engineering and research teams, further platform development ahead of a planned public launch later this year, early enterprise deployments, and expansion into the United States.

Overwatch AI, an aviation operations platform for pilots and airline crews, has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding in a round backed by United Airlines Ventures, Baobab Ventures, Pegasus Innovation Lab and Masia, alongside angel investors including David Bennett and Alex Brooker. Founded in 2025 by former airline pilot Leo Kotil and technology entrepreneur Nikita Kaeshko, Overwatch AI develops an operational intelligence platform designed to support aviation teams during flight preparation and live operations. Airline teams are often required to navigate fragmented systems and large volumes of documentation to make decisions related to safety, compliance, technical issues, airport procedures and weather conditions. Overwatch AI combines operational data sources and documentation into a single platform that allows teams to search and retrieve information using natural language queries. All answers generated by the platform are based on official documentation and fully sourced, allowing operational teams to make decisions with greater confidence while supporting compliance and efficiency requirements. The platform is already being used in live flight operations across multiple airlines, handling more than 30,000 flights per month. According to Overwatch AI, the system helps reduce the time spent searching for information while improving operational efficiency and decision-making consistency. The new funding will be used to expand the Overwatch AI team, further develop the platform’s operational capabilities and support deployments with additional airlines over the coming months.

Freiburg-based climate technology startup Qurie has raised €2.2 million in funding from High-Tech Gründerfonds, Technology Transfer Fund TT49 and Aepikur GmbH. The HVAC industry is facing increasing regulatory and environmental pressure as the European Union phases out conventional refrigerants under the F-Gas Regulation. Existing alternatives to compressor-based cooling systems have struggled to achieve commercially competitive operating costs, creating demand for new approaches to sustainable cooling infrastructure. Founded in 2026 by Dr Christian Vogel and Dr Kilian Bartholomé as a spin-off from Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM, Qurie develops refrigeration systems based on electrocaloric materials, which change temperature when electric fields are applied or removed. The company uses electrocaloric effects within stacked material structures to create solid-state cooling systems with minimal mechanical components. At the centre of the platform is a patented active electrocaloric heat pipe technology developed at Fraunhofer IPM over more than a decade. Dr Kilian Bartholomé said the company’s heat pipe technology enables more efficient heat transfer and higher pumping frequencies than conventional liquid-based systems, helping make the platform commercially competitive. Qurie’s systems are designed to achieve higher theoretical efficiency than conventional compressor-based cooling technologies, with the potential to reduce energy consumption. The architecture is also intended to support smaller and more flexible cooling systems for applications including industrial enclosure cooling, electronics, medical devices, automotive systems and building infrastructure. The HVAC industry is facing a fundamental transformation - regulatory, technological and economic. We have reached a point where we can demonstrate that our technology not only works, but also makes economic sense. This is the moment we have been working towards, said Dr Christian Vogel. The company plans to initially target industrial enclosure cooling before expanding into commercial refrigeration, medical technology, electronics and automotive markets. The new funding will support continued technology development, while an additional research programme funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy will support development activities through the end of 2026.

Dunia Innovations today announced plans for Berlin GigaLab: a 6,000 m², €280 million facility designed to discover and develop advanced materials at industrial scale. Siemens, ABB Robotics, NVIDIA, AWS and ILS will provide core technology. Dunia Innovations is an AI-driven materials company building autonomous infrastructure to discover, develop, and validate advanced materials at industrial scale.  Founded in 2022, Dunia's platform integrates AI, lab automation, and simulation into a closed-loop system serving customers in catalysts, batteries, and semiconductors. The company's first-generation platform launched in 2023, and its second-generation IRIS platform went live in May 2025.  GigaLab will integrate autonomous experimentation, AI-guided design, digital simulation, and industrial-grade characterisation into a single closed-loop platform serving customers across strategically important sectors, including energy storage, catalysis, semiconductors, clean manufacturing, and critical raw material substitution. The facility is expected to create over 200 direct jobs and begin operations in 2028. As AI models propose millions of novel material candidates, the bottleneck is shifting from discovery to verification. The published scientific record is too fragmented and sparse to train the large-scale models now reshaping other domains, and simulation alone has consistently failed to predict how materials behave under real-world conditions of temperature, pressure, and contamination. Closing this gap requires a new kind of infrastructure: facilities purpose-built to generate structured, multimodal, industrially relevant data at a scale no academic laboratory can match. According to Dr Alex Hammer, CEO and Co-Founder of Dunia Innovations: “With AI already dreaming up millions of new materials, the demand for experimental verification is exploding. We need factories that do science at industrial scale. GigaLab will be the first facility of its kind to do exactly that, removing material bottlenecks in frontier technologies.” Backed by an industrial consortium of deep domain expertise To deliver GigaLab, Dunia is assembling an industrial consortium with deep expertise across simulation, robotics, cloud computing, and laboratory infrastructure: Siemens — Digital twin and process simulation technology. ABB Robotics — Lab automation for fully autonomous experimentation. AWS — Cloud data infrastructure and large-scale analytics. NVIDIA — High-performance computing for AI model training via its Inception programme. ILS — Advanced high-throughput parallel testing equipment. Merck — Industry interest in GigaLab's capabilities to accelerate next-generation semiconductor materials. Dunia believes GigaLab is strategically relevant to European competitiveness, sustainability and sovereignty, and expects the project to attract significant public co-investment alongside venture capital and industrial partners. Dr Dirk Demuth, Head of Corporate Development, Dunia Innovations · Co-founder and former CEO of hte GmbH shared: “I spent twenty years at hte building the industry standard for high-throughput experimentation in the chemicals sector, and I've watched a generation of attempts to bring AI into materials R&D come and go; going all the way back to when we called it ‘in-silico chemistry’.  What's different about Dunia is the seriousness of the integration — we're building AI, automation, and industrial-grade workflow design all together from the ground up, not bolting them onto each other. The Berlin GigaLab is the natural next step, and is exactly the kind of infrastructure industries around Europe and the world have been waiting for.”

CircuitHub, a company focused on streamlining electronics production, has raised $28 million to accelerate hardware development and manufacturing workflows. The funding was led by Plural and will accelerate the expansion of CircuitHub’s automated factories across the US and Europe, grow its engineering team and extend the platform into full-service electronics manufacturing. Founded by CEO Andrew Seddon, CircuitHub has built the first-of-its-kind automated electronics manufacturing system that turns design files into printed, production-ready circuit boards in days.  Its R&D roots are in Cambridge, UK, with a growing team across London forming the foundation for a broader European manufacturing footprint. CircuitHub launched its first facility in Massachusetts to be close to early customers. The case for sovereign electronics manufacturing infrastructure Around 95 per cent of electronics projects today involve fewer than 10,000 units, yet the industry remains optimised almost entirely for mass production. For most hardware teams, manufacturing still looks as it did in the 1990s – manual assembly, supply chain bottlenecks and rising labour costs, while iteration cycles stretch into months.  With much of the world’s manufacturing overseas, critical supply chains are heavily concentrated in China, creating dependencies that are increasingly exposed to geopolitical tensions and disruption. The US alone has lost more than 85 per cent of its share of the global PCB market to lower-cost manufacturers overseas. In response, US and European governments and companies are rebuilding domestic manufacturing capacity, driven by geopolitical tensions, fragile supply chains and the need for technological sovereignty.  Bringing semiconductor-style automation to electronics manufacturing  Inspired by semiconductor fabs, among the most automated systems in the world, engineers building self-driving cars, satellites and more can upload designs and order circuit boards in seconds, via CircuitHub’s online platform. From here, the company uses automated robotics, computer vision and AI to assemble these designs at its first 5,000-square-foot factory, the Grid, before shipping them to teams around the world. By automating large parts of the production process and monitoring quality via a small on-site team, CircuitHub’s Grid can produce a single prototype or batches of 10,000 units across dozens of different designs simultaneously. This not only shrinks production cycles from months to days, which helps fuel innovation, but it finally makes high-mix manufacturing, where different designs are produced in small batches, economically viable in a world still built for mass production. Andrew Seddon, founder and CEO of CircuitHub, said:  “Today, hardware companies face a tough choice: either spin up their own vertically integrated manufacturing from scratch, or rely on a legacy Western supply chain that's been decaying for years. CircuitHub is the alternative: providing remote access to a cutting-edge factory through your browser or your AI agent. Just as software companies share cloud compute, hardware companies can now share our Grid.” The fastest-growing electronics manufacturer in the US Since launching its first facility in Massachusetts, CircuitHub has delivered 2 million + boards and placed 133 million + parts, serving 20,000 engineers across some of the world’s biggest and most innovative hardware teams. It has become the fastest-growing electronics manufacturer in the US and, over time, CircuitHub aims to make its factories increasingly modular, allowing new capacity to be deployed wherever needed. The company plans to expand its Grid model across the US and Europe, scaling high-speed, on-demand manufacturing to reduce reliance on distant supply chains and strengthen domestic control over critical technologies. According to Sten Tamkivi, Partner at Plural,the CircuitHub team are changing the unit economics of the entire industry. "As robotics, AI and advanced hardware accelerate, their combination of automation, software and data is making electronics manufacturing as fast, flexible, and accessible as writing code. This is also about resilience and sovereignty, ensuring that Europe and the US can design, build and iterate on critical technologies locally.  It’s the kind of infrastructure shift that creates billion-dollar outcomes and will supercharge progress across physical AI, from robotics to space, energy and defence.”

Global employment, payroll, and spend platform RemotePass has raised $17.4 million in Series B funding led by the EBRD Venture Capital (EBRD), with participation from 500 Global and existing investors Oraseya Capital, 212 VC, Access Bridge Ventures, and Khwarizmi Ventures.  Founded in 2021 by Kamal Reggad and Karim Nadi, RemotePass solves a problem incumbents have largely underserved: hiring, paying, and supporting workers across borders where local entity setup, compliance, and banking infrastructure remain genuinely hard. The platform serves customers, including Logitech, Tata Group, InDrive and Careem. It covers EOR, contractor management, payroll, and compliance, as well as a fintech layer that provides workers with access to USD accounts, global cards, and health insurance. The company reached profitability in early 2025.  In late 2025, RemotePass launched SpendCards, embedding corporate expense cards into the same platform that pays the workforce - collapsing payroll, contractor payments, and spend into one system regardless of where a worker sits or how they are employed. The company has also rolled out AI agents that automate workflows across onboarding, compliance, and support. Europe and the USA are already two of RemotePass's fastest-growing markets, with companies turning to the platform to onboard, pay, and support workers across geographies where incumbents have limited reach or experience.  "This round is about acceleration," said Kamal Reggad, CEO and Co-Founder of RemotePass. "We have the product, the traction, and now the partners to expand properly. Hiring is just the entry point. What companies actually need is a platform that supports their teams end-to-end, including the financial services that make distributed work function." According to Amine Chabane, Principal, EBRD Venture Capital, RemotePass lowers friction for employers operating across emerging markets while creating real economic opportunity for tens of thousands of workers. "The business has reached meaningful scale on a fraction of the capital others in the category have raised — a signal of how disciplined Kamal and his team have been with execution. This is exactly the kind of company we set out to back: a team building a leading platform from an emerging market, with the product depth and commercial momentum to compete in Europe and the US. We look forward to supporting them through the next phase of growth."  The Series B will fund expansion across Europe and the US, deeper compliance coverage, and continued investment in the financial product surface and AI capabilities that have become defining features of the platform.

Healthtech startup NEX Health Intelligence has raised €1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Brighteye Ventures, with participation from Adeline Arts & Science, AFI Ventures, Momentous Ventures, the Conception X Angel Syndicate and a group of industry angel investors. Healthcare-associated infections affect a significant proportion of hospital patients and contribute to longer hospital stays, operational disruption and rising healthcare costs. Highly resistant infections, in particular, continue to pose growing clinical and operational challenges for healthcare systems globally. NEX Health Intelligence develops an AI-powered infection intelligence platform designed to help hospitals detect, predict and prevent healthcare-associated infections before they spread. The platform aims to enable hospitals to identify transmission risks earlier and implement more targeted infection prevention measures. The company was founded by Dr Ashleigh Myall after his experience working on the NHS COVID-19 response highlighted how quickly infections can spread between vulnerable patients within hospitals. He later partnered with Dr Chang Ho Yoon to explore how AI could be applied to infection prevention and hospital safety. While supporting the NHS COVID-19 response, I realised the real challenge wasn’t just the number of admissions - it was how quickly infections spread between vulnerable patients already inside hospitals, said Dr Ashleigh Myall, who explained that the idea for NEX emerged during his PhD at Imperial, where he began developing AI systems to predict how infections could spread within hospitals. Following its latest product release, the company reported a significant increase in infection control compliance rates. To date, NEX says its platform has supported infection safety across more than 40,000 patient admissions internationally. NEX is currently working with NHS organisations in the United Kingdom, including evaluation projects across two London NHS Trusts and a deployment in the North West of England. Internationally, the company is operating at a military hospital in Southeast Asia and is expanding through projects in Malaysia. The new funding will support the company’s expansion across UK and international hospitals, alongside regulatory and clinical safety work and the generation of clinical and economic evidence from live deployments.

Ghent-based Exhibitly has raised €1.4 million in a pre-seed funding round led by New School VC, with participation from 100IN, Allusion Ventures and a group of angel investors including Louis Jonckheere, Jeroen De Wit, Pieter Vanermen and Tanguy Serraes. Additional investors include Piet van Waes, Bernard Rossel, Stefaan Rossel, Matthias Stevens, Jürgen Degrande, Wim Vernaeve and Arthur Stockman. Founded by Hendrik Franck and Brent Coppens, Exhibitly develops AI-powered personalisation technology for B2B event websites. The company aims to address a growing challenge in the global trade show industry, where organisers continue to invest heavily in digital marketing while conversion rates decline. According to the company, many potential attendees leave event websites without registering because the experience remains too generic and fails to demonstrate clear relevance to individual visitors. Exhibitly adds an AI layer on top of existing event websites, allowing visitors to receive a personalised experience based on their role and company. Within seconds, users are shown tailored recommendations for sessions, speakers and exhibitors that are most relevant to them. The company says visitors using the platform are significantly more likely to proceed to registration compared to users of traditional event websites. The platform requires no technical integrations, automatically analysing and enriching website content using AI. Our current solution gets us a foot in the door, but our ambitions go further. The events industry has never been more relevant, yet it remains years behind on technology. By the end of 2027, we aim to support more than 1,000 events worldwide and establish Exhibitly as the global reference in B2B event intelligence, said Hendrik Franck, co-founder and CEO of Exhibitly. Operating from Ghent’s Wintercircus, the startup now serves customers across the United Kingdom, the United States, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Alongside its current platform for event organisers, Exhibitly is also developing a second product focused on exhibiting companies. While the company’s existing solution targets organisers, the new offering is aimed at the millions of businesses that exhibit at trade shows each year. The new funding will be used to expand the team, accelerate product development and support the company’s international growth.