Healthtech startup Corti today announced the launch of the Startup Acceleration Program, a no-equity initiative providing healthcare AI builders worldwide with access to the same clinical-grade models that power AI for highly regulated systems across Europe and the US. The grant-funded program aims to help founders ship and scale at a moment when the regulatory bar for healthcare AI has never been higher. Check out our earlier interview with Andreas Cleve, CEO and co-founder of Corti. Copenhagen-headquartered Corti offers healthcare a frontier lab for clinical-grade AI. Symphony, its flagship clinical-grade AI model, powers clinical and administrative applications for EHR vendors, virtual care platforms, practice management systems, and life sciences organisations worldwide. It serves over 100 million patients annually across health systems, including the NHS.  Symphony has outscored OpenAI on HealthBench Professional, the company’s new healthcare benchmark. Healthcare AI builders now face tightening regulation in every major market - from the FDA's expanded AI/ML guidance in the US to new lifecycle accountability requirements in Canada and the UK. But Europe is the most acute case. In the past four weeks, OpenAI rolled out free clinical AI  to every verified American physician. One week later, OpenEvidence — a clinical AI platform used daily by 40 per cent of US physicians and valued at $12 billion — withdrew from the UK and European markets, citing regulatory uncertainty around the EU AI Act.  The high-risk system requirements that drove that decision will come into force for medical AI on August 2, 2026. Europe has emerged as the toughest proving ground for clinical-grade AI - and the asymmetry is sharpening. EU MDR certification alone now costs founders between €200,000 and €600,000 per device and takes 12 to 18 months. Capital is concentrating in larger, later-stage rounds, with investors increasingly favouring companies with proven clinical evidence and workflow integration. The structural difficulty is real enough to deter horizontal players - and the vertical products built on them - from competing in Europe, implying a narrower path for the next wave of healthcare AI builders to succeed there at exactly the moment they are needed most. But the reality is that the conditions making Europe hard for horizontal players are the same conditions that Corti was built for:"The future of healthcare AI won't be built by one company. It will be built by thousands of teams, each with deep knowledge of a specific care setting, workflow, or patient population," said Andreas Cleve, co-founder and CEO of Corti.   "Our job is to give those builders a head start: the leading clinical AI model, the evidence base behind it, and a path to production we've already navigated for regulated health systems. So they can focus on what only they can do - the workflow, the patient population, the problem they actually understand." Among the hundreds of development teams already building on Corti is Aisel Health, a European startup building AI for psychiatry. Check out our earlier interview with Augusta Klingsten Peytz, co-founder of Aisel.According to  Augusta Klingsten Peytz, co-founder and CEO of Aisel Health, Psychiatrists are a scarce and highly specialised resource.  “They should be focused on one thing only: making clinical decisions - everything else needs to go. Yet today, the majority of a psychiatrist’s time is spent not on clinical decision-making, but on the administrative and repetitive workflows surrounding it. By using Corti, we at Aisel can focus on delivering specialised psychiatric workflows that help clinicians regain capacity, rather than rebuilding the clinical-grade foundation underneath.” The Startup Acceleration Program includes: Up to $5,000 in credits across the full Symphony stack - Agents, Medical Coding, Speech-to-Text, and Text Generation - built on over 1.5 million hours of clinical audio. Support from Corti's clinical and regulatory team to navigate EU AI Act, MDR, and data residency requirements. Dedicated time with Corti's AI experts to scope product roadmaps and architect the right system before code is written. Founder-led webinars on industry developments and Corti's own roadmap. Invitations to Corti events in New York, Copenhagen, London, and Berlin Applications open today, reviewed on a rolling basis with a one-week turnaround. No pitching, no committee, no equity. Open to worldwide pre-seed through Series B companies building in healthcare, clinical workflows, or adjacent life sciences.

BioInnovation Institute (BII) is launching AI Lab, a new innovation platform designed to support the commercialisation of artificial intelligence research and accelerate the development of early-stage AI startups in Denmark. The initiative is backed by € 7 million (DKK 60 million) in funding from the Danish Industry Foundation and aims to strengthen collaboration between startups, researchers and industrial companies while helping bring AI-based technologies to market more quickly. AI Lab will be operated by BII, which, since 2018, has supported more than 140 startups across life sciences, quantum technology and biosolutions with funding, infrastructure and commercialisation support. Through the AI Lab, BII will expand its activities into artificial intelligence, focusing on helping startups develop scalable AI solutions and attract external investment. The programme will provide selected startups with non-dilutive financial support, access to datasets from Danish companies and institutions, computing infrastructure, technical guidance and connections to potential customers through BII’s industry network. AI Lab will also include an AI-focused accelerator programme designed to help startups become investment-ready and launch pilot projects more quickly. According to BII, the initiative is intended to address the gap between Denmark’s strong digital infrastructure and the slower adoption and commercialisation of AI technologies within the Danish industry. Jens Nielsen, CEO of BII, said Denmark has strong foundations for AI development due to its digital infrastructure, publicly available data, research environments and industrial base. With AI Lab, we at BII aim to create a hub where the right stakeholders can meet and collaborate to turn advanced AI into solutions that make a tangible difference in industry. The goal is quite simply to shorten the path from a good idea in an academic environment to implementation in the market. At BII, we have proven that we are good at this in other areas, and we hope the same will be true for AI. Thomas Hofman Bang, CEO of the Danish Industry Foundation, said AI is increasingly becoming a core part of how companies operate and compete, making stronger collaboration between academia, startups and industry increasingly important. The new platform forms part of BII’s broader efforts to support science-based innovation and help research-driven startups scale commercially across Denmark and internationally.

Sir Demis Hassabis has hailed a multi-billion-dollar investment in the startup he founded which was spun out of Google DeepMind and focuses on leveraging AI to help drug discovery as a “massive vote of confidence”.  Isomorphic Labs said it has raised $2.1bn in a Series B funding. The funding round was led by existing investor Thrive Capital, the US VC, with participation from existing backers Alphabet, Isomorphic's parent company, and its venture captial unit, GV.   New investors include Singapore's Temasek, Google’s growth fund arm CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund. Hassabis, CEO and founder of Isomorphic Labs, who also heads up Google’s AI offering, said: “This funding round is a massive vote of confidence from a diverse group of top-tier international investors in our AI-first approach to drug design and development. "Now that we have shown our approach is fundamentally sound, our focus is on scaling our technology to its full potential. This capital injection allows us to build out our drug design engine at scale, driving us forward in our mission to solve all disease." Isomorphic Labs is built on software that DeepMind developed, including its Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures. Isomorphic Labs is researching treatments for cancer and immune disorders. Isomorphic Labs said the new funds will be geared towards the development and deployment of Isomorphic Labs' AI drug design engine (IsoDDE), with the aim of speeding up and expanding its pipeline of therapeutic programmes. The funding would also be used to recruit top-tier AI, engineering, drug design, and clinical talent, it said. Isomorphic Labs raised $600m in May last year, marking its first external funding round.

N8n, the Berlin-based startup which helps businesses automate tasks, has more than doubled its valuation to $5.2bn in less than a year following a strategic investment from German software giant SAP, it said today. SAP’s investment in n8n comes courtesy of an n8n secondary share sale, which brings SAP to the n8n cap table for the first time. SAP was the only new investor taking part in the secondary share sale, which has led to a more than doubling of n8n’s valuation, from $2.5bn to $5.2bn in less than a year, n8n said.  N8n did not disclose further details about how much SAP had invested in n8n. N8n calls itself an “AI orchestration platform”. Its tech allows businesses to connect hundreds of different apps and services and automate many business tasks, including integrating large language models, as well as leveraging AI agents to simplify business tasks. Alongside the investment, n8n and SAP have struck a multi-year commercial deal. This will see n8n being available inside SAP’s AI agent offering, called Joule Studio, which allows users to create and manage their own AI agents. This will mean that instead of switching between different apps, developers can build complex AI workflows within SAP using n8n’s canvas. Jan Oberhauser, founder & CEO, n8n, said: "For n8n, securing SAP as a strategic investor marks a pivotal moment. As one of the world's largest enterprise software companies, its decision to back n8n and to embed us inside Joule Studio reflects genuine confidence in our platform and our vision." Christian Klein, CEO, SAP SE, said: "To provide accurate and secure business outcomes at scale, agentic AI must be grounded in deep process knowledge, reliable data, and enterprise-grade governance. By integrating n8n into Joule Studio, we're accelerating SAP's ability to help customers design, connect, and scale agentic AI across their core business processes."

Paymentology, the global issuer-processing platform for banks and fintechs, has secured a $175 million investment co-led by Apis Partners and Aspirity Partners. Founded to help financial institutions modernise payment issuing systems, Paymentology provides real-time card and payment processing technology for fintechs, digital banks and retail banks operating across multiple markets. The company says its platform addresses limitations associated with legacy issuer-processing systems, which continue to slow innovation and agility across parts of the global payments industry. Its multi-cloud platform enables clients to adapt payment programmes across different regulatory and market environments while managing card and digital payment experiences in real time. Jeff Parker, CEO of Paymentology, said legacy financial systems continue to create friction across the industry, adding that the company aims to help clients respond more quickly to changing market demands: We’ve built an issuing platform designed for growth, helping digital banks, fintechs and financial institutions launch, scale and expand their card programmes with confidence. By combining global capability with the flexibility to adapt locally, we enable our clients to compete more effectively with speed, control and efficiency, in an increasingly dynamic landscape. Paymentology has seen continued growth across digital banking, embedded finance, digital asset-linked card programmes and expense management platforms, alongside established financial institutions modernising legacy systems. The company’s customer base is geographically diversified, with significant exposure to growth markets across the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia-Pacific. The investment will support Paymentology’s international expansion, product development and team growth as demand increases for cloud-native issuer processing technology. The company said the funding will also support expansion into areas including credit, stablecoin infrastructure, tokenisation and AI-driven financial services.

The CEO of Sweden-based healthtech startup Tandem Health said it is “very difficult” for US competitors to compete against Tandem Health in Europe, amid a push from European healthcare providers to work with European businesses. Speaking on the Tech.eu podcast, Lukas Saari, Tandem co-founder, said: “We have very much taken the full European focus, we are a full-on European company. “Everyone is based here; we only have European-based investors. I think this has helped us a lot in many of the discussions and that it would be very difficult for the US-based competitors to come into Europe and compete.” Saari’s comments come amid a push from some European tech leaders and politicians to become less reliant on US tech amid fluctuating relations with President Trump. Saari has previously said that in procurement, European governments and public services increasingly prefer working with European businesses. Tandem, which is powered by LLMs, offers clinicians an AI co-pilot that generates medical notes during patient consultations. Tandem’s co-pilot has evolved from solving the niche use case of medical note taking, expanding to a full medical assistant, which now includes referral notes and patient communications before, during and after patient visits. In July last year, Tandem raised $50 million in a Series A round after a $10m seed round in 2024. Its investors include Kinnevik and Northzone. Tandem, which employs around 170 people, is focused on the European market, with the UK, where NHS clinicians use it, being its biggest market in terms of user numbers. Elsewhere in the podcast, Saari discusses Tandem’s use of LLMs, the possible threat from AI giants to its business, as well as Tandem’s future plans.

Ventory, the inventory management platform connecting enterprise ERP systems with field operations, has raised €2.65 million in a funding round led by KBC Securities, with participation from existing investors Finindus, Matterwave and delaware. Founded by Vishal Punamiya, Ventory develops software designed to help organisations manage inventory across field operations, including service vans, depots, consignment stock and customer sites. The platform integrates with enterprise systems, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Sage, providing companies with real-time visibility into inventory once it leaves the warehouse. The company says its platform replaces manual and disconnected inventory processes often managed through spreadsheets, paper-based workflows and fragmented tools. “From vans and trunk stock to consignment, field service depots and customer sites, Ventory replaces the Excel spreadsheets, Google Sheets, paper tickets and disconnected tools that have historically governed billions of euros of field inventory,” said Vishal Punamiya. The platform integrates natively with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Sage, and is newly ISO/IEC 27001 certified. Ventory now supports some of the most operationally complex organisations across multiple industries. Today, Ventory is used by organisations across seven countries, including healthcare providers, medical distributors, energy producers, asset managers, a national railway operator and a medical robotics manufacturer. The new funding will be used to expand Ventory’s AI product roadmap and ERP integrations, support geographic expansion across Western Europe, and grow its enterprise go-to-market team. The investment also forms part of KBC Group’s broader €100 million initiative announced last year to support the Belgian startup ecosystem through early-stage and follow-on funding programmes linked to Start it @KBC and KBC Securities.

Ghent-based Holmes, a technology company focused on reinventing software quality assurance for the AI era, has launched with €1.1 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Syndicate One, with participation from Aikido founders Roeland Delrue and Willem Delbare, Showpad co-founder Louis Jonckheere, and serial entrepreneur Thomas Van Overbeke. Investment funds NewSchool.vc, RDY Capital, and 100IN also joined the round. The investor base reflects the broader Ghent technology ecosystem behind companies such as Aikido and Henchman. Founded by Robin Praet, Robbrecht Delrue, and Sofie Buyse, Holmes is building an autonomous quality assurance (QA) platform designed for software teams operating at AI development speed. As AI coding tools accelerate software production, quality assurance has increasingly become a bottleneck, with engineering and product teams still relying heavily on manually written and maintained tests to ensure products function correctly. Rather than depending on predefined scripts and manual test maintenance, Holmes learns how a product works and how users interact with it. Based on those workflows, the platform continuously generates and updates tests that verify critical user journeys as the product evolves. At Henchman, I experienced firsthand how QA often becomes work that everyone knows is essential, but nobody truly owns. Testing frequently ends up on the plate of developers and product managers alongside their existing responsibilities. Holmes was built to automate that process and allow teams to continue shipping products with greater confidence, said Sofie Buyse, Product Manager at Holmes. Robbrecht Delrue, co-founder of Holmes, noted that most software companies do not invest heavily in QA teams early on. However, as products and development teams scale, manual testing increasingly becomes a constraint on release speed and growth, a challenge Holmes aims to address. In addition to its founding team, Holmes works with a group of experienced technology leaders advising the company on product development, including Dieter Wachters, Haroen Vermylen, Jaap Vergote, and Ivo Minjauw. The funding will be used to further develop the Holmes platform, expand the product and engineering teams, and support the company’s rollout beyond its current group of design partners.

Italian construction technology startup Pillar has raised €12 million in a seed funding round led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Base10 Partners, with participation from Italian Founders Fund. The round brings Pillar’s total funding to €15.2 million, less than eight months after its public launch. Existing investors, including Emblem, also participated in earlier financing rounds. Founded in 2025, Pillar is building a software platform designed to modernise construction operations and financial management. The company provides contractors with an AI-powered operating system that automates administrative and back-office processes, including quote generation, margin tracking, workforce management, and reporting while projects are underway. Construction remains one of the world’s largest and least digitised industries, with many companies still relying on fragmented workflows, manual processes, and disconnected data systems. Pillar integrates information from accounting software, bank feeds, and construction sites, including updates shared through WhatsApp, into a single interface designed to provide real-time operational visibility without requiring contractors to change existing workflows. Gabriel Guinea Montalvo, CEO and co-founder of Pillar, said the construction sector remains one of the few major industries that has yet to undergo a fundamental technological transformation. Every project runs on fragmented data, manual processes, and zero visibility - from the contractor's back office to the workers on site. We are building the default operating system this industry depends on, in Italy, in Europe, and everywhere construction still operates in chaos. The newly raised capital will be used to strengthen Pillar’s position in the Italian market, expand internationally, and continue developing its product ecosystem. The company plans to broaden its platform with additional modules covering procurement, tender management, subcontractor coordination, banking, and related construction services. The company’s long-term objective is to become a central operating platform for the construction industry, supporting the management of projects, payments, and workforce operations across the sector.

White Circle, the enterprise AI governance company helping organisations monitor, protect and improve AI systems in real time, has raised $11 million in seed funding from a group of prominent AI and technology leaders. Investors include Romain Huet (OpenAI), Dirk Kingma (Anthropic, formerly OpenAI), Guillaume Lample (Mistral), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), Olivier Pomel (Datadog), François Chollet (Keras), Mehdi Ghissassi (formerly DeepMind), Paige Bailey (DeepMind), and David Cramer (Sentry). As AI adoption accelerates, companies are facing increasing challenges around model reliability, safety and governance. The rise of “vibe coding” and low-barrier AI development has made it easier to launch AI-powered products quickly, often without full visibility into how those systems behave once deployed. White Circle helps companies test, protect, observe and optimise AI systems through a single API. Its proprietary models monitor AI inputs and outputs in real time to detect harmful content, hallucinations, prompt-injection attacks, model drift, and malicious users. The platform also provides analytics tools to help teams evaluate and improve model performance over time. In practice, White Circle can identify issues such as sensitive data leakage, attempts to manipulate AI agents into harmful actions, or signs of declining model performance. Teams can create custom policies and automate enforcement actions, including rate limiting or banning abusive users, while the system continuously improves through labelled user feedback. Denis Shilov, founder and CEO of White Circle, said the rapid pace of AI development is outstripping existing governance frameworks. Companies are increasingly relying on AI systems in areas that directly impact people, from healthcare and finance to hiring and security. At the same time, AI development has become significantly more accessible, making oversight more difficult. White Circle was built to give organisations visibility into how their AI behaves, help them respond when things go wrong, and provide a unified system for improving reliability, safety and compliance. Elena Iumagulova, Head of Design at White Circle, added that the company designed the product to make AI oversight more accessible for both technical and non-technical teams, giving organisations a centralised way to monitor performance, identify risks and optimise models through a single interface and API, regardless of deployment scale. The new funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand White Circle’s team across the US, the UK, and Europe, and support the continued growth of its global customer base.

Dutch healthtech startup Ditto has raised €7.6 million to support its European expansion and further develop its AI-powered patient communication platform. The funding round was led by Heal Capital, with participation from Optiverder and Rubio Impact Ventures. Since launching last summer, the app has been downloaded by nearly 100,000 users. Ditto was founded by Tobias Polak, Bart Voorn, and Merlijn van Breugel. The company aims to address a common challenge in healthcare communication: many patients leave medical consultations without fully understanding or remembering what was discussed. The app allows patients to record consultations or upload photographs of medical letters. Using AI, Ditto generates summaries that can be revisited later and translated into simplified language or other languages, including English, Turkish, and Arabic. Users can also securely share summaries with family members, while the company says no data is stored centrally. Tobias Polak, co-founder of Ditto, noted that medical consultations are often short, and patients may struggle to fully process or remember important information, particularly when receiving difficult news: We are trying to shift healthcare thinking away from institutions and towards the patient experience. Our ambition is to help people better understand their care journey during some of the most vulnerable moments in life. The company says the platform is designed not only to improve patient understanding and engagement but also to reduce repetitive follow-up questions and administrative pressure on healthcare professionals. The newly raised capital will be used to expand Ditto across Europe and develop additional patient support features, including tools designed to help users prepare for consultations and navigate treatment and care journeys together with family members.

Breathwork platform Regulate has closed a €1.4M Seed round.  The round is led by impact investor 4impact.vc and backed by an angel syndicate, which includes:   Hanno Renner (Co-Founder & CEO, Personio), Mike Wax (Co-Founder, Forto), Marlena Hien (Co-Founder, Bears with Benefits), and Felix Haas (10x Group, IDnow, Bits & Pretzels).  Founded in 2024 by CEO Peter van Woerkum, a certified breathwork coach and executive coach with over a decade of C-level advisory experience, and Paul Laechelin, former Product Lead for the BMW App, Regulate was founded on the conviction that breathwork is the most direct, science-backed way to improve focus, stress response and resilience. According to van Woerkum, breathwork is a proven way to shift from stress to clarity in real time.  “It’s accessible and it builds resilience that compounds over time. As pressures mount and AI raises the bar for what organisations can produce, expectations on professionals have never been higher. We’re building Regulate to help people meet these demands sustainably by embedding it into the way teams already work, not adding another source of stress.”  Regulate has developed an app with a library of over 60 science-backed sessions, ranging from 90 seconds to 60 minutes, developed in partnership with scientific advisor Prof Dr Hottenrott, a leading European authority on Heart Rate Variability and its role in human performance and recovery from Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. Rather than offering generic mindfulness sessions that sit unused in corporate benefits portals, the platform surfaces the right intervention at the right moment. This includes a focus protocol before a high-stakes meeting, a breathing exercise after an intense discussion, or a team session before a workshop. “What convinced me was the science. Breathwork has a direct, measurable effect on how people think and perform under pressure and Regulate has built the right product to bring that into the workplace. I introduced it at Personio because I know it works,” says Hanno Renner, Co-Founder & CEO, Personio This contextual intelligence is powered by wearables and workday systems. By reading physiological signals from connected devices and understanding the structure of the user’s workday, Regulate can recommend personalised sessions aligned to the user’s current state and demands of the workday, making it the first breathwork platform that functions as an on-demand performance tool. The platform also provides organisations with aggregated usage and impact dashboards, giving HR and leadership teams visibility into team-level adoption patterns and trends without compromising individual privacy. In under a year, the platform has completed over 50,000 sessions across organisations, and its enterprise pipeline represents over €9 million in ARR potential.   Regulate is already used by teams at leading organisations, including Raiffeisen Bank International, Vattenfall, Personio and others, including global enterprises and management consultancies. Victor Straatman, Partner at 4impact.vc, shared:   "We back companies where business model and positive impact align. Regulate improves how people perform and how they feel, allowing them to thrive in a fast-changing work environment. The data shows that at scale, this is a very compelling combination and solution for overall wellbeing.” The company will use the capital to accelerate growth, deepen product capabilities, expand its live-format offerings, and grow its team.

Cambridge-based biotech startup Tolemy Bio has raised €1.4 million in pre-seed funding to advance its AI-enabled technology for cell biology research and biopharma development. The round was led by Norrsken Evolve, with participation from Big Sur Ventures, JME Ventures, Masia, and a new UK-based stealth fund. Founded by Alex Ward and Caelan Anderson, Tolemy Bio is developing Orbit, a system designed to help researchers better understand, interpret, and optimise living cells used in modern therapies and drug development. The company is focused on a longstanding challenge within biopharma and cell biology: while living cells are central to areas such as cell therapies and therapeutic proteins, experimental workflows remain highly manual and fragmented. Research data is often spread across spreadsheets, lab equipment, notebooks, and disconnected systems, limiting the ability of teams to effectively apply AI tools to drug development and manufacturing processes. Orbit is designed to bring these fragmented workflows into a single AI-native environment. The system connects existing laboratory tools and experimental data sources, while also incorporating virtual cell models and AI research agents intended to help scientists analyse cellular behaviour and guide experimental decision-making. Alex Ward, co-founder and CEO of Tolemy Bio, said the company was founded to address the difficulties researchers face in interpreting and reproducing complex cell biology experiments. Our platform, Orbit, is designed to connect experimental data with AI models,” said Ward. “Our goal is to make complex cell biology easier to interpret, optimise, and apply to real therapeutic development. The newly raised funding will be used to expand Tolemy Bio’s data generation, machine learning, and engineering capabilities, continue development of Orbit, and support early customer and partner deployments. While headquartered in Cambridge, the company says much of its operational activity will continue from Barcelona. Tolemy Bio’s long-term goal is to build a virtual-cell platform that helps biopharma companies move beyond trial-and-error experimentation towards more precise and data-driven approaches to understanding and controlling living cells.

London-based fintech Adfin has raised $18 million in Series A funding to expand its AI-powered money movement and cashflow management platform for businesses. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Visionaries Club and new investors Stéphane Kurgan and Andrey Khusid. The investment brings Adfin’s total funding to more than $30 million, less than two years after the company’s launch. Founded to address inefficiencies in business payments and cashflow operations, Adfin is building what it describes as an “agentic” finance platform designed to automate how companies manage invoices, payments, and cash movement. Late payments remain a major challenge for small and medium-sized businesses in the UK, where nearly two-thirds of invoices are paid late. Adfin combines proprietary payment infrastructure with AI-driven workflows intended to automate payment collection processes and help finance teams improve cashflow visibility and operational efficiency. The company says its platform determines the most appropriate payment and follow-up actions for each client while reducing the amount of repetitive administrative work required from finance teams. Tom Pope, co-founder and CEO of Adfin, said the company is focused on building infrastructure that allows finance teams to automate workflows related to payments and cash management while maintaining transparency, auditability, and human oversight. He added that improving payment speed and cash management can have a significant impact on how businesses operate and grow, particularly for smaller companies managing working capital constraints. The newly raised capital will be used to expand Adfin’s platform beyond payment collection into broader cashflow management capabilities, support hiring across engineering and sales, and prepare the company for international expansion.

Nscale, the UK AI infrastructure startup backed by Nvidia, has secured a fresh $790m in debt financing geared towards the development of an AI data centre in Norway, where OpenAI had planned to house its ambitious Stargate Norway project. The debt financing comes from Dutch multinational bank ABN AMRO, Norwegian bank DNB, along with Eksfin, Nordea, and SEB. The funding will go towards the AI infrastructure buildout of Nscale's data centre in Narvik, northern Norway. The data centre was previously earmarked to house OpenAI’s ambitious Stargate Norway AI data centre project. But instead, Nscale has signed a deal with existing customer Microsoft, which will rent Nvidia chips from Nscale at the site, after it was reported that OpenAI and Nscale failed to land a deal. Microsoft has an existing multi-billion contract at the data centre site. Nscale said it had also inked a provision for an extra $790 million of financing by way of a so-called accordion feature, which would allow it extra funding without the need to renegotiate loan terms. Earlier this year, Nscale was valued at $14.6bn following a $2bn Series C funding round. Josh Payne, founder and CEO of Nscale said: “Together, these developments position Nscale at the forefront of global AI infrastructure, delivering scalable, high-performance capacity to meet rapidly growing demand for our services.”

Quantum software company Algorithmiq has established Milan as its global headquarters, signalling its confidence and commitment to Italy and Europe as the future hub for leadership in the industrialisation of quantum algorithms. Algorithmiq has raised €18 million in funding led by United Ventures and Italian institutional investor CDP Venture Capital, with continued participation from Inventure VC. This funding round brings Algorithmiq’s total funding to €36 million and represents Italy’s largest-ever venture capital investment in a quantum startup. Algorithmiq develops quantum software that makes quantum computers useful, enabling breakthroughs in chemistry, materials science, and life sciences through physically meaningful, energy-efficient quantum computation. With operations in Finland, the UK, Ireland and the US, Algorithmiq is led by CEO and and Co-Founder Dr Sabrina Maniscalco, CSO and Co-Founder Dr Guillermo García-Pérez, CTO and Co-Founder Dr Matteo Rossi and Lead Researcher and Co-Founder Dr Boris Sokolov.    To date, the quantum computing narrative has been dominated by the crowded race to develop hardware; Algorithmiq is building and industrialising the algorithmic layer in the technology that can transform quantum computers into tools with real-world applications. Algorithmiq’s decision to situate itself at the heart of the Italian quantum ecosystem reflects a deliberate European bet on quantum's software layer as the primary area of future innovation in the sector.      Milan will serve as the base for Algorithmiq to further its commercial operations as the software partner to the world’s leading quantum hardware companies. From Italy, Algorithmiq will also tap into Europe’s deep scientific talent base to expand its rapidly growing team and leverage the region’s growing strategic focus on quantum.    Algorithmiq’s relocation of its global headquarters to Milan (previously in Finland, where Algorithmiq will maintain significant operations) reflects Italy’s burgeoning quantum technology ecosystem and a broader European effort to close the gap between research and the commercialisation of deeptech.    The decision follows Italy’s National Quantum Strategy, launched in 2025, and a committment to supporting the creation of a robust quantum infrastructure in Italy. Access to national and pan-European capital backing for quantum, paired with the Italian government’s progressive policy commitments, makes Milan a highly attractive strategic base for expansion across European and global markets.   Rather than competing in the capital-intensive race for hardware, Algorithmiq focuses on building the algorithmic layer that helps quantum machines become tools of industrial value.       According to Dr Sabrina Maniscalco, CEO and Co-Founder of Algorithmiq, 2026 is a year in which more meaningful applications of quantum will become a reality. “This strategic move and funding injection give us the template to hit scale and continue to serve and work with the biggest quantum players in the world. Our quantum software makes quantum computers actually useful, and we’re delighted to be taking that message global from our new headquarters in Milan.  As quantum computing matures, the question is shifting from who can build the biggest machine to who can make the machines matter. That challenge sits at the intersection of science, software, and industrial execution, and it is increasingly where the real competitive edge may lie.”   Jacopo Drudi, Partner at United Ventures, sees quantum as an opportunity for Europe to set the pace rather than follow it.  "Italy has always been at the frontier of the mathematical and physical sciences — from Leonardo to Fermi to Marconi — and that foundation gives us a structural advantage in this next technological revolution.  Bringing a world-class international team like Algorithmiq to Milan is a win not just for United Ventures, but for the country. We are building a continental tech titan, and for European quantum talent looking to come home, Italy now has a place where they can do their best work."   Professor Tommaso Calarco said: "It is particularly valuable when a company’s trajectory sends a broader signal about where innovation can be built. Europe needs more of this: decisions that connect scientific excellence, entrepreneurship, and long-term industrial ambition. Italy is well placed to play a role in this context." Professor Calarco authored the Quantum Manifesto that launched the European Commission’s Quantum Flagship, where he currently serves as Chair of the Quantum Community Network (QCN).

The co-founder of Danish digital bank Lunar is stepping down as CEO after more than ten years and is being replaced by a former Danske Bank and Saxo Bank executive. Ken Villum Klausen, Lunar co-founder and CEO, who has led Lunar since its founding in 2015, said the timing “feels right” to stand down. He pointed out that Lunar was now the biggest challenger bank across the Nordics. Posting on LinkedIn, Klausen said: “Lunar has the strongest team in its history. The strategy for the next phase is sharp, and we're all aligned on it. The product is loved, the business is healthy, and the ambition for what comes next is bigger than what came before. The best time for a founder to hand over is when the thing is working, not when it isn't. So that's what I'm doing, with a full heart.” He is being replaced by Søren Kyhl, who spent 10 years at Danish investment bank Saxo Bank, latterly as deputy CEO, and over 13 years at Danske Bank, the Danish multinational bank. Kyhl will take over at the start of June this year. Lunar, which has raised over €500m in funding, has over one million customers. It has expanded from its native Denmark across the Nordics. As well as its retail offering, it has over 40,00 business customers. Chairman Jens Peter Leschly Neergaard said: "With Søren, Lunar gets a CEO with deep understanding of both the financial market and the regulatory requirements that come with running a modern bank. He brings a strong background in execution, commercial development, and leadership, along with a clear ability to continue developing the bank together with Lunar’s talented employees and create even more value for our users.” In 2022, Lunar launched its Lunar Block in-app crypto platform in 2022, allowing users to buy and sell crypto coins directly. In October last year, Lunar secured a crypto licence under the EU’s MiCA regulation.  Last year, Lunar was hit by a string of executive departures, including its co-founder and CTO, as it looked to cut management costs and become profitable in the long term.

Poland has long been known as one of Europe’s strongest software development and IT outsourcing hubs, supplying engineering talent and enterprise delivery capabilities to companies across Western Europe and the US. While countries like Germany focused more heavily on fintech or SaaS products, Poland carved out its own service niche. As AI reshapes how software is built, that legacy is turning into a strategic advantage. Miquido is a Polish software development and AI solutions company headquartered in Kraków. Founded in 2011, the company builds mobile apps, web platforms, AI systems, and enterprise software for startups, scaleups, and large organisations across industries such as fintech, healthcare, ecommerce, and entertainment. Originally known for mobile development, Miquido has increasingly focused on AI-native software development, integrating generative AI and agentic AI workflows into enterprise environments. I spoke to Chief AI Officer Jerzy Biernacki to learn more about the direction and opportunities for Poland and the rise of what he calls Software 3.0. For Biernacki, Poland’s biggest strength is its talent pool, which is rapidly embracing AI tools and building processes around them to deliver more, faster, without sacrificing quality. At the same time, while Poland is not yet one of the top ecosystems in Europe, companies like ElevenLabs and DocPlanner are helping lead that charge with massive funding rounds. Specifically in AI, Poland now has two independently developed large language models — BIELIK and PLLuM. This is unusual, especially for Central Europe and even across the EU more broadly. Poland is alos home to multiple top-tier software development agencies — including Miquido, as well as companies like Netguru, 10Clouds, and Spyrosoft. From copilots to Agentic AI The rise of large language models has already pushed software development through several distinct phases, according to Biernacki. In the early days of the AI boom, many believed developers would quickly be replaced altogether as companies rushed to adopt generative AI tools. “The first phase was: ‘LLMs can be used everywhere, and they’ll replace everyone,’ particularly programmers and developers,” he said. That narrative coincided with major layoffs across the tech sector, although Biernacki argues many of those cuts were more closely tied to companies correcting pandemic-era overhiring than AI-driven replacement. Initially, AI coding tools primarily functioned as copilots, helping developers autocomplete code and accelerate workflows within their IDEs. But Biernacki says the market underwent a major shift in 2025 with the arrival of agentic AI coding systems. “I think the major breakthrough was when Claude Code was released in May last year. That was a turning point,” he explained. “Agentic AI code generation really became a thing, and it changed the way we work with software development.” The later release of Codex further accelerated the transition. According to Biernacki, the two platforms now dominate much of the enterprise AI coding market. “Those two tools basically overtook the market. They now have something like 75–80 per cent of the enterprise segment between them,” he said. The shift is reshaping far more than coding itself. Biernacki argues that AI is transforming the entire software development lifecycle, from requirements analysis and design to testing, deployment, governance, and validation. How Software 3.0 Is reshaping software development As these workflows become increasingly autonomous, Biernacki argues the role of the developer itself is fundamentally changing, evolving toward oversight and verification rather than manual coding. “The bulk of the work is no longer writing code — because writing code is now relatively cheap — but verification, architecture, governance, and validation.” He believes automated validation will become one of the most critical layers in AI-assisted software development as enterprises look to safely deploy increasingly autonomous coding systems. This has led to a shift in local hiring practices, with companies like Miquido placing greater emphasis on soft skills than on whether someone knows a language's syntax perfectly. In terms of younger hires, Biernacki characterises the importance of university graduates who used AI throughout their studies and are naturally comfortable working with AI. He admits younger hires still need time to adapt to enterprise environments and operational discipline. “We look for a different skill set now: people who can translate business requirements into prompts and who can work naturally with AI agents. They also inject fresh energy into teams. Sometimes senior engineers get stuck in existing processes, and having fresh blood helps show alternative ways of working. They’re eager to learn, eager to adapt, eager to test new things. So I think they’re a really valuable addition to company structures.” "Software 3.0 "creates a new divide between startups and enterprises The divide between startups and enterprises is becoming increasingly visible in the AI-driven software era as companies adopt to Software 3.0 development workflows. According to Biernacki, startups are moving far faster than larger organisations because they are being forced to adopt AI-native development practices to survive: “Honestly, I think startups are leading the charge right now. Startups need to show investors tangible results extremely quickly across software sectors.  They can’t afford not to rely on AI-driven coding workflows — especially for early products and feature development.” As a result, startups are shipping products and features at an increasingly fast pace. Enterprises, however, operate under very different constraints.  “Startups don’t have to worry as deeply about enterprise-grade security, reputation risk, or massive scalability from day one,” said Biernacki. “Enterprises have to move more carefully because they need stability. Their primary concerns are reputation, compliance, security, and governance.” For software development firms serving enterprise customers, reliability therefore becomes the critical differentiator. “You can’t achieve that with pure ‘vibe coding’ and no safeguards. You need enterprise processes ensuring quality.” Biernacki contends that the whole ecosystem is moving from “we provide developers” toward providing augmented delivery systems. “I think the adoption rate in Poland is probably among the highest in Europe.” He sees Poland’s edge is not about being the biggest AI market, because clearly it isn’t, but rather having an ecosystem of software companies that spent 10–15 years building enterprise software for Western European and global clients — and are now rapidly retooling around AI. “The thing Poland may actually be leading in isn’t frontier AI research itself, but AI-augmented enterprise delivery. That’s where I think the country’s real value lies right now.” Biernacki believes the software industry has now crossed a major inflection point, with agentic AI fundamentally reshaping how software is built and maintained, and leading to a competitive advantage. “Companies like us have a temporary advantage over companies that aren’t aggressively adopting agentic AI workflows yet. Though I think that advantage will eventually narrow as others catch up.” At the same time, enterprises are facing rapidly growing regulatory and compliance complexity around AI systems and software governance. “There’s also the growing complexity around regulation and compliance in enterprise software,” said Biernacki. He argues that helping enterprises navigate this increasingly complicated landscape represents one of the biggest emerging opportunities for software companies. Biernacki also believes the industry is experiencing a form of Jevons Paradox, where making software development cheaper through AI actually increases overall demand for software rather than reducing it. The long-term winners in the AI software era will not necessarily be the companies producing the most code, but those capable of redesigning their organisations around governance, reliability, and operational quality. “The winners will be companies that redesign their processes around this new reality — including governance, compliance, and enterprise reliability — not the companies writing the most code or simply ‘vibe coding,’” he said. Startups to watch:  AIstats  AIstats is a football analytics startup that uses AI, computer vision, and machine learning to analyse football matches from standard video footage. Its technology reconstructs games in 3D, tracks player and ball movement, and generates advanced tactical and performance insights without requiring stadium sensors or wearable devices.   The platform is designed to help clubs, scouts, and agents better understand player behaviour, team dynamics, decision-making, and tactical patterns through automated AI-driven analysis. The company also operates a consumer-facing football app that delivers live scores, predictive analytics, AI-generated match insights, and performance metrics across thousands of leagues worldwide.  Carein  Carein develops nutritional supplements designed to improve skin and hair health from the inside rather than relying only on topical skincare.  Founded in 2021, the company targets issues such as acne, hormonal acne, redness, pigmentation, ageing skin, and hormonal hair loss. Its products combine vitamins, minerals, probiotics, plant extracts, adaptogens, and other active ingredients to support skin regeneration, hormonal balance, and the gut-skin connection. It works with medical experts to formulate its products and markets itself as a science-led premium skincare wellness brand.  DefendEye DefendEye is a defencetech startup developing fully autonomous, AI-powered “search drones” designed for rapid intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions.   Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Kraków, the company builds tube-launched drones that can deploy in under 10 seconds without requiring a pilot, joystick, or traditional drone training. Users simply launch the drone from a portable or fixed tube, and the onboard AI autonomously navigates, identifies humans, tracks movement, and streams encrypted live video back to a cloud command centre in real time. The drones are built to operate even in GPS-denied or jammed environments and include low-light and night-vision capabilities for use in difficult battlefield or emergency conditions. The startup is positioning itself within the growing “drone as first responder” and autonomous defence systems market, where rapid situational awareness is becoming increasingly important for both military and civil security operations. FormalFoundry.ai FormalFoundry.ai is an AI governance and verification startup developing mathematically traceable AI systems and compliance tooling. It builds a  verification layer for AI systems using formal methods and proof assistants, so companies can make AI outputs more reliable, auditable, and compliant.  This helps teams turn domain rules, regulations, and expert knowledge into machine-checkable logic to reduce hallucinations and errors. Graphcode Graftcode is a Polish software infrastructure startup tackling the large amount of time developers spend building and maintaining integrations between services, languages, and infrastructure layers.  According to Graftcode, engineering teams often lose 30–40 per cent of development time to API maintenance, DTO mapping, queues, versioning, and related backend complexity.  Its platform aims to remove that overhead by creating a unified communication layer between applications, enabling faster development, cleaner architectures, and easier scaling for distributed systems and AI-native software environments.   Instead of building separate services connected through traditional backend plumbing, developers can call methods across systems as if everything were in a single shared codebase.

Grand Games, a mobile gaming company focused on hybrid casual titles, has raised $70 million in a Series B funding round, bringing the company’s total funding to $103 million. The round was led by Balderton Capital through its Growth Fund, following the firm’s earlier Series A investment via its Early Stage Fund in January last year. Existing investors Bek Ventures and Laton Ventures also participated in the round, alongside mobile gaming entrepreneur Mert Gür as an angel investor. Founded in Istanbul by Bekir Batuhan Çelebi, Mehmet Çalım, and Mustafa Fırtına, Grand Games develops hybrid casual mobile games designed for short daily play sessions. The company focuses primarily on puzzle titles, combining accessible gameplay mechanics with a data-driven product development approach. With games such as Magic Sort! and Car Match reaching millions of downloads, Grand Games has rapidly emerged as one of Turkey’s fastest-growing startups. The company has recorded fivefold year-over-year revenue growth and raised three funding rounds within two years of its founding. Its valuation has also increased significantly since its previous round completed just over a year ago. We started Grand to build the kind of company we believed could unlock the full potential of great talent. Turkey has produced some of the strongest mobile gaming talent globally, and we wanted to create an environment where teams have real ownership over decisions, product direction, and outcomes, said Bekir Batuhan Çelebi, also known as Batu, CEO and co-founder of Grand Games. Grand attributes part of its growth to its organisational structure and approach to talent. Operating through five autonomous internal studios, the company gives teams significant ownership over decision-making and product direction, while the founding team provides strategic support across the business. The newly raised capital will primarily be used to expand the company’s marketing efforts, scale existing titles, and support upcoming game launches. Grand also plans to continue expanding its Istanbul-based team as it grows its international presence in mobile gaming.

European tech activity in April 2026 remained broadly stable compared to March, although overall funding volumes declined more noticeably. The ecosystem recorded 290 funding deals and €5.1 billion raised, compared to 292 deals and €7.5 billion in March, reflecting a marginal 0.7 per cent decrease in deal activity and a 32 per cent decline in total capital raised. At the country level, the UK maintained its position as the leading funding hub despite lower investment volumes. UK funding reached €1.9 billion in April, down from €2.6 billion in March, representing a 27 per cent decrease month-on-month. Sector trends also shifted during the month. Cleantech led in April with €1.3 billion raised, while AI dominated in March at €1.8 billion, indicating a rotation of investor focus between key technology sectors rather than a continuation of a single dominant theme. Exit activity softened further in April, declining from 52 exits in March to 35, a 33 per cent decrease, pointing to weaker liquidity conditions across the market. Alexander Kölpin, Managing Director & Partner at seed+speed Ventures, commented on the April numbers within the European tech investment landscape in our April Tech.eu Pulse, a compact version of the monthly report: The landscape of European tech in April 2026 paints a clear, if bifurcated, picture. The headline figures (a slight drop in total investment volume to €5.1 billion and fewer M&A exits) suggest a market tightening its belt. From my vantage point as an investor focused on B2B and enterprise solutions, this contraction is a necessary maturation. The era of unchecked growth at any cost is long over. What matters now most is: execution, market-fit, and a clear path to revenue. However, funding remains robust and even spectacular in critical, capital-intensive themes, most notably with big deals in Cleantech (Σ €1.3 billion in Sweden) and Artificial Intelligence (Σ €1.2 billion in the UK).If we abstract from those single, dominating deals, we see clear winners in the spaces we VCs talk about amongst our peers: semiconductors, robotics, HW, deep tech and obviously AI, AI, AI. For his more detailed review and more in-depth analyses of the European tech ecosystem, including industry and country performance, exit activities, and more, check out our April report. Here are the 10 largest tech deals in Europe from April, accounting for 62.7 per cent of the month’s total funding. Amount raised: €1.4B Stegra (formerly H2 Green Steel) is a Swedish industrial company focused on decarbonising hard-to-abate industries through the production of green hydrogen, green iron, and near-zero-emission steel. Founded in 2020, the company is developing one of the world’s first large-scale green steel plants in Boden, Sweden, using renewable electricity and hydrogen to significantly reduce CO₂ emissions compared to traditional steelmaking processes. Stegra secured €1.4 billion in additional funding from a consortium led by Sweden’s Wallenberg family to support the completion of its green steel plant project. Amount raised: $1.1B Ineffable Intelligence is a London-based artificial intelligence research company focused on developing “superlearner” AI systems that can acquire knowledge and skills through experience rather than relying solely on human-generated data. Founded by former DeepMind researcher David Silver, the company specialises in reinforcement learning and aims to advance AI capabilities across science, engineering, and other complex domains. Ineffable Intelligence has emerged from stealth mode and announced $1.1 billion in seed funding at a reported valuation of $5.1 billion. Amount raised: €340M AURA AERO is a French aerospace company developing low-carbon and hybrid-electric aircraft for regional transport and pilot training. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Toulouse, the company focuses on accelerating aviation decarbonization through innovative aircraft design, digital technologies, and sustainable manufacturing solutions. AURA AERO secured €340 million in funding to support its operations and expansion plans in Toulouse and Florida. Amount raised: €211M CamGraPhIC is a deeptech company developing graphene-integrated photonic circuits for telecommunications, data centres, and AI infrastructure. Founded as a spinout from the University of Cambridge, the company focuses on energy-efficient optical interconnect technologies designed to deliver higher bandwidth, lower latency, and reduced power consumption compared to conventional silicon photonics solutions. CamGraPhIC secured €211 million from the EU to build graphene tech for faster AI data transfer. Amount raised: $130M Xoople is an intelligence and data infrastructure company developing AI-ready geospatial data systems to monitor physical changes on Earth in real time. Founded in 2019, the company combines satellite technology, artificial intelligence, and cloud infrastructure to help enterprises and governments improve decision-making across areas such as supply chains, infrastructure monitoring, agriculture, and risk management. Xoople raised $130 million in a Series B funding round as it expands commercialisation efforts for its real-time geospatial data platform designed to support AI applications across industries. Amount raised: $117M Verda (formerly DataCrunch) is an AI cloud infrastructure company providing GPU-powered cloud computing services for artificial intelligence training and inference workloads. The company focuses on delivering scalable, energy-efficient, and sovereign AI infrastructure for enterprises, startups, and research organisations across Europe. Verda raised $117 million to scale AI cloud infrastructure built on clean Nordic power. Amount raised: $110M Sereact is an AI robotics company developing vision-language-action models that enable robots to autonomously perform complex physical tasks in logistics, warehousing, and manufacturing environments. Founded in 2021, the company focuses on hardware-agnostic embodied AI software that allows robots to perceive, reason, and adapt to real-world conditions with minimal programming or human intervention. Sereact closed a $110 million Series B funding round, with the proceeds intended to support development of its latest AI model and the company’s expansion into the US market. Amount raised: $72M Cloudsmith is a software infrastructure company that provides a cloud-native platform for managing, securing, and distributing software packages and containers across the software supply chain. Founded in 2016, the company helps enterprises centralise artefact management, improve software governance, and support secure software development workflows at a global scale. Cloudsmith raised $72 million in Series C to secure the AI-era software supply chain. Amount raised: £50M Raspberry Pi is a technology company that designs and manufactures low-cost, high-performance single-board computers, microcontrollers, and embedded computing products for education, industry, and consumer applications. Originally created to promote computer science education, Raspberry Pi’s platforms are now widely used in areas including industrial automation, IoT, robotics, and software development. Raspberry Pi raised £50 million in investment from a subsidiary of semiconductor company Arm Holdings. Amount raised: $60M MillTech is a fintech company providing FX and cash management solutions for investment managers, corporates, and institutional clients. Founded in 2019, the company offers a cloud-based platform that helps clients automate foreign exchange workflows, manage liquidity, reduce operational risk, and access institutional-grade treasury services. MillTech received a $60 million to support expansion in North America and further development of its treasury management platform.