SolvaPay, a Stockholm-based AI payments platform, has raised €2.4 million in pre-seed funding to develop payment infrastructure for the emerging era of agentic commerce. The round was led by European fintech venture capital firm Redstone and Silicon Valley-based MS&AD Ventures, with additional participation from Antler and Greens Ventures. As digital services continue to evolve, existing payment systems remain largely confined to closed ecosystems, limiting interoperability and preventing AI agents from freely interacting and transacting across platforms. SolvaPay addresses this challenge by enabling AI agents to discover, access, and pay for digital services seamlessly, supporting autonomous economic activity across the emerging agentic economy. The company’s infrastructure is designed to integrate directly into workflows, APIs, and applications, allowing payments to occur seamlessly within the user experience. Through a single integration, SaaS providers, API developers, and digital service companies can make their products discoverable, consumable, and payable across AI ecosystems such as Claude and ChatGPT, as well as future agent-based environments. ViggoStenseth, CEO and co-founder of SolvaPay, commented: Every major technological shift has needed a financial layer before it could become a real economy. The internet needed it. E-commerce needed it. Now, we’ve reached the same point with the agentic economy, but naturally the transaction types, the speeds, and the compliance required for this are impossible within the existing infrastructure. We’ve built what was missing. The timing is not early, it is exactly right. SolvaPay’s founding team brings more than five decades of combined experience across financial services and technology companies, including Spotify, FIS, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, and Handelsbanken. The newly secured funding will be used to accelerate the development of SolvaPay’s machine-native payment rails and agentic revenue infrastructure, expand the engineering team, and support early adoption among businesses seeking to participate in the emerging agentic economy.

Mission Control Games, a mobile game studio focused on the casual puzzle genre, has announced its launch alongside the close of a $4 million pre-seed funding round. The investment was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Arcadia Gaming Partners and e2vc. The studio was co-founded by Kıvanç Okutur (CEO) and Murat Gürel (CTO), both veterans of the team behind the casual gaming title Merge Dragons. Headquartered across London and Istanbul, Mission Control Games aims to create engaging puzzle experiences that balance familiarity with innovation. Kıvanç Okutur, co-founder and CEO, noted that while casual gaming attracts the largest audiences, it still offers significant untapped opportunities for innovation, drawing inspiration from concepts like Conway’s Game of Life, where simple rules can lead to complex and engaging outcomes. We want to move fast using emerging capabilities of AI and build games that feel alive. Our ambition is to become the largest mobile gaming company with the smallest team, Okutur adds. Operating within the casual gaming segment, the studio seeks to explore new design approaches and develop original sub-genres rather than replicate existing formats. Speed and iteration are central to its development process, enabling the team to rapidly test and refine game concepts while leveraging emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence. The company will use new funding to grow the team and accelerate development of the studio’s first title.

Today at the European Data Summit of the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation in Berlin, Cubbit, SUSE, Elemento Cloud, and StorPool Storage unveil Europe’s first fully sovereign disaster recovery pack.  The system is designed to guarantee business continuity for organisations in the face of uncontrollable, catastrophic external events, including a potential foreign vendor kill-switch. It also safeguards European enterprises’ data and operations while protecting them from dependencies on foreign technology infrastructure.The initiative gives European organisations a fast, concrete answer to an increasingly urgent question: which critical workloads should move to a fully sovereign European IT software stack — and how companies can start doing so immediately, without disruption.  The initiative addresses a growing gap in Europe’s digital infrastructure market, where sovereign digital solutions still face both demand- and supply-side challenges. Demand is rising, driven by geopolitical uncertainty, stricter regulation, and the need for greater control over critical data and services.  Many organisations still face the same issue: credible European solutions exist across the stack, but they are not always available as one integrated option ready to deploy. Focused on addressing the specific need to handle disaster scenarios, this pack also represents a practical first step towards data repatriation and regaining control of workloads from foreign vendors. Addressing IT managers’ concerns about the maturity of European alternatives and the risks of shifting operational workloads, the package approach bundles existing market products with established, proven quality to offer a credible, fast, and focused solution for the most critical business use cases.In the spirit of the EuroStack concept, the Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack is designed to help close that gap. It combines complementary technologies spanning from storage and multi-cloud orchestration to network, identity, observability, and management, bringing together European open-source and proprietary components in a single deployable stack designed to reduce fragmentation and accelerate adoption. In a few hours, the Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack enables organisations to implement a practical approach to reducing reliance on non-European cloud infrastructure without replacing everything at once. Additional integrations are expected to follow as further integrated use cases are made public. Disaster recovery is a natural starting point. If a critical cloud dependency puts services or data at risk of becoming unavailable, inaccessible, or strategically unsustainable — for example, in a kill-switch scenario that disrupts access overnight — the recovery path matters as much as the production environment itself. The Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack enables organisations to identify critical services, build and validate a sovereign recovery setup, and progressively extend it across other workloads through synchronisation and migration. It also provides a practical route to support compliance with stringent frameworks such as NIS2, DORA, GDPR, and regional laws, while preserving full European sovereignty across the technology stack.  In this way, disaster recovery becomes not only a resilience measure, but also a practical first step towards a broader sovereign cloud strategy. The technologies combined come from companies born in and based across Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and Bulgaria, marking a successful collaboration among European companies listed in the Tech Sovereignty Catalogue , in the spirit of the EuroStack manifesto and vision.The Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack has already been deployed by an Italian IT service provider and, thanks to its open architecture, can be integrated by any organisation, including through direct deployment on customer premises across Europe. Over the coming weeks, additional partners of Cubbit, SUSE, Elemento Cloud, and StorPool Storage are aiming to integrate the solution into their operations.According to Alessandro Cillario, co-CEO and co-founder of Cubbit, European digital sovereignty will only scale when it becomes practical to adopt.  “The Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack starts from a concrete operational need already being raised by some of Europe’s largest enterprises — disaster recovery — and turns it into one deployable solution. It gives organisations a realistic way to strengthen resilience, retain control over critical data and services, and begin building a sovereign alternative over time.” Andreas Prins, Global Head Sovereign Solutions at SUSE, said: “By integrating SUSE’s enterprise-grade open-source foundations with the specialised expertise of our partners, we are proving that Europe doesn’t just have the components, we have the complete, mission-critical stack.” Gabriele Fronzé, CEO and co-founder of Elemento Cloud, said: “This initiative turns sovereignty into an operational reality, enabling a concrete exit from dependency on non-European infrastructure. Elemento empowers this through the first vendor-neutral control plane, Electros, and our hypervisor, AtomOS, unifying fragmented environments into a single, resilient system.” Boyan Ivanov, CEO of StorPool Storage, said: “The existing alternatives are few and sparse, and we are now improving that with the introduction of the Sovereign Disaster Recovery Pack initiative.”

Today Germany signed a cooperation agreement with Ukraine to enable the Auterion Airlogix Joint Venture GmbH to execute its first production contract for thousands of mid-range, heavy AI-guided autonomous strike systems. The contract turns a February 2026 announcement at the Munich Security Conference into fully funded, large-scale production in Germany of thousands of systems per year from German production lines, and is the largest German production order for heavy autonomous strike drones to date.  Scaleup Airlogix is a Ukrainian defence technology company specialising in the development and production of unmanned aerial vehicles for military applications. Founded in 2020 and defence-focused since 2022, Airlogix has become a leading supplier to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and special operations units, with combat-proven systems deployed across the front lines.  Auterion develops open, vendor-agnostic operating systems for autonomous drones and robotic systems with customers including the US Department of War, UK Ministry of Defence, German Bundeswehr, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The mass production drives per-unit costs down fast. The result is production-rate munitions designed for contested, GPS-denied environments, built on combat-tested Ukrainian airframes and powered by Auterion's combat-tested AI guidance, autonomous navigation, and electronic warfare resilience software.  For Ukraine, a reliable European-manufactured supply of autonomous strike coordinated through the German Federal Ministry of Defence. German industrial depth behind every unit. For the Bundeswehr, the fastest path to fielding autonomous strike at scale: combat-proven systems shipping with Auterion's Skynode flight computer and Nemyx autonomy stack, integrating into western command architectures on day one.  For allied nations, the production line is open for scale-up beyond Germany. Vitalii Kolesnichenko, CEO, Airlogix, shared:  "Our engineers built these systems under fire. Now, German industry is producing them at a scale that changes the equation on the battlefield. Every unit that rolls off this line carries years of real combat learning."  According to Dr Lorenz Meier, CEO, Auterion: "This contract proves that Europe can move at scale. We are enabling Airlogix to manufacture thousands of autonomous systems on German soil, drawing on Ukrainian combat expertise and the best autonomy software in the world. This is what allied defence industrial cooperation looks like."  Lead image: Auterion CEO Dr Lorenz Meier, Airlogix CEO Vitalii Kolesnichenko, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz with an Airlogix autonomous strike system at the contract signing ceremony. 

Modern Relay today announced a $3 million funding round from Point Nine, Emerge, Amino Collective, Common Magic, and angels, including Charlie Songhurst (board member at Meta), Michael Boehler (former BioNTech executive), and Thomas Clozel (co-founder of OWKIN).  Employees are already running multiple agents to draft research, ship code, and handle day-to-day operations. The moment those agents touch anything cross-functional, they hit the same wall: organisational context is scattered across documents, chats, legacy databases, and knowledge that was never written down. Without a shared layer where people and agents can work from the same facts and rules, every department automates in isolation.  Modern Relay is building the infrastructure to fix this. Its system gives organisations a shared foundation for how the company actually works (its people, policies, data, and decisions) so that software and teams coordinate from the same reality. That makes it possible to route the right information to the right actor at the right time, while governing what changes, who approves it, and how work evolves over time.  “Every company will soon rely on a growing number of agents across all departments,” said Ragnor Comerford, co-founder of Modern Relay. “Without a shared foundation connecting them, those systems create more fragmentation than leverage. We’re building the layer that lets organisations preserve context, coordinate work, and stay in control.” “We backed Modern Relay because Ragnor and Aaron understood the fundamentals of this new reality early,” said Ricardo Sequerra, Partner at Point Nine. “The bottleneck has moved from model capability to organisational infrastructure. They're building the operational backbone for how AI actually works inside a company.” As AI embeds deeper into enterprise operations, that foundation becomes the most valuable asset a company has. Nothing this central to how a company operates should live inside someone else's platform, which is why Modern Relay runs entirely on infrastructure the customer owns. Founded in 2025 by Ragnor Comerford and Aaron Goh, the company is headquartered in San Francisco and Barcelona.  The company just released its first open-source product, Omnigraph - a Git-style graph database built for a world where agents are first-class operators. It lets people and agents branch, propose changes in parallel, and merge approved updates back into a canonical graph. 

UK biotech manufacturer Clean Food Group (CFG) has raised £4.5 million in investment led by Clean Growth Fund and New Agrarian.  CFG has also successfully secured a £700,000 non-dilutive grant from Innovate UK, which further improves the Company’s financial position.  Clean Food Group enables a more sustainable and resilient global food system by  producing essential oils and fats through fermentation, using food waste feedstocks and scalable  microbial production.  Founded in 2022 after eight years of pioneering research, CFG manufactures its oils and fats from food waste, leveraging scalable yeast strains and fermentation technology to deliver sustainable alternatives to traditional oil and fat ingredients.  With the manufacturing process now validated at scale and significantly bolstered by the transformational acquisition of a 1 million litre fermentation facility in Knowsley, Liverpool, in 2025, CFG has strategic and industrial collaborations in place with leading global FMCG and ingredients manufacturers and has a strong demand pipeline for its products.  In 2025, its  CleanOil™ 25 product received approval to be used as a cosmetics ingredient in the UK, US and  Europe.  According to Tom Ellen, Chief Financial Officer of Clean Food Group, the capital raised will enable  the Company to bring on-stream the world’s largest yeast-derived oils and fats facility and "to deliver on our long-term vision for sustainable food manufacturing.”  Rodrigo Hortega de Velasco, Managing Partner at Döhler Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Döhler Group, commented:  “CFG has  consistently demonstrated both the strength of its technology and the commercial potential of  its sustainable oils and fats platform.” According to Jim Mellon, Chairman and Founder of New Agrarian, supply chain fragility is one of the defining risks of our time: “War, climate volatility, and trade disputes are presenting a huge challenge to manufacturers; the ingredients we assumed would always be available are no longer guaranteed. Clean Food Group uses scalable science and technology to build genuine resilience and sustainability into how we produce and source key ingredients for everything from food to cosmetics.  For me, this sits at a rare intersection: a  compelling investment case and a genuine solution to one of the most pressing challenges of our  generation." 

Helical, a biotechnology company developing a virtual AI lab for pharmaceutical research and development, has raised $10 million in seed funding. The round was led by redalpine, with participation from Gradient, BoxGroup, and Frst, alongside angel investors including Aidan Gomez (CEO of Cohere), Clement Delangue (CEO of Hugging Face), and Mario Götze. Founded in early 2024 by Rick Schneider, Maxime Allard, and Mathieu Klop, Helical was established to address a key bottleneck in drug discovery: the limited throughput of physical experimentation. While biological foundation models enable scientists to test hypotheses computationally, many pharmaceutical teams still face challenges in translating model outputs into reproducible and actionable scientific decisions. Helical aims to bridge this gap by providing an application layer that integrates computational predictions with biological validation, enabling more efficient and collaborative research workflows. Its platform functions as a virtual AI lab, designed to transform bio foundation models into reproducible discovery systems. It features two interconnected components: the Virtual Lab, tailored for biologists and translational scientists, and the Model Factory, built for machine learning engineers and data scientists. By operating on shared data, models, and results, the platform facilitates collaboration across traditionally siloed teams and supports evidence-based decision-making throughout the discovery process. According to Rick Schneider, co-founder of Helical, meaningful drug discovery is driven by systems that combine and operationalise model insights rather than by models alone. Pharma teams need a system that turns foundation models into workflows scientists can run, validate, and defend. We built Helical to make in-silico science reproducible at pharma scale, so teams can go from hypothesis to decision in days instead of months. Helical is working with several top-20 global pharmaceutical companies. Across applications such as target identification, biomarker discovery, and therapeutic design, the platform has supported significant reductions in discovery timelines and facilitated expansion into additional therapeutic areas. Operating within an industry characterised by rising research and development costs and extended timelines, Helical seeks to enhance the efficiency and reliability of drug discovery. The newly secured funding will be used to deepen deployments across therapeutic areas with existing clients, expand engagement with additional pharmaceutical organisations, and further develop the platform’s evidence layer to improve performance across diseases.

London HRtech startup TraqCheck has raised $8 million in Series A funding, led by IvyCap Ventures, with participation from IIFL.      Instead of recruiters manually sourcing candidates, screening resumes, and coordinating background checks across fragmented tools, TraqCheck’s agents execute those workflows end-to-end. This creates significant operational efficiencies and eliminates manual errors, which can be costly and reputationally high-risk – particularly when it comes to background checks.     TraqCheck already has nearly 300 enterprise customers globally using its background screening agent Trace, including Randstad Enterprise, Wipro and The Digital College.     The business is also expanding upstream into talent acquisition with new real-time conversational talent sourcing agent, Nina. Nina initiates outreach conversations, qualifies applicants, and introduces vetted talent directly to hiring managers. By taking the administrative burden out of hiring, Nina empowers recruiters and hiring managers to supercharge their productivity and focus their time on the parts of the process that require human interaction and judgement.    According to Jaibir Nihal Singh, Founder and Co-CEO, TraqCheck, recruiting has been stuck in search interfaces and fragmented tools for two decades. “Agents change the interface entirely. Instead of navigating software, you simply tell an AI what role you want to hire for and the system executes the entire workflow. We are building systems that collaborate and make decisions, not just tools that display information.”  He believes that HR departments are moving beyond isolated pilots to truly embedded autonomous agents. “We believe that HR will be one of the earliest operational categories to see full automation. Future hiring teams will rely less on dashboards and more on digital colleagues.”    According to Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner, IvyCap Ventures, the team has demonstrated strong product vision and execution in applying autonomous agents to solve real enterprise challenges in talent acquisition and verification.    IIFL Fintech fund backs companies building deep, defensible infrastructure at the intersection of AI and enterprise workflows. According to Mehekka Oberoi, IIFL Fintech Fund Manager: “The Human Operating System thesis resonates with us deeply: as agentic AI moves from experimentation to production in enterprise environments, companies like TraqCheck that own the full workflow stack — sourcing, screening, verification - are positioned to become category-defining infrastructure.  We are excited to partner with the team as they scale this vision across India and Europe."  The funding will be used to increase UK headcount to 25 and scale its Human Operating System, an infrastructure layer of specialised AI agents designed to streamline HR processes by eliminating tool fragmentation and collaborating as human teams do, among SMBs and enterprises across Europe.  

UK startup StirLight has secured £1.25 million to commercialise its technology and accelerate the adoption of advanced manufacturing processes at scale by major industrial original equipment manufacturers. The company combines friction stir welding expertise with StirSense, a proprietary real-time process-monitoring and quality-assurance platform. StirLight serves R&D engineers and production teams in the nuclear, aerospace, defence, automotive and energy sectors through consulting and contract manufacturing.  Friction stir welding produces stronger, lighter, more repeatable joints than traditional fusion welding, with no filler materials, no shielding gas and significantly lower energy consumption. Adopting the technique enables manufacturers to increase productivity and reduce reliance on a shrinking skilled workforce. While used by leading manufacturers in aerospace, automotive and defence, wider industrial adoption has faced a persistent challenge: the inability to verify weld quality during production. Manufacturers have had to rely instead on costly, time-consuming post-weld inspection. The StirSense proprietary process monitoring platform addresses this directly. It captures and analyses process-specific data to provide in-process anomaly detection and traceable quality records for every joint. StirLight is led by three co-founders: Dr Jeroen De Backer (CTO), Dan Lord CEng (COO) and Toby Savage-Yu (CEO). The funding comprises over £750,000 in pre-seed investment from Haatch Ventures, The British Business Bank, D2N2 and angel investors, alongside approximately £500,000 in grant funding from Innovate UK and The Aerospace Technology Institute (‘ATI’) across two R&D projects. StirLight has been trading since March 2024, building its capability and generating revenue from FSW services and contract manufacturing for clients in the aerospace, automotive and nuclear sectors.  Proceeds will support pilot deployments of StirSense with industrial partners, the creation of highly skilled engineering and data science roles, and the continued development of StirLight’s core technology platform. The Company is actively seeking partnerships with manufacturers in aerospace, automotive, defence and energy who want to integrate real-time quality assurance into their friction stir welding (‘FSW’) operations. According to Toby Savage-Yu, CEO of StirLight, FSW produces some of the best joints in the world. The problem has always been proving it at scale, and that is what StirSense solves: “We are delighted by the support from Innovate UK, ATI, and our pre-seed investors who moved quickly to back this critical technology. We have been building this company over the last two years and the team’s work to get us here has been exceptional.  The team is looking forward to putting this funding to work and showing what UK manufacturing innovation can deliver.” Lead image: The StirLight Team L/R: Toby Savage-Yu, Jeroen De Backer, Alex Bennett, Dan Lord, and Sri Ranga Sai Tulasi.

Graftcode, a Warsaw-based developer platform focused on simplifying software integration, has raised €2.1 million in funding. The round was led by Hard2beat, with participation from DigitalOcean Ventures, Heartfelt Capital, and private investors, including company employees. The investment brings the company’s total funding to €6.5 million and coincides with the launch of the beta version of its platform, aimed at accelerating early developer adoption. Founded in Warsaw by Przemysław and Łukasz Ładyński, who bring more than two decades of experience in enterprise integration technologies, Graftcode addresses a significant challenge for development teams: the time and resources required to connect front-end and back-end systems. This complexity contributes to technical debt and increases project costs, particularly as enterprises adopt AI-driven applications that require seamless communication between services. The company’s solution, runtime bridging, enables applications written in different programming languages to communicate directly without relying on APIs, middleware, or client libraries. With a single command, developers can connect services, automatically generating the necessary client modules. The platform currently supports 14 programming languages and integrates with major cloud providers, covering a wide range of use cases such as web, mobile, IoT-to-cloud, cloud-to-cloud, microservices, and AI-driven interactions. This architecture is designed to improve performance and reduce cloud costs compared with conventional integration methods. Przemysław Ładyński, co-founder and CEO of Graftcode, commented: For two decades, the software industry kept optimising how systems connect rather than questioning whether that complexity should exist at all. We built Graftcode to remove the integration layer entirely, not improve it. Developers can focus purely on business logic, and their systems become immediately ready for AI consumption without any additional work. The newly secured funding will be used to further develop the platform, support its beta rollout, and drive adoption among developers.

Swedish green-tech startup Stegra has secured €1.4bn in rescue funding from a consortium led by the prominent Swedish Wallenberg family, as it looks to finish construction of the world's largest green-steel plant. The funding follows months of negotiations between Stegra and its investors and lenders as the Swedish startup looked to raise additional funding to support its ambition of building the giant plant in Boden, Sweden. The consortium is led by the Swedish business dynasty, the Wallenberg family, which also includes Temasek and IMAS, with the consortium now taking “a leading position in Stegra,” Stegra said, adding that the funding had been agreed "in principle". The green startup said the funding was also supported by Stegra’s existing shareholders, including Altor, as well as Hy24 and Just Climate. Stegra said it now had a “fully funded path to complete the construction and commissioning of its green steel plant”. It said it would now “ramp up” construction of the plant, following several slower months during the funding process. Henrik Henriksson, Stegra’s CEO, said: “This financing reflects the strong conviction in Stegra’s business model among new and existing investors, as well as lenders. It has been achieved in a very challenging macro-environment and reflects the significant efforts of everyone involved, including of course investors and banks, but also the team at Stegra and the extended family of suppliers, customers and other close partners in Boden.”

Obriy AI, a platform for building tools that optimise complex business processes using AI agents, announces the successful raising of $500,000 from N1 Investment Company, an investment firm specialising in supporting early-stage technology startups. Alongside the funding, the parties announce a long-term strategic partnership. Ukrainian startup Obriy AI is building an enterprise-grade, multi-agent AI platform that automates workflows rather than just generating text. Its core product, SURE, combines large language models with knowledge retrieval and orchestration to handle tasks like customer support, legal queries, and internal operations. Instead of a single chatbot, it deploys coordinated AI agents that understand intent, pull relevant data, and execute actions within controlled, compliant environments—positioning it as an AI “operating layer” for business processes. In February, Obriy AI was selected to pilot its technology within Ukraine’s GovTech Lab programme, working alongside the Ministry of Justice to support the country’s Free Legal Aid system. Its SURE platform uses AI agents to interpret citizens’ legal requests, retrieve relevant information from approved knowledge bases, and assist human operators in delivering consistent, timely responses. For Obriy AI, this deal marks its first external funding round, which will accelerate product development, expand the team, and enable entry into international markets.  According to  Viacheslav Shestakovsky, CEO & Co-founder, Obriy AI:   "It was important for us to find not just an investor, but a partner who is strategically engaged in the product's development. N1 understands the AI market, understands our direction, and is ready to accompany us through to the next round. This is exactly the kind of synergy that will allow us to scale globally much faster.” N1 Investment Company focuses on AI, software, and infrastructure technologies, backing teams that build products of global scale. The fund reviews hundreds of startups but invests only in exceptional teams with long-term growth potential. Kyrylo Medvediev, CEO, N1 Investment Company, shared:  "Obriy is an example of a Ukrainian technology team building a global product even under the most challenging conditions. For N1, this deal is not simply an investment; it is a long-term partnership and a belief in the potential of Ukrainian AI companies." The deal encompasses not only financial support but also active collaboration in the strategic development of Obriy AI. N1 plans to assist the company in scaling its product, entering European markets, and building local partnerships there.

Today, Locai Labs, the UK’s sovereign AI company, and Civo, the British sovereign cloud provider, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to undertake Project Mercury. The programme aims to build the UK’s first pre-trained, sovereign LLMs, designed to reclaim British digital autonomy. For a decade, the UK has operated as a "digital tenant," reliant on foreign-owned hyperscale cloud providers and AI model developers for its most sensitive computational needs. These companies are subject to control by their host nation governments, and we have seen them required to remove services from individuals who have criticised these governments.  Last year, Locai Labs launched Locai, a general AI assistant powered by Locai L1-Large, the UK’s first foundational LLM, marking a watershed moment for British technology and the nation’s role in the global AI race. The Mercury Series aims to end this dependency and prove that the UK possesses the talent, the infrastructure, and the vision to develop, train, and host frontier-level AI entirely on home soil. By providing a domestic alternative to foreign infrastructure and AI, Mercury reduces the geopolitical vulnerabilities associated with overseas-controlled data centres and AI models and ensures that British data and the use of AI by UK citizens stay under British jurisdiction. The Mercury Series will be a family of LLMs engineered to meet the stringent security, residency, and compliance requirements of both the public and private sectors. From the secure digitisation of public-sector services to providing a competitive edge for private-sector enterprises in finance, healthcare, and engineering,  These new models will be available from Civo Sovereign Cloud resident in the UK, or deployed and hosted on-premise within an enterprise’s own IT infrastructure. The series will feature a range of models built and trained entirely in the UK: Edge Intelligence: Efficient 0.8-30 billion-parameter models designed for local, low-latency applications. Frontier Power: 256 billion-parameter models capable of handling the most complex generative AI tasks.   This collaboration arrives as the UK government accelerates its investment in domestic AI through the £500 million Sovereign AI Fund.  The Mercury Series is the direct answer to the national goal of making the UK a maker of AI rather than just a taker of AI developed elsewhere. Furthermore, the Mercury Series will be developed using 100 per cent renewable energy, proving that the future of British AI is as sustainable as it is powerful. "This partnership is a pivotal moment for UK AI," said James Drayson, co-Founder and CEO of Locai Labs. "By combining our advanced Mercury model development with Civo’s UK sovereign cloud infrastructure, we’re creating a trusted, homegrown AI ecosystem that meets the highest standards of security, sustainability, and performance. The technology of the future is being built right here. AI’s coming home!" "Together, we are building a local ecosystem by creating a domestic alternative that reduces reliance on foreign-based infrastructure," said Mark Boost, Founder and CEO of Civo.   "This partnership proves the UK can develop, train and host sovereign LLMs entirely on home soil, showing what two UK‑founded companies can deliver for the security and trust of other UK‑based enterprises."

Wamo, a financial operating platform for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), has raised €10 million in a Series A funding round to support its expansion in Italy and the Nordic region, enhance product capabilities, and roll out AI-driven tools. The majority of the funding was provided by TCEE Fund IV, advised by 3TS Capital Partners, a technology-focused growth capital firm investing across Emerging Europe. Oleka Capital and existing investors also participated in the round. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Helsinki and London, Wamo is licensed and regulated by the Finnish Financial Supervisory Authority as a pan-European electronic money institution. The company provides a multi-currency business account integrated with cards, invoicing, expense management, and other embedded financial tools within a unified platform designed for SMEs. In addition to its core financial services, Wamo integrates lending into its platform, using real-time banking, payments, and operational data to enable faster, data-driven underwriting. Commenting on the development, Yanki Önen, Founder of Wamo, said: European SMEs need smarter infrastructure, not just digital banking. We are integrating AI and automation across our platform to reduce friction, unlock better insights and give businesses clearer control over their finances. Wamo’s platform is currently used by more than 15,000 customers across Europe, with adoption having tripled over the past 12 months. Growth has been particularly strong in Southern Europe and the Nordics, with Italy emerging as a key expansion market. The new funding will be used to accelerate geographic expansion, further develop AI-enabled features, and scale the company’s financial services offering, supporting SMEs with accessible financial infrastructure and data-driven tools to facilitate growth and operational efficiency.

The Tech.eu Q1 2026 Report reveals that European tech companies raised €20.2 billion across 855 deals during the first quarter of 2026. Approximately 6.9 per cent of these companies successfully closed seed rounds, amounting to €1.4 billion. Here is the list of the 10 largest seed rounds among European tech companies that were completed in Q1 2026. Amount raised in Q1 2026: $1B AMI (Advanced Machine Intelligence) is a frontier AI research lab developing a new class of systems that understand and interact with the real world. It focuses on building “world models”, AI that can reason, plan, and operate safely across complex physical environments, with applications in areas such as robotics, healthcare, and industrial systems. Founded by a global team of leading researchers and engineers, the company aims to advance reliable, controllable AI and enable real-world intelligence beyond traditional language-based models. AMI raised more than $1 billion in what it describes as Europe’s largest-ever seed funding round. Amount raised in Q1 2026: €40M Onodrim is an Amsterdam-based defence and industrial technology company developing integrated platforms that combine hardware, software, and manufacturing capabilities to strengthen Europe’s defence infrastructure and industrial capacity. Its approach focuses on building interoperable systems across sensing, production, and data networks, aiming to improve readiness, operational efficiency, and cross-border coordination in response to evolving security and industrial challenges. Onodrim Industries raised €40 million in seed funding to accelerate product development and expand manufacturing and R&D capabilities across Europe. Amount raised in Q1 2026: $40M PAVE Space is a Swiss aerospace company developing in-orbit transportation and servicing solutions, centred around its “kickstage” platform designed to move satellites from low Earth orbit to their final destination within 24 hours. The company combines propulsion, navigation, and autonomous systems to enable flexible satellite deployment, as well as future services such as in-orbit inspection, life extension, and space infrastructure operations. PAVE Space raised $40 million in seed funding to develop a new generation of spacecraft designed to move satellites rapidly between orbits. Amount raised in Q1 2026: €15M Hades Mining is a deeptech company developing next-generation drilling and subsurface technologies to unlock geothermal energy and critical minerals from ultra-deep underground resources. Its platform combines advanced techniques such as laser-based drilling and low-impact extraction methods to enable faster, more efficient, and sustainable access to resources that are currently difficult or uneconomical to reach. Hades Mining raised €15 million in seed funding to advance its laser-based drilling technology aimed at making deep hard-rock mining more economical. Amount raised in Q1 2026: €15M ShanX Medtech is a medtech company developing in-vitro diagnostic platforms for rapid antimicrobial susceptibility testing, enabling clinicians to identify the most effective antibiotic directly from patient samples. Its technology delivers results in around one hour, significantly faster than traditional methods, supporting faster, evidence-based treatment decisions and helping combat antimicrobial resistance. ShanX Medtech closed a €15 million seed funding round to support scaling, advance clinical validation, and prepare for market launch. Amount raised in Q1 2026: $16.5M Interloom is an enterprise software company developing an AI-powered “navigation system for work” that maps how teams actually operate and turns organisational knowledge into structured, reusable workflows. Its platform captures insights from documents, conversations, and processes to guide decision-making and enable AI agents to automate tasks based on real operational experience rather than rigid, pre-defined workflows. Interloom raised $16.5 million to advance its AI agent memory platform and expand enterprise automation capabilities. Amount raised in Q1 2026: $15M Zepo is a cybersecurity platform focused on human risk management, helping organisations detect, simulate, and respond to social engineering threats in real time. Its AI-driven system combines threat detection, behavioural analytics, and personalised training to reduce employee-related security risks and improve overall resilience against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. Zepo Intelligence secured $15 million to advance the company’s efforts to strengthen human risk management on a global scale. Amount raised in Q1 2026: $14.5M Plato is a Berlin-based AI software company that provides a sales intelligence and workflow automation platform designed for wholesale distributors, integrating directly with existing ERP systems to enhance sales processes. Its platform uses AI-driven insights and automation to identify sales opportunities, reduce manual tasks, and enable more proactive, data-driven decision-making across B2B sales teams. Plato raised $14.5 million to scale its AI platform for distributors internationally, starting with its sales intelligence offering. Amount raised in Q1 2026: €11M Oska Health is a digital health company that provides AI-supported coaching and virtual care tools to help patients manage chronic conditions such as kidney disease, diabetes, and hypertension between medical visits. Its platform combines human health coaches with data-driven insights and behavioural support to improve treatment adherence, reduce complications, and enable continuous care outside traditional clinical settings. Oska Health raised €11 million in seed funding to scale its continuous care model for high-risk, chronically ill patients. Amount raised in Q1 2026: $12M Chiral is a Swiss deeptech company developing high-precision manufacturing equipment for integrating nanomaterials into next-generation semiconductor and quantum devices at an industrial scale. Its proprietary robotic nanoassembly technology enables reliable, scalable placement of materials such as carbon nanotubes and graphene onto chips, unlocking higher-performance electronics beyond traditional silicon-based approaches. Chiral secured $12 million in seed funding to support the commercialisation of its robotic platform for wafer-scale integration of nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes and graphene.

Peak Quantum, a Munich-based quantum computing startup, has raised €2.2 million in pre-seed funding to advance its superconducting quantum processor technology and establish a European pilot manufacturing line. The round was led by Cloudberry Ventures, with participation from United Founders, QAI Ventures, Golden Egg Check, and several business angels with industry experience. Including public support, such as funding from the EU Chips Act, the company’s total funding now exceeds €5 million. Founded in 2024, Peak Quantum is a spin-off from the Walther-Meißner-Institute (WMI), part of the Technical University of Munich. Established by scientists and experienced entrepreneurs, the company integrates expertise in chip design, fabrication, and system integration. Peak Quantum’s technological approach focuses on developing quantum bits (qubits) with intrinsic error resilience at the hardware level. While conventional quantum processors rely heavily on complex post-processing error correction, the company’s architecture integrates error protection directly into the physical design of the qubits, reducing system complexity and supporting the development of practically usable quantum computers. The quantum computing industry has focused for too long on scaling the number of qubits. But more qubits do not help if each individual one is unreliable. We are developing processors where error resilience is an intrinsic physical property of the hardware itself, said Leon Koch, CEO of Peak Quantum. A key element of the company’s roadmap is its involvement in the planned SUPREME European quantum chip pilot line under the EU Chips Act. Peak Quantum has been selected to operate the facility, with operations scheduled to begin in April 2026. The initiative is intended to support the development and manufacturing of quantum chips in Europe. The new capital will be used to further develop error-resilient superconducting qubits and to support the establishment of the European pilot production line.

Across Europe, millions of heat and hot-water metres accurately measure consumption every day. Many have been in the field for a decade or more, performing their metrological function with high reliability. By 2027, a significant portion of this infrastructure will fail to meet a new regulatory requirement. Not because the sensing is wrong, but because the telemetry is missing. The EU Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) mandates that heat and hot-water metres in existing buildings must support remote reading by 2027, with monthly consumption reporting to residents wherever remote infrastructure is in place. For engineering and operations teams, the challenge is choosing the most resilient path to compliance. In most real-world deployments, that path is not mass hardware replacement. It is a retrofit of the communication layer, adding transmission capability to metres that already measure correctly. The distinction is technical and consequential. The compliance gap is in connectivity, not measurement technology The EED's requirement is specific: remotely readable data. Any metre that cannot provide it must either be replaced or retrofitted to do so. For the large share of existing installations that already measure accurately, retrofitting the communication layer is sufficient for compliance. This allows for a clean architectural separation between the physical metre and the communication layer, a distinction with significant implications for compliance costs and infrastructure longevity. The overwhelming majority of legacy heat and hot-water metres already transmit data over wireless M-Bus (wM-Bus), the dominant short-range radio standard in European utility deployments. A smaller share uses wired M-Bus interfaces or pulse outputs. In all cases, the metres carry accurate, calibrated readings. What they often lack is the infrastructure to push that data upstream without a physical visit. A retrofit concentrator attached to the building's existing meter population collects and forwards those signals without touching any calibrated measuring component. Transmission upstream can be handled via several standardised protocols depending on installation density, building topology, and backhaul requirements. NB-IoT is well-suited for sparse or geographically distributed installations where cellular coverage is reliable, and gateway density is insufficient. The choice of backhaul protocol is an engineering decision, not a product decision, and an interoperable data concentrator handles both. Managing protocol heterogeneity at the edge The primary engineering obstacle in European urban digitalisation is rarely the metres themselves. It is the patchwork of mixed-manufacturer and mixed-generation hardware accumulated over decades. A typical residential building might contain heat meters from three different manufacturers, two different communication standards, and a 15-year generation gap between the newest and oldest units. This heterogeneity creates data silos that no single-vendor replacement programme can cleanly eliminate. The technical solution is a protocol-agnostic data concentrator: a device that operates above the metre layer, collecting signals from diverse devices and translating them into a unified data stream for the central head-end system (HES). Rather than forcing the metre estate to conform to a single standard, the concentrator absorbs the complexity at the edge. Adherence to Open Metering System (OMS) standards at the concentrator level is the key to making this architecture durable. OMS defines an open, manufacturer-independent protocol stack for utility metering communication across Europe. By conforming to OMS at the gateway layer, operators ensure that the site's connectivity infrastructure remains decoupled from any individual metre vendor's roadmap. The practical consequence is that metres can be replaced, extended, or sourced from different suppliers without requiring changes to the data collection layer above them. This is not just a procurement convenience. It is a structural defence against vendor lock-in, a scenario that has proven costly for utilities that standardised on proprietary systems in earlier smart metre rollouts and found themselves unable to source compatible hardware when those vendors changed terms, exited markets, or were acquired. Architectural resilience and OTA firmware management A dedicated communication layer offers an operational capability that embedded metre firmware cannot: over-the-air (OTA) updates across the entire deployed fleet. For infrastructure of this kind, this is not a convenience feature. It is a fundamental requirement for long-term viability. The threat landscape for connected utility infrastructure will not remain static. New vulnerabilities will be identified. Regional radio regulations will evolve. The EN 13757 standard governing wM-Bus communication has already been revised multiple times since its first publication, and further updates are expected as the installed base grows. Hardware that cannot receive remote firmware updates will require physical intervention for each of these changes, a cost that compounds significantly across large deployments. ACRIOS Systems develops both hardware and firmware internally, making OTA update capability a core design requirement for its concentrator platform rather than an afterthought. The closed loop between hardware design and firmware development allows the company to push verified updates across deployed fleets without compatibility uncertainty. Proven at scale in high-density environments The technical feasibility of this retrofit architecture has been validated in one of the most demanding deployment environments in Central and Eastern Europe: Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, with a residential population of over 500,000. For a network of this scale, zero field visits for firmware maintenance result in a total cost of ownership (TCO) profile that diverges significantly from that of static hardware over a multi-year lifecycle. The city required a unified data collection infrastructure capable of reading metres across a heterogeneous installed base with multiple manufacturers, multiple protocols, and no uniform baseline. ACRIOS delivered 10,000 data concentrators to the project, each capable of serving up to 800 individual metres. The infrastructure now collects consumption data from hundreds of thousands of residential units continuously and automatically, without field visits. The deployment directly addressed the installation bottleneck. Every unit shipped pre-configured: customer SIM cards loaded, settings applied, installation materials included. Field teams could commission hardware without specialist radio or networking knowledge at each site. The full rollout was completed within five months, a timeline that reflects both logistics discipline and the maturity of the plug-and-play approach. The density conditions in Vilnius, with its multi-storey residential blocks, mixed construction materials, and high device counts per building, are representative of the urban housing stock that EED compliance must address across Europe. The concentrator architecture mitigated radio interference and signal collisions typical of these environments without degrading data-collection reliability. What the data layer enables beyond compliance Meeting the 2027 deadline is the minimum requirement. The greater value of a well-designed remote metering infrastructure lies in what it enables operationally once the data is flowing. For building operators, the elimination of physical metre access removes the single most common source of billing delays and estimated readings. A single inaccessible flat in a stairwell can cascade into deferred reconciliations across an entire building. Remote reading removes that dependency at the root. For residents, monthly reporting as required by the directive enables behavioural change that annual billing cannot. Consumption anomalies, visible within weeks rather than at year-end, allow for earlier intervention on leaks, faulty equipment, or unexplained increases. The feedback loop tightens from 12 months to 30 days. For grid operators and infrastructure planners, granular and continuous consumption data at the building level feeds directly into demand forecasting, load balancing, and the kind of infrastructure investment modelling that regulators across the EU are increasingly requiring as part of national energy efficiency reporting obligations. The architecture decision determines the cost curve The 2027 deadline is fixed. The cost of reaching it is not, and the variance between a replacement-first and a retrofit-first strategy is large enough to be a strategic decision rather than simply a procurement one. For most existing European buildings, the metering hardware is not the problem. The metres work. The calibration is valid. The gap is in the communication stack, and filling that gap with a well-specified, OMS-compliant, OTA-capable concentrator layer costs a fraction of a like-for-like hardware replacement. It also avoids the disruption of accessing every metered unit, decertifying installed equipment, and reconfiguring billing systems around new device identifiers. The infrastructure to do this exists, works at the city scale, and can be deployed without discarding what has already been built. The question for utilities and building operators approaching 2027 is not whether the retrofit model is technically viable. The Vilnius deployment makes a strong case for that. The question is whether the right architectural decision is made early enough to be properly deployed. About ACRIOS Systems ACRIOS Systems is a Czech technology company specialising in hardware and software development for smart metering, IoT, and energy management. The company designs and manufactures its own OMS-compliant hardware and firmware in-house, delivering robust, scalable, and interoperable solutions for cities, utilities, and industry across Europe. For more information, visit ACRIOS Systems.

Convelio, a technology-enabled fine art logistics and storage company, has secured a Series C investment to expand its AI-powered logistics and collections management services for the global art and antiques market. The round was led by a prominent French entrepreneurial dynasty with strong ties to the international art sector, with participation from existing investors Forestay, Mundi Ventures, and Acton Capital. The financial terms of the investment were not disclosed. Founded in 2017, Convelio seeks to modernise an industry that remains largely under-digitised despite its scale. The company combines proprietary algorithms and AI-driven technology with the operational expertise of specialist fine art handlers to deliver more efficient and transparent shipping and storage solutions. Its platform enables end-to-end shipment management, real-time tracking, and AI-powered inventory visibility, addressing longstanding challenges such as opaque pricing, limited oversight of stored collections, and fragmented logistics processes. Convelio serves around 3,000 art businesses globally and has been appointed a global logistics provider for Phillips, supporting integrated post-sale services across major art markets. Edouard Gouin, co-founder and CEO of Convelio, commented: The art world has a tricky relationship with AI, with participants more inclined to view it as an existential threat than as a potent economic ally. For us at Convelio, that distrust is wildly misplaced. AI’s biggest contribution to art will not be to replace human artistic endeavour with cheap, quick AI-generated alternatives. It will lie in its ability to make the mechanisms of access, circulation and collection management more seamless, for the benefit of a wider community of collectors, art lovers and institutions. By leveraging AI to automate processes such as quotation generation and workflow coordination, Convelio has reduced administrative overhead and enhanced operational efficiency. These capabilities enable the company to provide a more integrated and transparent logistics experience, supporting the continued evolution of the global art market. The new funding will support the acceleration of Convelio’s hybrid growth strategy, including further development of its AI-led technology and the expansion of its global storage infrastructure. The company plans to launch additional specialist storage facilities, including a flagship warehouse in New York, complementing its existing sites in London and Paris, both of which reached operational breakeven within their first year.

Kelluu, a Finnish deeptech company operating the world’s largest autonomous airship fleet, has raised €15 million in Series A funding. The round was led by the NATO Innovation Fund, marking its first investment in a Finnish company. Additional participation came from Keen Venture Partners, GungnirCapital, and Tesi. The funding follows Kelluu’s successful completion of two phases of NATO’s DIANA (Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic) programme. Kelluu designs, manufactures, and operates autonomous hydrogen-powered airships that provide persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities. The company’s unmanned fleet delivers continuous monitoring and high-resolution data collection across vast and remote areas, enabling earlier threat detection and more efficient operations. The airships are designed for silent, low-emission operation in challenging environments. By combining long-endurance persistence with high-precision sensing, Kelluu’s technology addresses a critical gap between satellites and drones. While satellites offer broad coverage and drones provide detailed imagery, both face operational limitations related to endurance, weather resilience, and regulatory constraints. Kelluu’s platform enables missions exceeding 12 hours and supports multiple sensing modalities, delivering real-time, ultra-high-quality imagery. Five airships operating from a single base can cover up to 30,000 square kilometres. We built Kelluu at the edge of Europe, in one of the hardest operating environments outside conflict zones, because we believe that persistent aerial intelligence would become critical infrastructure - not just for defence, but for the resilience of entire countries, said Janne Hietala, CEO of Kelluu. Founded as a dual-use company, Kelluu’s technology also supports civilian applications, including forestry monitoring, meteorology, smart-city sensing, and the protection of critical infrastructure. These capabilities enable the creation of high-resolution digital twins and provide cost advantages compared with traditional manned aviation. The new funding will be used to further optimise Kelluu’s technology, scale operations, and expand deployment of its autonomous airship fleet. The company is also advancing its long-term vision through Kelluu AI Labs, which aims to develop geospatial foundation models for the physical environment, supporting applications in defence, infrastructure resilience, and environmental monitoring. With increasing investment in European defence capabilities and a growing need for persistent aerial intelligence, Kelluu is well-positioned to contribute to strengthening security and resilience across both military and civilian domains.

Replenit, an AI decision engine for retail that turns customer signals into real-time, individualised decisions, has raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed funding round. The round was co-led by Movens Capital and Vastpoint, with participation from Logo Ventures, DigitalOcean Ventures, Finberg, Caucasus Ventures, and angel investor Mati Staniszewski, CEO and co-founder of ElevenLabs.  By adding a reasoning layer on top of existing data and orchestration systems, Replenit helps retailers improve retention, increase revenue, and deliver more relevant customer experiences. Developed with PhD-level AI researchers, the system interprets behavioural signals as indicators of intent and context, enabling retailers to decide what action to take in each moment rather than reacting to past events. Unlike a rules-based automation engine, it determines what each customer needs in real time. Then, selects the most relevant actions at scale based on analysis that more closely resembles human thinking than other standard retail AI models. This results in customer experiences that feel genuinely personalised rather than downstream of mass marketing. Ilyas Kurklu, Co-founder and CEO of Replenit, said: “Retailers can no longer rely on prediction alone. They need to understand intent, reason in context, and decide what to do next for each individual customer. Most AI tools today focus on efficiency or content generation, but the real challenge is decision-making. Replenit improves the quality of every commercial decision, helping retailers move from static rules to real-time, AI-driven actions that directly drive revenue. Our vision is to define a new standard for retail intelligence”. Replenit integrates with existing infrastructure  — including Databricks, Salesforce, Braze, Bloomreach, and Klaviyo —  adding an intelligence layer that drives stronger retention, repeat purchases, and greater value from existing data. The practical effect for retailers is significant increase in revenue, without increasing the volume of generalist campaigns. L’Occitane en Provence recorded a 235 per cent increase in post-purchase revenue after deploying Replenit’s engine. iBOOD, one of Europe’s best-known flash-deal retailers, now attributes 6.3 per cent of total company revenue to Replenit-driven decisions. Every contract includes an explicit 10× ROI guarantee with a contractual exit clause if results are not delivered. To date, no customer has invoked it. Lukasz Lewandowski, Investment Director at Movens Capital, said: "Retailers are sitting on tons of customer data, but very few can turn it into real-time decisions that drive revenue. Replenit is building the AI layer that closes that gap, helping brands act at the exact moment a customer is ready to buy again. With a team that has already scaled global martech platforms and early proof with major retailers, we believe Replenit has the potential to define a new category in retail infrastructure." Founded by entrepreneurs with experience scaling a martech company to unicorn status, Replenit is already working with more than 30 enterprise retailers globally within its first year. Replenit was founded by six Turkish entrepreneurs with more than 40 years of combined experience scaling B2B SaaS and martech companies internationally, including to unicorn level. Headquartered in Warsaw, the company chose Poland as its base to tap into one of Europe’s strongest engineering hubs and fastest-growing economies, with additional technical operations in the Netherlands. Replenit's story reflects a broader trend. Poland has long attracted founders from Ukraine and Belarus, entrepreneurs seeking stability and access to the EU market. Increasingly, teams from Turkey and the Baltic states are choosing Warsaw as their European base. Karolina Kukiłka, Partner at Vastpoint, said: “Higher diversity of talent is one of the keys to Poland’s long-term success as a technology hub. The Replenit team combines ambition, exceptional customer success, and operational efficiency, which made it an easy investment decision.” The $2.5 million round will support further product development, AI research, and the growth of operations and engineering teams in Poland and the Netherlands. Replenish also plans to expand its US presence and establish a local team before the end of 2026.