UK agentic AI startup Superbo has secured a strategic investment from Deep Capital Group. Superbo’s platform enables organisations to streamline operations and unlock efficiency through AI agents and cognitive flows. Through its Opero Suite, Nova, Solo and Aeon, the company turns enterprise knowledge into intelligent dialogue, connects APIs and systems into seamless cognitive workflows and deploys autonomous agents that deliver measurable outcomes, rewiring the operating models of businesses, instead of just adding new systems. According to Demetri Papazissis, CEO and co‑founder of Superbo: “At Superbo, we believe that conversation is just the beginning, true transformation happens when AI agents can act, drawing on enterprise knowledge and systems to drive outcomes.  Partnering with Deep Capital is like harnessing the energy of a supernova. Its experience in scaling technology companies and its visionary leadership will allow us to accelerate our Opero roadmap, hire exceptional talent and bring our agentic vision to more businesses worldwide.” Founded by Dimitris Maris following the successful creation and expansion of Kaizen Gaming International, Deep Capital Group is an international investment group overseeing a diverse portfolio of assets, across multiple geographies.  The investment will accelerate enterprise adoption of Agentic AI‑powered intelligence and scale Superbo’s operations across EMEA and the US. Beyond capital, Deep Capital will provide strategic guidance and access to its extensive network across technology, media and gaming. Lead image: Demetri Papazissis and Agis Stathakis from Superbo. Photo: uncredited. 

UK healthtech platform MANUAL has acquired FORMEL SKIN, Germany’s largest digital dermatology provider. Together, the companies will form one of Europe’s fastest-growing healthtech groups, united by a bold vision: to build the world’s leading unified health platform.  Since its founding in 2019, FORMEL SKIN has offered patients expert guidance, personalised treatments, and long-term support through a digital platform that bridges the gap between medical expertise and everyday life.  Today, FORMEL SKIN has provided over 2 million treatments and is one of Europe’s fastest-growing health techs, with tens of thousands of monthly users. The company set the standard for digital dermatological care in Europe through partnerships with leading European universities and treatment journeys that show more than 90 per cent improvement in treatment outcomes. Headquartered in Berlin with a team of 125 employees, the company has become a trusted name in dermatology, empowering patients to take control of their skin health from home.  By joining MANUAL, FORMEL SKIN will accelerate its mission and expand beyond dermatology, delivering better outcomes for patients across a broader range of conditions and markets.  “This acquisition is the most important milestone in FORMEL SKIN’s journey,” said Florian Semler, Founder and CEO of FORMEL SKIN. “For six years, we’ve been on a mission to make dermatology more accessible and to build a platform that serves millions of patients. From humble beginnings, FORMEL SKIN has grown into Europe’s leading digital dermatology provider. Now, we’re ready to take the next leap. Together with MANUAL, we are excited to go beyond dermatology and build the world’s leading global health platform." "We’re deeply impressed by FORMEL SKIN’s achievements since its founding in 2019 and enthusiastic about the company’s future growth potential,” said George Pallis, Founder and CEO of MANUAL. Under a new brand VOY, the company will launch Germany’s most advanced, medically supervised weight loss program, combining personalised, clinically proven treatments with comprehensive lifestyle and behavioural support. 

In schools, digital learning has become part of everyday life. Students turn to apps for homework help, explanations, and practice. At the same time, maths and STEM get special attention, with playful games, interactive tools, and even smart toys helping younger learners build confidence and skills. For adults, learning is increasingly tied to work and career shifts. Intensive coding and tech programmes help people move into software, data, and AI roles, while companies invest in platforms that train and upskill their employees continuously. Across all of this, AI runs through the ecosystem as a common layer: shaping content, adapting difficulty, giving feedback, and personalising the learning path. And while many solutions are born in specific countries or regions, they increasingly think and operate at a European scale, expanding across borders, but still tuned to local languages, school systems, and regulations. The following are the ten largest funding rounds in the European edtech industry during the first half of 2025. Amount raised in H1 2025: €240M AMBOSS is a digital medical-education and reference platform created by physicians to support medical students, residents, and clinicians worldwide. It provides a comprehensive Knowledge Library, a high-yield Qbank for exam preparation (including USMLE, COMLEX, Shelf exams), a rich set of clinical-decision tools (like drug databases, differential diagnosis support, management checklists), and integrations for study tools and mobile access. Founded in 2012, AMBOSS has a mission to “empower all medical professionals to provide the best possible care” by distilling medical knowledge into a single accessible, evidence-based platform. In March, AMBOSS secured €240 million to strengthen medical knowledge and support healthcare professionals. Amount raised in H1 2025: €27M Knowunity is an AI-powered learning platform, originally founded in 2020 in Germany, with the mission to revolutionise education globally by making personalised learning accessible to all students. It combines a vast library of user-generated study materials, such as summaries, notes, flashcards and quizzes, with an AI “study companion” that delivers individualised tutoring, tailored study plans, interactive quizzes, and homework help across many subjects. Knowunity serves tens of millions of students across multiple countries, helping them study more efficiently, prepare for exams, and access peer-generated learning resources whenever and wherever they need them. In June, Knowunity raised €27 million to scale its personalised AI tutor globally. Amount raised in H1 2025: $25M Attensi is a Norwegian company that delivers AI-powered, gamified simulation training and corporate learning solutions. The platform uses immersive 3D simulations, realistic role-play scenarios with virtual humans, and behavioural-science-backed gamification to help organisations worldwide train employees in skills like onboarding, sales, leadership, compliance, and customer service, often achieving higher engagement, faster learning, and stronger retention than traditional training. Attensi serves clients across diverse industries and operates globally, with content available in dozens of languages and deployments in 150+ countries. Attensi secured over $25 million in growth funding in May for gamified training solutions. Amount raised in H1 2025: €16.5M doinstruct is a German company that builds a mobile-first, multilingual training and compliance platform for frontline workers across industries. It enables businesses to deliver onboarding, training and compliance content (e.g. safety, hygiene, standard operating procedures) to employees on any device. Trainings can be automatically assigned and tracked, and companies can even upload their own content or use doinstruct’s existing library, all while staying GDPR-compliant and using secure hosting. In March, doinstruct secured €16.5 million to help companies navigate growing regulatory complexity. Amount raised in H1 2025: €10M Didask is a SaaS e-learning company that aims to revolutionise corporate and organisational training by combining artificial intelligence with insights from cognitive science. Their platform lets any subject-matter expert, regardless of pedagogical background, quickly convert raw content (slides, PDFs, text) into engaging, effective training modules. Using their proprietary “Instructional AI,” Didask automates course design (sequencing, layout, quizzes, simulations, micro-learning, etc.) and tailors learning paths to individual learners, supporting onboarding, upskilling, soft skills education, compliance, product knowledge, and more. In May, Didask secured €10 million to scale its AI- and cognitive science-driven e-learning platform, with plans to accelerate international expansion and launch a new tool focused on informal workplace learning. Amount raised in H1 2025: €7M ubiMaster is a German company that offers on-demand, unlimited online tutoring and learning support to students via chat or video. Through its mobile app, students (from grade 5 onwards, including vocational and secondary school students) can get help in core subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, German, English, and more, anytime they need it, without needing to schedule or travel. ubiMaster partners with employers, banks, and other institutions to offer its tutoring services as an employee benefit, helping families balance work, school, and learning while expanding access to education through institutional support. In April, ubiMaster raised €7 million to expand its presence in Germany and to support international growth and the development of additional educational products. Amount raised in H1 2025: €5.9M Bethink Group is a Poland-based e-learning company that operates multiple brands reshaping how students learn, especially in medicine, med-prep and effective learning. Using its own custom technology and evidence-based teaching methods, Bethink delivers cutting-edge online courses and learning experiences to tens of thousands of learners each year, with a strong presence in the medical education market. Bethink secured €5.9 million in February to expand e-learning platforms and prepare for global growth. Amount raised in H1 2025: €4.2M Alice.tech is a Copenhagen-based EdTech startup that offers an AI-powered study platform designed to help students learn faster, retain knowledge better, and prepare more effectively for exams. By uploading their course materials (e.g. lecture slides, PDFs, textbooks), students get automatically generated notes, structured summaries, flashcards, quizzes, exam-style practice, and adaptive study paths tailored to their individual learning needs. Alice.tech also supports collaboration through study groups and offers educators tools to integrate AI-powered learning and track student progress, while preserving control over course materials and maintaining academic integrity. In May, Alice.tech secured €4.2 million to redefine how students learn and succeed – at scale. Amount raised in H1 2025: £3.5M HowNow is a London-based edtech company that offers an AI-powered learning and upskilling platform designed to help organisations train, develop, and support their teams efficiently. Their platform acts as both a Learning Experience Platform (LXP) and a Learning Management System (LMS): it allows companies to create, curate, deliver, and track learning content, from onboarding and compliance training to upskilling and continuous development. With built-in content libraries, AI-driven skills mapping, and integrations into everyday business tools (Slack, MS Teams, etc.), HowNow ensures learning is accessible “in the flow of work,” helping employees acquire skills where and when they need them. In February, HowNow raised £3.5 million to accelerate product development and further integrate AI. Amount raised in H1 2025: €3.5M BRUM Patenti is an Italian digital driving school that modernises the licensing process by offering a fully online, flexible alternative to traditional driving schools. Through its app, users can register, access official theory materials, complete ministerial-quiz practice, book driving lessons, upload required documents, and track progress, all from home. BRUM takes care of the bureaucracy (medical visit, paperwork, exam registration) and lets learners choose when and where to study and take lessons, making the path to a driving licence more convenient and transparent. Brum raised €3.5 million in March to expand its service to new cities, enhance its technology, scale its operations, and strengthen its network of qualified instructors.

Two experienced entrepreneurs are launching an early-stage European "venture studio", which will invest in startups it co-founds as it looks to unearth the hot industrial AI companies of tomorrow.Founded by Kostas Fetfatsidis, a mechanical engineer turned entrepreneur, and Dimitrios Kourtesis, a founder, investor, and engineer, the new entity is called The Flywheel and is billing itself as a “venture studio”.Based in Thessaloniki, Greece, The Flywheel co-founds startups from scratch, providing co-founding partnership, operational support, and up to €300,000 in initial investment per company.  It will invest in startups across manufacturing and supply chain, defence and security, and energy and sustainability. In contrast to traditional early-stage venture capital funds, which typically invest after a startup has been founded, staffed, and acquired its first customers, The Flywheel starts earlier, co-creating startups around the technical or business expertise that founders bring to the table. Other venture studios exist in Europe but are usually generalist in their investment strategies.The. Flywheel is now recruiting for five Founder-in-Residence (FiR) positions, who will research a specific industrial AI venture concept. If successful, The Flywheel invests up to €300,000 in the startup.It is backed by a diverse group of private investors, including US-based entrepreneurs with European roots, tech founders who have scaled and exited startups, experienced business angels, and European industrial enterprises."Europe is a global engine of scientific and technical skill, yet we face a massive chasm between this world-class talent and the scalable, sustainable companies needed to secure our future," said Fetfatsidis. “The Flywheel venture studio is designed to bridge that chasm.” “By acting as a co-founder, providing early risk capital, and continued operational support through the growth phases of our ventures, we are building the on-ramp for Europe’s best engineers, operators and researchers to build the next generation of industrial AI champions," said Kourtesis.

London-based Curvestone AI has raised $4 million in seed funding led by MTech Capital, with participation from Boost Capital Partners, D2 Fund, and Portfolio Ventures. The company addresses a key challenge that most AI tools fail to solve in financial and professional services: making automation reliably accurate at scale. While individual AI tasks may achieve accuracy levels above 98 per cent, in complex multi-step workflows this small error rate can compound, with overall accuracy dropping to around 30–40 per cent by the twelfth step. Curvestone AI’s technology is designed to maintain stable performance at each stage, delivering dependable automation for document-intensive workflows commonly found in regulated industries. The platform is compatible with all major large language models and integrates with existing systems, such as CRMs, document management tools, and loan origination software, without requiring changes to current workflows. Its no-code configuration enables operations teams to adapt processes as regulations evolve, without needing engineering support. Curvestone AI works with organisations across law, mortgage services, and wealth management, including Stephenson Harwood, Browne Jacobson, Walker Morris, and Pivotal Growth, and is now expanding into the insurance sector. According to Dawid Kotur, co-founder and CEO of Curvestone AI, regulated industries have long struggled to balance quality with the ability to scale: You can review everything and go broke, or cut corners and hope for the best. AI that actually works changes that equation by handling routine validation at scale while humans focus on the complex cases that need expert judgment. With the new funding, Curvestone AI plans to accelerate product development and broaden its go-to-market efforts, expanding its library of validated workflows and strengthening its position as a reliable automation layer for agentic AI in regulated industries.

Paris-based Spark Cleantech has closed a €30 million Series A funding round (including €17 million in equity). The round was led by 360 Capital and Taranis, with participation from the Île-de-France Reindustrialisation Fund (initiated by the Île-de-France Region and operated by Innovacom), alongside Asterion Ventures, the company’s long-standing investor. Founded in 2022 in the laboratories of CentraleSupélec by Erwan Pannier and Patrick Peters, Spark Cleantech is a deeptech company focused on decarbonising heavy industries such as glassmaking, metallurgy, polymers, and batteries. The company has developed a patented process based on pulsed plasmolysis that replaces fossil-fuel combustion in high-temperature industrial furnaces and materials production with an alternative that is fully decarbonised, economically competitive, and requires minimal changes to existing operations. Spark Cleantech’s modules are installed between a client’s existing gas network and their high-temperature industrial burners. Using pulsed plasma, the technology removes carbon from the gas before combustion, leaving hydrogen as a fully decarbonised energy source. The extracted carbon is converted into a solid nanomaterial used in polymers and battery production, replacing a petroleum-derived material with a significantly higher carbon footprint. This approach relies on proprietary pulsed plasmolysis technology, initially invented at Stanford University, further developed at CentraleSupélec, and industrialised by Spark Cleantech in France. It reduces the energy required for separation while generating a high-value carbon nanomaterial. In practice, the process converts a hydrocarbon, without combustion, into two decarbonised materials, hydrogen and solid carbon, whose combined economic value is increased by a factor of four, while reducing emissions by up to 85 per cent. Spark Cleantech’s technology is currently being piloted with major customers in metallurgy, glassmaking, polymer production, and battery manufacturing. The new investment will support Spark Cleantech’s next phase of growth, allowing the company to complete and operate its first production module before rolling it out across customer sites. It will also fund the qualification of Spark Cleantech’s first commercial carbon grades, one of the two outputs of its pulsed plasmolysis process. In addition, the team will expand by around 20 new hires across commercial operations, engineering, and R&D.

French customer relationship management (CRM) company Brevo has become a unicorn following a €500m funding round.The funding round sees General Atlantic and Oakley Capital joining Brevo’s roster of investors while Bpifrance and Bridgepoint remain minority investors, with the latter reinvesting via Bridgepoint Development Capital V.  The round sees Partech fully exiting its stake while Brevo’s management and employees are now the company’s largest shareholders.Brevo did not disclose its exact valuation following the round but said it had now achieved unicorn status, valued at least at $1bn.Brevo previously raised a $35m Series A and $163m Series B, in rounds where its valuation was not publicly disclosed.The Paris-headquartered company says it will use the funds to pursue further M&A, having banked 11 acquisitions since its inception, while investment in its growing US market has also been earmarked. Brevo employs over 1,000 people and has seven offices around the world, including in Paris, Berlin, Sofia and Austin.Founded in 2012, Brevo began life as an email marketing startup targeting small businesses. But it has broadened its offering to become an all-in-one CRM and marketing platform, helping businesses manage their relationships with their customer base by unifying their communication channels.It is seen as a challenger to US heavyweights like Salesforce and Hubspot. It has more than 600,000 customers, including eBay, H&M, Louis Vuitton and Carrefour.Sascha Günther, managing director, General Atlantic, added: “We see strong secular tailwinds in AI-driven customer engagement software platforms that serve SMBs and mid-market clients. "Brevo is uniquely positioned at the centre of this shift with a product-led, capital-efficient foundation, and a visionary founder in Armand. We’re excited to support Brevo in becoming a global category leader.” Thomas Moussallieh, partner, Bridgepoint, said: “Brevo’s journey over the past five years has been extraordinary. Together, we’ve scaled the business internationally, expanded its capabilities, and built a platform that now leads its category in Europe."

London-based Hypercritical has raised £2 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate development of its foundation model and expand its engineering team. The round was led by Join Capital, with participation from Octopus Ventures, Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company (tiny.vc), and Plug and Play. Hypercritical is a deeptech company that develops machine learning models to generate fully correct control software for safety- and mission-critical systems. Using a novel, logic-driven architecture that eliminates hallucinations and errors, it enables engineers in sectors such as automotive, aerospace, defence, and robotics to design and deploy control systems more quickly and cost-effectively, with mathematically guaranteed reliability. Instead of writing code directly, engineers define the tests a system must satisfy, and Hypercritical’s AI automatically generates algorithms that meet all of them, enabling fully automated control development for highly demanding physical systems. Its Copilots deliver immediately usable, domain-specific output, while its Autopilot produces unsupervised software that passes 100% of tests. This results in software generation that is significantly faster, more cost-efficient, and mathematically precise, essential in industries where errors are unacceptable. Hypercritical aims to make its technology the benchmark for generating control software in safety- and mission-critical systems, and ultimately envisions its methods being incorporated into ISO standards to help modernise global software certification and compliance. The company’s flagship product, Hyperpilot, is already in use by engineering teams to automate the development of systems that rely on control software. In parallel, key components of its technology stack, including domain-specific “copilots” such as a QA engineer and a systems engineer, have been deployed with customers, demonstrating its applicability in real-world, safety-critical environments. Following the raise, Hypercritical plans to double its team, with funds primarily allocated to hiring and to cloud compute for training its proprietary model. Image: Freepik

Track Titan, an AI-powered motorsport tracking platform, has raised a $5 million seed round co-led by Partech and Game Changers Ventures, the fund led by Alpine F1 co-owner Roger Ehrenberg. The round also includes participation from investors such as Colton Parayko, Trevoh Chalobah, Sequel, Martin Hoffmann, and Emmanuel Tahar. Existing investor APX, a joint venture between Axel Springer SE and Porsche AG, also participated, increasing its previous pre-seed investment. Motorsport represents a sizable global market, with more than 1 billion fans worldwide, over 190 million people playing console and PC-based racing games each month, and more than 90 million hobby drivers visiting race tracks. Track Titan aims to serve this broad audience by positioning itself as a digital coaching and community platform for motorsport enthusiasts, by providing an AI-powered coaching and community solution for gamers and drivers of all ability levels. Founded in 2021 by gamer-turned-professional racer Max Teichert, who launched his racing career after success in the Gran Turismo Academy, the company focuses on making the type of high-level insights and training he received accessible to a much wider group of users. Through its AI coach, Track Titan gives racing-game players detailed feedback to help them reduce lap times in titles such as EA’s F1 series and iRacing, as well as in real-world driving. On average, users improve their fastest lap by more than half a second after their first session. The platform has grown to more than 200,000 users and has recorded a tenfold increase in ARR over the past two years. Our ambition at Track Titan is to be the Strava for motorsport - a rich community where people can further their passion for racing whilst building a true sense of belonging. Having these investors on board means we can unlock a new level for this technology and what it can deliver for the hundreds of thousands of people who already use it, said Teichert, explaining that his goal was to take the insights and support typically reserved for professional racers and make them available to the 190 million people who race online and the 90 million hobby drivers who take to real tracks. Track Titan also partners with hardware manufacturers such as MOZA and Fanatec to integrate its software into sim-racing equipment, enhancing immersion and performance analysis. While the primary focus is on “ambitious amateurs” looking to improve their performance and connect with a global community, professional racing teams have also started adopting the platform, incorporating Track Titan’s AI tools into their off-track training. In response, the company plans to continue advancing these AI capabilities to support the growing number of elite drivers and coaches integrating the platform into their preparation.

Fronted, the Nordic startup building an AI-powered platform to simplify international hiring, has closed a $1 million pre-seed funding round led by Antler and Sondo Capital.  Fronted is a global talent operating system that provides a unified platform for companies to manage their international teams. It addresses two key challenges for scaling businesses in a single solution - hiring and managing employees across borders. While many companies still depend on separate tools for sourcing, interviewing, onboarding, payroll, and compliance, Fronted brings these elements together. Its platform uses AI to streamline recruitment, contracts, onboarding, payroll, and offboarding, providing an end-to-end solution for global hiring. According to Marius Blaker Hogevold, co-founder of Fronted, many tech companies hope to expand internationally but often run into difficulties because cross-border hiring remains complex, costly, and fragmented. He explained that recruiters may invest months in finding strong candidates, only to encounter legal, payroll, and compliance hurdles that delay progress. With Fronted, we’re building a seamless, AI-powered platform that manages the entire process, from job description to contract signing and payroll. We’re finally bringing simplicity to something that has been too complex to scale, added Blaker Hogevold. Fronted was founded by a team of experienced operators in global hiring and fintech, including Marius Blaker Hogevold (CEO), Hans Nyvold Kjellby (Chairman and CCO), Håvard Liltvedt Dalen (CPO), Gelo Torres (COO), and Antonina Kruhlikova (CTO), along with early team members such as Kurt Alexander Bakke, Jørgen Riiser, and Lars Smith. With ARR rising 230 per cent since July 2025, Fronted plans to allocate the investment toward strengthening its product and engineering teams and speeding up work on the platform.

Nothing, the UK-based smartphone disruptor, is launching a fresh “community investment round", targeting a $5m raise.The crowdfunder will allow investors to buy shares at the same price as Nothing's $1.3bn Series C valuation.Investors can invest via Crowdcube and Wefunder in the fundraiser, with early access on December 10, followed by public access on December 11.Proceeds from the funding will be used to launch more products and expand its customer base, Nothing said.Smartphone handset maker Nothing has raised over $450m from investors, including Tiger Global, GV, Highland Europe, EQT, and Qualcomm Ventures, closing a $200 million Series C earlier this year.Nearly 8,000 investors have invested in its previous “community investment rounds”, investing around $8m.Carl Pei, CEO and founder, Nothing, said: “With technological developments in AI, consumer devices and software will fundamentally change in the next couple of years. This is where we're uniquely positioned to play. Our community helped us get here, and this round lets them participate in where we're going.”

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has launched a global innovation challenge to identify bold, practical solutions that can help crisis-affected communities recover and rebuild from scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs around the world. Partnering with UK-based innovation platform Wazoku, the UNDP will crowdsource ideas through a series of open-innovation challenges to find simple solutions that can give communities the tools they need to restart their lives. The first challenge focuses on detecting and mapping underwater mines and unexploded ordnance, from current and historic conflicts where the UN system has an ongoing mine action programme. Millions of tonnes of explosive ordnance continue to endanger lives, block recovery, and damage ecosystems worldwide. Clearing rivers, lakes and coastal areas affected by conflict are one of the most complex and costly aspects of mine action. Finding new and innovative ways to identify and mark underwater explosives would help to safeguard communities while clearing activities are planned and actioned. “Rivers and coastlines are lifelines for communities recovering from conflict, but they’re often littered with dangers beneath the surface,” said Steinar Essen, UNDP’s Global Advisor on Mine Action. “By tapping into global innovation, we can find faster, safer and more affordable ways to make these waters safe again, helping communities return and rebuild with confidence.” The new initiative seeks practical, affordable technologies capable of identifying concentrations of submerged ordnance in both saltwater and freshwater environments.  The challenge will be supported by Wazoku’s Innocentive global solver community, a network of over 700,000 problem-solvers that has delivered breakthroughs for partners such as the International Rescue Committee and the US Environmental Protection Agency.  “Our community has a strong track record in supporting humanitarian and development initiatives,” said Simon Hill, CEO of Wazoku. “We’re excited to bring that expertise to the UNDP Challenge and help translate innovative ideas into real-world impact.” The UNDP Challenge series will be supported by SeaFreight Labs, who is serving as Project Advisor following successful series with the IRC, Habitat for Humanity, and World Vision. “The problems that UNDP is bringing to the global crowd are vitally important, highly impactful and extremely difficult,” stated Harry Sangree, Founder and CEO, SeaFreight Labs. “We invite solvers from around the world to submit their solutions and to disseminate the challenge far and wide so UNDP has the best chance possible for finding a valuable and actionable answer to their request for help.” Future rounds will address youth-led mental health solutions in crisis-affected settings and community tools for real-time crisis data collection to improve aid delivery. For details on how to participate, visit the Challenge page. Submissions are open until March 9, 2026. Lead image: UNDP.

Personal Bitcoin mining device manufacturer Power Mining has developed a portable data centre that will heat towns using residual heat from Bitcoin mining.  Bitcoin mining consumes a significant amount of electricity globally eliciting significant greenhouse gas emissions and local air-pollution impacts. In response, the sector is advocating for ways to not only reduce the energy consumption of mining but also capture waste heat from mining hardware and feed it into district heating networks or local building systems. While classical datacenters can collect heat at approximately. At 27°C, Power Mining data centres can reach up to 65°C, providing cities with more efficient sources of heat.  European data centres already make up more than 3 per cent of the continent’s total electricity consumption, which is expected to surpass 150 Tw/h annually – an equivalent of all of Poland’s electricity demands.  Up to 40 per cent of this energy is turned into heat, which most often is released into the atmosphere. If this energy were collected and redirected back to heating, it could ensure up to 10 million European households with heat. Heat collection from data centres could become one of the most effective ways to combine digitalisation and climate goals. In one year, one Power Mining datacenter can mine up to 9.7 Bitcoin, and heat up to 2000 homes. With 1.6MW/h in power, the datacenter achieves 95 per cent energy efficiency, thereby providing the municipality with 1.52MW/h. The data centres are built in Latvia and cost from €300,000. Because they are assembled in a shipping container, they can be easily shipped around the world.  Power Mining’s data centre is made up of eight server closets, each outfitted with 20 Whatsminer M63S++ servers that consume 10kW of electricity each, and create an equivalent amount of heat. The servers can raise the incoming coolant temperature by 10-14°C, producing the equivalent amount of heat while mining Bitcoin. Each server closet is equipped with warm and cool fluid collectors, which send the warmed liquid to a built-in heat pump station, where a 1.7 MW heat exchanger ensures the redistribution of heat from the data centre to the town’s heating grid.  If the heating grid does not require additional heat from the datacenter, the heated fluid is redirected to a built-in dry cooler, which adjusts the temperature to suit the servers' needs. This way, the data centre is able to cool itself, and also contributes to balancing the municipality’s heating grid. The Latvian company’s first two datacenters, housed in shipping containers, will be shipped to a Scandinavian town, where they will be connected to the municipal heating system.  According to the Power Mining team:  “We’re truly grateful to our partners for trusting us with such an ambitious and technically demanding project. We hope this is only the beginning — an opportunity to scale this model further and demonstrate how Bitcoin mining can strengthen a town’s heating system, reduce waste, and deliver real, tangible value for local communities.” In addition to building over 100 Bitcoin data centres, Power Mining also builds personal- and industrial-scale Bitcoin mining hardware. Their desktop miner is one of the most widely used open-source Bitcoin mining devices globally, with over 20,000 devices shipped worldwide.

Portuguese Spotlite has closed a €3.5 million seed round to accelerate its global expansion. The round is co-led by Índico Capital Partners and Explorer Investments. Founded in 2017 by Ricardo Cabral and Martino Correia, Spotlite offers a platform that converts satellite data into actionable infrastructure insights, helping asset owners and operators reduce operational CapEx through solutions such as predictive maintenance and remote auditing. The company’s proprietary technology combines data from multiple satellite sources to continuously monitor a wide range of risks across thousands of kilometres, without the need for physical inspections or on-site sensors. Its platform delivers fully automated insights and alerts, enabling infrastructure managers to anticipate issues such as landslides, ground and slope subsidence, vegetation encroachment, flooding, fire hazards, and third-party interference well in advance. Initially focused on the transportation sector, the software has since been extended to cover mining sites, energy infrastructure, and buildings. Spotlite’s mission is to make infrastructure monitoring scalable and accessible for both small and large public and private organisations, helping asset owners extend the lifespan of critical infrastructure and enhance resilience in an increasingly challenging environmental context. Spotlite CEO Ricardo Cabral noted that the funding represents a significant milestone both for the company and for Portugal’s expanding spacetech sector: We are helping infrastructure operators shift from reactive to proactive maintenance,  empowering companies with AI-powered data-driven decisions. With this funding, Spotlite plans to expand into new markets and further enhance its platform’s capabilities. The company is positioning itself as an emerging reference in infrastructure intelligence, offering tools that support a safer, smarter, and more resilient built environment.

European SMEs are operating under conditions that leave little room for error. Costs are rising, margins are contracting, and cross-border activity is creating more complexity than ever before. Many smaller companies still rely on slow reporting cycles, retrospective oversight, and fragmented financial tools. Those approaches no longer match the pace or structure of modern spending, and the gap is turning into a competitive disadvantage Real-time finance is emerging as one of the most effective ways to close that gap. It gives SMEs live visibility over payments, expenses, and budget movements, allowing them to react the moment something changes. In an environment where operational precision often dictates growth potential, this capability is becoming a strategic differentiator. Instead of waiting for end-of-month corrections, SMEs can steer their finances continuously. Why real-time visibility matters? European SMEs face three structural pressures that make real-time financial oversight essential. First, operational costs are increasing across almost every recurring line item, and many of those costs fluctuate daily. Finance teams are discovering issues only when the accounting cycle catches up, by which point losses have already accumulated. SMEs need visibility at the point of spend, not weeks later. Second, even small firms are now operating across borders, relying on global platforms and managing payments in multiple currencies. This exposes them to FX volatility, payment failures and additional compliance requirements. Without immediate insight into these movements, it is difficult to maintain accurate budgets or forecast risk. A delayed view of cross-border spend is no longer adequate. Third, digital operations have dramatically increased spend frequency. SaaS subscriptions, cloud usage, marketing channels, and distributed teams all generate a high volume of small but impactful transactions. Traditional banking tools were built for predictable, low-frequency spending and cannot keep pace with this environment. SMEs need systems that reflect how they actually operate today. The shift from reactive to responsive finance Real-time finance replaces slow, retrospective workflows with immediate insight and control. Instant card issuance allows teams to access funds when needed while ensuring that rules, limits and approvals are enforced in advance. This removes bottlenecks caused by traditional corporate cards without sacrificing governance. Live transaction data means every payment appears the moment it is made. SMEs can spot duplicate subscriptions, unauthorised vendor charges, or unexpected cost spikes as they happen. This changes the role of the finance function from “detecting” issues to preventing them. Programmable spending rules convert financial policy into an operational layer. Budgets, merchant categories, and team-level permissions enforce themselves automatically rather than relying on manual checks. Finance teams can maintain discipline even as the business scales. The competitive advantages for SMEs Real-time finance gives SMEs several clear advantages over competitors that continue with traditional workflows. The first is stronger cash-flow protection. By reacting immediately to overspend or irregularities, SMEs prevent small issues from turning into major losses. The second advantage - improved vendor and subscription management. Many SMEs struggle with unused licences, hidden renewals, and overlapping tools, all of which drain budgets gradually. Real-time visibility allows them to identify waste at the precise moment it occurs, not after it has accumulated. The third is faster decision-making across the business. Leaders can freeze cards, redirect budgets, or approve urgent spending instantly. In sectors where conditions change rapidly, this responsiveness becomes a practical edge rather than an administrative improvement. Europe’s conditions for real-time finance adoption Europe is uniquely suited to accelerate the shift towards real-time finance. Regulatory developments such as PSD3 and the Digital Operational Resilience Act are raising expectations for financial oversight, auditability, and operational control. SMEs now require more structured and transparent financial systems to meet these obligations. The region’s fragmented markets add further pressure. SMEs operating across borders need consistent tools that work reliably in multiple countries and currencies. Real-time finance creates a unified layer of visibility that helps them manage this complexity. Europe is also home to a mature embedded finance ecosystem. The availability of modern issuing, payment and compliance infrastructure has made it easier for SMEs to access capabilities that were once limited to larger enterprises. This creates the conditions for widespread adoption. How Wallester Business supports real-time finance? According to Wallester, SMEs are adopting real-time finance to replace outdated financial workflows with infrastructure capable of supporting immediate oversight and control. Wallester Business enables this by allowing companies to issue unlimited virtual Visa cards instantly and apply detailed spending rules across teams, projects and vendors. Each transaction appears in real time, providing finance teams with continuous visibility over budgets and commitments. This approach reduces the risk of overspend, subscription waste, and cross-border payment failures. It also connects directly to accounting and ERP tools, ensuring that financial data flows continuously through the organisation without manual consolidation. For SMEs dealing with rising costs, distributed teams, and multi-market operations, this infrastructure makes true real-time finance achievable. The advantage is straightforward. Companies can act immediately, maintain tighter control, and make better decisions from day one. More information on Wallester Business is available here! Conclusion Real-time finance is becoming the operational standard for European SMEs. The companies that gain visibility and control at the moment of spend will be better positioned to manage volatility, protect margins, and scale with confidence. As digital operations continue to accelerate, real-time responsiveness will determine which SMEs adapt fastest and compete most effectively.

London-based BuiltAI, a financial modelling platform for commercial real estate investment, has secured $6 million in seed funding. The round was led by New York–based VC firm Work-Bench, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, Timber Grove Ventures, Emerald Pine, as well as several angel investors and property-sector professionals, including Jeremy Ford, Managing Partner at Manet Capital. Although an estimated $26 billion is spent each year on real estate software, the screening of investment opportunities and financial modelling remain largely manual processes, often carried out in spreadsheets. Tasks such as manual data entry and data extraction are highly time-consuming, and studies indicate that 88% of these financial models contain material errors. On average, it takes at least two weeks to analyse deal opportunities, with data dispersed across multiple systems, which can result in companies missing other potential deals in their pipeline. BuiltAI was co-founded in 2020 by Natan Lempert and Firoz Noordeen in response to the potential of technology and AI to modernise real estate investment by replacing outdated underwriting processes. The platform uses machine learning to rapidly extract and analyse building data, helping clients manage existing portfolios and underwrite new investment opportunities. Within minutes, it generates detailed financial models to support full business plans and scenarios for any asset, representing a tenfold improvement on current processes. The analysis incorporates real estate fundamentals, lease terms, valuation, tenant profiles, and local market data, and can be performed for single assets or entire portfolios, enabling investors to identify optimal business plans and asset management strategies. BuiltAI’s CEO and co-founder, Natan Lempert, noted that generative AI is playing a growing role in financial decision-making by enabling large-scale data translation and automating underwriting processes. He added that despite real estate being the world’s largest asset class, the tools used to evaluate deals have seen little change over the past four decades. Our AI solution will be transformative for every stage of the property asset lifecycle, from sourcing to acquisition to disposal, for brokers, investors, lenders, and valuers. BuiltAI’s new asset management tool, introduced following this funding round, provides real estate owners with full lifecycle modelling, instant portfolio roll-up, and real-time scenario analysis to support faster decision-making. The new funding will be used primarily to expand BuiltAI’s operations in the US and UK and to enhance its platform.  

Berlin database startup SereneDB has closed its Pre-Seed funding round, raising $2.1 million. The round was led by venture funds Entourage and High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF). Most search and analytics tools were built to find single, static items, not to analyse fast-changing, complex data. They struggle with real-time updates and deletions, and they force teams to stitch together searches, caches and dashboards. The result is slow answers, brittle pipelines and insights that arrive out of date. The team is leveraging its expertise from creating the world’s fastest enterprise-grade C++ search library to build the engine for next-generation data applications. I spoke to CEO Alexander Malandin to learn more. SereneDB brings live data and deep analysis into one system. It fuses a powerful and versatile search engine with modern OLAP execution under the standard PostgreSQL umbrella, handles real-time ingestion with correct updates and deletes, and returns complex results in milliseconds. While people and AI agents can ask better questions on of the most recent data, companies reduce tooling, cost costs, and operational risk by using simple and , standardised SQL tools and APIs. According to Malandin, there are three core pillars to SereneDB: “First: we’re written in an efficient stack. C++ lets us do things faster or with far fewer resources.  Second: we bring functionality to the market that hasn’t existed before — search tools couldn’t work with real-time changing data.   Third: we’re doing it all in open source. Because we believe in value creation through communities. We believe that since we are given the chance to stand on the shoulders of very tall men, we can give others an option to lean against us in the process. This creates a better community, a better industry.” Why two industry veterans walked away to reinvent search and databases SereneDB is led by CEO Alexander Malandin, a chemical technologist turned IT evangelist with deep experience in enterprise storage, servers, and databases at EMC and Dell, and ArangoDB. He is joined by CTO Andrey Abramov, a 15-year information-retrieval expert who built a C++ alternative to Lucene and became the first to properly integrate it with a database — a recognised visionary in search-driven database design.  Principal Software Engineer Valery Mironov, a self-taught developer who left college to focus on coding, is an open-source enthusiast and author of YACLib. Malandin and Abramov bring a 16-year working partnership across family IT businesses, startups, and large enterprises, including ArangoDB.  Malandin admits he was always the presales engineer — selling hardware at first, then moving into databases.  “I love infrastructure because it’s tangible. It’s slow, yes — deal cycles are six to twelve months — but it’s also the layer everything else is built on. That’s where you can make a real impact.”  He explains that the real turning point came at ArangoDB, working with Abramov:  “We reached a moment where we simply couldn’t get attention for the ideas we wanted to build. We knew the market needed what we were thinking about, but we couldn’t pursue it inside the company. So we left to build it ourselves.”  Why Search deserves a rethink Search quietly powers nearly every digital action we take, yet in the enterprise world it remains underserved, under-innovated, and dominated by decades-old foundations. “It’s ironic. Search is one of the biggest technologies of our lives — we use it dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day. But enterprise search is tiny. Almost everything relies on Lucene. It’s in ElasticSearch, OpenSearch, SingleStore, Neo4j — it’s everywhere,” shared Malandin. Alternative search libraries have existed, but his co-founder built one of the only independent ones: He explained: “Abramov started what is now called iResearch back in 2014. It’s written in C++, and today it’s one of the only independent search libraries left; the rest are developed internally for the needs of specific companies.” However, according to Malandin: “Honestly, no one has tried to integrate a search library with a database the way we’re doing it. Historically, companies put a search library next to a database. They exchanged data, but they didn’t understand each other. There was no consistency.” SereneDB takes a different architectural stance.  “We’re building something tightly fused — not two systems passing messages, but a unified engine where search understands the database and the database understands search. We started exploring this in a past project and learned a lot. SereneDB packages that knowledge properly for the first time.” In other words, instead of having separate systems for “live data writes / transactions”, “full-text / search queries”, and “analytics / aggregation queries”, SereneDB aims to handle all of that in one system. Real-time data is critical  By collapsing search and analytics into a unified engine, SereneDB positions itself as an infrastructure layer built precisely for the real-time era. For Malandin, real-time data processing is the difference between meaningful analytics and missed opportunities. He recalls a customer from a previous role — a large logistics company whose business depended on the insights generated from its operational pipelines. “Real time matters enormously,” Malandin says.  “The customer’s core value was analytics. But they could only update data every two days because the dataset was too large. The freshest data has the most value, but it was basically unavailable to them.” The company aims to eliminate the trade-off between fast-changing data and the ability to run sophisticated queries over it. “If you can analyse data the moment it’s produced, you unlock value. And if you can analyse aggregates from even five or ten minutes ago, that’s another layer of value. We’re designed to handle both,” he explains. “‘When Can I Try It?’ The response from the developer community has been overwhelmingly positive. “I haven’t heard a single negative reaction,” admits Malandin. “Whenever we explain that we’re building something with the functionality of ElasticSearch and ClickHouse, with a Postgres front end people already know, everyone says, ‘When can I try it?’” However, the company only started publishing code on GitHub yesterday — and that’s the biggest challenge, according to Malandin, in terms of next steps with devs.  “People want a demo immediately because they already know exactly where this would fit into their stack.”  SereneDB is expected to gain initial traction with two core user groups:  Startups: Malandin contends that while Postgres is the world’s default database, it’s a transactional system.  “The moment a startup becomes successful and needs real analytics, Postgres isn’t enough. They’re forced to bolt on ElasticSearch or ClickHouse — neither of which gives them consistency.” With this in mind, SereneDB wants to be 100 per cent Postgres-compatible — this means a startup could keep transactional Postgres and use SereneDB as analytical Postgres.  “ That’s a huge improvement, ” according to Malandin.  Existing search users: The team already sees use cases where it's 10× faster than ElasticSearch.  “And we offer a complete analytical layer on top of that. So anyone using ElasticSearch or OpenSearch is a natural fit,” asserts Malandin. This funding advances SereneDB’s commitment to open-source development, giving the data community a voice in shaping the technology while benefiting fairly from its progress. By enabling trustworthy, real-time insights at any point in the data life cycle, SereneDB aims to set a new practical standard for modern analytics. According to Pieterjan Bouten, Founder and Managing Partner at Entourage:  “SereneDB’s team has spent years in the trenches of information retrieval, where breakthroughs are rare. They’ve earned their position with core search technology addressing a critical layer of tech that is often overlooked.  Unlocking this data foundation paves the way for a wave of new applications. SereneDB is building that infrastructure, and they have the grit to see it through.” Hendryk Hosemann, Senior Investment Manager at HTGF, says: “As AI becomes central to every software product, engineering teams need the ability to query, analyse, and understand live data in real time at scale. SereneDB is redefining AI-memory infrastructure with search and analytics accessible to everyone through PostgreSQL. It’s incredibly rare to find a team that is both able and daring enough to build at this depth, and we’re proud to back them as they redefine what modern databases can deliver.”   The company will use the investment to expand its team. 

Bestie Bite, an app focused on authentic video reviews for the hospitality sector, has closed a $700,000 funding round. The funding, raised mainly through SAFE instruments, was led by Techstars. Investors include Zooga VC, Mamba Ventures, and several Italian and international business angels, among them Christian Marcon, Angelo La Rocca, and Claudio Vaccaro. Founded in Rome in 2024 by Carlotta Robbe Di Lorenzo (CEO) and Caterina Vertefeuille (COO), the startup aims to simplify restaurant discovery for users and make marketing more accessible for hospitality businesses. The company targets a common challenge in choosing venues: unreliable text reviews, fragmented information, and content heavily influenced by sponsorships and influencers. By applying AI to the hospitality sector, the app helps users discover restaurants, bars, and hotels through short, real videos created by everyday customers, supported by a cashback and gamification system that encourages honest sharing of experiences, whether positive or negative, as long as they are authentic. We built Bestie Bite starting from a real problem we face every day: choosing a restaurant shouldn’t require luck or hours spent reading unreliable reviews. This round allows us to accelerate a revolution already in motion: restoring authenticity to dining experiences and giving every restaurant simple tools to communicate with transparency, says Carlotta Robbe Di Lorenzo. For hospitality businesses, this authentic content becomes a practical asset: the app acts as a marketing tool powered entirely by artificial intelligence, collecting real user videos and turning them into ready-to-publish social media content for restaurant owners, all managed via WhatsApp. The AI also delivers sentiment and performance insights to help monitor service quality in real time. The platform has already shown strong organic traction, with over 70,000 registered users, 60,000 videos uploaded across more than 70 countries, and multiple viral spikes. The capital raised will allow the startup to expand its team in product, engineering, and business development, as well as further develop AI-based features within the app. A portion of the investment will be allocated to marketing and growth initiatives, targeting restaurant owners and users in major Italian cities and initial international markets.

Amsterdam-based Orq.ai has raised €5 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by seed + speed Ventures and Galion.exe, with continued support from Curiosity VC, Spacetime, XO Ventures, xdeck ventures, Waves Capital, and GoldenEggCheck. The round brings the company’s total funding to €7.3 million since its founding in 2022. As regulatory requirements tighten under GDPR and the forthcoming EU AI Act, enterprises are seeking infrastructure that gives them full control over data flows, model behaviour, and deployment environments. This shift has created growing demand for platforms capable of supporting operational, production-grade AI rather than isolated demos or proofs of concept. Orq.ai positions itself directly in this space, addressing what many refer to as the industry’s “production gap.” While enterprises can often build promising AI prototypes, few manage to run them reliably in real-world environments. Versioning issues, incomplete monitoring, manual governance, and POCs that fail under real data and compliance pressures remain common obstacles. To solve this, Orq.ai offers a unified control layer for the entire AI agent lifecycle, enabling teams to move systems from prototype to production with reliability and compliance built in. Unlike many point solutions in the generative AI tooling landscape, Orq.ai has taken an end-to-end approach, combining experimentation, evaluation, observability, an AI gateway, governance, and agent runtime in a single environment. Engineering teams can develop, deploy, monitor, and improve agents without relying on disconnected systems. According to Orq.ai Co-founder Sohrab Hosseini, engineering teams’ needs extend beyond access to new models; they need robust infrastructure that enables them to industrialise the development and deployment of AI agents: They want clarity on how agents behave, how data moves through their systems, and how to stay compliant as the regulatory landscape evolves. We provide them with the harness to have this control. As data governance and sovereignty requirements intensify, Orq.ai’s architecture is designed to allow enterprises to run AI on their own infrastructure, meet residency obligations, and reduce reliance on external providers, an increasingly important capability for regulated industries and the public sector. With the new capital, the company plans to expand its team across engineering, enterprise sales, and customer success, deepen its presence in key European markets, and accelerate growth in North America.

Shop Circle today announced an expanded partnership with i80 Group, increasing its credit facility to $100 million.  Shop Circle is a global AI-powered software platform that acquires and scales B2B software products. It operates a growing ecosystem of mission-critical tools used by over 165,000 companies worldwide. The acquisitive model is exploding, especially in Europe, with companies such as Bending Spoons and Visma. Shop Circle has acquired 16 companies to date.  According to Cartechini, "on average, we expand EBITDA margins by 15–20 percentage points, often taking a business from around 15–20 per cent to 30–40 per cent, which is a huge lever in our model.’"  I spoke with Cartechini to gain deep insights into the company’s goal of becoming Europe’s leading software platform. AI’s real impact: rewiring operations Cartechini believes that AI is now capable of transforming the efficiency profile of software companies — especially within a holding structure. Applied correctly, he says, it can meaningfully lift profitability across an entire portfolio.  “If you’re a holding company and apply AI properly — in an unsexy way — you can improve profitability across the whole group. I think we’ll see much more of this model in Europe. And that’s a good thing. When something works, competition catches up.” Cartechini argues that amid the noise of AI storytelling, the real winners will be the companies using AI to rewire their internal operations first. “We’re really proving the AI playbook, but in a very unsexy way,” he says. “Not cosmetic AI for investors or clients, though that matters too. But eventually the bubble will deflate, and then you’ll see who has strong fundamentals.” Inside Shop Circle’s AI engine Shop Circle’s first wave of AI implementation has been focused on the backend. As Cartechini explains, “In software, gross margins are usually around 95 per cent once you exclude infrastructure costs like Cloudflare or AWS. Ninety-five per cent of the remaining cost is people — and a lot of repetitive tasks.” To tackle that, the company created a centralised automation team at the holding level to eliminate low-value work across its portfolio. The team audited the entire organisation to identify waste and high-ROI automation opportunities. “We assessed ROI and focused on very specific use cases,” he says.   “For example, we built AI agents to answer repetitive customer-support tickets. We have a team of 60 people in support. Now they can focus on real problems, and the agents handle the repetitive tasks. About 30–40 per cent of tickets tend to be the same question.” The result: faster developers, streamlined workflows, and a clear boost in productivity. Still, Cartechini stresses that the company’s approach remains deliberately light-touch. “It’s very lean,” he says. “We run a decentralised model for product and technology. The worst thing we could do is tell a founder who has run a company for 10–15 years what to build.” Instead, Shop Circle removes the administrative and operational load that holds small software teams back. “We take away the boring stuff — finance, HR, budgeting, controlling,” Cartechini notes. “We help with AI because smaller companies can’t afford dedicated AI teams, and with B2B sales because we already have the distribution. We also support talent, because our brand can attract people they couldn’t.” Europe can build software — it just can’t scale it Shop Circle recently commissioned a report into the European software industry that highlighted that many European software companies succeed in innovation, but very few scale to truly global, high-revenue levels. The report finds that while there are ~50,000 companies above $2M ARR and around 13,000 above $10M ARR, only 15–20 have reached “true global scale.” Many of those are decades-old incumbents; the rest are via buy-and-build strategies.  Further, despite the large number of companies, Europe struggles to produce “champions” — global-scale firms — resulting in a largely fragmented landscape with many small or mid-size players. Against this is a backdrop where European venture funding for software plummeted from a peak of $117 billion in 2021 to about $51 billion in 2024 — or as low as $25 billion if AI “mega-rounds” are excluded — a drop of nearly 80 per cent. The report contends that Venture capital alone isn’t enough to produce European software giants, with the reality that fewer than 1 per cent of VC-backed European software firms ever reach $100M ARR, and virtually none make it to the $400 – 500M ARR range generally required for large-scale IPOs. “We’re not private equity — we’re builders” Ultimately, the report supports Shop Circle’s acquisition thesis: Acquiring smaller software firms and integrating them — potentially augmented by AI to drive operational efficiencies, could enable European firms to overcome structural obstacles to scale. Cartechini contends that “investors sometimes think acquisitive companies aren’t tech companies — that they’re more like private equity. That’s not true. Private equity raises capital and returns it to LPs. Their teams are 95 per cent finance and M&A. They don’t run the companies.” By comparison, Shop Circle acquires and holds forever. Eighty per cent of its people are technical — developers, PMs. “Our M&A team is only 3 per cent of the company. And after we buy a company, we run it,” shared Cartechini. Europe needs fewer wrappers and more real companies Cartechini argues that a large portion of Europe’s software landscape remains undervalued — particularly niche vertical tools with small total addressable markets, such as warehouse-management systems. These categories are typically “too small” for venture capital, yet mission-critical for customers. “These are terrific companies,” he says. “No churn, extremely sticky, profitable, and hard to replace. And no one is going to compete with them because the market is too small. We don’t need them to be $20 billion companies. Our model is permanent, stable operations that generate cash.” He is equally clear about what Shop Circle avoids. “We stay away from AI wrappers entirely,” Cartechini notes. “There’s no barrier to entry. Anyone can copy and paste something and call it a product.” Instead, he emphasises the importance of long-term defensibility. “Our real moat is continuously improving the product, owning distribution — we have 165,000 paying customers — and managing everything that comes after the code: QA, compliance, certifications, customer support, sales. Building something that looks similar is easy. Running a real company is not.” He also questions the economic logic behind the current wave of AI-wrapper tools. “Economically, AI wrappers are fragile. Every token costs money. And if OpenAI or another provider increases costs, you’re done. Software margins are 95 per cent. AI wrappers don’t offer that.” And while he resists tired narratives about hype cycles, he remains cautious. “I don’t want to be the cliché European who says the bubble is inflated — but I don’t see enough evidence that these wrapper tools are sustainable.” As Shop Circle accelerates its acquisition strategy, both the company and its investors say the expanded credit facility positions it to scale far more aggressively across the B2B software landscape. According to Cartechini, “Following our Series B equity raise, we now also benefit from a more competitive cost of capital and a larger credit facility, which allows us to move decisively on acquiring great B2B software products and scaling them through our AI and GTM infrastructure. “ “Shop Circle continues to execute at an exceptional level, and we see them at the forefront of a broader transformation where modern software and applied AI are becoming core to daily life,” said Peter Frank, Managing Director of i80 Group.” Shop Circle currently serves over 165,000 businesses worldwide, helping them work smarter, grow faster, and stay ahead.