AI Chamber, in partnership with The Recursive Media and with support from Europe Cloud, has launched the CEE AI Index 2026, a new research initiative designed to measure the strategic AI readiness of countries across Central and Eastern Europe. Covering 11 countries, the index evaluates the structural ability of nations to develop, deploy, and host artificial intelligence efficiently, safely, and within established governance frameworks. The assessment is based on 33 indicators and 363 data points across three categories: Environment (which measures governance and digital infrastructure), Resources (which evaluates talent and investment ecosystems), and Deployment (which examines AI adoption and research output). The findings suggest that while the region is more advanced in AI readiness than is often assumed, a growing divide is emerging between countries that are positioned to help shape Europe's AI landscape and those that are still building the foundations required to participate fully. According to the index, success is not determined by size alone. Several smaller countries outperform larger economies through targeted investments in governance, talent, and digital infrastructure. Estonia emerged as the region's most institutionally mature AI ecosystem, combining advanced digital public services, strong enterprise adoption, and a high concentration of AI talent. Lithuania ranked highly for open data governance and demand for AI professionals, while Slovenia stood out for research intensity and STEM capacity. Poland remains the region's largest AI market, leading in research output, high-performance computing capacity, and workforce scale. Central and Eastern Europe has been building the conditions that serious AI investment requires: governance frameworks, talent pipelines, and in several markets, infrastructure that is already operational. What has been missing is the data to make that case with precision, said Tomasz Snażyk, CEO of AI Chamber. Source: CEE AI Index 2026 One of the report's key conclusions is that governance has become a critical differentiator. While most countries in the region have introduced national AI strategies, only a smaller group has developed the institutional capacity required to implement them effectively. Estonia, Poland, and Lithuania recorded the strongest Environment scores, reflecting more mature governance frameworks, regulatory coordination, and digital infrastructure. Other countries continue to face challenges translating policy ambitions into operational readiness. The report also suggests that the European Union's AI Act could widen existing differences across the region. Countries with established governance structures may be better positioned to attract investment and support enterprise AI adoption, while others may face additional challenges in meeting regulatory requirements while simultaneously building domestic AI ecosystems. Despite the differences in readiness levels, the index highlights a region characterised by complementary strengths rather than direct competition. No single country leads across all categories. Instead, competitive advantages are distributed across research, talent development, infrastructure, governance, and market scale. Source: CEE AI Index 2026 The report also points to progress in countries including Hungary, Latvia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Croatia, each of which has developed specific capabilities ranging from experimentation infrastructure and tax incentives to technical expertise and education programmes. The publication of the CEE AI Index comes as AI sovereignty, infrastructure, and talent development move higher on policy and investment agendas across Europe. The report aims to provide policymakers, investors, and ecosystem builders with a clearer picture of where AI readiness is already operational and where further development is needed. Mark Boris Andrijanič, former Minister for Digital Transformation of Slovenia, said the findings highlight both the region's strengths and its continued funding gap. While several Central and Eastern European countries now rank among Europe's strongest performers in digital governance, talent, and infrastructure, he noted that the region remains underrepresented in discussions around major AI investment and development initiatives. 

Berlin-based GALVANY Energy GmbH has raised €10 million in seed funding to support the continued development and rollout of its platform for the installation, operation, and optimisation of heat pumps across Germany, with a particular focus on existing multi-family residential buildings. The round was led by Dutch energy-tech investor SET Ventures, with Berlin-based climate-tech fund AENU participating as co-lead. Founded in 2022 by Raik Belka, GALVANY has developed a platform that integrates the acquisition, installation, and management of heat pump systems into a single solution. The company has installed more than 2,500 heat pump systems to date and generated €20.1 million in revenue in 2025, while reporting positive EBIT. At the core of GALVANY's offering is a connected energy platform built around its proprietary GALVANY Cube hardware, produced in partnership with Panasonic in Pilsen. The system integrates heat pumps, battery storage, and GALVANY Fusion energy management software to help households and property owners optimise energy use and costs. Unlike many providers that rely on extensive direct sales operations, GALVANY operates a network-based platform model that connects customer acquisition, procurement, installation, and ongoing management. This approach improves efficiency across the value chain while supporting scalable deployment. According to founder and CEO Raik Belka, the company is focused on addressing some of the key barriers that have slowed heat pump adoption in Germany's existing building stock. We are building the infrastructure that will help make the heat transition work in existing buildings. In Germany, heat pumps do not fail because of the technology itself, but because of the challenges surrounding subsidies, installation capacity, and economic viability for end customers.Our platform is designed to address these issues by improving efficiency across the entire value chain while creating a sustainable business model. The company is also preparing to launch a consumer app that will enable users to monitor and manage their energy systems digitally.

Volteum, a fleet management platform designed for electric and mixed fleets, has raised €2.5 million in funding in a round led by Movens Capital, with participation from WakeUp Capital and Aidiom, alongside follow-on investment from existing backers Day One Capital, Techstars and Nesprit. The investment brings the company's total funding to €3.75 million and will support Volteum's expansion across the UK, Benelux and DACH regions. As fleet electrification continues across Europe, many operators are managing a combination of diesel, petrol and electric vehicles. This transition has created new operational challenges that traditional fleet management systems were not designed to address, including charging management, battery health monitoring, home-charging reimbursement processes and maintenance planning. As a result, fleet managers often rely on disconnected software systems, spreadsheets and legacy telematics tools, limiting visibility into vehicle performance, energy usage and operational costs. For larger fleets, these inefficiencies can translate into significant avoidable expenses. Volteum addresses these challenges through a single platform that consolidates fleet data, including charging activity, mileage and maintenance information. The software connects directly to data already collected by vehicle manufacturers, eliminating the need for additional hardware installations and enabling fleets to be onboarded within days. The platform also uses aggregated fleet data to automate reporting, optimise day-to-day operations and identify unusual vehicle or charging behaviour before it results in increased costs or vehicle downtime. Its recommendations around charging, maintenance, battery health and vehicle utilisation are continuously refined using more than three billion operational fleet data points. Zsófia Tóth, co-founder and CEO of Volteum, said Volteum was built to support fleet managers regardless of where they are in the transition from diesel-powered vehicles to electric fleets. We built Volteum to work for fleet managers regardless of where they are in the transition from diesel to electric. Our goal isn’t to push managers into electrifying their entire fleet, but rather to give them the knowledge and the tools to make the most cost-effective decisions. By helping operators identify maintenance issues before they become costly failures and uncover inefficient charging practices, Volteum says its platform can reduce operational costs by up to 30 per cent. The company also offers an Electric Fleet Planner workflow designed to help organisations plan long-term electrification strategies in a practical and cost-efficient manner. Volteum already works with organisations including Royal Mail, Bolt, Lex Autolease, Schneider Electric, OTP Bank, NG Bailey and Dundee City Council. The company plans to focus its expansion efforts on logistics providers, utility companies, and vehicle leasing and rental businesses as demand grows for tools that support the management of increasingly complex mixed fleets. Photo credit: Márk Rétsághy 

Creator Fund, a UK-based pre-seed venture capital firm focused on scientific founders, has closed its first European fund at $56 million. The capital will support Creator Fund's strategy of identifying and backing researchers and PhD students at the earliest stages of company creation, with a focus on deep tech sectors including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, robotics, advanced materials, and computing infrastructure. The final close includes participation from KfW Capital, the investment arm of Germany's state-owned promotional bank KfW, which joined as the fund's largest investor. Other major backers include the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO), alongside Equation Capital, Basecamp (Phoenix Court), JIMCO, and Allocator One. In total, 71 limited partners from 21 countries committed to the fund. Founded on the belief that scientific talent is one of Europe's strongest assets for startup creation, Creator Fund focuses on identifying researchers before they enter the traditional venture capital ecosystem. To source opportunities, Creator Fund has built a network of student investors across 30 universities in 10 countries and operates a Scientific Founder programme designed to help researchers navigate the process of building companies from academic research. With the new fund, Creator Fund plans to expand this model across Europe, becoming the first student-led venture platform to operate at continental scale. Creator Fund has already invested in 11 companies, including startups developing technologies in reproductive health, robotics, advanced materials, and next-generation data storage. Since launching in 2019, Creator Fund has backed 62 companies. It achieved its first fund return following the sale of portfolio company Loci to Epic Games and says two of its portfolio companies have surpassed $100 million in cumulative funding over the past six months. Jamie Macfarlane, founder and CEO of Creator Fund, said the organisation was established to address a gap in the venture ecosystem that has historically overlooked scientists as company founders: The world's biggest problems are being solved in European university labs. The scientists working on them are extraordinary but for too long, they've been overlooked by venture capital and encouraged towards academia rather than entrepreneurship. This fund allows us to support more of these founders across Europe and help translate scientific breakthroughs into companies. Christian Röhle, co-head of Investment Management at KfW Capital, said the fund's approach provides access to emerging founders at leading European universities while helping bridge the gap between academic research and high-growth technology businesses. Creator Fund's Scientific Founder programme remains central to its investment strategy. Each year, the programme selects venture fellows from universities across Europe and trains them to identify promising scientific founders and support them through the earliest stages of company formation. Three of the first investments made from the new fund were founded by former fellows.

Cosine, the British AI company selected by the UK Government as part of its Sovereign AI initiative, today announced that it has brought together a coalition of leading UK institutions to co-design Lumen Sovereign, which it describes as Britain’s first sovereign frontier AI model. Founded in 2023 in London, Cosine is a British sovereign AI frontier lab developing advanced models and coding agents that top public benchmarks — purpose-built for defence, national security and regulated industries where foreign-built AI is off the table and assurance by design is non-negotiable.  Its platform can run entirely within a customer’s own infrastructure, with no external dependencies, delivering frontier AI that is developed, deployed and operated under full UK control. Babcock International Group, BT, Lloyds Banking Group, LSEG, NatWest Group, PwC, Thales UK, BAE Systems, Leonardo UK, and Telefónica Tech UK&I are amongst the companies to have signed memoranda of understanding to participate in the model's design phase. The coalition reflects the fact that many of the UK's largest institutions are increasingly seeing AI as a strategic dependency risk. Just as organisations have spent years reducing reliance on single energy suppliers or foreign-controlled communications infrastructure, a growing number of the UK's defence, financial and public sector institutions are reaching the same conclusion about AI.  For some organisations, greater control over where AI models are trained and operated is becoming an increasingly important consideration. Lumen Sovereign is to be trained entirely on Isambard-AI, one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers, using compute awarded through the UK Government's £500m Sovereign AI programme.  MOU signatories will work directly with Cosine to define the use cases, security requirements and governance standards Lumen Sovereign must meet. The model is designed to be deployed entirely within a customer's own infrastructure, with no external data transfer. Lumen Sovereign is targeted for deployment readiness by the end of 2026. Priority applications include cybersecurity and adversarial testing, KYC and AML alert investigation, clinical trial coordination, legal document review and healthcare administration — workflows where the combination of sensitivity and complexity has made AI adoption difficult or impossible under existing tools.  Cosine has assembled one of the largest collections of domain-specific training datasets outside the hyperscalers, spanning more than 30 regulated industry workflows, to ensure Lumen Sovereign can operate across the full breadth of coalition members’ needs. According to Alistair Pullen, CEO and co-founder, Cosine: “AI is the single most important technology of our generation.  Enterprises are increasingly waking up to the risk of being wholly dependent on foreign providers for this technology. Vendor lock-in creates security risk, dependency risk and cost escalation risks.  Cosine is addressing those risks by building a model that is fully trained on UK soil and available into air-gapped environments at a far more efficient price point than OpenAI and Anthropic alternatives.” Chris Keone, MD, Innovation, BT, commented: "As AI becomes a foundational technology for the UK economy, our customers need confidence that the systems they depend on are secure, trusted and aligned with their requirements. This collaboration reflects our belief that innovation is strongest when industry, government and technology partners come together to build the foundations for future." Lumen Sovereign will be developed using proprietary datasets built entirely in-house across pre-training, mid-training and post-training, rather than being adapted from an existing open-source checkpoint. Lead image: Cosine.

24 of Germany’s leading venture capital funds have joined forces to launch the German Venture and Growth Forum and publish the German Venture & Growth Playbook, which uses market data to highlight the venture capital asset class’s risk-return dynamics and investment potential. The news is launching today at the “Future at the table”, a side event to the SuperReturn conference in Berlin featuring the Federal  Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, Katherina Reiche, the Personal Representative of the  Federal Chancellor of Germany for Investments, Martin Blessing, and the CEO of KfW Group, Stefan Wintels.  The Playbook shows that with the right approach, €15 billion in existing private capital can be activated annually for German growth companies – while meeting market-aligned return expectations for investors.  More investment in venture capital can deliver stronger returns, help cushion portfolios during turbulent markets, and accelerate the growth of innovative businesses and the future-proofing of employment in Germany. Today, VC-backed companies account for 40 per cent of the market capitalisation of the global top 100 and employ 2.3 million people worldwide.  In Europe, analyses estimate that startups have the potential to create 3.6 to 8.1 million additional jobs and generate up to $3.3 trillion in additional market capitalisation, provided capital is available.  With a strong industrial base and deep talent reserves, Germany's main structural constraint is access to capital. German institutional investors manage around €2.8 trillion and could, even with allocations in the low-percentage range, channel urgently needed additional capital into German and European growth companies. This has long been common in markets such as the US – without special funds, without government guarantees, and with market-aligned return expectations.  Three entry points for institutional investors  The playbook serves as a guide for allocations by pension funds, insurance companies, professional pension schemes, and foundations.  Recognising that investors start from different positions, the German Venture & Growth Playbook presents a range of accessible approaches to investing in venture and growth capital, aligned with varying levels of expertise and organisational capacity. Single funds offer direct exposure to the performance of typically 20 to 30 portfolio companies with a clearly defined thematic or regional focus. The funds’ general partners actively support their portfolio companies from the founding phase through to exit and invest in the funds themselves, creating a structural alignment of interests between fund management and investors.   Funds of funds further lower the barrier to entry. They invest simultaneously in numerous individual funds and handle the entire fund selection and due diligence process, making them particularly suitable for investors without their own VC team. The Wachstumsfonds Deutschland (Growth Fund Germany), which was launched at the end of 2023 with a volume of €1 billion, is a prominent example of this approach.  Co-investments enable direct participation in individual transactions alongside established lead investors, offering higher return potential, a targeted risk profile, and typically lower fees. They are suitable as a complement to an existing fund allocation or for investors with a dedicated in-house investment team.  According to investor Alexander Kudlich, the data is clear: the growing economic gap between the  U.S. and Europe is largely based on a lack of growth capital.  “Companies like the Magnificent Seven would never have emerged without VC investors. Startups don’t just develop disruptive technologies – they build the industries of the future. Germany has the resources to finance these industries precisely. With the German Venture and Growth Forum, we aim to address potential concerns and  highlight concrete solutions for a reevaluation of VC.”  Christian Nagel, Co-Founder and Partner at Earlybird contends that the current generation of founders and young companies have the potential to kick-start Germany’s growth engine and build future industries in areas such as AI, fusion energy,  robotics, quantum technology, and also in the defence and space sectors: “To achieve this, we need to scale these companies with the appropriate resources. Only in this way will we build the next  generation of DAX 40 companies that keep the German business model of a technology-driven export  economy alive.”  According to Dr Tanja Emmerling, Partner at High-Tech Gründerfonds: “As a group of more than 24 German funds, our goal is to lower the barriers to entry for institutional  investors and thereby lay the foundation for a high-performing capital structure – for innovation, startups, growth companies, and successful IPOs in Germany and Europe.”  The German Venture & Growth Playbook is now available for download. 

German fintech Solaris recently announced plans to become “Europe’s first AI-native bank”, undertaking a “strategic repositioning” following a troubled few years. Solaris, valued as a unicorn at around $1.6bn in 2021, was once a star performer in Berlin’s fizzing fintech scene, having raised hundreds of millions of dollars from US card giant Visa and Spanish bank BBVA.  In banking parlance, Solaris is called a Banking-as-a-Service provider, which means the Berlin-headquartered fintech, which has a German banking licence, offers white-label banking services to customers. Backed by its major shareholder, Japan’s SBI, its move to automate its processes with AI was announced in March.  German regulators were kept in the loop about the change. As part of the change, Solaris cut around 20 per cent of its 400-strong workforce. The change follows a difficult few years at Solaris, which has seen job cuts, unit closures, and a rescue funding round. “Wave” coming over financial services The man who is presiding over the change, CEO Steffen Jentsch, the former managing director at online brokerage Flatex who joined Solaris at the start of 2026, thinks the fintech is a pioneer. He says: “It’s like a huge wave coming over the financial services industry and will really turn around the whole industry. We have built something like a surfboard to ride this wave.” He says German financial service providers are keenly watching developments at Solaris, to see if they should follow suit. Going “AI-native” Jentsch said the inspiration behind the “AI-native” pivot was seeing robot workers in German factories, supervised by just a handful of people. He says: “Financial services are digital products, so why can’t we implement something like that for a digital product within a bank?” Combining Solaris’s existing API-first modular banking system with AI was not “rocket science," he says. He says it’s easier to implement AI into a modular system, with a flexible IT architecture, than a centralised legacy banking system. AI agents and LLMs The change is not insignificant, with Solaris rebuilding its banking processes from the ground up with AI. Solaris is leveraging well-known Large Language Models (LLMs) as well as utilising in-house AI tech. AI agents will now handle operational processes, while humans remain responsible for control and governance. There is AI in place to fend off cyber-attacks and curb hallucinations, the CEO says. As part of the change, Solaris says it’s developing data and AI-driven financial services for its partners, including its two big clients, ADAC, Germany’s largest motor association, and Boerse Stuttgart Group, which operates the Stuttgart stock exchange. Jentsch says: “The productivity will explode in the same way the steam machine exploded the productivity 150 years ago.” Staff reaction Is there any evidence of a positive impact since the pivot? He says it is already reaping dividends, saying it was “incredible” the precision with which AI could pick up suspicious transactions and filter out sanctioned accounts in its AML (Anti-Money Laundering) department. Jentsch says that staff, who have been given €1,000 vouchers for AI training, are now on board with the change. He says: “At the very beginning, they were a little bit reluctant. In the first week, I had my first all-hands, discussing the strategy and what I want to achieve. And then they carefully watched what I am doing.” Jentsch denies any charge of AI whitewashing, as in Solaris was falsely attributing AI to layoffs it would have made anyway. Shutting subsidiaries This is not the only recent change at Solaris, which also plans to shut subsidiaries in Italy, Spain and France to focus on its native Germany, where it has offices in Berlin and Frankfurt. Jentsch said that harmonised EU laws make it less important to operate subsidiaries in different European countries, adding that face-to-face meetings can run in tandem with video conferences. ADAC contract In its early days, Solaris targeted fintech clients but has pivoted to targeting major enterprises. Its flagship client is ADAC, which has around 23m members. Solaris won the contract with ADAC in 2022, which is said to be worth more than €100m in annual sales.  It has issued ADAC-branded credit cards and will next issue its members with savings accounts. Boerse Stuttgart and ADAC make up around 80 per cent of Solaris’s revenues. Is this concentration of clients not a danger? Jentsch admits there is a danger but says it also represents potential, pointing to the “lock-in effect” of two big clients. Timeline on profitability  Solaris announced an earlier restructure in 2024, amid the loss of key clients and trouble signing new clients. It discontinued major parts of a UK business it acquired, which had been hit with an €840,000 fine by the Bank of Lithuania over AML violations and closed a business in Lithuania. Solaris is still under BaFin restrictions, meaning the regulator must approve new clients. Early last year, Japan’s SBI Holdings agreed to increase its stake to more than 80 per cent in Solaris as part of a €140m funding round, which also included investment from Boerse Stuttgart, and a slashing of its valuation. Visa and BBVA no longer hold stakes in Solaris. Reputation of Solaris There are no plans for imminent future funding. Jentsch says SBI “provided us with sufficient cash to go through the whole process”. Solaris has also pushed back the timeline on when it will be profitable, saying it will hit profit in 2028, not 2027 as previous management had indicated. Jentsch hopes it will get there by offering new services and picking up new customers.  Does he think that Solaris has lost its sheen in the market? He says: “To be very open, it was about a bit over promise and under deliver and now I turn it around and under promise and over deliver. We don’t want to put the carriage before the horse, so let’s do it the right way.”

This week, we tracked more than 55 tech funding deals worth over €2.3 billion and over 10 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe. If email is more your thing, you can always subscribe to our newsletter and receive a more robust version of this round-up delivered to your inbox. Either way, let's get you up to speed. ? Notable and big funding rounds ??  Kpler receives $1B+ strategic growth equity investment from Sixth Street ??  Oxford Quantum Circuits lands “coming-of-age” £260M funding round ?? Perk secures a €258M credit line to accelerate the global growth of its AI-native platform ??‍?? Noteworthy acquisitions and mergers ?? Berlin-founded Contentful snapped up by Salesforce ??  CommerceClarity acquires Katalogo.ai ?? Vertice acquires Vendr to build AI-powered procurement intelligence platform ?? Entravel Group acquires Moca Traveltech to expand across Spanish-speaking travel markets ? Interesting moves from investors ? Deep Science Ventures and Medicines Discovery Catapult partner to tackle brain drug delivery ? Cambridge Enterprise builds London launchpad for next generation of deeptech founders ? Merantix Capital launches €103M fund for early-stage European AI startups ?️ In other (important) news ??  Revolut, Mistral and Wayve back six-figure “Built in Europe” campaign ⚛️  OQC, JPMorgan Chase and AMD launch Quantum-AI data centre to explore real-world fintech applications ??  EU says tech sovereignty package about “protecting citizens” ? The radar gap killing Western defences — and the Berlin chip startup closing it ? OSS Resistance: it's time companies treat open source maintenance as real work Cleantech: 10 companies that raised the most in 2025 “Speed“ reason CoreWeave leasing data centre space in UK, says European boss ? European tech startups to watch  ??  Poindexter Labs raises £2M to improve training data for advanced AI ??  Molfar raises €1.5M to bring tactical anti-drone radar systems closer to the frontline ??  SolarDew raises €800,000 to scale solar-powered drinking water tech ??  Vivilo raises €628,000 pre-seed round for AI-powered event content ?? hephaistos.bio secures €161,000 to advance sustainable chemical manufacturing

OQC, JPMorgan Chase, and AMD today announced a research collaboration leveraging a new, dedicated Quantum-AI Data Centre built by OQC in London.   JPMorganChase researchers will test near-term quantum and hybrid quantum-classical computing applications via a secure enterprise environment to examine how quantum computing, AI and high-performance classical infrastructure can work together on complex financial services challenges.   The environment will physically integrate the OQC GENESIS quantum system with AMD-supported AI and classical compute, high-performance computing resources and application-level tooling for simulation, optimisation, AI model development and benchmarking. AMD compute technologies will provide the infrastructure to support the platform's AI and classical compute layers.  By placing quantum hardware inside a secure enterprise compute environment, the platform is designed to enable JPMorgan Chase to test hybrid quantum-classical workflows for performance, scalability, and reproducibility against the operational standards used in financial services. The partners will use the platform to conduct research on the application of near-term quantum and hybrid quantum-classical computing, including areas such as portfolio optimisation and expanding explorations around quantum machine learning, while also developing specialised AI models to improve quantum circuit performance.  They also plan to investigate how these quantum-enhanced AI models can accelerate the discovery of novel algorithms purpose-built for financial use cases, and the role of classical compute toward scalable fault-tolerant quantum algorithms.     “Quantum computing has to move from isolated experiments into the secure compute environments where enterprises actually work,” said Gerald Mullally, CEO of OQC.  "That is what we are building with JPMorganChase’s quantum research expertise: a dedicated quantum-AI platform for financial services that combines quantum hardware, AI and high-performance computing to support serious technical research and move the industry closer to practical quantum applications.”   “The financial services industry depends on understanding complexity, managing risk and making decisions with speed, security and confidence,” said Lori Beer, global chief information officer of JPMorganChase. “Through this partnership, our teams will have a dedicated environment to research the near-term utility of hybrid quantum-classical computing in finance and assess how quantum, AI and high-performance computing can work together to address real-world challenges.” “Advancing quantum-AI research will require tightly integrated compute platforms that bring together quantum systems, AI infrastructure and high-performance classical computing,” said Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and chief technology officer at AMD. “AMD is pleased to support OQC and its dedicated environment, which will explore hybrid quantum-AI workflows for financial services and evaluate their performance, scalability and reproducibility in a secure enterprise setting.”   The project marks a shift from experimental quantum access toward secure, integrated infrastructure designed for real enterprise workflows, starting with financial services.   Lead image: Magnific.

GR3N, the Swiss cleantech company advancing the recycling of PET and polyester plastics and fibres, has closed a €15.5 million Series B funding round. The round was led by 360 Capital, with participation from new investor VP Textile. Growth Capital acted as financial advisor to GR3N. The funding comes as demand for recycled PET continues to accelerate. While PET is one of the world's most widely used plastics, current recycling technologies can process only a fraction of available PET waste, leaving most textile fibres, films, and coloured materials unrecycled. At the same time, increasingly stringent regulations and sustainability commitments from major consumer brands are driving the need for scalable solutions capable of processing a broader range of PET waste streams. To address this challenge, GR3N has developed MADE (Microwave-Assisted Depolymerisation), a patented chemical recycling technology that can process all types of PET waste, including both packaging and textile materials. The technology delivers high material recovery yields while reducing CO₂ emissions by up to 80 per cent compared with virgin PET production. Unlike alternative recycling methods such as glycolysis, methanolysis, and dissolution, MADE has no feedstock limitations and produces food-grade monomers that can be recycled repeatedly without any loss of performance. GR3N's intellectual property portfolio includes two patent families covering the depolymerisation process and an additional patent family protecting its proprietary equipment (PEQ). The proceeds from the Series B round will support the development of MODUS, GR3N’s first commercial-scale recycling plant.

AethexAI, a UK voice AI infrastructure company building for enterprises across emerging markets, today announced a $3 million pre-seed round led by 4DX Ventures and the launch of its platform. The round included participation from Enza Capital, Dorm Room Fund, Mojo Ventures, 26 Fund and strategic angel investors, including Stanford faculty, telecoms executives and AI researchers from Anthropic. Voice remains a primary channel for enterprise customer interaction across emerging markets, and while many companies have already experimented with voice AI, most solutions have failed to perform reliably in production.  Existing tools struggle with unreliable connectivity, fragmented telephony, high pricing and poor handling of local speech, often making them more expensive than human agents. AethexAI addresses this gap by rebuilding the voice stack from the ground up for these environments, enabling reliable, cost-effective deployment. This is done through a single platform: self-hosted, market-localised models trained on proprietary data, wired directly into fully managed telephony, orchestration, and existing workflows. Delivered through a no-code interface and APIs, it enables businesses to deploy and scale voice agents within existing workflows at a fraction of the cost of existing providers. The company is initially targeting a market of 1.5 billion people across Africa and the Middle East, where global providers have yet to deliver at scale and plans to expand to other emerging markets at a later date. Founded by Mariama Diallo and Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa, AethexAI was built to make voice agents deployable at scale in emerging markets. Diallo previously worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs before joining YC-backed Model ML as its first product and growth hire, working closely with large enterprise clients. Odemuyiwa trained as a computer scientist at Caltech, building systems across aerospace and at Meta, before attending Stanford Graduate School of Business. The pair started building AethexAI last year after spending time on the ground with businesses across Africa and the Middle East, where they saw firsthand that existing voice AI models were not built for these environments.  As a result, companies were unable to automate large parts of their customer interactions, leaving significant efficiency gains and revenue opportunities untapped. They left their respective roles to build AethexAI full-time and develop a purpose-built voice infrastructure stack from the ground up. The platform is powered by Kora 1, AethexAI’s proprietary voice model stack, trained on licensed datasets from call centres, radio and content platforms and designed for noisy environments, multiple accents and languages. The company is also launching a developer platform, enabling third parties to build voice applications across the region using a single API. According to Mariama Diallo, co-founder of AethexA, voice is already how businesses operate across emerging markets, but the technology behind it hasn’t kept up: “We kept hearing the same thing from customers: that existing tools simply didn’t work in their environments. That’s why we built our own model stack and infrastructure from the ground up, designed for how these markets actually operate.” According to Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa, co-founder of AethexAI, said: “Voice AI failed in these markets at every layer of the stack. Latency, cost, poor handling of code-switching, and weak performance under packet loss, jitter, and low-bitrate audio in real telecom networks led these systems to break in production." She contends that the fix was not incremental. It required redesigning the entire stack.  “Kora 1 is our family of speech models, specialised by dialect and fully self-hosted. We built and own the data pipeline behind them. Telephony, interruption handling, and retrieval are native to the system, proven and refined through enterprise deployments, not bolted on.” Walter Badoo, co-founder and Managing Partner, 4DX Ventures, said: “With real production deployments already at scale, the AethexAI team is building what we believe will become the defining voice infrastructure layer for the next billion users.”   The funding will be used to scale enterprise deployments, expand engineering and go-to-market teams, and deepen product coverage across key regional markets. AethexAI currently has a team of 10 and expects to double its headcount by the end of 2026.

Mike McQuaid has a message for open source maintainers at profitable companies: "Stop asking permission to fix what your employer already depends on." Open source software underpins critical infrastructure across the global economy, powering everything from public services and financial systems to energy grids, defence technologies and international organisations such as the United Nations.  Yet despite its centrality, much of that infrastructure is still maintained by small numbers of volunteers working in their spare time. The maintainer behind the movement McQuaid is the creator of OSS Resistance, a movement calling on engineers to contribute directly with their time because maintaining the open source infrastructure companies rely on ultimately serves those companies too. His argument is simple: if a business depends on open source software, helping maintain it is not charity — it's work. He describes himself as living “two parallel lives”: one as a technology executive and the other as the long-time project leader of Homebrew, the open source package manager used widely across macOS and Linux systems. “Homebrew is relied on by huge numbers of people, but it’s still run entirely by volunteers.  We have some money coming in, but it’s that awkward middle stage where there’s too much for stickers and not enough to actually pay someone a salary to work on it full-time.” Keep contributing on company time  The idea behind OSS Resistance emerged partly from his experience at GitHub, where he helped drive initiatives such as Open Source Friday and GitHub Sponsors.  But while those programmes encouraged contribution, they still framed open source work as something employees needed permission to do. “For years, my own attitude was basically: I’m going to do this during work hours until someone tells me not to. And nobody ever did. “As long as the work got done, nobody cared.” McQuaid argues that many maintainers already quietly spend part of their working day contributing to projects their employers depend on — and that this is both rational and sustainable. “There’s always some amount of bandwidth and slack in the system,” he says. “People might check TikTok, text friends or browse Amazon during downtime — or they could answer an open source pull request.” For him, the larger issue is burnout. Once maintainers have families and full-time jobs, the expectation that they should continue performing unpaid maintenance work deep into the evenings becomes increasingly unrealistic.  The strategic importance of open source software The consequences extend far beyond developer communities. As governments, militaries and critical industries become increasingly dependent on open source software, the sustainability of the ecosystem becomes a strategic concern. For example, according to Benjamin Wolba, co-founder of the European Defense Tech Hub, open source software has become deeply embedded in modern defence systems and Ukraine’s wartime technology stack. “Open source enables rapid iteration and deployment at a pace traditional defence struggles to match,” Wolba says. “When development cycles are measured in days instead of decades, openness beats over-engineered, closed systems.” He points to projects such as ArduPilot, Betaflight, YOLO and MAVLink as examples of open source technologies now embedded across modern battlefield systems. Open Source becomes a sovereignty issue Max Corbani, Partner at >commit, believes those pressures are only intensifying. The early-stage venture fund is built on the conviction that the next generation of global technology companies will emerge from open source. It combines ecosystem data from GitHub, package managers, container registries, Discord servers and developer forums with a network of open source founders, executives and enterprise CTOs to guide investment decisions and support portfolio companies as they scale. Corbani argues that geopolitical, technological and regulatory forces are converging simultaneously. “I think the pressure is only going to keep growing.” One major driver is digital sovereignty with increasing demand for open source from companies and governments that want more ownership of their infrastructure and more digital sovereignty. "The ability to run, adapt and control your own infrastructure independently is becoming an imperative, and open source is the only credible and realistic path to genuine sovereignty,” Corbani adds.  “You simply cannot build sovereign digital infrastructure on top of someone else’s closed platform.” Too much dependence, too little support At the same time, Europe continues to rely heavily on OSS while investing relatively little in the people maintaining it.  Linux Foundation research found that only 28 per cent of European organisations employ full-time contributors to the open source projects they depend on, despite 81 per cent reporting high value from doing so. Research from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency paints an equally fragile picture: a third of maintainers surveyed receive no payment at all for their work, while nearly three-quarters of projects are maintained by three people or fewer. In April, the agency launched a new funding program to support maintainers who work in the field of open standards and interoperability and want to get involved with the standardisation organisations IETF, W3C, or ISO with a monthly remuneration of €4800 to €5200 for the time spent on standardisation work and committee meetings. For McQuaid, the real shift needed is cultural rather than purely financial: maintainers establishing healthier boundaries around what they owe, to whom, and on what terms. Money can help, he says, but it is not a cure-all. “Homebrew has a reasonable amount more money than we used to. It fixes some problems. It introduces new ones.” Automation meets maintenance AI is simultaneously easing and intensifying the maintenance burden. McQuaid has already seen the benefits directly inside Homebrew. “Our main issue tracker currently has one open issue,” he says. “A huge amount of bug-fixing work is now almost automated.” Because Homebrew is a command-line tool with highly structured issue templates, AI systems can often reproduce, diagnose and patch problems quickly.  But both interviewees stress that human oversight remains critical. “Open source has always been built on trust — that’s its most important foundation, and no technology will change that,” Corbani says. “AI has the potential to accelerate contribution significantly, but we still need humans willing to take accountability.”“These tools can absolutely augment contributions and help maintain projects if they’re used wisely. But they can also be weaponised to identify and exploit vulnerabilities faster and at a much greater scale.” The cost of saying no Regulation is adding yet another layer of complexity. Frameworks such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act are likely to increase expectations around security, resilience and long-term support for open source projects. “Regulatory pressure is going to push companies to demand stronger guarantees from the open source they depend on,” Corbani says. Yet maintainers are already struggling to keep pace. “At Homebrew, we’ve become much more aggressive about saying no,” McQuaid says, pointing to the project’s decision to phase out Intel Mac support as Apple moves on from the architecture. “We simply do not have the resources to support hardware the way Apple itself can.” For both McQuaid and Corbani, the broader challenge is no longer whether open source matters but whether the ecosystem can evolve to support the people maintaining the infrastructure modern economies increasingly depend on. If your business depends on open source infrastructure, the next contribution doesn't necessarily need to come from a sponsorship budget. It might simply come from giving your engineers permission to spend an hour fixing the software you already rely on. Or, as OSS Resistance argues, perhaps they shouldn't need permission at all.

European cleantech companies raised €3.1 billion in 2025, with investment activity concentrated around clean energy infrastructure, industrial decarbonisation, advanced materials, recycling technologies, carbon management, and electrification. Large infrastructure and energy-transition projects attracted the biggest rounds of the year, particularly in areas such as battery storage, renewable energy, clean fuels, electric vehicle infrastructure, and low-carbon industrial production. Several of the largest financings were aimed at scaling commercial operations and supporting the deployment of capital-intensive facilities. Debt financing played a significant role across the sector, accounting for a substantial share of total capital raised. Equity funding remained strong, particularly for companies developing climate-focused software, advanced materials, circular economy solutions, and carbon removal technologies. Geographically, Germany emerged as the leading market by funding volume, followed by the UK, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Together, these countries accounted for the majority of capital raised, although funding activity was distributed across a broad range of European markets, including the Nordics, Southern Europe, and Central and Eastern Europe. Overall, the sector's funding activity highlights continued investor confidence in technologies supporting the energy transition, circular economy, and industrial sustainability, while also indicating a growing focus on scaling proven solutions from pilot projects to commercial deployment (for more detailed analyses of the European technology ecosystem, check out Tech.eu’s annual report: European Tech 2025 - The Big Picture). Here are ten cleantech companies that raised the most in 2025. Amount raised in 2025: €810M Enpal is a company that provides integrated residential energy solutions, including solar panels, battery storage systems, heat pumps, EV charging stations and energy management software. The company enables homeowners to generate, store and manage renewable energy through a connected platform designed to reduce energy costs and increase energy independence. Founded in Berlin in 2017, Enpal operates primarily in the German market and has expanded its offering beyond solar installations to a broader home energy ecosystem. In 2025, Enpal secured €810 million across two rounds to make solar panels and heat pumps more affordable for European homes. Amount raised in 2025: €252.5M Pulse Clean Energy is a UK-based company specialising in the development, construction, and operation of battery energy storage systems (BESS). The company helps accelerate the transition to a low-carbon energy system by balancing renewable energy supply and demand, improving grid stability, and supporting the integration of renewable power sources. Through innovative energy storage and optimisation solutions, Pulse Clean Energy is working to build a reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy infrastructure for the future. In 2025, Pulse Clean Energy secured €252.5 million to fuel the construction of six new ready-to-build BESS sites. Amount raised in 2025: $162M Climeworks is a Swiss company that develops and operates direct air capture (DAC) technology, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Founded in 2009, the company provides carbon removal services to businesses and organisations and works on projects involving the capture and permanent storage of CO₂. Climeworks operates direct air capture facilities and collaborates with partners in the carbon storage and climate technology sectors. Climeworks raised $162 million in 2025, bringing its total funding to more than $1 billion and providing additional capital to support operational expansion and the development of next-generation direct air capture (DAC) technology. Amount raised in 2025: €118M Aegis Energy is a UK-based infrastructure company developing a network of clean, multi-energy hubs for commercial vehicle fleets. Its hubs are designed to provide a range of refuelling and recharging options, including electric charging, hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO), hydrogen, and bio-CNG, to support the transition of trucks and vans to lower-emission energy sources. The company focuses on building public infrastructure for commercial transport operators across the UK. In 2025, Aegis Energy raised €118 million to establish clean energy hubs in the UK and help decarbonise commercial vehicles. Amount raised in 2025: €100M WAAT is an electric vehicle charging company that provides charging solutions for businesses, fleet operators, property owners, and public sector organisations. The company offers services including charging infrastructure installation, operation, maintenance, and energy management, supporting the deployment and management of EV charging networks across residential, commercial, and public environments. WAAT raised €100 million in 2025 to accelerate EV charging rollout across Europe. Amount raised in 2025: €94.8M Avantium is a chemical technology company focused on developing and commercialising renewable and circular materials. The company develops technologies that convert renewable carbon feedstocks, such as plant-based sugars and captured CO₂, into chemicals and polymers for applications in packaging, textiles, and other industries. In addition to its materials technologies, Avantium provides research and development solutions in catalysis and sustainable chemistry. In 2025, Avantium secured €94.8 million across two rounds to commercialise plastic PEF and reach EBITDA break-even by 2027. Amount raised in 2025: $100M CuspAI is a company focused on accelerating the discovery and development of advanced materials. The company combines generative AI, molecular modelling, and physics-based simulations to identify and design new materials for applications across industries including energy, climate technology, semiconductors, and manufacturing. Its platform is designed to reduce the time and cost associated with traditional materials research and development. In 2025, CuspAI secured $100 million to unlock AI’s potential in climate materials. Amount raised in 2025: £62M Pulpex is a sustainable packaging company that develops fibre-based bottles designed as an alternative to conventional plastic and glass packaging. The company works with consumer goods manufacturers and retailers to develop and commercialise recyclable packaging solutions made primarily from renewable pulp materials. Pulpex's technology is intended for use across a range of product categories, including beverages, personal care, and household products. In 2025, Pulpex secured £62 million to construct its first commercial-scale manufacturing facility near Glasgow. Amount raised in 2025: €60M GravitHy is an industrial company developing a low-carbon iron production facility that will use renewable hydrogen to produce direct reduced iron (DRI) for the steel industry. The company aims to supply iron products with a lower carbon footprint than conventional blast furnace production, supporting the decarbonization of steel manufacturing and related industrial value chains. GravitHy secured €60 million in 2025 to advance low-carbon iron production and steel decarbonization. Amount raised in 2025: €51.5 Fairmat is a company that develops recycling solutions for carbon fibre composites. The company uses proprietary processes to recover and transform composite waste into engineered materials that can be used in applications across industries such as mobility, electronics, consumer goods, and construction. Fairmat's technology is designed to support the circular use of advanced materials and reduce waste from composite manufacturing and end-of-life products. In 2025, Fairmat secured €51.5 million in a Series B to close the loop on material recycling.

From 8-12 June at Olympia and across London, London Tech Week brings together over 30,000 tech leaders, founders, and decision-makers from 130+ countries for one transformative week of discovery, connection, and strategic positioning. For Europe's most ambitious tech ecosystem, this is where the future takes shape. What You'll Gain The Intelligence That Drives Real Decisions Move beyond the hype. Gain unfiltered insight into agentic AI, national security implications, quantum breakthroughs, and the emerging risks reshaping competitive advantage across European and global markets. This isn't theoretical discussion – you'll learn from organisations already implementing transformative technologies, from Berlin-based AI pioneers to Stockholm fintech disruptors and London's deep tech innovators. Understand how regulatory frameworks like the EU AI Act are being navigated in real-time by companies leading the charge. Access to Innovation Before Your Competitors Connect directly with the startups transforming fintech, health tech, climate tech, and critical infrastructure – before they're on everyone's radar. London Tech Week showcases Europe's most promising scale-ups alongside global innovators, giving you early access to solutions addressing the continent's most pressing challenges: sustainable technology, digital sovereignty, and the future of work. Discover breakthrough technologies solving problems you haven't yet identified and gain competitive intelligence that positions your organisation ahead of market shifts. Strategic Relationships That Deliver ROI This isn't networking for networking's sake. With 300+ exhibitors and curated programming across every major technology vertical – from enterprise SaaS to Web3, cybersecurity to quantum computing – you'll leave with tangible outcomes: partnerships, pilot opportunities, investment prospects, and clear next steps. Whether you're seeking European expansion partners, evaluating emerging technologies, or building your innovation pipeline, London Tech Week delivers the connections that matter. Why Tech.eu Readers Can't Miss This As a member of the Tech.eu community, you're already tracking Europe's technology evolution. London Tech Week offers something different: the opportunity to shape it. Engage with policymakers, investors, and innovators to define Europe's digital future. Participate in discussions on topics that matter to your business – from navigating post-Brexit tech collaboration to capitalising on Europe's growing venture ecosystem. Your Exclusive Access As a valued member of the Tech.eu community, you can access London Tech Week at an exclusive discounted rate. Register your place and enter the code TECHEU25 for a 25% discount on your Premium pass. Join the thinkers and doers shaping the future of business through technology. This June, be where Europe's tech future is written. Get your pass

New Dawn Bio, a deeptech startup developing what it describes as the world's first cultured wood, has closed a €2.1 million oversubscribed pre-seed funding round. The round was led by CapitalT, with participation from Norrsken Evolve, Ontdekkers Group, and a group of prominent angel investors, including Jelle Prins. Founded in 2024 by Tom Clement (CEO) and Kianti Figler (COO), New Dawn Bio is developing a new approach to producing one of humanity’s oldest and most widely used materials. By harvesting stem cells from trees, multiplying them in bioreactors, and guiding their development into specific shapes, the company can grow wood into its intended form. This process eliminates the need for logging and enables production up to 10,000 times faster than conventional forestry. Tom Clement, co-founder and CEO of New Dawn Bio, said the wood industry still relies on a centuries-old process of shaping rectangular boards and beams from round tree trunks: For the first time in history, we can grow premium wood directly into its final shape. This funding allows us to advance our technology and bring a practical product to market. New Dawn Bio’s technology aims to address the environmental and industrial challenges of traditional timber production. With 5.3 million hectares of tropical forest lost annually, the company’s approach could help reduce pressure on natural forests while avoiding up to 2.1 gigatons of direct CO₂ emissions each year. Its shaped-wood production process also reduces material waste and manufacturing costs by eliminating many conventional woodworking steps. At the core of the company’s innovation is a new approach to wood production: cultivating living plant cells into wood structures rather than harvesting and processing trees. By combining advances in cell biology, materials science, and engineering, New Dawn Bio is developing tunable wood materials while using AI to accelerate research and development. The funding will be used to support the next stage of the company’s development, including further technology advancement and team growth. New Dawn Bio brings together expertise from a range of scientific and engineering disciplines to support the development and scaling of its cultured wood technology.

Merantix Capital has announced the final close of its €103 million AI Fund, which will invest in early-stage AI-native companies across sectors including logistics, manufacturing, energy, finance, healthcare, life sciences, robotics, enterprise software, and physical AI. The fund’s limited partners include Union Investment, Jungheinrich, KPMG Germany, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The fund builds on Merantix Capital’s first fund, which focused on venture studio incubations and backed companies including revel8, Deltia, Vara, and Cambrium. The new fund will allocate capital equally between venture studio companies developed with the Merantix team and direct investments in pre-seed and seed-stage AI startups across Europe. Merantix Capital’s investment strategy focuses on companies applying artificial intelligence to industry-specific use cases, particularly in sectors where AI adoption may support operational efficiency and workflow optimisation. With investment teams based in Berlin and London, the firm invests in founders across Europe. The fund has already made investments in companies including Droidrun, which develops mobile-native AI agent infrastructure, Arqh, focused on logistics optimisation, and Outpost Bio, which applies AI to human microbiology. The portfolio also includes several companies currently operating in stealth mode across logistics, manufacturing, recruiting, ERP, energy, and fashion technology. Merantix Capital operates within a broader platform that includes the Merantix AI Campus in Berlin, the London AI Hub, AI House Davos, and Merantix Momentum, an AI solutions provider focused on enterprise AI implementation. These initiatives provide portfolio companies with access to industry networks, technical expertise, and potential commercial partnerships.

Kodesage, a startup developing an on-premise AI platform for legacy software modernisation, has raised $6.6 million in a seed funding round led by VentureFriends. Existing investor Portfolion also participated in the round, alongside angel investors including Christian Szegedy, co-founder of xAI, and German footballer Mario Götze. Founded in 2024 by Gergely Dombi, Miklos Szurdi and Gyorgy Szilagyi, Kodesage helps enterprises understand, document and modernise complex legacy software systems. Its platform extracts information from source code and documentation to create a continuously updated knowledge layer that enables teams to maintain, migrate and support mission-critical applications with greater efficiency and lower risk. Kodesage is primarily focused on highly regulated industries, including banking, insurance, energy, transportation, telecommunications and the public sector, where critical business operations often continue to rely on software built decades ago. While these systems remain essential to day-to-day operations, modernising them can be costly and complex, particularly as experienced engineers retire and institutional knowledge becomes harder to access. The platform is designed to analyse both modern and legacy technology stacks, including Oracle Forms, PL/SQL, COBOL, PowerBuilder and RPG. It automates tasks such as codebase discovery, documentation generation, context-aware code conversion, test creation and AI-assisted production support. To address data residency and compliance requirements, Kodesage operates entirely within customer-controlled environments, whether on-premise, in a virtual private cloud or in fully air-gapped deployments. This approach allows organisations to use AI-powered tooling while keeping source code, databases and business-critical information within their own infrastructure. Software modernisation is rarely straightforward, particularly in regulated industries where legacy and modern systems often need to coexist for years. As institutional knowledge gradually disappears, the burden of maintaining these systems continues to grow. Our goal is to help organisations modernise faster, reduce operational complexity and improve support through AI-assisted tooling, said Gergely Dombi, co-founder and CEO of Kodesage. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its go-to-market efforts across the US and Europe, while continuing to invest in product development and engineering. Kodesage said its long-term vision is to enable self-healing enterprise applications capable of continuously learning, testing and validating improvements with human oversight.

A new Cambridge Enterprise Initiative called Leaps is launching today to embed Cambridge-based companies in complementary ecosystems, giving selected founders access to new markets, talent and investment in key geographical hotspots to enable their success The initiative has been launched in collaboration with global partners Phoenix Court, Balderton Capital and the BioInnovation Institute Foundation (BII). With space for three companies, the London Leap will allow Cambridge startups to be embedded within the dynamic London ecosystem, which attracts not only international capital, but has a reputation for continued unicorn creation.  With Cambridge being ranked as one of the world’s top cities for innovation output per capita in the Ecosystem Index, behind only the Bay Area and Boston, the deep connection with London will connect two powerful and complementary ecosystems. The aim is to boost Cambridge-born companies, translating the world-renowned research at the University of Cambridge addressing some of the major global challenges – climate health, human health and quantum computing to name just a few.  Since 1995, the companies supported by Cambridge Enterprise have collectively raised over £4.9bn, making Cambridge a source of trusted commercial science-based innovation. From idea development to investment, we provide the diverse support needed by researchers, innovators and talented teams tackling the challenges facing the world today. Notable spinouts from Cambridge Enterprise include BlueGnome, Centessa Pharmaceuticals, Gyroscope, Solexa, VocalIQ and Cytora. Companies will be invited to apply and chosen on a competitive basis by the Leap partners and an advisory board formed by investors and serial entrepreneurs with a global presence. Among them are Susan Hill, CEO of Mestag Therapeutics, Daniel Mahony, Senior Partner at Novo Holdings UK, Lord David Prior, Deputy Chairman UK and Global Senior Advisor at Lazard, Dr Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft and Dr Kaja Wasik, CEO of Echo Labs.  Jim Glasheen, Cambridge Enterprise Chief Executive Officer said: “Companies cannot grow and scale in isolation. London is a globally connected hub. Our partners can help our companies become a ‘local’ within these complementary innovation ecosystems, creating the meaningful connections that allow companies to grow. London is only the beginning, as we identify new ecosystems in different locations and continue to build on a global proposition of Leaps.” Suranga Chandratillake, General Partner at Balderton, said: “Cambridge continues to be one of the most exciting ecosystems for deep tech, producing companies such as Wayve, Healx and Darktrace. The next generation of ambitious founders deserves the support to match that ambition. This is why we’re delighted to partner with  Cambridge Enterprise through Leaps, enabling the connections that are such a critical part of building a successful tech business.”      Julia Hawkins, General Partner at Phoenix Court, said: “Cambridge has long produced some of the world’s most ambitious deep tech companies, from pioneers like Raspberry Pi to breakthrough businesses such as Nyobolt and CuspAI. The opportunity now is to help more of these companies connect earlier with global markets, talent and customers. London is one of the few ecosystems in the world with the density of operators, investors and international networks to help accelerate that journey.” Jen Nielsen, CEO at BioInnovation Institute, said: “We are excited to support the London Leaps initiative and help strengthen the bridge between Cambridge and other leading innovation ecosystems. At BII, we are passionate about turning outstanding scientific research into commercially viable companies, and Cambridge represents one of the world’s foremost hubs for scientific excellence, entrepreneurial talent and breakthrough innovation.” Lead image: Pixabay.

CommerceClarity, an AI agent platform for catalogue operations used by enterprise retailers and brands including Prada, STIGA, Cisalfa Sport, Arcaplanet, Next Hardware & Software and Top Farmacia (Hippocrates Holding), has acquired Barcelona-based startup Katalogo.ai. As part of the transaction, Katalogo.ai founder Luca Cozzolino will join CommerceClarity's founding team as Chief Product Officer. The acquisition marks CommerceClarity’s first M&A transaction, completed 18 months after the company was founded and six months after it raised €2.7 million in funding. The acquisition brings together two companies working to address the growing complexity of product catalogue management in e-commerce. As retailers expand across multiple channels, markets and marketplaces, and as AI-powered search and shopping agents increasingly influence product discovery, the quality and structure of product data have become critical factors in online visibility and performance. CommerceClarity has developed an AI-powered platform that helps retailers and brands structure, enrich and validate catalogue data across sales channels. The platform acts as an intelligence layer that enables businesses to manage catalogue operations at scale while maintaining data quality and compliance requirements. Katalogo.ai was focused on building AI-powered styling agents for retail catalogues, capable of analysing available products and generating curated outfit and product recommendations. The company’s technology was designed to help fashion and lifestyle brands create more personalised shopping experiences while maximising the value of their product data. We had identified the same problem from two different angles. Luca approached it from the merchant and platform side, while we focused on enterprise infrastructure. Bringing the two approaches together allows us to accelerate the development of a shared vision, said Federico Sargenti, co-founder and CEO of CommerceClarity. Cozzolino brings experience across e-commerce, retail and product development, having held product leadership roles at Shopify and Zalando. At Katalogo.ai, he focused on developing solutions to the growing challenges of product catalogue management. When I met the CommerceClarity team, it became clear that our expertise was highly complementary. Joining forces creates an opportunity to accelerate product development and pursue a larger vision for the future of commerce, says Cozzolino. The acquisition coincides with CommerceClarity’s international expansion, with the UK becoming the company’s first market outside Italy. As it expands internationally, CommerceClarity said it will continue to scale its AI-driven catalogue operations platform and its “Service as a Software” model, under which dedicated AI engineers work alongside customers to deploy and optimise catalogue management agents across product categories.

Innovorder, a French restaurant technology company specialising in the digitalisation of restaurant operations, has raised €20 million in a funding round led by UL Invest, the family office of technology entrepreneur Laurent Useldinger. The transaction combines a capital increase with the partial buyout of shares held by existing investors. Evolem, which first invested in the company in 2019, remains a shareholder following the operation. Founded in 2014, Innovorder develops cloud-based software and digital solutions for restaurant operators across both commercial and contract catering. Its all-in-one SaaS platform supports a wide range of operational functions, including order management, payment processing, kitchen operations, business management, customer loyalty, and AI-powered reporting. The company serves customers across multiple segments, including quick-service restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, food courts, transport catering, as well as schools, universities, hospitals, and corporate dining facilities. In the European contract catering market, estimated at €22 billion and still largely reliant on legacy systems, Innovorder has established a strong presence as a cloud-native technology provider. Over the past 18 months, the company has expanded its focus on artificial intelligence, building a dedicated AI team and deploying its first AI agents for customers. Central to this strategy is Atlas, Innovorder’s proprietary platform designed to automate operational and management tasks while integrating with existing software systems. The company says the technology helps restaurant operators improve efficiency and reduce the time spent on routine administrative work. The funding comes as Innovorder continues to expand across the European restaurant technology market. The company said it has been profitable since 2024 and reports annual organic growth of 40 per cent. It expects to generate €15 million in revenue in 2026. The new capital will be used to support Innovorder’s next phase of growth, including further product development, expansion across European markets, potential acquisition opportunities, and the strengthening of its position in both commercial and contract catering.