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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monzo today reported rocketing revenues and profits, helped by adding three million customers in its financial year. The UK digital bank reported pre-tax profits of £87.3m in the year ending March 2026, a 44 per cent jump on the year, while revenues were up 39 per cent to £1.7bn on the year. The figures were helped by adding three million customers in the year, increasing customer deposits, and increased lending, Monzo said. Monzo, which has over 15.2m customers, highlighted the diversity of its revenue streams, saying that it has four income streams over £300m, which are current account balances, borrowing, payments, and wealth. Monzo, which is making a push across the EU, said it now holds £25.7bn in customer deposits, up  55 per cent year over year. Monzo said that business banking now represented a growing 14 per cent of total revenue, while other highlights include 1.6m customers subscribing to paid plans. It also said 50 per cent of active Monzo customers are choosing Monzo as their primary bank, which is seen as a key metric as the bank looks to encourage more customers to get their salaries paid into Monzo. Income from lending, meanwhile, increased 39 per cent on the year. Diana Layfield, who took over as Monzo CEO this year, said: "We've delivered strong, profitable growth while investing in the foundations that will power our future.  "We're building on that momentum by delivering more products for personal and business customers, continuing to grow in the UK and bringing Monzo magic to Europe in a way that feels truly local from day one."

Europe’s leading AI model firm has acquired an Austrian AI startup, in an effort to build out its offering for aerospace, automotive and industrial businesses across Europe. France’s Mistral has acquired Emmi AI, marking its second acquisition, for an undisclosed sum. Emmi AI, founded in 2024 and which last year raised the largest-ever seed round for an Austrian startup, builds AI models that help industrial companies speed up engineering workflows and product design cycles. Specifically, it has developed expertise in physics AI developing engineering AI models. Emmi AI is part of a new wave of "applied AI" companies using AI to solve long-standing engineering challenges, such as computational fluid dynamics, thermal analysis, and material stress testing - critical tasks across industries like aerospace, automotive, energy, and semiconductors.   The move comes as Mistral, which is seen as a European competitor to the bigger US LLM firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, looks to position itself as the AI partner for industrial enterprises across Europe.   Emmi AI’s €15m seed round last year was led by 3VC, Speedinvest, Serena, and PUSH VC.   Emmi AI’s co-founders and its team of more than 30 researchers and engineers will join Mistral's Science and Applied AI teams later this year, Mistral said.   Mistral, which earlier this year acquired French AI startup Koyeb, said the acquisition means it's increasing its investment in Europe, in particular in Austria, Germany and Lithuania where the Emmi team is based.    It will further hire locally among the best experts in the field, it said.   Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO, Mistral, said: "This strategic acquisition cements Mistral's leadership in industrial AI and positions us as the partner of choice for manufacturers in high-stakes sectors like aerospace, automotive, or semiconductors.    “It empowers our customers with a fully integrated platform to solve complex challenges, transform core R&D processes, and accelerate high-value innovation." Johannes Brandstetter, Emmi AI’s co-founder and chief science officer, said:  "At Emmi AI, we have dedicated ourselves to solving high-stakes physical challenges, ranging from the real-time stabilisation of power grids to the intricate simulation of injection molding and automotive safety testing.    “By integrating our expertise into Mistral’s world-class AI ecosystem, we are positioned to revolutionise core R&D."

Helsinki-based retail technology startup Retailgrid has raised €358,000 in a pre-seed funding round led by Finnish B2B SaaS investors Ali Omar, Henry Nilert and Pekka Ylitalo, with participation from Innovestor Angel CoFund. Retailgrid develops an AI-powered workbook designed for retail pricing, assortment planning and forecasting. The company focuses on mid-market retailers and FMCG companies that manage large product catalogues but often rely on fragmented systems and spreadsheet-based workflows for operational decision-making. Many retailers continue to manage pricing, promotions and inventory decisions through manual spreadsheet models or external consulting projects, while enterprise software solutions are often too complex and resource-intensive for mid-sized organisations. Retailgrid aims to address this gap with a cloud-based platform that combines the familiarity of spreadsheets with AI-driven analytics and automation. The platform connects directly to existing retail data sources, including ERP systems, e-commerce platforms and market-data feeds. Users can generate pricing models, demand forecasts, assortment recommendations and promotion analyses using natural language prompts, while maintaining visibility into the underlying data and logic behind each recommendation. According to Retailgrid, the platform is designed to reduce the time and operational complexity associated with retail analytics workflows, with pre-built AI agents supporting use cases including price optimisation, sales forecasting, assortment planning, promotion analysis and competitor monitoring. Every retailer we talk to says the same thing: we already do this in Excel - but it’s breaking. Our job is to give them a tool that feels as flexible as the spreadsheet they know but actually scales with their data and their decisions, said Maxim Morozov, CEO and founder of Retailgrid. The company primarily serves omnichannel retailers and FMCG brands across sectors, including grocery, fashion, beauty, DIY and specialty retail. The new funding will be used to further develop the AI Grid platform, expand the customer base across Europe, and grow the engineering and commercial teams.

As the European AI Act moves from paper to practice, the tech landscape is shifting. For the continent’s innovation leaders and decision-makers, the challenge is no longer just "building fast," but building with sovereignty and scale. Nexus Luxembourg 2026 has emerged as the premier forum where these critical conversations turn into action. Strategically located at the crossroads of tech, European policy and finance, Nexus Luxembourg is far from a standard trade show. It is a curated event designed for high-level exchange. With 10,000 attendees expected and over 150 speakers, the 2026 edition focuses on key pillars such as cybersecurity, data sovereignty, fintech and digital finance, govtech, climate tech, space tech and health tech. Why Decision-Makers are attending: Positioned in Luxembourg, the event serves as a natural bridge between EU regulators, decision-makers and tech pioneers, offering a unique perspective on innovation and growth. With four dedicated zones -the Intelligence Forum, the Fintech Sphere, the Launchpad Arena and the Luxembourg Makes It Happen space- the event is structured to foster collaboration between established industry leaders and innovative companies. Nexus Luxembourg provides a "boutique" and human-sized experience, gathering a high-density of decision-makers and public-sector visionaries. The clock is ticking. To maintain the exclusivity and high-caliber networking environment, tickets are strictly limited. The current registration tier expires this week. Prices will officially increase on Friday, May 22nd. Position your organization at the heart of European innovation. Secure Your Pass at the Best Rate

Investor appetite is increasingly shifting toward infrastructure-heavy categories tied to food resilience, including AgTech, aquaculture, robotics, bio-inputs, and precision fermentation.  Europe’s foodtech sector is entering a more sober, pragmatic phase. According to DigitalFoodLab’s State of the European FoodTech Ecosystem in 2026 report, European foodtech startups raised €3 billion in 2025 — a 25 per cent decline year-on-year — as the industry continues to cool from the investment frenzy of 2021 and 2022. I spoke to Matthieu Vincent, co-founder of DigitalFoodLab, to learn more. ​ Europe’s food startups face a timing problem, not an innovation problem Reading the report, I found the investor funding rates shockingly low for such a sector that touches everyone. Vincent attributes the rate to “a dichotomy between the expectations of investors (rapid scalability) and the reality (5 to 10 years of research before real market adoption).  However, he notes that on the positive side, “we can compare AgriFoodTech funding to R&D investments of the industry: traditionally, food companies invest a tiny share of their turnover in R&D, much less than in other industries.” ​ Further, in most cases, food innovation is incremental (notably new food products) and doesn't require much funding. “As many technologies are (finally) maturing, they will enter the market in the next 12 to 18 months, which should lead to a new wave of funding.” ​ Beyond this, early-stage funding has remained relatively stable; Europe now accounts for 28 per cent of global FoodTech investment. According to Vincent, this is  “a very positive sign” in an otherwise depressed ecosystem. “Investors, as well as established companies, are betting on early-stage innovation. The support of leading companies has become a "must-have" as many investors now want corporate validation before investing.” ​ Despite regulatory friction, Europe remains a powerhouse for next-generation food startups Europe’s Novel Foods framework continues to slow the commercial development of many startups across both agriculture — including robotics and bioinputs — and food innovation sectors such as precision fermentation and cellular agriculture, particularly when compared to markets like the US and Singapore. As a result, many European startups now prioritise regulatory approval in the US or Singapore first, using those markets to validate demand and scale commercially before eventually expanding back into Europe. According to Vincent, “The goal is to test the market there and eventually come back to Europe at some point when they receive approval." "And, it should be pointed out that nowadays, a very large share of the "new ingredient" startups are based in Europe rather than in the US or Israel. So, European regulation is a challenge, but not a barrier.” ​ I’ve long been bullish on cell-cultivated meat and was disappointed to hear that Meatable announced its dissolution in December last year due to its inability to obtain further funding from existing or new investors. In April 2024, Meatable was the first company in the European Union to receive regulatory approval from the EFSA for a public tasting of cultured meat, in this case sausage.  Earlier this month, cultivated meat pioneer Meatly, Europe’s first company to sell cultivated meat for pet food raised £10.4 million in Series A funding. ​ Check out our earlier interview with Owen Ensor, founder and CEO of Meatly. Further, French dairy protein precision fermentation company Standing Ovation announced a €30 million Series B financing round in April this year , including €25 million in equity. Food manufacturers are becoming foodtech’s key startup partners The food and beverage industry has continued to show strong interest in startups, although that engagement is coming primarily from food manufacturers rather than retailers — with notable exceptions such as REWE Group in Germany, which has taken a more active approach to investing in and partnering with startups. According to Vincent, both global and European ingredient companies are also increasingly investing in and collaborating with startups as they recognise that many of these technologies are moving closer to commercial readiness. Last year, foodtech startup Nosh.bio publicly debuted its Koji-based hybrid beef mince through a week-long cafeteria partnership at Speisemanufaktur Adlershof in Berlin.  Rather than the conventional B2C route, Nosh.bio partners with food manufacturers to overcome the taste, texture, and price challenges, especially in hybrid and plant-based applications. With a focus on industrial readiness and cost-effective scale-up, the team is helping accelerate the shift toward more sustainable, consumer-ready products. Check out our earlier interview with Nosh.bio co-founder and CEO Tim Fronzek. Agritech and aquaculture emerge as Europe’s foodtech stabilisers Agritech is holding up the sector, especially in the Nordics, due to a rise in funding for aquaculture: “Europe is indeed importing a lot of fish from other areas of the world, and consumption is rising,” explained Vincent. The report notes that Europe as a whole is doing well in agricultural robotics, but, again, due to regulatory challenges (and other farm-size challenges), many companies have to move to the US for commercialisation. “That's an issue that should be tackled at the European level.” Further, he notes that many startups, initially focused on supporting carbon credit verification through satellite imagery, emerged in Europe but struggled to scale up and find clients. “The rise of defence budgets is creating new business streams for them, and we can hope that agriculture will, in the end, benefit from it.” Dutch grocery delivery startup Picnic raised the largest deal of 2025: €400 million. The investment is notable as the company has triumphed where numerous competitors, including Gorillas, Getir and Jiffy, etc.closed over the past few years. Vincent attributes the company’s success to price and affordability: “From the consumer perspective, companies like Picnic and Rohlik Group have focused on delivering groceries at competitive prices rather than simply maximising convenience. That contrasts sharply with many quick-commerce startups, where convenience was the core value proposition. In an environment shaped by inflation and growing consumer sensitivity to price, the model centred on affordability is clearly performing much better.” Further, the rapid growth of quick-commerce startups, with the opening of many dark stores in urban centres, made them enemies of many city councils, which banned them. “Instead, Picnic has a model focusing on suburbs, with large hubs, and is not creating the same defiance.” Ultimately, the report suggests that Europe’s foodtech slowdown is less a collapse than a reset. The question now is not whether Europe can generate foodtech innovation but whether it can create the regulatory, industrial, and investment conditions needed to keep those companies scaling at home rather than abroad. Lead image: Nosh.bio.

Milan-based legal AI company Lexroom has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Left Lane Capital, with participation from Base10 Partners, Eurazeo, Acurio Ventures, Entourage and View Different. The round comes eight months after the company’s Series A and brings Lexroom’s total funding to more than $73 million. Lexroom develops AI infrastructure for legal professionals, focusing on a data-first approach built around verified legal sources rather than fine-tuned general-purpose language models. The company says its platform is designed to address reliability and verification challenges associated with generative AI tools in legal work, including fabricated citations and inaccurate legal references. Its platform is built on a proprietary database of more than six million verified legal sources, including legislation, case law and regulatory materials, which are continuously updated and structured for legal research and retrieval. Lexroom says this architecture is designed to align more closely with legal workflows by grounding outputs directly in source material. When we started Lexroom, two things were immediately clear: lawyers needed a better way to work, and LLMs could deliver it. The missing piece was data - always-updated laws, relevant case law and legal proceedings. Civil law countries need an AI legal engine that reasons data-first, said Paolo Fois, CEO and co-founder of Lexroom. The platform is now used by more than 8,000 law firms and corporate legal teams, with a majority of users engaging with the product on a daily basis. Lexroom aims to reduce the time required for legal research and drafting, allowing firms to handle more work while maintaining professional standards. The new funding will support the company’s expansion across civil law jurisdictions in Europe, beginning with Spain and Germany. Lexroom plans to build local teams and develop jurisdiction-specific capabilities in collaboration with firms operating in those markets.

Finnish cybersecurity startup CRACI has raised €1.4 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by Lifeline Ventures, with participation from First Fellow Partners and Wave Ventures. The funding will support product development and the expansion of the platform ahead of new European cybersecurity regulations coming into force in 2026. Founded in 2025 by Juho Niemi, Dennis Marttinen, Jaakko Sirén and Petteri Pulkkinen, CRACI develops software supply chain security technology designed to help companies comply with the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). The regulation will require products with digital elements sold in the EU to meet stricter cybersecurity, documentation and lifecycle management standards, affecting hundreds of thousands of companies globally. The company says the increasing complexity of software development, driven by third-party components, open-source dependencies and AI-generated code, is making visibility and control across software supply chains more difficult. At the same time, businesses face growing regulatory pressure to ensure software products remain secure and traceable throughout their lifecycle. CRACI’s platform provides visibility across software supply chains while automating vulnerability tracking, lifecycle management and compliance processes. The company aims to help organisations meet CRA requirements related to supply chain control, traceability and continuous security without slowing software development. Juho Niemi, co-founder and CEO of CRACI, said: Supply chain security is now business-critical for software organisations. Companies that invest early will gain a competitive edge through faster market access and stronger trust. Those relying on manual approaches risk delays and higher costs. We enable fast and reliable security and compliance without slowing growth. He added that AI-driven software development is increasing both the complexity and risk associated with modern applications, while the CRA places greater accountability on companies to ensure the security of every product they ship. The new funding will support CRACI’s efforts to help businesses prepare for the Cyber Resilience Act and manage evolving software supply chain security and compliance requirements across the European market.

Mouro Capital has announced the first close of its third fund, securing $400 million from Banco Santander, the firm’s longstanding strategic partner. The latest fundraising brings Mouro Capital’s total investment commitments to more than $1 billion. Mouro Capital is an independently managed venture capital firm focused on financial services and technology. Since 2015, Mouro Capital’s team has invested across North America, Europe and Latin America, typically backing companies from seed through to Series C stages. Its investment strategy is centred on emerging technologies shaping financial services, including artificial intelligence, data infrastructure, blockchain and governance, risk and compliance technologies. Areas of focus for the new fund include capital markets, wealth management, insurtech and AI-enabled enterprise infrastructure. Manuel Silva Martínez, General Partner at Mouro Capital, said: We’re proud to have built a global platform delivering strong, consistent returns. With this fund, we’re excited to back the next generation of global founders rewiring financial services through the lens of AI, data and infrastructure. He added that Mouro Capital sees growing opportunities in areas such as capital markets, wealth management and governance, risk and compliance technologies, driven by developments in AI and blockchain, while insurtech remains an underserved segment where the firm plans to increase its focus. With seven investments already completed through the new fund, Mouro Capital has begun deploying capital into companies, including Eleven Labs and Sakana AI, reflecting its focus on AI-driven transformation within financial services and enterprise operations. According to Mouro Capital, the new fund will continue supporting founders across fintech and enterprise infrastructure, while maintaining follow-on investments in existing portfolio companies.

Agentic AI company Dust today announced a $40 million Series B led by Abstract and Sequoia, with participation from Snowflake and Datadog. With this round, Dust has raised over $60 million in total funding.  Most companies have adopted AI, but they haven’t become meaningfully more intelligent as organisations. One person prompts an assistant, gets an answer, and the context disappears into a private chat window. The result is real productivity at the individual level, with very little compounding across teams.  Dust is on a mission to transform how work gets done. It is the Operating System for AI Agents. It enables businesses to deploy, orchestrate, and govern fleets of specialised AI agents that work alongside the team, safely connecting the company's knowledge and tools.  "This is a century-defining transformation, and we're only in year three,” said Gabriel Hubert, Co-Founder and CEO of Dust. “What will transform the way we work isn't the next best model or assistant. It's going to be a completely new type of system that gives humans and agents shared, governed access to the same information and capabilities so that they become true collaborators, working with the same context, notifications, artifacts, and goals to compound organisational impact. This is what we call multiplayer AI, and this is what we’re building at Dust." Dust is the multiplayer AI system for human-agent collaboration. It’s a platform where business teams build, deploy, and manage AI agents that work together across an organisation, connected to company knowledge, integrated with the tools teams already use, and governed with enterprise-grade controls.   The product is built around a shared collaboration surface where teams and agents work in the same workspace with shared projects, context, conversations, to-dos, notifications, and a cloud-based compute environment for processing files and generating documents.  An intelligence layer connects more than 100 data sources and integrates with tools teams already rely on, enabling agents to work with company context and take action.  Built-in memory and reinforcement loops help teams achieve more impact with AI over time by understanding their preferences and proactively recommending agent improvements. Enterprise governance provides granular permissions, cost and usage monitoring, a full audit trail, and agent analytics.  Dust is SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR compliant with EU and US data residency, and does not train models on customer data, as contractually guaranteed by major providers.   Dust is used by more than 3,000 organisations, many of them household names. Over 300,000 agents have been deployed across the platform, with 70 per cent weekly active usage across customers and zero churn in 2025. The company was founded by Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu, who have been building together since meeting at Stanford in 2007. They previously co-founded TOTEMS, a data analytics company acquired by Stripe in 2014, and spent five years at Stripe scaling products and teams.  Polu later joined OpenAI as a research engineer on Greg Brockman’s team, co-authoring papers on AI reasoning with Ilya Sutskever. Hubert became Chief Product Officer at Alan.  In September 2022, Polu left OpenAI with a conviction that became Dust’s founding thesis: the models were already powerful enough to be economically transformative, but were under-deployed because the product layer was missing.   “We're in the early innings of a massive shift in how organisations use AI,” said Konstantine Buhler, Partner at Sequoia.  “Most enterprise AI today is single-player: one person, one prompt, no compounding. Dust is building the multiplayer system, where agents and humans share context and work together across the entire company. Zero churn and 70 per cent weekly active usage tell you this isn't experimental anymore. This is how enterprises will actually operate.”   "Most AI platforms are stuck in single-player mode: one person, one chatbot, one task,” said Ramtin Naimi, General Partner at Abstract.  “Dust is multiplayer. AI Operators inside companies like Datadog and 1Password don't just use Dust; they build agents that collaborate across teams, learn from every interaction, and rewire how the entire company works. That's a new operating model and category. That's why we participated in this round."   Dust plans to use this round to push three frontiers at once: agents that learn and improve automatically as they’re used, collaboration primitives that make humans and agents equal co-contributors with bidirectional access to shared projects, tools, and context, and infrastructure that makes governance and orchestration predictable at enterprise scale.  Lead image: Dust founders Stanislas Polu and Gabriel Hubert. 

Milan-based future of work company Cosmico has raised €12 million in a funding round combining equity and debt, led by P101 SGR. Existing investors, including Prana Ventures, also participated in the round. Alongside the funding round, Cosmico completed the acquisition of Flatmates, a creator agency focused on applying Talent-as-a-Service models to the creator economy across Italy, Spain and the United States. The transaction gives Cosmico full ownership of the company following its earlier acquisition of a majority stake in 2024. Cosmico operates as a holding company focused on the future of work, with activities spanning Italy and Spain. Its ecosystem is organised across several business verticals, including Talent-as-a-Service for digital professionals and creators, community-based employee engagement, and AI-supported team design. The company says its acquisition strategy will focus both on expanding into adjacent future-of-work segments and strengthening existing business units through further consolidation. Founded in 2021, Flatmates operates across talent representation, creator-brand partnerships, original content production and editorial channels. The company works with brands including Ducati, NordVPN, Google, Xiaomi, Trade Republic and Generali. According to Cosmico, the acquisition strengthens the group’s position in the creator economy market across Italy, Spain and the United States. Francesco Marino, CEO and co-founder of the Cosmico Group, said the funding supports Cosmico’s long-term expansion plans and continued acquisition activity: Cosmico is no longer a scale-up with a single product: we have become a future of work holding company, with multiple verticals and a growth strategy that also includes strategic acquisitions. Founded by Francesco Marino, Simone Tornabene, and Matteo Roversi, Cosmico today operates across Italy and Spain with a network of more than 35,000 digital professionals, more than 300 clients and teams based in Milan and Madrid. The new funding will support the next phase of the group’s expansion strategy, including three additional acquisitions planned by the end of 2026.