This week, we tracked more than 45 tech funding deals worth over €684 million and over 5 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. ❗ Want to explore the data in more detail? The free, open-access Tech.eu Funding Explorer offers deeper insights into funding rounds, investor activity, company profiles and market trends. Either way, let's get you up to speed. ? Notable and big funding rounds ?? SoftBank invests $200M in robotics startup Gravis Robotics ?? Ingenico secures €150M in fresh capital ?? Rillet received a $100M investment at a valuation of $1B ??  Callosum raises $100M seed round ??‍?? Noteworthy acquisitions and mergers ?? The Munich-based investment firm Tiven is acquiring Sonnen, the battery storage manufacturer ?? Digital health startup Aepsy acquires Kinastic ?? Billion-dollar startup Dash0 acquires Berlin-based tech company Polar Signals ? Interesting moves from investors ? Defence tech investor and builder Gallos raises $50M ? QuantumLight Closes $500 Million Second Venture Fund to Back AI and Crypto Startups ? Venture studio led by ex-GCHQ & NSA leaders raises £35m ?? Billion-dollar startup Dash0 acquires Berlin-based tech company Polar Signals ?️ In other (important) news ? Monzo chairman Gary Hoffman to stand down after nearly eight years ? ‘A nervous system as a service’: Julian Teicke’s new bet on human connection ? Nebius looks to raise $4.5BN through bond issue ?? France's top-funded tech companies in H1 2026 ? Recommended reads and listens ?‍? At 14, Sasha Bagrov is building a safer marketplace for teenage odd jobs ? How the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions transformed research careers over 30 years ?‍❤️‍? Bootstrapped and profitable: Taimi and Hily set their sights on IPO readiness ??  Aisel raises €1.7M to tackle psychiatry’s capacity crisis ?? European tech startups to watch  ? Astute raises $1.2M and launches B2B new media platform ??  AI startup Guideless raises €1M to streamline software training ?? EcoNomad raises £400,000 to bring waste-to-energy tech to small livestock farms ?? Paralo raises £270,000 to tackle golf’s fragmented technology stack

When I was a young teenager, I was in Girl Guides — essentially the Australian equivalent of Girl Scouts — and went to a school that strongly encouraged civic participation. So I duly knocked on strangers' doors, offering to do odd jobs and asking for sponsorship for various fundraising efforts. These included the 40 Hour Famine (world hunger) — and the MS Readathon (Multiple Sclerosis). I also did odd jobs in my Girl Guide uniform, like walking and washing dogs.  At the time, nobody seemed to think twice about it from a safety perspective. I think about the potential safety risks now, and I cringe. From doorstep jobs to a marketplace Sasha Bagrov is the 14-year-old founder and CEO of KidsHustle, the UK's first iOS marketplace for teenage employment. He began coding at age 9, had software on the App Store by 12, and spent three years building KidsHustle before its launch in April 2026. He is a Year 10 student at Hampton School in London. The idea for KidsHustle came about when his family had a couple of teenagers come to their front door and ask if they could wash their car. “I was sitting there thinking: they're going around without their parents, they're dealing in cash, and their parents have no idea where they are. They were about 13 or 14, around the same age as me. I just thought, this is so unsafe. What if there were a better way to do this where we could provide safety and financial security?” KidsHustle is targeting the UK’s 3.6 million teenagers aged 13–17, representing an estimated £1.2 billion casual labour market that remains entirely unplatformed. Every major gig economy platform — TaskRabbit, Fiverr, Airtasker — requires users to be at least 18. KidsHustle is the first platform to build verified, compliant infrastructure for this market across the UK and Europe. According to Bagrov, there's clearly a market of teenagers who want to be entrepreneurial and earn money. But many of the existing entry points lack safeguards and involve posting something in a Telegram or WhatsApp group. How the platform works KidsHustle connects teenagers with local paid jobs while keeping parents involved throughout the process. Jobs include gardening, babysitting, dog walking, tutoring, and tech help. A parent creates a Stripe-verified account and posts a job with the task, pay, and location. Teens browse nearby opportunities on a map, with parents retaining approval over applications. Once a job begins, the teen checks in using a QR code, triggering live GPS sharing with their parent for the duration of the job. When the work is completed, payment is released from escrow, and the teen receives a CV-ready reference. KidsHustle charges the job owner a service fee on top of the job price, meaning the teenager receives the full amount they were promised. Keeping parents in the loop Safety is embedded throughout the platform. Bagrov explained: “We're keeping the parent involved before the job owner can see who the teenager is. Once the teenager applies, the job owner can see things like their statistics and reviews, so we want the parent to have approved that first." If the parent approves it, the teenager then appears on the job owner's applicant list. The job owner can approve or deny the application and assess whether the applicant is a good fit. One of the problems KidsHustle wanted to solve was, “How do we know if a teenager is at the right house? How do we know they've gone to the correct person?” When the teenager arrives, they have to scan a unique QR code belonging to the job owner. That verifies that they're at the right place. Once they've scanned the correct QR code, live location tracking for their parent begins. KidsHustle also has a geolocation feature coming soon. If the teenager leaves a predefined area, it can send a notification to their parent and activate other safety features. Once the teenager completes the job, the platform asks them to take photos of the finished work, which the job owner can review. “That gives us a paper trail of what happened. If there’s a dispute, we have concrete evidence that the work was completed. We also have a system that can review the evidence and provide a confidence score on how well the teenager completed the job,” explained Bagrov. Can AI decide which jobs are safe for a 14-year-old? One of KidsHustle’s main uses of AI is content safety. When a job is posted, Google Gemini assesses whether it is appropriate for the teenager's age. “For example, let's say you're moving house and want someone to help you move boxes. If the target demographic is 14-year-olds and they're going to be moving heavy boxes, Gemini could identify that as a safety risk and deny the job,” explained Bagrov. The company previously used less contextual models, but found they were less effective at identifying risks that might be obvious to a human. Parcel deliveries are one example: “You can't guarantee what's inside that parcel. Gemini can identify that context and filter out those jobs.” Parents are required to complete ID verification and KYC. At the same time, KidsHustle says it has completed a Data Protection Impact Assessment and complies with GDPR and the Children's Code, including minimising the data collected from minors. “We don't try to upsell anything to them, and we use less promotional user interfaces,” said Bagrov. Teenagers also have in-app safety buttons that allow them to quickly call 999 or contact the safety team during a job, and users, jobs, reviews, and locations can all be reported. So far there have been no safety incidents on the platform. Building a startup around school By the time KidsHustle launched, Bagrov had spent roughly three years building it around his school commitments, developing most of the platform himself with occasional back-end help from his friend Gabriel. “I've wanted to rebuild it so many times because I'm constantly iterating. I'm always thinking: could this be faster? Could this be better? Is this efficient? Is this clear? We also have analytics software that lets us gauge what users are doing live.” Balancing work and school is a challenge. During term, development slows as Bagrov fits KidsHustle around homework, working on it after school and at weekends. “School and KidsHustle kind of revolve around each other,” he explained. “Sometimes I'm on the school coach doing stuff because that's 40 minutes that I don't want to waste. It's useful time.” Bagrov admits that his friends aren’t entrepreneurs, but they are supportive. “I do a lot of theatre tech at school — lighting, sound and stage management. I spend a lot of time in the theatre, and it's quite a techie group. They're supportive because they understand that this is something I want to do and something I find really fun.” Organic traction, fundraising, and GCSEs ​ The platform is seeing organic growth with teenagers. Then through its user acquisition funnel, it also acquires parents because the teenagers need their parents to sign up. “The parents are the ones who post the jobs, so either way we're bringing in both the demand and supply sides of the marketplace,” he explained. Bagrov is now looking to raise £500,000 in pre-seed funding to grow KidsHustle into a profitable business and bring more people onto the team. But building a startup still has to fit around school — and his upcoming GCSEs. “This app is very personal to me because it's pretty much how I learned to code. All the technologies and platforms I know have come from building KidsHustle,” he said. That learning has sometimes been very hands-on: “For example, learning about servers has come from our servers being down at 3 am. It's a very deeply personal product for me because I've learned so much from it, just from a technology perspective.” When you’re too young for LinkedIn Some of the biggest challenges for Bagrov stem from being a founder under 18, which he admits makes things “really complicated.” It's a problem I saw firsthand when Bagrov was removed from LinkedIn for being underage — I found out via a message from his dad in my inbox. Bagrov argues that much of the legal and regulatory framework isn't designed with young entrepreneurs in mind. “We want to fill that gap. Some teenagers want to earn money, become entrepreneurs, and start businesses, but legally they can't do much. There are too many roadblocks.” Those barriers extend beyond entrepreneurship to the relative lack of employment opportunities for younger teenagers. “Even people I know — my friends — want to earn money. But where can they do that? If you Google how to earn money now, you get things like dropshipping or making different physical products. They can be good businesses, but they're not necessarily sustainable in the long term. If you get a massive supplier involved and have to sign a contract, for example, what do you do then when you're under 18?”

Swedish deeptech company Solinide Photonics has raised €4 million in seed funding to commercialise its silicon nitride photonic integrated circuit technology and prepare for scalable manufacturing. The round was co-led by Navigare Ventures and PSV Hafnium, with participation from Chalmers Ventures, Turbine Capital, Norrsken Evolve and Almi Greentech Fund. A spin-out from Chalmers University of Technology, Solinide develops photonic chips and microcomb technology for optical interconnects, addressing the growing amount of data that needs to move between chips in AI data centres without a corresponding increase in power consumption. As AI infrastructure scales, data centres require increasingly high-bandwidth connections between processors and other computing hardware. Conventional optical systems typically rely on multiple individual lasers to transmit data, adding to their power consumption, cost and physical footprint. Solinide's technology replaces multiple laser sources with a single chip capable of generating dozens of precise wavelengths of light simultaneously. These multi-wavelength sources allow more data to travel through each optical fibre while reducing the energy consumption, cost and footprint of optical connections. The company's technology sits at the intersection of photonics, semiconductors, AI infrastructure and energy efficiency, with potential applications across AI data centres, telecommunications and other markets requiring high-capacity optical communications. According to Solinide, its microcomb technology has demonstrated the performance required for data centre links and has been integrated into a rack-mounted system. The company is now working towards commercial readiness and real-world deployment. Solinide has demonstrated that its microcomb technology can achieve the performance required for datacentre links and deliver an integrated rack-mounted product. A key priority now is preparing for commercial readiness, launch and real-world deployment with the aim of sharing product news very shortly, said Marcello Girardo, CEO of Solinide Photonics. The funding will support the expansion of Solinide's engineering and commercial teams, strengthen its in-house prototyping capabilities and prepare the technology for manufacturing in Europe. The company also plans to deepen collaboration with strategic industry partners as it works towards market adoption.

France remained one of Europe’s leading tech funding markets in H1 2026, with investment concentrated in AI, space, fintech and healthcare. Several large transactions shaped the total, including Eutelsat’s €975 million debt financing, Advanced Machine Intelligence’s €885 million seed round and Mistral AI’s €724 million debt raise. AI was a major driver of funding, supported by large investments in model development and infrastructure, while fintech also attracted substantial capital. Space and deeptech remained important parts of the market, with funding spanning satellite infrastructure, aerospace and quantum computing. Healthcare continued to generate activity across both large and mid-sized rounds, while software companies contributed to a broader pipeline of deals across the ecosystem. Security also gained momentum, reflecting growing investor interest in defence, cybersecurity and sovereign technologies. Large seed rounds and debt financing accounted for a significant share of capital raised during the period, highlighting the impact of a relatively small number of sizeable transactions. At the same time, funding activity remained diverse across AI, fintech, healthcare, software, deeptech and security. Overall, France’s H1 2026 funding landscape combined large investments in AI and strategic infrastructure with broader activity across the technology ecosystem. For further insights into funding trends across the European technology ecosystem, check out Tech.eu's Funding Explorer, free and open to everyone. Here are the ten companies that raised the most in H1 2026. Amount raised in H1 2026: €975M Eutelsat is a satellite communications operator providing connectivity and broadcast services through a combined fleet of geostationary and low Earth orbit satellites. Following its combination with OneWeb, the company operates more than 600 LEO satellites alongside its GEO network, serving video, mobile and fixed connectivity, and government customers worldwide. Its OneWeb constellation positions Eutelsat as a European provider of global LEO connectivity and an alternative to other large satellite networks. In H1 2026, Eutelsat secured €975 million in financing to support the procurement of 340 new LEO satellites and the expansion and renewal of its OneWeb constellation. Amount raised in H1 2026: $1B Founded by AI researcher Yann LeCun and entrepreneur Alexandre LeBrun, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) is developing AI systems based on world models that aim to understand and predict how the physical world behaves. Rather than relying primarily on the large language model approach used by many generative AI companies, AMI is building models designed to reason about real-world environments, with teams planned across Paris, New York, Montreal and Singapore. The company raised $1 billion in seed funding in H1 2026, one of the largest seed rounds ever raised by a European startup. Amount raised in H1 2026: $830M Mistral AI develops generative AI models and infrastructure aimed at businesses, governments and developers seeking greater control over how AI is deployed. The Paris-based company is expanding beyond model development into a full-stack AI offering, including tools for building agents and applications and infrastructure for training and running models. It positions its technology around customisation, data control and European AI sovereignty. Mistral secured $830 million in debt financing in H1 2026 to purchase 13,800 Nvidia GPUs for its first data centre in France. Amount raised in H1 2026: €580M Digital health company Alan combines health insurance, care navigation, prevention and wellbeing services within a single technology platform. Founded in 2016, the Paris-based company serves businesses, public-sector organisations and freelancers and has expanded from France into Belgium, Spain and Canada. Its platform uses technology and AI to simplify insurance administration while providing members with access to healthcare and preventive services. Across two rounds in H1 2026, Alan raised €580 million, including €100 million in March and €480 million in June, with the latter valuing the company at €5.5 billion. Amount raised in H1 2026: €340M Toulouse-based AURA AERO is an aircraft manufacturer developing lower-emission aircraft for training and regional aviation. Founded in 2018 by former Airbus engineers Jérémy Caussade, Fabien Raison and Wilfried Dufaud, its portfolio includes the two-seat Integral aircraft and ERA, a 19-seat hybrid-electric regional aircraft designed for short-haul routes. The company is building manufacturing capacity in France and the US and has also established a military division developing drones. AURA AERO secured €340 million in H1 2026 to produce its electric aircraft designed for training and regional passenger transport. Amount raised in H1 2026: $200M Harmattan AI is a defence technology company developing AI-enabled autonomous systems for military operations. Its technology combines autonomy, sensing and mission intelligence across applications including drone interception, intelligence and surveillance, electronic warfare and command and control. The company builds systems designed to operate at the tactical edge while retaining human decision authority. In H1 2026, Harmattan AI raised $200 million in Series B funding to expand deployments into new operational theatres, enter new defence domains and scale manufacturing of its ISR, drone-interception and electronic-warfare platforms. Amount raised in H1 2026: $200M Founded in 2020, Pennylane provides an all-in-one financial management and accounting platform for SMEs, startups and accounting firms. The software brings accounting, invoicing, payments, cash management and other financial processes into a shared workspace, allowing businesses and their accountants to manage financial operations together. Pennylane raised $200 million in Series E funding in H1 2026 to increase R&D investment, strengthen its product for the German market and improve its payments and cash-management offering as it expands across Europe. Amount raised in H1 2026: $175M Morpho is a decentralised finance company building open blockchain infrastructure for lending and borrowing. Its protocol enables financial institutions, fintechs and other platforms to offer configurable credit products through shared onchain infrastructure, connecting capital providers and borrowers without relying on a single intermediary. In H1 2026, Morpho secured $175 million to expand its credit infrastructure, deepen technical and commercial integrations with strategic partners and bring more financial institutions onto its open credit network. Amount raised in H1 2026: €115M Quobly develops silicon-based quantum computers designed to integrate with existing data centres and high-performance computing infrastructure. The company builds its quantum processors using silicon qubits and established semiconductor manufacturing processes, with the aim of making quantum systems scalable and suitable for industrial deployment. Quobly raised €115 million in Series A funding in H1 2026 to improve the performance and scalability of its platform, industrialise its silicon quantum processors and deploy its first Alloy systems in cloud and HPC environments. Amount raised in H1 2026: €83M French medtech company FineHeart is developing implantable technologies for patients with advanced heart failure. Its lead product, FlowMaker, is designed to support the heart's pumping function and address limitations associated with existing treatments for advanced-stage patients. The clinical-stage company was founded by a team with experience in cardiac rhythm management and electrophysiology. FineHeart secured €83 million in H1 2026 to advance the clinical development and industrialisation of FlowMaker while strengthening its position in Europe's active implantable medical device market.

A UK AI startup that is building software infrastructure that allows AI workloads to run on different chips and AI models has raised $100m in an exceptionally high-value European seed round. Callosum has raised $100m in a seed round led by European VC Atomico, with “significant participation” from European early-stage investor Plural, US VC DCVC, the UK’s Sovereign AI, along with angel investors. It follows Callosum raising $10.25m in February this year when it came out of stealth. Founded by Cambridge neuroscientists, Callosum is propounding a counterview to the “monoculture” that believes superintelligence will come from a single “God-like” AI model running on identical chips. It says its approach makes it “faster” and “cheaper" to solve hard, real-world problems at scale. Its approach has won the plaudits of the UK AI minister and the CEO of US chip company Cerebras, which Callosum has announced a partnership with. Callosum is challenging the assumption that AI development and greater intelligence will come through scaling a single AI model on identical chips, a process which demands high energy and capital costs and concentrates power in the hands of the likes of Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic. The startup points out that real-world problems are heterogeneous, complex and require different capabilities. Andrew Feldman, CEO, Cerebras, said: "By integrating Cerebras into Callosum's platform, we're making ultra-low-latency inference available exactly where it creates the greatest impact, enabling customers to build AI systems that simply weren't practical before."

UK golf technology startup Paralo has raised £270,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round to develop its operating system for golf clubs and a connected product for golfers. £250,000 of the founder-led angel round was raised under the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme SEIS), which offers great tax-efficient benefits to investors in return for investment in small and early-stage startup businesses in the UK. Founded in 2026 by Jarrad Hicks and Zaheer Merali, Paralo is developing software to replace the fragmented systems currently used to run golf clubs, spanning membership, tee sheets, competitions, payments, EPOS, food and beverage, marketing, reporting and agronomy. Golf’s technology market has historically offered clubs limited choice. Legacy systems remain deeply embedded and data is fragmented across vendors. In some markets, access to core infrastructure is controlled by governing bodies. In England, for example, technology providers require approval from England Golf to connect to World Handicap System infrastructure. Golf clubs can currently rely on more than 20 separate software products to manage their operations, while golfers often need several different applications to play a single round. Paralo is building a common operating layer for clubs alongside a connected golfer product designed to work across clubs, competitions, societies and golf trips. Rather than selling a fixed software package, the founders have spent months working inside golf clubs, shadowing staff and mapping their operations before developing the platform. According to Jarrad Hicks, co-founder of Paralo: “Golf is an incredibly sophisticated sport sitting on surprisingly fragmented technology. I couldn’t understand why I needed three apps to play one round, and once we started spending time inside clubs it became clear that the problem went much deeper. We don’t think golf needs another app. We’re building the infrastructure underneath the club and the product above it.” Paralo believes the next generation of golf technology will be built around greater interoperability and club choice, with open technical standards allowing clubs to choose the products that best serve their members. Paralo’s architecture allows individual clubs to retain their own operating rules, identity and member experience rather than standardising clubs around a single way of working. The intention is for technology to make a golf club “more itself”. The company is currently deploying the platform with one of the UK’s leading private golf clubs, which is working with Paralo as an early design partner. However, it's still waiting for access in England despite support from some of the country’s leading clubs. According to Hicks: “We want to earn our place on the quality of the technology we build. Ultimately, clubs should be able to choose the products that best serve their members.” Merali added: “The complexity should sit underneath the product, not with the golfer or the club team. That’s the engineering problem we’re interested in solving.” Hicks previously worked in healthtech, selling technology to complex hospital environments, while Merali is a senior systems engineer with experience at Cisco and Webex. The funding will be used to expand product and engineering development, continue deployment with design-partner clubs and build the infrastructure connecting club operations with the golfer-facing product. Paralo is initially focused on golf clubs in the UK and Ireland  The company was valued at £3 million pre-money. Lead image: Paralo CTO, Zaheer Merali (left) and CEO, Jarrad Hicks (right).

AI-powered software training and operational knowledge platform Guideless has raised €1 million in pre-seed funding to further develop its technology and expand internationally. The round was led by Superhero Capital, with participation from FIRSTPICK VC and angel investors Thomas Plantenga (Group CEO of Vinted), Vytautas Atkočaitis (CEO of Vinted Go), and Vinted co-founder Mantas Mikuckas. Founded by Evaldas Bieliūnas and Dovydas Remeika, Guideless is developing a platform that uses AI to automate the creation and maintenance of software training and workflow documentation. The company soft-launched its product in late 2025 and was incorporated in June 2026. Guideless is targeting the time and resources companies spend creating and updating software training materials as teams, tools and workflows change. Outdated documentation can also lead employees to rely on colleagues or support teams for information. The platform captures workflows as users perform them within business software and uses AI to turn individual steps into structured training materials, including visual sequences, written instructions, transcripts and narration. The content can then be edited, branded, shared or exported. We designed Guideless to convert every workflow it captures into structured operational context, eventually forming an evolving memory layer that preserves institutional knowledge as teams, tools, and processes change, said Evaldas Bieliūnas, CEO and co-founder of Guideless. Because workflows are captured step by step rather than as fixed recordings, tutorials can be easily updated, adapted and translated. The platform supports text-to-speech in more than 40 languages and, according to Guideless, can reduce the time needed to create and update training documentation by up to ten times. Beyond training materials, Guideless plans to use this structured workflow data as an evolving source of operational knowledge, providing AI agents with up-to-date, company-specific context about how work is carried out. Guideless currently has more than 3,000 users and paying customers across 15 markets. Its technology is used by teams at Vinted, Masan Consumer Holdings and the Nevada Hospital Association, alongside hundreds of other organisations. The new funding will be used to accelerate product development, grow the team and support Guideless' planned expansion into the UK, wider European and US markets.

Danish AI startup Velatir has raised €5 million in new funding to expand its AI infrastructure platform across Europe and grow its team. The round was co-led by new investor Spintop Ventures and existing investor Ugly Duckling Ventures, with participation from Norrsken Evolve and angel investors Jan Oberhauser (n8n) and Thomas Visti (Universal Robots and MiR). The Danish Export and Investment Fund (EIFO) also participated through a matching loan. The financing comes six months after Velatir raised its pre-seed round and follows the company's commercial launch. Founded by Michael Sørensen, Elias Sørensen, Christian Møller and Andreas Paulli, Velatir is developing an infrastructure layer designed to help companies manage the growing use of AI across their organisations. The platform provides visibility and controls across AI tools, employees, agents, vendors, devices and the underlying infrastructure. Velatir is addressing the security and compliance challenges that can emerge as businesses adopt more AI tools and autonomous agents. As AI becomes embedded across company systems and workflows, organisations need to track how these technologies are being used, where data is flowing and whether their use complies with internal policies and regulatory requirements. The platform brings together AI security, policy enforcement, usage monitoring and discovery in one system. It provides real-time visibility into AI activity across devices, browsers, employees and agents, including data flows, costs and the maturity of individual use cases. Companies can also establish centralised guardrails across systems and access a catalogue of more than 4,000 AI tools. Velatir has built its platform entirely on European-owned and hosted infrastructure, opting not to use US hyperscalers. The company positions this approach around data sovereignty, resilience and control as European businesses increasingly consider where their AI infrastructure and data are hosted. Sovereign cloud is a common phrase, and it often means American platforms with a European label. We built Velatir on European-owned and hosted infrastructure from the very beginning. It is the harder path, but the only viable one for us, said Christian Møller, COO and co-founder of Velatir. The new funding will be used to accelerate Velatir's expansion across Europe and recruit additional talent as it scales to meet growing customer demand.

Private equity investor Oakley Capital has reached an agreement to acquire a majority stake in Graphwise, a key player in the enterprise AI data platforms market.  The transaction represents one of the largest software sales in Bulgaria's history and one of the most significant exits in the regional enterprise AI sector. Graphwise was formed in 2024 through the merger of two pioneers in semantic technologies: Ontotext, founded in Sofia in 2000 by Atanas Kiryakov, and Vienna-based Semantic Web Company, founded in 2004 by Andreas Blumauer and Martin Kaltenböck. Since then, Graphwise has established itself as a leader in RDF (Resource Description Framework) knowledge graph and semantic layer technology and has delivered historical organic ARR growth of over 30 per cent a year, benefitting from the AI tailwind. It provides critical AI data infrastructure services to over 200 international blue-chip clients across the financial services, pharmaceutical, and public sectors. Through this transaction, Portfolion Capital Partners has successfully sold its stake in the company, which it acquired in 2022 as part of an investment consortium.  "This transaction is clear proof that domestic and regional private equity can achieve breakthrough successes in a globally competitive deep tech market," said Jenő Nieder, Deputy CEO and Partner at Portfolion Capital Partners.  "Through the international buy-and-build strategy implemented together with Integral Capital Group and Carpathian Partners, we successfully built an internationally dominant platform out of two regional pioneers, avoiding short-term AI hypes and creating genuine, commercially sustainable value." “We are excited for this new partnership with Oakley, as their team understands both our technology and our ambition,” said Atanas Kiryakov, President and Co-founder of Graphwise. “Oakley has an outstanding track record of transforming founder-led software businesses into unicorns. Together, we look forward to expanding our platform and supporting more organisations to adopt AI with confidence.” The new majority owner, Oakley Capital, in cooperation with management, plans to accelerate international expansion and further acquisitions. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

UK‑based startup EcoNomad Solutions has received £230,000 in funding from the British Design Fund (BDF) to help small livestock farms cut methane emissions, reduce rising energy and fertiliser costs, and turn organic waste into renewable energy.   The investment forms part of a wider £400,000 funding round alongside an Innovate UK Investor Partnership grant, and additional support from existing investor Beeches Group.    Small and mid‑sized livestock farms across the UK and Europe face a triple challenge: rising energy and fertiliser costs, tightening regulations around slurry and waste management, and pressure to reduce methane emissions, with agriculture being one of the largest sources of man‑made methane globally. Yet most existing anaerobic digestion systems are built for large farms, making them too expensive, too complex, or simply too big for smaller operators.   EcoNomad’s flagship product, the BioNomad, is designed specifically to close this gap. The patented system captures methane that would otherwise be emitted, converts organic waste into biogas for heating, cooking or electricity, and produces high‑quality biofertiliser that reduces reliance on chemical inputs. A typical smallholding of around 50 cows may reduce energy and fertiliser expenditure by several thousand pounds per year, depending on farm operations and usage.   The idea for the BioNomad originated in Latin America, where founder Dr Ilan Adler saw how simple, decentralised waste‑to‑energy systems could support rural livelihoods. After moving to the UK for his PhD at UCL more than 15 years ago, Dr Adler recognised that the core challenges around waste management were remarkably similar across both developed and emerging markets. This insight led him to design a system tailored for colder climates, smaller farms, and the regulatory landscape of the UK and Europe.   With more than two decades of experience in environmental engineering, specialising in wastewater treatment, anaerobic digestion and renewable energy, combined with entrepreneurial work overseas, Dr Adler was well‑placed to take the concept forward. A Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship supported the early development of the BioNomad, culminating in a patented, commercially deployable system now operating on farms across the UK and internationally.   Dr Ilan Adler, Founder & CEO of EcoNomad Solutions, said: “Small farms are under increasing pressure, yet they’re often excluded from the renewable energy solutions available to larger operators. Our mission is to change that. The BioNomad is designed to make waste‑to‑energy accessible, affordable and practical for even the smallest farms, helping them reduce emissions, lower costs and build resilience. The support from BDF, Innovate UK and our existing investors enables us to progress product development and scale our operations across the UK and Europe.”   EcoNomad’s technology is already deployed on 10+ farms across the UK, with additional installations in Africa, and successful trials with insect farms, food waste streams, and integrated renewable systems combining biogas, solar and wind to charge batteries for electric vehicles. The company’s core focus is dairy, beef, pig and poultry farms, including off‑grid and rural communities, in the UK, Europe and beyond.   Damon Bonser, CEO of the British Design Fund, said: “EcoNomad Solutions is addressing a major environmental and economic challenge with a solution that is both innovative and highly scalable. Their approach to decentralised anaerobic digestion has the potential to deliver meaningful impact for small farms globally.”   Over the next few years, EcoNomad Solutions aims to evolve the BioNomad® into a fully automated, plug‑and‑play system, making operation even simpler for farmers. Alongside product optimisation, the company is focused on scaling commercial deployment across the UK before exploring expansion into Europe and emerging markets, with the long‑term ambition of making on‑farm waste‑to‑energy more accessible for small farms.   Image: Ilan Adler. EcoNomad CEO & Founder, Roger Duckett from Organic Herd, an EcoNomad partner, David Ruvubi, EcoNomad representative in Rwanda and Uganda.

Nebius, the Amsterdam-based AI infrastructure provider, is looking to raise $4.5bn through convertible notes, it said today, as it looks to finance the sizeable cost of compute and data centre build-out. Nebius is issuing notes worth $2.75bn due in 2030 and notes valued at $1.75bn which mature in 2034, it said in a statement. It says the funds will be used for the build-out of data centres, investment in AI cloud, and buy GPUs. Nebius, which is sometimes referred to as a neocloud, builds and operates data centres, packing them with GPUs, then offers access to these data centres to AI and enterprise companies needing compute power, as well as offering them specialised software to run AI applications.   Nebius has bagged multi-billion-dollar contracts with Meta and Microsoft to supply them with AI infrastructure. In May, it acquired Eigen, a US startup which specialises in improving the performance of leading open-source AI models for approximately $643m in cash and stock.

For three decades, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) fellowships have helped shape the careers of thousands of researchers across Europe and beyond. Originally created to support scientific excellence through international mobility, the European Union's flagship fellowship programme has evolved into one of the world's most influential research talent networks. Today, MSCA alumni aren't just leading laboratories—they're founding startups, shaping public policy, building AI companies, and driving innovation across industry. As the programme celebrates its 30th anniversary, Cate Lawrence sat down with Dr Ornela Bardhi, Head of Data Science at Success Clinic Oy, Marie Curie alumna, and Board Member of the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), to discuss how research careers are changing. Drawing on an international career spanning artificial intelligence, healthcare, entrepreneurship and government —including advising Albania's Minister of Health and co-founding two startups — Ornela shares what it means to be a researcher in 2026.

Enterprise AI company Prevalent AI has secured a $22 million growth investment from Los Angeles-based Integrity Growth Partners (IGP), marking the first primary capital raised by the company since its founding nine years ago. Founded in 2017 by Paul Stokes and Arun Raj, Prevalent AI develops an AI-powered data platform designed to connect and contextualise data across enterprise systems. Prevalent AI's technology brings together data from hundreds of enterprise sources into a continuously updated sovereign knowledge graph. The platform provides a common layer of context across an organisation, mapping what data and systems exist, how they relate to each other and where operational gaps may remain. The company initially focused on cybersecurity, where organisations often need to make decisions using information distributed across multiple systems, controls, identities and data sources. Prevalent AI is now looking to apply the same approach to other enterprise functions as companies increasingly deploy AI systems and agents that depend on connected and reliable data. According to co-founder and CEO Paul Stokes, the challenge for large enterprises is not a lack of tools or data, but the ability to connect that information and provide sufficient context. He said Prevalent AI initially focused on cybersecurity, where fragmented data can create operational risks. As organisations adopt AI agents and other automated systems, Prevalent AI is positioning its knowledge graph as a source of enterprise context that can help these systems interpret relationships between data and support decision-making across different functions. The new investment will support Prevalent AI's sales, marketing, customer success and partnership operations, while accelerating its expansion in the US. The company also plans to extend its knowledge graph technology into broader risk and enterprise applications and strengthen its leadership team.

DeepL has struck a deal with US AI startup Harvey to carry out legal document translation, as it looks to push further into heavily regulated industries. DeepL, valued at $2bn in 2024, said the deal with Harvey, valued at $11bn and reportedly raising at a $15.5bn valuation, highlighted a growing demand for specialised AI tools to handle the complexity of legal work. It comes as DeepL, which axed 250 employees earlier this year, focuses in on striking deals in heavily regulated industries, such as legal, financial services, pharmaceuticals and life sciences. It says the accuracy and security of its tech lend themselves well to these industries. Cologne-based DeepL, whose other legal clients include Taylor Wessing, is known for its AI text translation and writing tools. It has also moved into voice-to-voice translation. Harvey, which competes against Swedish rival Legora, serves more than 2,000 lawyers across over 2,400 organisations. Cross-border legal work depends on translating contracts, filings, briefs, evidence, reports, and client materials quickly, accurately and reliably even when documents are long or highly complex. DeepL, which is one of a number of Harvey’s translation partners, will handle over a third of Harvey’s total document translation volume. DeepL’s other clients include SoftBank and Mazda. Jarek Kutylowski, founder and CEO of DeepL, said: “Working with Harvey brings our specialised Language AI capabilities to even more legal teams around the world, who work across borders every day.”

Employee experience platform Flip has raised $25 million in new funding to expand its AI-powered technology for frontline workers. Existing investors Notion Capital and HV Capital increased their stakes in the company, while L-Bank, the development bank of Baden-Württemberg, joined as a new investor alongside a group of business angels and institutional investors. Founded in 2018, Flip develops a digital employee platform for workers in sectors such as manufacturing, retail, logistics, care and hospitality, where employees often do not have regular access to corporate computers or email accounts. The platform brings together internal communication, workflows, digital identity and AI tools in a single application. The company is addressing a gap in workplace AI adoption between office-based and frontline employees. While AI tools have become increasingly integrated into knowledge work, deskless workers often lack access to the digital systems and infrastructure needed to use similar technologies. AI has long been part of everyday life in the office but, on the assembly line, in stores, or in care settings, it has barely arrived, said Benedikt Brand, co-founder and CEO of Flip. He attributed the gap partly to frontline organisations lacking the digital identity and infrastructure required to integrate AI into day-to-day operations. At the centre of Flip's expansion is Fusion, a product that generates custom applications for frontline teams based on specific stores, teams or operational processes. The technology is intended to reduce the need for companies to purchase and customise separate software applications for individual frontline use cases. Flip has also introduced Frontline Identity, which allows employees to access workplace systems without requiring a corporate email address. The capability is designed to simplify digital access for deskless employees and provide an identity layer through which they can use company applications and AI tools. Together, these capabilities form part of Flip's approach to providing the infrastructure for AI adoption among frontline employees, combining digital identity, AI agents and custom applications within its platform. The new funding will be used to further develop this infrastructure and support the expansion of Flip's platform for frontline workers.

Aisel Health, the Danish HealthTech company building an Operating System (OS) purpose-built for psychiatry and mental health, today announced it has closed a €1.7 million pre-seed round. The round was led by Caesar Ventures, joined by Nordic Web Ventures, LifeX, and Angel Invest, alongside existing investors Rockstart and EIFO.) For decades, mental healthcare has been underfunded, stigmatised, and passed over by innovation, while demand for psychiatric care is growing faster than health systems can absorb it: patients routinely wait weeks, months, or longer to see a clinician. According to Christian Houen, Aisel co-founder and Chief Product Officer, “We’re on the brink of something catastrophic with waiting lists. To radically change that, we need shorter, more efficient cycles with patients, fuelled by the understanding clinicians accumulate across consultations over time.” Check out our earlier interview with Aisel. AI scribes solve documentation — but not understanding   There’s no shortage of AI-powered medical scribes designed to make documentation easier — I see multiple vendors at virtually every tech conference I attend these days. But faster documentation doesn’t necessarily translate into a better understanding of the patient. In fact, making documentation cheaper and easier can simply produce more of it. That may help with compliance, but not necessarily with treatment.  When the patient returns, the clinician can still face the same problem: too much documentation to review, too little time to read it, and a patient forced to repeat information they have already provided. In that process, important details can still be missed. "AI scribes work - they write notes faster, and that's great for immediate burnout," said Houen. "But that's not what's keeping waiting lists long. Make notes cheaper to produce, and you just make that information harder for a clinician to find when they need it. We still have yet to overcome the human limitation of understanding everything that was ever written about every patient ever treated - that's the problem we built Aisel to solve: giving clinicians exactly what they need, when, and how they need it. " By surfacing concise, organised information shortly before a consultation, Aisel aims to help clinicians arrive prepared without adding more prep time, while reducing both consultation and post-appointment documentation time. Aisel's latest research, "The Documentation Minute", found that psychiatrists spend far more time on evidence gathering than on writing the note itself — pulling together a patient's history from referrals, prior notes, and multiple systems before they can even begin to assess and treat. According to the research, clinicians spend only around 40 per cent of their time with patients. The rest is spent on documentation, reading, gathering information, and writing.  Aisel’s platform aims to reduce that burden by turning interview recordings, existing documents, and patients’ own accounts into structured, contextual insights. Rather than simply generating more text, it surfaces the clinical history and context a psychiatrist needs at a particular moment, before, during, and after a consultation. By presenting concise, organised information shortly before an appointment, Aisel aims to help clinicians arrive prepared without adding more prep time, while reducing both consultation and post-appointment documentation time. Helping clinicians maintain continuity of care According to Houen, Aisel has built what it calls a “sphere of understanding” around each patient, which develops over time as more information is gathered. Using psychiatric protocols, its fact-deduction system, and AI scribing to capture context, the platform surfaces the information most relevant to the clinician at a particular point in a patient’s treatment. Rather than searching through multiple documents to work out what matters, clinicians are presented with the relevant information directly, along with its sources and citations. That information can then feed into the documentation they need, helping maintain continuity across repeated consultations. This could be particularly useful when patients move between providers and would otherwise have to repeatedly retell their story. Even the same clinician may struggle to remember the details of a consultation a few weeks later after seeing 100 patients in between.  But according to Houen, it's particularly important when someone moves from a GP to a psychiatrist or psychologist. “These questions are formative to treatment, so they need to be asked. If clinicians don't have access to that information upfront, or it's buried somewhere in the documents, they'll simply ask again because then they know they're compliant and have the information.” Bringing information from outside the consultation Aisel has expanded its intake technology beyond the work it did last year. In the case of the ADHD diagnostic process, for example, Aisel can send AI interviews to a patient's relatives, as well as to schools and other relevant parties, so they're all contributing to the same shared understanding of the patient. “We're currently piloting this with a clinic focused on children. It's particularly relevant there because you can't rely solely on the child. You need information from parents, teachers, and other people around them. Previously, someone might have had to call all these people individually, find the right person, deal with people who didn't answer or didn't have time, and so on. It sounds basic, but it takes a tremendous amount of time. It's also one reason waiting times in child and youth psychiatry can be so long.” To validate the technology, Aisel initially ran its system alongside clinics’ existing processes, comparing the information each produced and asking clinicians to assess the resulting reports, including through blind comparisons. As the product has matured, Houen says Aisel has increasingly focused on response rates and clinician satisfaction, while also tracking patient satisfaction. Those scores are shared with clinicians, giving them insight into activities that patients found difficult or ineffective and allowing them to adjust accordingly. From patient understanding to clinic operations  Aisel is also committed to smoothing the entire operational process within clinics. Understanding the patient and gathering information is the first step, but many activities are happening around the patient — rebooking appointments, managing medications, ordering prescriptions, and other administrative tasks. “A lot of these tasks can be deduced from conversations and the context we already have, then surfaced to the relevant people in the clinic " explained Houen. “Rebooking is a simple example. The doctor and patient might agree on another appointment, but then it ends there because booking it is the secretary's job. The secretary isn't told, the patient doesn't realise they need to arrange it, and several weeks later they call and discover the next appointment isn't available for another six weeks. We want to own more of that collaboration between clinicians working around the same patient.” That broader ambition — to become an operating layer for psychiatric care rather than simply another AI documentation tool — is also where the new funding comes in. "Few problems in healthcare are as large or as overlooked as psychiatry's, and few founders are as passionate about solving it the way Augusta and Christian are. We're proud to lead this round, and look forward to supporting them to deliver the next generation of technology for psychiatry,” shared Carolin Gabor, Managing Partner and GP at Caesar Ventures. Aisel will use the funding to grow its clinical and engineering team and fund its UK market entry, converting an active commercial pipeline of private psychiatry, ahead of a planned seed round.  The goal: give clinicians everything that matters about a patient, exactly when they need it - something no human memory, however well-trained, can do alone - and in doing so, help shorten the waiting lists that have defined psychiatric care for too long.

Edinburgh-based semiconductor company Singular Photonics has raised $2.15 million in an oversubscribed funding round to accelerate the development of its next generation of SPAD-based image sensors. The round was led by ACF Investors, with participation from Wren Capital, Cambridge Angels, Scottish Enterprise, Quantum Exponential and Old College Capital. Spun out of the University of Edinburgh from research led by digital imaging researcher Professor Robert Henderson, Singular Photonics develops image sensors based on single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) technology. The fabless semiconductor company has two commercially available product families, Andarta and Sirona. Unlike conventional image sensors, which primarily measure the intensity of light, SPAD sensors can detect and precisely time individual photons. This allows imaging systems to capture information that may not be accessible to conventional cameras, supporting applications that require high sensitivity or precise timing. Singular Photonics combines SPAD technology with on-chip computation, enabling data to be processed directly at the point where light is detected. This enables imaging systems to analyse information in real time while reducing the amount of data that needs to be transferred for external processing. The company's technology is being developed for applications across machine vision, industrial automation, physical AI, scientific research and medical imaging, including use cases involving edge computing and AI-driven systems. Alongside the funding round, Singular Photonics announced that Dipesh Patel, former CTO of semiconductor company Arm, has joined its board of directors. The new funding will be used to expand Singular Photonics' engineering capacity, develop additional image sensors and accelerate the introduction of new products in response to customer demand.

UK edtech startup Medly AI has raised $8 million in seed funding to expand its AI-powered exam preparation platform in the UK and international markets. The round was led by Felix Capital, with participation from existing investors Eka Ventures and Ada Ventures. Angel investors Andrey Dobrynin (CEO of InvestEngine), Al Giles (Venture Partner at Creator Fund), Jean Hammond (General Partner at LearnLaunch Accelerator), and Hector Mason (General Partner at Episode 1 Ventures) also participated. Founded by UCL medicine graduates Dr Paul Jung and Dr Kavi Samra, Medly develops an AI tutor designed to provide personalised academic support for students preparing for exams. Medly's AI tutor uses a proprietary combination of seven large language models alongside approaches drawn from neuroscience and teaching theory. The system tracks students' progress and learning patterns to adapt its feedback and support to individual users. Students can use the platform to answer practice questions and receive immediate feedback on their responses, including guidance on where additional marks could be gained. Other features include handwriting recognition, allowing students to complete work directly on the platform using a tablet or stylus, particularly for subjects such as mathematics and chemistry. Since launching in February 2025, Medly says it has reached more than 400,000 UK users, with students using the platform for around an hour a day on average. The company says students who used the platform for GCSE preparation saw improvements in their results and is conducting a trial with more than 1,000 students to assess its impact on attainment. Almost a third of 11–16-year-olds receive some form of private tutoring. For those who can afford it, it’s a powerful advantage. For those who can’t, it’s an equally powerful reinforcer of the status quo, said Dr Paul Jung, co-founder and CEO of Medly. He said the company aims to make personalised academic support more widely accessible by providing students with tutoring that adapts to how they learn. Medly is also developing proprietary models for specific educational functions, including marking and pedagogy, as well as features aimed at students looking to study beyond standard exam curricula in preparation for higher education. The company has begun expanding internationally, recently launching SAT preparation in the US, with plans to add AP and ACT support by the end of the year. The seed funding will be used to grow Medly's student community in the UK, support its international expansion, develop additional AI capabilities and expand its research into the platform's impact on academic outcomes.

Alex Pasykov and his fellow Kyiv co-founders made an unusual bet when they moved into mobile dating: rather than build one app, they built two in 2017. Hily targets the mainstream dating market, while Taimi is a fully inclusive LGBTQ+ dating app designed for people across the spectrum of sexual orientations, gender identities, and relationship preferences. Unlike apps aimed primarily at one part of the queer community, Taimi positions itself as a single dating platform for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, queer, and other LGBTQ+ users. I sat down with Pasykov on a trip to Kyiv earlier this year to learn all about it. From general dating to an LGBTQI+ app Taimi’s founders met as part of the management team at Genesis, where they worked on dating and other digital products. Further research convinced them to spin out their own company, where they quickly learnt that the opportunity extended beyond gay dating to the wider LGBTQI+ community. “We thought, why not build a product for the whole community?” shared Pasykov. Then the company made another pivot.  Pasykov explained: “We had this romantic idea of gathering the whole community in one app — not just for dating, but for communication, knowledge sharing, support, and creating a safe space. Essentially, we started building a social network for the LGBTQI+ community. And we failed.” The problem wasn’t the idea but a lack of knowledge to execute: “We were unfocused. We didn’t know exactly what we should develop next, which features to prioritise, or which problem we were actually trying to solve. That became a serious issue because we’re self-funded. We’ve never raised external investment, so being self-sufficient is very important to us. If we aren’t earning enough money to reinvest in growth, that’s a problem. We decided to go back to our origins.” According to Pasykov, it turned out to be the best decision they ever made: “We became focused. We understood what we needed to do, we already had experience in dating, and suddenly we were solving one clear problem: why should somebody install our app for dating?” ​ One app, many identities Taimi serves a huge range of gender identities and sexual orientations; Pasykov admits that this makes things much more complicated. “With Hily, it’s easier because it is predominantly focused on heterosexual dating. One of our North Star metrics there is increasing the proportion of women in the user base. Dating apps generally have far more men than women. A relatively good ratio might be 30 or 35 per cent women, whereas many apps are closer to 20 per cent. Hily is currently around 20 to 23 per cent women, so that’s something we’re working on.” Taimi, however, is completely different because there are so many gender identities and sexualities. “With Taimi, you have many different cohorts of people looking for different people, and the algorithms have to understand all of those combinations.” The platform’s largest audience is lesbian users. It's also very strong among transgender users because there aren’t many alternatives specifically serving them. Balancing safety with privacy Safety, moderation, and fraud detection are major priorities for Taimi, although Pasykov says this must be balanced with privacy: “It’s an automated process. We don’t have people sitting there reading private messages. If somebody is harming or harassing other users, they will be banned.” The apps also detect explicit imagery. On Hily, for example, images can be hidden until the recipient chooses whether to view them. “If somebody sends an explicit image, we can hide it and ask the recipient whether they want to see it.” Taimi also offers screenshot protection and allows users to disguise the app with a generic icon. ​ Keeping talent by turning them into founders In 2024 Taimi launched appflame, an initiative focused on developing new products and nurturing the next generation of founders. It currently has four products: three apps and one content-based business. The initiative draws on the company’s experience in consumer apps, subscriptions, and product development to diversify into new businesses. For Pasykov, however, the starting point is less the idea than the people behind it. “We invest in the person or the small team. Of course, they pitch their ideas, and we have a playbook to validate them. But the short answer is: do we trust this person enough to invest our money in them?” Most of those founders come from within the existing team, making Ignite a way to retain ambitious employees who may have reached the limits of their current roles. “We have a surplus of two things: talent and money. Talented people want to grow, and sometimes there’s nowhere else for them to grow because somebody is already above them. If they’re brave enough, they can start their own product.” Pasykov is realistic about the fact that not every experiment will succeed, but hopes some will grow into multimillion-dollar businesses. “Obviously, some will close. That’s reality. But some will thrive, and we’re already seeing good traction.” That diversification is also extending beyond in-house-developed products. In October 2025, Taimi participated in a €1.1 million Seed round for German healthtech startup Every Health, a virtual clinic providing LGBTQ+-focused healthcare, including testing, consultations, prescriptions, and medication delivery. Supporting Ukraine beyond the workplace Taimi’s Kyiv office can only be described as fancy, with a gym, meditation rooms, and sleep pods. Yet beyond the perks, the realities of operating during wartime have shaped the company in much more consequential ways. The team established the appflame Foundation, which supports prosthetics and military leadership education initiatives in Ukraine. Since 2023, the Foundation has partnered with “Captain’s Training,” a professional military education programme developed by leading military experts to NATO standards and incorporating lessons from  Russia's unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  More than 500 Ukrainian Defence Forces officers completed the training in 2023. Image: Future of Prosthetics System in Ukraine. In 2025, the Foundation joined the “Future of Prosthetics System in Ukraine” project, which develops additive manufacturing technologies, localises production, and trains specialists to expand access to prosthetics for veterans, wounded service members, civilians, and children with amputations. As part of the initiative, appflame provides veterans with grants to pursue Master’s degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, as well as a $200 monthly scholarship and associated study expenses. The Foundation also provides tactical medical supplies, equipment, humanitarian aid, and other essential items to the Ukrainian military. It supports mobilised appflame employees with the resources they need for their service while retaining their jobs and continuing their compensation, and provides financial and practical assistance to their families and loved ones. appflame employees also take part in volunteer initiatives, including donating blood, making trench candles and power banks for the military, and participating in charity runs. Gen Z isn’t abandoning dating apps Taimi and Hily are primarily built for Gen Z, though the companies are already preparing for Gen Alpha. While LGBTQI+ dating remains a smaller market than heterosexual dating, Pasykov sees it growing as more people become comfortable openly identifying themselves. He eschews the sentiment often shared in the media that Gen Z is looking for love in person, asserting:  “People say they want more authenticity and less digital interaction, but we don’t see that shift in the numbers yet. Dating apps give you access to far more people. They also make rejection easier. One of the greatest difficulties with meeting somebody in real life is the fear of rejection. On a dating app, that isn’t really an issue in the same way. You like somebody, and if they like you back, you can start talking. Online dating isn’t going anywhere. We can see that in our numbers.” ​ An untapped source of LGBTQI+ dating data Taimi also sits on a significant body of data about LGBTQI+ dating, which the company uses for research and analysis, some of which it publishes. The company’s research also points to why LGBTQI+-specific dating platforms can serve a function beyond matching. In a 2026 survey of 1,200 LGBTQ+ adults, 57 per cent said dating apps significantly reduced the burden of repeatedly coming out, because their identity could be communicated through their profile. Another Taimi survey of 2,503 US LGBTQ+ users found 85 per cent had recently been ghosted, with 74 per cent experiencing it more than once. “There isn’t enough discussion about what it actually means to build a dating product for the whole LGBTQI+ spectrum, or about the everyday dating experiences of people across that spectrum. We have a lot of data that can help illuminate that,” Pasykov said. ​ The road to two million daily users Taimi is intentionally focused on the US — the most competitive and largest market in the sector.  The company’s next major ambition is to become an IPO-ready company — not necessarily to go public, but to reach the required level of maturity across its product, audience, operations, and business. A key milestone on that journey is reaching two million daily active users. “That would make us bigger than Tinder or Grindr in the US in terms of that metric,” Pasykov explained. “Right now, we’re at almost 350,000 daily active users. We’re growing each quarter and each month, almost every day. The main issue is the pace. If you project the current trajectory, reaching that goal could take five or six years. We want to accelerate it.” Both Taimi and Hily are profitable and growing, while Taimi now has a team of around 100 people spread across locations including London, the US, and Cyprus. Why Pasykov wouldn’t launch a dating app today For anyone considering launching a dating app today, Pasykov asserts that the ship has already sailed. “A dating app is essentially a marketplace, and the fundamental problem is the cold start. You have to acquire a lot of people quickly and have them online simultaneously. If you acquire five users today, your app doesn’t really do anything for them. There aren’t enough people there. So you either need an enormous amount of money you’re prepared to burn to acquire users simultaneously, or you face a very difficult problem. Over the last five or seven years, while we’ve been building these apps, we’ve seen many other dating apps disappear. But there is one advantage to dating in the AI era: you can’t replace the people. If you want to find somebody, ultimately you’re looking for another human being. You can’t replace our app with a prompt. So I think we’re safe for now.” ​ Lead image: Taimi and Hily co-founders, Jake Vygnan, Alex Pasykov, and Dmytrov Kononov.

Alex Pasykov and his fellow Kyiv co-founders made an unusual bet when they moved into mobile dating: rather than build one app, they built two in 2017. Hily targets the mainstream dating market, while Taimi is a fully inclusive LGBTQ+ dating app designed for people across the spectrum of sexual orientations, gender identities, and relationship preferences. Unlike apps aimed primarily at one part of the queer community, Taimi positions itself as a single dating platform for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, queer, and other LGBTQ+ users. I sat down with Pasykov on a trip to Kyiv earlier this year to learn all about it. From general dating to an LGBTQI+ app Taimi’s founders met as part of the management team at Genesis, where they worked on dating and other digital products. Further research convinced them to spin out their own company, where they quickly learnt that the opportunity extended beyond gay dating to the wider LGBTQI+ community. “We thought, why not build a product for the whole community?” shared Pasykov. Then the company made another pivot.  Pasykov explained: “We had this romantic idea of gathering the whole community in one app — not just for dating, but for communication, knowledge sharing, support, and creating a safe space. Essentially, we started building a social network for the LGBTQI+ community. And we failed.” The problem wasn’t the idea but a lack of knowledge to execute: “We were unfocused. We didn’t know exactly what we should develop next, which features to prioritise, or which problem we were actually trying to solve. That became a serious issue because we’re self-funded. We’ve never raised external investment, so being self-sufficient is very important to us. If we aren’t earning enough money to reinvest in growth, that’s a problem. We decided to go back to our origins.” According to Pasykov, it turned out to be the best decision they ever made: “We became focused. We understood what we needed to do, we already had experience in dating, and suddenly we were solving one clear problem: why should somebody install our app for dating?” ​ One app, many identities Taimi serves a huge range of gender identities and sexual orientations; Pasykov admits that this makes things much more complicated. “With Hily, it’s easier because it is predominantly focused on heterosexual dating. One of our North Star metrics there is increasing the proportion of women in the user base. Dating apps generally have far more men than women. A relatively good ratio might be 30 or 35 per cent women, whereas many apps are closer to 20 per cent. Hily is currently around 20 to 23 per cent women, so that’s something we’re working on.” Taimi, however, is completely different because there are so many gender identities and sexualities. “With Taimi, you have many different cohorts of people looking for different people, and the algorithms have to understand all of those combinations.” The platform’s largest audience is lesbian users. It's also very strong among transgender users because there aren’t many alternatives specifically serving them. Balancing safety with privacy Safety, moderation, and fraud detection are major priorities for Taimi, although Pasykov says this must be balanced with privacy: “It’s an automated process. We don’t have people sitting there reading private messages. If somebody is harming or harassing other users, they will be banned.” The apps also detect explicit imagery. On Hily, for example, images can be hidden until the recipient chooses whether to view them. “If somebody sends an explicit image, we can hide it and ask the recipient whether they want to see it.” Taimi also offers screenshot protection and allows users to disguise the app with a generic icon. ​ Keeping talent by turning them into founders In 2024 Taimi launched appflame, an initiative focused on developing new products and nurturing the next generation of founders. It currently has four products: three apps and one content-based business. The initiative draws on the company’s experience in consumer apps, subscriptions, and product development to diversify into new businesses. For Pasykov, however, the starting point is less the idea than the people behind it. “We invest in the person or the small team. Of course, they pitch their ideas, and we have a playbook to validate them. But the short answer is: do we trust this person enough to invest our money in them?” Most of those founders come from within the existing team, making Ignite a way to retain ambitious employees who may have reached the limits of their current roles. “We have a surplus of two things: talent and money. Talented people want to grow, and sometimes there’s nowhere else for them to grow because somebody is already above them. If they’re brave enough, they can start their own product.” Pasykov is realistic about the fact that not every experiment will succeed, but hopes some will grow into multimillion-dollar businesses. “Obviously, some will close. That’s reality. But some will thrive, and we’re already seeing good traction.” That diversification is also extending beyond in-house-developed products. In October 2025, Taimi participated in a €1.1 million Seed round for German healthtech startup Every Health, a virtual clinic providing LGBTQ+-focused healthcare, including testing, consultations, prescriptions, and medication delivery. Supporting Ukraine beyond the workplace Taimi’s Kyiv office can only be described as fancy, with a gym, meditation rooms, and sleep pods. Yet beyond the perks, the realities of operating during wartime have shaped the company in much more consequential ways. The team established the appflame Foundation, which supports prosthetics and military leadership education initiatives in Ukraine. Since 2023, the Foundation has partnered with “Captain’s Training,” a professional military education programme developed by leading military experts to NATO standards and incorporating lessons from  Russia's unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  More than 500 Ukrainian Defence Forces officers completed the training in 2023. Image: Future of Prosthetics System in Ukraine. In 2025, the Foundation joined the “Future of Prosthetics System in Ukraine” project, which develops additive manufacturing technologies, localises production, and trains specialists to expand access to prosthetics for veterans, wounded service members, civilians, and children with amputations. As part of the initiative, appflame provides veterans with grants to pursue Master’s degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, as well as a $200 monthly scholarship and associated study expenses. The Foundation also provides tactical medical supplies, equipment, humanitarian aid, and other essential items to the Ukrainian military. It supports mobilised appflame employees with the resources they need for their service while retaining their jobs and continuing their compensation, and provides financial and practical assistance to their families and loved ones. appflame employees also take part in volunteer initiatives, including donating blood, making trench candles and power banks for the military, and participating in charity runs. Gen Z isn’t abandoning dating apps Taimi and Hily are primarily built for Gen Z, though the companies are already preparing for Gen Alpha. While LGBTQI+ dating remains a smaller market than heterosexual dating, Pasykov sees it growing as more people become comfortable openly identifying themselves. He eschews the sentiment often shared in the media that Gen Z is looking for love in person, asserting:  “People say they want more authenticity and less digital interaction, but we don’t see that shift in the numbers yet. Dating apps give you access to far more people. They also make rejection easier. One of the greatest difficulties with meeting somebody in real life is the fear of rejection. On a dating app, that isn’t really an issue in the same way. You like somebody, and if they like you back, you can start talking. Online dating isn’t going anywhere. We can see that in our numbers.” ​ An untapped source of LGBTQI+ dating data Taimi also sits on a significant body of data about LGBTQI+ dating, which the company uses for research and analysis, some of which it publishes. The company’s research also points to why LGBTQI+-specific dating platforms can serve a function beyond matching. In a 2026 survey of 1,200 LGBTQ+ adults, 57 per cent said dating apps significantly reduced the burden of repeatedly coming out, because their identity could be communicated through their profile. Another Taimi survey of 2,503 US LGBTQ+ users found 85 per cent had recently been ghosted, with 74 per cent experiencing it more than once. “There isn’t enough discussion about what it actually means to build a dating product for the whole LGBTQI+ spectrum, or about the everyday dating experiences of people across that spectrum. We have a lot of data that can help illuminate that,” Pasykov said. ​ The road to two million daily users Taimi is intentionally focused on the US — the most competitive and largest market in the sector.  The company’s next major ambition is to become an IPO-ready company — not necessarily to go public, but to reach the required level of maturity across its product, audience, operations, and business. A key milestone on that journey is reaching two million daily active users. “That would make us bigger than Tinder or Grindr in the US in terms of that metric,” Pasykov explained. “Right now, we’re at almost 350,000 daily active users. We’re growing each quarter and each month, almost every day. The main issue is the pace. If you project the current trajectory, reaching that goal could take five or six years. We want to accelerate it.” Both Taimi and Hily are profitable and growing, while Taimi now has a team of around 100 people spread across locations including London, the US, and Cyprus. Why Pasykov wouldn’t launch a dating app today For anyone considering launching a dating app today, Pasykov asserts that the ship has already sailed. “A dating app is essentially a marketplace, and the fundamental problem is the cold start. You have to acquire a lot of people quickly and have them online simultaneously. If you acquire five users today, your app doesn’t really do anything for them. There aren’t enough people there. So you either need an enormous amount of money you’re prepared to burn to acquire users simultaneously, or you face a very difficult problem. Over the last five or seven years, while we’ve been building these apps, we’ve seen many other dating apps disappear. But there is one advantage to dating in the AI era: you can’t replace the people. If you want to find somebody, ultimately you’re looking for another human being. You can’t replace our app with a prompt. So I think we’re safe for now.” ​ Lead image: Taimi and Hily co-founders, Jake Vygnan, Alex Pasykov, and Dmytrov Kononov.