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Barcelona-based pre-Seed manager 4Founders Capital today announced they will be taking a new step forward after surpassing €130 million in AUM with the launch of their first fund specialised in hotel real estate; 4Founders Capital Hospitality.
The new vehicle will have an investment capacity of €60 million, a six-year duration, and has already received approval from the CNMV. The Fund plans to carry out a first closing later this January, as well as execute the initial transactions that are already committed.
“We are committed to growth and have seen a great opportunity arising from a partnership with businessman Enrique Domínguez, who is the Founder of the Gaiarooms chain,” (translated) says Marc Badosa, Founding Partner of 4Founders Capital alongside entrepreneurs Jesús Monleón (Trovit), Marek Fodor (Atrápalo) and Javier Pérez-Tenessa (Edreams).
In 2025, EU-Startups coverage points to sustained capital deployment across the hospitality, hotel real-estate and HotelTech ecosystem, spanning both asset-heavy strategies and software-led platforms.
In Spain, Amenitiz (Barcelona) raised €38.9 million (Series B) to expand its hotel management software for independent operators, reinforcing Barcelona’s role as a hub for hospitality-focused innovation. Also in Spain, Room00 Group (Madrid) secured a strategic investment of up to €400 million to scale its urban hospitality platform through hotel acquisitions and refurbishments across Southern Europe, illustrating investor appetite for real-estate-backed hospitality models.
Beyond Spain, chatlyn (Vienna) raised €8 million to develop AI-driven communication tools for hotel operations, while Dutch startup Toppi (Amsterdam) secured close to €1 million to scale AI solutions for hospitality businesses. In Italy, Hotiday (Milan) raised €5.5 million to expand its decentralised hotel and TravelTech model.
Taken together, these EU-Startups-reported announcements amount to approximately €453 million in disclosed funding in 2025, providing context for the launch of 4Founders Capital Hospitality and indicating that significant capital continues to flow into both hotel real-estate strategies and enabling hospitality technologies, with Spain standing out as a particularly active market.
Founded in 2017, 4Founders Capital is an independent Venture Capital and Real Estate fund manager. Its main objective is to invest in high-growth technology companies and, now also, in strategic hotel assets through its Hospitality Fund, prioritizing profitability, capital efficiency and strong teams.
Specifically, 4Founders Capital Hospitality plans to invest in around 15 hotels located in prime areas of Tier 2 cities with a strong tourism component, outside the main already-saturated markets.
The strategy is based on a structural opportunity in the Spanish hotel market, where a significant portion of the hotel stock reportedly still attracts relatively limited investment volumes.
The Fund’s objective is to combine operating returns from hotel activity with real estate value creation, driven by the digitalisation of hotel management.
In this regard, returns are generated both through dividends from hotel operations and through the divestment of the properties (hotels) over a three- to four-year horizon. The Fund aims to achieve an IRR per transaction close to 18% and a net IRR for investors above 12%.
To lead this new vehicle, Enrique Domínguez, Founder of GaiaRooms, joins the project as Head of Investment Strategy. GaiaRooms is a leading Spanish operator in the long-tail hotel segment, with more than 100 hotels and over 1,500 rooms under management, and a model based on the end-to-end digitalisation of assets.
With this launch, 4Founders Capital expands its investment scope by bringing its expertise in active management, technology and value creation to a sector with solid fundamentals and strong return potential, reinforcing its position as a diversified investment platform aligned with the interests of its investors.
Dark Blue Therapeutics, a British discovery and development BioTech company innovating the next generation of precision oncology medicines, has been acquired by US-based global BioTech company Amgen, in a transaction valued at up to €718 million ($840 million).
Dark Blue’s lead candidate DBT 3757 is a first-in-class therapy in IND-enabling studies for leukemia, with the potential to deliver strong, durable single-agent efficacy and act as a safe backbone for earlier combination treatments. Dark Blue has been supported by investors Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE), Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) and Evotec.
“Amgen has the expertise, resources and commitment to accelerate development of DBT 3757 to treat patients with acute leukemia, including those that do not respond to current standard therapies. With its world-leading capabilities in oncology and deep experience in developing, manufacturing, and commercializing novel medicines, we are confident that Amgen will build on our pre-clinical work to bring DBT 3757 to the patients who urgently need new treatment options,” comments Alastair MacKinnon, CEO of Dark Blue Therapeutics.
In 2025, the European startup ecosystem shows sustained capital flows into oncology and adjacent BioTech platforms, providing context for Amgen’s acquisition of Dark Blue Therapeutics.
Notable funding rounds include Tubulis, which raised €308 million in a Series C to advance antibody-drug conjugates for cancer; Adcytherix, which secured €105 million in a Series A to develop novel ADC-based cancer therapies; and Artios Pharma, which closed a €99 million Series D to expand its precision oncology pipeline.
The UK in particular has seen multiple relevant raises, including CHARM Therapeutics (€68.5 million for AI-driven drug discovery) and T-Therapeutics (€27.5 million to progress immuno-oncology programmes), placing Dark Blue within a nationally active funding environment.
Elsewhere in Europe, EU-Startups also reported rounds for Hedera Dx in Switzerland (€15 million for precision oncology diagnostics), Adaptam Therapeutics in Spain (€3 million pre-Seed to target tumour-associated immune cells), and Lithea in Sweden (€851k for tumour-targeted therapies).
Taken together, these announcements represent approximately €627 million in disclosed 2025 funding across oncology-focused European startups, situating Dark Blue’s up-to-€718 million acquisition at the higher end of sustained investment and strategic interest in precision cancer therapeutics and enabling platforms.
“We extend our sincere thanks to the entire Dark Blue team for their dedication and hard work, and to our investors OSE, BMS, and Evotec, whose invaluable support has made this achievement possible,” adds MacKinnon.
Founded in 2020, Dark Blue is a drug discovery BioTech company that leverages cancer biology insights, from Oxford University, to discover and develop innovative precision medicines that exploit novel vulnerabilities and dependencies.
Their lead candidate DBT 3757, currently in IND-enabling studies, represents a first-in-class therapeutic strategy for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), with the potential for producing strong, broad and durable responses as an effective single-agent therapy.
In addition, its favourable safety profile suggests it could serve as a foundation for combination treatments earlier in the therapeutic course.
Dark Blue says they have been able to translate cutting-edge discoveries into previously unexploited Achilles-heel vulnerabilities and dependencies in cancer.
The MLLT 1/3 programme’s scientific foundation is rooted in insights from Oxford University and was awarded pre-Seed funding from the ‘LAB282’ initiative.
“Acute myeloid leukemia remains one of the most difficult cancers to treat, and we see an urgent need for new mechanisms capable of changing the trajectory of this disease,” says Jay Bradner, M.D., executive vice president of Research and Development at Amgen.
“This acquisition complements and extends our research in targeted protein degradation and leukemia therapeutics, advancing our strategy to invest early in rising medicines for novel therapeutic targets. The adjacency of this programme to our considered expertise in cancer biology will propel MLLT1/3-targeting medicines to clinical investigation for patients facing the challenging diagnosis of AML,” he adds.
Amgen expects to integrate Dark Blue Therapeutics into its existing research organisation, further strengthening the company’s early oncology discovery efforts.
Craig Fox, Oxford Science Enterprises Board Representative, adds: “As early supporters of Dark Blue, we are delighted to see the Company’s lead candidate, DBT 3757, a targeted protein degradation therapeutic, reach this important milestone. From the outset, we believed that targeting MLLT1/3 represents a first-in-class therapeutic strategy for patients with AML and ALL, and the progress made to date has strengthened that conviction.
“The acquisition by Amgen, a world-leading pharmaceutical company, is a strong validation of Dark Blue’s science, team, and vision. We look forward to seeing this promising therapy advance swiftly into clinical development and ultimately reach patients living with this devastating disease.”
CertHub raises €6.2M to transform MedTech compliance with AI-driven automation Munich-based medtech manufacturing compliance startup CertHub,has raised €6.2 million in investment in just two months.
Across Europe, medtech companies are facing unprecedented regulatory pressure. 70 per cent of manufacturers report significant struggles with regulatory burden, and implementing new medical regulatory requirements alone is estimated to cost the industry €12 billion.
Obtaining market approval for a medical device today takes an average of 5 years and costs companies more than €4 million in compliance and documentation labour — a structural bottleneck slowing innovation across the entire sector.
CertHub’s AI-first approach directly addresses this inefficiency: proven customer success have shown that manufacturers save up to 60 per cent on documentation time and cost, creating a €2.4 million saving potential per certification cycle.
CertHub’s platform automates key regulatory processes, including technical documentation generation, quality management system documentation, and audit preparation.
By replacing fragmented manual workflows with structured regulatory models and intelligent automation, the platform enables manufacturers to focus on cutting-edge innovation rather than paperwork. Notified Bodies benefit from higher documentation quality, standardised formats, and faster review cycles.
The round was led by Cusp Capital, with participation from D11Z, Calm/Storm, UnternehmerTUM, and nine prominent business angels, including, e.g. Axel Stepken (President and former CEO of TÜV SÜD).
“Our mission is to remove the regulatory bottlenecks that hold back medical innovation,” shared Leon Kobinger, co-founder and CEO of CertHub.
“With the support of Cusp Capital and our other investors, we can accelerate our vision of making certification faster, more predictable, and accessible for manufacturers and Notified Bodies. Ultimately, this means life-changing medical technologies reach patients sooner.”
Dr Carolin Althoff, GP from Cusp Capital, shared:
“What convinced us most is the team behind CertHub. CEO Leon Kobinger brings first-hand experience from safety-critical industries like aviation and has led certification processes himself as an auditor.
Combined with strong engineering from CTO Nicolas Gehring, this gives CertHub a rare credibility to modernise digital compliance and enable products to reach the market faster without compromising regulatory rigour.“
With this new funding, CertHub will scale its platform across Europe, extend its integrations with Notified Bodies, and develop jurisdiction packs for markets such as the USA and Brazil.
Long-term, CertHub aims to build the first shared compliance infrastructure connecting manufacturers and Notified Bodies — and ultimately create the world’s most valuable dataset on certification outcomes, enabling predictive compliance and data-driven product approvals.
London-headquartered e-commerce operating startup Swap has raised $100m in a Series C funding round.
The round was co-led by existing investor Iconiq and DST Global. The Series C follows just six months after Swap’s Series B round, when it raised $40m led by Iconiq. Swap has now raised $149m in total.
Founded in 2022, Swap provides a platform for e-commerce brands to manage their logistics. Instead of brands relying on multiple providers for tasks like cross-border shipping, order tracking, returns, tax, and inventory forecasting, Swap provides them all in one operating system.
Sam Atkinson, founder, CEO, Swap, said: "We have built an existing fleet of products that enable any brand to scale globally.
"Building upon this foundation of global commerce solutions, we will continue to help brands reach their full potential, levelling up on the promise to be the go-to platform for brands to sell anywhere, anticipate intent, and convert more business."
Swap, which struck a partnership with Adyen last year, said it will use the funds to bolster its payment capability, investing in digital payments, and targeting new markets.
The London-headquartered startup also has offices in the US, Israel and the Netherlands, and is targeting expanding into markets across Europe and North America.
Its clients include retailers Manors Golf, Never Fully Dressed and Surplus.
Swap has also been integrating artificial intelligence into its platform, in areas such as cross-border tax filing and return processing.
07/01/2026 01:10 PM
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Who decides the best AI?
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07/01/2026
The AI industry has become adept at measuring itself. Benchmarks improve, model scores rise, and every new release arrives with a list of metrics meant to signal progress. And yet, somewhere between the lab and real life, something keeps slipping. Which model actually feels better to use? Which answers would a human trust? Which system would you put in front of customers, employees, or citizens and feel comfortable standing behind it? That gap is where LMArena has quietly built its business, and why investors just put $150 million behind it at a $1.7 billion valuation, in a Series A round.…
Biographica, a British AI startup innovating how the agricultural industry develops new crop varieties, today announced an €8 million (£7 million) funding round to accelerate the creation of climate-resilient, productive and nutritious crops – addressing global food security challenges driven by climate change, population growth, and limited natural resources.
The round was led by Faber VC with participation from SuperSeed, Cardumen Capital, The Helm, EQT Foundation and Sie Ventures, and existing investors Chalfen Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, Nucleus Capital, Dhyan Ventures, Saras Capital and Ventures Together. The company also announced a new partnership with BASF | Nunhems, a leading seed companies.
“We’ve seen AI reshape pharma, turning trial-and-error pipelines into learnable biological systems – and it works. We’re bringing that same discipline to crops,” says Cecily Price, CEO of Biographica.
In the context of last year’s European investment activity, Biographica’s new round sits alongside a steady flow of capital into AI-enabled agricultural and plant-science companies.
In the UK, Wild Bioscience raised €51 million to advance AI-guided crop variety improvement, underlining investor appetite for computational approaches to plant genetics from the same country as Biographica.
Elsewhere, capital has flowed into adjacent parts of the agricultural value chain, including Source.ag, which secured €15.2 million to scale AI software for greenhouse operations, and Switzerland-based Ecorobotix, which raised €90 million to expand precision farming robotics. Funding has also reached automation and biological inputs, with SAIA Agrobotics closing a €10 million round for greenhouse robotics, ReSoil raising €4 million for regenerative agriculture projects, SugaROx securing €1.1 million to develop crop-enhancing biostimulants, and Messium raising €3.8 million for satellite-based crop analytics.
Taken together, these rounds represent roughly €175 million of disclosed funding moving through AI-driven AgriTech and agri-bio segments in 2025, positioning Biographica’s raise as part of a broader, data-led push to improve crop resilience, productivity and sustainability across Europe.
“Our partnerships with BASF | Nunhems and other leading seed companies show the industry is ready for AI-first approaches to trait discovery, to bring high-value crop varieties to market in seasons, not decades,” adds Price.
Founded in 2022, Biographica is an agricultural BioTech company applying breakthroughs from AI-driven drug discovery to design the next generation of crop traits. The company was founded by Cecily Price and Dominic Hall, who combine expertise in genetics, AI, and computational biology.
Price previously worked on the European launch of the world’s first gene-editing therapy and Hall earned his PhD in computational genomics where he developed machine learning models to map gene regulation.
According to the company, developing a new crop trait such as drought tolerance, disease resistance, or improved nutrition typically takes more than a decade and costs millions of dollars. The most significant and costly bottleneck is knowing which genes control key crop traits – knowledge that informs gene editing and breeding programmes.
Biographica’s proprietary AI platform reportedly solves this by pinpointing the most promising genetic targets within weeks – defining what to change, how, and why, to generate precise trait improvements – cutting crop development timelines by up to five years and reducing R&D costs by millions.
In pilots with leading seed and precision breeding companies, Biographica’s AI platform allegedly identified proven gene targets 12x faster than traditional methods.
Beyond speed, it can uncover novel targets that traditional methods miss, enabling entirely new, high-value traits to reach the market.
The company is now combining its AI-driven discovery with rapid experimental validation to create a “lab-in-the-loop” model – a self-improving cycle currently used in drug discovery that gives partners an increasingly rapid and reliable path to trait innovation.
“With climate change intensifying the pressure on agricultural systems, improving crop genetics is the most powerful lever we have to sustainably increase yields and build resilience,” said Sofia Santos, Partner at Faber VC. “Biographica is redefining how agricultural innovation happens, and this investment round will allow them to scale their impact globally.”
Biographica has demonstrated that deep technical partnerships can scale – the technology can be deployed at speed across crops and traits, in both breeding and gene-editing pipelines.
Early pilots have progressed into commercial agreements, with Biographica-identified targets already moving into testing pipelines.
The funding will be used to expand Biographica’s proprietary data collection, extend its AI platform to new crop traits, and deepen commercial relationships across the seed industry.
London-based Biographica, an agricultural biotechnology company, has
raised £7 million in a funding round led by Faber VC, with participation from
SuperSeed, Cardumen Capital, The Helm, EQT Foundation, and Sie Ventures. The
round also included existing investors Chalfen Ventures, Entrepreneurs First,
Nucleus Capital, Dhyan Ventures, Saras Capital, and Ventures Together.
Developing new crop traits such as drought tolerance, disease resistance,
or improved nutrition typically takes more than a decade and requires
significant investment, with gene identification representing the primary
bottleneck.
Biographica is addressing this challenge by applying AI-driven discovery
methods to support the development of next-generation crop traits. Its AI
platform identifies promising genetic targets within weeks, helping guide gene
editing and breeding decisions, reducing development timelines by up to five
years, and lowering R&D costs.
In pilot projects with seed and precision breeding companies, the
platform identified validated gene targets up to 12 times faster than
conventional approaches and uncovered novel targets not detected by traditional
methods.
The company is now integrating AI-driven discovery with rapid
experimental validation through a “lab-in-the-loop” model, creating a
continuous improvement cycle that enables faster and more reliable trait
development.
We’ve seen AI reshape pharma, turning trial-and-error pipelines into
learnable biological systems — and it works. We’re bringing that same
discipline to crops,
The company also announced a new partnership with BASF | Nunhems to support the development of new crop varieties in the
agricultural sector.
The new funding will support the expansion of Biographica’s data and AI
platform, the development of additional crop traits, and the strengthening of
partnerships across the seed industry.
07/01/2026 10:10 AM
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Bunq reapplies for US banking licence
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Bunq, the Dutch challenger bank which targets tech-savvy customers who live and work in multiple countries, has reapplied for a US banking licence, as it looks to target US metropolitan areas with its banking services.
The Dutch neobank, which has more than 20 million users in Europe, has filed for a US banking licence with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which regulates US national banks.
Bunq is the latest fintech to try to take advantage of a more welcoming approach to fintechs under the government of president Trump. In 2024, Bunq withdrew its application for a US banking licence, citing problems between the Dutch regulator, the OCC and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
The new filing for a banking licence follows Bunq being granted a US broker-dealer licence last year, which it saw as a step to applying for a US banking licence.
Ali Niknam, founder and CEO, Bunq, said: “Our users are building their lives across borders, so they need a bank that is safe, secure and easy to use, wherever they are. We want to give them the freedom to live the way they want, whether they’re heading to America, coming to Europe, or moving between both.”
Bunq suggested some of the services it will launch should it be granted a banking licence.
It said: “Bunq will launch its services starting in US metropolitan areas with large expat communities; the places where its users live, work, and move the most.
"With Bunq, users will also be able to quickly build credit scores—a common challenge for newly-arrived expats—by accessing European financial records, in addition to having the option to open both US and European checking accounts if eligible.”
PayPal, Nubank and Coinbase have also recently applied for US banking charters, under a more welcoming regulatory environment for fintechs under the Trump government.
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Female-led Dutch startup ShanX Medtech secures €24 million to combat antimicrobial resistance
Eindhoven-based MedTech startup ShanX Medtech (SXM), which provides in-vitro diagnostic platforms for antibiotic susceptibility testing, has closed a €15 million Seed funding round to scale, boost clinical validation, and prepare for market launch.
The oversubscribed funding round includes multiple funding instruments, including equity, grants and the Innovatiekrediet. The equity investment was led by the Borski Fund, NextGen Ventures, CbusineZ (an independent investment fund closely associated with healthcare insurer CZ), Brabantse Ontwikkelings Maatschappij (BOM), Invest-NL, and a prominent strategic angel fund.
The company was also recently awarded €8.85 million European Commission Contract (HADEA/2025/CPN/0006), developed by the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (DG HERA) in collaboration with the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA). This brings the total financing secured by ShanX to €24 million.
Dr Sophia E. Shanko, founder and CEO of ShanX Medtech, said, “We founded ShanX Medtech because of a single patient story, one that revealed how much is at stake when diagnostic results arrive too late.
“Our vision is to equip every clinician with the ability to act decisively, guided by diagnostic evidence in real-time. This funding brings us significantly closer to delivering ultra-rapid AST directly to both laboratory and point-of-care environments; faster, simpler, and more accessible than ever before.”
Founded in 2019 and based at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, ShanX Medtech develops In-Vitro Diagnostic (IVD) solutions that deliver direct-from-sample antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST).
By using novel chemistry to monitor microbial metabolism, SXM claims to deliver results within an hour with limited user involvement. According to it, this represents a significant improvement over current methods, which require trained expertise and time to yield actionable results. FLORA is the company’s proprietary chemical composition that monitors pathogen metabolism in real-time.
With this new capital, the company aims to accelerate the final development, clinical validation, regulatory approval, and commercial launch of the SXM diagnostic platform.
Simone Brummelhuis, Partner at Borski Fund, said, “Following an extensive market analysis of innovations addressing antimicrobial resistance, ShanX’s technology clearly emerged as best-in-class. While the company’s initial go-to-market strategy focuses on a well-defined women’s health application in urinary tract infections, the underlying platform offers substantial potential across a wide range of clinical indications.
“We are proud to support Sophia and her exceptional team in realising their ambitious vision. The oversubscribed financing round, together with multiple multi-million-euro commercial contracts, underscores both the strength of the technology and the founder’s proven commercial execution.”
Vienna-based Vitrealab, a developer of Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) for laser-based augmented reality (AR) display systems, has closed a €9.4 million ($11 million) Series A financing round to accelerate the development of its Quantum Light Chip (QLC) for AR Displays.
The “significantly oversubscribed” round was led by LIFTT Italian Venture Capital and LIFTT EuroInvest with participation from Constructor Capital, aws Gründungsfonds, Gateway Ventures, PhotonVentures, xista Science Ventures, Moveon Technologies, and Hermann Hauser Investment.
“The successful closing of our Series A is a strong validation of our technology and our vision for scalable AR display systems. This funding allows us to move from advanced prototypes to industrial-grade solutions, while continuing to push the boundaries of what is possible with photonic integrated circuits in display applications,” said Dr Jonas Zeuner, CTO and co-founder of Vitrealab.
Founded in 2018 by Chiara Greganti and Dr Zeuner, Vitrealab is a deeptech company with the mission to disrupt the display industry with a new kind of laser waveguide technology. It’s a spin-off from the Quantum Group at the University of Vienna, with one of its founding members being Anton Zeilinger, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2022.
The company develops PICs for laser–liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCoS)-based AR light engines. Its proprietary Quantum Light Chip enables compact, high-brightness, and energy-efficient light engines, addressing performance and scalability challenges in next-generation AR glasses.
Vitrealab claims to follow a vertically integrated approach that supports scaling from prototype to volume production in a seamless manner. This is made possible by its in-house manufacturing equipment and proprietary direct laser writing technologies, which enable it to design and fabricate its own photonic devices.
Its core technology leverages photonic integrated circuits to guide and shape coherent laser light for laser–LCoS light engines. According to the company, this approach significantly reduces system complexity, optical losses, and size, while preserving polarisation and beam quality. This enables higher brightness, wider fields of view, and lower power consumption in form factors suitable for lightweight AR smart glasses.
This fresh capital will be used to accelerate the development and industrialisation of Vitrealab’s QLC. It also aims to strengthen collaborations with customers and partners, demonstrate next-generation light-engine architectures, and continue developing the technical capabilities required to support the everyday adoption of AR displays.
Back in 2021, VitreaLab closed a seven-digit Seed round led by APEX Ventures to scale its solutions in the display market.
It works with leading Tier-1 OEMs and technology partners to bring high-performance AR glasses to the mass market.
Toloka.vc, a Ukrainian investment syndicate, has announced an investment of €215k in British electric bike company GIN e-bikes, which is scaling a subscription-based electric bike rental service in London under its PLUTO brand.
The investment was structured as a two-year secured loan with an annual interest rate of 12%, backed by the company’s electric bike fleet. The fresh capital will be used to purchase 160 new electric bicycles and expand PLUTO’s subscription offering across London. The startup targets 100 active subscribers within six months, building on strong early traction.
Founded in 2022 by Ukrainian entrepreneur Marina Vlasenko and Indian entrepreneur Rahul Pushp, GIN e-bikes initially launched as a direct-to-consumer electric bike brand focused on the under-£1,000 price segment. In 2024–2025, the young company pivoted to a subscription-based electric bike rental model, primarily serving couriers, gig-economy workers, and urban commuters.
PLUTO’s subscription includes monthly rental, maintenance, accessories, and insurance. After completing a 12-month rental cycle, bikes are sold on the secondary market, creating
an additional revenue stream and supporting a circular economy approach.
The PLUTO pilot currently serves 37 active subscribers, with an average monthly revenue of approximately £158 per bike, including add-on services. Reaching 100 active users would
generate an estimated £200,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Future Growth Plans: In 2026, GIN e-bikes plans to raise up to £1 million to scale its fleet to 1,000 electric bikes and further expand its operational and service infrastructure across London.
Toloka.vc is an investment syndicate uniting entrepreneurs and private investors focused on early-stage and growth-stage technology businesses. In November 2025, the syndicate invested in ALICE Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based startup, marking its eighth investment of the year. The syndicate was co-founded by Oleksandr Kolb, entrepreneur and founder of Promodo, Taras Kyrychenko, former CEO of Pravex Bank and supervisory board member of Nova Poshta, and Igor Shoifot, venture capitalist and partner at TMT Investments.
For years, the tech industry equated success with scale. Bigger stages, larger crowds, more logos, more panels, more noise. Five thousand people became ten thousand. Ten thousand became the goal. Somewhere along the way, that stopped making sense. Founders and executives didn’t announce a boycott. They simply stopped showing up. What we see today is not a rejection of events, but a correction in how people who actually run companies choose to spend their time. The shift is subtle, but consistent. Fewer large conferences. More small, curated gatherings. More closed rooms. More dinners. More tables of twelve. Big tech events…
A UK AI firm that advises OpenAI and other frontier AI models on AI safety is to be acquired by IT consulting giant Accenture.
Faculty, which also worked with Vote Leave on the Brexit referendum, was co-founded in 2014 by Marc Warner, its current CEO, who is also a former government AI adviser. The acquisition of Faculty comes as Accenture undertakes an aggressive AI push, as it looks to cash in on robust demand for its AI-driven IT services.
Multinational giant Accenture, founded in the US, said the acquisition would help its clients with “safe and secure AI solutions”.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture, said: “With Faculty, we will further accelerate our strategy to bring trusted, advanced AI to the heart of our clients’ businesses."
Manish Sharma, chief strategy and services officer at Accenture, added: “Together with Faculty we will assemble a powerhouse of talent helping clients make AI work in the real world.
“This will help our clients stay competitive, pursue sovereign solutions, and reinvent their operations with transparency and resilience at a critical time.”
Warner said: “Our vision has always been a world in which safe AI delivers widespread benefits to humanity. We have spent the last ten years supporting our clients to bring this world about, step by step.
“As AI advances rapidly, the ambition of our clients is now, rightly, no less than the reinvention of their business. I am delighted that by teaming up with Accenture, we have everything in place to support AI transformation from start to finish.”
The deal will see Faculty’s 400-plus staff joining Accenture, while Warner, in addition to his role as CEO of Faculty, will become chief technology officer of Accenture.
Faculty’s services include AI strategy and AI safety. Its client roster includes Anthropic and OpenAI, checking the safety of their models before they are released, as well as working with the UK government on a project to help develop AI to handle teacher lesson plans and mark homework.
Accenture and the Faculty have worked together since 2023.
In 2021, Faculty raised £30 million ($42.5. million) in growth funding from the Apax Digital Fund.
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United Manufacturing Hub bags €5m to power a shared data backbone for factories
Industrial data management platform United Manufacturing Hub (UMH) has raised €5 million in funding to accelerate its mission of building the foundational data layer for global manufacturing.
The round was led by KOMPAS VC, with participation from seed + speed Ventures, Sustainable Future Ventures, Archimedes New Ventures, and renowned industry angels, including Jan Oberhauser (Founder & CEO of n8n) and Jeff Hammerbacher (Founder of Cloudera), amongst others.
Manufacturers are investing heavily in digital tools and AI-driven automation. But progress stalls because data is trapped in proprietary systems and scattered across machines, processes, and applications.
UMH unifies industrial data into a real-time data hub, called Unified Namespace, replacing fragile point-to-point integrations with a scalable, interoperable structure.
The platform connects machines, sensors, and IT systems through standardised interfaces, then cleans and contextualises their data – creating a single source of truth that any application can use without custom integration work.
On top of this foundation, UMH delivers ready-to-use capabilities: operational KPIs, energy and resource tracking, condition monitoring, alerting, and industrial AI applications.
Customers typically go from setup to measurable business impact in weeks.
Leading industrial organisations from various industries, including HiPP, Edeka, and Böllhoff, are already using UMH to digitise their factories.
"Instead of spending months building data infrastructure from scratch, we were up and running in no time," said Lutz Hermanns, Head of PDA & Supply Chain at Böllhoff who leads Böllhoff’s Digital Manufacturing.
"We now connect new data sources and build digital use cases in hours instead of weeks."
“Every factory runs on decades-old software – Data is trapped in proprietary protocols, siloed by vendors, missing the context that real use cases and AI depend on," said Alexander Krüger, CEO & Co-Founder of UMH.
"We're building the open-source data infrastructure layer that finally makes industrial data available in the quantity and quality it needs to be – ready for what comes next.
This round lets us double down: wider connectivity, greater scale, pool and a product that works for data engineers and shop floor engineers alike."
“Industrial AI will only scale once factories have a reliable, shared data foundation - and in manufacturing, that data lives on the factory’s shopfloor. UMH is building this foundation by turning fragmented factory data into accurate, contextualised input for modern analytics and intelligent systems, unlocking a step-change in innovation speed, giving European manufacturers the data backbone they need to compete globally,” said Andreas Winter-Extra, Partner Kompas VC
"In areas like ERP, CRM, or HR management, billion-dollar companies have emerged. In digital manufacturing, such a player is still missing. That's exactly our mission: We want to build the world's leading Industrial Data Company," says Niklas Hebborn, Chief Commercial Officer at UMH and former Partner at Freigeist Capital, where he was an early pre-seed investor in UMH.
The fresh capital will be used to strengthen UMH’s open-source platform, accelerate product development, including broader connectivity, advanced data modelling and AI agents.
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