Digital learning has made educational resources more widely available, but access remains a challenge for many students, particularly those with disabilities or limited budgets.

London-based edtech company Perlego is tackling these barriers through a subscription-based digital library with access to more than 1.5 million books, alongside accessibility features, such as text-to-speech, adjustable fonts and reading tools. The company has raised over €70 million in funding.

I spoke to Gauthier Van Malderen, founder and CEO of Perlego, to learn more.

From expensive textbooks to digital subscriptions

I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers university textbooks being heinously expensive. When I studied in Australia, textbooks — including those written by my lecturers — were compulsory, and I remember spending around €400 per semester at a minimum.

Worse, books were frequently updated, making it difficult to buy second-hand copies.

Van Malderen had a similar experience studying in Italy and the UK. At the same time, he noticed publishers were losing revenue through piracy and the second-hand book market.

“Students were sharing books or turning to illegal websites because they couldn't afford to buy them.

I started thinking about how people were already subscribing to music and films, and wondered why the same model couldn't exist for educational books.

That's where Perlego came from.”

Making digital books genuinely accessible

Accessibility is often treated as an additional feature rather than something fundamental to learning. Digital technology, however, offers opportunities to improve the reading experience, particularly for people who struggle with printed materials.

Perlego allows users to adjust fonts, text sizes and colour settings. It also offers a dyslexia-friendly reading mode and BeeLine Reader, which uses colour gradients to guide readers through text.

According to Van Malderen, one of Perlego's most important features is Read Aloud, its text-to-speech tool, which uses AI-generated voices with adjustable reading speeds. Traditional audiobooks cover only a small proportion of the publishing market, largely bestselling fiction and some nonfiction.

“For academic textbooks, research papers and other specialist materials, producing conventional audiobooks often doesn't make economic sense.

With text-to-speech, we can make that content available in audio format without needing to produce a separate audiobook.”

The feature is now available across more than 95 per cent of Perlego's catalogue.

Perlego pays publishers royalties based on consumption, treating listening and reading equally. It also shares usage data, helping publishers identify opportunities for audio versions of content that might otherwise be commercially unviable.

AI that supports learning rather than replacing it

Perlego has also introduced AI-powered research tools that draw on its catalogue of licensed educational content to help students and academics find relevant sources. Van Malderen explained:

“Our research tool uses semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which means it draws on content from our catalogue rather than simply generating an answer.

For example, you might ask about the impact of interest rates on debt markets. The system generates an answer with the relevant source information and takes you directly to the book.”

Unlike general-purpose generative AI tools, which can produce fabricated references, Perlego's approach is designed to connect users with identifiable source material they can examine themselves. However, there's considerable debate about AI in education, particularly around students relying on generated answers rather than developing their own understanding.

Van Malderen says Perlego must balance the interests of three groups: publishers concerned about how copyrighted material is used in AI systems, academics worried about the impact on learning, and students who want to find information quickly.

“One of the biggest concerns we hear from professors is that students are increasingly using generative AI to produce essays without necessarily learning the underlying material.”

Perlego has developed AI principles intended to ensure its tools support learning rather than replace it. Rather than generating complete essays for students to submit, the company focuses on helping users discover sources and engage with the underlying material.

Van Malderen believes universities need to work with AI technologies rather than ignore them, particularly as students already have access to tools that may lack educational safeguards.

Beyond the reading list: How Perlego is improving access at Leeds

The University of Leeds, one of the UK's largest universities, began using Perlego around two years ago. According to Isabel Archer, Access & Acquisitions Manager (Acquisitions & Reading Lists) at the University of Leeds, the platform helped address longstanding gaps in access to reading-list materials.

“One of the things that initially drew us to Perlego was the coverage of reading list titles that we couldn't provide electronically through other providers, and in some cases couldn't obtain in print either.”

Further, the university previously couldn't provide electronic access to 60 per cent of reading-list citations.

Since the partnership began, students have used Perlego's Read Aloud feature 40,871 times, activated dyslexia-friendly font settings 2,532 times and adjusted text sizes 11,391 times.

The partnership has also eliminated licensing-related “turnaways” during peak exam periods — instances where students are denied access to a text because the maximum number of permitted users has been reached.

Students have opened an average of more than 18 books each from Perlego's catalogue.

Van Malderen says the data also reveals that students are exploring material beyond their prescribed reading lists.

“For us, that's an important part of accessibility too. It's not simply about changing the way someone reads a book, but giving them access to a much broader range of resources.”

The economics of a subscription-based library

Textbook demand is seasonal, peaking at the start of semesters and during exams. I asked Van Malderen how Perlego manages subscriber churn during quieter periods.

“We have both direct-to-consumer and institutional businesses. Universities often sign multi-year contracts, which helps offset seasonality, while consumer demand peaks around the start of the academic year and exam periods.”

Perlego also targets markets where academic calendars differ, and has expanded beyond textbooks into fiction, nonfiction and travel guides.

“Imagine you're a student travelling over the summer. You might want access to Lonely Planet guides. You've already got your highlights and annotations saved in Perlego, so there's an incentive to stay.”

A global library for a changing generation of learners

International expansion remains a major priority for Perlego, which is active in more than 180 countries. North America accounts for more than 55 per cent of its revenue, with Europe its second-largest market. South Africa has also been growing particularly quickly. In parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, distributing physical books can be expensive or logistically difficult, creating opportunities for digital platforms.

Perlego is also benefiting from growing interest in lifelong learning, with its audience extending beyond traditional university students to professionals looking to retrain or develop new skills.

“People often assume our typical users are university students aged 18 to 24. But in the US, we're seeing an older audience, with an average age somewhere around the mid-30s.

These are people who might be retraining, developing new skills or studying alongside work and family responsibilities.”

The company also plans to develop more interactive learning experiences, including elements of gamification, while expanding its relationships with academic and trade publishers.

Academic journals could be another area of expansion. Ithaka, the nonprofit organisation behind JSTOR, participated in Perlego's last funding round, and Van Malderen sees potential for collaboration to make academic books and journals easier to discover together.

He has also noticed how closely people's reading interests follow what's happening in the news.

“When there's a major geopolitical event, conflict or economic development, we can see changes in what people search for.

They might suddenly become interested in the history of a particular country or want to understand an economic issue in more detail.

People are continually looking for ways to understand the world around them, and our role is to make that knowledge easier to access.”

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Biotech startup Vale Biolabs has received €164,000 (CHF 150,000) from Venture Kick to advance its platform for studying brain diseases and evaluating potential treatments.

Founded by Ilaria Incaviglia, Angeliki Damilou, Daniel Medina Cano and Theodoulos Rodosthenous, Vale Biolabs combines lab-grown human brain tissue, automation and predictive AI to help researchers better understand how the brain responds to drugs and support the development of new therapies. The founding team brings together expertise in organoid neurobiology, automation, data science engineering and early-stage venture development.

Developing treatments for neurological disorders remains challenging, particularly because preclinical research relies heavily on animal testing. Differences between animal and human biology can make it difficult to predict how drugs will perform in patients, contributing to failures during clinical trials, increasing development costs and delaying new therapies.

Vale Biolabs aims to address these challenges by developing standardised human brain organoids, miniature tissue models that reproduce certain characteristics of the human brain. Using automation, the company monitors changes in these models over time, analysing their structure, activity and molecular responses before and after exposure to potential treatments.

The collected data is used to develop predictive AI models that support research into brain development, neurodegenerative diseases and healthy brain ageing. By allowing drug developers to test treatments on human brain tissue earlier in the development process, the platform aims to identify promising therapies and potential failures before they reach clinical trials.

The technology could support research into a range of neurological conditions, including rare brain disorders and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, while potentially reducing development costs and accelerating the introduction of new treatments.

The funding from Venture Kick will support the further development of Vale Biolabs' automated platform, the expansion of its human brain organoid models and the generation of datasets to train and validate its predictive AI models. It will also help the company advance collaborations with research and industry partners.

Onodrim Industries, a defence group based in Amsterdam, has raised $300M in a round led by Lux Capital. The deal values the firm at $1.3bn, Onodrim said in a statement on Monday. Other backers include General Catalyst, Lakestar, Altimeter, Strike Capital, 137 Ventures, 8090 and Expeditions. The capital comes nine months after Onodrim’s €40M seed […]

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Last week, we tracked more than 55 tech funding deals worth over €2.7 billion and over 5 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe.

? The top three industries that raised the most were content (€1.2 billion), energy (€857.5 million), and fintech (€291.7 million). At the country level, ?? Türkiye took first place (€1.2 billion), followed by ?? the Netherlands (€900 million) and ?? the UK (€242.4 million).

❗ Be sure to check out the Tech.eu Funding Explorer, free and open to everyone, for deeper insights into funding data, investor activity, company profiles, and market trends. Now, let's get you up to speed on everything that happened last week.

Have a great week!

Funding deals by amount

• TÜRKİYE: Fal doubles valuation to $16B after $1.3B Series F
• NETHERLANDS: Return secures €835M financing to expand battery storage capacity in Germany
• UK: Hoxton Wealth receives $135M minority investment from Aspirity Partners
• SPAIN: EOS-X Space raises $120M at $1.2B valuation ahead of its first commercial balloon flight
• GERMANY: Defence startup Hypersonica raises €100M
• GERMANY: Pliant raises $80M Series C for AI agent payments
• NETHERLANDS: Fourthline receives up to €65M in funding
• SPAIN: Smart TV operating system developer Titan OS raises $46 million
• GERMANY: Aerospace startup Vaeridion raises €30M for zero-emission regional flights
• UK: FluoRok raises €26.64M to scale fluorochemical production
• UK: Supa raises £21M in seed funding to transform UK residential block management
• UK: Human cell programming company bit.bio closes $25M Series D
• DENMARK: Biograil raises €20M for oral drug delivery device
• SWEDEN: Green Voltis raises €13.5M to operate and trade battery storage
• GERMANY: Quint Computing raises €9.1M to scale quantum computing technology
• UK: LO:TECH lands $12M Series A led by MMC
• SPAIN: Kabilio raises €10M to expand AI accounting platform and introduce AI agents
• FINLAND: Vensum Power raises €9M to cut power losses in AI data centres, EV charging and energy storage
• UK: OSSTEC raises $8M in funding
• FRANCE: Gallium Defense raises €7.1M to make drone detection cheaper and scalable
• AUSTRIA: Tumbleweed raises record €6.9M seed round to bring microgravity research to the masses
• GERMANY: Conlio secures €6.4M to expand AI-powered financial tools
• NORWAY: Vitroscope raises $7M to turn living human tissue into a new source of drug discovery data
• UK: Sporta receives £5M investment from Lazaroo-Hood Group
• DENMARK: Claimlane bags €5.6M to turn product claims into business value
• UK: Symbe raises $5.7M in funding
• UK: Tallia raises €4M to bring AI-powered research and review tools
• GERMANY: Marble raises $3.75M to build AI coworkers that learn by watching
• UK: Memory magicians raise $3.3M for Mindmax to put human learning first in the AI age
• UK: Bioliberty raises additional $3.3M in Series A funding
• ESTONIA: Veriff co-founders’ Roleo raises €2.9M to expand AI career agent across Europe
• ITALY: CyberKord raises €2.7M to automate IT and cybersecurity operations with AI
• UK: Turning pollution into everyday products: Viridi raises €2.6M to transform waste
• UK: 1nhaler secures £2.2M to replace bulky plastic inhalers with cardboard
• UK: Crediflow AI secures €1.8M to automate commercial loan processes
• PORTUGAL: AI startup Granter bags €1.6M to expand across Europe
• GERMANY: Smycles secures €1.5M investment
• SWEDEN: Juritas raises €1.4M in pre-seed funding
• UK: Kinewell raises over £1M in funding
• POLAND: SuppMatch.AI raises $1.3M pre-seed round to help consumers choose supplements
• FRANCE: Seamoretech secures €1.1M to turn desalination brine into freshwater
• GERMANY: JawBuddy raises €818,000 to help people reduce jaw pain and bruxism
• SWEDEN: Sortrace lands $800,000 to improve waste sorting with AI-powered analysis
• SWITZERLAND: Avaisor secured €531,000 to scale surgical expertise
• UK: BrowsAble raises £300,000 in funding
• TÜRKİYE: For Physician raises $267,000 in funding
• ITALY: Promethence receives €200,000 investment
• SWEDEN: Proofbacked comes out of stealth with €182,000 angel round and a mission to fix compliance’s proof problem
• SWITZERLAND: Venture Kick backs Apolarion with €164,000 to advance plasma-based seed treatment
• LATVIA: Unitoq raises €155,000 in pre-seed to make real estate investment more accessible
• SWEDEN: MucoLife Therapeutics secures €91K from Vinnova to scale manufacturing of COPD treatment
• UK: Ticketing giant Skiddle secures first external investment
• UK: UK sovereign AI fund and Stripe CEO back Potential Sciences in multi-million-dollar raise
• UK: SFC Capital backs Nayara’s AI platform for patient care
• GERMANY: Lazzaro One lands pre-seed funding to advance maritime intelligence technology
• NETHERLANDS: Hardt Hyperloop secures multi-million-euro funding
• GERMANY: Enginsight closes funding
• FINLAND: Saidot raises undisclosed funding
• SWITZERLAND: Klett Group is investing an undisclosed sum in Epalero

Exits and M&A activity

• SWEDEN: Nordtech Group acquires SaaS company Leasify
• SLOVAKIA: TrollWall AI buys rival Elv.ai to dominate Europe's comment moderation market
• FRANCE: Mistral acquires SkipLabs in its fifth acquisition since the start of the year
• SWITZERLAND: Technis strengthens its position with the acquisition of Konstl
• GERMANY: The Conrad Electronic Group is acquiring the Berlin-based procurement startup Hivebuy
• GERMANY: Upwork is acquiring the Berlin-based HR startup WorkMotion
• NORWAY: CO3 is acquiring the Norwegian startup Kinver

European defence and industrial scale-up platform Onodrim Industries has raised $300 million in a Series A funding round led by Lux Capital, with participation from new and existing investors, including General Catalyst, Lakestar, Altimeter, Strike Capital, 137 Ventures, 8090 and Expeditions.

The financing values Onodrim at $1.3 billion and follows a $45 million seed round announced earlier this year.

Onodrim focuses on strengthening Europe's defence and industrial capabilities by acquiring controlling stakes in businesses operating across critical supply chains, services and products, particularly those addressing bottlenecks in the European defence industry.

The company uses permanent capital to support the long-term development of its portfolio businesses, combining financial resources with technology, operational expertise and business development support to help them expand their capabilities, take on larger programmes and serve customers across Europe.

According to Aistis Šimaitis, co-founder and CEO of Onodrim, Europe has many strong companies, but their growth has often been constrained by limited access to the resources needed to scale at the pace required by current conditions.

We are bringing permanent capital, technology and world-class operators to Europe's best companies, giving them the resources to expand, compete and strengthen the continent's defence industrial base.

Onodrim has assembled a team with experience across private equity, aerospace and defence, technology and government. Its approach involves working with acquired businesses to modernise manufacturing processes, improve operations and develop new products through access to engineering teams and shared resources.

Our approach at Onodrim is rooted in long-term partnership and collaboration. We believe Europe's industrial champions are built by investing in great businesses, empowering the people behind them and giving them the resources to grow for the long term,

said Alex Blessing, co-founder and CTO of Onodrim.

The new funding will support Onodrim's plans to acquire established businesses across the aerospace, defence and industrial manufacturing sectors. The company expects to announce its first acquisitions in the coming months.

Alongside its acquisition strategy, Onodrim is expanding its European presence with new offices in Munich and Turin, adding to its existing locations in Amsterdam, London and Vilnius.

Image credits: Getty Images for Onodrim

Scottish biotech PhaSER Biomedical has won a $2.7M (£2m) grant from the Gates Foundation to help find new drugs for diseases such as TB and malaria. The company announced the award in a statement this morning. The two-year grant renews PhaSER’s place in the foundation’s Global Health Discovery Collaboratory, a programme that gives Gates-funded teams access […]

Rillet, a US start-up that makes accounting software with built-in AI agents, has opened an office in central London. It is the company’s first major move into Europe, Rillet said on Monday. Customers in the UK and the rest of Europe already account for 15% of Rillet’s new annual recurring revenue, the company said. They […]

Marble Imaging, founded to fill a critical capability gap in Europe's intelligence infrastructure, has raised an additional €6 million led by Cherry Ventures. This extends the initial €5.3 million seed round led by High-Tech Gründerfonds.

Marble Imaging is a big-data EO company founded in August 2023 in Bremen, Germany, building its constellation of very-high-resolution (VHR) satellites to provide up to hourly EO data and analytics for time-critical insights of our planet.

Marble is setting up Germany's first commercial constellation of (VHR) satellites. VHR imagery is a core input for security and commercial intelligence, yet Europe and many of its partners depend on non-European providers. This makes them vulnerable to being cut off from coverage over key areas of interest, as seen in Ukraine or the Strait of Hormuz, creating major economic and security knowledge gaps.

The data and derived EO-based analytics will be vital in supporting rapid decision-making with regard to defence, climate security, crises and disaster management, green and sustainable energy transitions, infrastructure and mobility and much more.

Marble already offers advanced data analysis services, including object detection for situational intelligence, terrain analysis and trafficability assessment, coastal asset monitoring and land cover classification.

Alongside the space infrastructure backbone, Marble is building an AI-powered analytics platform where multi-source data is converted into insights.

As Marble's constellation scales, the interplay of these segments will create a uniquely well-trained AI solution delivering actionable decision-support for users in the defence, civil security, and critical infrastructure sectors as well as beyond.

"To make better decisions, data access must be immediate and actionable," says Robert Hook, co-founder and CEO of Marble Imaging.

"Europe and many of its global partners lack this capability today. We at Marble are determined to close this gap, and Cherry's trust helps us achieve this faster."

Marble's first satellite, Marble Sat-1, is fully funded, completed pre-flight testing and scheduled to launch in early 2027. It is designed to capture imagery at up to 0.7 m spatial resolution in the visible and near-infrared spectrum and will also gather data in the short wave infrared spectrum.

The new funding accelerates the scaling of our constellation, with a goal of 30 satellites by 2030.

"Europe needs its own eyes in space, and Marble Imaging is building them. They are using AI to turn pixels into answers, exactly what government and defence customers need. This team has spent their careers in the industry and knows what it takes to build something very big. The product Marble will deliver doesn't exist in Europe yet, but we're convinced it has to," says Filip Dames, Founding Partner at Cherry Ventures.

Lead image: The founding team of Marble Imaging: Dr Raul Scarlat (Lead instrument scientist), Robert Hook (CEO), Dr Gopika Suresh (CSO), Alexander Epp (CCO). Credit: Marble Imaging

Tencent’s chief AI scientist has warned that AI models will soon be able to cause harm in biology, as they already can in cybersecurity. Yao Shunyu spoke at a science event in Hong Kong on Saturday, the South China Morning Post reported. “The cyber abilities of [AI] models and soon [the] bio ability of models […]

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has blamed pro-Russian hackers for posting the foreign minister’s personal data on the dark web. She said the sale of officials’ data was a grave concern, in a statement carried by ANSA on Saturday. The minister, Antonio Tajani, said on X that the hackers had been spreading his data for days. […]

I cloud company CoreWeave has written to Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, offering to work with her team on data centre rules. The letter from chief executive Michael Intrator was sent on Saturday, Bloomberg reported. Intrator offered to work with her transition team on finishing projects that already have permits. He also offered help setting clear, lasting […]

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Anthropic has agreed to pay $3.4bn for gas-fired generators to power its data centres, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. The FT said it is the biggest known single buy of power kit by an AI company. The deal covers 1.7 gigawatts of large generators, the FT said, citing one person who knows about it. […]

The US Justice Department has set up a task force to lead its work on AI crimes and AI lawsuits. It is called the Super Intelligence Task Force, the department said on Thursday. The name follows a September order from President Donald Trump telling federal agencies to call AI “super intelligence” in official documents. Associate Attorney General Stanley […]

The UK government is considering adding Vinted and eBay to its ban on social media for under-16s, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said on Sunday. The ban is due to start next spring.Nandy said on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that the government was “looking seriously” at the move to keep children safe, the BBC reported. […]

Artificial intelligence is changing how enterprise security teams operate. Tasks that once required analysts to spend hours investigating alerts, correlating data, and navigating different security platforms are increasingly being delegated to AI copilots and autonomous agents. Yet as organizations accelerate adoption, a fundamental question remains: how effectively can an AI agent protect an environment it does […]