Autentic AI has raised €1.5 million in pre-seed funding from venture capital firms Baobab Ventures, Lanai Ventures, Acurio Ventures and Masia VC.

Founded by Dani Diestre, Aniol Carreras and Jacob Bamio, Autentic AI has developed a platform that uses artificial intelligence to conduct interviews with hundreds of consumers and experts simultaneously, reducing the time required for market research from weeks or months to days. The company combines AI-led interviews and data analysis with human researchers who interpret the findings and provide context.

The platform aims to address the time and cost associated with traditional market research, which can limit how frequently companies gather customer feedback. Autentic AI seeks to make research more accessible, allowing businesses to gather customer insights more regularly and use them to inform their decisions.

Dani Diestre, co-founder and co-CEO of Autentic AI, commented:

When a study costs €100,000 and takes three months, companies cannot run one every time they need an answer. By the time the findings arrive, the market may have moved on. The real cost is making important decisions without hearing from customers.
At Autentic, AI conducts the interviews and researchers interpret what the answers mean. We want research to be something companies can do every week.

Autentic AI currently conducts around 1,000 interviews per day and expects to complete more than 400,000 by the end of 2026. Its platform serves four main sectors: fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), retail, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, and strategy consulting and private equity.

To support the reliability of its findings, Autentic AI works with verified participants who are compensated for their time. Each finding is linked to video evidence from interviews, allowing clients to review the responses behind the conclusions. The platform also analyses conversations to identify patterns and connections, with results that can be segmented by factors such as age, region or product usage.

The new funding will be used to further automate Autentic AI's research process and build its own network of verified consumers and industry experts. This will give the company greater control over research quality while reducing its reliance on third-party panels.

September marked a strong rebound in European tech funding after a slower August. Companies raised €15.8 billion across 300 funding deals, compared with €3.2 billion across 165 deals in August. This represents an increase of almost 394 per cent in funding value, while deal volume rose by around 82 per cent month on month.

Companies

Out of 300 deals in September, 25 companies raised more than €100 million each, including three rounds exceeding €1 billion secured by Mistral and Nscale. The value of 34 deals remains undisclosed. The month’s largest deal came from French AI company Mistral, which raised €3 billion in a Series D round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion.

Industries

Cloud was the leading sector by investment volume in European tech startups in September 2026, capturing 35 per cent of the month’s total funding, at €5.5 billion.

Countries

UK emerged as the top fundraising market in September, securing €7.3 billion over 65 transactions.

Exits

Exit activity across the European tech ecosystem remained active in September, with 39 transactions recorded during the month. Germany was the most active market, accounting for eight exits, or around 21 per cent of the total, followed by France with six. The UK and Sweden recorded three transactions each.

Grab the PDF version of this report for even more critical insights.

Besso, a Bern-based startup that helps companies manage the complexity of international trade regulations, has secured €4.29 million (CHF 4 million) in funding.

The funding came from a single large European family office, which opted to remain anonymous. This is a departure from traditional early-stage funding rounds, which have multiple backers, and the company says the funding raised from a single long-term investor was deliberate. 

“We have always been very deliberate about building Besso around real customer demand rather than funding milestones. The traction we are seeing now tells us that the time is right to invest more aggressively in growth. Having one long-term investor take the entire round gives us both the resources and the focus to do exactly that,” said Philip Sieber-Gasser, founder and CEO of Besso.

Founded and headquartered in Bern, Switzerland, Besso helps multinational corporations turn the growing complexity of international trade regulation into a source of competitive advantage. It has built an AI platform that continuously monitors over 1,250 trade regulations and tariff schedules across global corridors, automatically identifying where companies are overpaying on duties and offering them opportunities to recover costs through preferential tariff rates and free trade agreement (FTA) eligibility.

According to the company, global tariff teams miss out on preferential tariff rates on around 30% of eligible shipments. This reportedly costs mid-size importers between $2 million and $15 million annually. In addition to cost, these trade teams are also grappling with more than 7,000 regulatory changes every week across major trade corridors, a figure that has grown due to geopolitics and tariff volatility.

Besso’s AI platform replaces the manual, error-prone processes reliant on spreadsheets, PDFs, and consultancy dependency that most companies currently use to manage their requirements. Besso has already built a strong roster of global clients, including Danone, Unilever, AB-InBev, BASF, Coca-Cola, Heineken, Philip Morris International and Syngenta. The company says additional Fortune 500 companies recently joined the platform.

Alongside its strong client base, the company has built a team with expertise in legal research and is supported by academic partners including the Geneva Graduate Institute, the World Trade Institute, and ETH Zurich. Its advisory board includes Jean-Daniel Gerber, a former Swiss Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, along with other leading trade law academics and AI specialists.

The company, a Venture Leaders alumnus, plans to use the funding to increase its headcount, scale capacity to serve a rapidly growing multinational customer base, and advance its technology platform through continued investment in product development and R&D.

“This is an important milestone for us, but the funding itself is not the destination. What matters is what it enables us to build from here,” added Sieber-Gasser.

With geopolitical uncertainty and shifting tariff regimes reordering the global supply chains, the demand for intelligent trade compliance tools is surging with NMSC forecasting the AI trade compliance market to reach €9.84 billion ($11.05 billion) by 2035, expanding at a 21.07% CAGR. Besso is positioning itself as the platform of record for multinationals looking to reduce trade-related costs and build more resilient supply chains.

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Observability platform OllyGarden has raised $4 million in venture capital funding to further develop its technology for improving telemetry quality. The round was backed by Next Frontier Capital, Grand Ventures and ACTAI Ventures, with existing investor DIG Ventures also participating. Observability companies Datadog, Grafana Labs and Dash0 made additional strategic investments.

Launched in 2025, OllyGarden helps companies manage the quality of telemetry data used to monitor their software systems. Working with businesses across retail, financial services and enterprise software, the company addresses the growing volume of unreliable and unnecessary data, which can increase costs and make it harder for engineers to identify relevant information.

Its platform continuously evaluates telemetry quality, identifies problems and turns findings into fixes at the source, preventing unreliable data from reaching observability backends. This allows engineers and AI agents to work with more accurate information while reducing the costs of storing and processing unnecessary data.

Over the past year, OllyGarden has helped companies identify opportunities to reduce log volumes by up to 85 per cent.

Alongside the funding announcement, OllyGarden has introduced Minimum Viable Instrumentation (MVI), a new capability for its AI OpenTelemetry Engineer, Rose.

Previously, Rose could analyse existing instrumentation and recommend improvements. With MVI, it can also identify areas where instrumentation is missing and provide guidance on establishing a baseline. The aim is to help organisations apply consistent instrumentation practices across teams, code repositories and pull requests without generating unnecessary data.

Juraci Paixão Kröhling, founder of OllyGarden, commented:

More instrumentation is not better instrumentation. It's about surfacing only the information and data that's useful and actionable: no more, no less.

According to Kröhling, the growing use of AI-generated code has contributed to rising telemetry volumes, making it harder for engineers to identify critical information. MVI is designed to address this challenge by extending OllyGarden's capabilities beyond improving existing instrumentation to identifying where new instrumentation is needed.

Built on OpenTelemetry, an industry standard for software telemetry, OllyGarden's technology is designed to help organisations apply instrumentation best practices at scale, even with small observability engineering teams.

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