If you own a small or midsize business (SMB), chances are, you and your team wear a lot of hats. Time and resources are luxuries you don’t always have, making it hard to feel productive some days. Meet Zoom AI Companion, our generative AI assistant that helps you get time back in your work day without adding to your headcount. No matter if you’re a solopreneur, own a small family company, run a thriving agency, or are the IT manager at a large enterprise organization, we believe everyone should experience the benefits of AI. To help with this, AI Companion is available at no extra cost for paid users on eligible plans and can be used by businesses of all sizes, without a minimum number of licenses.

Grow your business. Shrink your to-do list

Implementing AI tools for your business may sound a little daunting without an IT team to help you out. But the truth is, using AI Companion is as simple as logging in to the tools you already know and love. From summarizing meetings to in-meeting questions to suggesting chat responses and email replies, our AI Companion is natively integrated into the solutions you use for day-to-day business.

Still exploring the benefits of generative AI? Want to know how it could work for a team of two or a 300-person firm? Keep reading to learn how an AI assistant can help you maximize productivity no matter the size of your business.

Zoom AI Companion for the solopreneur

Solopreneurs are no strangers to juggling tasks, but when you’re a party of one, it’s hard to find the time to market your services and still deliver exceptional customer support. If you need another pair of hands but can’t afford to hire extra help, an AI assistant may just be the best friend you never knew you needed. Our AI companion can be your notetaker or help with drafting emails, composing chats, or catching you up on any meetings you may have missed.

AI Companion is available with eligible paid Zoom user accounts at no extra cost,* so small and midsize business owners can take advantage of the increased productivity that AI has to offer. We’ve made it easy to minimize the repetitive tasks and focus more on what matters.

How AI Companion works for small marketing agencies

Small teams do big things, so it’s no wonder we’re constantly impressed by the creativity and impact we see from our customers with as few as 2–10 employees. That’s why we want to help you capture the creative sparks in real-time — without distractions.

Imagine a brainstorming session where AI can prompt new ideas on your virtual whiteboard. It’s like a built-in antidote for writer’s block. Need to send an update to a colleague who couldn’t attend that meeting today? Forward a meeting summary generated by AI Companion so they don’t have to watch a meeting recording and you don’t have to summarize.

Meeting summaries has saved our team a ton of time. We feel that everyone is in the loop without necessarily having to attend every meeting, which results in better collaboration.

Karl Morsgofian, CIO, Gainsight

Explore AI Companion for fast-growing start-ups

Start-ups move at warp speed and don’t have a minute to waste. When you have distributed employees across multiple locations and time zones, effective communication is paramount. A smart AI assistant can help you generate efficiency when you need it most. Short on time? Write emails faster with the help of suggested content. Late to a meeting? Make a query inside the meeting to catch up without having to interrupt a colleague.

As you begin to execute new business strategies like virtual events, AI Companion is your built-in event planner right inside Zoom Events. You can use it to draft your invitation emails, help with attendee registrations, ticketing communications, and more. Why get buried in administrative tasks when you can automate the heavy lifting?

What can an AI assistant do for a 100-person law firm?

We know SMB leaders need to not only collaborate more effectively but also free up more time to focus on decision-making, creative ideation, and activities that move the needle. With 100 employees or more, keeping teams up to date can be challenging. Lean on AI Companion to summarize large chat threads in seconds, or catch you up if you need to join a meeting late or briefly step away.

Zoom’s AI Companion exemplifies our vision for enhanced collaboration and innovation. With automated, detailed meeting summaries, it streamlines information sharing and boosts productivity. This inclusion in our Zoom plan not only improves efficiency but also yields significant cost savings, reflecting our commitment to a smarter, more connected future.

John Georgatos, CIO, Mike Morse Law Firm

Smart AI assistants help uncover new efficiencies in 200+ person businesses

The rise of remote and hybrid work means employees are often distributed across the globe. Communicating with overseas vendors and team members can be challenging in multiple regions, especially as your business grows to 200 employees or more. This makes it more important than ever to have an AI tool that is built for multiple languages and enables communication across geographies.

Luckily, AI Companion already supports in-meeting questions for English and an additional 7 foreign languages in preview.

It will soon support a total of 33 languages for both meeting summaries and in-meeting questions, so your global team can benefit by getting caught up on that crucial meeting. And with Meeting coach’s speech analytic features coming soon, hosts can get feedback on how well they engaged meeting participants with filters, talk speed, talk-listen ratio, and more.

The AI Companion tool that scales as your business grows

The evolution from a small- to medium-sized business can bring lots of excitement and revenue but headaches as well. When you’re in a period of rapid growth, you need a solution that scales with your business. AI Companion is built to support growing businesses and large organizations. It can help teams as small as two or large enterprises keep up with revolving chat messages and missed meetings. You’ll love having more freedom to work on what matters most and spend less time catching up.

Breeze through your workday

Customer loyalty is the backbone of small and medium businesses, as 59% of customers say they’ll switch to a new brand after just one or two bad experiences. We’re here to help your business grow by giving you more time to focus on creating, selling, and marketing your services to better serve your customers. AI Companion isn’t just another tool in your toolbox—it’s a vital part of our all-in-one intelligent collaboration platform. We’re making connecting easier, more immersive, and more dynamic for businesses and individuals. Discover how our smart AI Assistant can help your business grow.

Milan-based fintech Finanz has raised €700,000 in an all-equity pre-seed round, backed by leading business angels and senior executives from the financial industry, including investors from Amazon, Amundi, Rothschild & Co, and Fundsgate.

Finanz helps people start investing with a personalised, five-minute-a-day guided journey. Built on the belief that financial education is a right, not a privilege, it began as a mission to make finance understandable, even in high school classrooms, before becoming an app.

Research indicates that roughly €10 trillion sits idle in current accounts, and 335 million Europeans aren’t investing due to limited financial knowledge.

Finanz aims to turn this gap into an opportunity by combining technology and cultural impact to help people manage savings and invest with confidence.

We started by bringing financial education into Italian schools, organising over 100 assemblies for students and teachers. Today, we want to directly address a problem that affects millions of Europeans, not just the younger generations, by helping everyone learn how to save and invest, one step at a time,

says Lorenzo Perotta, CEO of Finanz.

Launched in November 2024 by founders Lorenzo Perotta (CEO), Andrea Pasini (CTO), Matteo Spreafico (COO), and Matteo Longoni (CMO), Finanz has a young team with an average age of 23 and plans to hire across technology, product, and design as it develops a leading European platform for financial education and management.

The new capital will support growth in Italy, expansion beyond 100,000 users, and accelerated product development.

Prague-based energy scaleup Delta Green has secured €2 million in fresh funding from Credo Ventures, Tilia Impact Ventures, and Purple Ventures to accelerate its pan-European expansion. 

Delta Green aims to turn ordinary European homes into a powerful force on the energy market. The company's platform connects ordinary homes into a virtual power battery, enabling households to shift consumption, discharge batteries, and export rooftop solar at times of peak demand. Every kilowatt activated at the right moment lowers bills, supports renewables, and reduces fossil fuel reliance.

Delta Green is co-owned by four engineers and developers, David Brozik, Prokop Cech, Lukas Benes and Jan Hicl. I spoke to Delta Green co-founder Jan Hicl to learn more.

Delta Green was originally called Nano Green and has been around for about 13 years. 

Why the energy industry's conservatism is creating opportunity

According to Hicl, "We acquired and rebranded it three years ago to focus on what we do now."

"Our background is in building software startups, so we've turned Delta Green into a software-first company for the energy sector — which is traditionally quite conservative and slow to change."

According to Hicl, a good example of that conservatism is the growing number of negative price hours on the spot market.  "Everyone knows how to fix it — by shifting when electricity is produced and consumed — but very few are acting fast enough.  The fact that those hours are still increasing shows just how rigid the industry remains."

Hicl shared that this is why "flexibility' has become such an energy buzzword: everyone recognises it's critical for the transition, but real-world implementation is still limited."

We've already seen small blackouts in the Czech Republic, Spain, and Portugal. However, without flexibility to stabilise the network, especially at the low-voltage level — the local networks closest to households. 

Hicl contends that most investment goes into high-voltage transmission networks and utility-scale batteries, "but the real fragility is in local distribution systems."

"These networks were built decades ago for completely different consumption patterns.

If five EVs on one street start charging simultaneously, you can overload the grid.  That's where residential flexibility — our speciality — becomes essential.

Our platform can coordinate devices, telling some to wait and others to charge, so the network doesn't collapse."

How ending subsidies is actually helping Delta Green grow

Greentech is a tough sector for many startups at the whim of European policy priorities, especially in areas like EV-subsidies and ESG. But interestingly, Hicl asserts that the fact that many countries are ending net-metering schemes—where households could feed excess solar power into the grid in summer and draw it back in winter, is helping the company. 

He admits, "That was effectively a form of subsidy, and now it's disappearing."

However, the end of subsidies is actually prompting both consumers and retailers to consider energy management more seriously. 

"As a result, consumers are starting to ask new questions: When should I consume energy? How can I use what I produce more intelligently? 

Retailers, too, have lost many of their government incentives, so they're looking for new ways to stay competitive. Our technology gives them that edge.

While first movers benefit most from the shift, it's more difficult in markets where there aren't enough EVs, heat pumps, or residential batteries—" assets we can control.

But overall, the shift away from subsidies is creating stronger demand for what we do."

Further, household flexibility is no longer in a pilot phase — "our business growth proves it works across thousands of households," says Hicl.

"We're now accelerating our plans as market demand is clear, with major retailers across Europe approaching us to deploy our solution."

From test lab to pan-European platform

In the Czech Republic, Delta Green is a small energy supplier, serving about 7,000 customers. 

"That's our test lab, where we can develop and refine our technology before scaling it," shared Hicl.

"Then we license our platform to large utilities. They use it to manage flexibility across their customer base."

Delta Green runs a lean ship, which Hicl admits is partly out of necessity.:

"Margins in the energy sector are extremely thin — around 1 per cent. When we entered the industry, we were shocked to find that no one accepted credit card payments.

Then we discovered that card processing fees are about 1.5 per cent, which would instantly wipe out profits! We've managed to stay profitable because we utilise our proprietary technology to operate efficiently.  We make money from our customer portfolio and from selling the platform to other suppliers.

We're sustainable, even if we're not the fastest-growing company out there — and that's okay. A lot of hyper-growth players in our space have already burned out."

Hicl asserts that for decades, we've been accustomed to having electricity available whenever we want it, at a constant price. That era is ending.

"In the future, prices will vary hour by hour depending on supply and demand. Sometimes electricity will even be free, or have negative prices.

For households, that means comfort will come at a cost. If you insist on consuming energy during peak times, you'll pay more. But if you're flexible — if you shift your consumption, like charging your EV or heating water when solar or wind generation is high — you'll save money and help stabilise the grid."

E.ON partnership sparks snowball effect across Europe

By the end of this year, Delta Green platform will manage tens of thousands of households, putting it on track to become Europe's largest household-based virtual power plant. 

"We just closed first deals in Romania, Italy, Hungary and Slovakia, and we are in advanced discussions with several major international energy suppliers about adopting our technology," shared Hicl. 

Since its last funding update in 2024, Delta Green has made significant strides. It has become the first company in CEE to successfully involve households directly in grid balancing. 

In the Czech Republic, one of country's top three energy providers E.ON has integrated Delta Green's flexibility service into its operations and plans to scale it to thousands of customers within the next 18 months. Thanks to this collaboration, E.ON customers can earn up to €200 per year by monetising their household energy flexibility. 

Hicl admits that the momentum has created a snowball effect — "everyone realised they needed something similar to stay competitive. That's when we knew we were ready to expand internationally."

"Now we're active in Austria, Romania, and Hungary, and preparing to launch in other European countries."

From here on, Delta Green is expanding the types of assets it can control.

"Right now, we mainly manage EVs, but we're adding heat pumps and residential batteries to the platform."

"We are really happy to see that Delta Green's timing for their flexibility aggregation solution was perfect. Just as the market realised the importance of this kind of solution for energy transformation towards greater sustainability, the company already had a real solution in place that the energy companies can instantly use, because it's been tested on Delta Green's own retail customers," says Tilia Impact Ventures partner, Pavel Petřek. 

Delta Green's mission is clear — to place households at the very centre of Europe's energy transition and build the continent's largest network of flexible homes.

Munich, a city known for its role in technology and innovation, recently hosted Photonica 2025 – the final event of the PhotonHub Europe project. Taking place on 25 June at automatica’s Start-up Arena, happening alongside Laser World of Photonics at Messe München, the half-day gathering served as an important platform to connect promising startups with investors, industry leaders, and potential partners

Photonica was designed as an “Investors Day” under PhotonHub’s mandate to accelerate the commercialisation of photonic technologies across Europe. With over 47,000 visitors attending the surrounding trade fairs, the event benefited from strong visibility within one of the world’s largest innovation showcases for photonics, smart automation, and robotics.

Highlights from the agenda

The event opened with a keynote by Mehrnaz Heidari, Strategic Partnership Manager at Tyndall National Institute – member of PhotonHub Europe’s consortium – and Coordinator of Photonics Ireland, who highlighted the strategic role of photonics in Europe’s future competitiveness. This was followed by a panel discussion on emerging trends and disruptive technologies, with perspectives from academia, research, and venture capital.

At the heart of Photonica was the startup pitching competition, where eight startups, most of them being beneficiaries of PhotonHub Investment Readiness Coaching Program led by FundingBox Accelerator, presented their solutions to a jury of experts and investors. Participants included Lumos Laser, Meet Optics, Photin, Blue Tube, Alcyon Photonics, Quantum Brand Protection, and Hypermemo Oy. Each company was tasked with outlining its innovation, business model, and go-to-market strategy before a jury of investors and experts.

The pitching session was followed by a fireside chat titled The Art of the Deal, where Tomasz Mazuryk, Co-CEO of FundingBox and Martyna Waliszewska, Investment Manager from Invest in Odense, explored agreement structures for European startups and investors, such as equity transfers, convertible notes and SAFE agreements available in the US, currently being developed by the EU under the EUSAFE project.

And the winner is ….. 

The jury selected Alcyon Photonics as the winner of the pitching competition. Specialising in high-performance integrated photonic circuits (PICs), the startup impressed with its clear market strategy and strong scalability potential. Its proprietary subwavelength grating (SWG) technology enables advanced polarisation management and broad bandwidth, offering applications across telecommunications, sensing, quantum technologies, and data communications.

Jimena García-Romeu, CEO at Alcyon Photonics, said: “We first heard about PhotonHub Europe and the Photonica competition through our network in the European photonics ecosystem, where PhotonHub is widely recognised as a key initiative supporting innovation and startups. We saw it as a unique opportunity to showcase our vision, connect with leading experts and investors, and highlight how our silicon photonics IP can bring real impact to strategic industries in Europe and beyond.”

She then continued: “Winning Photonica is both an honour and a milestone. It validates the relevance of our technology, boosts our confidence as we scale, and gives us stronger momentum in attracting partners and customers. At this stage of our journey, it represents recognition that we are on the right path to make a real impact.”

As a prize, Alcyon Photonics received one-on-one consultation sessions with each jury member, providing valuable access to investor expertise.

A catalyst for visibility and collaboration

Photonica not only highlighted the entrepreneurial talent within Europe’s photonics sector but also provided concrete opportunities for networking and collaboration. A dedicated lunch session encouraged startups, investors, and industry representatives to explore collaborations and new business leads. Early feedback from beneficiaries indicated that even brief interactions had already resulted in promising contacts.

The event also served to showcase the impact of public investment in innovation. By presenting startups supported through an EU-funded initiative, Photonica underlined how public resources are being channelled into fostering entrepreneurship and deep tech development, while providing transparency and accountability in the use of public funding.

Looking ahead

Since 2021, PhotonHub Europe has supported over 100 companies, helping generate more than €750 million in revenues, create 1,000 jobs, and raise €250 million in venture capital. With new investment from the European Commission, its activities will continue under the PhotonHub PHACTORY, providing access to Europe’s leading laboratories, technical expertise, and training.

Photonica 2025 marked the conclusion of PhotonHub Europe’s current programme, reinforcing the project’s role in bridging the gap between deep tech innovation and market deployment. By integrating with major industry fairs and focusing on investor-startup connections, the event set a benchmark for how European photonics can thrive within the global innovation ecosystem.

The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement n°101016665, in public-private partnership with Photonics21. To learn more, visit Photonhub’s website.

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London-based Orbiri has raised £320,000 in an oversubscribed angel round with 14 individual investors, following an initial £45,000 in seed funding. The company is preparing to launch a community-wide solution that aligns children, parents, and schools around shared digital limits (shifting peer pressure from a barrier to a support) instead of relying on parents to police screen time individually or enforce blanket smartphone bans.

Orbiri provides a community-powered platform with preset, considered screen-time boundaries for children. Its collective-action approach aligns children, parents, and schools around shared boundaries to eliminate daily device battles and protect the conditions necessary for healthy childhood development. Rather than leaving schools and families to act alone, it enables coordinated limits within a single framework, aiming to make healthy digital habits the norm.

Amid growing concern about children’s unrestricted smartphone use, with schools in England adopting phone bans and ministers considering Australia-style limits on under-16s’ social media, Orbiri contends that durable progress depends on bottom-up community coordination rather than top-down restrictions.

Set to roll out next year, Orbiri will complete product development, secure compliance certifications, and run trials with early-adopter schools while expanding its core and product teams.

The goal is to demonstrate that shared community boundaries can replace daily device conflicts with a more natural shift toward healthier technology use, addressing shortcomings of school bans and individual parental controls.

The funding will support upcoming trial phases ahead of a broader launch, aligning with a growing view that approaches such as school phone bans and individual parental controls are insufficient and difficult to implement at scale.

SLNG.ai, a speech infrastructure startup out of Barcelona building the first radically global platform for voice AI, today announced it has raised €3.3 million in pre-Seed funding to challenge the US-centric voice technology ecosystem that “has left billions of users worldwide in digital silence.“

The round, led by Earlybird VC, will accelerate SLNG’s plan to provide developers, startups, and enterprises with a unified platform that integrates multiple speech models, supports true global deployment with regional compliance, and eliminates the barriers that have kept voice technology concentrated in a handful of languages and markets.

According to Luke Miller, CEO and Co-founder of SLNG: “We’re not just building another voice AI platform, we are rethinking the entire ecosystem to be developer first, truly global and compliant.“

The pre-Seed round raised by SLNG reflects growing investor attention in Europe’s voice and speech technology sector during 2025.

The landscape includes funding rounds such as Vox AI’s €7.5 million Seed to expand multilingual voice assistants for quick-service restaurants, Synthflow AI’s €17.2 million Series A for enterprise-grade voice agents, and Solda.AI’s €3.5 million Seed for telesales automation.

Other adjacent raises include Augmented Hearing’s €3 million Seed for speech enhancement and MEGA’s €1.7 million pre-Seed to build compliant AI voice agents.

Against this backdrop, SLNG’s Barcelona base makes it one of the few Spanish entrants in the voice infrastructure field, contrasting with Northern European dominance in voice agents.

Unlike peers that build application-level conversational systems, SLNG focuses on model-agnostic voice infrastructure, offering developer tools to integrate multiple speech models and maintain regional compliance. The raise positions SLNG as an early mover in the foundational layer of Europe’s speech ecosystem – complementary to, rather than competing directly with, voice agent startups driving the broader 2025 funding trend.

“What excites us about SLNG is the audacity of their mission: to make voice AI universal, compliant, and developer-first from day one. Luke and the team are not just building a product – they’re building the missing infrastructure for a truly global voice ecosystem. We believe SLNG can define the next era of speech technology,“ added Akash Bajwa, Principal at Earlybird VC.

SLNG was founded in 2025 by Ismael Ordaz and Luke Miller. Ordaz leads product and engineering, while Miller scales GTM like he did at companies like npm and Vercel. Having seen speech AI break beyond US borders: models failing on dialects, compliance blocking markets and costs spiraling out of control, they built SLNG to “unmute the world”.

The startup was founded to address repeated patterns that companies continuously struggle with:

1. Lack of regional compute
2. Missing industry-specific models
3. Compliance barriers
4. Latency issues

According to SLNG, most platforms optimise primarily for premium languages like English, Spanish, and French, leaving other languages/dialects as afterthoughts. High latency and data residency issues entangle deployment in many non-US centric regions.

Developers are forced into single-provider ecosystems with limited flexibility in terms of cost and model testing. Lastly, regulated industries can’t deploy voice AI products due to data sovereignty requirements that existing platforms simply can’t meet.

Unlike traditional speech AI providers, SLNG offers a model-agnostic platform where developers integrate any speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or voice cloning model through a single API.

The company’s open ecosystem approach lets developers combine open-source and proprietary models without vendor lock-in, while developer-first design delivers SDKs and APIs built for rapid integration. This avoids months-long implementations, giving developers unprecedented flexibility in building voice-enabled applications.

The platform already supports deployment across over 20 regions, enabling companies in regulated industries, like healthcare, finance, and government, to finally deploy voice AI while meeting strict data residency requirements.

The post “Unmuting the world”: Spain’s SLNG raises €3.3 million to challenge US-centric speech AI infrastructure appeared first on EU-Startups.

SLNG.ai, the speech infrastructure startup building the first radically global platform for voice AI, today announced it has raised €3.3 million in Pre-Seed funding to challenge the US-centric voice technology ecosystem that has left billions of users worldwide in digital silence.

The round, led by Earlybird VC, will accelerate SLNG's mission to restore the universal power of voice by providing developers, startups, and enterprises with a unified platform that integrates multiple speech models, supports true global deployment with regional compliance, and eliminates the barriers that have kept voice technology concentrated in a handful of languages and markets.

Spain-based SLNG was founded by Ismael Ordaz and Luke Miller after spotting the same pattern globally: companies struggling with 1) lack of regional compute, 2) missing industry-specific models, 3) compliance barriers, and 4) latency issues. SLNG solves all four.  According to Luke Miller, CEO and co-founder of SLNG:

“We're not just building another voice AI platform, we are rethinking the entire ecosystem to be developer first, truly global and compliant."

SLNG aims to solve fundamental limitations of the current voice AI infrastructure. Most platforms optimise primarily for premium languages like English, Spanish, and French, leaving other languages/dialects as afterthoughts.

High latency and data residency issues entangle deployment in many non-US-centric regions. Developers are forced into single-provider ecosystems with limited flexibility in terms of cost and model testing. Lastly, regulated industries can't deploy voice AI products due to data sovereignty requirements that existing platforms simply can't meet.

Unlike traditional speech AI providers, SLNG offers a model-agnostic platform where developers integrate any speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or voice cloning model through a single API. This fuels a truly global deployment through regional infrastructure and ensures low latency and compliance worldwide.

The company's open ecosystem approach lets developers combine open-source and proprietary models without vendor lock-in, while developer-first design delivers SDKs and APIs built for rapid integration. This avoids months-long implementations, giving developers unprecedented flexibility in building voice-enabled applications.

The platform already supports deployment across over 20 regions, enabling companies in regulated industries, like healthcare, finance, and government, to finally deploy voice AI while meeting strict data residency requirements.

“What excites us about SLNG is the audacity of their mission: to make voice AI universal, compliant, and developer-first from day one. Luke and the team are not just building a product - they’re building the missing infrastructure for a truly global voice ecosystem. We believe SLNG can define the next era of speech technology, “ added Akash Bajwa, Principal at Earlybird VC.

Rome-based SpaceTech startup Titan4 has closed a €4 million Series A round to advance its Earth Intelligence platform, which integrates satellite data, ground sensors and AI-powered analytics to monitor the condition of critical infrastructure.

The round was led by CDP Venture Capital, through the Infratech sector of the Corporate Partners I fund, together with Vertis, through the Vertis Venture 6 Digital South fund – partly co-financed by the European Union, NextGenerationEU.

For Giovanni Quacquarelli, Founder and CEO of Titan4, this round represents not only a financial goal, but also a step that has strengthened the company strategy: “This round represents a turning point for us: not only a financial goal, but also a path of comparison that has strengthened our strategic vision. The trust of partners such as CDP Venture Capital and Vertis allows us to accelerate technological development and aspire to an international role, building increasingly effective Earth Intelligence tools to support the security and resilience of critical infrastructures”. (Translated)

Titan4’s Series A aligns with a broader 2025 European funding trend focused on Earth intelligence, satellite infrastructure, and resilience technologies.

Several DeepTech peers have recently attracted investment, including Belgium’s EDGX (€2.3 million Seed for onboard AI compute), France’s UNIVITY (€31 million to advance satellite-enabled 5G), Look Up (€50 million for radar-based orbital safety), and the UK’s Spaceflux (€6.1 million to expand its satellite-tracking network). Germany’s OroraTech (€37 million for wildfire and climate monitoring) and the UK’s Messium (€3.8 million for satellite-driven precision agriculture) further illustrate investor confidence in AI-enhanced geospatial analytics.

Within this context, Titan4’s raise is notable as one of the few Italian-based ventures in the SpaceTech and Earth observation sector, underscoring both national progress in the field and a Europe-wide push toward AI-enabled infrastructure safety and climate resilience.

“We decided to invest in Titan4 because we believe in the solidity of their vision and in the ability of the team to translate it into a concrete industrial impact. The technology they are developing allows those who design, manage and maintain infrastructures to make more informed and timely decisions, guaranteeing a strategic contribution to the security of the territories and the competitiveness of our country,” added Claudio Bruno, Senior Investment Manager of the Corporate Partners I fund of CDP Venture Capital.

Founded in 2019, Titan4 has developed an Earth Intelligence solution that integrates satellite data, information from ground sensors and climate models, processed using AI algorithms. This makes it possible to analyse the state of infrastructure – from bridges to dams, to water, energy and transport networks – and to identify anomalies, criticalities and changes.

The company provides managers, institutions and operators with advanced tools to allegedly anticipate risks, optimise operational decisions, reduce costs and strengthen the security and resilience of communities.

The funding follows the Seed investment made in 2023 by Galaxia, the National Aerospace Technology Transfer Pole, born on the initiative of the Technology Transfer Fund of CDP Venture Capital together with Obloo Ventures.

The new resources will allow the startup to consolidate its presence on the national market, accelerate research and development activities and initiate international expansion, with the aim of positioning itself as a global leader in support of infrastructure safety and resilience.

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Revolut, the British FinTech leader with more than 65 million customers worldwide, today announced the strategic acquisition of Berlin’s Swifty, an AI-powered travel agent startup and 2023 FutureTravel Pitch Competition finalist.

This acquisition brings Swifty’s proprietary AI technology and Co-founders to Revolut, where they will focus on enhancing the company’s loyalty and lifestyle products for its global customer base.

Stanislav Bondarenko and Tomasz Przedmojski, Co-founders of Swifty commented: “We’re excited to bring the power of Swifty to tens of millions of Revolut users. Joining forces with one of the world’s leading FinTechs is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to scale our vision globally and enhance the lifestyle of over 65 million customers. Together, we’ll build an AI concierge that not only simplifies travel but anticipates everyday needs across all aspects of life.“

The Revolut acquisition of Swifty aligns with a broader 2025 trend across Europe where travel, mobility, and lifestyle startups are increasingly integrating AI to bridge finance and travel experiences.

In 2025, Exoticca in Spain raised €25 million to enhance its AI-driven trip-planning capabilities, while WeTravel secured €78 million to automate workflows for multi-day travel operators. Denmark’s Tryp.com raised €3.1 million to refine its AI-based travel planning engine, and France’s Kolet closed €8.6 million to expand global connectivity services for travellers. In Germany, Circula secured €15 million to advance its AI-powered expense management tools, overlapping finance and travel functions.

Collectively, these developments show how FinTech and TravelTech are converging – with Revolut’s integration of Swifty exemplifying how financial platforms are extending into lifestyle and travel through applied AI.

Christopher Guttridge, Head of Loyalty at Revolut, says: “This acquisition strengthens our position at the intersection of finance, AI and lifestyle. Through this move we’re gaining both talent and expertise in AI driven travel solutions, which will help us deliver even more personalised and seamless experiences to our customers.”

Founded in 2023 originally incubated at Lufthansa Innovation Hub (LIH), Swifty is an AI assistant that autonomously manages essential steps of business travel, encompassing planning, booking, payment, and invoicing, all within the chat interface, helping travellers book their business trips in 5 minutes via chat.

This acquisition complements Revolut’s development of its AI financial assistant, building on the lifestyle offering. Swifty’s AI agent will enable a powerful customer experience that combines smart financial guidance with the automated execution of complex travel and lifestyle tasks.

Swifty was also part of the 2023 FutureTravel Pitch Competition featuring 10 promising early-stage travel startups on a global scale. Swifty, along with the other nine startups, competed for the title of FutureTravel startup of the year and a prize package valued at €56k. To learn more about the FutureTravel Summit and this year’s edition, click here.

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Christopher Savoie, one of the original inventors behind the AI system that led to Apple’s Siri, has raised over €2M for SiC Systems, a startup combining agentic AI and quantum sensing technologies for use in critical industrial and defence applications.

The full amount raised has not been disclosed.

The company is a spinout from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The round was led by Dutch quantum investment fund QDNL Participations, with additional backing from Propagator Ventures, Plug and Play, and Wavepeak Ventures.

SiC Systems aims to develop intelligent, adaptive AI agents capable of orchestrating complex physical systems in real time. Its proprietary platform integrates classical and quantum sensors with agent-based AI and generative models to support decision-making in high-stakes sectors such as biomanufacturing, industrial automation, and defence.

Savoie, who co-founded the company with DTU professor Seyed Soheil Monsouri, said:
"From the early multiagent natural language interfaces that brought Siri to life to today's agentic AI for the physical worlds of industrial and defense applications, my personal AI journey has always been about making intelligence actionable."

QDNL Participations Investment Director Kris Kaczmarek said: "SiC's fusion of agentic AI and quantum innovation represents a leap forward for mission-critical applications."

Founded across Copenhagen and Nashville, SiC Systems builds on DTU research in model-based tools for dynamic, multi-scale systems. The company’s quantum-inspired virtual sensors aim to reduce reliance on costly hardware by predicting physical states with high precision, even in harsh conditions.

The startup plans to use the funding to scale its platform, form strategic partnerships, and pilot deployments across the chemical, biological manufacturing, energy, and defence sectors.

Oura, the Finnish health tech startup known for its popular smart rings, has raised over $900m in a new funding round, valuing the startup at “approximately $11bn”, it said.

The funding round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company with participation from new investor ICONIQ and investment from Whale Rock and Atreides. 

Oura's valuation has now more than doubled since its $200m last funding round in December last year, valuing it at $5.2bn.

Oura says it will funnel the new funding to speed up AI and product innovation, expand global distribution and invest in the development of new health features.

Oura says it has sold more than 5.5 million Oura rings since they were launched in 2015, with more than half of those sales in the past year.

The startup says it recorded revenues of more than $500m in 2024, and says it’s on track to top $1bn in sales for 2025.

“This new funding is a testament to the strength of Oura’s business and the trust millions of members place in us every day,” said Tom Hale, chief executive officer, Oura.

“We’re proud to be building not just a product, but a global movement toward proactive health—helping people understand their bodies, make better lifestyle decisions, and connect more effectively with their healthcare providers.

"Today, our technology supports consumers, employers, insurers, and clinicians working together to advance preventive health at scale. With this investment, we will accelerate innovation, expand our global reach, and set a new standard for what wearables can achieve in advancing preventive health.”

David Shuman, Oura board chair, said: "Oura’s growth and impact over the past year have been truly remarkable.

“The company has doubled revenue, expanded its global reach, and delivered transformative solutions that are reshaping the wearables industry."

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Strawberry, an agentic browser with built-in, personalised AI companions, has raised $6 million led by General Catalyst and EQT Ventures, with participation from founders of Lovable, Supabase, and Hugging Face.

While enterprises often deploy AI via large budgets and multi-year programs, freelancers, startups, and small businesses need tools that work immediately. Many existing solutions require technical expertise, disrupt workflows, or sit in standalone interfaces outside the browser.

Strawberry embeds AI directly into browsing to create a no-code, adaptive workspace that automates routine digital work so people can focus on higher-value tasks.

Founded in Stockholm by a technical team focused on bringing AI beyond developers, Strawberry streamlines tab switching, data movement across tools, spreadsheet population, and message drafting, while adapting to each user’s context and workflows.

Early users have built custom assistants for competitive intelligence and sales prospecting, earning Product Hunt “Product of the Day” and “Product of the Week.” The platform signals a shift from generic enterprise AI toward personalised companions that make everyday work more collaborative and usable.

Charles Maddock, CEO and co-founder of Strawberry, commented: 

The browser is a tool most people use daily and know intimately. By giving Strawberry powerful AI features out of the box, we're making AI automation accessible to everyone. This funding helps us continue our mission to help modern workers love what they do and skip their busywork.

The financing will fuel Strawberry's expansion across engineering and design to support rapid iteration with its growing beta community.

Alongside the financing, the company is rolling out an upgraded version with new features, offering early access to select customers and expanding onboarding monthly.

Stockholm-based Epiminds, which develops multi-agent AI systems to run marketing end-to-end, emerged from stealth with $6.6 million in funding. The funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from EWOR, Entourage, and high-profile angels, including the former CMO of Booking.com.

Agencies face pressure from both clients and operations as clients expect greater transparency, faster reporting, and measurable ROI on tighter budgets, while internally, fragmented data slows decisions, and AI adoption is uncertain. Traditional responses like hiring more specialists, adding dashboards, or reacting after problems arise raise costs and complexity without fixing core inefficiencies or preparing for the future. Epiminds addresses these issues.

Founded in 2025 by Google and Spotify alums, Elias Malm and Mo Elkhidir, respectively, the company builds multi-agent AI systems that agencies can train and evolve. Its core product is Lucy, an AI marketing manager coordinating over 20 specialised agents across reporting, optimisation, budget pacing, bidding, and creative.

Agencies can onboard a client in under 30 seconds and immediately deploy an AI team to run campaigns end-to-end. Lucy and team not only surface insights but execute them, learn each agency’s playbooks, and proactively monitor accounts to flag risks before performance declines.

According to Mo Elkhidir, marketers are increasingly expected to achieve more with fewer resources:

Lucy and her team take on the busywork so that marketing talent can do their best work. This is not about replacing creativity; it’s about giving it room to flourish.

Agencies using Epiminds report faster onboarding, improved performance, reduced wasted spend, and more time for creative and strategic work. The multi-agent system manages routine tasks such as reporting and pacing, as well as audits, creative analysis, competitive insights, and strategic planning. By linking insights to execution across platforms, Lucy can increase output without additional headcount.

The product targets a gap in the market. Legacy dashboards and optimisers are siloed and manual, while point AI tools address narrow problems without coordination. Epiminds’ multi-agent approach provides an integrated, adaptive system that learns and improves over time.

Elias Malm added:

Our vision is simple. We're building Epiminds because we see where marketing is headed. The future is about dynamic, agentic teams that analyse, plan, execute, and improve in real time. Every marketer should have access to a 24/7 AI workforce that frees up their time for creativity and strategy. Our goal is to give them that future, today.

Looking ahead, Epiminds plans to expand Lucy’s capabilities across more integrations, increase the level of autonomy, and self-improving capabilities. Each new feature strengthens the entire system, creating a network effect where every agency benefits from smarter, more capable AI.