After more than a year of quietly investing, German VC firm futurepresent is emerging from stealth with Fund I totalling $300 million.

The firm is being built as a deliberately small partnership with a flexible mandate, arguing that founder relationships matter more than platform scale.  The firm has already invested in 14 portfolio companies with an investment strategy that includes Pre-Seed/Seed and concentrated-growth investments.

futurepresent  is backing companies across three areas:

AI for the Physical World: the portfolio includes General Intuition https://www.generalintuition.com/, which is building a world model for spatiotemporal reasoning

Applied AI in Complex Industries: portfolio includes Skalar, a fully autonomous tax and audit provider, alongside Afori and inca, which are rebuilding different parts of the insurance value chain with AI

AI Infrastructure: portfolio includes Isidor, where futurepresent led the Pre-Seed round for vertically integrated data pipelines supporting reinforcement learning and model training, and Slide, where the firm recently participated in the Series B for modern IT infrastructure for  Managed Service Providers in the AI era

The team also sees its footprint across the US and Europe as a core advantage, staying close to both markets while linking the two ecosystems for globally minded founders.

The partners come to futurepresent after a decade helping build venture funds across both multi-stage and specialist firms, and are now establishing the firm as repeat founders and investors.

According to Thomas Lueke, Partner, futurepresent, the best founders choose people and relationships over any platform feature. 

“We deliberately architected futurepresent as a small partnership maniacally focused on building relationships with founders.”

Johnson Yang, Partner, futurepresent, shared: 

“Our intention is that each founder we work with gets to build a genuinely authentic relationship with our whole team, that lasts from the earliest stages through scale.”

The world’s largest sporting goods retailer has turned seven of its European warehouses over to robots, and the early results suggest the machines are earning their keep. Decathlon announced on Tuesday that its partnership with Exotec, a French warehouse robotics company, has delivered what it calls significant productivity gains across sites in France, the United […]

Granola, the AI note-taking app, has bagged a $125m funding round, elevating its valuation to $1.5bn, hitting unicorn startus, it announced today.

The funding round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins with existing investors Lightspeed, Spark and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross also contributing to the Series C round.

The latest funding round increases Granola's valuation from $250m in its $43m funding round announced in May last year.

Granola, which launched in 2023, has raised around $192m in total.

London-based Granola is a well known AI note-taking app used by companies such as Vanta and Gusto, as well as startups such as Cursor, Lovable, and Mistral AI. It is also very popular with VCs.

Chris Pedregal, co-founder and chief executive of Granola, said: “These companies are turning to Granola not only to capture their notes, but also to capture their context.

“Conversation transcripts are the richest source of context for what’s happening across your company, and when paired with powerful AI models, they can unlock workflows that wouldn’t have been possible before.”

The startup also annouced some new features including a public and enterprise API.

Image: Granola

Mandel AI has raised $3.9 million Seed funding to build coordination for global supply chains. 

The startup has developed an  AI supply chain coordinator that helps manufacturers manage supplier coordination, detect disruptions, and automate procurement, replacing the spreadsheets and email chains that still run most industrial supply chains today. 

The platform sits on top of existing email and ERP systems, using purpose-built AI agents to read supplier communications, extract critical data, reconcile documents such as PO confirmations and invoices, and act autonomously—following up with suppliers, flagging discrepancies, and escalating issues in accordance with company-defined rules.

One procurement manager with Mandel agents can now coordinate what used to take an entire team: reading, reconciling, and acting on hundreds of supplier emails per day, 24/7. 

The round is backed by Y Combinator, Category Ventures, Ritual Capital, e2vc, and other Silicon Valley investors and angels. 

This year, due to supply chain disruptions, businesses will lose over $1.6 trillion, and 62 per cent of manufacturers say unstructured data remains their number one barrier to AI adoption. 

Mandel has already processed $1B+ in material spend for clients in aerospace, pharma, industrials, and similar complex manufacturing industries.  The timing is not coincidental. As tariffs and geopolitical volatility force manufacturers to rapidly diversify supplier networks, often adding dozens of new supplier relationships under intense time pressure, the limitations of email-and-spreadsheet coordination have never been more exposed.  Companies that might have managed 20 suppliers are now managing 60, with no new headcount to match. 

“Every supply chain system was built to track what happened. None were built to read and act on what’s happening right now,” says Nick Gospodinov, Bulgarian founder and CEO. 

“Sales has Gong. Legal has Harvey. Finance has Ramp. We built the AI for the people who keep the world’s supply chains running.” 

Mandel AI’s vision is to become the API for global trade communication, enabling self-coordinating supply chains for every manufacturer and distributor in North America and Europe. 

Lead image: Freepik.

Meta began cutting hundreds of jobs on Wednesday across Reality Labs, Facebook, recruiting, sales, and global operations, according to people familiar with the matter and LinkedIn posts from affected employees. The layoffs are the latest in a rolling series of workforce reductions that have accelerated sharply in 2026, as the company redirects resources toward artificial […]

One of Germany’s most high-profile fintechs in recent years is cutting 20 per cent of its workforce, as it looks to become an “AI-native bank", marking the latest restructure at Solaris.

Solaris, which offers white-label banking services and is known as a BaaS (Banking-as-a-Service) provider, is axing around 80 roles across its approximately 400-strong workforce, as it undertakes a major restructuring.

The latest round of job cuts follows previous job cuts, a write-down and a rescue funding round by Japan’s SBI Group at Solaris, which has held unicorn status.

New CEO Steffen Jentsch is repositioning Solaris from an embedded finance platform into what it’s calling an “AI-native bank”.  

This means that it aims to increase automation across its processes and products.

It will see AI agents handle operational processes, while humans remain responsible for control and governance, Solaris said.  

The fintech said it was developing data- and AI-driven financial services for its partners, including ADAC and Boerse Stuttgart Group. Solaris has got investor support behind its repositioning.

Jentsch said: “Ten years ago, Solaris was one of the first companies in Europe to prove that cloud-based banking via APIs works. Today, we are taking the next logical step.   

"Together with SBI and in close dialogue with the regulatory authorities, we are developing Solaris into an AI-native bank and creating new growth through the broad use of artificial intelligence in banking.”

Last September, when OpenAI quietly released the Sora 2 app to the public, the discourse around it was not quiet at all. Commentators who had spent months watching the model’s preview clips, the golden retriever bounding through autumn leaves, the Tokyo street scene that looked almost real, lined up to declare that something had shifted. […]

The Swiss startup, spun out of EPFL’s student rocketry programme that built Europe’s first student-made reusable rocket, has raised one of the largest seed rounds ever in European space. Visionaries Club and Creandum led; Lombard Odier, Atlantic Labs, and Sistafund also participated. The satellite lifecycle has a structural inefficiency baked in. Launch vehicles deliver payloads […]

Battery optimisation company Entrix today announced two critical milestones. It has raised €43 million in funding and reached 3 GW / 8.5 GWh of contracted battery storage capacity. Of the contracted portfolio, 2 GW will be live and operational during 2026. 

Entrix operates a large and growing portfolio of battery storage systems across Europe, with more than 70 systems under management, ranging from standalone projects to co-located solar-plus-battery models. 

The company maintains offices and local teams in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Poland, ensuring strong market proximity and regulatory expertise across its core European markets

The funding is led by Junction Growth Investors and Korys, alongside BNP Paribas via its Solar Impulse Venture Fund, Allianz, AENU, Enpal, Abacon, and Arvantis Group.  What began in 2021 as a pioneer operating one of Germany's first large-scale battery storage projects has grown into Europe's leading player in battery optimisation. 

With 3 GW of contracted flexible capacity, Entrix operates at a scale equivalent to approximately three nuclear power plants or the peak electricity demand of around three million households. 

Flexibility as critical infrastructure

As renewable penetration accelerates and power markets become increasingly volatile, orchestrating flexibility across markets becomes critical – and increasingly urgent. 

Europe's continued exposure to unstable fossil fuel markets has made accelerating the energy transition not only a climate imperative but a strategic one.

The need for flexibility is further amplified by the rapid growth of data centres. 

Entrix offers an end-to-end solution in five core markets: Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Germany represents Entrix’s largest market by capacity, while Poland represents a fast-evolving flexibility market, supported by capacity mechanisms and structural changes in the generation mix. 

Entrix optimises battery storage systems across all relevant electricity markets, including balancing services, day-ahead and intraday trading. Its AI-driven trading and optimisation enables batteries to respond in real time to price signals, grid needs and portfolio strategies – turning technical flexibility into measurable economic value and helping make the energy transition more affordable, greener and more efficient for everyone.

According to Steffen Schülzchen, founder and CEO of Entrix, the scale of projects entrusted to the company reflects a structural shift in the energy system: flexibility has become critical infrastructure. 

"Our role is to translate technical performance into stable, risk-adjusted revenues for investors while strengthening grid resilience and enabling renewable integration at scale.

This milestone underscores the long-term partnerships and operational depth we have built across Europe.”

Eunice, a London-based company building due diligence infrastructure for regulated markets, has raised $8 million in a combined seed and pre-seed funding round led by Moonfire Ventures and Speedinvest, with participation from Openspace Ventures and several industry founders.

The company develops institutional-grade infrastructure designed to standardise how complex investment decisions are assessed, documented and defended, as alternative assets grow in scale and regulatory scrutiny increases.

Eunice initially focused on digital assets, where the need for structured, audit-ready due diligence emerged early. The company deployed AI agents to deliver asset-level assessments and contributed to disclosure template development through the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s Regulatory Sandbox.

The same infrastructure is now being applied more broadly across alternative assets, where institutional investors such as pension funds, endowments and funds of funds face increasing expectations around governance, transparency and documentation. In these markets, due diligence processes often remain fragmented and manual, with teams required to evaluate complex opportunities while clearly demonstrating how decisions are made.

When decision-making in alternative assets is opaque, risk doesn’t disappear - it becomes invisible until it surfaces. We’re building infrastructure that enables institutions to show not only what decisions were made, but how they were reached, in a structured and transparent way,

explained Yi Luo, founder and CEO of Eunice.

Eunice’s platform replaces these workflows with standardised, auditable frameworks that incorporate human oversight, aiming to make decision-making more transparent and defensible without removing professional judgement. As digital assets mature and private markets continue to expand, both sectors are seeing growing demand for consistent and accountable decision processes.

The funding will be used to further develop Eunice’s AI capabilities, expand its coverage across private markets, and scale its commercial operations.

Italian-based Subbyx, a technology scaleup focused on infrastructure for the subscription economy, has closed a €30 million Series A financing round, bringing its total funding to €50 million across equity and debt. The round was led by Systemiq Capital, with participation from existing investor Azimut, while Flashpoint has provided venture debt to support the expansion of Subbyx’s device portfolio.

Founded in 2024, the company builds infrastructure that enables businesses to shift from ownership-based models to access-based subscriptions, allowing technology products to be offered through flexible, recurring models.

At the core of its offering is Subbyx Builder, an AI-powered platform that allows merchants and enterprises to convert traditional sales into subscription-based revenue streams, managing the full lifecycle of subscriptions.

Our goal is to provide the operating system for the access economy. We have built an infrastructure layer that enables businesses to transition from transactional to subscription-based models, and we are now scaling it to meet growing market demand,

said Filippo Rocca, CEO and founder of Subbyx.

The new funding will be used to support Subbyx’s international expansion, with Sweden selected as its first market outside Italy. The company is targeting regions with strong adoption of circular economy principles, aligning with its focus on extending product lifecycles and promoting reuse.

The London startup, founded by the team behind Darwin, acquired by Mercer in 2016, has built an AI platform that ingests fragmented global benefits data from PDFs, insurance contracts, and vendor portals into a single intelligence layer. Notion Capital led the round; HSBC Innovation Banking UK also contributed growth financing. One CFO told Origin’s CEO […]

Every day in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, consumption data is automatically collected from hundreds of thousands of residential utility meters. There are no technicians in the field, no paper forms, and no manual labour involved. For most residents, this system is invisible, yet it is fundamental to the city’s modern infrastructure. While many "smart city" projects remain stuck in the pilot phase, Vilnius has achieved full-scale digitisation by looking to Central European engineering.

The technology driving this city-wide transformation was designed, engineered, and manufactured by the Czech firm ACRIOS Systems. Their work in Lithuania serves as a case study for the application of "Made in Europe" hardware. This is especially relevant in an era where supply chain resilience and data security are becoming central considerations for municipal authorities.

Bridging the gap between vision and reality

Smart city technology is often discussed as a horizon: a strategic vision, a pilot programme, or a future state. In Vilnius, however, the conversation is different because remote meter reading at the city scale is a daily operational reality for more than 500,000 residents.

ACRIOS Systems secured this contract through an open and competitive tender process. They were selected alongside a field of international technological suppliers, including established global players. This successful implementation may reflect a shifting landscape in the European tech market. It suggests that municipalities and utilities might increasingly consider agile, specialised firms that can deliver field-proven, customisable solutions. Such a shift could potentially enable greater flexibility and faster digitization of critical urban infrastructure.

Scaling 10,000 devices in five months

The Vilnius project involved an extensive deployment, requiring significant technical and organisational coordination. A total of 10,000 IoT data concentrators were installed across the capital. This creates a network that stands as a major implementation of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe.

The implementation tempo required the entire infrastructure to be deployed within a five-month window. Each of these 10,000 units is designed to service up to 800 individual meters. To manage this scale, ACRIOS shipped every unit pre-configured. Installation materials were included, customer SIM cards loaded, and specific settings already applied.

This foresight saved tens of thousands of minutes of manual configuration that would have otherwise been required in the field. By treating the hardware as a ready-to-use solution rather than just a component, the firm simplified a complex urban rollout into a streamlined industrial process.

Interoperability: breaking the legacy patchwork

Most European cities carry decades of accumulated utility infrastructure. This includes meters from different manufacturers, different generations, and different communication protocols. This heterogeneity is often a significant obstacle to digitisation and is rarely solved by replacing hardware.

ACRIOS Systems built its products to handle this complexity by connecting devices from multiple manufacturers into a unified data layer. Existing infrastructure is integrated rather than discarded. This approach avoids the high costs associated with "rip-and-replace" programmes.

In Vilnius, this had a concrete commercial impact. It removed the city's dependence on a single provider and enabled competition among meter vendors. This resulted in measurable operational cost savings for the city.

In-house development as a long-term advantage

A key structural element of the ACRIOS approach is that the company develops both hardware and firmware internally. This matters beyond the initial installation because remote firmware updates can be pushed to every device in the field. This allows the network to adapt to new technical requirements or evolving security standards without physical intervention.

For a deployment of 10,000 units, this can lead to a lower total cost of ownership. The infrastructure can evolve in place. This helps ensure cities are not locked into a static technology stack that requires replacement as standards shift, a scenario that has affected earlier smart city deployments across Europe.

A model for European collaboration

The project was delivered in partnership with Taiklu, a local partner responsible for platform integration and market knowledge in Lithuania. This combination of a specialised technology provider and a locally embedded partner is a model for delivering complex infrastructure projects in the European Union.

"Our strength is the ability to connect different technologies into one functional whole," says Radim Malinowski, CEO of ACRIOS Systems. "We are not just a hardware supplier. We deliver technology that must work in real city and utility environments."

"Our goal is to deliver a system that works reliably and provides useful information," adds Lukáš Smetana, Chief Sales Officer at ACRIOS Systems. "Every project starts with a conversation where we understand the operator's needs. Only then do we discuss the specific technology. After years of preparation, it is rewarding to see the project meeting these expectations."

Building the future of European infrastructure

As European institutions focus more on the provenance of critical infrastructure, hardware designed and built in Europe is increasingly scrutinised. The Vilnius deployment aligns with broader regulatory shifts, such as the Energy Efficiency Directive. This is increasing the need for accurate and accessible consumption data across the continent.

Vilnius argues that Central European firms can serve as architects of the systems that define European smart cities. Infrastructure that works is often infrastructure that remains in the background. In the streets of Vilnius, this Czech-engineered technology has been in full operation for two years, establishing itself as a proven functional standard for the city's energy grid.

About ACRIOS Systems

ACRIOS Systems is a Czech technology company specialising in hardware and software development for smart metering, IoT, and energy management. With an in-house engineering team, the company designs and builds its own hardware and firmware. It delivers interoperable solutions for cities, utilities, and industry across Europe.

For more information, visit ACRIOS Systems.

Berlin-founded biotech startup Cellbricks Therapeutics has raised €10 million to advance its goal of 3D-printed organs, beginning with biofabricated human tissue implants. 

If successful, Cellbricks is not just building better implants — it is laying the groundwork for manufacturing living human organs.

The financing includes a €7 million seed round and more than €3 million in additional non-dilutive funding currently under negotiation. 

For patients with severe soft tissue loss, complex wounds such as full-thickness burns or blast injuries, and reconstructive defects, medicine still too often relies on compromise: invasive grafting procedures, synthetic implants and solutions that restore shape imperfectly but rarely restore living function.  

Cellbricks Therapeutics has developed a proprietary biofabrication platform capable of producing vascularised human tissue implants. Combining human cells with biomaterials, it creates tissue constructs designed to be implanted into patients.

In the longer term, Cellbricks aims to build the biological and manufacturing capabilities needed to produce fully functional, implantable human organs.

I spoke to Alexander Leutner, Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Cellbricks Therapeutics, to find out more. 

A personal turning point into regenerative medicine

Leutner describes himself as “an entrepreneur at heart and an engineer by training.”

Earlier in his career, he built the metrology startup Apodius, which was later acquired by Hexagon AB. He stayed on to lead the "Vision Systems" metrology business unit but admitted that the startup life was still calling.

At the same time, it was clear that he would need to donate a kidney to his younger brother. He began looking at startups in regenerative medicine, where he found Cellbricks Therapeutics.

The company was originally founded by co-CEO Dr Simon MacKenzie following his PhD, during which he developed and globally patented the light-based process that underpins the platform.

MacKenzie liked the idea of  bringing in an experienced entrepreneur, while he remained the chief scientist, and Leutner recalled: 

“When I joined, the company was still working heavily on the bioprinter itself, while also exploring the broader space of tissue implants. I very quickly said: Let’s go for the really big opportunity. Let’s focus fully on human tissue implants.”

From bioprinting tools to human tissue implants

Today, Cellbricks has two main areas. One is adipose tissue for wound healing and breast reconstruction, which is less complex than liver tissue.  The focus on tissue bioprinting serves as a key validation programme, enabling the company to demonstrate that its platform can produce human tissue that can enter the clinic and function properly. At the same time, it's also working on the moonshot, which is organ tissue, including liver tissue.

The decision to start with tissue therapeutics is strategic. Leutner explains that as the company continues to develop its capabilities, tissues and programmes, it is also spinning out applications that can help patients sooner, while serving as validation milestones on the path towards tissues with organ function.

“It builds step by step. In wound healing, for example, we are targeting very complex wounds, including severe full-thickness burns in which the damage extends far beyond the skin surface. 

We are not simply producing a superficial cover. This is where we develop the full platform and show that we can produce something large, viable and functional that works in large animals and, later, in the clinic.

At the same time, it is a strong business case because there is currently no product on the market that truly solves these problems for patients. There are wound dressings, but they do not really solve it. There is autologous skin grafting, but that is extremely burdensome.”

From there, the next step is breast reconstruction, which uses much the same material but at a much larger volume and with even greater vascularisation requirements. 

It's a process of  solving the biology, engineering and  translation challenges tissue by tissue. Living implants that survive, vascularize, integrate and function in the body are the essential stepping stones.  

“You can see how that starts to lead towards organ tissue, which also requires larger, highly vascularised constructs. So we are building one stage on top of the other as we advance our platform,” explained Leutner.

A fully integrated approach to biofabrication

Leutner describes one of his biggest contributions as bringing in more pharmaceutical expertise:

“I hired a very experienced co-CEO, someone I would describe as a biopharma silverback, and he helped us set up the programmes properly. We also brought in a lot of new talent. Our team now includes 13 nationalities, with people coming from all over the world to Berlin to work on this."

While there are several bioprinting startups, Leutner sees Cellbricks as possessing a core competitive advantage:  

"We have everything in-house — expertise across cells, biomaterials, the bioprinter, software, maturation, and now the translational capabilities needed to bring this into the clinic. I would say there is no other company in the world with all of that under one roof, and certainly not in Europe.

That is what makes us unique and gives us a real competitive advantage. Our scientists can, for example, say that to achieve fully vascularised tissue implants that work properly, we need to slightly adjust the biomaterial or the printing parameters, and we can do so directly. We have built a dedicated system for producing human tissue."

Further, Cellbricks stands out for its ability to produce tissue in the lab at speed.

“Because we use light-based bioprinting, we can work around 15 times faster than other bioprinting approaches,” explained Leutner.

“We have demonstrated that we can produce large volumes of tissue at high speed while maintaining full vascularisation. Our technology enables the creation of large tissue constructs that remain healthy and viable over time, as the cells receive sufficient nutrients and oxygen. That is what we are most proud of: producing large, vascularised tissue constructs that function in vivo.”

Solving the cell supply challenge

When it comes to 3D bioprinting, Leutner explained that historically, one of the biggest questions was where all the cells would come from:

“For organ tissue, for example, you cannot simply replicate liver cells from a patient at the scale required.”

But breakthroughs in cell biology, particularly in pluripotent stem cells such as iPS cells, have changed that. 

“Large quantities of cells are becoming available, and many companies are emerging in that field.  We can partner with those companies and secure the cell supply.”

Partnering with pharma to reach the clinic faster

For adipose tissue, Cellbricks uses patient-derived cells because that offers a faster regulatory pathway and development route. For the liver programme, it uses stem-cell-based allogeneic cells, which can work across many different patients without severe issues. However, the real challenge now is scaling.  “Producing tiny tissue sections in the lab is no longer the main issue. Many groups can do that,” shared Leutner. 

From hospital printers to pharma partnerships: the path to market

But what does the business model of 3D tissue (and later organ) printing look like in practice?

Leutner admits that from the visionary founder perspective, “ignoring time for a moment, the ideal future would be that the technology sits close to every hospital, perhaps even inside every hospital, and hospitals can produce their own tissue implants for patients."

"Later on, that could extend to tissue with organ function as well, not necessarily full organs immediately, but functional tissue.”

But today the company wants to partner its lead programme with a large pharmaceutical company. Canadian company Aspect Biosystems has already done something comparable with Novo Nordisk to develop cellular therapies for diabetes using stem-cell–derived islet cells in a deal worth $2.7 billion for one programme.

Leutner explained that for a small biotech, that model is attractive because it creates early revenue. 

“There is an upfront payment, potentially worth tens of millions, followed by milestone payments as the programme progresses. The pharmaceutical company then launches the product, and the smaller company receives royalties. That is what we are aiming for, and we are already in discussions with two large pharmaceutical companies about those kinds of partnerships.

That model means we do not need to raise hundreds of millions of our own funds to commercialise the therapy independently. We can move forward through partnership, generate revenue earlier, and potentially even pursue an IPO on the back of that in a few years. That is our strategic path today.”

Berlin vs Boston: cost meets speed

Celbricks has offices in both Berlin and Boston. I was curious about the differences between the biotech ecosystems.

Despite the disadvantage that Berlin has no direct flights to Boston, Leutner sees speed as the biggest difference. 

“A good example is regulatory approval for a small animal trial. In Germany, that can take between six and 12 months. In Boston, it can take around six weeks.”

Conversely, Boston is significantly more expensive, with higher labour costs, pricier lab space, and more costly professional services. However, with most of the team based in Berlin—where laboratory setup is more affordable—the company can balance costs while benefiting from Boston’s faster, more innovation-driven ecosystem, particularly in areas such as regulation and clinical translation. For a small biotech, this combination is highly attractive.

Funding will accelerate the preclinical validation and enable Cellbricks Therapeutics to move beyond promise to proof: demonstrating that engineered human tissues can perform in clinically relevant models. This includes advancing its lead adipose tissue implant programme, launching up to three preclinical animal studies, and generating the necessary data to progress towards human trials.

Lead image: Cellbricks executive leadership team. From left to right: Dr Tobias Lam (CTO), Michael Kring   (CFO), Dr Kathy Kordy (CMO), Alexander Leutner  (Co-CEO), Dr Simon MacKenzie (Co-CEO).

The AIM-listed language technology company says its new model, the largest dedicated translation model in production, ranked first in 31 of 32 languages in internal benchmarking against DeepL and Gemini. The model is natively integrated into the Trados portfolio. The problem RWS is describing is a real one in enterprise translation: the tools that move […]

A Nick Candy-backed fintech founded by a “millionaire” who grew up on a council estate has gone into liquidation, leading to job losses, after investors pulled the plug on the payment app.  

Staff at VibePay, a UK peer-to-peer payment app, were made redundant after the investment arm of the billionaire Reform UK treasurer and property mogul, called Candy Ventures, and other investors, pulled future investment, following a strategic review.  

Around 10 staff were made redundant in an online call weeks ago, following around 30 redundancies in 2025, sources say. One axed staff member said: "I am very upset, we believed we had built a really strong product."

Liquidators have been appointed to VibePay, in which Candy Ventures was the largest shareholder.  

VibePay was founded by Luke Massie, who grew up on a council estate in Lancashire with an alcoholic and depressed mum. Massie, who according to The Sun was a millionaire, launched VibePay in 2019.

The fintech facilitates account-to-account payments for businesses, content creators, and individual consumers using open banking. VibePay grew out of Massie’s previous venture Vibe Tickets. 

Sources said a deal to buy VibePay by Bank of America-backed fintech Banked did not go through, despite a press release announcing the deal last year.   

Sources said the deal failed due to issues arising out of the due diligence process carried out by Banked.  Neither Banked nor VibePay confirmed this. After this, investors carried out a strategic review and decided to pull the plug on future investment.  

Massie, who set up his first business when he was 17, left VibePay in December last year. According to Crunchbase, VibePay has raised £8.3m. Its other backers include YouTube star and DJ Vikkstar, UK entrepreneur Scott Fletcher and Vela Technologies.  

A spokesperson for Candy Ventures, which had invested millions in VibePay, said: “Following the departure of founder and CEO Luke Massie in December, the board of Vibe conducted a strategic review of the business and its funding requirements.  

“The findings were shared with key investors in January, who decided not to commit further capital. As a result, and after exploring all available options, the board concluded that placing the business into liquidation was the only viable course of action. The board thanks the Vibe team, partners and clients for their support and contribution, and is working with the appointed liquidators to ensure an orderly process.”  

Banked did not respond to a request for a comment.

IMAGE: PIXABAY

PAVE Space, a Swiss space infrastructure company, has raised $40 million in seed funding to develop a new generation of spacecraft designed to move satellites rapidly between orbits. The round was led by Visionaries Club and Creandum, with participation from Lombard Odier Investment Managers, Atlantic Labs, Sistafund, b2venture, ACE Investment Partners, Ilavaska Vuillermoz Capital, and Pareto & Motier Ventures.

The company is building a family of orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs) capable of transporting satellites from low Earth orbit to higher-energy destinations such as geostationary and lunar orbits in under 24 hours, addressing a growing bottleneck in the space economy. Today, satellites typically rely on onboard propulsion systems that can take months to reach their final orbit, delaying operations and increasing costs.

PAVE’s flagship kickstage vehicle is designed to shorten mission timelines and reduce costs using storable bipropellants, while a smaller mobile platform is being developed for rapid, flexible satellite repositioning.

As the number of satellites in orbit continues to grow, demand for faster and more flexible orbital mobility is increasing across both commercial and institutional markets. PAVE aims to provide a launcher-agnostic logistics layer compatible with multiple launch systems, supporting satellite operators, telecom providers and defence organisations.

Julie Böhning, CEO and co-founder of PAVE Space, said that the space economy is moving into an industrial phase where logistics in orbit will become as essential as they are on Earth:

Our ambition is to build the infrastructure that enables industries to move, operate and scale beyond Earth, while supporting Europe’s strategic autonomy in space.

The company is preparing its first in-space demonstration mission and has already secured early reservation agreements with satellite operators.

The funding will be used to accelerate development of its orbital logistics platforms, conduct initial demonstration missions, expand its engineering team and prepare for its first commercial deployments.

Renasens, a Stockholm-based deeptech company developing textile recycling technology, has raised €10 million in a seed funding round led by Extantia, with participation from Course Corrected VC and continued backing from Norrsken Launcher.

Renasens is addressing a structural challenge in the textile industry, where more than 12 million tonnes of waste are generated annually in Europe, yet less than 1 per cent is recycled into new fibres. Existing recycling methods struggle to process blended and treated fabrics, which makes up the majority of post-consumer waste.

The company aims to close this gap by enabling fibre-to-fibre recycling at scale and reducing reliance on imported virgin materials.

Its platform uses modified supercritical CO₂ to separate and decolour blended textiles, recovering intact fibres without the use of water or the use of toxic chemicals. The recovered materials can be reintroduced into existing manufacturing processes without requiring new equipment, and the system is designed to be modular, allowing deployment within existing facilities across fragmented supply chains.

Post-consumer textile waste has long been considered both technically and structurally unsolvable. We have developed a process that makes fibre recycling viable at industrial scale, and are now building the infrastructure and partnerships to support its adoption across Europe,

said Dr Jade Bouledjouidja, founder and CEO of Renasens.

The company has already begun supplying recovered cotton and polyester fibres to manufacturers in Portugal and Italy. Its development comes as EU regulations tighten, with mandatory textile collection systems introduced in 2025 and extended producer responsibility schemes are expected by 2027, increasing demand for scalable recycling solutions.

The funding will support the development of a pilot plant in Borås, Sweden, and enable the company to begin supplying recovered fibres directly into European manufacturing.