The European agrifood entrepreneurial ecosystem is rapidly expanding: innovative agrifood startups are becoming increasingly numerous, particularly in sectors such as agtech, functional foods, biotech, and alternative proteins. 

The European Union’s AgriFood Industrial Ecosystem generates around €603 billion in value add and supports 16 million jobs. The food and beverage industry alone accounts for €227 billion and employs 4.6 million people, with more than 99 per cent of companies being SMEs.

However, the ecosystem must transform to become more sustainable and competitive. This places pressure not only on local startups and scaleup but also those seeking to enter the European market.

Europe’s agrifood transformation demands innovation — and startups need a clear path to scale

The pressure to reduce environmental impact, adopt digital technologies, and respond to increasingly conscious consumers is pushing the entire chain—from farmers to distributors — towards innovation.

But at the same time, production costs in Europe (labour, energy, regulatory compliance) are high, posing a significant barrier for new companies seeking to scale.  Moreover, climate change adds uncertainty around agricultural productivity and the reliability of raw materials, demanding more resilient and circular models. 

Another major challenge is market fragmentation, as each European country has its own regulations, distribution channels, consumption habits, and food-specific rules. For a startup aiming to sell across multiple EU markets, adapting to each context can be costly and time-consuming. 

To address these barriers, the European Union and organisations such as EIT Food have launched programmes to support startups in the agrifood sector. 

There is strong institutional support to strengthen European competitiveness in food innovation. EU programs and projects targeting startups and scaleups — especially those led by EIT Food — are helping drive a more sustainable, resilient and tech-enabled agrifood value chain. As well as a strong foundation for local startups,

Europe represents a highly attractive market for internationalisation, as its diverse economies,  consumers, and regulations offer numerous opportunities for startups to scale beyond their local markets. 

For a startup, expanding into new European markets not only means increasing sales but also gaining access to strategic partners (distributors, retailers, and companies within the food value chain),  optimising the supply chain, and diversifying risks. 

In response to the opportunity for internationalisation, EIT Food has developed a tailored program called Sales Booster to help agrifood startups that are established in their home country’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and want to expand into new markets within the European region.

Inside Sales Booster: EIT Food’s pathway for agrifood startups to enter new markets

Sales Booster offers selected startups personalised support tailored to their growth stage, current needs, and geographical focus.

Participants gain not only technical support but also recognition and visibility within the European food innovation ecosystem.

The program is run through collective activities, such as online workshops and meetings with key industry players to facilitate networking, as well as one-to-one sessions. 

Each startup has a dedicated Growth Advisor, expert guidance, and resources to design its expansion plan and ultimately develop an internationalisation plan for its target country or countries. 

There’s also access to EIT Food’s wider network. Startups can request meetings with industry and business experts from across the ecosystem, as well as draw on support from an experienced pool of coaches.

At the end of the programme, startups are expected to present a concrete action plan for their expansion and have established connections with experts across the European agrifood ecosystem. 

Startups powered by EIT Food’s Sales Booster

Here are some of the standout startups that have taken part in the programme. Many of them are pushing the boundaries in agrifood innovation — from biotech and agritech to functional foods.  They illustrate not only the breadth of solutions supported by Sales Booster, but also how the programme helps founders turn those innovations into solid expansion plans for new European markets.

By backing these companies, EIT Food is both accelerating innovation and strengthening a more connected, resilient and sustainable agrifood system across Europe:

• Agritrack SA: a platform to automate post-harvest value chains, reducing losses and improving traceability. 
• Cynomys: IoT solutions to monitor environments (such as farms), enabling more sustainable resource management and improved animal welfare. 
• EarthAutomations: autonomous robots for agricultural tasks, facilitating automation even on smaller farms.  • BuzzUp: a startup that has developed a programme that “translates” the sound of bees to help farmers understand their condition and improve pollination, directly impacting productivity.
• Agricolus: a digital platform for precision agriculture, with satellite maps, sensors, and predictive tools to optimise crops.
• Rebread transforms leftover bread into valuable ingredients, promoting a circular economy in the food industry. 

Who can apply for EIT Food’s Sales Booster?

Sales Booster targets two groups of innovative startups: agrifood ventures aligned with EIT Food’s mission areas, and non-agrifood startups whose solutions can be applied within the agrifood sector. 

To be eligible, companies must be registered in one of the designated RIS countries, offer an innovative or impactful solution relevant to the agrifood industry, and aim to expand within EIT Food’s geographic footprint. 

Ideal applicants are those with meaningful early sales traction, a consolidated home market, and a dedicated sales or business development team ready to scale internationally.

Mindoo, a Belgian platform deploying safe and governed agentic workflows in healthcare, announced today that it has secured €5 million in Seed financing to provide hospitals and practices with a scalable AI workforce layer that performs routine tasks and alleviates pressure.

The round was raised from 6DC, Syndicate One and a group of strategic angel investors.

“We learned very quickly that workflows in healthcare cannot be adapted to a product. The product has to adapt to existing workflows,” said Gauthier Willemse, CEO and co-founder. “That is why Mindoo lets hospital teams configure and run their own agents, so automation fits naturally into how they already work.”

In 2025, EU-Startups has reported several funding rounds across European healthcare and AI-enabled workflow automation, providing context for Mindoo’s Seed round.

These include Jutro Medical, a Warsaw-based AI-first primary care provider, which raised a €24 million Series A extension to scale AI-supported clinical operations; XUND, which secured €6 million to strengthen its AI-powered healthcare platform; and Helsinki-based Elea, which raised €4 million to accelerate diagnostic workflows using AI.

Earlier-stage rounds include Punto Health in the UK, which raised €2.3 million to scale its AI-enabled dementia care platform. In Belgium specifically, EU-Startups has also covered Cavell, which raised €1.5 million to improve healthcare efficiency through digital tools, and Brussels-linked Model Health, which secured €800k in pre-Seed funding for AI-based movement analysis in clinical settings.

Excluding Mindoo, these rounds represent approximately €38 million invested into adjacent healthcare AI and digital health segments during 2025.

Against this backdrop, Mindoo’s €5 million Seed financing positions the Belgian company within a broader European pattern of investment focused on applying AI to operational and clinical workflows rather than experimental use cases.

While larger rounds such as Jutro Medical’s reflect capital-intensive care delivery models, smaller Seed and pre-Seed financings across Finland, Belgium and the UK indicate sustained investor interest in modular, workflow-oriented AI tools for healthcare organisations.

“We designed Mindoo so healthcare organisations can deploy agents that follow their rules, integrate with their systems and behave predictably in real-world environments,” added Bart Lens, CTO and co-founder. “This is how AI becomes operational, not experimental.”

Founded in 2025, Mindoo is a healthcare AI company that claims to provide hospitals and medical practices with a safe, governed platform for agentic workflow automation. Mindoo’s configurable AI agents perform structured intake, documentation drafting, follow-up communication and front-desk workflows, helping healthcare organisations increase capacity without increasing headcount.

The company outlines that healthcare organisations face a widening gap between available staff and rising care demand. Many workflows remain uncaptured or incomplete simply because teams do not have the capacity to handle them.

Mindoo looks to address this by providing configurable AI agents that hospital teams use to handle structured intake, documentation drafting, follow-up interactions and front-desk communication within a single platform.

Mindoo currently offers four core agents that hospitals can configure to reflect their own protocols, languages and specialty workflows:

• Receptionist agent for handling routine patient communication and registrations
• Pre-visit agent for structured intake and medical history
• Scribe agent for drafting notes, letters and orders
• Follow-up agent for post-visit communication and care pathways

“We invested in Mindoo because the founders understand healthcare from the inside and have built a platform that lets hospitals adopt AI responsibly. The opportunity ahead is enormous. Automated workflows will become essential infrastructure for healthcare,” Lucas Stoops, Partner at 6 Degrees Capital.

Mindoo is already deployed in hospitals across Belgium and Germany and supports integration with EHR systems. Expansion to the Netherlands and France will follow as new reference sites go live.

The funding will support Mindoo in strengthening its platform, bringing its four core agents to full production maturity across multiple specialties and expanding the team with engineers, clinical specialists and deployment experts.

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Agreenculture, a Toulouse-based startup specialising in the autonomy and safety of agricultural machinery and tractors, has raised €6 million in a Series A equity round to enhance, standardise, and industrialise its products for rapid integration, while strengthening its commercial deployment.

The funding was raised with participation from Supernova Invest, Future Food Fund and Unilis (Unigrains Group). Alongside this round, Agreenculture has secured a credit facility from Crédit Agricole Toulouse 31. 

“Our ambition for every manufacturer is to provide a simple and safe autonomy kit capable of working without local supervision in the field. Providing tangible performance gains and generating cost and time savings for farmers,” says Christophe Aubé, CEO of Agreenculture.

In the context of European AgTech funding in 2025, Agreenculture’s Series A sits alongside a range of investments targeting automation, robotics and sustainability in agriculture.

UK-based CroBio raised around €805k through grant funding to advance soil-microbe technologies aimed at improving nutrient efficiency and water retention. In Spain, Voltrac secured €2 million to develop and launch an electric autonomous tractor platform, placing it in an adjacent segment to Agreenculture with a focus on vehicle autonomy for agricultural and logistics use cases. At a significantly later stage, Swiss scale-up Ecorobotix disclosed total funding of €128 million in 2025 to scale its AI-driven precision farming and weeding robots, highlighting strong investor appetite for proven agricultural robotics platforms.

Taken together, these announcements point to more than €130 million moving through Europe’s AgTech sector in 2025, spanning early-stage biological solutions through to capital-intensive autonomous and precision machinery, with Agreenculture’s French-based raise reinforcing the country’s position within the autonomous agricultural equipment landscape.

“We want manufacturers to focus on their core business. We bring them a reliable, interoperable, ready-to-use product and to accelerate the deployment of autonomy in the fields,” explains Clément Baron, CTO of Agreenculture.

Founded in 2016 by Christophe Aubé (CEO), Clément Baron (CTO) and Emmanuel Goua de Baix (GNSS expert), Agreenculture supports agricultural machinery manufacturers by providing them with both technological solutions and consulting services, enabling their machines and tractors to become autonomous and certified, capable of operating without local supervision.

By integrating the AGC Autonomy Kit, manufacturers can reportedly deploy safe, accurate and agronomically efficient machines – optimising agricultural operations.

Agreenculture provides Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) with a plug-and-play AGC Autonomy Kit that allegedly ensures the precision, autonomy, and safety of machines and tractors.

Moreover, the company outlines that with autonomy, soil compaction can be reduced by replacing big machines by multiple small ones, fuel consumption can be minimised, cover cropping becomes more affordable, and application of fertiliser and pesticides becomes even more precise.

Jeroen Kimmels, Managing Partner at Future Food Fund: “As an impact food & agri investor, we were an early investor in and have followed the developments of autonomous tractors and machines closely. Autonomous tractors and machines should not be seen simply as a way to relieve farmers of the burden of driving, but as a unique opportunity to change the way farming is done. We regard the management of Agreenculture as visionaries, spearheading this shift from conventional to regenerative farming. “ 

Agreenculture claims to be the first technology supplier to offer a safe and certifiable Autonomy Kit. The AGC Autonomy Kit enables machines to operate without local supervision thanks to Safencing, a secure geofencing system that ensures machines and their tools remain within defined virtual boundaries.

Utilizing the S-RTK positioning system, the AGC Autonomy Kit is fully compliant with European regulations and can be integrated by machinery manufacturers for off-road autonomous navigation. 

“Agreenculture stands at the forefront of autonomous farming technologies. Their certified, safety-first approach is a decisive advantage for manufacturers seeking reliable automation solutions. We are proud to support a team whose technology is poised to become a market standard in Europe and beyond”, says Romain Sautrau, Partner at Supernova Invest. 

Agreenculture collaborates with notable agricultural manufacturers, including Pellenc with the RX20 vineyard crawler, Kubota with the M7 tractor for field crops and the KFAST sprayer for orchards, Kuhn with the Karl field robot or with cutting edge companies like Fieldworkers and Trabotyx with their autonomous laser weeding robot TOR. 

Jean-François Hurel, Director of Unilis Agtech adds: “As a farmer-backed investor focused on innovations for field crops, we support technologies that enable producers to spend more time on higher-value agronomic decisions and market opportunities – while safely and reliably automating repetitive tasks when it makes sense. Beyond responding to labour constraints, Agreenculture contributes to the productive and sustainable transition of agricultural operations. We look forward to supporting Agreenculture in this new stage of its development.” 

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Tallinn-based logistics startup MyDello has raised €3.1 million in a funding round led by Icelandic venture capital firm Frumtak Ventures, with participation from existing investor Finnish early-stage venture capital firm Superhero Capital. Frumtak Ventures general partner Andri Heiðar Kristinsson and Jevgeni Kabanov, President of urban mobility company Bolt and a previous investor in MyDello, have joined the board.

Freight and shipping across all transport modes account for an estimated 10–12 per cent of the global economy, with maritime shipping handling most international trade by volume, yet the sector still relies heavily on manual workflows, paper documentation, fragmented communication, and limited real-time shipment visibility.

Founded by experienced logistics professionals, MyDello aims to address these challenges by digitalising international freight processes and reducing inefficiencies in global supply chains through a B2B platform for manufacturing, wholesale, and e-commerce customers that provides instant door-to-door pricing and routing across freight modes from a single inquiry, supported by agreements with 400+ carriers and partnerships including DHL, Lufthansa, Maersk, Qatar Airways, and Finnair.

Businesses enter shipment details (origin, destination, dimensions, and weight) to compare quotes, book transport, and track deliveries in real time with an AI-powered delivery countdown, with a focus on complex long-distance international freight such as routes in and out of the EU, China-linked trade, and lanes between the Americas and Europe.

In our coverage earlier this year, MyDello co-founder Magnus Lepasalu said sustainability is becoming a bigger priority in logistics and that the company’s platform is intended to help customers make more informed, sustainable choices, an approach it now plans to scale following the new funding.

Since launching in 2021, the company has facilitated thousands of shipments and established partnerships with hundreds of carriers and industry participants.

When we launched MyDello in 2021 we knew there was a better way for our industry to operate and in just a few years we have facilitated thousands of shipments, built up a deep customer base, and struck partnerships and agreements with hundreds of key carriers and industry peers. However, this is just the start, and we’re overjoyed to welcome Frumtak Ventures, and we thank them and our returning investors for their support,

adds MyDello co-founder and CEO Joel Timm.

The company reports onboarding 12,500 businesses from 110 countries and currently operates across 12 countries in Europe and China, with an aim to expand across Europe by 2027.

The investment will be used to accelerate international expansion, starting with the UK, where the platform is expected to be available to customers from December. MyDello also plans to further integrate AI into its systems, with the goal of automating most shipment operations by the end of 2026.

The European platform for deploying safe and governed agentic workflows in healthcare, Mindoo, has secured €5 million in seed financing from 6DC, Syndicate One and a group of strategic angel investors.

Healthcare organisations are increasingly balancing limited staffing with growing demand for care, leaving some workflows unfinished or not recorded because teams do not have the capacity to manage them.

Mindoo addresses this by providing configurable AI agents that hospital teams use to handle structured intake, documentation drafting, follow-up interactions and front-desk communication within a single platform.

The company currently offers four core agents that hospitals can adapt to their own protocols, languages, and speciality workflows: a receptionist agent for routine patient communication and registration, a pre-visit agent for structured intake and medical history, a scribe agent for drafting notes, letters, and orders, and a follow-up agent for post-visit communication and care pathways.

We learned very quickly that workflows in healthcare cannot be adapted to a product. The product has to adapt to existing workflows. That is why Mindoo lets hospital teams configure and run their own agents, so automation fits naturally into how they already work,

explained Gauthier Willemse, CEO and co-founder of Mindoo.

Mindoo is currently deployed in hospitals in Belgium and Germany and is designed to integrate with modern EHR systems. The company plans to expand into the Netherlands and France as additional reference sites become operational.

The investment supports Mindoo’s plan to provide hospitals and practices with a scalable AI workforce layer that can take on routine tasks, ease pressure on clinical teams, and keep organisations in control of their workflows.

The funding will be used to develop the platform further, bring its four core agents to production readiness across multiple specialities, and expand the team across engineering, clinical, and deployment functions.

French preventive healthcare startup Lucis has announced the closing of a €7.2 million ($8.5 million) Seed funding round to boost its European expansion, broaden its network of partner laboratories and physicians, and scale its platform. 

The round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Y Combinator, Kima Ventures, Motier Ventures, Circle.Co, and North South Ventures.

Maxime Berthelot, CEO and co-founder of Lucis, said, “Our mission is to empower individuals to take ownership of their health by giving them a clear view of key indicators before symptoms even appear, and providing practical guidance to improve their well-being, without replacing physicians.

“At a time when more and more Europeans are looking to take control of their health and feel better overall, this funding round will allow us to democratise access to disease prevention by connecting analyses conducted in certified laboratories, medical expertise, and a simple, user-friendly platform.”

Founded in 2025 in Paris by Maxime Berthelot, Baptiste Debever, and Max Gueroi, Lucis offers preventive health check-ups carried out in certified laboratories and interpreted by a medical team with the support of AI. It claims to deliver a clear, structured view of more than 180 biomarkers, including cardiometabolic health, hormones, inflammation, liver and kidney function, as well as certain micronutrients. 

It positions itself strictly as a preventive tool for individuals and not as a medical platform. It emphasises that users should not consider its services as a replacement for medical consultation, diagnosis, or prescription.

According to the company, rather than delivering results in a static PDF format, each member gains access to a clear dashboard and a prioritised action plan built around five pillars: nutrition, supplements, physical activity, sleep/recovery, and mental health.

Lucis has already conducted more than 500,000 clinical tests in its initial markets, which include France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Portugal. 

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Lucis, a French startup focused on expanding access to preventive health testing, has closed an $8.5 million seed round led by General Catalyst, with participation from Y Combinator, Kima Ventures, Motier Ventures, Circle.Co, and North South Ventures.

Founded by Maxime Berthelot, Baptiste Debever, and Max Guerois, Lucis offers a platform that translates blood test results into a set of indicators tracked every six to 12 months. It provides a structured view of more than 180 biomarkers, covering areas such as cardiometabolic health, hormones, inflammation, liver and kidney function, and selected micronutrients, with the aim of helping users identify potential imbalances and early signals associated with chronic disease.

The company positions Lucis as a preventive tool to support understanding and monitoring of health, and notes that it does not replace medical consultation, diagnosis, or prescribing.

Our mission is to empower individuals to take ownership of their health by giving them a clear view of key indicators before symptoms even appear, and providing practical guidance to improve their well-being, without replacing physicians,

said Maxime Berthelot, CEO and co-founder of Lucis.

Members complete check-ups through certified medical biology laboratories across Europe. Results are reviewed by a multidisciplinary medical team, with AI used to help surface key signals and track changes over time.

Instead of receiving a static report, users access a dashboard and a prioritised action plan organised around five areas: nutrition, supplements, physical activity, sleep and recovery, and mental health. Lucis positions this model as an extension of broader consumer health tracking, adding biological markers and clinical oversight to support a more structured, public health–aligned approach.

The new funding will be used to accelerate rollout in France, the UK, Ireland, and Portugal and into additional markets, expand its network of partner laboratories and clinicians, and further develop its AI-enabled preventive analysis and support platform.

Warsaw-based primary healthcare startup Jutro Medical has raised €24 million to scale its AI-enabled primary care rollup. 

This Series A extension round was led by Warsaw Equity Group, with participation from Vinci, naturalX Health Ventures, Fluent Ventures, Aternus, KAYA VC, and Inovo VC. A debt component from mBank and Orbit Capital is also included in this round. This new capital extends the company’s previously announced Series A, bringing its total to €36 million.

“By running our own clinics on our own software, we’ve learned firsthand which tasks can be handled by AI. Instead of hiring more staff, we now build AI agents that do the same work – freeing clinicians to practice medicine, not paperwork. These agents already manage thousands of patients interactions every month,” said Adam Janczewski, founder and CEO of Jutro Medical.

Founded in 2020 by Janczewski, Jutro Medical is an AI-first primary care operator integrating online and offline care, and has its own EHR, scalable clinic operations and AI agents. Its telemedicine platform and app offer virtual consultations, prescriptions, referrals, lab results and the ability to request medical leave online for less complex cases. For more immediate or complex cases, patients can be seen in person at Jutro Medical’s proprietary clinics, often by the same practitioner they have been consulting virtually, helping ensure continuity of care.

Jutro Medical claims to be the first operator in Europe to apply the AI rollup model to primary care at scale. According to the company, it spent its first four years focused on building its proprietary electronic health record system, laying the software and data foundations for all of its clinics.

This enabled the company to build an AI layer on top of this software and data foundation quickly and easily. With Jutro Medical’s AI agents taking over the administrative work, the doctors are free to focus on the patient and clinical decisions. However, the company reveals that the use of AI is completely opt-in, and patients can always choose a traditional appointment. Jutro Medical plans to continue to develop new AI agents with this new capital. 

Bartosz Drabikowski, CEO of Vinci, said, “For us, this is a strategically important investment in the healthcare sector, and the key factor behind our decision was Jutro Medical’s mission to improve access to high-quality healthcare in Poland and across Europe. 

“Through the practical use of AI agents in everyday clinical operations, the company enables doctors to spend more time with patients, reduces waiting times and improves access to medical services. 

“The fact that these solutions are already being implemented at scale and deliver clear value for both patients and clinicians was an important consideration in our investment decision, and we are pleased to support Adam and his team in the next stage of growth.”

Another core part of the company’s value proposition is its unified operating model. Jutro Medical acquires clinics and brings them onto a unified operational and technological platform, giving each location access to the same EHR, workflow system and AI agents. The company says this approach ensures consistent quality, speeds up integration, and improves margins across its network.

This year, Jutro has added nine clinics to its network, and says it is on track to complete around 20 acquisitions annually. The company currently provides care to 120,000 patients across Poland, and after 500,000 visits, reported an average visit rating on a 1–5 scale of 4.94. Its NPS stands at 86, according to the company.

The new capital will support further clinic acquisitions in Poland and enable the company to expand its rollup model by buying and integrating primary care clinics across Europe. 

Jan Szumada, Investment Manager at Warsaw Equity Group, said, “Primary care is undergoing significant structural change across Europe, with thousands of small GP practices approaching retirement each year. 

“Jutro Medical is capitalising on this opportunity – nearly quadrupling its revenue year over year while keeping EBITDA around break-even – a rare combination in this market. 

“At WEG, we invest in companies whose technology delivers meaningful customer value and reshapes their industries. We’re excited to back a team that is proving the AI-rollup strategy works and support them as they build a pan-European operator targeting more than €1 billion in revenue.”

According to the company, it is growing 270% year over year, and in the past month, nearly 1,500 doctor visits were supported by AI.

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Warsaw-based Jutro Medical, an AI-first primary care operator combining online and in-person care, has raised €24 million in new funding led by Warsaw Equity Group, with participation from Vinci, naturalX Health Ventures, Fluent Ventures, Aternus, KAYA VC, and Inovo VC. The round also includes a debt component from mBank and Orbit Capital. The raise extends the company’s previously announced Series A, bringing the total to €36 million.

Founded in 2020, Jutro Medical has grown from a single clinic focused on technology-enabled care into an integrated primary care operator with its own electronic health record (EHR), standardised clinic operations, and AI-based tools.

In its first four years, Jutro Medical prioritised building a proprietary EHR and the underlying software and data infrastructure used across its clinics. The company says this foundation has enabled it to add an AI layer more efficiently, allowing AI agents to support administrative tasks such as intake and drafting visit documentation. Clinicians begin appointments with relevant context prepared, review and adjust information as needed, and retain responsibility for all clinical decisions. Use of AI is optional, and patients can choose a traditional appointment.

The company’s approach is positioned against broader pressures in primary care, where workforce shortages, rising administrative workloads, and uneven access continue to limit capacity. Primary care spending in Europe exceeds €200 billion annually, including around €9 billion in Poland, yet many clinics still rely on manual or paper-based processes that can slow access to care.

Jutro Medical follows an acquisition-led strategy, bringing acquired clinics onto a shared operating and technology platform that includes a common EHR, workflows, and AI tools. The company says it added nine clinics to its network this year and is targeting around 20 acquisitions annually, with the aim of supporting more consistent service delivery and faster integration.

By running our own clinics on our own software, we’ve learned firsthand which tasks can be handled by AI. Instead of hiring more staff, we now build AI agents that do the same work – freeing clinicians to practice medicine, not paperwork. These agents already manage thousands of patients interactions every month,

says Adam Janczewski, founder and CEO of Jutro Medical.

The new capital will be used to support further clinic acquisitions in Poland and to expand the model into other European markets. Jutro Medical also plans to continue developing AI agents to automate additional administrative and operational tasks, while clinicians focus on diagnosis and treatment.

Over the longer term, the company aims to build a pan-European primary care operator by consolidating a fragmented market of small practices.

Mirelo, an audio company that lets anyone generate perfectly synchronized sound effects for videos, has just raised about €35 million ($41 million) in a seed round, co-led by Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Atlantic.vc and TriplePoint Capital.

The Berlin-based startup was founded by two senior AI researchers who are also accomplished musicians, and who left big tech to build breakthrough foundation models in audio – one of the most emotionally resonant but technically underdeveloped areas of AI. The funding is a sign of a broader shift in creative expression, as AI tools empower more and more artists and designers to bring their ideas to life.

Sound has a unique power to influence our feelings and reshape how we experience reality. Yet while AI has transformed the creation of text, images and video, sound is yet to catch up. As a consequence, adding music and audio to visuals still involves creators and sound designers spending hours searching stock libraries and manually syncing effects.

Mirelo, founded in 2023, has responded to this challenge by developing its own cutting-edge foundation models for sound in videos. A user can upload any video, and in a matter of seconds Mirelo’s system produces matching audio for anything happening on screen. The ability to produce high-quality sound faster than real time becomes particularly important in a world of dynamic content, whether that’s AI-generated videos or adaptive gaming worlds that shift for each player.

“Think of the difference between talkies and silent films – video without sound has so much less feeling and atmosphere,” says CJ Simon-Gabriel, CEO, and co-founder. “Mirelo’s first step is about democratising access, empowering everyone to create the sound that their (AI) video deserves. But we’ll also empower professionals to rework audio, to do more of what they love, to be more expressive and imaginative in what they can achieve, while handling the boring stuff such as synchronization. Our bigger mission is to become the audio layer for all visual content across videos, gaming, social media, films and beyond.”

Mirelo’s founders, CJ, and Florian Wenzel, met as AI researchers at AWS Labs before starting their own company. CJ has a PhD in machine learning and causal inference from the Max Planck Institute, where he studied under renowned computer scientist Bernhard Schölkopf, and completed a postdoc at ETH Zurich. Florian, Mirelo’s CTO, has a PhD in deep learning from Humboldt University, and was a researcher at Google Brain.

Mirelo sprang from the pair’s shared passion for music and frustration with their field’s narrow focus on images and LLMs. CJ has a degree in piano, organ and composition from the Conservatoire in Strasbourg, and was very close to pursuing music professionally; he dreams one day of recreating the unwritten music of Mozart and Schubert. Meanwhile, Florian mixes music and plays electric guitar as a member of an electro band in Berlin.

A couple of weeks ago, the young company released a new, top-notch video-to-sound-effect model, Mirelo SFX v1.5, which can generate various soundtrack versions faster than real-time. It is available via their self-serve API and web-app, Mirelo Studio. Mirelo’s models are very lightweight, requiring 50 times less compute than typical LLMs, while also delivering superior quality to any competitor so far according to external evaluations.

“Sound is too often an afterthought in video production, yet it’s what determines whether a video or game truly resonates with its audience. Mirelo gives creators a new form of expression, letting them move faster and sound better,” says Georgia Stevenson, the partner at Index Ventures who led the investment. “The team led by CJ and Florian combines cutting-edge AI expertise with an unparalleled focus on audio’s emotional power. It is a combination that positions them to reshape how the world experiences sound.”

“To date, a16z has invested in multiple world-leading generative models each with a different focus area. Mirelo is tackling one of the most technically challenging and least explored areas of generative media: a specialized model for sound effect creation.” said Guido Appenzeller, partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “CJ and Florian have assembled a research-driven team whose breakthroughs in tokenization, data curation, and conditioning rival far larger efforts and we’re excited to back Mirelo as they scale their technology for the next generation of video models.”

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A Berlin-based audio startup, which leverages its own AI models to let users generate synched sound for video, has raised $41m in a seed round, led by Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. The funding round in Mirelo also lured in Berlin-based investor Atlantic and California-based VC TriplePoint Capital.

Mirelo has raised around $44m to date and has bagged angel investment from several tech luminaries, including Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch and Revolut executive Antoine Le Nel. Mirelo, which has a 10-strong team, was founded by a pair of former musicians, CJ Simon-Gabriel, and Florian Wenzel, who met as AI researchers at Amazon.

Mirelo’s big play is that while AI has transformed the creation of text, images and video, sound is lagging behind. It points out the laborious process of adding music and audio to visuals, involving creators and sound designers spending hours searching stock libraries and manually syncing effects.

Mirelo, founded in 2023, has developed its own AI models for sound in video. It says a user can upload any video, and in a matter of seconds, Mirelo produces matching audio for anything happening on screen.  It says its sound generation tech is a good fit for AI-generated videos or the gaming worlds.

It builds its own AI models from scratch, training them on data for which it says it has licensing deals in place. Its customers are typically individual creators and small studios while its API is used by companies wanting to leverage its models into their platforms or tools.

Mirelo recently released a new video-to-sound model, Mirelo SFX v1.5, which it says can generate various soundtrack versions faster than real-time.

The startup says its models require 50 times less compute than typical LLMs. The startup will use the funds to advance its tech and try and grow its customer base.

Simon-Gabriel, Mirelo CEO, said: “Think of the difference between talkies and silent films – video without sound has so much less feeling and atmosphere.

“Mirelo’s first step is about democratising access, empowering everyone to create the sound that their (AI) videos deserve.

"But we’ll also empower professionals to rework audio, to do more of what they love, to be more expressive and imaginative in what they can achieve, while handling the boring stuff such as synchronisation. Our bigger mission is to become the audio layer for all visual content across videos, gaming, social media, films and beyond.”

Wenzel said: “There’s a deep affinity between music and engineering; maybe that’s why so many of Mirelo’s team are musicians, and why musicians have always been early adopters of new technology.

“There’s something about the intersection of mathematical precision and expressiveness that seems to draw people to both fields.”

Guido Appenzeller, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said: "To date, a16z has invested in multiple world-leading generative models each with a different focus area. Mirelo is tackling one of the most technically challenging and least explored areas of generative media: a specialised model for sound effect creation.

“CJ and Florian have assembled a research-driven team whose breakthroughs in tokenisation, data curation, and conditioning rival far larger efforts and we’re excited to back Mirelo as they scale their technology for the next generation of video models.”

Smile Genius, the fast-growing dental-tech platform transforming clinic–lab workflows, today announced it has raised €850k to date, with fresh funding provided by Enterprise Ireland, Haatch (UK) and a network of angel investors. This milestone marks a major step forward as the company scales its platform and strengthens its footprint across the UK and Ireland.

Over the past two years, Smile Genius has expanded at pace, with clients in Ireland, UK, US, UAE, Europe, Egypt with clinical users in 33 countries worldwide. The platform is used by more than 1,200 clinics and has processed over 10,000 patient cases since launch. In the UK, Smile Genius works closely with leading dental laboratories, including three of the top five in its segment—further solidifying its position in a key growth market.

Originally launched as an aligner-workflow only solution, Smile Genius has evolved into a comprehensive end-to-end lab-order management platform serving independent clinics, laboratories and dental groups. Recent enhancements include automated lab-order workflows, real-time cost visibility for dental groups, and improved transparency for finance, administrative and clinical teams, a big issue for the dental industry today.

“This milestone reflects the momentum and confidence we’re earning across our UK and Ireland customer base,” said Nipun Kathuria, CEO of Smile Genius Dental. He continued: “Our ambition is to establish Smile Genius as the de facto standard for clinic–lab engagement globally, and we are targeting a doubling of our clinic presence by the end of 2026 as we continue to scale.”

Smile Genius also plans to expand its teams in Ireland and the UK, with new roles opening across Product, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success in the coming months.

Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Leinster, Smile Genius is a dental-tech platform that streamlines communication and workflow between clinics and dental laboratories. The platform supports all clinical cases, lab orders, digital workflows and multi-site dental-group operations. Smile Genius enables clinics and labs to benefit from transparent, automated and efficient processes that improve turnaround times and case outcomes.

The post Irish HealthTech startup Smile Genius raises €850k to modernise how clinics and labs work together appeared first on EU-Startups.

Iconic, an interactive entertainment and AI-native platform company, has raised $13 million in its seed round, co-led by venture capital funds Kindred and Northzone, with further investment from leading industry players. 

The round also brings together a highly curated group of the world’s top AI, gaming, and system engineering leaders from Google, Meta, Disney, DeepMind and OpenAI.

Founded by John Lusty and Junaid Hussain, Iconic began in 2023 as a small, technically focused team exploring how advances in AI could enhance human creativity and transform the way players interact with and experience games.  

From the outset, the team was equally driven by a desire to improve life for developers, enhancing the creative process whilst reducing the rapidly increasing cost and complexity of building games, and it is this ethos that attracted CEO Andrew Bowell, formerly Product Head at Unity.

Through its pioneering on-device AI technology, Iconic is bringing intelligence, agency, and personalisation to the heart of the player experience, allowing game studios to build entirely new genres of games whilst driving down development costs. Earlier this year, Iconic debuted the demo of its voice-driven narrative puzzle game.

It enables every word spoken by players to actively shape the world they are playing in.  By applying SLLMs, the technology ensures that internet connectivity is not required, allowing game play across a range of environments without cloud costs or privacy issues.

Since launching with NVIDIA at Gamescom, The Oversight Bureau has received strong, consistent praise for its unique level of immersion and responsiveness.

With early prototypes demonstrating the potential of voice-driven, character-rich worlds powered by on-device intelligence, this became the backbone of Iconic’s formal launch in 2024, bringing talent from Unity, Meta, Sony, Microsoft, Cambridge University, and major gaming franchises, including GTA and Star Wars.  Andrew Bowell, CEO of Iconic, said,

“Our voice-driven gameplay experience is transforming traditional entertainment, utilising novel technology and innovative digital systems to enhance creativity, revolutionise the player experience, and redefine the boundaries of gaming.

We are excited to announce our successful seed round led by Kindred and Northzone, with further support from leading industry players, including Google, a testimony to Iconic building the next iteration of interactive entertainment.”

Emmi AI is an Austrian deep-tech company that builds AI-driven physics simulation technology to accelerate engineering processes in fields like Fluid Dynamics, Multiphysics, and Solid Mechanics.

For a company doing this kind of work, how people collaborate matters as much as the tech itself. And it turns remote work on its head with its hybrid, remote-first approach.  Every month, they fly everyone to Linz, Austria, for a week.

I spoke to Miks Mikelsons, COO, to learn all about it.

A research-heavy team, with applied outcomes in mind

Today, Emmi AI employs around 30 people, with research forming the backbone of the organisation. Roughly two-thirds of the team come from academic or scientific backgrounds.

“We’re very research and science-heavy,” says Mikelsons. “About 20 of our people come from academia.”

Around 40 per cent of the team is based across different locations such as Austria, London, and other parts of Europe.

Competing for talent without forcing relocation

Once a month, for a full week — always the first week of the month, Emmi AI brings everyone together to the same location and covers all the costs of travel and accommodation. Mikelsons  asserts: 

“We’d rather spend an extra €1,000 per person per month on bringing people together than invest in the fanciest office or compete in the most aggressive hiring markets.

This allows us to attract talent who might not want to relocate.

“We’re still distributed across Europe, but this model works well here. It would be harder across the US, but in Europe it’s very achievable.”

For someone deciding whether to stay in the US or return to Europe, this model is very compelling. For example, the company hired someone originally from Spain who had been in the US, at the University of Pennsylvania.

Competing on culture, not compensation

From the beginning, Emmi Ai decided that as a scaling company in one location, it needed to differentiate.

“Especially for research-driven companies, culture matters a lot. We wanted strong chemistry and bonding early on, so we invested in being together."

“We’re not the company offering the biggest salaries in AI research right now. Some people are getting extremely high compensation offers, and we don’t compete on that,” Mikelsons admits.

And the result is that people recommend the company to their networks.

“What we offer instead is a way of working and a culture people value. That’s how we’ve been able to attract talent from places like Oxford and Cambridge.”

In-house tech by an all-star team 

Emmi AI has developed its technology entirely in-house, with its core architecture built in Austria by co-founder and Chief Scientist Johannes Brandstetter and his research team. Brandstetter previously worked on Microsoft Aurora, widely regarded as the world’s first foundation model for weather forecasting.

Following the breakup of that original team, the researchers went on to found their own companies. Brandstetter chose to return to Austria from Amsterdam to build Emmi AI. “We have our own technology stack,” says Miks Mikelsons, COO of Emmi AI.

“The architecture was built by Johannes together with his team in Austria.”

Deeptech for real-world problem solving 

“Johannes is a pure researcher,” Mikelsons explains.

Unlike many startup founders, Brandstetter comes from a purely academic background, with no prior business or operational experience. Emmi AI’s leadership team is intentionally structured to balance those strengths.

“Together with Arno Hollosi, our CTO, and myself focusing on operations and scaling, we bridge deep research with real-world deployment.. As we always say, we apply groundbreaking research to real-world problems and focus on business needs,” Mikelsons adds. “That combination is still relatively rare.”

How Emmi AI is rethinking how physical systems are designed and tested

In simple terms, Emmi AI uses AI to run complex physical simulations — like fluid flow, heat transfer, structural mechanics, and other engineering problems — orders of magnitude faster than traditional methods.

According to Mikelsons.

“People sometimes ask,:'What is simulation and what does it do in engineering?' I always tell the story that a hundred years ago, people tested designs by simply crashing them into a wall. Then came wind tunnels, where you could test how a design behaves under air pressure.

Later came numerical simulation — equations and formulas that calculate how a particular design will behave in the real world.”

However, this process is very expensive and computationally heavy and can take days or weeks. 

“With AI, we can now do it in seconds or minutes. That changes the way you design and work in engineering entirely,” he shared. 

Industrial use cases: where simulation meets reality

The company is active in sectors such as automotive and energy. 

“For example, we have customers producing power transformers: those big machines you see near cities that convert high voltage to low voltage.

They’re full of metal and oil, and they involve very complex behaviours like transient simulations.”

Large grid assets such as power transformers are designed to last for decades, but they are also slow to replace. That reality shapes how electricity networks are operated today. “If you order one of these machines today—say from Brazil or another country — you might get it five years from now,” says Mikelsons.

With replacement timelines stretching into years, grid operators have little margin for error. Assets are therefore run cautiously, often well below their theoretical limits, to minimise the risk of failure.

“Because of that, grid operators run these systems very conservatively.” 

AI-driven simulation offers a way to change that dynamic. By modelling how equipment behaves under different conditions, operators can gain a far more precise understanding of performance and risk.

“What we can build are models that simulate operational behaviour,” Mikelsons says. 

“That allows operators to anticipate challenges and actively control how these systems behave in practice.” Rather than relying solely on conservative assumptions, grid operators can use simulation to make informed, real-time decisions—unlocking."

Letting the team self-organise

In terms of employee adoption, Mikelsons asserts that it's all about setting clear rules and planning upfront.

“From the interview process onward, people know exactly how this works. It’s always the first week of the month. It’s always the same location.

Costs are covered. People really enjoy it. Some take the night train, others fly in. The organisational overhead isn’t actually that big.”

In terms of logistics, the company’s office in Linz fits around 25 people comfortably, maybe 30 at a stretch and is hot desking by design.

  The company is not aiming for hundreds of people, “but maybe 50 by the end of the year.”

Emmi AI also organises activities outside work, such as dinners, bouldering, and spending time in nature. 

“We try to make it special without wearing people out,” shared Mikelsons.

One of the secrets is that the team increasingly self-organises. At the beginning, management structured everything. Now people suggest activities, breakfasts, and experiments. They try things, see what works, and adjust.

For people thinking of doing something similar, Mikelsons advises that clarity is key. You need to be clear about the identity you want to build:

“If you’re fully remote, set clear rules for that. If you meet once a year, plan everything around that. Budget, communication processes, meeting structures — everything follows from that decision."

Ultimately, Emmi AI believes that the best companies don’t invest only in the next fundraising round or the next customer. They invest in how they collaborate and how they work together.

Most organisations do not wake up one morning and decide to overhaul how they manage messaging and streaming. The shift usually begins with something far less glamorous. A delayed release because a queue was not provisioned on time. A compliance reviewer asking for audit evidence that takes days to assemble. Or a capacity scare on a Kafka cluster that no one saw coming.

The familiar moment in a war room, when everyone realises the issue is happening somewhere between five different platforms and no one has the full picture, is also a common trigger. These incidents are usually dismissed as “part of the job”. They sit quietly in the background, tolerated but not solved. They accumulate, and eventually the realisation sets in. The organisation is operating its most critical digital plumbing through a system of fragmented tools, tribal knowledge, spreadsheets, screenshots, and luck. The good news is that there is a way out of this.

A new operational model is emerging that allows large organisations to run their messaging and streaming estates with far more efficiency, resilience, and auditability than what has been possible before. But before we get there, we need to understand how the current model became so strained.

The Reality No One Talks About: Middleware Has Become Too Fragmented to Manage Conventionally

If middleware were still a neat, single-platform world, most enterprises would not have a problem. But the world changed. Acquisitions happened, and digital programmes layered new technologies on top of old ones. Critical systems stayed on MQ, and cloud teams adopted native messaging.

Modern apps moved to Kafka. Integration teams added Solace, and microservices brought in RabbitMQ. Different business units made different choices at different times. Now most organisations operate a collection of platforms that were never designed to be viewed or run together. This creates three immediate problems.

1. Operational Fragmentation

Every platform has its own way of working. Kafka has partitions and consumer groups, and MQ has channels and queues. Solace has VPNs and message spools, and cloud brokers follow their own patterns. Tools are inconsistent, naming conventions drift, and monitoring is disconnected. Incident diagnostics spread across too many places, and the operational view becomes blurred. Teams spend time stitching context instead of solving problems.

2. An Unsustainable Human Workload

The people who understand this infrastructure are both scarce and overloaded. They are asked to provision objects manually, review ACLs, check configurations, investigate drift, run failovers, and validate release plans. They also decode logs, triage incidents, and locate the source of message failures. Repetition becomes the norm, and heroics become the expectation. This is not a scalable operating model for a multi-platform estate.

3. Blind Spots in Risk and Compliance

Most organisations can prove that “something happened,” but not necessarily “what happened,” “where it happened,” or “why it happened”. Regulators and audit teams want traceability, consistency, and evidence. Middleware estates rarely provide it. A fragmented environment makes even basic audit questions difficult.

Who changed this configuration? Which systems participated in this transaction? Was the failure internal or external? Did messages retry, and was the security model consistent? These questions require coordinated visibility, which is difficult when data is spread across incompatible logs and systems. This gap is becoming more dangerous as regulations tighten around operational resilience.

The Hidden Costs: Waste, Delay, and Defensive Operations.

The consequences of this operating model are often underestimated because they are dispersed across many teams.

Infrastructure Waste

Most organisations cannot see true utilisation across all messaging technologies. They over-provision Kafka storage and leave unused queues and topics running for years. They maintain oversized clusters or duplicate environments because it is easier than cleaning up. Storage, compute, and licensing bills grow gradually. They are rarely challenged because no one has system-wide context.

Slow Delivery and Change Friction

Provisioning a new topic or queue should take minutes. In most enterprises, it becomes a mini-project involving approvals, compliance reviews, manual configuration, and cross-team coordination. Release cycles slow down not because of application development, but because of the plumbing beneath it.

Incident Resolution Drag

A business-critical slowdown might start in one platform and surface in another. Without visibility, teams chase symptoms. War rooms stretch into hours, and incidents that should be diagnosed quickly turn into cross-functional investigations. Mean Time to Recovery expands, and customer-facing systems suffer.

Compliance Overhead

Audit requests become painful exercises in log mining, screenshot gathering, Excel reconciliation, and interpretation. Evidence gathering interrupts real work. Compliance results take weeks. Reviewers lose confidence in the underlying controls, and findings start appearing in reports. These costs accumulate quietly but powerfully.

A New Pressure Point: Auditability Has Become Strategic

A decade ago, auditability was mostly an internal concern. Today it is a board-level conversation. Regulators across financial services, healthcare, energy, and the public sector now require organisations to prove the resilience and traceability of their operational systems. Messaging and streaming platforms sit at the heart of these systems. They remain some of the least auditable components in the digital landscape.

Why Auditability is so Hard Today

There is no unified audit trail. Kafka, MQ, Solace, RabbitMQ, and cloud brokers all produce different artefacts, and correlating them manually is slow and error prone. Configuration drift is constant, and even small changes create gaps in compliance evidence. Without unified configuration intelligence, drift remains invisible. RBAC inconsistencies multiply risk. Each platform has its own security model, and proving consistency across them is almost impossible manually.

Incident reconstruction takes too long. When things go wrong, teams must recreate the past using logs from multiple systems, often with incomplete or misaligned timestamps. Compliance slows the business. Approvals, reviews, and evidence all take longer. This becomes a tax on every change and every release. Without built-in auditability, a middleware estate simply cannot operate at the speed the business requires.

The Shift: Lean Operations as a Strategic Imperative

Lean operations is not a slogan, nor is it about doing more with less. It is the recognition that the old operating model cannot sustain the scale, complexity, and regulatory expectations of modern middleware estates. A lean model has four defining characteristics.

1. Unified Visibility

Teams need to see the entire estate in one place. This includes health, flows, dependencies, performance, lineage, configuration, and security. It means actual end-to-end operational clarity, not summaries or partial views. Without this, speed and reliability are impossible.

2. Automation and Controlled Self-Service

Provisioning, validation, drift detection, ACL checks, failover routines, and compliance evidence should not rely on manual effort. Automation removes friction. Policy-based self-service allows developers to work faster without increasing operational risk.

3. Resource Optimisation

A lean model gives clear insight into what is oversized, under-utilised, misconfigured, or simply no longer needed. The result is lower infrastructure cost, more predictable capacity planning, and fewer performance surprises.

4. Built-in Auditability

Audit trails must be complete, consistent, and automatically captured. Configuration history must be reliable. Access models must be validated across platforms. Incident reconstruction must be fast, and evidence must be exportable without effort. Lean operations is what happens when you combine these principles. It is an operating philosophy supported by the right platform capabilities, not a tool.

The Future State: Middleware as a Governed, Efficient, and Transparent Layer

Organisations that embrace this model experience a radically different operational reality. Release cycles become smoother because provisioning and compliance do not hold them back. Outages become less frequent and shorter because teams can identify root causes quickly. Platform teams spend less time firefighting and more time improving. Infrastructure costs fall because utilisation is visible and manageable. Audit requests that once took days are delivered in minutes. Regulators gain confidence in the organisation’s operational discipline.

The biggest shift, however, is cultural. Developers stop waiting for middleware teams. Middleware teams stop playing catch-up, and compliance teams stop battling for evidence. Everyone operates with the same truth, the same visibility, and the same level of control. This is the future state that progressive organisations are now moving toward.

So What Makes This Future State Possible?

Very few platforms are capable of supporting the operational model described here. Most observability tools focus on metrics rather than message flows. Most monitoring solutions are tied to a single platform. Integration tools typically manage connectivity, not operations. Open-source utilities provide valuable functions but lack governance, auditability, and cross-platform consistency. Cloud services help but introduce their own silos.

To reach a fully lean operating model, organisations need something that is still rare. They need a unified operational command plane that spans every messaging and streaming platform in the estate.

It must provide:

• A single operational view across all technologies.
• Transaction-level lineage and flow analysis.
• End-to-end audit trails.
• Consistent configuration and security governance.
• Automated provisioning and validation.
• Self-service within guardrails.
• Capacity and cost intelligence.
• Multi-cloud and hybrid compatibility.
• Integration with existing processes, not disruption of them.

When these capabilities come together, the fragmented middleware world becomes manageable. It becomes transparent, and it becomes compliant. This is the model that forward-thinking organisations are now adopting. This is exactly the model made possible by meshIQ Core.

meshIQ appears at the end of this story not because it is an afterthought, but because the logic leads naturally to it. Once you understand the operational, architectural, and compliance realities of modern messaging and streaming, the need for a unified control plane becomes obvious. meshIQ is one of the few platforms purpose-built to deliver it. For many organisations, it has become the turning point from reactive, high-cost operations to a lean, governed, and resilient operating model.

Want to Explore This Further?

If you want to understand how a lean operating model could apply to your own messaging and streaming landscape, meshIQ offers briefings and assessments for platform, architecture, and risk teams. You can start the conversation at meshiq.com/contact.

Europe's first National Security VC firm, MD One Ventures and Randox, a global diagnostics and healthcare company from the UK and Ireland, today announce the launch of Randox for Builders, a security and biotech incubator and accelerator.

Randox for Builders gives early-stage companies the funding and hands-on support they need to grow faster.  At its core, Randox for Builders is about strengthening national resilience by developing technologies that will shape the future security and health of the UK and its allies. 

By fast-tracking solutions with real-world impact, the incubator aims to ensure that the next generation of breakthrough capabilities is built, tested and deployed far earlier than traditional systems allow.

Selected founders and their startups will gain access to Randox’s global leadership in diagnostics and biotechnology, leveraging resources rarely accessible to early-stage ventures, including:

• Access to advanced laboratories & manufacturing facilities   
• Clinical trials and validation
• Commercial partnerships
• Distribution channels
• Regulatory framework advice and support
• World-leading resources for IP and Research
• Deeply established routes to market - B2B and B2C

Alongside investment, founders get instant access to a ready-made network of world-class scientific experts, R&D, and commercial resources. 

The MD One Ventures team includes Co-founder Will McManners, who spent 10 years in the British Army, and served as an officer in a Specialist Military Unit, Commando and JTAC, before working at BlackRock, Investbridge Capital and Palantir.

Alongside McManners, providing strategic oversight is Cecilia Fortugno, PhD, who serves as both Vice President and Chief Operations Officer at Randox Biosciences and the Senior Technical Advisor for the new accelerator.

Wil McManners, Co-founder of MD One Ventures, commented:

"This is not a traditional accelerator, it's a strategic partnership designed to de-risk and accelerate companies that solve national security and public health challenges.

The access our founders receive to Randox's infrastructure is literally a money can't buy opportunity.

We are looking to support world-class founding teams that can deliver solutions to fundamental issues affecting our National Infrastructure, Health and ultimately, Security".

Dr Cecilia Fortugno, Vice President and Chief Operations Officer at Randox Biosciences and the Senior Technical Advisor for Randox for Builders, said:

"For forty years, Randox has invested deeply in R&D to drive diagnostic and preventative healthcare. This program with MD Ones is a natural extension of that mission.

By opening our technical infrastructure to the next generation of innovators, we are ensuring that the solutions to future health and security challenges are being built and scaled rapidly right now."

The incubator has already started investing, with initial companies including Untap Health, which delivers automated wastewater-based diagnostics and Airfinity, which provides a health intelligence and bio risk forecasting platform, integrating AI-driven simulations.

Iconic, a London-based interactive entertainment and AI-native platform company, has raised €11 million ($13 million) in seed funding to develop its on-device AI technology for immersive gaming experiences.

The round was co-led by venture capital firms Kindred and Northzone, with additional backing from industry players including the Google AI Futures Fund. The investment also brings together a group of advisers and participants from organisations such as Google, Meta, Disney, DeepMind and OpenAI.

Founded in 2023 by John Lusty and Junaid Hussain, Iconic began as a small technical team exploring how advances in artificial intelligence could enhance creativity and change the way players interact with games. The company has focused on reducing the cost and complexity of game development while expanding creative possibilities for studios. This approach later attracted Andrew Bowell, formerly Product Head at Unity, who joined as CEO.

Iconic’s platform centres on on-device AI technology designed to introduce intelligence, agency and personalisation directly into gameplay. By running models locally rather than in the cloud, the company aims to enable new types of interactive experiences while lowering development costs and avoiding connectivity, privacy and infrastructure constraints.

Earlier this year, Iconic unveiled a demo of its voice-driven narrative puzzle game, The Oversight Bureau. The project showcases the company’s ACT-1 AI platform, which uses a modular, on-device engine allowing spoken player input to influence the game world in real time. Built using small local language models, the technology operates without an internet connection. Since its debut with NVIDIA at Gamescom, the demo has received positive feedback for its level of immersion and responsiveness.

Following early technical validation, Iconic formally launched its platform in 2024 and expanded its team with talent from Unity, Meta, Sony, Microsoft and Cambridge University, as well as contributors with experience on franchises such as GTA and Star Wars. The company is also supported by advisers from technology, academia and entertainment, including representatives from DeepMind, NBCUniversal and Embracer Group.

Andrew Bowell, CEO of Iconic, said, “Our voice-driven gameplay experience is transforming traditional entertainment, utilising novel technology and innovative digital systems to enhance creativity, revolutionise the player experience, and redefine the boundaries of gaming.

We are excited to announce our successful seed round led by Kindred and Northzone, with further support from leading industry players, including Google, a testimony to Iconic building the next iteration of interactive entertainment.”

Iconic plans to use the funding to further develop its on-device AI systems and expand partnerships with game studios interested in building new forms of interactive entertainment driven by intelligent characters and emergent worlds.

The post London-based raises €11 million to build on-device AI platform for next-generation gaming appeared first on EU-Startups.

As renewable generation expands and conventional baseload plants retire, electricity supply has become more volatile — amplifying price swings and increasing pressure on grid stability. Battery energy storage systems (BESS) address this imbalance by absorbing excess power when generation is high and discharging it when demand peaks.

In doing so, they stabilise the grid, reduce renewable curtailment, and smooth electricity prices for both consumers and businesses. As a result, battery storage is now a bankable infrastructure asset.

Today, Tier-one suppliers, primarily from China, offer containerised systems with performance warranties extending up to 20 years. Those guarantees underpin project-finance structures that can support up to 70 per cent debt financing — something that would have been unthinkable when the technology was still regarded as experimental.

I spoke to Nikolas Samios, Managing Director, PT1, to understand the promise and opportunity of this rapidly evolving asset class.

PT1’s thesis: Upgrading the physical world

PT1 is an early-stage venture capital fund launched in 2018, focused on upgrading the physical world. Software and AI now underpin almost everything, but there is still a vast physical layer beneath that — energy systems, infrastructure, the built environment, robotics — that needs to evolve alongside it, and that’s where the Firm steps in.

PT1 has made around 27 investments in Europe across two funds, and is headquartered in Berlin with a second office in London. It's now planning a third fund vintage for 2026.  PT1 focuses on three core areas:

• Electrification of everything, including energy, transport, and industrial systems.
• AI and robotics applied to the physical world, especially where labour shortages exist, and automation hasn’t yet penetrated — for example, construction.
• Infrastructure resilience, including climate resilience and the protection of critical assets such as grids and pipelines.

The Firm doesn’t invest in defence per se, but Samois acknowledged that surveillance, maintenance, and monitoring of critical infrastructure is becoming increasingly important.

Batteries inflection point

Batteries often outperform gas-powered plants by responding faster, emitting nothing, and avoiding many of the siting and permitting constraints that plague thermal assets.

“Batteries themselves are decentralised, modular, and quick to deploy. At scale, they also dampen peak pricing, lowering average electricity costs system-wide.

That broader economic benefit helps explain the growing enthusiasm from both policymakers and investors.”

Why PT1 followed the data, not the impact narrative

Samios admits that PT1 were never impact-first investors. “Instead, we started by looking at the data.” Germany’s nuclear exit, coal phase-outs across Europe, and the acceleration triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have all amplified this shift toward battery storage.

According to Samios, the second major driver was cost:

“Battery prices fell much faster than even optimistic forecasts from consultancies like McKinsey or BNEF. Chinese industrial policy created massive manufacturing capacity, pushing prices down week by week.

When you combine grid volatility with falling battery costs — and layer in AI-driven optimisation — you reach a point where battery storage becomes commercially viable without subsidies.

That was the key insight: this could become a new, standalone asset class. One that large institutional investors would eventually allocate to, once risk and bankability were proven.”

He admits that traditional renewable infrastructure has largely been commoditised. But, it’s increasingly hard for infrastructure funds to achieve double-digit internal rate of returns (IRRs) in solar or wind without taking emerging-market risk:

“Battery storage changes that. It benefits from volatility rather than being harmed by it. And as volatility is structural, not temporary, the opportunity persists for decades. 

Our role as an early-stage VC is to identify these asset classes early, take the initial technology and execution risk, and help companies mature to the point where they can absorb large pools of institutional capital.”

For Samios, where innovation really happens now is in system control and trading:

“Early battery projects followed a simple arbitrage model — charging during periods of excess solar and discharging at night. 

Today, AI-driven trading systems analyse vast volumes of real-time data across multiple European electricity markets, optimising decisions in 15-minute intervals.

Machines now outperform even the best human traders in this context, because they can process weather patterns, grid constraints, outages, and market signals simultaneously.

That intelligence directly translates into higher returns on the same physical asset.”

The Texas oilman test 

Battery storage plays a different role in energy trading because it does not rely on subsidies in most markets. 

According to Samios: 

“That insulation from political swings is critical. At PT1, we focus on climate technologies that have reached a commercial tipping point — where they make economic sense even to conservative investors.

A simple test we use is whether a Texas oilman, advised by Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, would invest purely on financial grounds. If the answer is yes, scale follows — and with scale comes impact.

Battery storage passed that test.”

Early conviction, institutional scale

In just one week this September, two portfolio companies from PT1, Terra One and Voltfang, secured €1 billion to finance large-scale battery projects in Germany.  PT1 was the first institutional investor in both companies back since 2022, spotting the need for grid-scale storage before it became mainstream. 

Terra One raised €150 million mezzanine financing, triggering an additional €500–600 million in project debt from banks, unlocking €750 million for ~3 GWh of new capacity

“This is enough to power 20 per cent of German households for one hour,” shared Samios. 

German battery specialist Voltfang launched a long-term partnership with infrastructure investor Palladio Partners to develop, finance and operate large-scale battery storage systems across Germany, targeting around €250 million in investments by 2029. This scales Europe’s largest second-life battery factory into repeatable grid projects.

Flexibility is critical for risk mitigation

PT1’s investment in Voltfang reflects the firm’s view that flexibility is a core form of risk mitigation in energy storage. From a venture perspective, Samios argues that the appeal lies in business models that are not locked into a single supply pathway.  

“What we like about companies such as Voltfang is flexibility,” he says.

“They’re not solely dependent on second-life batteries; they’ve built systems that can integrate batteries from multiple sources — unused first-life inventory, surplus stock, and second-life EV batteries that still retain 80 to 85 per cent of their original capacity.” 

For stationary storage applications, energy density is far less critical than it is in vehicles, making second-life batteries particularly compelling.  This multi-source strategy improves supply resilience, lowers the carbon footprint of storage systems, and strengthens the overall investment case — especially for customers with explicit sustainability targets.

Samois believes that in more liberalised markets in Germany, Australia, and parts of the US, private capital is clearly leading. Renewable energy created a globally investable infrastructure class, and battery storage now fits naturally into that same capital pipeline.

“Battery projects can be structured very similarly to solar or wind assets, but with higher returns. That’s why large investors—pension funds, insurers, multi-asset managers—are moving quickly once bankability is demonstrated.”

In contrast, gas peaker plants (power plants that generally run only when there is a high demand) require state guarantees to be investable, because they sit idle most of the time. Batteries operate autonomously, generate revenue continuously, and stabilise the grid without public subsidies.

A broader European momentum builds behind storage

Beyond the investments of PT1, over the past year, a wave of funding rounds and acquisitions has underscored growing investor confidence.

In 2024, Swiss startup Libattion, which builds stationary energy storage systems using upcycled electric vehicle batteries, secured €14 million in funding, reflecting rising interest in circular and second-life battery solutions.

Momentum has only increased in 2025. In January, large-scale battery storage developer green flexibility raised over €400 million to deploy utility-scale battery storage systems across Europe, marking one of the sector’s largest infrastructure-backed investments to date.

Young company Scale Energy, developing decentralised industrial battery storage systems, raised a €2 million Seed round in February this year.

There’s also momentum with companies like Delta Green which aims to turn ordinary European homes into a virtual power battery, enabling households to shift consumption, discharge batteries, and export rooftop solar at times of peak demand.

However, this is a sector requiring deep domain expertise. You need founders who understand complex systems—regulation, infrastructure, financing, and often have decades of industry experience. According to Samios, the strongest teams combine that expertise with entrepreneurial ambition. 

“Our role is not to build companies from scratch, but to support excellent teams with market access, strategic insight, and connections to later-stage capital.

That’s where PT1 adds value: helping companies become bankable, scalable, and relevant to the largest capital pools in Europe.”

Lead image: An edited Voltang battery storage photo.

IVFmicro, a University of Leeds spinout developing technology intended to improve IVF outcomes by increasing the quality and number of embryos produced per cycle, has raised £3.5 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Northern Gritstone, with support from the Innovate UK Investor Partnerships Programme.

An estimated 1 in 6 couples globally experience fertility issues. IVF success rates remain relatively low, with around 25–30 per cent of cycles resulting in success for women under 35. Contributing factors include limitations in standard embryo culture processes, such as repeated handling, subjective embryo selection, and reliance on highly skilled operators, which can also add cost.

In the UK, a single IVF cycle costs patients an average of about £5,000, and access through the NHS can involve long waiting lists and eligibility criteria.

IVFmicro has developed a microfluidic device designed to support embryo culture and handling using very small volumes of nutrient-rich fluid. The company says the device can be used in any IVF treatment cycle and is intended to increase both the number of viable embryos available for transfer and the likelihood of implantation and pregnancy. IVFmicro reports a 10–15 per cent improvement in embryo quality and quantity.

Helen Picton, Scientific Director and co-founder of IVFmicro, said the company is applying extensive research in reproductive biology to develop a practical and accessible approach aimed at improving outcomes for patients undergoing fertility treatment.

Our goal is to make IVF more effective, more predictable, and ultimately more hopeful for those striving to start a family.

The company plans to use the funding to support its next verification and validation phase, ahead of trials involving human embryos in fertility clinics.

For years, legal teams have worked under impossible pressure. They have been asked to move faster, handle more, and protect everything all at once. Templates, workflows, and automation helped for a while, but they only took us so far.

Now, something deeper is happening. Legal systems are beginning to think, adapt, and make decisions on their own. We are entering the era of the Autonomous Legal Department, a world where law does not just keep up with business; it learns alongside it. And that idea can feel both exciting and unsettling.

The uneasy edge of progress

It is completely natural to feel uneasy about this shift. The legal profession is built on certainty, precedent, and precision. AI, on the other hand, thrives in ambiguity and probability. That tension can feel uncomfortable.

But discomfort is often the first signal that transformation is real.
Just as lawyers once had to adapt from paper to email, or from physical files to cloud systems, we are now adapting from human memory to machine learning.

It is okay to admit that it feels strange to let go of control. Yet it is also where the biggest opportunity lies, in learning to guide the systems that are beginning to guide us.

From legal operations to legal intelligence

Most companies today are still in transition. They have automated the basics, built templates, and digitised processes. But true autonomy goes further.

It begins when systems can:

• Detect inconsistencies across thousands of contracts
• Compare terms against regulation, precedent, and company policy
• Learn from negotiation outcomes
• Recommend next steps automatically

When that happens, legal does not just get faster. It gets smarter.
It becomes a living, learning ecosystem that improves with every use.

Trust as a System

At its heart, law has always been about trust, the confidence that a deal, rule, or promise will hold.

In the next phase, trust will not only come from people. It will also come from systems that are trained to act in line with our principles.

These systems will balance three layers:

• Law and regulation: What is permitted
• Market practice: What is standard
• Company policy: What is acceptable
• They will interpret all three in real time, giving teams clarity before risk arises. This is not the end of human judgment. It is the start of judgment at scale.

The one lawyer organisation

A few years ago, the idea of the One Lawyer Company felt radical. Now it is becoming a reality. One lawyer, supported by an intelligent system, can oversee risk for an entire organisation.

The next step is the Autonomous Legal Department, which does not just process work but also learns from it. Every negotiation, policy, and decision becomes part of its shared intelligence.

The lawyer’s role changes from operator to guardian of principles. They define what the system should value, where the boundaries are, and when a human should step in.

This shift does not make lawyers less important. It makes them more essential than ever.

Learning to trust the unknown

Change on this scale always brings uncertainty. There is anxiety in not knowing exactly how AI will evolve or how quickly. But there is also energy in that uncertainty, a creative space where the next version of our profession is being built.

The law has always been slow to move, but when it does, it moves with purpose. Right now, that purpose is becoming clear: to turn the law into something living, adaptive, and shared.

At Genie AI, we have seen this across both legal and non-legal teams. When people learn to collaborate with intelligent systems, they do not lose control; they gain visibility. They do not work less; they work better. And as unfamiliar as it feels, this shift is already underway.

The human core

As machines take over the mechanical parts of legal work, the human role becomes even more vital. Lawyers will be the ones who define the principles that shape how these systems behave, what fairness means, what transparency looks like, and where empathy belongs in automation.

Progress always brings uncertainty. But uncertainty is not the enemy. It is a sign that we are moving forward.

The Autonomous Legal Department is not just about AI or automation. It is about rediscovering the human side of law in a new context, where trust, judgment, and adaptability matter more than ever.

The future is not fully known, and maybe that is the point. Because in the unknown is where the next version of our profession will be written.

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