All3, a company developing a robotic platform for construction, has raised $25 million in a seed funding round led by RTP Global, with significant participation from SuperSeed and additional backing from Begin Capital, s16vc and VNV Global.

The company is developing an integrated construction model that combines autonomous robotics, AI-powered design software, and robotic manufacturing. Its system includes a legged robot for on-site assembly, alongside tools that enable the production of custom components, with the aim of improving efficiency, reducing costs, and lowering the environmental impact of construction projects.

Construction remains one of the world’s largest industries, with limited productivity gains over recent decades and continued reliance on manual labour. Existing prefabrication approaches have struggled to scale in complex urban environments, while All3’s approach is designed to enable automation without imposing design constraints.

Rodion Shishkov, CEO and co-founder of All3, said the company was founded to develop robotics and AI solutions to address fundamental challenges in construction, adding that the seed round confirms its ability to tackle problems long considered unsolvable.

Construction is the largest global sector yet to experience a productivity revolution, representing a trillion-dollar opportunity. With this funding, we'll scale deployment of our technology with one clear mission: to solve the housing crisis once and for all.

The company has already seen early demand for its platform, having processed more than 100,000 square metres of residential projects through its design software, contributing to a growing pipeline of projects in Germany.

The funding will be used to advance research and development in London and Belgrade and to deploy an initial fleet of robots on commercial construction projects in Germany, the company’s first launch market. All3 operates across Europe, with offices in Berlin and Zug, and focuses on applying robotics and AI to modernise construction processes at scale.

Malta is increasingly positioning itself as the answer, specifically for non-EU founders looking to establish a serious foothold in Europe without unnecessary complexity.

Funding that doesn’t cost you equity

Launching or scaling a startup is capital-intensive, and while venture capital remains a key route, dilution isn’t always the preferred option, especially for founders who’ve already built momentum. This is where Malta Enterprise stands out.

Malta’s economic development agency offers non-dilutive funding instruments tailored to startups, including grants and repayable advances. For founders used to giving up equity to fuel growth, this creates a different equation, one where scaling doesn’t automatically mean sacrificing ownership.

Beyond funding, Malta Enterprise operates as a strategic partner. Founders can plug into accelerator programmes, mentorship networks, and advisory support, alongside incentives for R&D and skills development. The ecosystem is designed not just to fund startups, but to de-risk growth and accelerate execution. Additionally, with support from Trade Malta, startups can streamline their internationalisation strategy to new markets across Europe and beyond.

Malta as a strategic operating base

For founders, location is a strategic decision, including a lifestyle one. Malta delivers on the fundamentals. As one of the EU’s fastest-growing economies, it offers a stable regulatory environment, pro-business policies, and a highly accessible ecosystem. English as an official language removes operational friction, while a strong digital infrastructure ensures seamless day-to-day execution.

Geographically, Malta sits at a crossroads between Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Combined with its time zone alignment and connectivity, it enables founders to operate across multiple markets without compromise.

In short, it’s not just a place to set up, it’s a place to scale from.

The Malta Startup Residence Programme: built for founders

What truly differentiates Malta is how it integrates residency into the startup journey. The Malta Startup Residence Programme is designed for non-EU founders who are serious about building or expanding highly innovative startups within Europe.

The Programme targets ventures operating in forward-looking, high-value sectors, including: high-end manufacturing, industrial services analogous to manufacturing, software development, life sciences, medtech, biotech and pharmaceuticals, as well as eco-startups focused on blue, green and sustainable industries.

It offers a 3-year residence permit, extendable by a further 5 years, giving founders the runway needed to execute long-term strategies. Crucially, the Programme reflects how startups actually operate. It extends beyond the founder to include co-founders, core employees, and immediate family, supporting both business continuity and personal stability.

The entry requirements are pragmatic yet focused. To qualify, startups must:

• Be less than 7 years old
• Minimum investment of €25,000 in tangible assets or paid-up share capital
• Establish a genuine operational presence in Malta, ensuring real economic activity and integration within the local ecosystem

In return, founders gain visa-free access across the Schengen Area, making it easier to manage partnerships, investors, and clients across Europe. Note that, after five years, beneficiaries may apply for long-term residency, further strengthening Malta’s value proposition.

A base that works beyond the boardroom

Even for founders operating at pace, the environment matters. Malta combines safety, quality services and a lifestyle that is difficult to replicate in traditional startup hubs. The Mediterranean setting, compact geography, and vibrant cultural scene create a backdrop that supports both productivity and balance. For founders relocating with families or building international teams, this becomes a meaningful advantage.

For non-EU founders already in motion, Malta isn’t about starting from scratch; it’s about scaling smarter. With aligned funding, a founder-centric residency programme, and direct access to the EU market, Malta offers a compelling proposition: a base that works as hard as you do.

For info, visit startinmalta.com and startup.residencymalta.gov.mt

The post Malta’s startup residency: A pathway for founders expanding into Europe (Sponsored) appeared first on EU-Startups.

The collapse of Tuesday’s trilogue exposes deep divisions over whether high-risk AI systems embedded in consumer products should be exempt from the world’s strictest AI rules After 12 hours of negotiations on Tuesday, EU member states and European Parliament lawmakers failed to reach a deal on proposed changes to the bloc’s landmark AI Act. Talks […]

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KOMPAS VC, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on physical industries, has announced the €160 million final close of its second fund. The fund attracted support from existing backers such as VKR Holding, as well as new institutional investors including Realdania.

With Fund II, KOMPAS VC will continue investing in technologies aimed at improving productivity, resilience, and decarbonisation across sectors such as manufacturing, the built environment, energy, advanced materials, and logistics. These industries are characterised by complex infrastructure and legacy systems, where transformation is both necessary and challenging.

The investor focuses on solutions that can be deployed in real-world industrial environments, including industrial AI, robotics, and cybersecurity. Its strategy centres on supporting technologies that integrate with existing workflows and enhance how companies design, operate, and maintain physical assets.

Founded in 2021, KOMPAS VC invests from seed to Series B across Europe and North America, typically deploying initial cheques between €1 million and €5 million. With the new fund, KOMPAS VC plans to expand its investment and platform teams, strengthening its ability to support founders through domain expertise, industrial partnerships, and commercial access.

The investment strategy focuses on three core priorities: increasing productivity, strengthening resilience, and enabling decarbonisation. In practice, this includes backing technologies that optimise industrial workflows, secure critical infrastructure, and support retrofit and electrification efforts.

Sebastian Peck, partner at KOMPAS VC, said the focus is on addressing barriers to adoption in industrial environments, ensuring that innovations can scale effectively within complex, real-world systems:

We prioritise understanding the operational friction from legacy infrastructure to complex buying cycles that often stall transformation. By solving these real-world constraints, we ensure our investments don't just offer performance gains, but actually scale within the industry.

The fund is expected to support a portfolio of early-stage companies and has already made several initial investments across industrial technology, energy, advanced manufacturing, and data infrastructure. 

SPREAD AI has raised $30 million in Series B funding to support international expansion, enhance its platform capabilities, and strengthen its position across key industries. The round included new investors such as DTCP Growth, IQT, OTB Ventures, Salesforce, and Thesiger Capital, alongside angel investor Christian Schulz. Existing backers, including HV Capital and Nauta Capital, also participated.

The investment deepens the company’s collaboration with Salesforce, combining SPREAD’s product data capabilities with Salesforce’s Customer 360 platform to help address the gap between customer expectations, engineering, and operational execution.

SPREAD’s platform integrates and contextualises product-related data across the entire lifecycle, from design through to production and operations. By connecting structured and unstructured data across enterprise systems, it enables the creation of “Product Twins” that help engineering and operations teams understand dependencies, assess trade-offs, and make decisions more efficiently.

The company works with global manufacturers across industries, including automotive, aerospace and defence, and industrial equipment, and reports that its platform has contributed to faster development cycles, improved troubleshooting times, and significant cost savings.

Commenting on the round, Robert Göbel, co-founder and co-CEO of SPREAD, said:

Working with Salesforce gives us the reach to bring Engineering Intelligence to the industrial companies that need it most: the teams developing, operating or servicing defence systems, vehicles, and industrial machinery. Together, we're making sense of industrial data scattered across a sprawl of legacy systems with our AI-native data foundation that lets engineering, sales and service teams decide and act with speed and confidence. This is Industrial AI delivering tangible impact.

Philipp Noll, co-founder and co-CEO, added that the focus is on helping manufacturers operate more efficiently by providing an AI-native foundation built on existing engineering data and designed to support long-term performance.

The investment comes as European policymakers place increasing emphasis on AI capabilities in strategic industries, with initiatives aimed at strengthening regional leadership in industrial AI. SPREAD is positioning its platform to support manufacturers globally with data-driven operations aligned with European standards for transparency and data protection.

Cleo Labs, a Paris-based RegTech startup specialising in product regulatory compliance, has today announced a €1.5 million funding round to accelerate the development of its AI-powered platform for international product compliance. 

The round was led by Larry Berger, alongside Kima Ventures and Financière Saint-James, as well as several tech ecosystem figures, including Boris Paillard (Le Wagon), Ambre Soubiran (Kaiko), Stéphanie Zolesio (Casino), and Charles Sutton (Datascientest). The round also includes a scout ticket from Accel.

Cleo Labs secured first place at The Pitch by Deel during the regional final at Station F. This victory includes funding from Deel and earns the company a spot in the international final in Dubai.

“Our ambition is to transform regulatory compliance—currently seen as a constraint—into a strategic lever for companies. Thanks to AI, it becomes possible to anticipate rather than react,” says Naomie Halioua, co-founder of Cleo Labs.

Founded in 2023 by Naomie Halioua and Anaëlle Guez, Cleo Labs enables companies to anticipate non-compliance risks by automating international product compliance. 

According to the company, every year, thousands of companies operating internationally face the challenge of navigating a fragmented, constantly evolving regulatory environment specific to each market. It states that launching a simple connected bike helmet can involve more than a hundred regulations, including material standards from the R&D phase, country-specific certifications and testing, labelling requirements, and export-related customs constraints. These are all essential steps before going to market.

Cleo Labs highlights that the cost of non-compliance reaches hundreds of billions of dollars through product recalls, fines, and customs blockages. Despite this, many companies continue to depend on spreadsheets or insufficient tools.

“In this context, the RegTech sector is rapidly accelerating, driven by the proliferation of regulations — Digital Product Passport, CSRD, ESG, and many others. Companies must manage increasing volumes of constraints without compromising competitiveness,” mentions the company. 

In order to address this challenge, Cleo Labs has developed an artificial intelligence platform dedicated to international product regulatory compliance. Its solution enables companies to map, automate, and manage their regulatory obligations across all markets.

The platform is powered by MARIA (Multi-Agent Regulatory Intelligence Architecture), a proprietary multi-agent AI pipeline that continuously monitors more than 25,000 regulatory authorities across 106 countries, including agencies, regulators, and standardisation bodies. The startup claims that each analysis produced by MARIA is validated by legal experts through a human-in-the-loop approach, ensuring the reliability of recommendations.

The platform handles pre-launch mapping by generating a checklist of regulatory requirements per product and per market. It also offers continuous monitoring of regulatory changes with business impact analysis.

Cleo Labs notes that this enables teams to process up to 10× more regulations without additional hires, shorten compliance timelines, and anticipate risks before they affect commercialisation. 

“Today, teams still spend considerable time manually analysing complex and evolving regulations, often using spreadsheets or inadequate tools. With Cleo, we enable them to gain speed, reliability, and processing capacity by automating these processes at scale,” said Anaëlle Guez, co-founder of Cleo Labs

With this funding, the company aims to accelerate its technological development to strengthen platform capabilities and expand its feature set. It will also support commercial expansion in Europe, its primary strategic market, while laying the groundwork for international growth, particularly in the United States. 

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South Africa’s Department of Communications and Digital Technologies spent months drafting a national artificial intelligence policy. It proposed a National AI Commission, an AI Ethics Board, an AI Regulatory Authority, an AI Ombudsperson, a National AI Safety Institute, and an AI Insurance Superfund. It outlined five pillars of AI governance: skills capacity, responsible governance, ethical […]

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Christopher Gray built Scholly to help students like himself find scholarships. He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, became the first in his family to attend college after winning $1.3 million in scholarships to Drexel University, and turned that experience into a mobile app that matched students with financial aid based on their profiles. The app […]

Elon Musk told a federal jury on Tuesday that his lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founders is not about him. “It is not okay to steal a charity, that’s my view,” Musk said from the witness stand in Oakland, California, in his first testimony under oath in the case he filed in 2024. “If we […]

Google has signed a deal allowing the Pentagon to use its Gemini AI models for classified military work under terms that permit “any lawful government purpose,” the company confirmed on Tuesday, one day after more than 580 Google employees signed a letter urging CEO Sundar Pichai to refuse exactly this kind of arrangement. The agreement provides the […]

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are here today because the defendants in this case stole a charity.” That was how Steven Molo, Elon Musk’s lead trial lawyer, opened the most consequential technology trial in a generation on Tuesday morning in an Oakland federal courtroom. Molo told the nine-person advisory jury that without Musk, “there would be […]

Nvidia released Nemotron 3 Nano Omni on Tuesday, an open-weight multimodal AI model that unifies vision, audio, and language understanding in a single architecture designed to power autonomous AI agents on edge devices. The model has 30 billion parameters but activates only three billion per forward pass through a mixture-of-experts design, a ratio that allows […]

Amazon Web Services announced a set of AI-powered business applications on Tuesday that move the company from selling cloud infrastructure to selling the software that runs on it, a strategic shift that puts Amazon in direct competition with Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce in the $300 billion software-as-a-service market. The new products, Amazon Connect Decisions for […]

Amazon Web Services will begin selling OpenAI’s models to its cloud customers, the company announced on Tuesday, one day after Microsoft agreed to end the exclusive reselling arrangement that had given Azure sole access to OpenAI’s technology for the first three years of the generative AI era. “It’s something that our customers have asked for, […]

True Anomaly, the Colorado-based startup that builds autonomous spacecraft for orbital combat, has raised $650 million in Series D funding at a $2.2 billion valuation, bringing total capital raised to $1 billion since its founding in August 2022. The round was co-led by Eclipse and Riot Ventures, with new investors Paradigm, Atreides, G Squared, The […]

For more than two decades, software has defined the trajectory of venture capital. It was efficient, scalable, and, for a long time, unmatched in its ability to generate outsized returns. Investors poured capital into SaaS platforms, marketplaces, and digital infrastructure, confident in a model that prioritized speed, low marginal costs, and rapid growth. I was […]

Málaga-based Magnific, formerly known as Freepik, has relaunched with a new identity as an AI creative platform bringing image generation, video, audio, upscaling, collaboration tools, 3D features, and stock assets into one production environment.

The company reported €196 million ($230 million) in ARR, alongside more than 1 million paid subscribers and adoption by over 250 enterprise clients, including BBC, DeliveryHero, Guess, Mayoral, Huel, R/GA, Damm, and Job&Talent – all without a single round of US VC funding.

“The industrial revolution created the blue-collar jobs and the digital revolution created the white-collar jobs,” says Joaquín Cuenca, CEO of Magnific. “Creatives are about to become more powerful than anyone expected. That’s the no-collar economy. The economy of people who don’t wear a shirt collar. And it’s already underway.”

Founded in Málaga in 2010 by three friends, Freepik began as a search engine for graphic resources. Sixteen years later, the company has repositioned itself as Magnific, bringing together its stock content heritage with generative AI tools for creators, marketing teams, studios, and enterprise users.

Andreessen Horowitz named Freepik the top generative AI web company in Europe by users. Magnific says it has reached its current scale without a single round of US venture capital funding, growing its AI revenue while competing with US-based creative AI platforms such as Midjourney, Runway, and Leonardo.

“We started without any capital, three friends dreaming big,” says Joaquín. “We didn’t know what we’d build. We just knew we weren’t comfortable staying still. We found new things to build. Now we’ll find new stories to tell.”

The relaunch reflects a broader shift in the creative software market, where companies and individuals are moving from separate AI tools towards more integrated creative workflows. Magnific says enterprise teams are already using the platform to generate assets, prototype visuals, and scale content across campaigns and markets.

The company’s Business plan, launched in January 2026 for smaller teams, surpassed 2,000 subscriptions in six weeks and is currently growing by around 150 new teams per week. Magnific also reports that 72% of new creators joining the platform identify as beginners, which it sees as evidence that generative AI is lowering the cost and complexity of producing high-quality creative work.

“In the future, we will make films like we write books,” says Joaquín. “One person with a vision and the tools to execute it.”

Magnific’s platform has already been used across a range of professional creative projects. These include

• The Chronicles of Bones, an original series by Phantom X produced entirely on the platform
• APuma x Manchester City campaign produced by The Berry
• The Patchwright, a sci-fi production from Gossip Goblin
• An Alain Afflelou TV ad campaign produced by Xiaolongbao
• House of David, a series produced by The Wonder Project for Amazon Prime Video
• A Carl’s Jr. campaign with Paris Hilton created by Native Foreign.

The company frames these use cases around what it calls the “no-collar economy”, a term it uses to describe a new class of creators able to produce professional-grade work without traditional studio infrastructure. Rather than presenting AI as a replacement for creative workers, Magnific argues that these tools can expand who gets to participate in creative production.

The new Magnific platform combines image and video models, 4K generation with audio, AI upscaling, real-time collaborative workspaces, 3D and virtual scene tools, and a library of more than 250 million creative assets.

The company says tens of thousands of creators use its collaborative workspace daily.

“People saw fragments: Freepik as stock, Magnific as an upscaler”, says Joaquín. “This is the first time the full system is visible as one platform.”

The new Magnific identity was developed with brand and strategy agency Area17. Its logo, formed from two squares that expand upward, is intended to represent the company’s aim of helping creators make their work “bigger and better”.

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The UK government will develop an AI hardware plan, the Technology Secretary announced today, just days after US AI giant OpenAI paused a major UK data centre project. The announcement of the plan emerged today as Liz Kendall said that AI sovereignty was not about “isolation” and trying to “pull up the drawbridge and go it alone”.

Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute, Kendall said: “We will continue to use the best technology and welcome inward investment because that’s what our public services and economy demand.”

Her comments come amid government fears about the dominance of US tech giants, which control vast amounts of global tech infrastructure and compute power.

The government recently announced the first investments from its £500m VC fund backing domestic AI startups. The government said it would announce the launch of its AI hardware plan at London Tech Week, which takes place in June.

Kendall said the plan would help secure Britain’s capability in chips and the semiconductor technologies that underpin the full AI hardware stack.

The government has already promised to buy emerging chip technology from British companies in a £100m bid to boost growth by supporting the AI sector.

Kendall has previously said the government would offer guaranteed payments to British startups producing AI hardware that can help sectors such as life sciences and financial services. 

Under a “first customer” pledge Kendall’s department will commit in advance to buying AI inference chips that meet set performance standards.

The government is backing British strengths in the parts of the AI stack where it believes the UK has an edge, such as frontier research, compute and infrastructure, while working closely with other countries to shape the global AI ecosystem.

Earlier this month, it was revealed OpenAI’s plans to bring its flagship $500bn AI data centre project to the UK have been put on hold, with the ChatGPT developer citing energy costs and regulatory issues as factors which have halted its plans.