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The 62nd Munich Security Conference opened on 13 February 2026 in Munich, Germany, and this year’s gathering feels different from past editions. For decades, Munich was about jets, troops, and treaties. Today, cyber and AI are no longer peripheral; they are part of the architecture of security itself. Cyber risks, digital infrastructure, and emerging technologies […]
As OpenAI removed access to GPT-4o in its app on Friday, people who have come to rely on the chatbot for companionship are mourning the loss all over the world.
13/02/2026 10:10 PM
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Why top talent is walking away from OpenAI and xAI
As prediction market platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi battle regulators in court, Senate Democrats are urging the CFTC to avoid weighing in, escalating a broader fight over the burgeoning industry.
13/02/2026 08:10 PM
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Join Our Livestream: The Hype, Reality, and Future of EVs
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As the housing market stalls, Zillow’s CEO sees AI as “an ingredient rather than a threat” that can both help the company protect its turf and reinvent how people search for homes.
13/02/2026 05:10 PM
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Nscale secures $1.4B, Eutelsat expands with €975M, and Germany’s scale-driven ecosystem
This week, we tracked more than 65 tech funding deals worth over €3.4 billion and over 10 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe.
Alongside the week’s top funding rounds, we’ve highlighted key industry developments, as well as notable trends in European venture activity, investor moves and emerging sectors shaping the current funding landscape.
If email is more your thing, you can always subscribe to our newsletter and receive a more robust version of this round-up delivered to your inbox.
Either way, let's get you up to speed.
? Notable and big funding rounds
?? Nscale has secured a $1.4M Delayed Draw Term Loan backed by GPUs
?? Satellite operator Eutelsat secures €975M for LEO expansion
?? 25-year-old founder’s Olix nabs $220M for photonic AI inference chips to take on Nvidia
???? Noteworthy acquisitions and mergers
?? London-headquartered tech firm Reward has been acquired in a $230M deal
?? Admiral Group has acquired London insurtech Flock for £80M
?? Uber acquires Getir’s Turkish delivery business
?? Dcycle acquires ESG-X to scale sustainability data management in Europe
? Interesting moves from investors
? Elaia’s Digital Venture Fund V reaches €120M at first close
London-based deep tech startup Stanhope AI has closed a €6.7 million ($8 million) Seed funding round to advance what it calls a new class of adaptive artificial intelligence designed to power autonomous systems in the physical world. The round was led by Frontline Ventures, with participation from Paladin Capital Group, Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund, UCL Technology Fund, and MMC Ventures. The company says its approach moves beyond the pattern-matching strengths of large language models, aiming instead for systems that can perceive, reason, and act with a degree of context awareness in uncertain environments. Stanhope is developing what it terms a…
Zurich-based startup ScyAI has closed a €2
million pre-seed funding round led by AENU and co-led by PT1. The round also
includes participation from unicorn founders David Helgason (Unity), Maex Ament
and Philip Stehlik (Taulia, Centrifuge) through Anti Ordinary Ventures, as well
as Bela Lainck, Robert Levenhagen, Christoph Aufmhof and Stefanie Gerhart
through the angel investor alliance better ventures.
For manufacturers, energy producers and
other organisations with large physical asset portfolios, climate risk has
become an increasingly important operational challenge. Industry data indicates
that natural catastrophes continue to generate significant economic losses,
with a substantial share remaining uninsured.
One reason for this protection gap is that
insurance pricing is often based on broad industry categories and regional
averages rather than company-specific risk profiles. Without detailed
information on factors such as facility construction, mitigation measures or
asset separation, underwriters may apply more conservative pricing. As a
result, companies with strong risk management practices may face higher costs
or retain more risk than intended due to limited visibility into potential
coverage gaps.
In response to these challenges, ScyAI has
developed a platform that creates quantified, auditable risk profiles by
combining operational data with external hazard models. This allows
organisations to demonstrate their specific risk characteristics using metrics
aligned with those used by underwriters.
According to the company, early users of
the platform have reported reductions in insurance premiums alongside improved
coverage terms. ScyAI’s solution is aimed at organisations with significant
physical infrastructure and is designed to help address both affordability and
coverage adequacy, which contribute to the existing protection gap.
Bernhard Rannegger, founder
and CEO of ScyAI, said that physical risks are becoming a central operational
and financial issue for companies. He added that the company’s goal is to help
organisations make these risks measurable and easier to understand, enabling
risk and insurance teams to make more informed decisions.
13/02/2026 03:10 PM
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Score, the dating app for people with good credit, is back
Anthropic has just closed a $30 billion Series G funding round, pushing its valuation to $380 billion and catapulting it into the rarefied ranks of the most valuable private tech companies in the world. The financing was led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and investment firm Coatue, with backing from a long list of global institutions, including D.E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX, alongside strategic participation from existing tech investors. That valuation is roughly double what Anthropic was worth at its last funding round in 2025, when it raised $13 billion at a $183 billion post-money…
If you opened a tech newsletter or even the internet in early 2026 and thought you’d stepped into a dystopian screenplay, or you are the main character in one of Isaac Asimov’s writings, you wouldn’t be alone. Headlines trumpet layoffs, companies blame “AI transformation,” and somewhere in the background, billionaires cheer hot-off-the-press artificial intelligence strategies. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: people are still losing their jobs, while AI gets most of the credit. According to the most recent tracking data, the pace of layoffs in tech remains high in 2026. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that U.S. employers announced…
Nscale, the British hyperscaler engineered for AI, announced it has signed a €1.1 billion ($1.4 billion) Delayed Draw Term Loan backed by the GPU DDTL to purchase GPU infrastructure to deliver service under multiple contracts.
The GPU DDTL was led by funds managed by PIMCO, Blue Owl, and LuminArx Capital Management, with support from additional asset managers and banks. This follows a €146 million Series A in late 2024, and a record-breaking €936 million Series B in Sept. 2025.
Josh Payne, Founder and CEO of Nscale says: “We’re seeing massive demand for AI infrastructure to support the needs of businesses and consumers. This GPU debt financing is a key step in meeting that demand – backing infrastructure that can be delivered faster and more cost-effectively than industry norms, whether that’s large-scale hubs in Norway to smaller metro clusters built for low-latency workloads.”
In 2025 a number of European AI infrastructure and compute-platform startups secured significant funding. Among these is DataCrunch, which secured €55 million in September 2025 to scale its high-performance compute platform from Finland, and NexGen Cloud, a London-based provider that raised €41 million in April 2025 to extend sovereign AI infrastructure services.
Together, these disclosed rounds (totaling €96 million in 2025 outside of Nscale’s recent debt finance) reflect growing investor interest in European alternatives to dominant hyperscalers.
Against this backdrop, Nscale’s latest €1.1 billion GPU delayed-draw term loan to finance GPU infrastructure purchases builds directly on its earlier equity rounds and positions the company to accelerate deployment of large-scale AI compute capacity for enterprise customers across Europe.
Founded in 2024, Nscale is an AI-native infrastructure platform, providing vertically integrated compute, networking, storage, managed software and AI services delivered in Nscale-owned and colocated data centres.
This financing directly supports Nscale while it builds large scale GPU deployments in support of the surging enterprise demand. Its strategically located data centres reportedly harness some of the lowest-cost renewable energy in the world, allowing Nscale to pass these significant savings directly to customers.
The GPU DDTL will be used to further Nscale’s deployment of large-scale AI infrastructure across Europe by allowing Nscale to utilise debt to finance a portion of GPU infrastructure purchases. The loan provides capital for capex spend associated with multiple GPU clusters for customers with executed contracts and additional liquidity for pipeline clusters.
This announcement comes following major milestones for Nscale over the last year – including contracts for multiple large scale compute clusters across the globe, along with expanding its leadership team and the acquisition of Future-tech, a European data centre engineering consultancy – in service of continuing to grow its global footprint.
simmetry.ai, a
synthetic data company working across agriculture, food and industrial sectors,
has secured €330,000 from NBank, the investment and development bank of the
German state of Lower Saxony. The funding was provided through the High-Tech
Incubator (HTI) accelerator programme.
simmetry.ai was
founded in 2024 as a spin-off from the German Research Centre for Artificial
Intelligence (DFKI) by Kai von Szadkowski (CEO), Anton Elmiger (CTO) and Prof. Dr. Stefan Stiene. The company develops a simulation platform that generates
photorealistic, fully annotated synthetic data across multiple sensor
modalities for training computer vision models. Its current focus includes
agriculture, food and industrial computer vision applications.
The platform
supports tasks such as semantic segmentation, object detection, 3D pose
estimation and regression. It is aimed at computer vision engineers and AI
developers working in areas such as robotics, autonomous machinery, quality
inspection and other environments that rely on visual perception under complex
and changing conditions.
simmetry.ai aims to
address what it describes as a key data bottleneck in AI development. According
to the company, a significant portion of effort in building AI models is spent
on data collection and preparation, particularly in industries where capturing
diverse real-world scenarios is costly or difficult. Its synthetic data
approach is intended to augment real-world datasets and improve model
robustness by generating photorealistic images across controlled conditions,
environments and edge cases.
The technology is
being applied to use cases including precision weed control, quality inspection
in food production, and AI-based monitoring in industrial environments.
Commenting on the
company’s focus, Anton Elmiger, said that agriculture was chosen as an initial
sector due to its technical complexity and potential impact. He explained that
improving crop monitoring and management requires reliable computer vision
systems, which are often limited by a lack of diverse training data.
With new funding,
the company plans to develop a scalable platform that enables AI developers to
generate photorealistic, fully annotated training data tailored to specific use
cases, with the aim of reducing the time and cost required to build robust computer
vision models in data-constrained environments.
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ScyAI raises €2 million to bring AI-driven risk intelligence to enterprise real estate and insurance teams
Zurich-based PropTech startup ScyAI has closed a €2 million pre-Seed round to further develop their solution to make AI-powered risk intelligence accessible to companies with large real estate portfolios.
The round was led by AENU and co-led by PT1, also attracting unicorn founders including David Helgason (Unity), Maex Ament and Philip Stehlik (Taulia, Centrifuge), investing through Anti Ordinary Ventures, as well as Bela Lainck, Robert Levenhagen, Christoph Aufmhof, and Stefanie Gerhart through the angel investor alliance better ventures.
“Physical risks are becoming a core operational and financial issue for companies,” says Bernhard Rannegger, founder and CEO of ScyAI. “Our mission is to make these risks measurable, understandable, and controllable – so that enterprise risk and insurance teams can make better decisions and evolve from a cost center to a strategic resilience capital allocator.”
In the context of European PropTech funding in 2025-2026, ScyAI’s pre-Seed raise sits alongside several other notable investments that reflect investor interest in digital tools addressing building data, climate impact, sustainability and financial decision-making.
For example, Telescope (€3.7 million Seed round), an Oslo-based PropTech startup, secured funding in March 2025 to help real-estate owners turn climate and sustainability risk data into actionable, portfolio-level insights for better strategic decisions. In Germany, Lumoview (€3 million Seed) raised capital in June 2025 to accelerate its building analytics technology that rapidly captures and processes physical building data to support energy efficiency and retrofits.
This backdrop shows a pattern of early-stage funding flowing into solutions that help property owners and investors manage climate risk, sustainability performance, and data-driven decision workflows. ScyAI’s round, with its focus on AI-powered risk intelligence for large asset portfolios and insurance teams, fits within this trend of capital supporting digital transformation in real estate risk and asset management
“We are excited to back ScyAI as they build the next generation of AI-native risk management. The combination of strong technical ambition, clear customer ROI, and a massive global market makes this a compelling opportunity, “says Robert Stoecker, Partner at AENU.
ScyAI was founded in 2025 by an insurance and risk tech team: CEO Bernhard Rannegger spent six years in tech and product management at Swiss Re, developing AI risk models and building a joint venture with Palantir that scaled to 50+ enterprise customers (including Siemens, Petronas, and Maersk). As Head of Risk and Insurance AI, Alex Sidorenko brings 20+ years of experience in risk management and insurance management, including from Deloitte, PwC, and EuroChem, and most recently as Group Head of Insurance & Risk at Serra Verde.
For manufacturers, energy producers, and companies with large physical asset portfolios, climate risk has become a critical operational concern. Munich Re reports that 2025 saw approximately €188 billion ($224 billion) in economic losses from natural catastrophes, with insured losses of €91 billion ($108 billion). More than half remains uncovered.
According to the company, this protection gap exists partly because many companies cannot justify the premiums they’re quoted. Insurance pricing is typically based on broad industry categories and regional averages rather than company-specific risk profiles. Without detailed data on a facility’s construction quality, mitigation measures, or asset separation, underwriters price defensively.
Companies with strong risk management end up subsidizing weaker peers in their industry category – or they retain more risk than intended, either by choice or without fully realising the gaps in their coverage.
This is where ScyAI looks to come in. The platform builds quantified, auditable risk profiles by combining operational data with external hazard models, enabling organisations to demonstrate their specific risk quality using the same and more metrics underwriters rely on.
“We are excited to join ScyAI’s pre-seed round as climate risk starts to redefine how real assets are insured and managed. ScyAI enables companies to precisely quantify climate exposure and risk, providing critical infrastructure for a more resilient built world. The team’s exceptional founder–market fit gives us strong conviction in their ability to lead this emerging category,” says Fabian König, Investment Manager at PT1.
Early adopters of the methodology report 30–50% premium reductions – translating into seven-figure savings for companies with substantial insurance programmes – while increasing limits and closing coverage gaps. These savings then fund physical resilience investments, creating a cycle in which better risk management generates measurable returns.
ScyAI is designed for companies with substantial physical infrastructure, addressing both the affordability and adequacy challenges that drive today’s protection gap.
“ScyAI has what is rare in this category: genuine insurance DNA plus product delivery. The team is not building another climate analysis tool, but rather decision-making tools that really work in risk and insurance teams. That is precisely why we believe that ScyAI can set a new benchmark here and shape the market,” says Tina Dreimann, founder and managing director of better ventures.
Companies are often judged solely on share price and valuations that ignore fundamentals such as debt, profitability, and societal impact. There are multi-billion-dollar startups that are haemorrhaging money and have never turned a profit, yet are celebrated for their “unicorn” status.
Reaching that target is the driving force behind many ventures, but it means very little if your company depends entirely on investors to keep the lights on.
Growing slowly, but staying true
Not every startup is founded with the intention of selling up and getting rich. Many teams begin with a genuine desire to solve a problem or make a positive impact, rather than chasing headlines or billion-dollar valuations.
However, while many startups launch with a clear mission, it is difficult to maintain that focus once investors come on board. Investors are putting their money on the line with the expectation of strong returns. The industry norm is a 20 to 40% annual return rate and an exit multiple of up to 100x for early-stage investments, and that inevitably creates pressure to prioritise growth above all else.
When external capital far outweighs revenue, saying no becomes difficult. And if that funding stops, the runway quickly disappears, often taking the original mission with it.
Bootstrapping is a slower process with a higher initial risk, but it allows founders to build businesses that put customers first, rather than stakeholders.
Balancing risk and reward
There is no question that external investment can make the early stages easier. For bootstrapped startups, there is no safety net. Founders find themselves sweating over cents, second-guessing decisions, and worrying about every hire. There is rarely room in the budget for tools or subscriptions that would make day-to-day work easier.
Those hesitations can slow progress, but the long-term time-cost trade-off of bootstrapping is often positive.
Instead of spending energy building relationships with VCs, inflating metrics, or rushing out features designed to extract value, teams can focus on building what users genuinely need. That extra time allows for more thoughtful product development and fewer costly mistakes before features are pushed live.
Will it take longer to establish the business? Yes. But considering that 74% of high-growth digital startups fail due to premature scaling, often by injecting capital before achieving product-market fit, the slower route is frequently the safer one.
Purpose can be profitable
Becoming a unicorn does not have to be the primary goal, but neither does purpose require sacrificing profit.
It is possible to build products that deliver real value while remaining affordable, precisely because there is no pressure to extract maximum short-term returns. That approach tends to foster stronger customer loyalty, higher retention, and more stable revenue over time. High user metrics may look impressive in pitch decks, but they mean little if customers are cancelling as soon as free trials end.
In many cases, prioritising purpose and sustainability leads to profitability faster than expected. Well-known tech giants took anywhere from seven to seventeen years to turn a profit. Some bootstrapped businesses achieve it in a fraction of that time.
That outcome is rarely luck. It is usually the result of deliberate decisions focused on sustainability, discipline, and long-term thinking.
Bootstrapping to a billion: Expert tips for self-funded startups
Prioritise profit first, not growth: Scaling shouldn’t cross your mind until you’ve proven that the business can survive without external capital. Prioritise turning a profit first, even if the numbers are modest, to validate demand, costs, and pricing. Problems are far cheaper and easier to fix when you’re small.
Build a product that retains: In the early stages, you won’t have capital to mask churn, and one bad month could undo all your hard work. Your product must deliver long-term value, or you’ll spend all your time trying to replace lost users rather than addressing the issues causing them to cancel.
Don’t spend without purpose: Don’t rush into implementing new software because your competitors are doing it, and don’t hire simply because there’s a little spare in the budget. One bad decision can make a huge dent, so even seemingly small choices require caution. If it doesn’t directly improve retention, revenue, or customer experience, don’t do it.
Hire your audience: It’s your money on the line, so do you really want to gamble on big ideas without proof of demand? Customer insight is essential, but it’s also costly. The most cost-effective solution is to build a team that is your target audience. They’ve lived with the problems and know precisely how to fix them.
Put your customers first: Without investors pushing for fast returns, bootstrapped teams can take their time to create real value for customers. That strengthens reputation, increases word of mouth, reduces churn, and ensures customers won’t jump ship if a venture-backed competitor offering a lower price enters the market.
British DeepTech startup Stanhope AIhas secured €6.7 million ($8 million) in Seed funding to advance a new generation of AI designed for autonomous systems operating in the physical world.
The round was led by Frontline Ventures, with participation from Paladin Capital Group and Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund, alongside follow-on investment from UCL Technology Fund and MMC Ventures.
“We’re moving from language-based AI to intelligence that possesses the ability to act to understand its world – a system with a fundamental agency,” says Professor Rosalyn Moran, CEO and co-founder of Stanhope AI. “Our approach doesn’t just process words, it understands context, uncertainty, and physical reality.”
In the broader European startup funding environment, capital has flowed into a range of AI and autonomy-related ventures around the time of Stanhope AI’s €6.7 million Seed round.
For example, Allonic (Budapest-based) closed a €6 million pre-seed round in early 2026 to develop a robotic body manufacturing platform. In the broader AI sector, Mistral AI (Paris) secured a record-breaking €1.7 billion Series C in 2025 to expand foundational AI model development, while Nscale (London) raised €958 million for its full-stack AI cloud platform and Helsing (Berlin) closed €600 million to accelerate AI-powered defence software.
Together, these data points show a spectrum of funding in Europe’s DeepTech and AI ecosystem: from early-stage robotics and physical-AI hardware to large infrastructure and software-centric AI rounds.
Against this backdrop, Stanhope AI’s Seed financing reflects continued investor interest in startups building next-generation autonomy and real-world intelligent systems.
“This is very distinct from deep learning,” adds Professor Moran. “This is actually built by us [to be like] memory in a human brain. You get all the good efficiencies and reasoning, but you also get that fundamental thing: agency. It’s a real generative model.”
Founded in 2023 as a spin-out from University College London and King’s College London, Stanhope AI is developing what it calls a “Real World Model” – a framework for adaptive intelligence aimed at overcoming the limitations of large language models when deployed in dynamic, real-world environments.
Stanhope AI was co-founded by computational neuroscientist Professor Moran and theoretical neurobiologist Professor Karl Friston, drawing on research conducted at UCL’s Institute of Neurology. The company’s approach is rooted in the ‘Free Energy Principle’, a neuroscience framework that seeks to explain how intelligent systems minimise uncertainty through continuous perception and action.
From this foundation, the team has developed a brain-inspired paradigm known as ‘Active Inference’, which allows machines to learn and adapt in real time rather than relying solely on static, pre-trained datasets.
Unlike other AI systems that depend on large-scale cloud infrastructure, Stanhope AI’s models are designed to run directly on devices at the edge. This shift from cloud-based AI to on-device intelligence is becoming increasingly relevant as industries seek systems that are more efficient, resilient and capable of operating in communications-denied environments.
According to the company, its lean and explainable models require less data and energy, making them suitable for deployment in autonomous systems, defence technology, industrial automation and embedded devices.
The company’s technology is already being trialled in autonomous drone and robotics applications with international partners, including defence-related use cases.
“The future of physical AI demands systems that can truly adapt in real-time. The team at Stanhope AI are bringing a unique scientific approach to deliver exactly that, and are already proving themselves in high-stakes, real-world applications,” says Zoe Chambers, Partner at Frontline Ventures. “Their pace of execution, from academic research papers to a system that works safely at the edge, is both rare and deeply significant.”
The funding follows earlier backing in March 2024, when the company raised €2.6 million (£2.3 million) in a round led by UCL Technology Fund, with participation from Creator Fund and MMC Ventures. Since then, Stanhope AI says it has progressed from foundational research and prototypes to production-grade systems operating in customer environments.
In contrast to conventional deep learning approaches that rely on extensive retraining cycles, Stanhope AI argues that its Active Inference-based systems can adapt during deployment. This capability is particularly relevant in high-stakes environments such as defence or industrial robotics, where conditions may shift rapidly and unpredictably.
The technology is currently being tested in autonomous drone and robotics platforms, where machines are introduced to new environments and tasked with navigating obstacles in real time.
“We are excited to support Stanhope AI as they redefine the boundaries of machine intelligence,” adds Christopher Steed, Chief Investment Officer and Managing Director at Paladin Capital Group. “Their technology showcases the next evolution of AI – intelligent systems that can operate with autonomy, efficiency, and resilience across real-world domains. This aligns strongly with our mission to back innovations that strengthen and secure critical technologies globally.”
Quantum Systems, the Munich-based powerhouse of unmanned systems, announced a new financing package of a total value of €150 million to support their continued growth and industrial scaling in Europe.
The financing was supported by the European Investment Bank (EIB) who provided a €70 million loan, along with participation from Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank and KfW. It presented at a joint press conference at Quantum Systems’ headquarters in Gilching, ahead of the Munich Security Conference – in attendance was Nadia Calviño, President of the European Investment Bank.
“This financing is a strong vote of confidence in our company, technology, and our vision,” said Jonas Jarosch, Group CFO at Quantum Systems. “It enables us to scale responsibly while remaining firmly anchored in Europe. Security and technological sovereignty start with the ability to invest long-term in critical capabilities.”
Recent EU-Startups reporting highlights sustained investment across Europe’s drone, autonomy and DefenceTech ecosystem in 2025 and early 2026.
Elsewhere in the sector, Poland’s Orbotix raised €6.5 million to advance autonomous defence systems including drone swarming technologies, while France’s Rift secured €4.6 million to develop an on-demand aerial reconnaissance network. Spain’s Fuvex attracted €1.7 million to scale long-range autonomous aerial systems, and Denmark/Lithuania-based Monopulse received €1.12 million to expand NATO-grade UAV production capacity.
In Germany – the same home country as Quantum Systems – Energy Robotics raised €11.5 million to advance autonomous robot and drone inspection software, signalling domestic depth in autonomy technologies beyond pure defence applications. In the UK, Occam Industries secured €3 million to support frontline drone autonomy.
Excluding Quantum Systems’ new €150 million package, these disclosed rounds total approximately €28 million, illustrating a steady flow of capital into European unmanned and autonomous systems.
Within this context, Quantum Systems’ latest financing stands out both in scale and structure, reflecting growing alignment between public financial institutions and private lenders in supporting security-relevant and sovereignty-focused technologies across Europe.
“Drones and aerial intelligence are already indispensable for Europe’s security – from defending Ukraine to protecting critical infrastructure and borders. With this €70 million financing, the EIB is backing a European technology champion in Germany and showing how public and private finance can scale up Europe’s defence capabilities and better protect our citizens,” said Nadia Calviño.
Founded in 2015, Quantum Systems employs up to 1,000 people across Germany, Ukraine, the US, Australia, Romania the UK, and the Baltic states and continues its global growth in hardware, software, and AI across all domains.
The financing reflects recent, targeted adjustments to ESG frameworks, enabling European banking to support security-relevant technologies more effectively.
The company says it sends a clear signal that technological resilience, security, and European sovereignty require not only innovation but also access to appropriate capital. The agreement underscores the growing recognition that critical security infrastructure must be financed within Europe to ensure long-term independence and stability.
“As a banking partner, we are delighted with the successful development of Quantum Systems, which we have been supporting since its early growth phase as its principal bank and also as its first lender,” says Michael Kotzbauer, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Managing Directors of Commerzbank AG.
The €70 million loan marks the EIB’s second investment in Quantum Systems, following its €10 million investment in June 2021, highlighting the bank’s sustained commitment to the company.
“This financing package sends a strong signal about Europe’s ability to develop and scale security relevant technologies with its own capital. At Deutsche Bank, we are committed to supporting companies like Quantum Systems as they expand critical capabilities responsibly – strengthening Europe’s industrial base and technological sovereignty for the long term,” adds Michael Diederich, Global Co-Head of Corporate Banking at Deutsche Bank.
The financing package will support Quantum Systems’ ongoing investments in technology, industrial capacity, and organisational growth, while reinforcing its commitment to European security, resilience, and long-term value creation.
“Through its Venture Tech Growth Financing program, KfW is backing Quantum Systems’ continued growth in Europe. By providing targeted growth capital – including equity via KfW Capital and debt – we are strengthening Europe’s technological resilience and contributing to security-relevant capabilities that are developed, financed, and anchored in Europe. This commitment is an essential building block for Europe’s sovereignty and its ability to act independently in a changing security environment,” shares Melanie Kehr, Member of the Executive Board of KfW.
Following our series of country articles, today we turn our attention to Hungary, a country that has quietly built a resilient and increasingly specialised startup ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe. With strong technical education, competitive operating costs, and a growing base of internationally minded founders, Hungary continues to produce companies tackling complex, global challenges.
In this article, we highlight 10 of the most promising Hungarian startups founded from 2021 onwards that are shaping the country’s next wave of innovation. Presented in alphabetical order, the selection focuses on companies that have demonstrated early momentum through product development, funding activity, and market traction as Hungary’s tech ecosystem moves toward 2026.
Founded in 2021 and based in Szentendre, ABZ Innovation is a drone technology company developing and manufacturing heavy-duty unmanned aerial vehicles for agricultural, industrial, and commercial use. The company focuses on European-built drone systems designed to support precision operations across farming, construction, logistics, and maintenance environments.
Its portfolio includes agricultural spraying and seeding drones, as well as multifunctional platforms for industrial cleaning, research, and custom integrations. The systems are CE-certified and built to operate in demanding field conditions, with modular configurations and varying payload capacities. ABZ Innovation completed its latest funding round in 2026, bringing total funding to €7 million to support further product development and international expansion.
Headquartered in Budapest, Axoflow is a cybersecurity company developing a Security Data Layer designed to automate security data curation for SIEM and analytics tools. The platform collects, classifies, normalises, and routes security telemetry in real time, aiming to improve detection quality while reducing operational complexity.
Built by the creators of syslog-ng, Axoflow integrates pipeline, storage, and AI capabilities into a single layer that manages ingestion, preprocessing, storage, and search. By automating parsing and data reduction, the system is designed to reduce SIEM costs and accelerate investigations while maintaining visibility across security environments. Founded in 2023, the company has raised over €8.5 million in funding.
Founded in 2021 and based in Budapest, denxpert EHS&S software provides cloud-based compliance solutions for environmental, health, safety, and sustainability professionals. The system is designed to help organisations manage regulatory obligations, streamline reporting, and centralise compliance processes across multiple sites and jurisdictions.
The platform combines EHS compliance management, ESG reporting, and sustainability data collection within a single digital environment, supported by a global network of sustainability consultants. By replacing fragmented spreadsheets and manual workflows with structured, audit-ready documentation and continuously updated legal registers, denxpert aims to reduce risk and improve operational transparency. The company completed its latest funding round in 2024 and has raised over €900k.
Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Budapest, Mitzu is a warehouse-native product analytics platform designed to operate directly within a company’s existing data warehouse. The solution enables teams to analyse product usage, marketing performance, funnels, retention, and customer journeys without moving data to external systems.
By processing data where it is stored, Mitzu aims to ensure accuracy, governance, and privacy while reducing infrastructure costs associated with third-party analytics tools. The platform supports self-service analytics for non-technical teams, allowing them to generate insights without SQL while maintaining full traceability to underlying data. To date, they have secured around €450k in funding.
Based in Budapest, Qneiform is a talent intelligence platform focused on financial services and investment markets. The company provides tools to help executive search firms, investors, and financial institutions identify, analyse, and track professionals across sectors such as private equity, hedge funds, investment banking, and venture capital.
The platform combines AI-driven data collection with expert verification to build structured, frequently updated talent datasets. Features include natural language search, market mapping, benchmarking tools, and collaborative project management, enabling users to monitor hiring activity and analyse market dynamics in real time. Founded in 2022, they have secured €3.75 million in funding.
Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Budapest, Redmenta is an AI-powered education platform designed to support teachers in creating, evaluating, tracking, and personalising classroom activities. The system combines AI-assisted content generation with competency tracking tools to provide a structured environment for both digital and paper-based learning.
Redmenta enables educators to design worksheets and lesson plans, analyse student work across multiple formats, and monitor progress through detailed competency profiles. The platform integrates with major learning management systems and complies with GDPR, allowing students to use it without mandatory registration. To date, the company has raised €466k and continues to scale its platform across international education markets.
Founded in 2025 and based in Budapest, Riptides is a cybersecurity startup developing an identity-based security platform for machine-to-machine communication and AI-driven workloads. The company focuses on replacing static credentials with short-lived, verifiable workload identities.
Riptides provides a unified identity layer that issues and rotates identities automatically, enabling secure authentication and encrypted communication between services, infrastructure components, and AI agents. By enforcing identity at the operating system level and integrating with standards such as SPIFFE and cloud-native environments, the platform aims to reduce credential sprawl and improve visibility across distributed systems. To date, the company has raised over €2.7 million as it prepares for broader market rollout.
Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Budapest, scoutlabs is an agri-tech startup developing a digital insect monitoring system designed to help farmers detect pest pressure earlier and more accurately. The company provides solar-powered traps equipped with cellular connectivity that transform traditional manual trap networks into AI-supported monitoring systems.
The platform uses cloud-based artificial intelligence, supported by entomological expertise, to identify and quantify pest populations and send automated alerts to farmers. By enabling more precise intervention and reducing the need for manual scouting, scoutlabs aims to support more efficient crop protection and lower input costs. To date, the company has landed €1.75 million as it expands deployment across agricultural markets.
Founded in 2022 and based in Szeged, Tengr.ai is an AI-driven image generation platform designed for creative and business use. The system enables users to generate high-resolution visuals, customise styles, edit images through text prompts, and apply tools such as face swap and background removal within a single interface.
Tengr.ai positions itself as a commercially oriented AI partner, allowing users to retain ownership of generated content for business applications. The platform offers tiered subscription plans, API access, and advanced editing capabilities, supporting use cases ranging from marketing and branding to digital art production. To date, the company has raised €1 million as it continues to grow its international creative community.
Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Budapest, VRG Therapeutics is a biotechnology company focused on developing miniprotein-based therapeutics and cell and gene therapy technologies. The company combines AI-driven protein engineering with wet-lab directed evolution to design peptide-based medicines targeting mechanisms that are difficult to address with traditional small molecules or antibodies.
Its proprietary platform integrates in silico scaffold selection with laboratory screening to optimise potency, selectivity, and safety. By leveraging its ISEP and CREATe technologies, VRG Therapeutics aims to accelerate the discovery of highly selective therapeutic candidates for complex disease targets. Founded in 2023, they have €5 million to advance its research pipeline and platform capabilities.
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