Customer communication platform Intercom has announced the opening of its next R&D hub in Berlin, marking a major investment in the company’s AI-powered customer service platform and its market-leading AI agent, Fin.

Founded in Dublin in 2011, Intercom builds customer communication and service tools for online businesses. Fin is the centrepiece of the company’s push into fully automated, intelligent customer support.

It’s designed to act as a “Customer Service Agent” rather than just a chatbot, blending automation with human-level understanding and context.

I spoke to Darragh Curran, CTO of Intercom, to learn more.

According to Curran, Intercom has around 28,000 customers across virtually every corner of the planet, with strong concentrations in North America and Europe. 

“Germany is our third-largest and fastest-growing market among the major European countries.”

100 roles up for grabs in AI hub

Over the next year, Intercom plans to hire 100 people across engineering, AI, data science, product, and design roles.  The new hub will serve as a cornerstone for advancing Fin, which the company envisions evolving into a true end-to-end Customer Agent, far beyond traditional customer service boundaries.

“Berlin strikes us as a great city, providing a deep concentration of technical talent, universities that feed that, and a culturally rich, creative scene,” shared Curran.

“Intercom is a very design-oriented company, so Berlin fits that ethos. It’s also emerging as a real hub for AI talent, which is particularly important for us.”

While Intercom’s global headquarters remains in San Francisco, its R&D leadership is anchored in Dublin, making Berlin both geographically and strategically a natural next step in the company’s global expansion.

“It’s close enough to those hubs to collaborate but has its own energy.”

Further, Intercom says it chose Berlin for its unique blend of deep technical talent and creative energy. 

“The city’s dense ecosystem of AI startups, applied research labs, and ambitious practitioners makes it an ideal location to accelerate the company’s AI hiring and innovation efforts.

Berlin is a place where world-class engineers and designers thrive and its optimism and ambition in AI align perfectly with our own goals for Fin.”

In terms of roles, Curran shared;

“We intend to build a holistically complete R&D unit in Berlin — everything from AI and machine learning researchers to product engineers, designers, and managers. A huge focus of our investment is on building Fin, our AI Customer Agent.”

I asked Curran what attracts people to work for Interim. He revealed:

“You’ll join an incredibly talented team — people at the top of their field. If I were an engineer today, I’d want to be at a company doing something meaningful with AI. It’s the best way to learn.

For us, it’s a moment of abundance — we know what we want to build, customers want it, and the opportunity is huge.”

 Intercom’s Fin aims to redefine customer interaction

Fin started as a customer service agent, but according to Curran,

“Our vision is broader — an end-to-end customer agent. Think of it like a concierge that guides you through the customer journey, not just answering support tickets but handling anything from upgrades to refunds to helping you when you’re stuck in a product.”

“We’re betting on this idea of the end-to-end customer agent. Even before we’ve built all the features, customers are already pushing Fin in that direction — that’s a great sign.”

Significantly, Fin’s performance, measured in resolution rate, has improved from around 26 per cent to 65 per cent over two years. Only a few percentage points of that came from model upgrades — the rest came from Intercom's own architecture and continuous experimentation.”

So far, more than 7,000 businesses have adopted Fin, including Berlin-based companies Ostrom and Tado, as well as global leaders such as Anthropic, Vanta, Clay, Personio, Whoop, and Miro.

Fin has quickly become a core growth driver for Intercom, with the company approaching $100 million in ARR and positioning itself as one of the fastest-growing private software firms.

Lead image: Darragh Curran, CTO of Intercom. Photo: uncredited. 

Antidote, a new London-based accelerator, has launched with £2.5 million in funding from Fulgur Ventures, Initial Capital and a group of private angel investors.

Antidote aims to promote growth in the UK and to support entrepreneurs in Britain to build on open technologies, starting with Bitcoin and fintech.

The accelerator provides workspace, funding, mentorship, and policy access, helping founders turn ideas into products that solve real challenges in payments and advance the technologies powering the next internet economy.

Targeting early-stage entrepreneurs, experienced operators and corporate innovators, Antidote wants to empower founders from any background to turn serious ideas into investable, commercially viable businesses. Its programmes support founders working on:

• Financial and payments infrastructure.
• Digital identity and data sovereignty.
• Bitcoin and open-source technologies.
• Institutional and regulatory alignment for fintech innovation.

Ben Cousens, Co-Founder and CEO of Antidote, shared

: “We’re here for entrepreneurs turning new technology into real impact. Whether it’s Bitcoin, fintech, or leveraging AI and online identity, Antidote can offer the capital, community, and credibility to scale.

The UK has the potential to lead this new wave of innovation. We just need to back the people building and focus on solving real problems: that's what matters.”

Cousens contends that the UK has all the right ingredients by way of talent, capital, and legal frameworks to lead this new era of open, financial innovation, but "what's been missing is a credible bridge between founders and institutions, as well as a constructive approach to the 21st Century technologies that will define the economy of the future.

"That’s what Antidote is here to build.”

Through its workspace and network in London’s Hatton Garden, Antidote will offer founders access to:

• A six-month accelerator programme with workspace, workshops, and demo days.
• Direct funding and investor introductions.
• Mentorship from leading fintech, Bitcoin, and venture experts.   
• Community events and policy roundtables with UK regulators and ecosystem partners.

Antidote is working in partnership with organisations such as UK think-tank Bitcoin Policy UK, who were instrumental in the formation of the organisation to enable access to a network that can bridge grassroots innovation with institutional support building trust, clarity, and collaboration across the UK’s growing technology ecosystem.

Richard Faichney, Partner at Taylor Wessing, said:

“We’ve worked closely with Antidote from the start to help build a foundation grounded in trust, clarity, and collaboration.

Their work demonstrates how legal and institutional rigour can enable innovation rather than restrict it. This is a crucial step in strengthening the UK’s position as a hub for credible, long-term technology ventures."

Mayra Tama, Partner at Initial Capital, said: 

“Initial Capital invests in founders and ecosystems that turn Bitcoin’s potential into real-world progress. Antidote is building exactly what the UK needs right now, a credible platform that connects entrepreneurs, capital, and policy to accelerate meaningful innovation.

We’re confident that Ben and the team will help cultivate the kind of companies that define the next decade of fintech and open technology.”

Lead image: Freepik.

AnyTax, the Berlin-based startup building embedded tax solutions for financial platforms, today announced the closing of its €1 million pre-Seed funding round to make tax “truly accessible“, simplifying how platforms integrate tax capabilities and how users experience them.

Investors from the banking world, such as IBB Ventures and BLACKVRST Equity, as well as early-stage VC Heartfelt and prominent angels, including the current Chairman of the Supervisory Board of N26 and the Founder of sevDesk, are participating in the round.

“Banking, payments and investing have all become real-time; with taxes being so closely connected to these aspects of our financial lives, it feels ancient how manual and intransparent everything around taxes still is today,” said Moritz Kuder, Co-founder of AnyTax.

AnyTax’s €1 million pre-Seed round sits within the tax and financial-infrastructure ecosystem – a sector with limited funding, with EU-Startups reporting on only two startups of similar relevance.

In April 2025, TaxDown from Madrid secured €4 million to enhance its AI-powered tax-return platform and broaden its user base. Similarly, in August 2025, Creem from Tallinn raised €1.8 million to develop a cross-border financial-infrastructure layer for AI-native startups, including tax and compliance features.

While these examples highlight growing investor confidence in the automation of tax and compliance processes, Germany has seen no such funding rounds reported in 2025. This positions AnyTax as one of the few Berlin-based entrants addressing the embedded tax-solutions segment, potentially giving it a first-mover advantage within its domestic market.

“Our mission is simple: anyone offering financial services should be able to extend their product offering with seamless, digital tax solutions,” adds Yash Gadiya, Co-founder.

Founded in 2024, AnyTax is building API-first, embeddable tax infrastructure for financial platforms. Its solutions enable companies to seamlessly integrate fully compliant, digital services into their products.

While banking and personal finance have rapidly digitalised over the past years, AnyTax says innovation in tax services has been minimal. Taxes remain disconnected, intransparent, and costly, with taxpayers relying on outdated tools or expensive and understaffed tax advisors.

Financial platforms are in a prime position to solve this problem for their users since they already sit on a wealth of tax-relevant data points. However, the company insists they lack the expertise and capacity to build these solutions themselves.

AnyTax aims to change this by providing pre-built, API-first and fully compliant tax solutions that financial platforms can embed directly into their product suite. AnyTax’s modular and AI-powered tax infrastructure unlocks tax as a new product vertical for any financial platform.

Not only financial platforms benefit: financial advisors and tax advisors can also leverage AnyTax’s white-label digital solutions to offer modern tax services to their clients under their own brand.

“Digital tax solutions are a natural extension of financial services, and users are increasingly expecting them from modern platforms. The pressure to start offering tax solutions to stay competitive, especially as digital tax platforms begin offering financial services themselves, has never been higher,” said Tobias Schimmelpfennig, Investment Director at IBB Ventures.

AnyTax is led by a team of former FinTech operators, tax and accounting professionals, and tax technology engineers, blending industry experience with technical expertise to modernise tax services for financial platforms. ​

According to data from 2024, 57% of Germany’s tax advisors are over 50 and set to retire within the next decade, while fewer young professionals are entering the field. At the same time, FinTech platforms are evolving into all-in-one financial hubs, offering an increasingly comprehensive suite of personal finance products, with tax being the missing piece of the puzzle.

“The team’s tax domain expertise and track record of building highly compliant and secure technological solutions uniquely position them to build and lead in this emerging category,” added Cindy Beckel, Investment Manager at IBB Ventures.

The new funding will be used to expand AnyTax’s tax infrastructure and portfolio of embeddable tax solutions in partnerships with leading financial platforms.

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Eindhoven-based startup CityLegends has secured €1.7 million in funding to expand its street sports and culture platform internationally and advance its technology for connecting athletes, creators, and fans.

The round saw participation from GFR Fund, Dutch Sport Tech Fund, Leisure Fund, and SportInnovator, alongside follow-on investments from existing backers LUMO Labs and LeanSquare.

Founded in 2020 by Jimmy Hermans and Thijmen Verkerk, CityLegends operates a digital platform that connects street sports enthusiasts and urban creatives through media, gaming, and social interaction. Users can share clips, discover local spots, and compete in street Esports challenge while tracking and comparing performance.

Andy Lürling, Founding Partner at LUMO Labs, said:

“CityLegends has had an audacious global vision for their community from the get-go. We are excited to continue to be part of CityLegends’ journey going forward.

"With also new global investors like GFR Fund from San Francisco joining the roster with unmatched expertise in shaping digital communities and cultures, we are confident CityLegends’ impact on the global urban sports community will only grow faster and stronger.”

Founded in 2020 by Jimmy Hermans and Thijmen Verkerk, CityLegends operates a digital platform that connects street sports enthusiasts and urban creatives through media, gaming, and social interaction. Users can share clips, discover local spots, and compete in street Esports challenges while tracking and comparing performance.

Hermans, the company’s CEO, said:

“Urban culture being included in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles are a great testament to the global recognition and appreciation for the athletic and creative abilities of its practitioners.

"Participation already matches traditional sports like football, basketball, and soccer, but the community is still wildly underserved with regards to digital tools. This new investment allows us to expand our platform and unite 200 million urban athletes and inspire 2 billion fans worldwide.”

CityLegends plans to use the new capital to expand into new markets, enhance both its free and paid platform features, and grow its B2B media unit. The company will also develop “culture playbooks”, digital engagement tools designed to help brands and partners connect with urban sports and culture communities.

Paris-based Primaa, a developer of AI software for automated, accurate histological and cancer diagnostics, has extended its financing round to €7 million. The round is backed by the partnership fund between MH Innov’ and Elaia, and SWEN Capital Partners, with additional participation from Super Capital and members of the Wendel family.

Primaa builds AI tools that detect cancer biomarkers and support diagnostic workflows. Cleo Breast (CE-IVDR) assists pathologists by automatically detecting and quantifying key biomarkers in breast cancer, while Cleo Skin, currently undergoing CE marking, addresses skin cancer and is designed to diagnose melanoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and basal cell carcinoma on histological slides.

These tools aim to improve diagnostic reliability and consistency, reduce processing time, and ease routine workloads for pathologists.

As well as saving time and improving accuracy in diagnostics, our tools make life much easier for practitioners. The automatic counting and detection features completely relieve them of certain time-consuming tasks,

said Fanny Sockeel, CEO and co-founder of Primaa.

Cleo Breast and Cleo Skin are in use at leading centres in France, including Institut Curie, AP-HP, and Saint-Joseph Hospital, and are beginning to roll out in Europe (ZAS Laboratory and Liège University Hospital).

Primaa is expanding its portfolio with solutions in development for cervical cancer (in partnership with AP-HP and Medipath) and prostate cancer (Erasme Hospital, Belgium).

The new funding will strengthen the sales organisation for faster European deployment and customer support, and accelerate feature development, including predictive AI models for disease progression and relapse risk. It will also support international expansion, particularly in the United States with planned FDA certification activities.

Qala AG, a Swiss startup redefining how enterprises achieve real-time data visibility and governance at source, today announces it has raised €1.7 in pre-Seed funding to accelerate product development for their source-level data observability and compliance platform.

The round was led by QBIT Capital and Haatch, with participation from Backbone Ventures, ROI Ventures and seasoned SICTIC data security and technology angels.

“AI is really forcing enterprises to better understand the data they have and rethink who is trusted with this valuable resource,” said David Scott Turner, Co-founder and CEO of Qala AG. “Governance and compliance simply can’t sit at the edge anymore, it has to be continuous and operate at source. Trustworthy software starts the moment data enters your system. Qala gives teams clarity and control they’ve never had before.”

The pre-Seed round for Qala AG reflects growing European investor focus on data observability, governance, and compliance infrastructure.

Across the continent in 2025, several startups have secured larger rounds in adjacent domains – including Sweden’s Rerun (€15.6 million Seed) for multimodal data observability in robotics and spatial AI; Lithuania’s nexos.ai (€30 million Series A) tackling AI security and governance; Germany’s Tanso (€12 million Series A) expanding its environmental-compliance platform; and the UK’s Cloudsmith (€21.9 million Series B) advancing real-time observability of software supply chains.

While these ventures differ in application, they share a common trend: enterprises seeking continuous visibility and automated control of data flows and compliance processes. Qala stands out as the only Swiss startup among them, signalling the country’s growing role in Europe’s next generation of data-governance infrastructure.

“We’ve seen firsthand how teams across engineering, security, and compliance scramble to answer the same basic questions – where data lives, how it’s protected, and who controls it,” said Carl Strempel, Co-founder of Qala. “Whether for vendor assessments or security audits, teams lose time and confidence trying to piece that picture together.”

Qala was founded in 2024 by David Scott Turner, Carl Strempel, and Bruno Soares, who have decades of experience building secure, compliant systems across highly regulated industries. Their previous venture, Imburse Payments – a global enterprise payments platform – was acquired by a leading insurance software provider based in the US.

As enterprises consume ever more data and scale across cloud architectures, microservices, and AI pipelines, their data landscape has increasingly become a black box.

According to the company, compliance and engineering teams are struggling to map the full extent of their data, pinpoint how it moves, understand who (or what) can access it, and identify where internal and third-party dependencies are creating security and compliance risks.

By the time highly manual evaluations are completed, the landscape has already changed. This lack of real-time, continuous clarity creates security risks and slows efforts to comply with critical regulations like GDPR, DORA, and the EU AI Act.

“With AI, these questions are more relevant and harder to answer than ever. Qala was built to bring that clarity continuously and automatically,” added Bruno Soares, Co-founder of Qala. “It was from these scars – and the conviction that compliance must shift left – that Qala was born”.

Qala introduces a “shift-left” model for data compliance, delivering real-time visibility, lineage, classification, and policy enforcement at the source, leading to visibility and governance directly from the source code, APIs and pipelines. Qala makes compliance inherent to product and software delivery, without refactoring or workflow disruption, allowing teams to quickly understand their data environment and enforce meaningful changes.

Benefits for compliance and engineering teams

• Live Data Mapping: real-time mapping of data flows and topologies across services and systems.
• Data Lineage: trace origins to downstream systems, understand dependencies, and evaluate impact.
• Automated Classification and Labeling: data fields are automatically detected and classified for sensitivity and regulatory frameworks.
• Policy Enforcement and Continuous Audit: apply guardrails, collect evidence and generate audit trails automatically and continuously straight from the source.

“Qala makes compliance continuous, automatic, and built into the development lifecycle, removing the lag between data creation and compliance insight. The Founders’ deep experience in regulated infrastructure, combined with the timing as data control and governance become central to AI adoption, gives them a unique advantage to define this new category,” added Basel Sbeini, General Partner at QBIT Capital

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Nvidia is making a $1bn equity investment in Finnish telecoms infrastructure firm Nokia, as the two firms undertake a strategic partnership centred on working together on leveraging AI into telecoms networks and data centre development.

The deal will see the US chip giant acquire more than 166 million new Nokia shares, at $6.01 each, giving Nvidia a 2.90 per cent stake in Nokia.

Nvidia's investment marks the latest in a recent spree of equity stake deals undertaken by the US chip giant, as it looks to cement its position at the forefront of the AI race.

Nokia says it will use the funds to speed up Nokia’s 5G & 6G software to run on Nvidia’s architecture as well as increase its presence in the AI & cloud market, according to a statement.

Nokia added: “Nokia and Nvidia have agreed to collaborate on AI networking solutions and explore opportunities to incorporate Nokia’s data centre switching and optical technologies in Nvidia's future AI infrastructure architecture.”

Nokia, well known for its early mobile phone, has pivoted into a telecoms infrastructure company and is now mainly known as a supplier of 5G cellular equipment to telecom providers.

Nvidia has previously announced deals to invest $100bn in OpenAI and made a $5bn investment in Intel.

Nokia's shares were up 15 per cent following the announcement.

iPNOTE, a Spanish-American LegalTech platform that streamlines intellectual property (IP) management, has raised €857k in a Seed funding round to accelerate the development of its AI agent and deepen its presence across Europe and the UK, alongside expansion into the US.

The round was led by AltaIR Capital, with participation from Hi2 Venture Fund and several angel investors, including partners at Erdem Kaya Patent, a Turkish patent law firm, and Founders of high-tech startups like Super, Lokalise, Chainstack and others.

“Companies face enormous challenges when protecting their ideas globally. At iPNOTE, our mission is to remove that complexity by providing a single AI-powered interaction point that automates the annoying ping-pong with IP attorneys,” said Alex Levkin, Founder and CEO of iPNOTE. “This funding will help us bring our enterprise solution to life and prove that IP management can finally be as seamless as any modern SaaS experience.”

This Seed round for iPNOTE fits within a broader upswing in European LegalTech and legal-AI investment during 2025.

Early-stage funding has been active, with Pandektes in Denmark securing €2.9 million to automate legal research and knowledge management, and Augmetec in the UK raising over €2.4 million for an AI system that streamlines regulatory investigations.

Larger rounds have also been observed: Lexroom from Italy closed €16.2 million to expand its generative-AI platform for legal teams, including into Spain, while Sweden’s Legora raised €70.6 million for its collaborative AI suite for law firms. The Netherlands-based Saga also secured over €1.5 million to expand its lawyer-centric AI platform across Europe and Latin America.

Within this environment, iPNOTE stands out as one of the few Spain-linked LegalTech companies focusing specifically on intellectual-property management. Its AI-driven approach to automating global IP filings aligns with a sector-wide trend of embedding AI into legal and compliance workflows, positioning the startup well for subsequent expansion across Europe, the UK, and the US.

“iPNOTE shows how AI can give companies comprehensive global IP coverage without the burden of hiring and coordinating hundreds of lawyers across jurisdictions. By automating the creation, protection, and maintenance of IP rights, iPNOTE saves businesses significant time and resources while making global protection finally accessible,” said Igor Ryabenkiy, Founder and Managing Partner at AltaIR Capital.

The company was founded in 2022 by Alex Levkin, a certified patent attorney with more than 13 years of experience in IP. Before launching iPNOTE, Levkin built an IP law firm providing startups with cost-effective solutions for international markets. His work revealed how difficult it was to scale traditional IP practices. He envisioned iPNOTE as a way to unify fragmented IP processes and connect enterprises with trusted contractors through one platform.

In 2023, creators and companies around the world filed over 23 million intellectual property applications, including patents, trademarks, utility models, and industrial designs. Europe accounted for about 3.3 million filings, marking one of its busiest years for IP activity.

However, the company says IP protection across borders is still manual and fragmented. Companies are required by law to work with local IP providers in every country where they seek protection. This leads to fragmented processes, endless email chains, and high operational costs.

iPNOTE helps enterprises manage thousands of trademark and patent filings across dozens of jurisdictions by unifying IP management in a single platform and allowing users to automate interactions with IP service providers worldwide.

At the core of this innovation is an AI paralegal – a virtual assistant that can simultaneously manage global IP filings and handle up to 90% of routine communications with providers. The AI oversees the entire IP registration workflow: answers attorney questions, reviews deliverables, summarises documents, tracks deadlines, sends follow-ups to providers, monitors progress from filing to grant, and processes payments.

Instead of sending hundreds of emails, IP managers and paralegals interact with a single AI assistant that seamlessly coordinates with patent attorneys worldwide, reportedly turning weeks of manual work into streamlined automation.

When the AI agent encounters a complex request, it escalates the issue to a human for review to ensure accuracy and reliability at every step.

“Protecting intellectual rights and promoting innovations are not mutually exclusive. The solutions are not more government initiatives but technologies from companies like iPNOTE. Our decision to invest is not only based on iPNOTE’s automated IP management systems, but also on its global coverage. iPNOTE’s clients are not only protected in the US and Europe, but also in over 100 emerging and frontier markets,” said Jerry Wang, Founder and CEO at Hi2 Global.

The company has already created a SaaS platform and processed over 2,000 IP cases in 130+ countries, saving millions of IP budget. Half of iPNOTE’s enterprise pipeline comprises large corporations in Europe and the UK, making the region the fastest-growing market.

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Amsterdam-based micro-mobility company Dott has raised an additional $70 million, extending its Series B funding round to over $150 million. The company has previously raised over $228 million including $85 million Series B funding in spring 2021.

Since the merger of TIER and Dott in 2024, the Company has successfully integrated operations to create one of the leading micromobility players in EMEA with operations in over 400 cities and 21 countries, and delivered over €60 million in annual cost savings to become adjusted EBITDA positive.

The investment comes amid intensifying competition in Europe’s micro-mobility sector. Rivals such as Tier, Voi, and Lime continue to scale their e-bike and scooter fleets as cities shift towards low-emission transport. Many operators are also grappling with tightening regulation, city-level tender systems, and growing pressure to achieve profitability.

Henri Moissinac, Co-Founder and CEO of Dott, said:

“We reached a significant milestone for our business in 2021, launching e-bikes to extend our offer with a vehicle that is more familiar to many people and broadens the appeal of our service.

Starting 2022 with additional funding will propel our growth and allow us to offer environmentally friendly travel to more people.”

The company operates under an in-house logistics and maintenance model, in contrast to competitors who rely on third-party services.

Alistair Watson, Head of Strategy Innovation, Private Equity at abrdn, said:

“We felt that Dott is well positioned to be a leader in the category, offering a high quality product that has been recognised with significant growth in 2021, alongside a responsible business model which takes a rigorous approach to minimising its carbon footprint.”

Specially, the company has successfully issued €70 million of senior secured floating rate bonds in the Nordic market, within a total framework of €150 million (the “Nordic Bonds”), and concurrently is raising a minimum of €15 million in preferred equity as an extension of its existing Series D fundraising round (the “Series D Extension”).

The fresh capital will support the rollout of e-bikes, further product development, and expansion into new markets. Dott said the investment would help enhance user experience while maintaining a focus on safety and environmental impact.