Manchester-based startup Voxelo has secured €346k (£300k) in the first close of its pre-Seed round, as it brings a faster, more accessible 3D & AI product content studio to market. The round remains open, with limited allocation available for strategic investors.

Voxelo is supported by Andy Gray, former Director at eBay and co-founder of NFT marketplace KnownOrigin. Gray joins founders Vladimir Mulhem (CEO), Ben McKay (COO) and Roman Bromidge (CTO) to support the company through its next phase of growth as it progresses toward the final close of its pre-Seed round.

“All of this starts from capturing a 3D digital twin with a short video,” said Vladimir Mulhem, CEO of Voxelo. “Our belief is simple: better product content builds buyer confidence – and buyer confidence drives conversion in e-commerce.”

Voxelo’s pre-Seed first close sits within a broader pattern of European funding activity in AI- and 3D-driven digital commerce and content technologies during 2025.

In March 2025, Italy-based Covision Media raised €5 million to scale its automated production of reality-grade 3D models and advance AI-powered 3D tools for large product catalogues, positioning itself at the enterprise end of digital twin creation for brands and platforms. A few months later, London-based SpAItial secured €11.4 million in Seed funding to develop AI systems capable of understanding and generating complex 3D environments, with applications spanning digital twins, gaming and simulation.

Alongside these larger 3D-focused rounds, further continued early-stage investment was seen in AI tools supporting e-commerce operations, rather than content creation directly.

Prague-based DeepScout raised €600k to optimise pricing and assortment decisions for online retailers using AI, while Vienna-based Minimist closed a €350k pre-Seed round to improve workflows for second-hand sellers through machine learning.

Against this backdrop, Voxelo’s pre-Seed raise represents a smaller but more narrowly focused bet on 3D and AI-enabled product content for e-commerce teams, contributing to an estimated €17.7 million in disclosed 2025 funding across adjacent European AI, 3D and e-commerce technology startups.

Co-founder and COO, Ben McKay added: “We’ve built Voxelo in lockstep with our end-users, and what’s clear is that product content creation remains too hard, too costly and too creatively limited when budgets are tight – which they almost always are. When ecommerce and content teams lean on AI tools today, they often encounter hallucinations and content constrained to 2D. Our approach is different.”

Founded in 2025, Voxelo enables retailers and brands to generate high-quality 3D, AR, product imagery and lifestyle content – all from a single uploaded video.

The founding team brings over 50 years of combined experience across ecommerce, AI, and creative tech: Vladimir Mulhem, CEO and former founder of Creative Content Works; Ben McKay, COO and ex-WPP agency, product and consultancy leader; Roman Bromidge, CTO and former co-founder of Kaedim, a 3D AI startup.

At the heart of the platform is UG3D (User Generated 3D) – Voxelo’s proprietary technology that turns a product video into a production-ready digital twin in approximately two hours.

That digital twin becomes the foundation for a wide range of content, including:

• Ultra-realistic interactive 3D
• Augmented Reality (AR) “place-in-space” experiences
• Annotated 3D for product education
• Studio-quality product visuals (beta)
• Lifestyle imagery for campaigns and PDPs (beta)

Roman Bromidge, co-founder and CTO says: “Advanced 3D shouldn’t feel intimidating. We’ve focused on making the experience simple, consistent and reliable, so teams can focus on merchandising and storytelling rather than production complexity.”

With traditional content production pipelines costly, fragmented and slow, Voxelo says that they offer a single, intuitive, low-cost platform designed for non-technical e-commerce teams to scale content creation across multiple formats.

Voxelo is already working with early customers including Cosatto and British Attire, and has received support from Innovate UK, Turing Innovation Catalyst, Exchange Accelerator, and Venture Forward.

“Voxelo makes it easy to capture a digital twin, removing the friction from diverse product content creation,” Ben continued. “With a richer understanding of the product, Voxelo can create new 3D, AR and AI-powered product experiences that build buyer confidence and drive conversion.”

To mark the release of version 2.0, Voxelo is offering 10,000 free credits – equivalent to 10 3D digital twins and AR experiences – and invites people to join its AI beta programme.

Andy Gray, Advisor and Investor shares: “Product experience in e-commerce is ripe for disruption. Consumers deserve more than a carousel of flat images. When I first interacted with Voxelo’s user-generated 3D models, it was a lightbulb moment – and I think we’re just at the beginning of what this technology can unlock.”

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Nuremberg-based ZOHO.VC, the new venture capital arm of ZOLLHOF – Tech Incubator, today announced the successful First Closing of its inaugural fund – with a target volume of €10 million – already securing securing 70% of the target fund volume ten months ahead of the final closing.

The focus of the fund, which currently sits at €7 milllion, is on early stage technology-driven startups that benefit from a close connection to the ZOLLHOF ecosystem.

Dennis Kirpensteijn, General Partner at ZOHO.VC, commented on the milestone: “Securing 70% of our capital by the First Closing is a massive vote of confidence from our LPs. They support us not only with capital but with their own networks, expert knowledge across a variety of industries and technologies, and immense entrepreneurial experience. It also shows that our approach – being deeply rooted in the operational startup ecosystem – strikes a chord in today’s market.”

Analysis from 2025 and 2026 shows sustained activity around early-stage, technology-driven venture funds across Europe, providing relevant context for ZOHO.VC’s first close.

The Footprint Firm announced a €76 million fund focused on early-stage climate and DeepTech companies across Northern Europe. Germany remains particularly active: Munich-based Vanagon Ventures secured €20 million to address the pre-Seed DeepTech and AI gap, while Ananda Impact Ventures completed a €73 million first close for its impact-focused technology fund.

At a pan-European level, U2V launched a €60 million vehicle to back pre-Seed and Seed DeepTech startups emerging from technical universities. Southern Europe has also seen new early-stage capital formation, with Milan-based Step Fund raising €30 million for Seed-stage tech startups and Madrid-based Mission unveiling a €35 million pre-Seed fund following Demium VC’s rebrand.

Taken together, these announcements account for approximately €294 million in newly raised or first-close capital directed towards early-stage and adjacent technology sectors, situating ZOHO.VC’s €7 million first close within a broader pattern of continued European investor commitment to pre-Seed and Seed-stage technology investing, including multiple funds originating from Germany.

“We are not just financiers; we are partners from day one. Launching its own venture capital fund is the logical next step for ZOLLHOF – Tech Incubator, ensuring it can continue to provide ideal conditions for the growth and scaling of technology startups well into the future,” adds Dennis.

ZOHO.VC is a VC fund born out of the ZOLLHOF innovation center. The fund invests in technology startups in the pre-Seed and Seed phases. Through its combination of capital, technical understanding, and a network of corporate partners, tech experts, and co-investors, ZOHO.VC looks to offer startups more than just financial support.

The VC is led by Dennis Kirpensteijn, Benjamin Bauer, and Nicolas Sievers. The team is further supported in its investment decisions by Dr. Judit Klein, Head of Startups at the ZOLLHOF Tech Incubator.

The investment strategy comprises a mix of startups emerging from its own incubation programme – recently designated a “Startup Factory” by the German Federal Government – as well as co-investment opportunities from its investor network.

This strategy is already yielding results: parallel to the fundraising process, the investment team has already added five startups to its portfolio. A highlight is Merge Labs, the new venture from Sam Altman and FAU alumnus Alex Blania, whose funding round was led by the OpenAI Startup Fund. 

Due to steady deal flow and fast growth, partners Benjamin Bauer and Dennis Kirpensteijn, together with Principal Nicolas Sievers, plan to increase the fund volume beyond the initial target during 2026.

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The Footprint Firm has completed the final closing of Footprint Fund I, an Article 9 €76 million venture fund. The fund focuses on early-stage deeptech companies in the green transition in Northern Europe.

Footprint Fund I is the first fund in The Footprint Firm’s venture platform and has already invested in 20 startups, including Reel Energy,  Kvasir Technologies, Nordic Salt Cycle, FoodOp, and Rock Flour Company. Footprint Fund I invests in areas such as biotechnology, energy, AI and climate technology, circular manufacturing, the built environment, CO₂e reduction, and food systems.

The fund is supported by The Footprint Firm’s team of 45 specialists, who work actively with the portfolio companies in areas including commercialisation, regulation, scientific validation, scaling, and partnerships. “The synergies between our advisory business and The Footprint Fund I are already visible.

"Our business model allows us to invest significantly more hours and expertise into all investment stages than the traditional VC-setup. That is exactly what is needed in the sustainable innovation space, which adds deep environmental, regulatory and transformational requirements to the classic investor toolbox. We are confident that that’s the way to ensure both vital impact and healthy returns”, adds co-founding Partner Christian Sparrevohn.

The fund is backed by a group of leading Danish institutional investors and family offices, including North-East Family Office, EIFO, Realdania, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, TryghedsGruppen, Lauritzen Fonden, Nordea-fonden, Novo Holdings, and Velliv Foreningen.

The fund invests in early-stage companies that address key sustainability challenges while also having the potential for competitive financial returns.

The completion of the fundraising marks an important milestone in The Footprint Firm’s development as an investment platform.

“The closing of Footprint Fund I reflects a strong alignment with investors who value disciplined investing, deep sustainability expertise and long-term partnership. The dialogues we’ve had throughout the fundraising process have helped sharpen both our platform and our ambitions. This positions us well as we continue to scale our investment activities and prepare for future funds built on the same integrated model” said Jakob Mathias Wichmann, co-founding partner and Managing Partner of the Footprint Fund.

“With Footprint Fund I, we are doubling down on our mission to accelerate what is necessary,” said Anna Søndergaard, co-founding Partner and CEO at The Footprint Firm.

“The future worth building will not arrive by chance; it must be ventured into. Europe has the talent, research depth, and industrial base needed to build category-defining climate solutions, and we want to contribute to the success of these teams with funding, ecosystem support and our expertise and network.”

UK-based Vennre, a wealth creation platform, has raised $9.6 million in a pre-Series A funding round through a hybrid equity and debt structure. The round was co-led by Vision Ventures and anb seed Fund, with participation from Sanabil 500, Ace & Co, Plus VC, and a group of strategic individual investors from the private banking, technology, and entrepreneurship sectors.

Vennre is designed to give high-earning professionals access to curated investment opportunities traditionally reserved for institutional investors and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. The platform offers vetted deals across asset classes, including real estate, private equity, venture capital, and private credit, with investment minimums starting at around $5,000 and options that include Sharia-compliant opportunities. It combines financial expertise with technology to streamline access to alternative investments, with an emphasis on due diligence, transparency, and a user-friendly experience.

The company aims to reduce traditional barriers to private market investing, such as high minimums and complex structures, and enable so-called HENRYs (High Earners, Not Rich Yet) to build diversified portfolios and pursue long-term wealth creation with greater confidence.

Ziad Mabsout, CEO and co-founder of Vennre, noted that many high-earning professionals in the region have achieved financial success but lack effective tools to compound it. He added that Vennre is focused on long-term wealth creation rather than transactional investing, starting with curated private market opportunities and evolving into a comprehensive wealth platform built on discipline, trust, and alignment.

Vennre plans to use the capital to expand its client base, launch new platform features, and strengthen its presence in Saudi Arabia, in line with ongoing financial sector liberalisation and fintech growth.

Rainbow Weather, a next-gen climate tech startup specialising in hyper-localised short-term weather forecasting, announced it has raised $5.5M Seed funding round. 

Rainbow Weather has developed a real-time, AI-driven weather intelligence platform that fuses satellite imagery, radar, meteorological stations, and even smartphone sensor data to deliver highly precise, minute-level forecasts and severe-weather detection. The company now sells its data both through a consumer app and directly to enterprises and other weather providers, positioning itself as an infrastructure layer for a world of increasingly volatile climate conditions.

The company was founded in 2021 by Belarusian serial entrepreneurs Yuriy Melnichek and Alexander Matveenko. Melnichek previously built AIMatter, a neural-network platform later acquired by Google, as well as video app Vochi (acquired by Pinterest) and fashion tech startup Wanna (acquired by Farfetch). Matveenko, meanwhile, founded AI mapping company MapData, which he sold to Mapbox in 2017.

I spoke to the co-founders to find out more. 

From colleagues to the hailstorm that exposed the limits of traditional forecasting

Melnichek and Matveenko have known each other since childhood and have worked together previously. Throughout, they kept the shared ambition to eventually build a startup together as co-founders.

Melnichek recalled, “Some time later, I approached Matveenko and said: “How about we finally do it?” They started thinking about something at the intersection of maps and weather."

For Melnichek, it was personal. 

“I was living in Switzerland and hiking in the Alps, using an app called RainViewer, which I really liked. I was literally hiking behind a rain cloud. The app showed that the cloud would keep moving and I would stay dry.

But then I suddenly felt something hitting my head. It was hail, about the size of grapes. The rain cloud reached the mountains, stopped, intensified, and started hailing.

The app didn’t account for elevation. It didn’t know there was a mountain, so it relied only on past observations, not on how the terrain would affect the cloud.”

That was the moment he realised: existing models don’t really understand how weather systems evolve in real time in complex geography.  S

o the idea to use machine learning, elevation data, and multiple sources of real-time input to predict how rain and other weather phenomena actually develop, not just where they were historically, was born. How Rainbow builds forecasts from space, radar, and smartphones

Rainbow Weather’s core product is a hyper-accurate minute-by-minute weather forecasting app powered by AI and machine learning.

It delivers four-hour precipitation reports tailored to the exact moment a request is made. 

For instance, if a user checks weather at 3:51 am, the app will provide precise predictions through 7:51 am. The platform updates every 10 minutes. It also offers spatial resolution down to a single square kilometre (0.62 mi²). All of these features set the product apart from major competitors, including The Weather Company (formerly owned by IBM) whose forecasts refresh every 15 minutes and extend up to 7 hours ahead. 

The team started with rain prediction, and then expanded to other weather parameters. Initially, Rainbow was built as a consumer weather app with AI-based rain prediction. But the team soon discovered that the forecast's quality is limited by the quality of the input data. 

“If you put garbage in, you get garbage out,” shared Melnichek.

“So we started investing heavily in data acquisition and data fusion. We work with satellite imagery, which captures cloud systems from above across multiple infrared and visible spectral bands. You can roughly detect where precipitation is happening, but it’s not very precise.

Then there are meteorological radars – the big round radomes you often see near airports. They work like microwaves: they emit radio waves that bounce back from water particles, so they detect rain extremely well, but only what is already falling, not what is forming behind the front.”

Rainbow.ai also gathers ground weather station data, and started collecting air-pressure data from smartphones. 

“Modern phones have barometers, originally introduced to measure altitude changes for fitness tracking, like counting how many stairs you walk, explained Melnichek.

But these sensors are very accurate, and pressure changes are highly correlated with weather dynamics. Rainbow Weatehr currently ingests data from more than 1,000 meteorological radars worldwide, multiple satellites, ground stations, and mobile sensors. Each source has its own processing pipeline. One central system then blends the outputs using neural networks.

Why Rainbow replaces batch forecasting with continuous atmospheric streaming

I wanted to understand why real-time data was possible with such a large data set.

According to Melnichek:

“Crucially, we do not operate in batch mode but as a continuous stream: as soon as a new satellite frame, radar scan, or pressure update arrives, it is immediately ingested and processed.

Each data source has its own pipeline feeding our neural networks, which continuously blend these inputs to produce the most accurate real-time representation of the global atmospheric state, updated every few minutes.”

Beating legacy models on timing, not probabilities

Although there are a number of prominent players in the market, including AccuWeather, Apple Weather, and The Weather Company, Rainbow Weather asserts that the current forecasting methods are outdated. 

“Many legacy forecasting providers rely on optical flow for short-term precipitation forecasting. That’s a fast but simplistic method that treats clouds as shapes in motion, without any understanding of atmospheric physics,” explained Matveenko.

“A second category of services uses large-scale mathematical models that do incorporate physical principles, but they’re so cumbersome and slow that they can’t respond quickly to real-time weather changes.”

Rainbow Weather, by contrast, uses advanced machine-learning models to merge a vast array of high-resolution data to generate predictions.

“Mixing heterogeneous data allows us to eliminate the typical errors inherent to each individual source. This, in turn, helps us to feed cleaner and more accurate data into our models and achieve a much more precise forecast. And thanks to the optimised performance of our AI models, we can make this forecast much faster than our competitors,” Matveenko added.

From rain app to real-time environmental intelligence

Specifically, Rainbow.ai focuses on timing: the exact start and end of precipitation events.  “On the consumer side, we deliberately do not show probability distributions, because most people do not understand them correctly,” shared Melnichek.

“There was even a Stanford study showing that users misinterpret “30 per cent chance of rain” in completely different ways – some think it means 30 per cent of the hour will be rainy, others think it means it will rain in 30 per cent of the area.” 

For B2B clients, the company, of course, provides full probabilistic fields, confidence levels, and uncertainty bands.  “But our competitive advantage is very precise nowcasting – what will happen in the next minutes and hours, not in seven days.”

The company has also expanded into fire detection, a move inspired in part by the severe wildfires Melnichek has witnessed in Cyprus, where he lives.

“We realised that we already process satellite imagery for the whole planet every few minutes, so why not extend our pipeline to detect thermal anomalies and smoke patterns that indicate fires?” he says.

“We don’t need to build a completely new infrastructure — we just add another model on top of the same data streams. The philosophy is the same: fast detection, continuous monitoring, global coverage.

“With climate change, wildfires, heatwaves, and extreme weather are becoming more frequent. We want Rainbow to become a general real-time environmental intelligence system, not only a rain app.”

The ‘wow moment’ driving organic growth

As of today, Rainbow Weather has reached over 1 million installs and over 100,000 active users. The app's strongest growth driver is word of mouth.

According to Melnichek: 

"When people experience that the rain starts exactly when the app says it will start, and stops exactly when it says it will stop, they remember it.

They compare it with the default weather apps on their phones, which can sometimes show sunshine while it is already raining outside. This “wow moment” creates very strong recommendations to friends and family.”

Opening the black box to transparent analytics

The team also runs weatherindex.ai, an open-source tool that evaluates the accuracy of short-term precipitation predictions from providers like AccuWeather, Vaisala, and The Weather Company in real time. It pulls live data from public APIs and compares forecasts with verified airport weather reports using standard metrics such as accuracy and F-score (a measure of predictive performance).

Melnichek says the decision to build an open benchmarking platform was driven by a belief that weather forecasting, like AI, should be judged through transparent, comparable, and publicly verifiable performance metrics.

"In the AI world, we are used to open benchmarks. Everyone compares models — GPT, Claude, Gemini, open-source LLMs — and you can see how they perform on standard datasets.

In weather, it is very different. Many providers explicitly forbid you, in their license agreements, from comparing their data with competitors’ data. That felt very outdated and very defensive to us.”

So the company decided to do the opposite.

It built Weather Index to compare different weather providers against verified ground truth, mainly using airport meteorological stations. Airports have high-quality instruments and human meteorologists who validate observations, so this gives a very reliable reference.

“We buy data from different providers, run the same evaluation across all of them, and publish the results openly. You can see which provider is more accurate in which country and for which forecast horizon. For example, for one-hour rain timing, we perform best in much of Europe — the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, the Baltics, and Turkey. In North America,

The Weather Company performs extremely well. In Japan, AccuWeather is very strong. In Southeast Asia and Australia, we are again among the leaders. We believe weather data is critical infrastructure, and critical infrastructure should be evaluated transparently.”

The startup was backed by a syndicate of investors, including Yuri Gurski, founder and president of Flo Health, the first purely digital consumer women’s health app to achieve unicorn status.

With the new funding, the startup plans to go beyond precipitation forecasts by incorporating additional weather parameters, extend the forecasting horizon from 4 hours to 24 hours, and grow its presence in the B2B segment of the weather-forecasting industry, which is projected to reach $4.07 billion by 2030. 

In the long term, Rainbow AI wants to build the most accurate real-time environmental intelligence platform in the world. Not just a weather forecast, but a continuously updating digital representation of what is happening in the atmosphere and on the ground – a system that helps people and businesses stay safe and make better decisions in an increasingly unstable climate.

Madrid-based STAMP has raised €4 million in a funding round led by Dozen, with participation from EBISU Digital, Barça Innovation Hub, and several international business angels, including Andreas Mihalovits and Thibaut Courtois through his investment arm NXTplay.

In addition to private capital, the company has secured public grants from the Spanish Ministry of Industry and Tourism, the City of Valencia, the Community of Madrid, and the City of Madrid, reflecting alignment with public initiatives focused on digitalisation, tourism, and the modernisation of commerce.

STAMP addresses long-standing inefficiencies in traditional VAT refund systems, which are typically based on post-purchase reimbursements, intermediaries, and complex processes. Its technology applies tax benefits directly at the point of sale, digitally integrating them into the payment experience in compliance with European regulations.

The model adapts to each country’s fiscal framework. In markets such as Italy, where regulation allows, purchases can be made VAT-exempt at checkout. In others, including Spain, VAT is included on the invoice, but customers receive an immediate discount equivalent to the VAT amount at the moment of payment. STAMP then validates transactions, ensures traceability, and manages tax recovery, including fraud scenarios, enabling merchants to reimburse tax authorities without assuming fiscal risk.

By reducing payment friction and simplifying access to Tax Free benefits, the platform allows merchants to use Tax Free as an effective commercial tool, supporting higher conversion rates, larger basket sizes, and improved shopping experiences for international customers. Through its integrated Tax Free and payments platform, STAMP connects European retailers with global travellers and acts as a strategic marketing and payments partner for WeChat and Alipay.

“Tax Free, as applied until now, has operated more as an administrative procedure than as an automatic consumer right. When that friction is removed, customer behaviour changes, and merchants regain control over both the shopping experience and their margins,” said Abel Navajas, CEO of STAMP.

STAMP delivers, for the first time, a real Tax Free model that does not require regulatory change, provides maximum security and prevents fraud.

According to Navajas, the funding round strengthens the company’s ability to execute its roadmap and advance its mission of enabling merchants in Southern Europe to better serve international customers by streamlining payments and turning Tax Free into a tangible purchase incentive.

The funds will be primarily used to support expansion in Spain, Italy, and Portugal, and to further develop the company’s product portfolio, with a focus on advanced international payment solutions and the launch of a new AI-based product.

“With Footprint Fund I, we are doubling down on our mission to accelerate what is necessary,” said Anna Søndergaard, co-founding Partner and CEO at The Footprint Firm. “The future worth building will not arrive by chance, it must be ventured into. Europe has the talent, research depth, and industrial base needed to build category-defining climate solutions, and we want to contribute to the success of these teams with funding, ecosystem support and our expertise and network.”

The Footprint Firm was founded in 2019 as a leading Danish sustainability strategy advisory and venture capital firm. The Footprint Firm advises private companies, investors, public institutions and research institutions incl, among others, Altor Equity Partners, Axcel, Danske Bank, EQT, Lundbeck, Polaris Private Equity and Ørsted.

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One of the UK’s most hyped AI startups has nearly doubled its valuation to $4bn in just 12 months, following a $200m funding round.

The $200m Series E funding round in Synthesia was led by existing investor Google Ventures, Google's VC arm, with participation from Evantic, the venture fund founded by former Sequoia partner Matt Miller, and Hedosophia. 

Other existing investors NVentures, Nvidia’s VC arm, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), PSP Growth, Air Street Capital, and MMC Ventures, also participated. As part of the deal, Synthesia, which makes AI-powered corporate videos, is allowing employees to sell a percentage of their shares through a partnership with Nasdaq.

Synthesia, founded in 2017, has become something of a talismanic company in the UK’s burgeoning AI scene. It was last valued at $2.1bn in January last year, following a $180m funding round.

The startup develops digital avatars which are deployed for corporate clients, such as to help explain health and safety in the workplace. The startup plans to use the funds on building new interactive AI agents for companies to use for employees and marketing videos, according to The Times. Synthesia's customers include SAP and Microsoft.

Headquartered in London, Synthesia also has offices in New York, Munich and Zurich.

Victor Riparbelli, Synthesia’s co-founder and CEO, said: “Synthesia was founded on two core beliefs: first, that AI will bring the cost of content creation down to zero. And secondly, that AI video provides a better, more engaging way for organisations to communicate and learn.

“This funding round is about scaling that vision. We see a rare convergence of two major shifts: a technology shift with AI Agents becoming more capable, and a market shift where upskilling and internal knowledge sharing have become board-level priorities.

"We intend to build the defining company at that intersection, by combining our know-how in AI video with our ability to build and integrate AI technologies into products and services that solve real business needs.”

For years, PR success was measured in coverage. One strong article, one respected outlet, one moment of visibility. Founders collected logos, screenshots, and traffic spikes and considered the job done. We’re noticing that this model no longer holds. As discovery increasingly happens through AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, PR is undergoing a fundamental structural shift.

Visibility alone does not compound anymore. What compounds is retrievability, and retrievability requires something far more intentional than isolated press hits. PR is moving from coverage to corpus. Traditional PR treated each media mention as a standalone win. Today, what matters is the accumulation of coherent and interconnected content that AI systems can repeatedly recognise, contextualise, and trust. Coverage is short-lived and often driven by vanity metrics. A corpus, by contrast, is durable. It functions as a discovery infrastructure rather than a campaign. It replaces a press-centric mindset with a web-wide presence built over time.

This distinction matters because AI systems do not remember articles the way humans do. They learn through patterns. A single high-profile article with vague positioning does little to help a language model understand what category a company belongs to, what problem it solves, or why it matters. When each article frames the company differently, using inconsistent language or shifting narratives, classification becomes harder rather than easier. Random press hits create noise, and noise does not train models effectively.

What compounds instead is repetition with intent.

This is where the difference between visibility and retrievability becomes critical. Visibility is being seen once. Retrievability is being surfaced repeatedly in response to relevant prompts. When users ask AI tools to recommend startups, vendors, or solutions in a given domain, the systems do not scan headlines. They rely on learned associations drawn from trusted sources and recurring entities that appear consistently across contexts. A startup that exists only as a fleeting mention may achieve momentary visibility, but it will not be retrievable.

An AI-readable PR footprint is not accidental. It is designed. It emerges from consistent founder positioning, stable category language, and repeatable explanations of what the company does and why it exists. It is reinforced through expert commentary, interviews, and bylined thought leadership that echo the same core narrative across different outlets. Over time, these signals form a structured body of knowledge that AI systems can confidently surface.

In this environment, consistency matters more than virality. Virality is unpredictable and often short-lived. Consistency compounds. A single viral article may drive attention for a week, but a coherent narrative reinforced over months or years builds authority. In AI-mediated discovery, authority is what wins.

You don’t need to be everywhere: You need to be recognisable

That recognition comes from repeating the same core message across funding announcements, founder interviews, expert quotes, and opinion pieces, rather than reinventing the story each time. This is how both markets and machines learn who you are.

For founders, this requires a shift in mindset. Instead of asking what the next PR announcement should be, the better question is what they want to be known for and how that narrative can be reinforced consistently over time. PR in 2026 should be designed in content clusters rather than isolated announcements. Each article becomes a node in a larger system, contributing to a growing corpus rather than existing as a one-off event.

PR is no longer just about getting coverage. 

It is about building memory. In a world where AI increasingly mediates discovery, the startups that succeed will be those that intentionally shape how they are understood, classified, and retrieved. The future of PR is not about being louder. It is about being clearer, more coherent, and durable enough to stand the test of time and train the systems that increasingly decide who gets found.

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London-based MyARC, a platform that enables fitness creators to train their communities at scale, has secured more than $2 million in funding, with participation from Araya Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Techstars, and G Fund. Alongside the funding, the company has launched a next-generation version of its platform aimed at supporting the operation, monetisation, and growth of creator-led fitness businesses.

Founded by Peter Monteza, together with co-founders Nikhil Shah and Arohan Subramonia, MyARC seeks to address structural limitations in the fitness industry, where creators have traditionally relied on static programmes or one-to-one coaching models that are difficult to scale. The platform is designed to help creators deliver personalised training and nutrition plans that adapt to individual user goals, lifestyles, and preferences while remaining scalable.

The platform supports this approach through tools that automate the personalisation of training programmes, recipes, and nutrition plans, enable the launch and management of branded fitness applications without coding, and support subscription-based monetisation models that combine challenges, workouts, and meal planning. Automation features are also used to facilitate ongoing community engagement and operational efficiency.

The traditional online fitness model has left creators trapped between low-value generic products and unsustainable personal coaching. With this platform, they can scale their impact and income without sacrificing quality,

explained Monteza.

Over the past two years, MyARC reports that creators using the platform have generated material revenue, with several reaching seven-figure earnings and average annual creator income in the high six-figure range. The platform supports a global user base with thousands of daily active users, who together have completed hundreds of millions of minutes of training.

The funding will be used to support continued product development, expand creator tools, and advance the company’s global growth plans.

Orbital, a London-based AI platform for real estate law, has raised a €50 million ($60 million) Series B funding round to support continued US and UK growth and expand adoption across the real estate transaction ecosystem.

Led by Brighton Park Capital, the round also featured new investors including REV, the venture capital arm of RELX; The LegalTech Fund; Moderne Ventures; and Grosvenor Group. Existing investors including JLL Spark, Outward, and Seedcamp also participated in the round.

On the news, CEO and co-founder Will Pearce comments: “Real estate is, by far, the world’s largest asset class. Yet the legal work that underpins it remains slow, fragmented and largely manual: opaque work that in many cases hasn’t meaningfully changed since the 19th century. Orbital is changing that with AI purpose-built for real estate, making transactions more transparent and reliable for all parties.”

Across 2025 and early 2026, funding activity shows steady capital flowing into AI-driven LegalTech, mostly at early stages, with a small number of larger growth rounds.

In Sweden, Legora raised a €70.6 million Series B to scale its collaborative AI platform for law firms and in-house legal teams, representing one of the largest European legal-AI rounds of the period.

Earlier-stage activity includes Switzerland-based Ex Nunc Intelligence, which secured €1.8 million pre-Seed to develop its AI legal intelligence platform; Italy’s Lexroom, which closed a €16.2 million Series A to expand its generative-AI legal services; Amsterdam-based Saga, which raised €1.5 million Seed for lawyer-focused AI productivity tools; Denmark’s Pandektes, which secured €2.9 million Seed to automate EU legal research; and Madrid-based iPNOTE, which raised €857k Seed to expand its IP-focused legal platform.

Together, these rounds account for approximately €94 million in disclosed funding, excluding Orbital. Against this backdrop, Orbital’s €50 million Series B stands out as one of the larger growth-stage raises in European LegalTech during this period, indicating increasing investor appetite for specialised, domain-specific legal AI platforms as the sector matures beyond predominantly seed-stage financing.

“This funding round brings together investors and operators who understand these challenges firsthand and share our conviction that the real estate legal category is ready for transformation. With their support, we’re accelerating our US expansion and extending Orbital’s potential across the full real estate transaction lifecycle – fundamentally improving how work gets done for the professionals who operate within it, and for everyone who derives value from real estate,” adds Pearce.

Founded in 2018, Orbital is an AI platform purpose-built for real estate law, innovating the transaction process for the world’s largest asset class. Co-founded by Will Pearce and Ed Boulle, Orbital supports 200,000 residential and commercial real estate transactions annually for more than 5,000 property professionals across leading law firms, in-house legal teams, developers, title companies and REITs.

Orbital has raised €63 million ($75 million) in funding to date, with customers including AM Law 100 and Magic Circle law firms as well as multinational corporations across the real estate ecosystem.

Kevin Magan, Partner at Brighton Park Capital who will be joining the board, added: “We recognised immediately that Orbital is targeting a critical gap in the legal AI sector. Real estate law is one of the most complex legal markets globally, yet it has remained dramatically under-automated. Orbital’s focus on accuracy, real estate domain expertise, and real-world workflows positions them to define a new category in legal automation.

“We are incredibly excited to partner with Orbital in this next stage of growth as they expand more aggressively into the US market.”

Orbital’s technology is designed to meet the specific demands of real estate legal work, a practice area that the company says is materially underserved by the broader LegalTech AI landscape. By combining AI optimised for real estate law with spatial visualisation, mapping, and real estate data, Orbital automates real estate legal work and enables transactions to progress faster.

The company says their tech will replace manual, document-heavy review across hundreds of interdependent records, maps and historic deeds (many of which date back decades or even centuries) and chart the course to fully automated AI-driven real estate legal processes.

This funding round will support Orbital’s expansion into the broader real estate ecosystem and accelerate product investment to build a single, secure workspace for real estate legal work across the lifecycle of the entire real estate asset class.

Following the opening of its New York office in 2025, the company plans to double headcount and establish additional US hubs from where it can best serve its customers.

EU-Startups has previously covered Orbital under its former name Orbital Witness, including its 2020 €3.64 million Seed round to develop AI for property due diligence and its subsequent 2023 €8.6 million Series A to further automate document-heavy real estate legal workflows.

The post London’s LegalTech Orbital raises €50 million Series B to expand AI platform for real estate law appeared first on EU-Startups.

Copenhagen-based AI SaaS company Kime has raised €2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by PSV Tech, with participation from Nordic Makers and a group of angel investors based in Copenhagen and Stockholm.

As user behaviour shifts away from traditional search engines toward AI assistants that provide a limited number of direct answers, brand visibility is increasingly shaped by how large language models select and prioritise information. Recent research from McKinsey indicates that AI-based search is becoming an important entry point to online decision-making and is expected to influence a substantial share of consumer spending.

Despite this change, many companies have limited insight into whether their brands are mentioned at all when users ask AI assistants for recommendations, comparisons, or purchasing advice.

Kime aims to address this gap by tracking how brands are represented across major AI platforms, including which brands are cited, their relative positioning, associated sentiment, and the sources used to generate responses. The company refers to this emerging discipline as generative engine optimisation (GEO), reflecting a shift from ranking in traditional search results toward visibility within AI-generated answers.

According to founder and CEO Vasilij Brandt, marketers are increasingly focused on understanding how their brands appear in AI assistants, and Kime’s objective is to make that visibility measurable and actionable.

Since launching, the company has seen early commercial traction. In November, Kime conducted more than 60 product demonstrations, primarily with senior marketing leaders and executive teams. It has also expanded its product to include an agency-focused module that enables agencies to analyse AI visibility across their client portfolios. The platform is currently used by brands across multiple industries and is also deployed through agency partnerships.

In its current phase, Kime is focused on analytics, offering dashboards that show brand visibility across prompts and AI platforms, competitor benchmarking, sentiment, share of voice, and the domains and publications informing AI responses.

Looking ahead, the company plans to develop the platform into a broader layer for AI marketing, giving teams a centralised way to manage and optimise their presence across multiple AI assistants as the LLM landscape continues to fragment.

British Venture firm 2150 today announced the final close of its €210 million second fund, bringing total AUM to €500 million – continuing their focus on backing technology companies seeking to reshape our cities and the industries that power them.

Investors include Viessmann Generations Group, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Novo Holdings, the Danish sovereign fund EIFO, Security Trading Oy,  Islandbridge Capital, Fund of Funds Carbon Equity, and the US-based Church Pension Group.

Christian Jolck, 2150 co-founder and Partner, says: “Four years after unveiling 2150 we have raised €500 million, invested into 27 companies and mitigated over a megatonne of CO2e per year. Our exceptional founders are building companies of scale with an aggregate revenue of over $1 billion and over 4,500 employees.”

This final close of 2150’s Fund II sits within a broader pattern of capital formation in European climate, energy and industrial decarbonisation investing during 2025 and 2026, as reported by EU-Startups.

Comparable activity includes Berlin-based Future Energy Ventures, which closed a €205 million second fund focused on energy transition technologies, and Barcelona-headquartered Suma Capital, which raised €210 million for its SC Net Zero Ventures I fund targeting industrial decarbonisation and related infrastructure.

Alongside these larger vehicles, EU-Startups has also highlighted mid-sized and early-stage funds such as Índico Capital Partners, which launched a €125 million Fund III with a remit that includes climate-adjacent technologies, and Rubio Impact Ventures, which closed a €70 million impact-focused fund with climate as a core theme.

At the company level, funding rounds such as Spark Cleantech’s €30 million raise for clean industrial energy solutions illustrate parallel deployment of capital into operating businesses.

Taken together, these announcements represent approximately €640 million in disclosed funding commitments across funds and startups in adjacent sectors, highlighting the scale of capital flowing into urban, energy and industrial climate technologies over 2025 period.

“For Fund II, we have continued to partner with leading institutional investors across Europe, North America, and Asia, and who have invested in this category for multiple cycles. This combination gives us strong conviction in 2150’s ability to deliver attractive long-term returns and a long-standing investment platform,” adds Christian.

Founded in 2019, 2150 is a VC firm investing in technology companies that are redefining cities and the industries that sustain them. Built on the belief that cities drive the majority of global prosperity and represent the greatest opportunity for sustainable progress, 2150 backs founders developing solutions across energy, industrial decarbonisation, advanced manufacturing, mobility solutions, and urban systems.

Since raising its first fund in 2021, 2150 has executed on its thesis that cities generate 80% of the world’s prosperity and that new technologies are converging to ensure urbanisation finally becomes sustainable for both people and the planet.

To date, 2150’s twenty seven portfolio companies have combined annual revenues in excess of (€844 million) $1 billion, employ over 4,500 globally, and report climate impacts measured at megatonne scale.

2150’s portfolio includes energy, cooling, lower-carbon cement, biodiversity monitoring, industrial heat, critical minerals, urban mobility and circular economy.

Fund I portfolio companies include:

• Pan-European home energy platform 1Komma5º
• E-mobility leasing and battery-swapping network Vammo
• Ultra-efficient cooling tech company Blue Frontier.

Meanwhile, momentum is already underway from Fund II, with completed investments in electrified industrial heat pump manufacturer AtmosZero, refurbished electronics marketplace GetMobil, metals recycling and trading platform Metycle, versatile direct air capture platform Mission Zero Technologies and three further unannounced investments.

EU-Startups covered 2150 prior to this Fund II announcement, including its inclusion in a 2025 editorial feature on Europe’s leading sustainability-focused venture capital firms, where the firm’s focus on urban and climate-driven technologies was highlighted.

In addition, EU-Startups published a podcast interview in 2024 with Peter Hirsch, Head of sustainability at 2150, discussing the firm’s approach to impact measurement and long-term climate investing.

The post London VC 2150 closes €210 million Fund II, bringing AUM to €500 million in order to scale climate-driven urban systems appeared first on EU-Startups.

Orbital, an AI platform for real estate law, has raised $60 million in a Series B funding round to support continued growth in the US and UK. The round was led by Brighton Park Capital and included participation from investors across the legal and real estate sectors, including REV, The LegalTech Fund, Moderne Ventures, and Grosvenor Group. Existing investors JLL Spark, Outward, and Seedcamp also participated.

Orbital develops AI technology tailored to the specific requirements of real estate legal work, an area that has seen relatively limited coverage from broader legal technology platforms. By combining AI designed for real estate law with spatial visualisation, mapping, and property data, the platform automates document-intensive legal processes and supports more efficient transaction workflows.

The company was co-founded in 2018 by Will Pearce and Ed Boulle. Its platform supports hundreds of thousands of residential and commercial real estate transactions each year for thousands of property professionals, including law firms, in-house legal teams, developers, title companies, and real estate investment trusts. Orbital’s customer base includes large international law firms and multinational companies across the real estate sector.

Will Pearce, Orbital's CEO and co-founder, noted that although real estate is the world’s largest asset class, the legal processes that support it are still largely manual, fragmented, and opaque, with many practices having changed little for more than a century.

Orbital is changing that with AI purpose-built for real estate, making transactions more transparent and reliable for all parties.

With the new funding, the company plans to expand across the wider real estate ecosystem and increase investment in product development, with the goal of creating a single, secure workspace for real estate legal work across the full asset lifecycle.

Following the opening of its New York office in 2025, Orbital plans to grow its team and establish additional US hubs to better support customers.

Venture firm 2150 today announced the final close of its €210 million second fund, bringing total assets under management to €500 million. 

The fund remains focused on backing technology companies seeking to reshape our cities and the industries that power them. 

I spoke to partner and co-founder Christian Hernandez to learn more. 

Building a climate Fund around cities and industry

2150 is built on the belief that cities drive the majority of global prosperity and represent the greatest opportunity for sustainable progress. 2150 backs founders developing transformative solutions across energy, industrial decarbonisation, advanced manufacturing, mobility, and urban systems. 

Why LPs re-committed in a tough climate fundraising market

When asked what convinced limited partners to commit such a large amount in a difficult fundraising environment for climate funds, Hernandez points first to continuity. “Raising money for Fund I happened in a very different market,” he said.

“We were lucky to have large institutional anchors back then, and the important part this time was getting those anchors to recommit.”

The second fund from 2150 garnered a broad international participation from financial institutions and family offices. Investors include Viessmann Generations Group, Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, Novo Holdings, the Danish sovereign fund EIFO, Security Trading Oy,  Islandbridge Capital, Fund of Funds Carbon Equity, and the US-based Church Pension Group. Proving the investment model with a transatlantic portfolio

Beyond repeat investors, a second group of LPs came in only after the firm could demonstrate a real operating track record. “In a first fund, you’re selling a vision and a team,” Hernandez explained.

“People wanted to see that we could actually find deals, win deals, and that those deals could progress — with follow-on rounds of real scale. That validation matters.”

Since Fund I, the firm has built a transatlantic portfolio despite having no permanent US presence, with companies now operating at meaningful scale.

“We’ve proved that we can win deals in both Europe and the US. The portfolio has an aggregate run rate of around a billion dollars and about 4,500 employees. Some of these companies are already very significant businesses.”

Demonstrating a deep, repeatable pipeline was also critical. By the time Fund II launched, the team had already completed seven investments.

“That helped convince new groups that this wasn’t just one good vintage, but a sustainable platform,” shared Hernandez. 

Those new backers include Germany’s B. Braun Generation Group, a large, mission-aligned family office; a Finnish family office; specialist climate investors such as Carbon Equity; and, for the first time, a major US institutional LP.

“Our first US institutional investor is Church Pension Group, a $17.5 billion pension fund for the Episcopalian Church,” Hernandez noted.

“They evaluated us first as a venture fund, and then on impact. They’ve been in venture for a long time and invest in many of the marquee names, but there’s also a strong moral compass behind how they deploy capital.”

With just 34 limited partners in a €210 million fund, ticket sizes are unusually large for the sector. “We only have about 34 LPs,” he said.

“So if you divide 210 by 34, the median cheque is pretty high.”

The importance of backing scalable climate solutions

2150 backs founders scaling economically competitive climate solutions. Fund I portfolio companies include 1Komma5º, Vammo, and Blue Frontier. 

Secondly, 2150 has always focused on the industrial side. According to Hernandez:

“The first thing that never existed is going to be expensive. It’s literally cobbled together by hand. My partner Hernandez  Yolk was in industry before, building stuff in factories. I worked in electronics.

We always asked: at what point does this become price-competitive with what it’s replacing? Is it unit one? It might not be unit 20. Is it unit 100 or 1,000? How do they get there, and how much is it going to cost? Do they need to build their own factory or can they outsource manufacturing?”

A third factor, Hernandez added, was demonstrating that the portfolio’s growth was not driven by equity alone.

For every euro of venture capital raised, the companies have attracted an additional €0.75 in debt or other forms of non-dilutive financing.

“That’s working capital, that’s factory build-out, that’s financing products for customers,” he said.

Unlike pure software startups, capital-intensive climate and industrial technologies must be designed from day one to access these alternative funding sources.

“If you’re doing hard tech, you have to think about this other type of capital from the start,” Hernandez explained. “It can’t just be venture equity.”

That discipline also shaped how the firm positioned itself to investors. Rather than relying on the idea of a “green premium,”

2150 focused on backing technologies that win on fundamental economics. “There was no green premium in 2021,” Hernandez said.

“Nobody was going to pay three times more for something just because it was better for the planet. It had to be cheaper, faster, better, or cheaper to own over time. That’s always been the core focus of the solutions we back.”

Over the last year, Hernandez has seen software for commercial and industrial energy management as the fastest way to scale, noting, “We’ve probably seen two dozen companies in that space, many in Germany.”  

These startups focus on optimising energy use across factories, logistics centres, and cold-storage facilities, often applying AI to fine-tune complex industrial processes.

“It’s about how you use algorithms to make industrial systems run better, or to control robots and machinery more efficiently,” Hernandez explained.

“That’s less the case for areas like cement, cooling hardware, or other deep industrial technologies,” he said.. 2150 often co-invests with firms like Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Energy Impact Partners, who are willing to go down the hard-tech path. 2150 is intentionally a Series A investor. 

Hernandez explained:

“It doesn’t have to be revenue, but it has to be a product we can touch, pilots deployed, maybe some ARR, and most importantly, the team: the PhD, the commercial lead, and often someone who can talk to banks for debt.

Two brilliant minds spinning out of Imperial with something that might commercialise in five years is probably not for us. Our bias is to have an impact today with solutions that can scale today.”

Investing for impact now

2150’s second fund is structured as an Article 9 fund under the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) — meaning every investment must qualify as environmentally sustainable under that strict regulatory regime.  Hernandez explained that it's an EU regulation to avoid greenwashing.

“Article 8 is light green, Article 9 is dark green. Everything you invest in has to have a positive planetary or societal impact.

You have to report annually. There are exclusions: no extractives, no weapons, no significant harm. It limits dual-use technologies. We were one of the first VC funds to choose Article 9, and it matched our mission.”

In terms of sustainability priorities, cooling stands out as one of 2150’s biggest focus areas. By 2035, global energy demand for cooling is expected to exceed that of data centres, making it a critical and fast-growing source of emissions and infrastructure strain.

Water is another major theme, spanning challenges from floods and droughts to contamination by PFAS and microplastics. 

Further, “demand drivers like sustainable aviation fuel mandates, data centre energy costs, carbon pricing, and industrial partnerships are becoming very important,” shared Fernandez.