Apple reported its best March quarter in history on Thursday, posting revenue of $111.2 billion, up 17 per cent year over year, with net profit of $29.6 billion. iPhone revenue reached a March quarter record of $58 billion, up 22 per cent, driven by what Tim Cook called “extraordinary” demand for the iPhone 17, which […]

Google DeepMind alumni have founded dozens of European startups or plan to launch startups in the past 18 months, new data shows.

Ex-DeepMind luminary David Silver captured headlines last month when his new UK AI lab Ineffable Intelligence landed a massive $1.1bn seed funding round.

But data shows that Silver is one of 112 alumni of DeepMind, which was founded in the UK, who in the past 18 months have launched a startup or are believed to be launching one. Many of the startups are focused on AI.

The data has been sourced from Evertrace, a data firm which helps VCs and investors with investment decisions. Evertrace gathered the data from a range of public sources, including Companies House, patents and research grants.

DeepMind doing for AI what Klarna and Spotify did for European tech

Jacob Houlberg, Evertrace co-founder, said: “We are seeing that DeepMind is doing for AI what Klarna and Spotify did for European tech.

“It's compounding into a founder factory. David Silver is the headline, but the pipeline behind him is the real story."  

Of the 112 new startups identified, 70 have been identified as being in the US, 28 in the UK, three in Spain, two in Switzerland, Germany and Canada and one in Austria, Poland, Hong Kong, India and South Korea.

Thirty-eight have started a new company, while 74 have moved into a "stealth" role.

The startups identified each have a LinkedIn company page and an active website.

A “stealth” role is a term typically used when an individual is launching a new startup, although Tech.eu has not ascertained fully whether each "stealth” role equates to a new startup.  

One of the most prominent names identified is Saining Xie, an ex-DeepMind scientist and computer science professor at NYU, who began the research project that spawned the diffusion transformer in 2022. 

Xie is now the chief science officer and co-founder at Advanced Machine Intelligence, the high-profile AI world model startup founded by former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun.  

Another DeepMind heavy-hitter is senior researcher Wojciech Marian Czarnecki who has joined Ineffable Intelligence as chief scientific officer, though he did not make the list as he is not a founder.  

Meanwhile, ex-DeepMind scientist and Stanford professor of psychology and computer science Noah Goodman is the co-founder of US AI startup Humans&, which wants to empower people rather than replace them and which raised $480m in a seed funding round earlier this year.   

UK startups  

In the UK, examples include former DeepMind scientist Olivier Henaff, who is now the co-founder of Cursive, an AI foundation model startup. Cursive recently received backing from the government-backed VC fund Sovereign AI.

Meanwhile, a trio of former DeepMind interns have set up tech companies.   

Guanming Wang has set up vision-language-model AI startup General Instinct; Arhaan Shaikh has co-founded healthcare data infrastructure startup Wizzaid; and Abdul Raheem Nazir has co-founded tech research startup Experiqlabs.  

Another notable DeepMind reinforcement learning researcher, Edward Hughes, is in a stealth role.  

Across Europe  

Across Europe, Alexander Taboriskiy, a former software engineering lead on Gemini at DeepMind, is the CEO and co-founder of Zurich-based Mentiora, which is building a “next-gen” AI platform.  

Former DeepMind consultant Angelos Chionis has founded Paris-based FormalistAI, an AI legal outfit, and Ann-Kristin Balve, who received a scholarship from DeepMind, co-founded Munich-based defence tech startup Omnisent.  

In the US  

In the US, examples include former DeepMind Gemini scientist Pierre-Alexandre Kamienny, who is the co-founder of Kinro, which is building AI sales agents and Pouya Samangouei, former DeepMind search engineer, who has founded AI agent platform ROI-AI.

Octopus Energy Generation has committed $500 million to Living Carbon, a San Francisco biotech company that plants trees on degraded land to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The deal, announced on 30 April, will fund reforestation projects across North America with the goal of removing up to 50 million tonnes of CO₂ over 40 […]

Greg Brockman’s comments at Sequoia’s AI Ascent 2026 conference fit a pattern of AI lab leaders citing self-reinforcing productivity numbers, but the underlying evidence on AI coding productivity remains substantially more contested than the headline figure suggests. OpenAI president Greg Brockman said AI is now writing roughly 80% of the company’s code at Sequoia Capital’s […]

Thomas Reardon has a pattern. In 1994, he created the project that became Internet Explorer, the browser that turned Microsoft from a software company into an internet company and triggered the most consequential antitrust case in technology history. In 2015, he co-founded CTRL-labs, a neural interface startup that built a wristband capable of translating electrical […]

Five months after launching its first beta version, Vienna-based AI canvas for architects, Synaps, has announced its €3.06 million ($3.6 million) pre-Seed investment round from US-based Plug and Play and Fil Rouge, among others.

This beta debut took place in November 2025 in Tirana, and the official launch of the first full product will take place in summer 2026.

“While most startups would capitalise on the initial hype, we chose an alternative path that better fits our company DNA. We wanted to demonstrate actual numbers, traction, and credibility from relevant users. For us, it was important to state that we are here to stay, having built an AI-focused product to disrupt and democratise an entire industry—a platform that most people in the architectural and real estate worlds will use on a daily basis,” said CEO Brendon Ahmeti. 

Founded by Brendon Ahmeti, Agron Bajraktari, and Kevin Cobaj, Synaps is the AI canvas for architectural design. It allows users to design, visualise, collaborate and present in one platform.

Ahmet describes Synaps as a child of Figma and the Swedish AI-coding startup Lovable, which grew up to become an architect. The company’s tagline, “turning words into buildings,” highlights its innovative approach to building design. This shift is driven by “vibe designing” and the use of Synaps’ generative vector-based AI floorplan tool, Vecy AI.

However, Synaps claims to be much more than just vibe designing via a prompt bar. Its aim is to disrupt the entire architectural drawing and rendering industry with AI. By analysing architects’ behavioural patterns, Synaps claims it has cut the number of commands by 80%, which has significantly sped up the architectural drawing process in the Synaps editor by a factor of 50 compared to existing solutions.

The company reports that rendering of 2D, 3D, and video is claimed to be 100 to 1,000 times faster than with current market solutions, depending on the project’s complexity, and can be achieved with just a few words and the push of a button.

“The positive consequence of this massive simplification for the estimated 200 million draftspeople worldwide, who design 95% of the world’s buildings and spend almost half their time on drawing and rendering: Synaps ends the theft of time, talent, and money spent on these mostly outdated processes, offering a solution for a fraction of the cost,” mentioned the company. 

Aside from this investment, the company has achieved several notable milestones after its beta launch, such as reaching 60,000 total users, 1,500 daily active users, and hundreds of paying customers. It also states that major global VCs are eager to invest, with three of the world’s ten largest VC firms currently seeking to invest in Synaps.

It also claims that 6 out of the 10 most globally relevant architectural offices have already trialled or implemented Synaps, some on a daily basis. The platform has received incredible feedback from industry leaders. 

Synaps has reached over 10 million users via social media, including YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn, through viral influencer campaigns with minimal investment. Before the beta launch, it secured 10k pre-registrations.

The company has also set up a US office in San Francisco. Since the beta launch, the team has grown from 4 to 17 employees, mainly filling important strategic roles.

Going forward, Synaps aims to increase its user base fivefold from 60k to 300k by the end of 2026. It is on track to reach 150k users by September. The company plans to launch Version 1 in summer 2026, introducing over 20 new AI tools for drafting and post-production. Additionally, a double-digit million Seed round is expected to close by the end of 2026. Within the next six months, its San Francisco office will become fully operational.

“What excites us most about Synaps is the tangible productivity impact it delivers for architecture bureaus. Rendering alone can consume an enormous share of a studio’s time – time that could otherwise go toward taking on more projects and winning more pitches. Synaps compresses that process dramatically. Equally important is the platform’s approach to collaboration: in an industry defined by fragmented tooling, an AI-native environment where the entire team works together in one place is a genuine step change,” said Christopher Polligkeit, Senior Investment Associate at Plug and Play Austria.  

The post “If Figma and Lovable had a child that became an architect”: Synaps raises €3.06 million to rival AutoCAD appeared first on EU-Startups.

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