German stock trading app Trade Republic has confirmed a €12.5 billion ($14.7bn) valuation, following a secondary share sale which saw Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Sequoia buy more shares.

The new €12.5bn valuation propels Trade Republic to decacorn status (privately held company valued at over $10bn), more than doubling its 2022 approximate valuation of €5bn.

Investors sold shares worth €1.2bn to existing investors, including Founders Fund, Sequoia, Accel, TCV and Thrive Capital, Trade Republic said.

New investors in Berlin-based Trade Republic include Wellington, Fidelity and Khosla Ventures, it said. The deal doesn’t bring any new capital into Trade Republic.

Christian Hecker, co-founder and CEO, Trade Republic, said: ‘“This transaction underlines that the cultural shift to retail investing in Europe is only starting. Especially since governments such as Germany start meaningful pension reforms to foster private stock ownership in the broader public.” 

Two German autonomous innovators merge today, as Quantum Systems, a developer of AI-powered unmanned systems, announced the acquisition of FERNRIDE to expand their leadership position from air and software intelligence to autonomous ground mobility, creating a connected, cross-domain offering for intelligent unmanned systems.

Both Quantum Systems and FERNRIDE raised funding this year, raising €180 million and €18 million, respectively.

“FERNRIDE has developed one of the most advanced and scalable autonomous ground platforms,” said Martin Karkour, Chief Revenue Officer of Quantum Systems. “By integrating their technology into MOSAIC UXS, we are consistently implementing our vision of creating a connected ecosystem in which unmanned systems think, move and act as a single entity across different dimensions.”

In 2025, coverage shows continued but uneven funding activity across Europe’s defense, robotics and autonomous systems sector, providing useful context for today’s acquisition.

London-based Arondite raised €10.5 million to develop AI software that connects and orchestrates defense systems, focusing on human–machine teaming rather than hardware. In Spain, Valencia-based Voltrac secured €2 million to deploy autonomous ground vehicles for agriculture and frontline logistics, illustrating crossover between civilian and defence use cases. Warsaw-headquartered Orbotix raised €6.5 million to advance AI-driven autonomous defence systems, including swarm technologies, while drone manufacturer Monopulse (operating across Denmark and Lithuania) received €1.12 million to expand NATO-grade UAV production capacity.

Collectively, these disclosed rounds amount to just over €20 million, underlining how exceptional the scale of funding behind Quantum Systems and FERNRIDE is by comparison.

Germany stands out not only through these large capital raises but also through broader sector activity, with Munich-based ARX Robotics unveiling a combat-capable unmanned ground vehicle, signalling sustained momentum in autonomous air-and-ground systems development within the country.

“Europe urgently needs sovereign autonomy solutions. By joining forces with Quantum Systems, we can take our technology to a new level,” said Hendrik Kramer, CEO and co-founder of FERNRIDE. “Together with Quantum Systems, we are accelerating the deployment of our platform in the European defense sector, which is currently the most urgent environment globally for scaling autonomous ground systems. In the future, this experience will also be transferred back to civilian logistics applications, making our society safer and more resilient.”

Founded in 2015, Quantum Systems develops intelligent unmanned systems. The company supplies mission-grade ISR, autonomy and integrated mission solutions to military, government and commercial customers.

Their operational experience in Ukraine has demonstrated the relevance of the interaction between air and ground robotics. The integration of FERNRIDE solutions into MOSAIC UXS, Quantum Systems’ autonomous mission software, is intended to enable multi-domain operations that improve situational awareness and decision-making.

Founded in 2019, FERNRIDE offers an industry-proven software platform for ground autonomy in the areas of container terminals, defense logistics, yard operations and autonomous driving.

In 2025, FERNRIDE became the first company to obtain TÜV approval for autonomous trucks in Europe – they have already used them in initial tests with the German Armed Forces and have expanded their portfolio to include defense logistics.

This acquisition comes less than a month after Quantum Systems tripled its valuation to €3 billion and eight months after their acquisition of drone technology innovator AirRobot – underlining the continued growth and success of the German startup.

The post Following last month’s triple valuation, Quantum Systems deepens its autonomous focus through FERNRIDE deal appeared first on EU-Startups.

Angers-based tech accelerator Cube, formerly known as Cube3, has closed a €700k funding round as it doubles down on its hybrid accelerator model that merges business support, financing, and media production.

The company has attracted investment from a diverse lineup of tech entrepreneurs, institutional backers, and digital creators, including Bpifrance, Banque Populaire Grand Ouest, Nicolas Bacca (co-founder of Ledger), Emmanuel Picot via his family office Marco&Co, entrepreneur and TV personality Jean-Pierre Nadir, and YouTuber Amixem.

“We are entrepreneurs who invest and engage alongside entrepreneurs. Our board brings together builders of unicorns, industries, and media with a simple method: surround ourselves with those who have succeeded to guide startups toward profitability and provide the visibility essential for their growth. Too many startups don’t die from a lack of cash, but from a lack of visibility,” says Valentin Demé, CEO and co-founder of Cube.

This year has been home to continued activity around accelerator and pre-accelerator programmes that provide context to today’s announcement.

Programmes such as EIT Jumpstarter have remained prominent, offering structured pre-acceleration support and access to up to €150k in prize funding for early-stage European founders.

Research like “From seed to success: European accelerator programmes” underline the breadth of more than 35 active accelerators across sectors including FinTech, sustainability, HealthTech and Web3, reflecting diversification in how support is delivered.

At an ecosystem level, our very own EU-Startups Summit 2025 highlighted shifting accelerator models, with operators discussing deeper operational involvement beyond short cohort programmes. Alongside this, corporate-backed initiatives referenced in EU-Startups’ 2025 overview of corporates supporting startups show established companies continuing to run accelerators focused on pilots and sector-specific validation rather than equity-heavy investment.

Against this backdrop, Cube’s €700k raise positions it within a 2025 European accelerator landscape that is experimenting with structure and value proposition. Analysis suggests that most programmes are evolving through format innovation, thematic focus and ecosystem partnerships, with Cube’s hybrid model – combining acceleration, investment and media exposure – representing one such variation.

“France has been a pioneer in structuring the tech and Web3 ecosystem. It is essential to maintain this position by fostering the emergence of strong companies capable of developing in harmony with the regulatory framework. Cube is fully contributing to this dynamic, with startups such as Dowgo, which we are helping to obtain approvals from De Gaulle Fleurance,” adds Anne Maréchal, former legal director of the AMF and partner lawyer at DGFLA, advisor to Cube.

Launched in 2023, Cube stands out in the European accelerator landscape by embedding content creation and media exposure directly into its model.

Startups receive strategic legal, HR, and regulatory support alongside visibility via in-house video production, which includes six studios and proprietary media formats like the Plan Cube and Spotlight shows. The latter, filmed inside a giant immersive cube, showcases emerging startups to juries including regional government figures, corporate innovation heads, and VCs, with €50k in prize funding on the line.

To date, Cube has supported 20 startups from over 300 applications (an acceptance rate of just 5%) and claims to have facilitated €7 million in total startup funding.

It also reports 35 million impressions across its media outputs, underlining its positioning at the intersection of Tech acceleration and the creator economy. Early episodes of Plan Cube have already catalysed €400k in startup investments.

Cube’s approach offers an alternative to traditional accelerators by actively investing in its portfolio companies while equipping them with resources and exposure usually out of reach for early-stage ventures.

Dowgo, one of Cube’s portfolio companies, has already benefited from this comprehensive model. “Cube has been a real accelerator for us. In one year, we have been able to build a solid network. Their strategic support, combined with a strong ability to raise visibility, has played a key role in the credibility and success of our project,” adds Oscar Dumant, CEO of Dowgo.

The post TV personalities and YouTubers back French accelerator Cube in €700k funding round appeared first on EU-Startups.

As a small business owner, you have to be scrappy. You need to find ways to break out in today’s crowded market — reach new audiences, automate processes, improve efficiencies, and do more with less — without overextending your team. The right technology can unlock all that, and then some.

A 2024 study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported that 99% of small-business owners use at least one tech platform or tool to run their business, with 47% using four or more platforms. Two out of five small business owners (40%) said they were using generative AI, nearly double the percentage of generative AI users in 2023 (23%).

But some may not realize that they only need one platform for their communication and collaboration needs, with generative and agentic AI built in. Zoom Workplace with AI Companion brings together phone, team chat, whiteboard, meetings, smart documents, and supported third-party integrations into a single user experience.

Whether you’re looking to get more done for your current customer base or actively grow your business, check out the tips below to see how Zoom Workplace can help you save more time while getting the biggest bang for your buck.

1. Boost productivity with AI Companion

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce small-business survey reports that 91% of businesses said they were optimistic that AI would help their business grow in the future. However, 22% of businesses that don’t use AI cite concerns about cost as a barrier to adoption.

While some companies charge a premium for AI capabilities per user, Zoom AI Companion is included at no additional cost with your eligible paid Zoom plan.*

Just click the AI Companion sparkle icon when you’re hosting a Zoom meeting. This will allow you to turn on meeting summaries or ask a question like “catch me up” to get the details on what has been discussed so far.

In addition to summarizing meetings, AI Companion can also help you compose emails and chat messages, brainstorm and organize content on a whiteboard, and prioritize your voicemails and summarize phone calls on Zoom Phone. You can ask AI Companion to pull insights from your meeting transcripts to jumpstart a project brief, blog post, or other content in Zoom Docs. You don’t need to spend time going through colleagues’ calendars to schedule your next check-in — AI Companion can check availability and schedule that meeting on your behalf.

These capabilities enable you to be more efficient, which means you can spend your valuable time doing more meaningful work. Visit our AI Companion page to learn more about specific ways your small business can use AI to improve your workday.

2. Cut down on app switching

You might be familiar with Zoom Workplace as the app you use to join Zoom Meetings. But there’s so much more you can do from the Zoom Workplace desktop app:

• Chat with teammates on Zoom Team Chat, which is included with all Zoom accounts — you can create channels with groups of people or send direct one-on-one messages. You can even add external contacts and chat with them, for communication that feels easier, faster, and more organized than email.
• Connect your Google or Microsoft calendar with your Zoom account to see all your meetings in the Calendar tab. You can join Zoom Meetings with a few simple clicks (you won’t have to hunt for the meeting link anymore!), schedule meetings directly in the Zoom Workplace app using AI Companion, and more.
• Connect your Google or Microsoft email account with your Zoom account (or set up a free email address with Zoom Mail) to easily access email messages without having to navigate to a different app. You can even use AI Companion to help you compose emails.
• If you have Zoom Phone, use the softphone interface in the Zoom Workplace app to make calls, view and listen to voicemails, send text messages, and more. AI Companion can help out here, too, with post-call summaries and the ability to prioritize and extract tasks from your voicemails.
• Access a suite of built-in productivity tools to create notes, video clips, and whiteboards, which you can easily share with your colleagues.
• If you have Workvivo, you can access it directly in the app to view colleagues’ posts, give kudos to a teammate, read company news, and explore different department spaces.
  

If you haven’t already, download the latest version of the Zoom Workplace app and explore the tabs in the top navigation bar to see how you can get more out of Zoom while you work.

3. Streamline your appointment scheduling

Appointment scheduling apps can help your team cut down on the time spent setting up meetings with prospects, customers, and clients. Instead of emailing back and forth to schedule an appointment, all your customer needs to do is click on a scheduling link and select a date and time that works for them to book a spot on your calendar.

If you have a Zoom Workplace Business or Business Plus account, you get access to Zoom Scheduler right in your desktop or mobile app at no additional cost. Zoom Scheduler syncs with your Google, Microsoft, or Zoom Calendar to make booking easy, and you don’t have to worry about sending an email with a Zoom meeting link — it’s all taken care of automatically.

If your Zoom Workplace plan doesn’t come with Scheduler, you can add it on for less than other scheduling apps like Calendly. Learn more about how Zoom Scheduler stacks up against Calendly.

4. Keep the conversation going after meetings

Important conversations don’t end when a Zoom meeting is over. In fact, a lot of critical action items, discussions, and decision-making actually happen once you leave your Zoom call. Learning how to use Zoom Workplace throughout the meeting lifecycle (the time you spend before, during, and after your meetings) is key to spending your time more efficiently.

When you schedule a meeting in the Zoom Workplace app, click the option to enable continuous meeting chat. This lets you start a group chat with meeting attendees beforehand to align on agenda items or share pre-meeting materials for review. Once the meeting starts, you can refer back to those messages and continue chatting in the meeting. After the meeting is over, continue the conversation in Team Chat. You can share the AI Companion meeting summary and revisit discussion threads to close the loop on outstanding items.

5. Work on the go with Zoom Phone

According to a 2024 Morning Consult survey commissioned by Zoom, 82% of small-business owner respondents said they use phones to stay connected, versus 70% of respondents at companies with over 1,000 employees.** Even in the digital age, phone communication is still critical — but it needs to fit your business’s on-the-go or hybrid work style.

Zoom Phone brings your phone communications into the cloud, letting you and your employees access your business phone from the Zoom Workplace desktop or mobile app. That means you can make and receive calls from any compatible device, whether you’re in the office, at home, or on the go. You can keep your existing compatible desk phones if you want, or choose supported desk and conference phones from our leading hardware partners.

Here are just a few ways Zoom Phone helps improve communications among your employees and customers:

• Employees can save time by leveraging AI Companion for Zoom Phone to summarize calls and text messages, prioritize voicemails, and more.
• You can use your favorite business tools in tandem with Zoom Phone. Our phone solution integrates with essential applications like Salesforce, Google G-Suite, ServiceNow, and HubSpot.
• It’s easy to add and manage users in Zoom Phone. This makes it especially great for small business owners who might wear many hats and lack the IT resources to manage a more complex solution.
• You can set up call queues to help lessen response times. Divide and conquer customer inquiries by routing calls to a designated group of users, such as a sales or support team, so the first person available can answer the phone.
• Employees may be on a phone call and want to draw a quick sketch or pull up a document to review with the other people on the phone. With Zoom Workplace, they can easily go from a phone call to a video meeting when the situation requires, giving them more ways to have a productive conversation.

Get more tips for running your small business

If you want more tips for running your small business with Zoom, check out our on-demand webinar. It breaks down the top 10 time-saving Zoom Workplace features to help small business leaders like you improve how you work.

Monzo has been given the green light to expand across Europe, after winning a banking licence. The UK digital bank announced today that it has secured a European banking licence.

The winning of the licence comes amid reports that well-known Monzo shareholders are agitating to reinstate the Monzo CEO and push out the Monzo chair.

Monzo outgoing CEO TS Anil was asked to step down by the fintech’s board amid concerns over international expansion and his post-IPO commitment, according to reporting from the Financial Times. Anil's exit was announced by Monzo in October this year.

It has now been reported that venture capital firms Accel and Iconiq are among the investors who have hired lawyers as they look to bring back Anil as CEO, who is set to be replaced by ex-Google executive Diana Layfield early next year. The VCs also want greater representation on the board and for Monzo chair Gary Hoffman, who has been in the role since 2019, to step aside.

The revolt is said to have the backing of investors holding more than 40 per cent of shares, the report says.

Separately, Monzo has won a European banking licence from the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Central Bank of Ireland (CBI), as it looks to expand across the EU.

Monzo, which has over 13m customers, already has a UK banking licence. The challenger bank has been vocal about its EU expansion plans.

In its 2024 annual report, Monzo said: "We've set our sights on Ireland as the destination for our EU base as we start laying the foundations for expansion across Europe."

The licence, which can be passported across the EU, means Monzo can begin offering its banking products across the EU, kicking off in Ireland, which is Monzo’s EU headquarters. The licence will allow Monzo to hold customer deposits, opening the door to income streams such as loans and mortgages.

In the coming month, Monzo’s Irish customers will be able to apply for retail and business Monzo accounts, Monzo said.

Michael Carney, EU CEO at Monzo, said: “The approval from European regulators means we can now take our much-loved products and services to millions more personal and business customers. 

“Monzo has already proven that by combining the trust of a regulated bank with cutting-edge technology, we can truly transform people’s relationship with money. Today marks a significant step forward in our global mission to make money work for everyone."

Elaine Deehan, country manager, Ireland, Monzo, said: “We’re excited to be launching an Irish digital bank serving customers and businesses."

As digital ordering reshapes how people buy food, one of the biggest operational bottlenecks in restaurants isn’t the kitchen — it’s the pickup counter.  

Off-premises orders now dominate in many markets, yet the moment where digital orders meet the physical world remains largely manual, inefficient, and data-blind. 

Startup Pickpad was founded in 2024 with a hardware-first system designed to bring automation and real-time data to restaurant pickup operations.

I spoke ot co-founder and CEO Yaro Tsyhanenko at Slush this year to learn all about it. 

Tsyhanenko has been building technology for the restaurant and food-delivery sector for more than 15 years. He began with a simple city guide — a better way to help people discover where to eat and how to spend their time.

That product gradually evolved into a marketplace model similar to today’s delivery platforms. Across Europe, the company scaled the marketplace to 15 cities in Ukraine, facilitating millions of orders along the way.

“We started with a city guide, just helping people understand where they could go and what they could do,” Tsyhanenko explained. “That naturally evolved into a marketplace, and in Ukraine, we scaled it across 15 cities and delivered millions of orders.”

Building on that foundation, the team launched a ghost kitchen designed exclusively for delivery. The experience of running both the marketplace and the kitchen revealed the strength of the underlying infrastructure they had developed.

“Once we started operating ghost kitchens, we realised we’d built really strong internal technology,” he said. 

"At that point, it made sense to turn it into a product.”

The company then began offering its platform as a service to third parties, including delivery providers and fast-food chains, effectively transitioning from an operator to a technology supplier for the broader restaurant ecosystem. “We started providing our technology as a service — first for delivery providers, and later for fast-food chains — because we knew it worked at scale,” Tsyhanenko added.

The pickup counter Is restaurants’ new front line

Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and he had to move his family abroad. Once in the US, he began rediscovering the restaurant space — not as an operator, but as an observer:

“I was sitting in different restaurants — fast food, fast casual, coffee shops — with my stopwatch and my notebook, making notes. Just to better understand how flows are changing.

Because tech is changing how millions of people order food and drinks, and how businesses operate.”

He observed a shift in demand, with many restaurants seeing pickup and off-premises orders overtake in-store dining.

“Statistics say that three out of four orders in the US leave the building. So it’s a complete change in consumption patterns. We all like ordering — grabbing and going, or delivery.” (In the future, it will be robots like with Estonia’s Starship). He discovered that every store has a designated place where all the digital orders are placed — the pick up area.

The data gap at the pickup counter

A new set of challenges is emerging at the intersection of digital ordering and physical pickup — and they all stem from the same issue: a lack of real-world data. The first is labour efficiency, he shared.

  “Staff spend hundreds of hours of manual work every month just managing interactions with drivers and customers. Every interaction takes time. It creates an operational bottleneck.”

There’s also a huge problem with order accuracy. People forget drinks, mix up orders — it’s very common. That leads to food waste. And there’s a data problem. 

“No one knows when an order was placed on the shelf or when it was taken. That means they can’t control the full order cycle — customer experience or delivery driver performance.”

In other words, restaurants don’t have the data to effectively monitor orders.

Pickpad provides that missing layer of data points. 

How Pickpad connects digital orders to the physical world

Pickpad is a smart order-pickup system that connects the digital order world with the physical pickup counter in a seamless and automated way.  Its proprietary hardware offers a differentiation from other order management services .

As Tsyhanenko shared,

“We can source those unique data points and make operations better for restaurants and delivery providers.”

At the core of Pickpad is a modular system of smart pads placed in a restaurant’s pickup area, each equipped with sensors and machine-learning capabilities that automate the handoff between digital orders and physical pickup.

Each pad combines four sensors, a microcontroller, and a display into a simple, proprietary, and cost-efficient unit designed to work seamlessly at scale.

It helps restaurants measure their pickup operations:

• Was the order ready on time? 
• Was it accurate? 
• What was the prep time — from receiving the order to placing it on the shelf?
• What was the waiting time?
• Was there a delivery driver delay?
• Where exactly was the problem when the customer complained?

Pickpad sources those missing data points.

“We create a new data layer using sensors. A lot happens in the real world, and no one wants to build physical hardware because it’s harder. But someone needs to do it.”

The system integrates directly with existing point-of-sale (POS) software, pulling order data and updating statuses in real time as orders move through the pickup workflow.

When an order is ready, the corresponding pad lights up with a customer name or identifier, prompting staff to place the prepared order on the pad. Using its sensors, Pickpad verifies order completeness by matching the physical order against POS data, helping catch missing items before pickup.

Once the customer or courier collects the order, the system automatically updates the order status — eliminating manual clicks and reducing friction for both staff and customers.

The user experience is intentionally minimal. “The idea is to help people without bothering them with extra tech,” Tsyhanenko said. He illustrated the flow with a simple example:

“You order your coffee. The order goes into the system. The restaurant has shelves or a countertop — that’s the pickup area — and they upgrade it with Pickpads."

For example, Starbucks uses stickers. They place the sticker on the pad, and we print the pad number on the sticker. No RFID, no expensive tags — nothing special about the cup.

The system assigns the order to a pad, which can show a number or a customer name. If something’s missing — like a doughnut — the pad shows a red light. When it’s complete, it turns green.

“At that moment, we record a timestamp automatically. Staff don’t press buttons — no one does that in reality. Customers and delivery drivers get notified. The order is ready, you grab it, and it’s done.”

Pickpad has gained traction for its frictionless tech. Restaurants are small — especially in cities like Berlin, New York, and London. Drivers are milling around, space is tight, and if you add complexity, it breaks.

“So this is about synchronisation — timing, statuses, readiness. Not fancy displays. Data and protocols,” shared Tsyhanenko.

Making hardware viable for price-sensitive hospitality

Pickpad’s business model is straightforward. Restaurants receive a box containing 10, 15, or 20 smart pads, which connect to each other and require minimal setup.

“It’s very simple,” said Tsyhanenko.

“We ship a box with 10, 15, or 20 pads. They connect to each other, and you just plug one into a socket.”

Installation is entirely self-serve, with no need for specialist technicians or complex configuration. “The setup is like IKEA,” he explained.

“You unpack it, arrange the pads based on your layout, and plug them in.”

Pickpad operates on a subscription model, with pricing starting at $9 per month per pad, including the hardware itself. “You pay a subscription — there’s no capital investment,” Tsyhanenko added.

“Hospitality is very price-sensitive. Price can’t be the blocker.”

So far, the product has gained the most traction in the UK and US, especially in fast food, fast casual, and coffee chains, where up to 80 per cent of orders leave the building. “We want inexpensive hardware for reliability and scale. We’re building physical infrastructure. Both our hardware and software are patent-pending.”

Why timing beats temperature

Of course I wondered about temperature monitoring as a potential data asset. Tsyhanenko admits that this was his first idea: 

“I tested mug heaters, disassembled them, and talked to Starbucks managers. But temperature isn’t the problem. Many cups contain plastic. Some foods shouldn’t be reheated.

It’s a timing and data problem. If you know how long an order has been waiting, you can remake it quickly and make the customer happier.”

Industry validation for Pickpad’s pickup tech

Pickpad’s proprietary tech has gained significant interest from tech enthusiasts and industry insiders:

•  CES 2025 Innovation Award honoree in the Artificial Intelligence category
• Best of Tech Podcast Network recognition during CES 2025 
• Winner in Fast Company’s 2025 Innovation by Design Awards, which celebrate excellence in design and innovation across industries.
  

And in terms of sector support, Pickpad won at MURTEC Startup Alley 2025 — a competition for emerging tech solutions in restaurant and hospitality operations. 

50 locations, seven countries — and this is just the beginning

Today, Pickpad is active in over 650 locations across seven countries. Pickpad is still in the pilot phase, rather than a full commercial rollout. Tsyhanenko is building the hardware in-house, with early versions produced using three 3D printers in his lab.

“The first pilots were really about proving the concept,” he said.

“Now the second wave is focused on measuring everything, building strong case studies, and getting ready for mass production.”

Pickpad has built 50 new pads for the next pilot wave, which will include one large Ukrainian brand with hundreds of locations and a  US brand with about 100 locations.

“The pads are approved by cybersecurity and IT teams. Now we measure everything, then scale production and sales. That’s why I’m raising a pre-seed round,” shared Tsyhanenko.

ZeroPhase, a Munich-based company building software-defined, mission-proven data links for unmanned defense platforms, has raised €5.8 million in an oversubscribed Seed round to accelerate development and deployment of their adaptive communications layer – preserving sovereign control of critical links across air, land, and sea.

The round was led by BlueYard Capital, with participation from multiple Business Angels.

“Communication is the nervous system of defense, communication decides outcomes,” says Dr Florian Petit, CEO of ZeroPhase. “Our goal is to ensure it never fails. And with the support of Blueyard, we’re building adaptive data links that deliver uncompromising performance and reliability – adaptable across domains and mission types, forming the foundation of trusted connectivity for the unmanned systems of tomorrow.”

2025 has been home to a steady flow of early-stage capital into European defense, unmanned and autonomous systems, providing a useful benchmark for ZeroPhase’s Seed round.

In Germany, ARX Robotics (Munich) raised around €11 million to scale autonomous unmanned ground vehicles, while Project Q (also Munich) secured €7.5 million to expand its defense interoperability and sensor platform – making Germany a clear focal point for defense-oriented funding this year.

Elsewhere in Europe, Rift (Paris) raised €4.6 million to develop on-demand aerial reconnaissance networks, Orbotix (Warsaw) closed a €6.5 million round to advance autonomous defence systems, and Monopulse (Denmark/Lithuania) received €1.12 million to expand NATO-grade UAV capacity. Spain-based Fuvex added a further €1.7 million to develop long-range autonomous aerial systems.

Taken together, these EU-Startups-covered deals represent approximately €32 million invested into adjacent defence and unmanned technology segments in 2025, before accounting for ZeroPhase’s raise.

Within this context, ZeroPhase’s funding aligns with a broader pattern of capital moving into complementary layers of the unmanned stack – from platforms and autonomy to communications and interoperability – with a notable concentration of activity in Germany but growing momentum across multiple European defense ecosystems.

“ZeroPhase’s technology has proven to be a key enabler. Its adaptive protocol, when integrated into our custom-developed UAV systems and deployed by our expert field teams, has allowed us to maintain communications in the most extremely jammed environments on the frontline – areas where other drones simply cannot fly,” according to UAV Operations Lead, Ukraine.

Unmanned defense systems rely on robust, low-latency communication to transmit video, telemetry, and command data under demanding conditions. According to the company, the number of these systems in operation is expected to exceed 4.5 million units in Ukraine alone in 2025, making secure and stable data links more critical than ever.

ZeroPhase’s data links dynamically adapt to jamming, interference, and signal degradation-ensuring mission continuity and trusted, sovereign connectivity where “failure is not an option“.

Founded in 2025, ZeroPhase’s technology is already deployed at scale, operating daily in Ukraine and supporting thousands of unmanned missions. The company outlines that it is their extensive field use under real combat conditions that has validated the company’s ability to maintain high-performance communication even under electronic attack and degraded network conditions.

Experts estimate that today’s electronic-warfare systems can disable unprotected drone communications in a matter of seconds – highlighting the critical importance of secure and adaptive data-link technology.

The post Ukraine battlefield use underpins €5.8 million raise for ZeroPhase’s communications software appeared first on EU-Startups.

The post Palantir veterans’ startup Ankar raises €17 million to expand AI-driven IP software into the US appeared first on EU-Startups.

IP patent platform Ankar has raised a $20 million Series A round led by Atomico, with Index Ventures doubling down and Norrsken VC and Daphni participating. 

This Series A brings Ankar’s total funding to $24 million.

AI is fundamentally changing how inventions become protected assets. It enables patent teams to analyse novelty, draft claims and evaluate prior art with unprecedented depth and speed. 

Yet fragmented tools, gaps in AI trust, and slow enterprise adoption have held organisations back. Ankar solves these challenges with an operating system that unifies the entire patent lifecycle into one secure workflow for the first time. 

I spoke to co-founder Wiem Gharbi to learn more.

Why Ankar’s founders saw an untapped problem

For Ankar’s founders, these challenges were not theoretical — they had seen them firsthand.

Alongside co-founder Tamar Gomez, Gharbi previously built mission-critical software at Palantir in Europe and the US. Gharbi helped adapt Palantir’s platforms to real-world business needs, supporting organisations in extracting value from complex data environments.

Beyond customer deployments, she was also involved in strategic initiatives, including efforts to make Palantir’s software more accessible to startups, and worked closely with executive teams on high-level collaboration and product strategy. Toward the end of her time at Palantir, Gharbi began to notice a recurring pattern:

“While exploring new ideas with other alumni, we began looking at intellectual property as a way to create long-term value.” Gharbi said.

“Coming from a company that builds software for governments and large organisations, I was struck by how little innovation had actually happened in IP tooling itself.”

At the same time, her co-founder, Gomez, was working in defencetech as a product manager, responsible for managing IT lifecycles. She was encountering the same issues — innovation data being tracked through tickets, spreadsheets, and fragmented systems.  

Those shared experiences really became the spark for Ankar.

The broken reality of modern patent workflows

In practice, the traditional patent process is stubbornly manual.

Most teams manage innovation and IP work largely by hand. To understand the state of the art in areas such as additive manufacturing, companies often relied on patent engineers or PhDs to read hundreds — sometimes thousands — of patent filings and scientific papers, manually extracting insights, assessing relevance, and tracking everything in spreadsheets. The process was is, fragmented, and highly inefficient.

Patents can take up to 24 months to secure and still rely on scattered Word documents, spreadsheets, emails and outdated IP systems.

This inefficiency slows teams down and discourages inventors from filing altogether. In response, Ankar is building an operating system for innovation.

Turning data into defensible assets

Ankar's platform helps patent teams go from idea to granted patent in a fraction of the time, delivering an average 40 per cent boost in productivity and hundreds of hours shifted to high-value work. That efficiency matters as IP increasingly underpins long-term competitiveness.

“Today, around 90 per cent of company value is already intangible — patents, know-how, R&D output — and that proportion will only grow in the age of AI,” shared Gharbi.

At the same time, enormous volumes of innovation data already exist: patents, research publications, and technical documentation.

But they’re extremely hard for teams to digest and act on.

“What we do is provide AI-powered assistance that accelerates that process dramatically — extracting, structuring, and surfacing relevant insights so teams can move much faster and more confidently,” explained Gharbi.

Ankar aims to make that data usable. It builds AI tools that sit at the intersection of IT teams and R&D teams, helping them analyse existing innovation, build on top of it, and turn it into structured, defensible assets that actually contribute to enterprise value. One core use case is analysis and synthesis. 

“Imagine a pharmaceutical company developing a new compound,” shared Gharbi. 

“To understand what already exists, teams need to analyse millions of patents and research publications — for example, to identify relevant excipients or prior formulations.” 

Ankar’s system uses LLMs to aggregate, analyse, and synthesise that information so teams can make sense of it quickly and make informed decisions. Once a team has created something new — say, a novel product feature or technical solution — they often need to formalise it as a patent. Writing a patent application is time-consuming, highly structured, and can run to dozens of pages. 

“Our tools assist with structuring and drafting those applications, helping teams move faster while maintaining quality,” shared Gharbi.

Ankar replaces the fragmented patent process with a unified platform that orchestrates the entire patent lifecycle, helping teams turn ideas into defensible global IP in hours rather than weeks. 

Acting as an assistant rather than an autopilot, it combines instant novelty and prior-art analysis across 150+ million patent applications and 250+ million scientific publications with strategic drafting, prosecution support, and a single consolidated view of examiner responses—delivering stronger claims, clearer framing, and more defensible portfolios as competition for IP intensifies.

However, for enterprise adoption, speed and intelligence are only part of the equation.

Designing patent AI for high-sensitivity R&D environments

Patent workflows require the highest confidentiality in the enterprise world, and Ankar has been built for this. 

This matters more than ever: generative AI is making it easier for competitors to replicate designs, architectures and experimental approaches.

As a result, C-suites, especially in automotive, electronics and other R&D-heavy sectors, are prioritising deeper, more defensible patent portfolios to secure future revenue.

Ankar ensures that customer data is not fed back into shared models, implementing strict access controls and designing strong checks and balances throughout the system. 

Gharbi asserts: 

“Innovation data is extremely sensitive, so security and confidentiality were not afterthoughts for us — they were foundational design principles. We’ve spent significant time ensuring that data stays isolated, secure, and confidential within each customer environment.”

“We also pursued ISO 27001 compliance very early, which many startups only tackle much later."

For us, security isn’t a feature — it’s a prerequisite,” shared Gharbi.

Further, because accuracy is critical when dealing with chemical formulas or engineering specifications, Ankar ensures its models are grounded, meaning they operate only on verified data sources such as patent databases and research publications rather than relying on free-form model memory.

“On top of that, we’ve added verification layers in the product itself, so users can trace outputs back to source documents and validate results before acting on them,” explained Gharbi.

According to Tamar Gomez, co-founder of Ankar AI: 

“Invention is how we solve humanity’s biggest challenges, yet the systems that protect those ideas are decades out of date.

AI will redefine how global organisations innovate over the next five years, turning IP from a cost centre into a growth driver. The companies that adopt Ankar now will shape the future of innovation."

Andreas Helbig, partner at Atomico, said:

“Tamar and Wiem bring exceptional technical depth and first-hand experience of how broken the patent process is. Their momentum with Fortune 500 companies shows they’re building the right product at exactly the right moment.

We’re proud to support their mission as they build the foundational infrastructure for how the world’s most important ideas are protected and commercialised.”

Ankar’s long-term ambition is to become the software layer that orchestrates how ideas become globally defensible patents, serving as the core infrastructure for innovation in the AI era. 

The capital will be used to double the company’s 20-person team, expand engineering, product and design, and grow Ankar’s go-to-market organisation to support rising demand across Europe and the US. 

Würzburg-based T-CURX today announces the first closing of a €17.7 million Series A to accelerate clinical development of T-CURX non-viral clinical CAR-T therapies in AML and solid tumor indications, as well as advancing T-CURX proprietary non-viral technologies for in vivo CAR-T generation.

The Series A syndicate was led by BiomedVC and included Bayern Kapital, HighLight Capital (HLC), and i&iBio Fund, as additional investors along with existing and new individual investors.

Ulf Grawunder, PhD, co-founder and CEO of T-CURX, says: “I am very excited that T-CURX attracted such a high-profile, international investor’s syndicate, led by BiomedVC, for financing T-CURX`s non-clinical and clinical CAR-T technologies and CAR-T pipeline programs, respectively. It is a testament of the high quality of T-CURX data and the promise of our non-clinical and clinical non-viral CAR-T pipeline in AML & CLL and solid tumor indications going after novel targets. It also highlights the high value of our unique approach to leverage non-viral CAR-vector and LNP technologies for highly economical and scalable in vivo CAR-T generation, in order to ‘democratise’ CAR-T therapies for patients globally.”

In 2025, funding activity points to steady but selective investment activity across Europe’s oncology and immuno-oncology landscape, providing context for T-CURX’s Series A.

Alongside the German CAR-T developer, several other cancer-focused companies have secured funding this year. In Switzerland, Hedera Dx raised €15 million in a Series A to scale its precision oncology and diagnostics platform aimed at improving access to targeted cancer therapies. Finland-based TILT Biotherapeutics secured €22.6 million in a Series B to advance clinical development of its immuno-oncology candidates for solid tumours, while Dutch startup BIMINI Biotech closed a €3 million Seed round to progress small-molecule therapies for haematological cancers.

Taken together, these rounds represent approximately €58 million in disclosed funding moving through the European cancer and immunotherapy sector in 2025. Within this cohort, T-CURX’s Series A ranks among the larger early-stage raises and stands out for its focus on non-viral CAR-T technologies developed in Germany.

Aristotelis Nastos, PhD, Managing Partner and investment director at lead-investor BiomedVC adds: “I am thrilled about leading a highly dedicated international syndicate of early-stage investors from Europe and Asia in this Series A financing for T-CURX. We were deeply impressed by the data on non-viral CAR-T product and technology development at T-CURX, the track-record and experience of T-CURX Founder’s and Management team and the promise of T-CURX non-viral CAR-T technologies hold for making CAR-T therapies accessible and affordable for many cancer patients globally.

“We are very much looking forward to support T-CURX to achieve all of their therapeutic and commercial ambitions.”

Founded in 2017, T-CURX is a German BioTech company spun-out of the laboratory of its co-founder, Prof. Michael Hudecek, University of Würzburg, who is a European KOL and pioneer in the development and clinical translation of non-viral CAR-T cell therapies to target various types of cancer.

Their mission is to bring next-generation CAR-T cell therapies manufactured with cost-effective and highly scalable non-viral CAR-T cell technologies to more cancer patients in need of more effective cancer therapies.

T-CURX leverages a portfolio of proprietary non-viral CAR-T technologies for scalable and cost-effective CAR-T manufacturing based on virus-free, Sleeping-beauty transposon gene transfer into patient’s T cells.

The post German startup T-CURX secures €17.7 million to support development of new cancer treatments appeared first on EU-Startups.

What continues to fascinate me about Ukrainian startups and scaleups is their ability to solve problems for other countries — problems many of those countries are still struggling to fix.

From edtech and lifelong learning to mental health, cybersecurity, and HR, Ukrainian founders are building globally relevant solutions shaped by constraint, resilience, and deep technical skill.

Take Brighterly (edtech), Headway (lifelong learning), Pleso Therapy (mental health support), Stackbob.ai (enterprise IAM) and PeopleForce  (HR). All of these companies are addressing systemic challenges at scale.

Kyiv-founded health product marketplace Liki24 fits squarely into this pattern. Its ambition is unapologetically European: to build the continent’s leading health marketplace across fragmented pharmacy markets.

But that ambition was tested earlier — and harder — than most startups ever face. Founded in Kyiv, the company has navigated COVID, war, and investor flight, emerging with 70 per cent of its revenue now coming from the EU and €19 million in funding since its founding in 2017.

I sat down with Anton Avrynskyi, CEO and co-founder at IT Arena in Lviv, earlier this year to learn all about it.

How Liki24 lets customers trade speed for price in healthcare

Liki24 is a marketplace for health products. It connects sellers with buyers of physical health products — medicines, supplements, vitamins, medical cosmetics, and OTC drugs.

Liki24 operates as a marketplace that aggregates products from multiple pharmacies and optimises for price, speed, and availability. A customer, for example, may choose from:

• Delivery in one hour from a local pharmacy,
• Next-day delivery from within the country, or
• Delivery from another EU country at a much lower prices.
  

  
  

Besides Ukraine, its present in 10 European countries and the UK. And, the model was shaped by a very personal frustration Avrynskyi had experienced years earlier.

A mid-career leap: how Anton Avrynskyi walked away from stability to fix a broken pharmacy market

Anton Avrynskyi is from Kyiv, Ukraine. He studied computer science at Kyiv Polytechnic University and, from his second year, began working at a tech company that developed and implemented ERP systems for large enterprises and corporations. He went from developer to project manager, then head of the project department, and eventually became a shareholder and the company's CEO.

After 15 years, he started thinking that he wanted to build a big international interest. He walked away from the company and sold his shares without fully knowing what he would do next, a leap that highlights how much harder risk-taking becomes for founders with families and long-built careers.

Avrynskyi admits,

“It was a big risk. At the time, I had two kids — one was four years old, the other just one — and my wife. She asked me, “What are you doing?” But she supported me, which was incredibly important. I understood that if I didn’t leave, I would stay there for the rest of my life.

My biggest internal fear was losing motivation and internal drive.”

He spent a few months in the US with his family, attended many conferences, and saw how fast digital health was growing. At that time, Avrynskyi remembered the problem he faced in Ukraine when his children were born:

There were huge price differences for the same medicines between pharmacies — sometimes two or three times; lack of availability — you couldn’t buy everything you needed in one place; and inconvenient or impossible delivery of everything in one order.

He realised that the US hadn’t cracked this problem, so he decided to create a solution in Ukraine.

He asked former colleagues from his previous company to join him and started the company in mid-2017, about half a year after exiting his previous business. Things moved fast.

He recalled:

“We built an MVP very quickly, saw good traction within a few months, and then I was invited to Austria to present the company.

We won a startup competition there. After that, we raised our first funding round of €1 million. Two years later, COVID hit — and our growth accelerated dramatically, as demand for remote access surged. During that period, we raised a €5 million round led by Horizon Capital.

That’s when we began executing the company’s full-scale vision.”

From investor pause to European expansion

By the end of 2021, just months before the full-scale invasion, Liki24 was experiencing strong growth and had already begun fundraising.

But as geopolitical tensions escalated, that momentum stalled. By mid-December, investor conversations abruptly paused. “We had great numbers and a clear direction, but Ukraine was suddenly seen as too high risk,” he says.

“Everyone was talking about the possibility of war.” When the team re-engaged investors in April 2022, the message was consistent — and blunt. “They told us, ‘Let’s talk only when more than half of your business is outside Ukraine.’

Some said it directly, others said it more carefully, but the reason was obvious.”

At the time, around 97 per cent of the company’s business was still inside Ukraine, with international operations not yet financially sustainable.

“From an investor perspective, it was absolutely fair. The risk was simply too high.”

How Liki24 mobilised medicines for a country at war

On 24 February 2022, Avrynskyi was in Kyiv with his family. He recalls:

“We woke up to bombs. During the first two weeks of the war, more than 80 per cent of pharmacies were closed — not because products weren’t available, but because pharmacists had fled."

Just a day later, Liki24 created a free map of open pharmacies across Ukraine. Almost 2 million Ukrainians used it in the first two weeks. Then the team expanded it so that people could find pharmacies that actually had the medicines they needed.

However, Liki24 also observed that when supply chains were disrupted, people began facing shortages of essential products.

Fortunately, during that time, Avrynskyi received many messages from international friends saying, “We’ll send you everything you need — just tell us what’s missing.”

Friends from Greece, Turkey, and France sent entire trucks — big trucks — filled with medicines, an incredible range of much-needed medications.

Avrynskyi explained:

“We created three logistics centres and sorted everything. It was extremely hard because product names differed across languages, and dosages were sometimes different.

We worked with more than 50 volunteer pharmacists and built a platform that allows Ukrainians to order exactly the medicines they need for free.

This was crucial — medicine requires precision. In total, we distributed around $5 million worth of medication and helped more than half a million Ukrainians.”

However, the project was a victim of its own success. Healthcare organisations told them that free humanitarian medicine was hurting local pharmacies' finances.

So they changed the model, asking international partners to send money instead of medicines, created an NGO, and upgraded the platform so Ukrainians in need could upload documents and order what they needed — donations covered around half the cost.

“This way, we supported local pharmacies and helped around one million Ukrainians. Donors could see exactly where every euro went via an online dashboard.”

Business survival vs humanitarian responsibility

However, what made the situation especially complex was that the business was operating on two fronts at once: running a company while simultaneously responding to a humanitarian crisis.

“On the outside, it was a 24/7 charity effort. Inside the company, there was still a business that had to survive — with a team to support and salaries to pay.”

But while still running humanitarian operations, Liki24 focused on European expansion — Romania first, then Italy, Germany, France, and Spain. While many companies focus on their US for growth, according to Avrynskyi:

“Europe is underestimated. Over 500 million people, fragmented markets, and around $400 billion in pharmacy sales — larger than the US. Fragmentation is our advantage.

Our goal is to become Europe’s leading health marketplace.”

By 2023, 35 to 40 per cent of revenue came from the EU. Today, it’s 70 per cent. Revenue in Ukraine has still grown twofold since the invasion, and Liki24 raised €9 million this year, bringing its total funding to €19 million.

AI under the hood: product matching, logistics, and support at scale

AI was a key enabler of making European scale possible and plays a major role across three key areas at Liki24: Product mapping. Avrynskyi explained:

“There are thousands of sellers, each with thousands of products, often the same products with different names. We use machine learning to match them accurately.”

So the company used AI for three specific needs:

Product mapping: Thousands of sellers, each with thousands of products, often the same products with different names. Likl24 uses machine learning to accurately match them.

Logistics: Traditional carriers failed for cross-border delivery—slow and expensive.

“We broke logistics into local segments and built an AI delivery agent that chooses the optimal chain. This cut delivery times sevenfold and costs fivefold.”

Customer support: Liki24 reduced its support team from 80 to about 40 people while expanding to more countries, using AI-driven multilingual support available 24/7.

The company also uses AI for recommendations, marketing, and B2B pharma advertising—without sharing personal data.

But this is not the end of innovation for Liki24. The company launched a lab test marketplace and a health coaching platform focused on prevention.

“People do regular blood tests, track trends, and receive personalised health plans. It’s especially valuable for expats navigating unfamiliar healthcare systems. Eventually, everything will connect: diagnostics, coaching, doctor access, and product delivery via Liki24,” shared Avrynskyi.

Avrynskyi stresses that readers should support Ukraine — not only through aid but also by supporting Ukrainian businesses.

“Ukraine should not be seen only as a country in need, but as a country that creates value and innovation.

Our story shows that even during war, it’s possible to build and scale international companies."

Ben, a London-based platform using AI to help global enterprises manage employee benefits, has raised €23.6 million (£20.8 million) to accelerate its product roadmap and strengthen its go-to-market capabilities to meet the growing demand.

The round was led by Mercia Ventures with participation from existing investors Atomico, Cherry Ventures, DN Capital, and Seedcamp, along with new backing from Revolut founder Nik Storonsky’s QuantumLight Capital.

This follows Ben’s €15.6 million Series A raise in 2022.

“Employee benefits have never been more important – and never harder for global employers to manage,” says Sebastian Fallert, co-founder and CEO of Ben.

In a broader 2025 European HRTech funding context, Ben’s raise stands out as one of the largest rounds reported this year in the space.

Across adjacent segments, EU-Startups has covered several smaller financings pointing to sustained investor interest in AI-driven workforce infrastructure. These include Zelt, a London-based HCM platform that raised €5.7 million to consolidate people operations such as onboarding, payroll and HR data; Orbio, which secured €6.4 million in Madrid to scale its AI-native human capital management system; Skillvue in Milan, which raised €5.5 million to support skills-based talent management; and Shyfter, a Brussels-based workforce management SaaS that raised €1.5 million for European expansion.

Together, these rounds amount to approximately €19 million in disclosed funding in adjacent HR and workforce technology segments in 2025.

Against this backdrop, Ben’s financing not only exceeds the typical deal size reported this year but also highlights investor appetite for platforms addressing the growing operational complexity of managing employees at scale, particularly in areas such as benefits administration that sit between HR, payroll and external providers.

“For years, enterprises have been held back by fragmented systems and manual processes. AI changes that. It gives employers a way to tackle complexity at its source – in the rules, workflows and data that sit between HR, providers and payroll. This investment lets us bring that approach to more markets so benefits teams can spend less time on administration and more time supporting their people,” adds Fallert.

Ben was founded in 2019 with the realisation that the benefits system was “fundamentally broken“. Co-founders Sebastian Fallert, who had previously built and sold travel app JustBook Mobile to Secret Escapes, and David Duckworth, who spent years in financial services at HSBC and Monitor Deloitte, had each seen how painful and outdated benefits administration had become.

Ben is an AI-native intelligent benefits platform, uniting a fragmented industry of brokers, providers and employers into a single ecosystem. Ben enables organisations to design, manage and scale benefits globally while giving employees choice, transparency and control.

Its AI-native technology automates admin-heavy work for HR teams, provides a real-time view of costs and utilisation, and gives clear, personalised guidance to employees.

The company’s customers include Mondelez, Trainline, Octopus Energy, Deliveroo and Zalando.

Jonathan Kruger of Mercia Ventures adds: “Employee benefits are a huge expense for businesses but the current infrastructure is broken. Ben’s platform brings together employers, employees, brokers and providers to create an intelligent network that delivers value for everyone. The company is growing fast and winning against the big incumbents, and this investment will help to establish Ben as the ultimate platform for modern employee benefit management.

“We’re very excited to be working with Seb, David and the rest of the team, alongside Atomico, Cherry Ventures, DN Capital, QuantumLight and Seedcamp.”

Ben now serves enterprises across Europe and North America and supports employees in more than 140 countries. The company has also reportedly grown its revenue more than tenfold since its previous funding round.

According to data provided by the company, employee benefits account for between 10% and 30% of payroll and are central to how companies attract and keep talent. However, for global employers with thousands of employees across different countries, each with its own rules, regulations, and providers, managing benefits has become increasingly difficult.

Ben looks to reduce that complexity by consolidating benefits into a single platform, connecting employers, employees, brokers and providers.

As part of its growth plans, Ben is looking to expand its go-to-market presence, invest further in its product roadmap and deepen its relationships with channel partners.

The post Used by Deliveroo and Zalando, the UK’s Ben secures €23.6 million to scale employee benefits platform appeared first on EU-Startups.

Innovation doesn’t only come from research labs; sometimes it’s sparked by bringing the right people together at exactly the right moment.

This is the idea behind The Impact Circle, a curated network where corporates, startups, investors, and policymakers collaborate to tackle major societal and industrial challenges. In recent years, it has become a key partner of the European Innovation Council’s Corporate Partnership Programme (EIC CPP), helping connect Europe’s top innovators with large corporates for impactful commercial collaborations.

At the heart of this effort is Mats Reas, who has helped channel the power of Tomorrowland – a huge music festival known for creating meaningful human connections at an extraordinary scale – into a new kind of meeting ground, where corporates and startups spark ideas, pilot solutions, and build long-term innovation partnerships.

In this interview, we dive into how The Impact Circle’s model accelerates corporate–startup collaboration, why its partnership with the EIC CPP has been so effective, and what came out of the co-hosted EIC Multi-Corporate Discovery Day this year. We also explore the upcoming 2026 Circles focused on Mobility, Consumer Goods, and Construction, and how new corporates can formally get involved.

So Mats, welcome! Most people know Tomorrowland as one of the world’s biggest music festivals, but far fewer know about its innovation ecosystem. In one sentence each, how would you describe Love Tomorrow and Impact Circle in your own words?

Love Tomorrow Summit is a thought leadership festival organised on the grounds of Tomorrowland.

The Impact Circle is Europe’s exclusive network where pioneering corporates with an open innovation culture and bold startups connect, joined by a curated group of visionary investors and policymakers to extend scale and momentum. In summer, this group of bright minds comes together at the main 3-day event taking place at and around the Love Tomorrow Summit.

How did The Impact Circle evolve into a platform for startups, corporates, and sustainability-driven innovation, and what are some of your biggest successes with this format? 

Organising a mass event like Tomorrowland with more than 200 nationalities is much like building a temporary city. Many of the challenges we face are in parallel with broader societal or ecological challenges, and so over the years, we’ve learned that open innovation is crucial in finding effective and durable solutions.

Most importantly, the Impact Circle wants to help you as a company to engage with the innovation challenges you are facing. The primary focus is on the cleantech, digital, health and lifestyle industries.

If and when relevant, we will add some of the challenges we can bring to the table, so we can make a difference together. In this way, we believe we can create meaningful impact and generate real economic value. And why not have some fun while doing so?

As an experienced community builder and event organiser, we believe we have the responsibility and the unique ability to bring people together. We are convinced that, in partnership with leading companies, we can shape a path toward scalable impact and celebrate shared success!

Impact Circle curates “Circles” where corporates meet startups. What inspired you to create this format, and why is it so effective?

We believe that uniting multiple companies in circles around shared goals creates fertile ground for maximum cross-pollination. By integrating disruptive startups and scaleups, the strongest ideas gain room to win, while internal buy-in increases through the involvement of corporate experts. Often, adopting external technologies also delivers a better business case than building them internally.

From the corporate perspective, what makes participating in a Circle valuable, and how can it help them explore innovation opportunities?

In addition to the above, beyond connecting companies to exchange best practices, we also organise targeted workshops around specific innovation themes. In these workshops, we bring together corporate experts with the most relevant startups for their challenges. This format has been a great success and significantly strengthens internal buy-in within the companies. The informal and open atmosphere certainly contributes to that success. 

This year, you partnered with the EIC Corporate Partnership Programme as part of your wider Impact Circle 2025 event. For the EIC’s Multi-Corporate Discovery Day, the EIC brought 40 startups, and you saw corporates P&G, Coca-Cola, and AB Inbev team up. Could you tell us about the results of this event?

It’s a bit early to share the final results. The various companies that participated last summer are actively implementing their client venturing processes as we speak, and we expect the outcomes to become clear in the coming months. First testimonials, however, are remarkably positive: 25-35% of the startups they met during The Impact Circle are already actively engaging with them to build a collaboration.

This is a natural and logical result of the intensive preparation leading up to the event, together with the EIC and its official suppliers, Dealflow and Hello Tomorrow. If you partner with The Impact Circle, we will be working closely over a period of 4–6 months leading up to the summer event: defining challenges, scouting startups, developing expert workshops, preparing pitching competitions, and much more. Because of the fact that the Impact Circle is an invite-only event, we can ensure the relevance of all the participants and maximise the value of the three days spent together.

For 2026, you’re planning three themed Circles with the EIC: Mobility, Consumer Goods, and Construction. What opportunities do you see for new corporate partners, and what kind of partnerships do you hope will come out of the event? 

The primary focus is on the cleantech, digital, health, and lifestyle industries. We chose this positioning with large organisations to collaborate around technologies that tackle society’s most pressing challenges head-on. We firmly believe in the power of economies of scale and in the positive impact that can be achieved by engaging major companies through renewed networks and working toward scalable outcomes.

For corporates curious about applying for the next co-hosted EIC Multi-Corporate Discovery Day and Circle at Impact Circle 2026, how can they get involved and apply officially? 

For any questions, companies can contact our team via Bart Deweer, our Partnerships Manager, at bart.deweer@lovetomorrow.com. You can find our website here, which will be fully updated in the coming months.

The post Harnessing Tomorrowland’s spirit for corporate–startup innovation: Interview with Mats Raes of Love Tomorrow & Impact Circle appeared first on EU-Startups.

AI-powered unmanned systems company Quantum Systems today announced the acquisition of FERNRIDE.  

With the acquisition of FERNRIDE, Quantum Systems is expanding its leadership position from air and software intelligence to autonomous ground mobility,  creating a connected, cross-domain offering for intelligent unmanned systems. 

FERNRIDE offers an industry-proven software platform for ground autonomy in the areas of container terminals, defence logistics, yard operations and autonomous driving. The technology is already in use by well-known customers. 

In 2025, FERNRIDE became the first company to obtain TÜV approval for autonomous trucks in Europe, and has already used them in initial tests with the  German Armed Forces and expanded its portfolio to include defence logistics. 

Check out our earlier interview with Hendrik Kramer, CEO and co-founder of FERNRIDE.

“‘FERNRIDE has developed one of the most advanced and scalable autonomous ground platforms,’ said Florian Seibel, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Quantum Systems.

"By integrating their technology into MOSAIC UXS, we are consistently  implementing our vision of creating a connected ecosystem in which unmanned  systems think, move and act as a single entity across different dimensions."

"Europe urgently needs sovereign autonomy solutions. By joining forces with  Quantum Systems, we can take our technology to a new level,"  said Hendrik Kramer, CEO and co-founder of FERNRIDE.

"Together with Quantum Systems, we are accelerating the deployment of our platform in the European defence sector, which is currently the most urgent environment globally for scaling autonomous ground systems.

In the future, this experience will also be applied to civilian logistics applications, making our society safer and more resilient."

Earlier this week, Quantum Systems and Frontline Robotics announced the creation of “Quantum Frontline Industries” (QFI), a German-Ukrainian joint venture that will establish Europe’s first fully automated, industrial-scale foreign production line for drones for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Quantum Systems' operational experience in Ukraine has demonstrated the relevance of the interaction between air and ground robotics. The integration of FERNRIDE solutions into MOSAIC UXS, Quantum Systems' autonomous mission software, is intended to enable multi-domain operations that improve situational awareness and decision-making.

The financial deals have not been disclosed.

London-based deeptech AI company geoSurge has launched out of stealth, focusing on helping brands understand and improve how they are represented within large language models.

As AI increasingly serves as a starting point for everyday decisions, visibility within generative AI systems is becoming more commercially significant. Recent reports find that ChatGPT prompt volume rose by nearly 70 per cent in the first half of 2025, while shopping-related queries doubled over the same period. In this context, appearing in LLM-generated answers can influence consideration, while brands that are not surfaced may be less likely to be evaluated.

geoSurge says its data indicates that even well-known brands can lose visibility between GPT releases. Its platform helps organisations assess how their brands appear in LLM-generated responses, identify weaknesses in representation, anticipate how upcoming releases may affect them, and take steps intended to improve and maintain visibility as models change.

geoSurge’s approach, which it describes as “corpus engineering,” is designed to strengthen how large language models learn, store, and surface brand information, with the aim of making generative visibility more stable across model updates.

Francisco Vigo, co-founder and CEO of geoSurge, explained:

LLMs don’t pull from a live index. They generate answers from compressed memory that shifts with every update. That means a brand can go from ‘high visibility’ to ‘completely gone’ overnight - and most organisations won’t even know it’s happened.

Founded in London, geoSurge works with companies across retail, travel, fintech, and consumer services, supporting visibility in AI-driven discovery as LLMs evolve.

Luxembourg-based FundTech company Fundvis has raised €2.12 million in pre-Seed funding to accelerate product development, support its growth ambitions, and strengthen its European footprint. 

The round was backed by a mix of private shareholder investment and public funding, comprising of €1.12 million from existing shareholders and €1 million via the Luxembourg Young Innovative Enterprise (YIE) programme. Martin Vogel, Kneip Management, Alessia Lorenti, and Frame also participated in the round. 

“As AI continues to transform risk and compliance in finance, we’re excited by the potential it holds to reshape the entire sector. It’s an exciting time for Fundvis to be at the forefront of this evolution,” said Leonhard Kossmann, CEO and founder of Fundvis. 

Fundvis is a fund oversight platform that helps financial institutions simplify oversight by digitalising workflows. According to the company, its AI-powered provider management platform is designed to automate key processes such as onboarding, ongoing monitoring and regulatory reporting. It provides API connectivity to link with other apps/databases, including DocuSign, LuxTrust, and CSSF eDesk. 

“By centralising provider data and oversight workflows within a single system, the platform enables regulated financial institutions to strengthen visibility, consistency and operational control, while supporting compliance with both local and European regulatory requirements,” the company mentioned in the press release. 

According to the company, its platform is not only for funds but serves the entire financial industry. Its client base includes banks, insurance companies, management companies, AIFMs, law firms, and private equity firms. 

On the data security front, Fundvis claims to offer a 22/806 and DORA-compliant EU-only hosting with servers in Frankfurt, Brussels, Paris (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure), and physically in Luxembourg via DEEP/POST Group to meet the compliance and security standards.

The company aims to deploy the newly raised capital to support the next phase of its growth, including strengthening its presence in Luxembourg and accelerating expansion across European markets.

The funding will also support the development of a Luxembourg-based AI infrastructure designed to enable secure, autonomous vendor and fund oversight. It plans to grow its team through new hires across AI, technology, marketing, and sales.

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Wodan AI, a startup specialised in running artificial intelligence models directly on fully encrypted data, has closed a €2 million pre-seed round led by Spanish funds JME Ventures, Swanlaab and Adara Ventures, with additional participation from ScaleFund in Belgium.

Wodan AI is a European company developing homomorphic encryption technology for use in artificial intelligence. Its platform is designed to enable ML, computer vision, and LLM models to run on encrypted data without decryption, reducing exposure of sensitive information.

Its platform ensures compliance with the EU’s most stringent requirements on privacy, regulation and digital sovereignty, especially relevant in sectors such as finance, defence, healthcare and critical infrastructure.

Commenting on the investment, Bob Dubois, CEO and co-founder of Wodan AI, said the funding will support the company’s plans to expand its technology and strengthen its position in the European secure AI landscape.

Recent advances in homomorphic encryption allow, for the first time, large organisations to use artificial intelligence on sensitive data without compromising security.

The company plans to make Spain a central part of its European strategy by relocating its global headquarters to Madrid and consolidating its R&D team there, with a focus on advanced cryptography, machine learning, and privacy technologies. It also develops a pilot projects with a Spanish financial institution, which it describes as an early validation of encrypted AI for critical-sector use cases.

Spain has the technical talent required to develop critical sovereign AI technologies. With our headquarters, R&D centre and team growth in Madrid, we aim to consolidate a European hub of reference in private, secure AI designed for the most demanding sectors,

adds Manuel Pérez Yllan, CTO and co-founder of Wodan AI.

The funding will support R&D hiring, accelerate the technical roadmap, and extend the platform to more advanced encrypted computer vision and LLM capabilities, with an aim to deploy these technologies at scale. It will also be used to strengthen commercial capacity and pursue contracts with European organisations in strategic sectors.

Global connectivity provider Roamless has closed a $12 million Series A funding round led by Rasmal Ventures, with participation from Shorooq, Revo Capital, Finberg, and JIMCO. The new capital brings Roamless' total funding to $18 million, following a $6 million seed round in 2024.

Founded in Türkiye and headquartered in the US, Roamless was established in 2023 by Emre Demirel, Ali Gazioglu, Asim Alp, Selim Aykut, Cagdas Yalti, and Cengiz Oztelcan. It offers a borderless mobile connectivity platform built around a single eSIM intended to work across multiple countries.

Roamless provides a “Single Global eSIM” with pay-as-you-go and trip-based plans across 200+ countries, designed to keep travellers connected without changing SIM cards. The company says it operates on its own telecom infrastructure and plans to add features such as local numbers, voice, SMS, and partner APIs. Roamless reports serving more than one million travelers and working with partners in travel, aviation, and financial services.

Roamless telecom stack is a cloud-based, carrier-grade infrastructure layer that manages connectivity across hundreds of networks through a single service. This supports cross-border coverage and is intended to enable services beyond data-only offerings, while giving it more control over the customer experience than a resale model.

The eSIM market has been growing quickly, supported by wider adoption from smartphone manufacturers. While fewer than 20 per cent of global smartphone connections used eSIM in 2024, the GSMA projects penetration could reach up to 88 per cent by 2030. Roamless also expects adoption to continue rising as more devices move away from physical SIM trays.

Emre Demirel, co-founder and CEO of Roamless, said the company expects the market to grow significantly and believes long-term winners will combine a strong product with reliable infrastructure and carrier-grade technology.

We are rolling our local market, b2b and AI-enabled features in our next phase - all to ensure we continue to lead on innovation, and give global mobile users what they need to maximise their experience.

In the next phase, the company will expand network coverage, scale its global go-to-market and customer support efforts, and deepen supplier and corporate partnerships. It plans to launch Roamless Numbers, which would allow users to obtain local numbers in more than 20 countries and make calls or send and receive SMS within the app.

The company will also invest in APIs and B2B solutions so airlines, airports, online travel agencies, financial institutions, and superapps can embed connectivity into their customer journeys.

In addition, it expects to roll out AI-driven features aimed at improving network quality, lowering costs, and surfacing relevant partner offers, while growing its team across regional offices in major travel hubs.

A David vs. Goliath shift is emerging in AI as a small Nordic team is challenging Big Tech’s cloud-LLM dominance by bringing Small Language Models (SLM) directly to users’ devices  

Copenhagen-based open-source startup NobodyWho has raised €2 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate Europe’s ability to compete in global AI by championing Small Language Models as a cost-efficient, data secure and sustainable climate-aligned alternative to today’s massive cloud LLMs.  

I spoke to founder to CEO, Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, to learn all about it.

NobodyWho is founded by award-winning entrepreneur and artist Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, whose pioneering work with interactive AI dates back to 2016. Together with co-founder and CTO, Asbjørn Olling, and a team of software engineers, she has spent nearly a decade advancing local-AI technologies — from UN-commissioned projects to a 2021 edge-AI experiment aboard NASA’s International Space Station. 

Today’s cloud-based LLMs are controlled by a handful of non-European tech giants and require massive computational resources, constant internet access, and the transfer of vast amounts of data to third-party servers. This creates high costs, lock-in, and a structural loss of European data security. 

NobodyWho takes a fundamentally different approach. Its engine enables Small Language Models (SLMs) to run locally on laptops and mobile phones, so organisations and individuals keep full control over their data. With device-first architecture, no data needs to leave the device enabling true data sovereignty and privacy by design. 

Waagner Falkenstrøm explains:

“These models are still large by most standards, but they’re much smaller than systems like ChatGPT. They’re comparable to earlier generations of large modelsn— and they’re more than capable for many real-world use cases.”

Local inference as a security and privacy advantage

Running models locally has immediate privacy and security implications. From a security standpoint, this also creates a more resilient architecture.

Rather than relying on a single, centralised cloud server that can be targeted, computation is distributed across thousands—or even millions—of devices. Further, local inference shifts the cost burden away from cloud infrastructure entirely.

Users bring their own hardware, meaning the system can scale without increasing inference costs. Whether an application serves ten users or ten million, there is no escalating cloud bill.  This makes advanced AI accessible to organisations that would otherwise be priced out, including NGOs, public-sector bodies, and early-stage startups.

A 500x reduction in AI’s carbon footprint

NobodyWho’s local-first SLM architecture dramatically reduces this footprint by shrinking the models and moving them close to where they are used.

Early benchmarks show up to 100x lower training footprint and up to 500x lower inference footprint. So this approach isn’t just cheaper and faster — it’s also dramatically more sustainable.

Open source by default

Everything core to NobodyWho is open source — from its inference engine and inference libraries to its developer integrations — and that will remain the case. Rather than building proprietary language models, NobodyWho focuses on the infrastructure layer that makes existing open-source models usable in real-world products. Its engine enables more than 10,000 open-source language models to run efficiently across devices and operating systems.

“Our belief is simple: the models already exist,” says founder and CEO Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm.

“The real bottleneck is making them practical to deploy — especially for developers who don’t have machine-learning expertise.”

Most developers, she explains, aren’t ML specialists. NobodyWho’s goal is to make running a local language model as straightforward as integrating any other software dependency.

“An app developer should be able to run a local model with two lines of code,” she says.

“You shouldn’t need a PhD in machine learning to ship AI.”

To achieve this, NobodyWho integrates directly with major developer frameworks.

The company recently launched Python support and is expanding into additional ecosystems, allowing developers to drop NobodyWho into existing projects without deep ML knowledge or custom infrastructure work.

The company operates on an open-core business model. While all core components remain open source, NobodyWho monetises fine-tuning services — an area where compute requirements quickly become expensive and operationally complex for teams to manage alone.

“Companies could fine-tune models on-prem,” Waagner Falkenstrøm explains.

“But that means servers, engineering time, and ongoing maintenance. Instead, they can fine-tune models using our engine, pay for the compute, and we take a small cut. It’s still significantly cheaper and simpler than doing it themselves.”

Once a model is fine-tuned, it can be deployed to millions of end users with no additional inference cost, a key advantage of running models locally rather than in the cloud. Small language models, running where the data lives I was curious what the trade-off is from using SLMs instead of LLMs.

“Historically, making an API call to a cloud-based model was easy, and running models locally was hard. "We've solved that problem,” shared Waagner Falkenstrøm.

“With NobodyWho, the traditional complexity gap of local inference is effectively removed.”

There are still some use cases where very large models are necessary — extremely broad or complex reasoning tasks. Those models won’t disappear. But for most real-world business applications, such as chatbots, HR assistants, customer support, and domain-specific tools,  Small Language Models are more than sufficient, especially when fine-tuned. “Fine-tuning smaller models is also easier, explained Waagner Falkenstrøm.,

“You need less data and less compute, and you get more controllable behaviour. Most companies operate within specific contexts, and small models excel there.”

NobodyWho uses the European Public License (EUPL) 1.2, which explicitly allows both individuals and companies to build commercial products on top of its code — a deliberate choice aimed at driving real-world adoption with cross-platform support across mainstream operating systems and development frameworks included.

“If you want genuine uptake, commercial use has to be allowed,” says Waagner Falkenstrøm.

“Otherwise you don’t get an ecosystem — you get a demo.”

Over 5,000 devs building

The ecosystem is already forming. NobodyWho now has more than 5,000 developers building with the platform via GitHub, alongside an active Discord community where contributors discuss use cases, share feedback, and help shape the roadmap.

“The open-source aspect is critical,” Waagner Falkenstrøm adds. “It’s what allows a real community to emerge — not just users, but contributors.”

With the platform well beyond MVP, the company’s focus has shifted firmly to scale. “We’re past the experimentation phase,” she says.

“Now it’s about expanding framework support and enabling more developers to build production-grade applications.”

She believes the next leap forward in AI will come from making models smaller, more local, and more human-centric. 

“The future of AI won’t be won by size, but by decentralised models that anyone can run on their own devices.”

Investors view the rise of local, energy-efficient AI as a major strategic opportunity for Europe, especially as demand grows for privacy-compliant and cost-effective alternatives to cloud models.

The round is backed by PSV Tech and The Footprint Firm, and Norrsken Evolve.

“I’ve known Cecilie for nearly a decade and have seen first-hand how she consistently turns bold ideas into real, working technology,” says Christel Piron, co-founder and General Partner at PSV Tech:

“Backing NobodyWho was a no-brainer for us: this is an exceptional team building critical European AI infrastructure that is privacy-protecting, energy-efficient, and accessible to developers and companies everywhere”.

Sofie Käll, CIO at The Footprint Firm, shared:

“NobodyWho is pioneering the infrastructure that makes these ultra-efficient models truly plug-and-play for developers. 

This is a transformative climate-tech opportunity in one of the fastest-growing emissions categories, and we’re excited to support a team capable of moving the industry toward more responsible AI." 

Waagner Falkenstrøm contends that no matter what we do, Europe will not outcompete the US or China in the “bigger is better” game. 

“The compute, capital, and hyperscale infrastructure simply aren’t comparable.

“But from our experience, we knew that smaller models are genuinely powerful in many fields. That creates an opportunity for Europe to compete differently.”

At the same time, there’s a strong values-based dimension to what NobodyWho is doing.  She asserts:

“Coming from the EU and the Nordics, we care deeply about data security, GDPR compliance, sustainability, and data sovereignty. NobodyWho is designed to reflect those values.”

“Technology is power”

Waagner Falkenstrøm asserts that Europe needs to believe in itself. We have some of the best education systems, software engineers, and research institutions in the world.

“We don’t need to copy the US — we need to build AI that reflects European strengths and values. Further, technology is power.

If we care about privacy, sovereignty, sustainability, and democratic control, those values must be embedded in the technology itself. That’s what we’re trying to do with NobodyWho: decentralised, open, privacy-preserving AI that anyone can build on.”

Waagner Falkenstrøm sees NobodyWho as part of the first real wave of companies building infrastructure specifically for Small Language Models.

“A year ago, SLMs weren’t widely discussed. Today, developers and investors understand the category. The models are improving rapidly, and the tooling has matured.

Big tech companies will enter this space — but they’ll optimise for their own ecosystems. Apple will build for Apple. Microsoft will build for Microsoft. We’re platform-agnostic. That creates a meaningful opportunity.”

Oxford-based materials science startup A&B Smart Materials has closed a £1.5 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by existing investor Sake Bosch, with new strategic investors Caesar and Living Hope VC, alongside participation from Archipelago Ventures, Triple Impact Ventures, Cranfield University Seed Fund, Oxford Seed Fund, and several business angels from Cambridge Capital Group and Oxford Innovation Finance.

The superabsorbent polymers (SAP) market is sizeable and growing, driven mainly by demand from absorbent hygiene products such as nappies and menstrual pads, with additional use in agriculture and smaller applications in areas like medical products, construction, consumer goods, and water treatment.

Most SAPs in use today are synthetic and fossil-based, and because they are not designed to biodegrade, they can persist in the environment and contribute to microplastic pollution, including through high-volume single-use products such as disposable nappies.

A&B Smart Materials is developing fully biodegradable alternatives to fossil-based superabsorbent polymers, using polymer science and natural feedstocks to create absorbent materials intended to match existing performance requirements and fit within established manufacturing processes. Its approach is based on modified biopolymers derived from widely available, lower-cost natural materials.

A&B Smart Materials co-founder and CTO Dr. Benjamin White said the persistence of synthetic superabsorbent polymers contributes to long-lasting pollution, including microplastics in the environment.

We intend to completely replace these products with biocompatible and biodegradable materials, without compromising on product performance or affordability.

The funding will primarily be used to accelerate R&D to refine A&B’s sustainable superabsorbent polymer formulations and target a combination of strong performance, competitive cost, and industrial-scale validation for hygiene and agricultural applications.

The company’s longer-term objective is to replace synthetic SAPs in a market projected to reach about $17 billion by 2035.