At 8pm Tehran time on Tuesday, a new kind of front line was drawn, not through desert terrain or along a disputed border, but through the server farms, cloud regions, and corporate campuses of America’s largest technology companies. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps published a statement on its official Sepah News channel naming 18 US […]

Six weeks ago, a video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt on a rooftop went viral. It was, of course, not real. It was generated by Seedance 2.0, ByteDance’s AI video model, and it set off a firestorm that drew cease-and-desist letters from six major Hollywood studios, a formal denunciation from the Motion Picture Association, […]

There is a number that keeps getting larger, and on Tuesday it got larger again. OpenAI announced that it had closed its latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital, valuing the ChatGPT maker at $852 billion post-money. The figure is up from the $110 billion the company announced in February, when Amazon, Nvidia, […]

When Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in late February, choking off the corridor through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas flows, the immediate consequences were predictable: crude prices spiked, energy markets convulsed, and geopolitical analysts reached for their most alarming adjectives. What fewer people anticipated was how quickly the crisis […]

In the small hours of Tuesday morning, something unexpected appeared on iPhones across mainland China. Apple Intelligence, the suite of AI-powered tools that the company has spent nearly two years trying to bring to its largest market outside the US, flickered to life, showed up in users’ settings menus, and then vanished. The brief, unannounced […]

The Brussels-founded, Y Combinator-backed startup counts Orange among its early enterprise customers, which deployed a customer onboarding agent in four weeks. General Catalyst led the round. Nexus, the Brussels-founded AI agent deployment platform backed by Y Combinator, has raised $4.3 million in a seed round led by General Catalyst, with participation from Y Combinator, Transpose […]

For decades, nickel-hydrogen batteries have been the quiet workhorses of space, powering the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope through the extremes of orbit. Now, a California startup wants to put that same chemistry to work on the ground, and it just secured serious money to do it. EnerVenue has raised $300 million […]

The Palo Alto small-EV company raised $200M in a Series C led by Greenoaks, with DoorDash investing alongside a multi-year commercial agreement to deploy purpose-built autonomous vehicles for last-mile delivery. DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang joins the board as an observer. ALSO, the small electric vehicle company spun out of Rivian in 2025, has raised $200 […]

German consumers throw away 4.4 million tonnes of food every year, worth roughly €6 billion. Austrian startup Afreshed just bet that the solution is consolidation, not competition, acquiring Munich-based rival Etepetete and raising a mid-seven-figure sum to take its organic rescue-box model across the border. The deal, announced on Monday, unites the two largest “ugly […]

Finnish IoT cybersecurity company Test of Things has raised €1.2 million in Pre-Seed funding.

When a company builds a connected device — whether it's a smart lock, a hospital monitor, or a piece of factory equipment — it has to make sure that device is secure before selling it. 

However, cybersecurity testing and compliance documentation are largely manual work performed by highly skilled experts, and thus very expensive. And it doesn’t scale when today’s market is flooded with connected products.

"Cybersecurity of products is in everyone's interest," says Marko Kaasila, CEO and co-founder of Test of Things.

"But the current way of assuring it — manual, not systematic, and expensive — is unsustainable."

Every insecure device that makes it to market is a potential door left unlocked for cyber criminals to exploit— hack your personal data, the operational systems of the factory, or the controls within an office building, even threatening essential critical infrastructure such as the electricity grid.

Test of Things is building a platform that automates cybersecurity compliance testing end-to-end. Instead of a team of cybersecurity experts spending weeks manually combing through a device's security, their AI-powered software handles the heavy lifting — running tests continuously, flagging issues early, and generating the compliance documentation that regulators increasingly require.

For device manufacturers, this means getting secure products to market faster. For the rest of us, it means the things we invite into our homes and workplaces are a little less likely to be someone else's backdoor.

According to Rauli Kaksonen, CTO and co-founder:

"This investment will let us focus on building the product further and start helping manufacturers to achieve their customers’ and authorities’ trust with secure products."

The €1.2 million round was led by

, with backing from industry veterans: Aapo Oksman, Zach Shelby, Neil Costigan, along with ScanABC and Business Finland innovation.

According to Sami Ahvenniemi, Partner at Vendep Capital, the market for IoT and OT security and compliance testing is entering a high-growth phase driven by two converging megatrends: 

“Firstly, the increasing integration of industrial control systems, IIoT and OT networks into enterprise IT and cloud ecosystems; and secondly, the rising regulatory and operational risk environment around critical infrastructure, manufacturing, energy and utilities.

When two successful entrepreneurs with 100 per cent relevant experience put their heads together to build a testing platform, we wanted to jump in right from the start!”

The fresh capital will go toward growing the engineering team and accelerating platform development—so that the next generation of connected devices can be shipped with a little more peace of mind.

Afreshed, an Austrian organic fruit-and-vegetable rescue-box company, has acquired the German competitor etepetete. Fresh fruit and vegetables account for 35 per cent. of all avoidable food waste in private households. 

Fruit and vegetables that do not meet the required standard sometimes do not make it onto the shelves and are, in some cases, destroyed directly by the farmer.  The afreshed delivery service operates nationwide in Austria and has reached break-even. Thousands of deliveries are made to customers in Germany and Austria every day. 

The founders have continuously improved the model, heavily digitised their product and invested in their own logistics infrastructure, which forms the core of the business. afreshed maintains its own delivery fleet in Austria, comprising just under 20 vehicles. afreshed uses specially developed software to plan routes to minimise CO₂ emissions. This ensures that the ‘last mile’ – the journey from the distribution centre to the customer’s front door – is organised efficiently.

“The founding philosophy of both companies is essentially the same: saving food and passing it directly on to consumers, all via an optimised supply chain. In recent years, we have each demonstrated the potential of this vision independently. With the acquisition of etepetete, we are now taking the next logical step in our expansion and joining forces to further strengthen this shared mission,” shared Lukas Forsthuber, co-founder of afreshed.

He asserts that with etepetete, afreshed has acquired an established competitor that has customers in every German state, particularly in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, and Berlin. 

With this transaction, afreshed marks the start of its expansion into the German market; to this end, the organic delivery service has closed a funding round in the mid-seven-figure range.

According to Bernhard Bocksrucker, co-founder of afreshed, etepetete will be continued as a brand:

“The acquisition not only gives us immediate market presence, but also local expertise and an existing customer base on which we can build. This acquisition is intended to be the first of further such moves.

Our goal is to become the leading provider of rescued food in German-speaking regions. By bringing both brands together, we will further raise awareness of our food rescue boxes.” 

Raiffeisen-Holding Niederösterreich-Wien, which invests across the food and consumer goods sectors, among others, is taking a 25.1 per cent stake in afreshed. With Raiffeisen-Holding NÖ-Wien on board, afreshed gains a strong strategic partner that supports its long-term growth strategy: expanding its market leadership in German-speaking countries.

The acquisition price has not been disclosed. 

Employees across the US, India, Canada, and Mexico woke up on 31 March to termination emails from “Oracle Leadership” with no prior warning. TD Cowen estimates the cuts will affect 18% of Oracle’s 162,000-person workforce and free up $8-10 billion to fund AI infrastructure. Oracle has not confirmed the total number. Oracle began executing what […]

The Ontario startup combines AI with trained human professionals to help patients navigate PCOS, endometriosis, fertility, and perimenopause, the conditions with the longest diagnostic delays and most fragmented care in the system. Graphite Ventures led the round. When a patient receives a specialist referral, a confusing test result, or a diagnosis that landed in their […]

A London-headquartered fintech, which provides financial services businesses with debt market data and analytics, has become a unicorn, following a $170m funding round.  

9fin has raised the Series C funding at a $1.3 billion valuation, it said. The round was led by HarbourVest, the private equity investor, with participation from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and earlier investors Redalpine, Highland Europe, Spark Capital, and Seedcamp.  

The fintech was valued at around £500m in 2024, when it raised $50m, according to the FT.  

9fin’s platform combines data, analytics, and AI in one system, with more than 300 banks, asset managers, law firms, and advisory firms as clients who use its tech for sourcing deals, analysing risk, and monitoring global debt markets.   

It said it would use the funds to invest in AI, proprietary data, and international expansion as it scales its platform for global debt markets.  

The fintech is headquartered in London, with a Belfast office focused on data operations and engineering, with operations spanning New York, Asia, and Latin America.   

Steven Hunter, CEO & co-founder of 9fin, commented: “AI will redefine the credit markets, but only if it’s powered by proprietary data and embedded into how professionals actually work.   

“That’s exactly what we’ve built at 9fin. We've scaled our product rapidly across geographies and asset classes to provide clients with unmatched breadth and depth of data in an AI-native platform.  

“Our ultimate goal is to be the only platform credit professionals ever need. This capital gets us there even faster.”

The French open-source orchestration platform has grown enterprise revenue 25x in 18 months and executed over 2 billion workflows in 2025. RTP Global leads the round; total funding reaches $36M. Kestra, the open-source orchestration platform for data, AI, infrastructure, and business workflows, has raised a $25 million Series A led by RTP Global, with continued […]

The Paris-based precision fermentation startup has already validated industrial-scale production of its Advanced Casein with Bel Group. The Series B will fund its US commercial rollout in 2026, with Europe and Asia from end 2027, pending regulatory approvals. Standing Ovation, the Paris-based precision fermentation startup producing casein from dairy waste streams, has raised €30 million […]

Barcelona-based Brickken, a provider of tokenisation infrastructure for financial institutions, has raised €3 million in a pre-Series A funding round. The round included strategic investors from across Europe, including Marco Podini, founder and executive chairman of Dedagroup, who invested in a personal capacity, as well as GRX.

The funding follows the company’s seed round, completed a year earlier and reflects continued market traction and investor interest.

Brickken provides a platform that enables financial institutions, asset managers, and issuers to tokenise and manage real-world assets, including equity, debt, funds, and physical assets, within a compliant framework. As adoption accelerates, the market for tokenised real-world assets is moving beyond early experimentation towards broader institutional use.

Industry estimates indicate rapid growth in recent years, with expectations of significant expansion over the coming decade as traditional financial instruments are increasingly issued and traded on programmable infrastructure.

This financing marks a deliberate step toward institutional scale. We are investing in regulatory readiness and operational depth to support financial institutions as tokenised infrastructure becomes an increasingly important part of capital markets,

said Edwin Mata, CEO of Brickken.

The newly raised capital will be used to establish The Brickken Group and strengthen the company’s regulatory capabilities across key international markets, supporting further expansion of its global operations and infrastructure.

Kestra has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by RTP Global, with continued participation from Alven, ISAI, and Axeleo. The round brings the company’s total funding to $36 million.

Kestra develops an open-source orchestration platform designed to unify data pipelines, AI workflows, infrastructure automation, and business processes within a single control plane. As enterprise systems become increasingly distributed across cloud, on-premise environments, and AI-driven applications, organisations often rely on fragmented tools that are not built for current levels of complexity.

The company addresses this challenge with a unified orchestration layer that enables teams to manage workflows across systems in a consistent and scalable way. Its platform is designed to support hybrid and secure environments, with an extensible architecture supported by a broad plugin ecosystem.

Most enterprise software companies try to sell top-down and hope developers adopt. We took a different approach, focusing on building a product that engineers choose because it works in production. That foundation continues to guide how we develop the platform,

said Emmanuel Darras, CEO and co-founder of Kestra.

The newly raised capital will support the development of Kestra 2.0, including enhancements to its distributed execution capabilities and real-time observability features.

The company also plans to expand its cloud offering, strengthen its presence in North America and Europe, and continue investing in its open-source ecosystem.