London-based Flowla, a platform developing AI-assisted automation for sales and customer success teams, has closed a $2.5 million seed funding round to scale its buyer journey automation engine. The round was led by Revo Capital, with participation from AI Startup Factory, Türkiye Development Fund, APY Ventures, Sharks & Partners, and angel investors, including Salesforce operators.

Despite significant investment in CRM and sales tools, many revenue teams continue to rely on manual processes to manage complex B2B deals. Sales representatives spend a large share of their time on non-selling tasks such as drafting emails, coordinating stakeholders, and tailoring materials, which can slow follow-ups and contribute to deal delays or customer churn, particularly during handoffs from Sales to Customer Success.

Founded by Erdem Gelal (CEO) and Oguz Gelal (CTO), Flowla transforms the digital sales room from a simple content-sharing link into a no-code automation layer that standardises the buyer journey across Sales and Customer Success. The platform provides revenue teams with a single, branded digital workspace that evolves from a sales proposal into an onboarding hub, consolidating documents, communication, and next steps in one place.

Teams can design predefined journeys using templates, AI-assisted personalised content, and communication rules, with subsequent actions triggered automatically based on real-time buyer behaviour. For example, when a buyer views pricing information, Flowla can identify the viewer’s role, analyse their activity, prepare a relevant email draft, notify the sales representative, and queue the message for review.

Erdem Gelal, co-founder and CEO of Flowla, noted that sales enablement is shifting from coaching representatives toward building more structured approaches to revenue execution, adding that managing complex B2B deals can no longer rely on human memory without creating execution gaps.

Flowla provides the customer-facing layer where revenue execution runs on autopilot, ensuring that every follow-up and stakeholder alignment happens instantly and consistently,

Gelal said.

By reducing reliance on manual execution, Flowla helps minimise missed follow-ups and inconsistent handovers, enabling teams to manage the full customer journey more predictably and build a repeatable approach to revenue execution.

The new funding will be used to scale Flowla’s automation engine and content generation capabilities, as well as to establish a dedicated US-based go-to-market team to support its expanding international presence.

Lunar, the Nordic digital challenger bank, has raised €46 million in fresh funding, with the funds geared towards growing its business customers and supporting the launch of a suite of new lending products.  

Lunar, which has over one million users across the Nordics, has raised the funding from existing investors Heartland and Orbit Alliance and new investor 100A, a London-based fintech investor.

Lunar did not disclose a valuation following its new funding, when asked by Tech.eu. Lunar was last valued at $2.2 billion in 2022.

The latest funding round means that Lunar has raised €537m in total, according to Pitchbook. Ken Villum Klausen, founder and CEO of Lunar, said the funding would be used to grow its business customers, which currently stands at 40,000 users, in Denmark, Sweden and Norway.  

On a target number for business customers by the end of 2026, he said: “I think we would be aiming for 100,000, that is one of the core ambitions for 2026."  

He said business customer growth was currently stronger in Sweden than in Denmark. He added: “We can see that our strategy is working. More users are choosing paid subscriptions, and we are seeing strong momentum in our business customer base, reaching 40,000 business users in January."  

The funding will also support the launch of a suite of lending products, including credit cards and overdrafts, in the second quarter of this year, said Villum Klausen. He said expansion would continue to focus on the Nordics, not beyond into wider Europe.

In 2022, Lunar launched its Lunar Block in-app crypto platform in 2022, allowing users to buy and sell crypto coins directly.  

In October last year, Lunar secured a crypto licence under the EU’s MiCA regulation. Villum Klausen said crypto was “doing OK”.  

Last year, Lunar was hit by a string of executive departures including its co-founder and CTO, as it looks to cut management costs and become profitable in the long term.  

Peter Andreasen, Lunar’s co-founder and chief investment officer, and Kåre Kjelstrøm, the CTO (chief technology officer) of Lunar, have both left. The two executives are understood to have left in the past few weeks.

GoCanopy, a Paris-based AI-powered operating system for institutional real estate investors, today announced that it has raised €2.1 million in Seed funding to scale its platform capabilities and support international expansion. 

The round was led by ISAI, with participation from BNP Paribas Développement, Yellow, and angel investors, including Andrew Baum (Emeritus Professor of Real Estate Investment at the University of Oxford) and Ludovic Jacquot (CEO of Batipart Europe and former Chairman of EMEA Real Estate Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley). The funding marks the company’s exit from bootstrapped mode.

William He, co-founder and CEO of GoCanopy, said, “Over years spent as a real estate investor at Morgan Stanley and Davidson Kempner, I saw firsthand how data fragmentation blocks revenue. When intelligence is captured and made available across both investment and asset management, it compounds. It can be harnessed to uncover millions in potential revenue opportunities that spreadsheets simply can’t reveal.

“I built GoCanopy because the first LLMs made it clear that such data fragmentation could finally become a thing of the past. Just as Bloomberg transformed finance, we are creating the system of record for real estate. This is the industry’s “Bloomberg moment”. We are here to help institutions leverage data that makes up institutional intelligence – something that the majority has yet to seize.”

GoCanopy was founded in 2023 by William He, who has seven years of experience in private equity real estate investment, including at Morgan Stanley and Davidson Kempner, and Yaswanth Kumar Pabbisetti, who has nine years of experience in software engineering, including 5 years at Google Dublin. GoCanopy was founded with a mission to transform how real estate investors interact with institutional intelligence by utilising new, institutional-grade AI.

Describing the challenge the company is solving, the startup stated in the press release, “Institutional real estate investment teams sit on a mountain of valuable deal, tenant, and financial data related to their assets. But this data is fragmented across countless inboxes, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, and team knowledge siloes. As a result, firms lack a single system of record that captures and compounds intelligence across historic activity, limiting both investment decision-making and asset management execution.“

GoCanopy claims to address this by providing a single source of truth through a shared AI-driven extraction layer that transforms fragmented internal documents into institutional intelligence related to assets. 

According to the company, it uses Human-in-the-Loop agentic AI workflows to ingest unstructured internal documents, including offering memoranda, rent rolls, and asset management reports, into one platform to build a living institutional memory. Unlike static databases, this creates a system of compounding intelligence that exists beyond individuals and strengthens with every deal.

On the investment side, the company states that it enables teams to search, compare, and analyse data across historic deals, while actively augmenting core investment workflows, from deal screening and underwriting to investment committee preparation. 

Whereas, on the asset management side, GoCanopy claims that the same institutional memory supports proactive portfolio execution, including lease expiry detection, rent review tracking, and leasing opportunity identification. 

According to the company, its platform includes security measures such as dedicated database architecture per client, enterprise-grade encryption at rest and in transit. It offers institutional security standards from day one and notes that it does not train AI models on client data

GoCanopy has been supported by CentraleSupélec’s ‘21st’ impact accelerator. According to the company, it chose to end its bootstrapped phase and raise funds following strong validation for its proposition and growing client demand, including contracts with Brookfield and certain Apollo-managed funds.

It plans to deploy this capital to develop its enterprise-grade platform, expand internationally, open an office in London alongside Paris, and expand its commercial and engineering teams as it scales go-to-market efforts globally. 

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The construction and real estate sector is Europe’s largest industry, yet it remains largely dependent on manual and disconnected processes.

This inefficiency is becoming critical as the sector faces a massive wave of activity, driven by a €584 billion requirement for power grid upgrades and an estimated €500 billion in transport infrastructure modernisations across Europe by 2030. 

From large-scale residential developments to the repair of ageing bridge networks, the increasing complexity of these projects is pushing traditional administrative systems to a breaking point.

German startup Arctis AI has raised $1M+ to provide the technological shift required for the sector to evolve.

Arctis AI is building AI agents that help construction companies structure, access, and work with contracts throughout the project lifecycle. Instead of treating contracts as static documents, the platform structures them into one central hub where obligations, risks, payment terms, and dependencies are transparent and usable for commercial and project teams.

I spoke to CEO  Dila Ekrem to learn more. 

Ekrem explained that in construction, document and contract processes begin as early as the tendering phase and continue through a complex chain of workflows until project completion — from drafting and contract review to change-order handling, claims management, and more. It is a broad and fragmented landscape.

“Construction remains a highly traditional industry with deep structural inefficiencies,” she said.

“Our vision is to build an end-to-end platform for general contractors and project developers that embeds AI across daily workflows, enabling them to run projects faster, more accurately, and at lower cost.”

Arctis AI provides the digital infrastructure to manage the administrative complexity of large-scale construction and infrastructure projects. By replacing fragmented files with a connected workflow for project delivery, the platform enables teams to align faster, reduce friction between parties, and maintain consistency from tender through close-out.

The company focuses on resolving the industry’s most demanding administrative bottlenecks, allowing general contractors and developers to execute Europe’s critical building projects with higher precision and reduced operational overhead.

From fencing champion to founder

Before founding her own company, Ekrem spent her teenage years in fencing halls and on planes between competitions, eventually ranking #1 in Turkey and winning 35+ national & international medals.

The daughter of a custom shirtmaker, she grew up in her father’s shop, watching him build a business with his hands. Early on, she knew she wanted to build something of her own, too. Two years ago, Ekrem moved to Germany to study at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). She found her way into Munich’s startup ecosystem.

From TUM classmates to first Pilot in three months

Ekrem is joined by co-founders Duc-Trung Nguyen and Leon Stawowiak, both of whom she met at TUM. Nguyen arrived in Munich from Vietnam and worked as a Flink delivery driver to support his computer science studies before breaking into the software industry and working most recently as an AI engineer at SAP. Stawowiak rounds out the trio, having previously worked on AI applications at Bain & Company and KPMG.

Ekrem admits:

“When we were friends at university, we always knew that we wanted to found a startup. We were really active in the startup ecosystem and at the same time, we all have an immigration background. We didn’t know many people here, so we always thought a good programme and a good community are very essential."

The team consolidated their business solution through extensive market research and speaking with over 150 contract managers in the construction field. Once they identified their significant painpoints, they started building in parallel. 

The team started Arctis AI in August 2025 and deployed their first pilot project in Germany just three months later —
impressive speed. 

Winning trust in a conservative sector

When asked about attaining that critical initial pilot, Ekrem shared, “What’s really important in this industry is personal relationships. Warm introductions and being able to reference trusted names made a big difference in getting people onto calls. Once we had their attention, we could clearly demonstrate the problems they were facing and show that we had the technical capability to solve them.“

From there, it was about building trust. The team invested heavily in onboarding — sometimes spending an entire day with a client, explaining the product in detail, answering questions, setting up access, and carefully walking them through every step.

“Most of them are not used to modern software; for many, SAP is the only system they know, " shared Ekrem. 

2It takes time at the beginning, but after the first one or two weeks, the product becomes very intuitive and largely self-explanatory.”

Ushering in a new era for Europe’s largest industry

Ekrem said that most existing contract management tools still treat each document as a standalone, static file — an approach that simply does not work in construction, where every contract must be understood in the context of technical specifications and the wider web of project agreements.

“In construction, you can’t review a contract in isolation,” she explained.

“You can’t sign an agreement with your door supplier before the wall has even been built. Every document is connected, and those connections really matter.”

Arctis’ approach, she said, is to build AI agents that understand and reason across these interdependencies, allowing teams to interact with their full set of project documents and contracts as a connected system.

“You can talk to your documents and your project contracts and see everything in relation to each other,” Ekrem said. “It gives you a holistic view of the entire contract ecosystem.”

The company is starting with pre-signature workflows and building its platform on top of this agent-based infrastructure, while also turning past and present contracts into a reusable knowledge base.

“A huge amount of valuable knowledge is hidden in the contracts companies have already signed and are currently negotiating,” she said.

“Project developers often build the same types of assets in different geographies or work with the same subcontractors again and again. When senior people leave, a lot of that institutional knowledge disappears.

Our goal is to make this knowledge a core, living part of the product, so it can be reused and built on over time.”

From 150 incoming investor calls to a strategic lead in PT1

The round was led by PT1 (Berlin/London), with participation from EWOR, Superangels, and a prominent group of angels from the European construction and tech ecosystems, including Alexander Schwörer (Owner of PERI), Sebastian Johnston (Founding Partner at La Famiglia), Christian Vollmann (Founder of C1 Green Chemicals), Daniel Bronk (Founder of B+V Union & Real Estate Developer), Christian Marquart (Director Legal at Marvel Fusion).

According to Ekrem, the company’s fundraising journey began with the UnternehmerTUM Ideation Fellowship, which later invited the team to pitch and opened the door to a long and intensive investor process.

“After that, I ended up doing around 150 investor calls,” she said.

From the outset, the team was clear that they did not just want generalist capital, but investors with deep roots in the construction sector who could actively help with market access and credibility.

“We specifically wanted an investor from the construction industry,” Ekrem explained.

“It was important for us that our backers could make introductions and help us build trust with customers.”PT1 was very important for us because they really understand the industry and have strong connections. We also brought industry angels on board whose names carry a lot of weight when talking to customers and opening doors.”

To support the company’s growth, Arctis AI has already made its first technical hires, recruiting engineers with experience from AWS, Snowflake, and Palantir.

With the new capital, the company plans to further strengthen its technical team, develop additional modules, and expand its customer base across Europe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Melnichek, it was personal. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Rainbow replaces batch forecasting with continuous atmospheric streaming

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

According to Melnichek:

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

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

Beating legacy models on timing, not probabilities

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

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

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

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

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

From rain app to real-time environmental intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘wow moment’ driving organic growth

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

According to Melnichek: 

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

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

Opening the black box to transparent analytics

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

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

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

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

So the company decided to do the opposite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What compounds instead is repetition with intent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

PR is no longer just about getting coverage. 

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

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

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

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

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

explained Monteza.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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