Today Romanian-founded SaaS marketplace Tekpon has acquired 100 per cent of the TNW media and events brands from the FT.

The financials of the deal have not been disclosed, but the transaction is Tekpon’s largest investment in media and events so far.

Alexandru Stan is CEO of Tekpon, a SaaS marketplace he founded in 2020 after building 21 companies and exiting five.  In late 2025, he quietly acquired TNW from the FT — without seeing any financials before signing the deal. 

I spoke to him about why he bought TNW, his view on the role of journalism, what the new editorial strategy will look like, and how he plans to position TNW in Europe’s evolving tech ecosystem.

From SaaS entrepreneur to media owner

Founded in 2020, Tekpon is a marketplace and buying/ procurement service for software (especially SaaS & AI tools). It helps businesses discover, compare, and purchase software through a combination of a software tool directory and a human-led procurement service. 

Stan describes himself as a serial entrepreneur: 

“I built 21 companies, did five exits, the rest failed — which is normal for an entrepreneur.  In 2020, I launched Tekpon with former co-founders from previous businesses.

We built a SaaS marketplace with the idea of becoming the first honest software review platform.”

When I queried Stan to understand the state of the financials at TNW, he admitted, 

“The deal happened without me seeing any data. TNW is so well-known—especially across Europe and the US—that the brand’s strength alone meant they didn’t show me anything.”

The acquisition is part of Tekpon’s long-term plan to build an international ecosystem connecting software, media, events, advisory, and innovation.

“TNW was too small for FT”

I wanted to understand why Stan thinks TNW was closed down. I mean, I’ve heard everything from the post-COVID financials to the lack of profitability of its much-esteemed annual conference. 

Stan asserts:

“The Financial Times is extremely powerful. TNW was a strong brand and community—but too small for the FT. TNW wasn’t a business that could generate a billion dollars in annual revenue

 It’s like someone very rich buying a bicycle: it doesn’t matter to them.”

According to the deal with FT, TNW’s brand and editorial standards will be maintained, while its events and digital platforms will be integrated into Tekpon’s wider strategy.

The FT will continue to own and operate TNW Spaces, offering private offices and coworking spaces that support a thriving community of startups, scale-ups, and innovators.

TNW will support all major European ecosystems—Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, the Nordics, and more, as well as Romania, even though it’s still a small market. 

When asked about verticals or niches, Stan says TNW will stay away from politics and by default defencetech, but focus on:

• AI, especially startups with a positive societal impact.
• The software industry.
• What’s next in tech, staying true to the brand’s name.
• M&A and investment insights:

“We have multiple M&A partners in Tekpon’s community who give us information months before it becomes public as well as a community of 136,000 people at Tekpon who can provide insights from across the ecosystem.

 Journalists can turn those insights into real news. It will become very powerful for Europe.”

TNW staff to have independence — and better conditions

Tekpon already hosts annual awards, an AI summit, a podcast and a magazine. With this in mind, I asked Stan about editorial independence. He asserts that “independence is essential. Tekpon makes money selling software. We take commissions on HubSpot, Monday.com, etc."

"This means TNW can stay 100 per cent independent. We don’t need to mix software sales with journalism.”

However, Stan also admitted that he loves writing, saying, “I’ll be involved daily in finding what’s interesting in the market, supporting the community, and avoiding conflicts of interest. I’ll help the newsroom understand what deserves coverage, but journalists will stay independent.”

And, he shared that he has no intention of making journalists work for peanuts. “I care about people first. I want them to have a good life and the means to perform well.”  

Stan is undecided on how many journalists the publication will fund throughout Europe, but shared that the company is calculating how many new quality pieces it needs monthly.  He asserts:

“If I need 10 people, 20, or even 30, I’ll hire them. And if I need capital, it’s easy to raise it.”

According to Stan, the first order of business is to transfer the 100,000-plus TNW articles currently in FT's possession. 

Plans for 2026 include an expanded TNW Conference, new SaaS and AI program tracks curated by Tekpon, and cross-regional executive programmes. The brand also plans to launch a 1,000-member exclusive TNW community called TNW Inner Circle — an exclusive community for founders and executives. It aims to help members succeed and to make Europe more competitive globally.

“Europe doesn’t fully know what’s coming, so we need strong networks” shared Stan.

“I’m a big fan of real journalism. I analyse articles deeply—why something was written, what’s behind it. There are not many tough tech journalists — you are one of them —, and Europe needs them.

With TNW, I want people — executives, founders — to share things they don’t usually share in public. That’s how we’ll build something meaningful.”

The state of tech media in Europe

It's not been an easy year for Europe’s tech media. Private equity firm Regent LP bought Techcrunch from Yahoo Inc. in March 2025 and shed the vast majority of its European office.  June saw European layoffs at Business Insider by 21 per cent, and  TNW’s media and event management closed in September. 

That said, it's not all doom and gloom.

Defender Media was launched in April. etn began its YouTube channel in September, and Pathfounders started publishing articles in October. 

In June, The Recursive tripled revenue, and announced the launch of a global advisory board. Resiliience Media bagged funding in August.

There are other acquisitions, too. Silicon Canals was sold to Brown Brothers Media in September, while EU-Startups was sold to MeOut Group in November. These moves reflect a broader consolidation across European tech media—but also raise questions about editorial integrity and long-term strategy.

However, the most controversial example is Silicon Canals, which has rapidly shifted away from its original newsroom model and now resembles an AI-driven content mill producing low-quality, click-optimised articles at scale.

Having seen this pattern before, I’m wary.

As I noted on LinkedIn, I previously worked at ReadWriteWeb — once one of the world’s top ten tech blogs, syndicated by The New York Times and ranked in Technorati’s top 100. After multiple ownership changes, it too devolved into AI-generated clickbait. It devalues the ecosystem for us all.

That said, competition is always a good thing. There are enough stories in Europe for all of us.

Disclosure: I’m a former Senior Writer at TNW, where I focused primarily on mobility. TNW always felt like FT’s errant little brother compared to the more stoic Sifted — but being under the FT banner had its perks. 

People recognised the FT name, even if they’d never heard of your publication. And it’s the only newsroom I’ve ever worked for that paid out a Christmas bonus — much less to freelancers — so for that alone it has a place in my heart.

There are a whopping 64,142 people currently living with dementia in Ireland. With age being the leading risk factor for dementia, this number is expected to rise alongside population ageing to 150,131 by 2045. Dementia describes a group of symptoms that affect memory, thinking, and social abilities severely enough to interfere with daily life.

Among its many forms, Alzheimer’s disease is the most common, accounting for 60–70 per cent of dementia cases worldwide.

With millions of people and families impacted globally, early and accurate diagnosis has never been more critical.

MemoryTell is a digital health tool that uses speech-based biomarkers to support the early detection of dementia. Instead of relying on lengthy memory tests or medical imaging, it analyses short recordings of a person speaking — looking at patterns in language, rhythm, pauses, and acoustics that research shows can signal cognitive decline. 

I spoke to Corrina Grimes to learn all about it. 

Turning a research breakthrough into a clinical tool

Grimes started in health and social care 25 years ago as a clinician, and then moved into policy and commissioning.  Parallel to that, in 2017, she became an Atlantic Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute, affiliated with Trinity College Dublin and UCSF in San Francisco.

That’s when she became interested in brain health and how to reduce the scale and impact of dementia through a life-course approach, and where she met Adolfo García, a neuroscientist who spent 15 years researching how speech can be used as a biomarker. Garcia is an internationally recognised neuroscientist with 200+ publications and a global authority in speech biomarkers and brain health, and he has already developed a tool called TELL — “Toolkit to Examine Life-Like Language”.

The duo joined forces with Fernando Johann, an engineer and serial entrepreneur with two successful exits, venture capital experience, and experience scaling tech to international markets to co-found MemoryTell, to take the technology from the lab to frontline services in Europe. 

MemoryTell’s real-time speech analysis supports dementia diagnosis

While in relatively early stages, MemoryTell is a web-based AI platform that records, transcribes, and analyses a person’s speech and provides a real-time report to support clinicians in diagnosing and monitoring dementia. MemoryTell’s approach makes analysis objective.

The AI compares a person’s speech against a dataset of 13,000 clinically coded records — labelled with disease status and validated in clinical practice, plus healthy volunteers.

A 10-minute, non-invasive assessment designed for primary care

A person engages in a short conversation or performs structured speech tasks (e.g. picture description, story-retelling, spontaneous speech) that are recorded.  Advanced algorithms analyse the recording.

They extract a large number of acoustic features (pauses, speed, tone, prosody, silence duration, jitter, etc.) and linguistic features (lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, fluency/disfluency, phrase structure, word usage, etc.).

The speech is compared against a validated database of prior speech samples from people with known clinical status (healthy, MCI, dementia). 

Using machine-learning or statistical classifiers (or, in some newer approaches, deep learning), the system estimates the likelihood that the speech sample corresponds to cognitive impairment, or flags patterns indicative of early signs of neurodegenerative disease.

The output is packaged into a real-time result/report that clinicians can view. Over time, repeated assessments allow tracking of changes in speech biomarkers — useful to monitor disease progression, cognitive decline, or possibly responses to interventions/therapies.

MemoryTell slots into primary care with fast, consistent dementia assessment

“It doesn’t diagnose, but it provides a proposed classification that helps clinicians,” explained Grimes.

According to Grimes:

“Our first use case focuses on people who present to their GP with symptoms and are then referred for assessment. 

Providing an alternative to invasive assessments Across Europe, the diagnostic pathway varies — in some countries, initial assessments happen in primary care, while in others they’re carried out in specialist memory clinics — but MemoryTell is designed to slot naturally into the primary-care stage because it offers a quick, non-invasive 10-minute assessment with real-time, objective scoring.”

It's an approach that contrasts with today’s common methods, which typically rely on pen-and-paper psychometric tests such as the ACE-III, alongside clinical conversations, multidisciplinary meetings, functional assessments, and, when needed, further diagnostics like MRI, lumbar puncture, or other scans.

“Further, it provides longitudinal tracking — something our systems lack today. Speech biomarkers can objectively track disease progression or the efficacy of new treatments over time.”

It can also be used to plan other interventions — including social care — as conditions progress. It’s an objective, consistent way to document change.”

And, unlike other tests, results are instant. The healthcare provider receives a real-time PDF or API-delivered report. There’s no waiting period.

MemoryTell is currently developing validation studies, which will assist in determining whether (and how) the tool assists with:

• Screening,
• Prioritising waiting lists.
• Shortening diagnostic timelines.
  
  “It won’t replace other tests, but it can be used earlier in the pathway, and it’s faster than standard care,” detailed Grimes.

Momentum builds after winning Catalyst Invent 2025

MemoryTell has been received positively from healthcare providers and clinicians, policymakers, and government — “you don’t usually get that 3D level of support,” admits Grimes. 

“Investors have also been extremely positive. Being part of the Global Brain Health Institute also brings credibility, and we have strong institutional letters of support."

In October 2025, MemoryTell won big in the Catalyst Invent startup competition, winning the bio breakthrough category and the overall category, which has generated a lot of momentum.

Further, Grimes asserts that “a lot of people have been personally impacted by dementia, so they understand the mission: shifting from invasive, subjective tests to something faster, more dignified, and more objective.”

Once it obtains CE marking, MemoryTell will be a software-as-a-service medical device. The first customers will be public sector primary care and memory clinics, then the private sector. “Many startups go private first, but for us, the mission is rooted in public services,” shared Grimes. 

“I have 25 years’ experience working across health systems — policy, commissioning, service redesign — so I understand the implementation challenges from inside the system.”

From here, MemoryTell’s priorities focus on completing clinical validation studies, advancing its regulatory strategy, building a robust quality-management system, securing CE marking, forming partnerships across Europe, and applying for targeted European grants to support further development and deployment.

News service Freepress has raised €1M in seed funding to advance its platform and prepare for international expansion. The AI-powered service plans to enter global markets in collaboration with local publishers, sharing up to half of its revenue to help sustain quality journalism. Freepress curates verified news from multiple global sources and presents it as concise, bite-sized stories in users’ own languages, making international news easier to follow.

Founded in 2023 by Joel Uussaari and Aleksi Kaistinen and launched in Finland in autumn 2025, its AI acts as a virtual news editor, analysing hundreds of thousands of publicly available and licensed articles from multiple countries and generating key information on each topic in the user’s language.

Users can follow news events from different countries in real time or have Freepress track them automatically. When the international media covers a chosen topic, the service sends a notification. According to Joel Uussaari, CEO of Freepress, AI enables a level of information organisation that allows the service to deliver exactly the news readers want, without requiring them to search for it:

"Through Freepress, publishers can reach readers outside their own language and market area. For publishers, this means reaching audiences far beyond their home market."

Freepress provides its AI-generated news content free of charge and complements it with quality journalism from publishers in various countries. The company shares up to half of its revenue from both consumer and business users with publishers and is in discussions with several international media partners.

Freepress also plans to expand to additional languages and markets and, alongside its consumer service, is developing business tools for content use, media monitoring, and market behaviour forecasting.

Across Europe, buildings account for nearly 40% of total energy use and over a third of CO₂ emissions. Yet every year, less than 1% of the housing stock is renovated to modern efficiency standards when experts say 2–3% is needed to reach the EU’s 2030 and 2050 decarbonisation targets. This “renovation wave gap” is one of Europe’s most pressing and underestimated climate challenges.

The barriers are familiar: high upfront costs, complex regulations, long project timelines, and above all, a shortage of skilled tradespeople. Without a massive acceleration in retrofitting, Europe will struggle to cut emissions, protect households from volatile energy prices, and meet its social and environmental goals.

To bridge that gap, three levers must work in concert: innovation, incentives, and intelligent regulation.

Startups and digitalisation: New accelerators of change

The first lever lies in innovation. Traditional construction methods are slow, fragmented, and labour-intensive. Startups and technology-driven firms are introducing digital tools, data-driven planning, and efficient re-skilling of labour that can multiply productivity in the building sector.

By digitising customer journeys, standardising workflows, and using software to coordinate projects, retrofits can be planned and executed faster, cheaper, and with fewer errors. These process innovations are also helping to address the blue-collar labour shortage by allowing skilled workers to achieve more with the same time and resources, turning craftsmanship into a more efficient, scalable profession.

Digitalisation doesn’t replace human know-how; it amplifies it. The next wave of the energy transition will depend not only on new materials or heat pumps but on how efficiently Europe’s craftspeople can deliver upgrades at scale. Technology, training, and industrial processes can make that possible.

Incentives and government schemes: The policy push

The second lever is financial and political. Retrofitting delivers one of the highest climate returns per euro invested, yet many homeowners cannot afford the initial outlay. Incentives such as tax credits, grants, and low-interest loans can trigger private investment and turn climate goals into economic opportunity.

For governments, encouraging retrofits is one of the fastest and most job-intensive ways to cut carbon emissions. Each major retrofit programme supports thousands of small and medium-sized contractors, manufacturers, and local installers.

Italy’s Superbonus 110% tax scheme showed how quickly demand can rise when incentives are strong, even if its rollout also revealed the need for robust oversight and predictable rules. The lesson is clear: policy must be generous, stable, and well-managed to unlock sustained market confidence without creating uncertainty through frequent regulatory changes.

Regulation and taxonomy: Setting minimum standards

A third and increasingly powerful lever is regulation, establishing clear performance thresholds for buildings. France provides a striking example. Under its Climate and Resilience Act, homes with the lowest energy ratings will progressively be banned from the rental market: From 2025, G-rated homes may no longer be leased, from 2028, the same applies to F-rated homes and by 2034, E-rated dwellings will follow.

The logic is simple: if a building consumes excessive energy, it becomes legally and economically obsolete. Such regulation effectively turns inefficient buildings into stranded assets unless upgraded. It sends a strong signal to owners, investors, and banks that poor energy performance is no longer tolerable.

Other EU member states are likely to follow similar paths as the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive tightens. This approach not only enforces climate responsibility but also drives investment and innovation in renovation services.

Why accelerating matters

If Europe could double its renovation rate from under 1% to even 2% per year, it could eliminate more than 500 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions by 2050: roughly the combined annual output of France and Italy. The benefits go beyond climate impact: lower household energy bills, healthier indoor environments, revitalised trades, and reduced dependence on imported gas.

Europe’s energetic retrofitting crisis will not be solved by one lever alone. It requires digitalisation to make work faster, policy to make it affordable, and regulation to make it unavoidable. Aligning these forces would turn Europe’s ageing homes from carbon liabilities into cornerstones of the green transition and empower a new generation of craftspeople and innovators to quite literally rebuild the future, one wall at a time.

The post Addressing Europe’s energy retrofit challenge: Can innovation and policy work together? appeared first on EU-Startups.

Paris-based Corma, a SaaS management solution that helps IT teams better control software usage and sprawl, has raised €3.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by XTX Ventures, with follow-on investments from Tuesday Capital, Kima Ventures, 50 Partners, and Olympe Capital. It also includes participation from business angels such as Thomas Wolf (co-founder of Hugging Face), Jean-Louis Quéguiner (co-founder of Gladia), and Doreen Pernel (CSO of Scaleway).

Internal software stacks have grown more than tenfold, turning software into a drag on productivity and financial performance. At the same time, tracking and understanding software costs has become increasingly complex due to company growth, evolving workforces, new subscriptions, and changing business models. As the number of tools grows, many IT departments lack clear visibility into how many applications are in use, how much is being spent, and whether those tools are actually delivering value.

Founded in 2023, Corma focuses on helping small and mid-size companies understand, manage, and optimise their software spend. Developed in response to the rapid expansion of software tools and rising AI-related complexity, the platform aims to bring greater clarity and efficiency to software management while providing a stronger foundation for productivity.

Its specialised agents collect key information such as licence renewal terms, authorised users, and usage metrics, giving organisations an accurate view of their software landscape. This enables more informed investment decisions, helping reduce overall spend by up to 20 per cent and saving hundreds of hours on provisioning and access reviews.

We see teams everywhere that are overwhelmed by the number of apps they need to manage every day. They lose money left and right and spend their day on operational tasks instead of strategic initiatives. At the same time, the risks of data leaks and access abuse increase with the rise of Shadow AI and overall permission sprawl,

says co-founder and CEO Héloïse Rozès.

The funding will be used primarily for product development, AI buildout, and commercial expansion.

Melt&Marble, the Swedish BioTech scale-up using precision fermentation to produce designer fats, has just raised €7.3 million in Series A funding, to scale production and bring its first ingredients to market. Designed to deliver enhanced functionality, taste and even health outcomes, the company’s ingredients offer sustainable, high-performance alternatives to conventional oils and fats for use in personal care and food applications.

The €7 million Series A round was led by Swedish DeepTech investor Industrifonden, with participation from the European Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund and strategic partners Beiersdorf and Valio, key players in the personal care and food sectors, respectively. Additional backing came from Chalmers Ventures and Catalyze Capital. The EIC Accelerator also supported with an additional €2.5 million grant last year, bringing latest funding to a total of €10 million over the past year.

Melt&Marble was founded in 2014 in Gothenburg, and the fresh funding marks a pivotal moment for Melt&Marble, signalling cross-sector validation of its technology platform and commercial strategy. With investors spanning venture capital, industry, and European innovation policy, the round brings together deep expertise and networks critical for scaling precision fermentation solutions.

“This investment marks a major milestone for Melt&Marble as we transition from R&D to commercialisation. With key scalability milestones already achieved and strategic partners onboard, we’re entering the market with the capabilities and confidence to deliver real impact. Our vision has always been to deliver more sustainable, high-performance ingredients, and this round brings us significantly closer to that goal,” said Anastasia Krivoruchko, CEO of Melt&Marble.

Tobias Elmquist, Senior Investment Director at Industrifonden, commented: “Melt&Marble has achieved an impressive level of technical and commercial readiness for a company at this stage. Their ability to engineer functional fats through precision fermentation addresses a clear and growing demand across industries. We’re proud to lead this round and support a team combining scientific depth with strong execution to bring sustainable, high-performance ingredients to market.” 

The market opportunity for oils, fats and lipids relevant for Melt&Marble’s platform is estimated to be worth more than $100 billion, covering personal care and beauty, meat and dairy alternatives, chocolate confectionery, bakery and specialised nutrition. As brands in food and personal care race to meet sustainability targets and consumer demand for high performance ingredients, fats are a critical piece of the puzzle. Traditional fats like palm, coconut, and animal-based sources often struggle with performance, supply volatility, and environmental criteria. Melt&Marble’s precision fermentation platform offers animal-free, tailored fat structures that unlock superior functionality, from texture and mouthfeel in food to enhanced skin-feel and bio-activity in cosmetics.

Melt&Marble is creating ingredients that deliver on functionality, impact and cost. By engineering fats from the molecule up, the Swedish scale-up can deliver cost-competitive, locally produced ingredients that meet both technical demands and sustainability goals. Strategic backing from Beiersdorf and Valio is a reflection of the good product-market fit across these high-performance sectors.

Ascan Voswinckel, Head of Venture Capital at Beiersdorf stated: “Melt&Marble is addressing an important challenge in the personal care industry, with its advanced innovative precision-fermentation technology. With consumer interest in more sustainable and responsible skincare products growing, Beiersdorf is pleased to invest in Melt&Marble, and support their highly committed, science-driven team as they aim to advance sustainability across multiple industries.”

Melt&Marble’s product pipeline spans fats designed to unlock functionality across multiple categories, including alternative meat and dairy, bakery, chocolate, skincare, and haircare. The new funding will take Melt&Marble from demo to market-ready, with its first ingredients set for commercial launch in personal care applications in 2026. Production volumes will be delivered through an existing commercial manufacturing partner, ensuring capex-light scalability. Alongside a focus on Europe, the company is also preparing for food market entry in the US, where regulatory pathways allow for faster deployment, and eyeing other geographies for further expansion. Commercial collaboration and distribution discussions are underway and Melt&Marble is actively working on co-development products with partners in preparation for a commercial launch.

Svetoslava Georgieva, Chair of the EIC Fund Board, added: “Melt&Marble’s precision-fermentation approach to designer fats offers sustainable, high-performance alternatives for food and personal care. This Series A round is a strong endorsement of their technology. The EIC Fund is proud to support their scale-up and market entry.” 

The funding news comes as Melt&Marble continues to explore opportunities with industry players across multiple regions, buoyed by strong application results and major advances in bioprocess efficiency. These achievements potentially mark the company’s next phase of growth, as it moves toward commercialising precision-designed fats and lipids and contributing to a more sustainable future for food and personal care.

The post Swedish BioTech company Melt&Marble secures €7 millon to scale designer fats in beauty and food appeared first on EU-Startups.

Helsinki-based news service Freepress has raised €1 million in seed funding to further develop its AI-powered platform and prepare for international expansion. As part of its growth strategy, the company plans to enter global markets together with local publishers and will share up to half of its revenue with them to support quality journalism.

Founded in 2023, Freepress operates with an AI-driven virtual news editor that analyses hundreds of thousands of publicly available and licensed articles from different countries. Based on this material, the app writes key information in the user’s own language and enables real-time monitoring of international news events. Users can also follow topics automatically and receive alerts when major media outlets publish updates on areas they care about.

“Freepress gives its users access to a news feed they would never otherwise see. It opens up the world in multiple languages from around the globe. The application makes global news accessible in people’s own language at a scale never seen before. Freepress is the news media of the AI era – capable of unprecedented scalability,” said Mikael Pentikäinen, editor-in-chief, Freepress’s editorial advisor and board member.

Freepress positions publishers as key partners in its international rollout. While its AI-written news updates are available free of charge, the platform will also include high-quality journalistic content from media organisations across different countries. Freepress pays publishers up to half of the revenue generated from both consumer and business users, and is currently in talks with several international outlets. Reuters’ international news is set to be available on the service from January 2026.

“AI enables information organisation that lets Freepress deliver exactly the news readers want – without them having to search for anything. Through Freepress, publishers can reach readers outside their own language and market area. For publishers, this means reaching audiences far beyond their home market,” said Freepress CEO Joel Uussaari.

The service launched in Finland in autumn 2025 and quickly reached top positions in App Store news categories. The company plans to expand into new languages and markets, and is also developing business tools for content, media monitoring, and forecasting market behaviour.

Freepress was founded by Joel Uussaari, a well-known figure in real estate, and Aleksi Kaistinen, a veteran software professional. Its investor group consists of experienced Finnish investors anchored by Kustaa Poutiainen’s Stephen Industries Inc. Advisors include technology expert and startup mentor Erkki Heilakka, journalism digitalisation pioneer and former executive editor-in-chief Jussi Tuulensuu, former Finnish News Agency and Helsingin Sanomat editor-in-chief and current CEO of Finnish Entrepreneurs Mikael Pentikäinen, and Dottir Law partner Jaakko Lindgren, a specialist in copyright and AI regulation.

The post Helsinki-based Freepress raises €1 million aiming to expand its AI-powered news service appeared first on EU-Startups.

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The post Weekly funding round-up! All of the European startup funding rounds we tracked this week (Dec. 01-05) appeared first on EU-Startups.

This week, we tracked more than 65 tech funding deals worth over €1.3 billion and over 15 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe.

In addition to this week's top financials, we've also indexed the most important/industry-related news items you need to know about. If email is more your thing, you can always subscribe to our newsletter and receive a more robust version of this round-up delivered to your inbox. Either way, let's get you up to speed.

? Notable and big funding rounds

?? French CRM outfit Brevo hits unicorn status following a €500M funding round

?? Black Forest Labs secures $300M Series B at $3.25B valuation

?? Shop Circle secures $100M credit facility as it positions itself as Europe’s alternative to VC funding

??‍?? Noteworthy acquisitions and mergers

?? Bending Spoons to acquire Eventbrite in $500M all-cash deal

?? Wayve acquires German startup Quality Match

?? Shiftmove acquires Ocean, expanding its European fleet technology footprint

?? FORMEL SKIN joins MANUAL to expand from skin health to whole-body care

?? KKR completes £4.7B acquisition of Spectris

? Interesting moves from investors

? Europe’s overlooked alpha: Growathon Ventures targets Venture’s biggest market failure

? SwissHealth Ventures doubles fund volume to CHF 100 million

?? Backing founders from “day zero”, Dutch VC Volve Capital closes Fund I at €9 million

?️ In other (important) news

?? Former Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billström joins Nordic Air Defence

?? New programme fast-tracks European defence innovation with controlled testing in Ukraine

? UN Development Program and Wazoku invite startups to pioneer new tech for underwater mine detection

? From heat waste to heat source: Power Mining launches shipping-container data centres for city heating

? Entrepreneurs launch European “venture studio”

? Recommended reads and listens

? The biggest European edtech deals in H1 2025

?? Mater-AI secures £1.5M to tackle one of energy’s oldest problems: wasted heat

?? “I definitely want a European listing”, says Nvidia-backed n8n CEO

? Biotech scaleup NADMED launches $30K global award to advance innovation in cellular health

? European tech startups to watch 

?? Complir raises €1.7M to help retailers manage global compliance with AI infrastructure

??  Sky Spy lands $1.6M to fix SIGINT failures in saturated signal environments

??  Liablix secures €1.2M to modernize automotive claims analysis

?? Fronted lands $1M to modernise global hiring using AI

?? Bestie Bite raises $700,000 to reinvent restaurant choices with AI gamification

?? Lovable-built Lumoo gets €550,000 funding from Lovable CEO

A Swedish startup built on vibe coding startup Lovable, which aims to reduce the age-old problem of customers returning ill-fitting clothes, has bagged funding from the Lovable CEO as part of a SEK 6million (around €550,000)  angel investment round.

Lumoo's AI platform, built on Lovable, helps brands and retailers with product visualisation, such as virtual try-ons and automated brand modelling, and content production. It says its AI-powered tech is a notch above current virtual try-ons.

It aims to reduce the problem of customers returning clothes, which costs the retail industry billions of pounds every year.

Lumoo has signed deals with brands including Gant, Brothers and AWNR Group. Lovable co-founder and CEO Anton Oskia is part of a "strategic group of prominent angel investors", who are mainly from the fashion and tech industry.

Lumoo will use the capital to target international expansion and cater for the demands of its clients. Oskia said that Lumoo was on track to hit €1M ARR within its first year.

Lumoo was founded by Peter Thörngren and Henrik Skagerlind Fasth, who between them have 25 years in the fashion and retail industry.

Thörngren, CEO, Lumoo, said: “This investment is a strong validation of the rapid growth we are experiencing and the trust we’ve built with some of the most influential brands in the Nordics.

"The capital enables key recruitment and faster development of our AI platform, with the goal of establishing Lumoo as the global industry standard."

Image: Lumoo

ReSoil, a Paris-based company supporting farmers in the agroecological transition of their operations, has raised €4 million in order to scale its regenerative agriculture projects and expand its digital carbon-management platform.

Participants include Banque des Territoires, InvESS Île-de-France Amorçage (initiated by the Île-de-France Region), and Generali Impact Investment – two funds managed by INCO Ventures.

“With ReSoil, we can finally offer farmers the financial visibility they need by guaranteeing upfront revenues – a critical lever for enabling change. We also provide agricultural sectors with robust tools to measure and track their decarbonization using transparent, internationally aligned methodologies. And we empower French companies to act locally by capturing carbon in French soils while demonstrating tangible climate impact to customers, employees and investors,” says Grégoire Alston, co-founder of ReSoil alongside Yohann Vrain and Luc Bailly.

European AgriTech funding activity in 2025 shows a steady flow of capital into solutions improving soil health, farm resilience and environmental performance.

Alongside ReSoil’s new round, the UK-based CroBio secured €850k to advance microbial soil amendments that enhance nutrient and water retention while supporting carbon sequestration, and Antler Bio raised €3.6 million to scale its gene-expression technology aimed at improving dairy-farm productivity and animal resilience.

Together, these 2025 rounds represent approximately €4.45 million invested in adjacent AgriTech areas, indicating sustained interest in technologies that improve environmental outcomes and operational efficiency across farming systems.

Founded in 2022, ReSoil empowers farmers by financing the evolution of their agricultural practices, reducing the environmental footprint of farms, and unlocking the value of environmental services generated at the farm level.

The company is now experiencing strong growth, supporting agroecological transition across more than 100,000 hectares monitored via ReSoil Carbon – 40,000 hectares of active projects, and an additional 60,000 hectares under development in partnership with agricultural cooperatives.

Across its existing portfolio, ReSoil’s projects are reportedly expected to reduce or store more than 300,000 tonnes of CO₂. Since opening its projects to corporate funding in 2024, ReSoil has already onboarded 80 corporate clients, enabling more than €3 million to be committed to financing the agricultural transition.

ReSoil plans to make significant investments to scale regenerative agriculture projects across France. Through its ReSoil Carbon platform, the company guarantees farmers additional revenue directly linked to improvements in their environmental performance, ensuring a predictable and attractive financial incentive for adopting agroecological practices.

The funding round will also accelerate the expansion of ReSoil’s digital platform, enabling more farmers to access support and equipping agricultural stakeholders with new features that simplify the management of carbon projects.

ReSoil’s remuneration framework for farmers is built on two complementary mechanisms:

• Within agricultural value chains: sector-based premiums tied to measurable decarbonisation outcomes, using ISO 14067–certified emission factors aligned with GHG Protocol and SBTi FLAG methodologies
• Beyond agricultural supply chains: sale of Label Bas-Carbone certified carbon credits on the voluntary market to companies committed to local climate action and biodiversity preservation.

ReSoil will also strengthen its teams of agronomists, who design and deploy projects on the ground, and its carbon contribution experts, who support corporate sustainability departments in their soil carbon sequestration strategies.

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London-based yuv, a beauty technology company developing the world’s first smart hair colour lab system for salons and freelancers, has closed a $12 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Nineyards Equity, with participation from Founder Francisco Gimenez, existing investor VNV Global, and a network of strategic angel investors.

yuv is modernising the professional hair colour market through patented hardware, AI-enabled software, and refillable packaging. Its flagship product, the yuv Lab, is a compact, app-connected dispensing system that replaces single-use tubes with refillable aluminium cartridges, delivering precise, customizable formulations at the touch of a button.

Designed for both salons and freelancers, the platform combines patented hardware, AI-powered software, and Swiss-developed formulas optimised for customisation, performance, and safety. By pairing refillable packaging with intelligent data systems, yuv helps beauty professionals reduce waste, cut costs, streamline operations, and expand creative possibilities.

Commenting on the round, Francisco Gimenez, Founder & CEO of yuv, said the new investment marks an important step in the company’s development:

With the backing of Nineyards Equity, VNV Global, and our wider investor community, we are strengthening our commitment to reshaping professional hair colour through sustainability, design, and technology.

The new funding will support yuv’s growth in the UK and its planned US launch in 2026, scaling its patented platform and subscription model to a wider network of salons and freelancers worldwide.