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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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almost half their time on drawing and rendering: Synaps ends the theft of time, talent, and money spent on these mostly outdated processes, offering a solution for a fraction of the cost,” mentioned the company. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Immunogenicity is one of the largest hidden costs in biologics, and the industry has accepted late-stage surprises as the norm for too long. We believe this risk should be measured and reduced years earlier than it is today. This financing lets us scale the experimental and computational foundation of our platform and partner with teams who want to make antibody development more predictable from the start,” says Dr Christian Vahlensieck, CEO of ALP Bio AG.

“Our scientific conviction is that immunogenicity cannot be solved by computation alone. By combining human immune organoid readouts with AI, we can generate the type of biological feedback needed to make antibody design more informed, iterative, and ultimately more useful for discovery and optimisation teams,” adds Dr Lucas Schaus, CSO of ALP Bio AG.

Founded in 2025, ALP Bio is developing an immune organoid and AI platform for immunogenicity intelligence in biologics development. The company combines human immune organoid readouts with generative AI to help drug developers predict and reduce anti-drug antibody risk earlier in antibody discovery and development.

The post Swiss BioTech startup ALP Bio raises €1.9 million to advance immune organoid and AI platform appeared first on EU-Startups.

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Featherless.ai, a platform for running open-source AI, has secured $20 million in Series A funding to give enterprises a new path to AI independence.

The round was co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, with participation from BMW i Ventures, Kickstart Ventures, Panache Ventures, and Wavemaker Ventures.

Featherless.ai is a serverless inference platform. Its goal is to make all AI models available for serverless inference. It offers a production-ready alternative to proprietary compute environments. The platform is built on deep research. The founding team created RWKV, a breakthrough open-source architecture designed to challenge the traditional dominance of transformers.

Currently cited as the fastest-growing Hugging Face inference partner, Featherless.ai supports over 30,000 open models across language, vision, and audio, enabling developers to deploy production-grade AI instantly.
It is a neutral layer for AI, unaligned with any hyperscaler, chipmaker, or proprietary ecosystem.

By hosting its core infrastructure in the US and EU and maintaining a global team across Canada, Europe, the US, Singapore, and Australia, Featherless.ai is meeting a critical demand for sovereign AI that respects jurisdictional boundaries and data privacy.

A core part of the Featherless.ai mission is hardware diversity. Through a strategic collaboration with AMD, Featherless.ai ensures that the world’s most popular open-source models run natively on AMD ROCm. This provides a competitive, auditable alternative to proprietary hardware systems, giving businesses a structural cost advantage.
Featherless.ai also aims to protect the industry from the dangers of AI monopolies. By ensuring that state-of-the-art models remain accessible beyond proprietary ‘walled gardens’, Featherless.ai enables developers to build the next generation of applications with greater creative flexibility.

According to Eugene Cheah, CEO and co-founder of Featherless.ai, when a few dominant players control the entire stack, it stifles competition and limits what developers can imagine.

“We’re building the infrastructure that makes open-source AI practical and reliable at scale, ensuring that enterprises can build on a foundation they actually own rather than one they merely rent.

This investment signals a turning point in the AI market. While the first wave of adoption was defined by proprietary, closed-door ecosystems, we provide a neutral ground for a second phase where companies can own and run their own models without being tethered to a single cloud provider or a restricted tech stack.”

Sagi Paz, Head of AMD Ventures, said:

“Featherless.ai is at the forefront of a critical new phase in the development of the AI industry. By providing a strong foundation for open-source AI, it helps expand access and supports a more competitive and diverse ecosystem. We are delighted to support Featherless.ai on their journey.”

Kasper Sage, Managing Partner at BMW i Ventures, said:

“As AI adoption accelerates, enterprises want more control over performance, cost, and where their data lives. Featherless.ai is making leading open models production-ready at scale.

Being able to use a variety of different models is key for future enterprise AI use cases."

Featherless.ai will use the capital to scale its global infrastructure, launch a dedicated marketplace for specialised open models and deepen its technical integration with diverse hardware architectures to continue driving down the cost of AI inference.

Lead image: Eugene Cheah, CEO and co-founder of Featherless.ai.