London-based Human Health, a patient-first precision health platform, has secured a €4.7 million seed round from LocalGlobe, Airtree, Skip Capital, Aliavia, and Scale Ventures, with participation from angels including Arvind Rajan (Cricket Health), Eric Salama (former Kantar CEO), and David Shein (OIF Ventures).

In the EU, more than one in three adults (35 per cent) live with a long-standing health condition, and waiting times have risen in several countries, leaving many patients to manage care across multiple providers and rely on ad hoc tools.

Human Health develops patient-centred solutions. By combining patient-reported data with AI, its Precision Health platform creates a feedback loop that helps individuals track their health, identify patterns, and generate actionable insights. The goal is to make precision healthcare broadly accessible, extending tools typically reserved for clinicians and leading institutions.

Founded by former Canva product leaders Kate Lambridis and Georgia Vidler, Human Health lets users capture their medical history, track interventions, and generate clinician-ready reports. With consent, de-identified experiences can also contribute to research. AI surfaces patterns across mind, body, and lifestyle, helping users focus on areas such as mental health, pain, gut, women’s health, autoimmune conditions, or sleep. When it’s time to see a clinician, the platform compiles a clear report built from real patient data.

The new funding will help the company accelerate development of advanced features, expand coverage into additional conditions, and give patients the option to contribute anonymised data to research.

Human Health will also scale its B2B platform, Human Evidence, enabling selected life sciences partners to gather real-world, patient-reported data at scale.

Bending Spoons, the acquisitive Italian software conglomerate, is acquiring AOL, one of the internet’s most well known early companies.

Bending Spoons is buying AOL from Yahoo, which is backed by private equity firm Apollo for an undisclosed sum, though the Italian firm said it had bagged a $2.8 billion debt financing package to finance the acquisition and future M&A activity.

Reuters, which tipped the deal, previously said the acquisition valued AOL at more than $1.4 billion. 

Bending Spoons, founded in 2013, is known for acquiring tech companies and then trying to improve their finances, sometimes by laying off staff.

Last month, the Milan-based firm acquired US video sharing platform Vimeo for around $1.38bn, in a deal which will take Vimeo private.

Luca Ferrari, Bending Spoons CEO and co-founder, said Bending Spoons would invest "significantly” in AOL, which was an internet giant in the 1990s.

He said: "AOL is an iconic, beloved business that’s in good health, has stood the test of time, and we believe has unexpressed potential.

“By our estimation, AOL is one of the top ten most-used email providers in the world, with a highly retained customer base counting around 8 million daily and 30 million monthly active users.

"We intend to invest significantly to help the product and the business flourish. Bending Spoons has never sold an acquired business—we’re confident we’re the right long-term steward for AOL, and look forward to serving its large, loyal customer base for many years to come.”

Jim Lanzone, CEO, Yahoo, said: "AOL and Yahoo share a great deal of history, and our new team has enjoyed the opportunity to return AOL to growth.

“This transaction will allow us to focus more deeply on the aggressive roadmaps we have planned for Yahoo’s core products moving forward, while ensuring AOL continues to thrive under new ownership.”

Reed Rayman, chair of Yahoo’s board of directors and partner at Apollo, said: “We believe this transaction positions AOL well for its next phase, while Yahoo accelerates investment in its flagship properties and AI-powered experiences.”

According to The Information, AOL was worth over $100 billion by 2000 when it merged with Time Warner, which later spun AOL off, which then merged with Yahoo, which was acquired by Apollo in 2021.

Bending Spoons has previously acquired Vimeo, WeTransfer and Evernote.

Qovery, a DevOps automation platform that makes software deployment effortless across any cloud environment, today announced the release of its AI DevOps Copilot, an AI agent that delivers answers, executes complex operations, and anticipates what’s next. 

To date, it’s the only automation platform to cover the entire DevOps lifecycle.

I spoke to Romaric Philogène, CEO and cofounder of Qovery, to learn all about it.    

From automation to intelligence

Simply put, DevOps is a collaborative approach that combines cultural principles, practices, and tools to automate and streamline the processes between software development and IT operations teams.  

Qovery’s DevOps automation platform lets developers deploy and scale applications on their cloud — simplifying and automating infrastructure so tech teams can focus on what matters most: building great products. 

According to Philogène, while Qovery already automates key steps such as provisioning, application deployment, and server security,  no matter how much you automate, there are always edge cases — configuration issues that arise from how developers set up applications or infrastructure. 

"That’s where AI becomes powerful,” he contends. 

“Our Copilot lets software engineers continue working in the language they’re used to, without switching between interfaces. Instead of troubleshooting manually, they can simply say, ‘Copilot, can you fix this issue?’

The Copilot diagnoses problems, accesses configuration data, and resolves issues autonomously.

A new DevOps interface: natural conversation to reduce worker inefficiencies 

Atlassian’s 2025 DevEx reports 50 per cent of developers lose 10 or more hours a week on non-coding toil in the software pipeline. 

Qovery’s Copilot aims to change this: engineers give instructions in simple language and the system executes, turning a drain on resources into a competitive advantage.   

According to Philogène, the Copilot represents a new type of interface—natural language. Instead of working through UIs, CLIs, or APIs, users can simply talk to the system.

“Our goal is to optimise how customers already use Qovery: reducing the time spent debugging, troubleshooting, or optimising configurations.” 

For example, a team can request simple instructions that unused environments be shut down at the end of the day, or that a new service be deployed at a specific time, or more complex ones - such as “to run dev environments only from Monday 8 a.m. PT to Friday 6 p.m. PT; tear down non-used environments automatically at night; and trigger daily integration tests only if the platform has been unstable in the last 48 hours” and Qovery DevOps Copilot will handle the process automatically.

Developers are increasingly using AI not just to write code, but to verify it—to double-check what the model produces. This inspired Qovery to build a compatibility matrix: a list of tasks that the Copilot is guaranteed to perform safely. 

“Of course, you can ask it anything, but we ensure that what’s officially supported works reliably without excessive human supervision,” explained Philogène.

Five AI agents powering the future of DevOps

What makes the company distinct is learnings from Qovery’s five years of experience streamlining the entire DevOps lifecycle — thousands of clients over 25 million applications and 30+ million infrastructure operations —- are built into DevOps Copilot’s five AI agents:  

• AI Provision Agent: Automates environment creation and scaling by interpreting natural-language requests to allocate resources on demand, enforce quotas, and optimise infrastructure usage.
• AI FinOps Agent: Improves efficiency by detecting idle environments, scheduling shutdowns, and identifying opportunities to reduce spend.
• AI Observability Agent: Enhances incident response by retrieving logs, identifying anomalies, and suggesting solutions before issues escalate.
• AI DevSecOps Agent: Strengthens governance by enforcing compliance, requiring confirmations for sensitive actions, and maintaining a full audit trail.
• AI CI/CD Agent: Simplifies deployment and pipeline management with natural-language prompts for scheduling releases and managing test queues.

Strong guardrails for data security   

While prompts are processed through Claude AI, (Anthropic's model) but private data and credentials are never transmitted. Qovery already runs customers’ infrastructure, so the company is very mindful of privacy.  Philogène explained: 

“We’ve designed guardrails so users can configure how the Copilot interacts with their environment.

For example, they can restrict it to read-only mode—where it reviews configurations and provides recommendations—or grant write access for direct operations.

Even then, the Copilot always requests confirmation before executing any changes.  We ensure that only non-sensitive information is ingested into the AI system, and we’re continuously refining how we handle and anonymise data. Data safety is absolutely central to this product.”

Further, all actions are bound by role-based permissions, requiring explicit approval internally for high-stakes decisions like deleting databases or applications.  

In the future, customers will be able to bring their own models for full control and compliance. 

But for now, because Qovery controls both input and output data flows, the Copilot can learn from users' behaviour across organisations. It adapts to their workflows and infrastructure patterns, allowing for increasingly personalised recommendations.

“We have a huge advantage: access to well-structured data and consistent user behaviour patterns. This gives the AI the right context to make meaningful decisions without compromising privacy,” shared Philogène.

While too many tools in the software pipeline impact developer efficiency, engineers don’t want the fewest tools — they want the best tools for the job. Copilot, therefore, is totally agnostic — working seamlessly with any tool currently employed by development teams.

Further, in production DevOps, reliability and latency are everything. Philogène explained that the company’s new AI Copilot maintains real-time responsiveness by operating directly within the Qovery platform rather than relying on third-party intermediaries.

 “That’s the beauty of the Qovery AI Copilot. It leverages the full capabilities of our platform, integrating directly with our APIs,” he said. 

From automation to agentic autonomy

In terms of what’s next in the DevOps space, Philogène contends that the industry is moving toward fully autonomous agents. 

“The Copilot will eventually identify and resolve problems before the engineer even needs to intervene. We’re not there yet—we still need to solve problems like hallucination, data ingestion limits, and context window size.

At Qovery, we mitigate these by feeding our models highly structured operational data and monitoring user behaviour to limit hallucinations.

Once those foundational challenges are solved, we’ll see agents capable of managing complex systems end-to-end.”

However, he doesn’t believe AI will replace developers. Rather, it will redefine their role.

“Developers are becoming more like product engineers—people who define and solve problems, not just write code.

Similarly, designers and engineers will use AI to bring their product ideas to life faster. It’s a complete shift in how teams collaborate.”

Two early pilot customers already tested Copilot during its pre-launch phase. Their feedback informed Qovery’s development roadmap.

“It is a sign for Ukrainian businesses and the country”, says the co-founder of Ukraine’s newest unicorn, commenting on its recent external funding, which propelled it to unicorn status.

Fintech-IT Group, the firm whose tech powers Ukraine’s biggest challenger bank, Monobank, recently became Ukraine’s latest $1bn-valued tech firm, after securing funding from regional fund, Ukraine-Moldova American Enterprise Fund (UMAEF), reported to be around $18m.

The funding lifted Fintech-IT Group to unicorn status, joining half a dozen fellow Ukrainian unicorns, which include writing assistant Grammarly, software company GitLab and workflow automation company AirSlate (though some of these now have overseas HQ).

Broader implications of outside investment

It also has wider ramifications for the startup and tech ecosystem in Ukraine, a country still at war with Russia, says Oleg Gorokhovskyi, Fintech-IT Group co-founder.

He says: “It’s a sign for everybody, a sign for Ukrainian businesses and the country, that even during this hard war, if you do the right things, if you help clients, you could be interesting for investors and raise money. 

“It is a huge, important step for Ukrainian entrepreneurs and Ukrainian businesses overall.”

Jaroslawa Z Johnson, president and CEO of UMAEF, which was set up by the US Congress in 1994 and has long-term experience of investing in tech firms in Ukraine and Moldova, said Fintech-IT Group was a “local leader” and that its success was testament to the strength of the Ukrainian tech ecosystem.

Russia war blocking investment

Ukraine’s war with Russia has been a block on external investment coming into Ukraine, experts say.

Maria Kucheruk, co-founder, Ukrainian Association of Startups, said: “In general, attracting external investment into Ukrainian startups during the war remains extremely challenging. Only a few mature or already profitable companies manage to raise capital.

“For the majority of early-stage startups, investors remain cautious due to perceived risks and geopolitical uncertainty. This makes the need for international co-investment mechanisms and innovation support programs more critical than ever.”

Gorokhovskyi co-founded Fintech-IT Group, the umbrella company for several tech firms, including FintechBand, which supplies the core tech behind the Monobank app, with Mykhaylo Rogalskyi.

Rogalskyi said during the war, the “mood of entrepreneurs in Ukraine is that it’s not the time to raise funds”.

Furthermore, he said he was expecting complications with the UMAEF investment deal.

Rogalskyi said: “It is really hard to expect investors to queue for Ukrainian companies. It was a big surprise for me to go through the deal, and nothing scared the potential investor during the negotiation period.” 

A previous attempt at a fundraiser in 2021, with a consortium involving Goldman Sachs, “blew up” during negotiations, says Rogalskyi.

What is Monobank?

Monobank, founded in 2017, is Ukraine’s biggest neobank, and Ukraine's second biggest retail bank overall with around 10m customers.

It is jointly owned by Universal Bank, which provides retail and commercial services, and Gorokhovskyi and Rogalskyi.

Monobank says customers can open accounts within minutes, manage payments, access loans, and enjoy cashback and loyalty rewards.

It also has a B2B offering supporting SMEs, and an e-commerce offering.

Monobank's customer base is skewed towards younger people, with 85 per cent of 15 to 35-year-olds in Ukrainian cities using the banking app.

Impact of war on Monobank

Like other Kiev-headquartered businesses, Monobank has been badly impacted by the war- be it blackouts, air raid sirens, and staff anxiety.

Rogalskyi says: “When you have a blackout in the cities, you have to buy generators and operate generators in the office.

“You have to buy Starlink and operate Starlink. If anyone is not sleeping because of air raid sirens during the night and rocket attacks, the next day is not super productive.”

Monobank staff are located in different locations within Ukraine for security reasons, and there is also the added threat of a cyberattack.

Rogalskyi says: “Every couple of weeks, we have attempts to attack our infrastructure from, let’s just say, unknown hackers."

International expansion on hold

International expansion is on the agenda for Monobank, but the war has put its plans on hold.

Possible markets include those where there are many Ukrainians, such as Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic countries.

Rogalskyi says that the company would want to have a team in place in an overseas market, which, given restrictions on air travel out of Ukraine, coupled with a desire for the founders wanting to be in the challenger bank’s home market amid a war, has stymied these plans for the time being.

Rogalskyi says: "For now, it’s important to be here in Ukraine, with our team, with our customers."

Life sciences investor Earlybird Health has promoted Dr. Rabab Nasrallah and Dr. Christoph Massner to Partners. Both new partners have led the firm's strategy across biotech, data-enabled therapeutics and medtech.

Earlybird Health, part of Earlybird Venture Capital, focuses on early-stage investments in biotech, medtech, and digital health. The wider Earlybird group manages more than €2.5 billion in assets and has backed over 70 companies across Europe, including nine IPOs and 36 trade sales.

“Rabab and Chris combine discipline and bold thinking. As they step into the partnership, they will help lead the future of Earlybird Health,”

said Thom Rasche, Partner at Earlybird Health.

“They have each helped shape how we evaluate opportunities, support portfolio teams, and translate innovation into clinical impact.”

Massner joined Earlybird in 2018 and brings a commercial-led perspective spanning diagnostics, healthtech platforms, and device-enabled therapeutics. He has led several transactions across Earlybird Health I & II, focusing on business models that integrate data and AI into healthcare delivery and product development.

He serves on the boards of Noscendo, Ariceum Therapeutics, and Hilo, and is a board observer at Shape Memory Medical and Alesi Surgical. Earlybird said he also plays a role in connecting its health portfolio with the wider technology investment ecosystem.

Nasrallah, who joined Earlybird in 2020, brings a therapeutics and platform-led investment perspective. She has been closely involved in developing the firm’s biotech strategy and building partnerships with venture and pharmaceutical investors across Europe and the United States.

Her board roles include HAYA Therapeutics, Greywolf Therapeutics, and Portal Biotech, alongside observer positions at GEMMABio, Priothera, ImCheck Therapeutics, and Prothea Technologies..

The promotions reflect Earlybird Health’s growing role in Europe’s life sciences ecosystem, which has seen increased investor interest amid advances in data-driven healthcare and biotech platforms. European life sciences VC investment surpassed €10 billion in 2024, driven by continued demand for innovation in precision medicine, AI-led drug discovery, and clinical technologies.

As we enter the final few months of 2025, a year that has proven volatile for geopolitics, climate tech is facing a new world. One that is defined by those rapidly shifting geopolitics, more careful investors and an increasing focus on opportunistically rebranding climate to resilience. 

“Resilience” – as climate tech – is a buzzword that doesn’t mean much. It can encompass making supply chains more resilient and independent, but it can also be a euphemism for defence. 

As a founder, it’s crucial to follow your north star and not be led by distractions. Rebranding to resilience is a seemingly easy way to tap into new money pools, but it doesn’t solve the problem of actually developing technology that customers want to buy.

What is resilience tech?

This past year has seen a big shift in attitudes towards climate tech, reflecting changing political realities. While climate tech has always been about innovation, what the market increasingly demands are solutions grounded in customer value. Tangible outcomes, clear unit economics, not just bold ideas.

And then there’s the word climate itself. What once was a unifying call for action now often reads as a political stance. Working in climate has become political. With more governments leaning into conservative agendas, climate tech is no longer just a category – some perceive it as a statement. That makes messaging tricky, especially for companies that want to scale internationally or secure public funding.

Add to that the geopolitical shifts of the last few years – Russia’s war in Ukraine, rising protectionism, fractured supply chains – and we see a new theme emerging: resilience. Governments and industries alike are hungry for solutions that support energy independence and supply chain security. And so, the framing shifts from saving the planet to safeguarding economies. From climate to resilience.

The opportunities and anxieties sparked by a growing resilience sector

Investors are seeing a strong future in resilience, which is reflected in the way funds are being allocated. For example, the European Investment Fund recently approved €8.9 billion of new financing for investments in security, defence and critical raw materials – all sectors fitting under the resilience umbrella.

A new appetite in the market opens up new doors. Companies can attract new customer segments and scale internationally. But it also raises new questions. Resilience, especially when tied to technological sovereignty, is a lens that invites dual-use. Some technologies that support electrification or decarbonisation also serve military purposes. Battery systems are a prime example. That makes it all the more important for climate tech companies to be clear on their positioning, values and the outcomes they want to enable.

While there are some investors who love the notion of dual-use and actively push it, others are more hesitant.  European Investment Fund head Marjut Falkstedt has emphatically stated that it will not finance weapons and ammunition with its new financing, but others are yet to commit. It’s a debate that’s starting to pick up speed now.

Where does this leave climate tech?

Amongst all the debates and uncertainty surrounding resilience, one truth remains clear: the transition to net-zero is not just necessary – it’s inevitable. 

Funding for European climate tech officially fell by 71% in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2024, from €21.7bn to €6.2bn. But in reality, the drop hasn’t been quite as dramatic as the numbers suggest. Rather, climate investing has fractured as solutions that were previously branded as climate tech are being reclassified as AI or defence, two areas which have enjoyed a big increase in funding recently. Investments in European AI companies have already grown by 61% in 2025 so far, and funding into European defence increased by nearly 30% over the same time period. 

So, while there’s no denying that climate tech is not in its heyday, it’s important to understand that the situation is not as clear-cut as it seems at first glance. This is also only the current situation, and not representative of long-term expectations. While geopolitics constantly shifts, influencing investment in defence on a short-term basis, climate tech remains as vital as ever – that’s not going to change.

Taking a stance

The emergence of resilience tech throws up new, often uncomfortable and ethically challenging questions for companies in the climate tech space. Navigating the new reality of our sector requires all involved – whether that be founders, investors or partners – to take a stance and know where their red line falls.

It’s something that’s very close to me. Since the beginning, I founded my company to work in the climate tech space, and our articles of association clearly state that we can only operate in this area. That’s why we have decided to work exclusively with companies whose core mission is to tackle the climate crisis.

We won’t tell stories for technologies that could be turned towards surveillance, weapons or oppressive systems. If other applications of their technology are incidental, such as alternative proteins for food resilience, we can accept that. We know the world is often more complicated than a simple yes or no. Reality is more nuanced. Resilience can mean many things. If it’s a climate technology now dressed differently – fine. If it’s a shortcut to avoid saying defence or weapons, then no. 

The difficult part is arriving at a clear-cut answer. Ultimately, most decisions are binary; they force you to take a stand. We ask those questions in conversations. After having had those discussions, we’ll know where our prospective customers stand. It’s either a yes or a no. We know our stance. What’s yours?

The post From climate to resilience: what does this shift really means? appeared first on EU-Startups.

London-based Marleybones, a premium dog food brand, has closed a £2.5 million funding round led by TAW Ventures, the investment firm founded by Jane Lauder, with follow-on support from JamJar Investments, Active Partners, and Animal Health Angels.

The round stands out for its strong female representation, with a female-founded company and an all-female investor team, still rare in European venture capital.

Founded in 2020 to bridge the gap between quality and convenience, Marleybones offers Pantry Fresh® meals that are slow-cooked, nutritionally complete, and packaged in sustainable cartons. The range also includes vet-developed supplements, an omega oil, and natural air-dried treats, each vet-approved and produced in the UK.

This investment follows over 200 per cent growth since the previous round and several milestones: expanded retail distribution, new product partnerships, a line of functional supplements, and a pilot veterinary channel.

Mikala Skov, Co-founder of Marleybones, said:

We’ve built strong traction across D2C and retail, expanded into supplements, and proven category demand with triple-digit growth. With TAW Ventures and JamJar by our side, we’re ready to accelerate our journey to make Pantry Fresh® a household standard.

On sustainability, Marleybones partnered with rePurpose Global to achieve plastic-neutral certification, sources 100 per cent of UK-made products from locally grown British ingredients, and packages all meals in fully recyclable Tetra Pak cartons, avoiding millions of single-use plastic pouches and trays.

Josephine Bager, co-founder of Marleybones, noted that the company’s growth reflects strong demand for dog food that doesn’t compromise on nutrition or ease of use. She said the Pantry Fresh® meals show that both can be delivered together, and the new funding will help Marleybones reach more customers and continue shaping the fresh dog-food category.

The new funding will expand teams across creative, customer experience, and retail, build brand awareness via influencers, PR, retail activations, and events, and accelerate performance marketing and customer acquisition.

Customer communication platform Intercom has announced the opening of its next R&D hub in Berlin, marking a major investment in the company’s AI-powered customer service platform and its market-leading AI agent, Fin.

Founded in Dublin in 2011, Intercom builds customer communication and service tools for online businesses. Fin is the centrepiece of the company’s push into fully automated, intelligent customer support.

It’s designed to act as a “Customer Service Agent” rather than just a chatbot, blending automation with human-level understanding and context.

I spoke to Darragh Curran, CTO of Intercom, to learn more.

According to Curran, Intercom has around 28,000 customers across virtually every corner of the planet, with strong concentrations in North America and Europe. 

“Germany is our third-largest and fastest-growing market among the major European countries.”

100 roles up for grabs in AI hub

Over the next year, Intercom plans to hire 100 people across engineering, AI, data science, product, and design roles.  The new hub will serve as a cornerstone for advancing Fin, which the company envisions evolving into a true end-to-end Customer Agent, far beyond traditional customer service boundaries.

“Berlin strikes us as a great city, providing a deep concentration of technical talent, universities that feed that, and a culturally rich, creative scene,” shared Curran.

“Intercom is a very design-oriented company, so Berlin fits that ethos. It’s also emerging as a real hub for AI talent, which is particularly important for us.”

While Intercom’s global headquarters remains in San Francisco, its R&D leadership is anchored in Dublin, making Berlin both geographically and strategically a natural next step in the company’s global expansion.

“It’s close enough to those hubs to collaborate but has its own energy.”

Further, Intercom says it chose Berlin for its unique blend of deep technical talent and creative energy. 

“The city’s dense ecosystem of AI startups, applied research labs, and ambitious practitioners makes it an ideal location to accelerate the company’s AI hiring and innovation efforts.

Berlin is a place where world-class engineers and designers thrive and its optimism and ambition in AI align perfectly with our own goals for Fin.”

In terms of roles, Curran shared;

“We intend to build a holistically complete R&D unit in Berlin — everything from AI and machine learning researchers to product engineers, designers, and managers. A huge focus of our investment is on building Fin, our AI Customer Agent.”

I asked Curran what attracts people to work for Interim. He revealed:

“You’ll join an incredibly talented team — people at the top of their field. If I were an engineer today, I’d want to be at a company doing something meaningful with AI. It’s the best way to learn.

For us, it’s a moment of abundance — we know what we want to build, customers want it, and the opportunity is huge.”

 Intercom’s Fin aims to redefine customer interaction

Fin started as a customer service agent, but according to Curran,

“Our vision is broader — an end-to-end customer agent. Think of it like a concierge that guides you through the customer journey, not just answering support tickets but handling anything from upgrades to refunds to helping you when you’re stuck in a product.”

“We’re betting on this idea of the end-to-end customer agent. Even before we’ve built all the features, customers are already pushing Fin in that direction — that’s a great sign.”

Significantly, Fin’s performance, measured in resolution rate, has improved from around 26 per cent to 65 per cent over two years. Only a few percentage points of that came from model upgrades — the rest came from Intercom's own architecture and continuous experimentation.”

So far, more than 7,000 businesses have adopted Fin, including Berlin-based companies Ostrom and Tado, as well as global leaders such as Anthropic, Vanta, Clay, Personio, Whoop, and Miro.

Fin has quickly become a core growth driver for Intercom, with the company approaching $100 million in ARR and positioning itself as one of the fastest-growing private software firms.

Lead image: Darragh Curran, CTO of Intercom. Photo: uncredited. 

Antidote, a new London-based accelerator, has launched with £2.5 million in funding from Fulgur Ventures, Initial Capital and a group of private angel investors.

Antidote aims to promote growth in the UK and to support entrepreneurs in Britain to build on open technologies, starting with Bitcoin and fintech.

The accelerator provides workspace, funding, mentorship, and policy access, helping founders turn ideas into products that solve real challenges in payments and advance the technologies powering the next internet economy.

Targeting early-stage entrepreneurs, experienced operators and corporate innovators, Antidote wants to empower founders from any background to turn serious ideas into investable, commercially viable businesses. Its programmes support founders working on:

• Financial and payments infrastructure.
• Digital identity and data sovereignty.
• Bitcoin and open-source technologies.
• Institutional and regulatory alignment for fintech innovation.

Ben Cousens, Co-Founder and CEO of Antidote, shared

: “We’re here for entrepreneurs turning new technology into real impact. Whether it’s Bitcoin, fintech, or leveraging AI and online identity, Antidote can offer the capital, community, and credibility to scale.

The UK has the potential to lead this new wave of innovation. We just need to back the people building and focus on solving real problems: that's what matters.”

Cousens contends that the UK has all the right ingredients by way of talent, capital, and legal frameworks to lead this new era of open, financial innovation, but "what's been missing is a credible bridge between founders and institutions, as well as a constructive approach to the 21st Century technologies that will define the economy of the future.

"That’s what Antidote is here to build.”

Through its workspace and network in London’s Hatton Garden, Antidote will offer founders access to:

• A six-month accelerator programme with workspace, workshops, and demo days.
• Direct funding and investor introductions.
• Mentorship from leading fintech, Bitcoin, and venture experts.   
• Community events and policy roundtables with UK regulators and ecosystem partners.

Antidote is working in partnership with organisations such as UK think-tank Bitcoin Policy UK, who were instrumental in the formation of the organisation to enable access to a network that can bridge grassroots innovation with institutional support building trust, clarity, and collaboration across the UK’s growing technology ecosystem.

Richard Faichney, Partner at Taylor Wessing, said:

“We’ve worked closely with Antidote from the start to help build a foundation grounded in trust, clarity, and collaboration.

Their work demonstrates how legal and institutional rigour can enable innovation rather than restrict it. This is a crucial step in strengthening the UK’s position as a hub for credible, long-term technology ventures."

Mayra Tama, Partner at Initial Capital, said: 

“Initial Capital invests in founders and ecosystems that turn Bitcoin’s potential into real-world progress. Antidote is building exactly what the UK needs right now, a credible platform that connects entrepreneurs, capital, and policy to accelerate meaningful innovation.

We’re confident that Ben and the team will help cultivate the kind of companies that define the next decade of fintech and open technology.”

Lead image: Freepik.

AnyTax, the Berlin-based startup building embedded tax solutions for financial platforms, today announced the closing of its €1 million pre-Seed funding round to make tax “truly accessible“, simplifying how platforms integrate tax capabilities and how users experience them.

Investors from the banking world, such as IBB Ventures and BLACKVRST Equity, as well as early-stage VC Heartfelt and prominent angels, including the current Chairman of the Supervisory Board of N26 and the Founder of sevDesk, are participating in the round.

“Banking, payments and investing have all become real-time; with taxes being so closely connected to these aspects of our financial lives, it feels ancient how manual and intransparent everything around taxes still is today,” said Moritz Kuder, Co-founder of AnyTax.

AnyTax’s €1 million pre-Seed round sits within the tax and financial-infrastructure ecosystem – a sector with limited funding, with EU-Startups reporting on only two startups of similar relevance.

In April 2025, TaxDown from Madrid secured €4 million to enhance its AI-powered tax-return platform and broaden its user base. Similarly, in August 2025, Creem from Tallinn raised €1.8 million to develop a cross-border financial-infrastructure layer for AI-native startups, including tax and compliance features.

While these examples highlight growing investor confidence in the automation of tax and compliance processes, Germany has seen no such funding rounds reported in 2025. This positions AnyTax as one of the few Berlin-based entrants addressing the embedded tax-solutions segment, potentially giving it a first-mover advantage within its domestic market.

“Our mission is simple: anyone offering financial services should be able to extend their product offering with seamless, digital tax solutions,” adds Yash Gadiya, Co-founder.

Founded in 2024, AnyTax is building API-first, embeddable tax infrastructure for financial platforms. Its solutions enable companies to seamlessly integrate fully compliant, digital services into their products.

While banking and personal finance have rapidly digitalised over the past years, AnyTax says innovation in tax services has been minimal. Taxes remain disconnected, intransparent, and costly, with taxpayers relying on outdated tools or expensive and understaffed tax advisors.

Financial platforms are in a prime position to solve this problem for their users since they already sit on a wealth of tax-relevant data points. However, the company insists they lack the expertise and capacity to build these solutions themselves.

AnyTax aims to change this by providing pre-built, API-first and fully compliant tax solutions that financial platforms can embed directly into their product suite. AnyTax’s modular and AI-powered tax infrastructure unlocks tax as a new product vertical for any financial platform.

Not only financial platforms benefit: financial advisors and tax advisors can also leverage AnyTax’s white-label digital solutions to offer modern tax services to their clients under their own brand.

“Digital tax solutions are a natural extension of financial services, and users are increasingly expecting them from modern platforms. The pressure to start offering tax solutions to stay competitive, especially as digital tax platforms begin offering financial services themselves, has never been higher,” said Tobias Schimmelpfennig, Investment Director at IBB Ventures.

AnyTax is led by a team of former FinTech operators, tax and accounting professionals, and tax technology engineers, blending industry experience with technical expertise to modernise tax services for financial platforms. ​

According to data from 2024, 57% of Germany’s tax advisors are over 50 and set to retire within the next decade, while fewer young professionals are entering the field. At the same time, FinTech platforms are evolving into all-in-one financial hubs, offering an increasingly comprehensive suite of personal finance products, with tax being the missing piece of the puzzle.

“The team’s tax domain expertise and track record of building highly compliant and secure technological solutions uniquely position them to build and lead in this emerging category,” added Cindy Beckel, Investment Manager at IBB Ventures.

The new funding will be used to expand AnyTax’s tax infrastructure and portfolio of embeddable tax solutions in partnerships with leading financial platforms.

The post With 57% of German tax advisors over 50, AnyTax raises €1 million to modernise tax infrastructure appeared first on EU-Startups.

Eindhoven-based startup CityLegends has secured €1.7 million in funding to expand its street sports and culture platform internationally and advance its technology for connecting athletes, creators, and fans.

The round saw participation from GFR Fund, Dutch Sport Tech Fund, Leisure Fund, and SportInnovator, alongside follow-on investments from existing backers LUMO Labs and LeanSquare.

Founded in 2020 by Jimmy Hermans and Thijmen Verkerk, CityLegends operates a digital platform that connects street sports enthusiasts and urban creatives through media, gaming, and social interaction. Users can share clips, discover local spots, and compete in street Esports challenge while tracking and comparing performance.

Andy Lürling, Founding Partner at LUMO Labs, said:

“CityLegends has had an audacious global vision for their community from the get-go. We are excited to continue to be part of CityLegends’ journey going forward.

"With also new global investors like GFR Fund from San Francisco joining the roster with unmatched expertise in shaping digital communities and cultures, we are confident CityLegends’ impact on the global urban sports community will only grow faster and stronger.”

Founded in 2020 by Jimmy Hermans and Thijmen Verkerk, CityLegends operates a digital platform that connects street sports enthusiasts and urban creatives through media, gaming, and social interaction. Users can share clips, discover local spots, and compete in street Esports challenges while tracking and comparing performance.

Hermans, the company’s CEO, said:

“Urban culture being included in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles are a great testament to the global recognition and appreciation for the athletic and creative abilities of its practitioners.

"Participation already matches traditional sports like football, basketball, and soccer, but the community is still wildly underserved with regards to digital tools. This new investment allows us to expand our platform and unite 200 million urban athletes and inspire 2 billion fans worldwide.”

CityLegends plans to use the new capital to expand into new markets, enhance both its free and paid platform features, and grow its B2B media unit. The company will also develop “culture playbooks”, digital engagement tools designed to help brands and partners connect with urban sports and culture communities.