Articles written by
Stéphane Paillard

European tech startups collectively raised more than €40 million in disclosed equity this week, with Finnish autonomous airships and German quantum photonics headlining a round-up dominated by deep science and applied AI. Between 13 and 17 April 2026, seven venture-backed companies crossed the line — covering quantum computing, AI-native workflow software for finance, sales and retail, drone-alternative intelligence platforms, and the first Series C for a French logistics operator applying AI to the rarefied world of fine art transport. Week 16 reinforces a theme that has defined the early weeks of Q2: European investors are comfortable writing pre-seed and seed cheques into hard tech — quantum, photonics, autonomous systems — even as later-stage growth rounds remain concentrated and selective. The stage mix this week (three pre-seed, two seed, one Series A and one Series C) is also a useful reminder that the continent’s pipeline is being refilled at the early end. The week’s deals, deal by deal The biggest fully disclosed round of the week went to Kelluu, which closed a €15M Series A to scale its autonomous airship intelligence platform. Led by the NATO Innovation Fund, the round backs the Finnish deeptech company’s mission to provide persistent geospatial AI coverage where satellites and fixed-wing drones fall short — a capability attracting renewed interest from European defence, border-security and critical-infrastructure buyers. Close behind, German quantum photonics company Pixel Photonics raised €13.5M to accelerate market entry for its superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs), combining a seed round with an EIC Accelerator blended-finance ticket. As the US and China ramp up quantum spending, Pixel Photonics is positioning Europe’s detector layer — a critical bottleneck for quantum networking and optical quantum computing — as a defensible sovereign capability. AI-native financial software continued to attract capital. Round raised a $6M seed round to scale its AI-powered finance automation platform, targeting the accounts-payable and treasury workflows still stranded in spreadsheets and legacy ERPs. Retail is getting its own version of that story: Warsaw-based Replenit picked up $2.5M to bring real-time AI decision-making to retailers, promising to replace the overnight batch jobs that still drive a lot of merchandising decisions with always-on agentic inference. On the quantum hardware side, Peak Quantum reached a €2.2M pre-seed to build error-resilient superconducting quantum chips, backed by Cloudberry Ventures and aligned with the EU Chips Act’s SUPREME programme. The company’s pitch is familiar in quantum circles but sharpened by this week’s funding: Europe’s best shot at competitive quantum processors runs through specialist chip designers, not general-purpose semiconductor incumbents. Sales tooling is still a prolific seed category. Berlin’s Zell raised €500K to scale its AI-powered sales management platform, focusing on AI coaching for frontline sellers — a niche increasingly crowded but with clear willingness-to-pay from mid-market B2B teams. Rounding out the week, French AI logistics operator Convelio secured a Series C to scale its AI-powered fine art logistics business globally. The amount was not disclosed, but this is a meaningful signal: applied, vertical AI businesses with real logistics margins are still able to raise growth capital in a market that has otherwise been tough on later-stage rounds. Sector themes: quantum, agentic AI, and vertical software Three patterns stand out this week. Quantum is back in the weekly headlines. Between Pixel Photonics and Peak Quantum, roughly €15.7M flowed into European quantum hardware in a single week — notable because both rounds explicitly position European capability against US and Chinese scale-up. Public instruments (EIC Accelerator, EU Chips Act SUPREME) are doing what they were designed to do: crowding in private capital around strategic hardware. Agentic and real-time AI are getting operationalised in unglamorous verticals. Round (finance), Replenit (retail), Zell (sales) and Convelio (logistics) all share the same underlying thesis: take a repetitive operational workflow, replace batch processes and human triage with always-on AI agents, and charge for the efficiency gain. None of these companies are building new foundation models; they are productising them. That is exactly what mid-market B2B customers have been asking for. Deeptech with dual-use applications continues to attract European defence-adjacent capital. Kelluu’s round, led by the NATO Innovation Fund, is the clearest example this week — but the line between civilian infrastructure monitoring and security surveillance is, by design, thin. Expect more of this as European defence budgets work their way through into venture allocations across Q2 and Q3. What to watch next week Several of the articles monitored this week — including large raises from Stegra (€1.4bn recapitalisation for green steel), Helical ($10M for AI pharma research), Graftcode (€2.1M for AI-era software integration), Wamo (€10M Series A for pan-European SME banking) and Clean Food Group (£4.5M for yeast-derived oils) — are still moving through the pipeline and should appear in next week’s round-up. Combined, they point to a continuing barbell: climate and industrial deeptech at one end, applied AI infrastructure at the other, with relatively thin activity in classic consumer categories. We will also be watching for the first flagship growth-stage AI rounds of Q2 from UK and French portfolios, where several companies are reportedly in late-stage conversations. Week 16 summary table Startup Amount Stage Sector Kelluu €15M Series A Autonomous airships / geospatial AI Pixel Photonics €13.5M Seed + EIC Accelerator Quantum photonics Round $6M Seed AI finance automation Replenit $2.5M Pre-Seed AI retail decision-making Peak Quantum €2.2M Pre-Seed Quantum computing hardware Zell €500K Pre-Seed AI sales management Convelio Undisclosed Series C AI fine art logistics For the full archive of European fundraising coverage, see blog.sesamers.com/category/fundraising.

The offshore inspection market has long depended on an expensive dependency: ships and the people who sail them. That arrangement is now under pressure, and French deeptech startup Bubble Robotics believes it has a credible alternative. The company has emerged from stealth with a $5 million pre-seed round led by Episode1 Ventures, with participation from Asterion Ventures and Norrsken Evolve, to develop resident autonomous robotic systems designed to operate continuously at sea without human intervention. The investment arrives against a backdrop of mounting operational and environmental pressure on Europe’s offshore industries. Wind farms, subsea cables, port infrastructure and aquaculture sites all require regular inspection, monitoring and data collection — work that today is largely performed by crewed vessels, divers and remotely operated vehicles. Bubble Robotics wants to replace that model with persistent, unmanned robots that live at sea and deliver data to shore on a continuous basis. A robotics-as-a-service model for the blue economy Bubble Robotics was co-founded in 2025 by chief executive Jean Crosetti and Patricia Apostol, who met around a shared ambition to apply aerospace-grade engineering to ocean challenges. The founding team brings together alumni of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and ETH Zürich, a pedigree the company has leveraged to attract early institutional backers. Its platform centres on two components. The BubbleDock is a surface station capable of generating its own power and remaining on station for up to six months. It hosts BubbleBots — subsea robots equipped with cameras, sonar, multibeam echosounders, side-scan sonar, hydrophones and environmental sensors. The payload is processed by Bubble OS, a proprietary software layer that converts raw visual and acoustic data into compliance-ready intelligence for customers. The commercial proposition is robotics-as-a-service. Rather than selling hardware, Bubble Robotics owns and operates the fleet, billing customers for continuous monitoring and reporting. The company claims the approach removes customer capital expenditure and reduces inspection costs by up to 70 per cent relative to vessel-based missions. “By removing that dependency, we unlock a step change in cost, safety and operational frequency,” said Jean Crosetti in the announcement. Episode1 Ventures leads a specialist syndicate The round is led by Episode1 Ventures, a London-based fund active in early-stage deeptech, with participation from Asterion Ventures and the climate-focused fund Norrsken Evolve. The capital will be directed at technology development and a first wave of operational deployments with offshore energy, port and environmental monitoring customers. The line-up reflects a broader pattern. European investors have become increasingly comfortable underwriting maritime robotics, a category that until recently was considered capital-intensive and slow to scale. Recent rounds for Mirai Robotics in defence-adjacent autonomous maritime systems and ScrubMarine in hull-cleaning robotics suggest a thesis is forming around resident, unmanned platforms as the next layer of infrastructure for the ocean economy. Why the ocean needs persistent robots The operational case for persistent subsea robotics is easier to make today than it was five years ago. Offshore wind capacity has expanded sharply across the North Sea, the Baltic and the Atlantic façade, and each installation requires periodic inspection of turbines, foundations, cables and scour protection. Regulators increasingly demand continuous environmental monitoring of protected areas and aquaculture zones. Subsea cables, which carry an estimated 95 per cent of international data traffic, are attracting renewed security attention after a series of high-profile disruptions. Bubble Robotics is pitching itself as the operating layer for this emerging market. The company targets three initial segments: ports and coastal infrastructure operators, offshore energy developers, and environmental and security agencies. Partnerships visible on its website include the French marine research institute Ifremer, ETH Zürich and NVIDIA, alongside public backing from Bpifrance. The $3 trillion blue economy figure cited by the company is an ambitious framing, drawn from OECD projections for the total value of ocean-based industries by 2030. Whether Bubble Robotics can capture a meaningful share of that opportunity will depend on execution: autonomous subsea systems face hard engineering constraints in energy management, communication bandwidth and fault tolerance, and commercial adoption tends to reward demonstrated uptime rather than demo-day capability. What to watch next For an early-stage company, the $5 million pre-seed is a sensible amount for the stage Bubble Robotics is at. The next twelve months should see the company progress its first paid deployments, validate the economics of its service model and build the operational data required to court Series A investors. Episode1 Ventures has a track record of doubling down on portfolio companies that prove early traction, and Norrsken Evolve’s involvement signals a climate-impact lens that is likely to inform how the company is measured. The European deeptech market has produced a steady cadence of maritime robotics rounds over the past twelve months, and Bubble Robotics joins a category that is increasingly well-defined. For further coverage of European fundraising activity, see the Sesamers fundraising hub. Source: tech.eu.

Dublin-based fintech Seapoint has announced a €7.5 million seed round led by London fintech specialist 13books Capital, bringing total funding to €10 million just over a year after the company was founded by former Stripe European CIO Sean Mullaney. The round represents one of the larger early-stage fintech deals to close in Ireland this year and underlines investor appetite for platforms that consolidate the financial stack used by venture-backed companies. Existing investors Frontline Ventures and Tapestry VC participated in the round, alongside more than 40 angel investors. Notable individual backers include Claire Hughes Johnson, the former chief operating officer of Stripe; Laurence Krieger, former UK chief executive of Tide and ex-chief operating officer of Revolut; Intercom co-founder Des Traynor; and Kota chief executive Luke Mackey. Michael McFadgen of 13books Capital joins Seapoint’s board as part of the transaction. From Stripe alumni to a consolidated financial operations platform Seapoint was incorporated in January 2025 by a founding team that is majority-Stripe by lineage, with additional alumni from Wise, Wayflyer, Nubank and Tide. The company’s thesis is that venture-backed startups waste too much time stitching together the patchwork of banking, payments, payroll, expenses and accounting tools that accumulates after incorporation. Seapoint aims to replace that patchwork with a single, AI-native platform that imports existing systems and automates the financial admin that sits between founders and their product. The platform bundles business accounts, treasury management, payroll, expenses, invoicing and reporting into one interface. According to the company, its AI layer can import and connect a startup’s existing banking, email and accounting data within about ten minutes, after which routine bookkeeping, reconciliation and reporting tasks are automated. Additional features include multi-currency accounts, payments, corporate cards and foreign-exchange services. “More than half the Seapoint team are Stripe alumni,” said Sean Mullaney in the announcement. The pitch, in effect, is that a team which built the payments infrastructure of a previous era now believes the same disciplined approach is needed to rebuild the financial back office of modern startups. 13books Capital leads a well-populated fintech syndicate The decision by 13books Capital to lead the round is consistent with its portfolio bias towards European B2B fintech, with prior investments spanning treasury, reconciliation and embedded-finance categories. Michael McFadgen’s board seat suggests the firm sees Seapoint as a multi-round position rather than a tactical entry. The participation of more than 40 angel investors is unusually broad for a seed round and reflects the founders’ network. Claire Hughes Johnson’s involvement is particularly notable: her reputation for operational rigour at Stripe makes her one of the most sought-after angels in European B2B software. The presence of Laurence Krieger, Des Traynor and Luke Mackey adds a second layer of operating-led capital from founders who have each built scaled products in adjacent categories. Frontline Ventures and Tapestry VC, who led earlier funding, re-upped in the seed round. That signal matters: re-investment from existing backers is typically the clearest endorsement available at this stage. A maturing category with familiar competitors Seapoint is entering a category that is no longer empty. Established neobanks such as Revolut Business and Tide serve millions of SME customers; Qonto and Finom compete aggressively in continental Europe; Mercury and Brex have defined the equivalent American market; and a new cohort of AI-native operating platforms — Puzzle, Rillet, Numeric and Ramp — is pushing into finance automation. Seapoint’s specific wager is that European venture-backed startups require a bundled, operations-first alternative, combining licensed banking services with automated reporting rather than stitching together point tools. The company targets venture-backed startups from pre-seed through Series A in the UK and Ireland, with self-service sign-up now open to all founders in both markets. The €7.5 million is intended to fund expansion across continental Europe, deepen the AI layer and extend the platform’s banking feature set. What to watch next Three questions will determine how far Seapoint can push this round. First, can the platform sustain the ten-minute import-and-automate claim as customer data gets messier? Second, how quickly can it move beyond the UK and Ireland into the French, German and Nordic markets where Qonto and Finom have established positions? Third, at what point does it move from seed-stage angel momentum to institutional Series A conviction? For founders, Seapoint is a useful addition to the market. For investors, it is an indication that AI-native financial operations is now a fundable category in Europe, rather than a US phenomenon. For further coverage of European fintech fundraising, see the Sesamers fundraising hub. Source: Sifted.

ATMOS Space Cargo, the Franco-German orbital logistics startup, has closed a €25.7 million Series A round to scale production of its PHOENIX re-entry vehicles and establish Europe’s first routine orbital return service. The round, announced on 22 April 2026, was co-led by Balnord and Expansion Ventures, with participation from a broad syndicate of defence-aligned and deep-tech investors. Twelve months after becoming the first private European company to conduct an orbital re-entry — a milestone reached with the PHOENIX 1 demonstration flight in April 2025 — the Lichtenau- and Strasbourg-based firm is transitioning from proof-of-concept to commercial service. Management says the new capital will fund a three-vehicle PHOENIX 2 campaign, seed a new governmental and defence division called ATMOS WORKS, and begin development of PHOENIX 3, a next-generation vehicle capable of returning around one metric tonne of payload from low Earth orbit — roughly ten times the PHOENIX 2 capacity. Inside the round The Series A was co-led by Balnord and Expansion Ventures, and backed by a long list of strategic and financial investors: Keen Defence and Security, the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator programme, OTB Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), APEX Ventures, Seraphim, Faber, E2MC, Kirch Ventures, Lennertz & Co., Mätch VC, MBG Baden-Württemberg and Tech Horizons. The composition of the cap table is notable. The mix of defence-specialist funds (Keen Defence and Security, Seraphim), European public finance (EIC Accelerator, MBG Baden-Württemberg, HTGF) and deep-tech specialists (OTB Ventures, Expansion, E2MC) reflects the dual-use positioning that increasingly defines European space financing. ATMOS is courting civilian microgravity customers — pharmaceutical research, in-space manufacturing, life sciences — while pitching the same hardware as a sovereign logistics capability for European governments and militaries. “This financing allows us to move to regular operational service,” said chief executive and co-founder Sebastian Klaus, framing the round as the step that turns a single demonstrated mission into infrastructure. Why return-from-orbit matters The commercial case for returnable capsules has been building for several years. SpaceX’s Dragon has dominated the U.S. market, while Varda Space Industries has commercialised small autonomous re-entry capsules for pharmaceuticals manufactured in microgravity. In Europe, however, there has been no sovereign equivalent — every kilogramme of material returned from orbit has had to travel back on American hardware. ATMOS is pitching PHOENIX as the European answer. The vehicle uses an inflatable heat shield that deploys in orbit to decelerate the capsule during re-entry, enabling a controlled ocean splashdown without parachutes. Recovery operations are based near Santa Maria in the Azores, giving the company an Atlantic landing corridor. The strategic context has shifted sharply since PHOENIX 1 flew. European defence spending is rising, the EU’s Space Act and the EU Defence Industrial Strategy are directing capital towards sovereign capabilities, and in-space manufacturing is beginning to move from research budgets to commercial contracts. A European-built, European-operated return service addresses both sides of that equation. Commercial traction The Series A also arrives against a backdrop of signed demand. In November 2025, ATMOS and France-based Space Cargo Unlimited announced a seven-mission programme to support autonomous in-space manufacturing, with the first flight targeted for 2026. PHOENIX 2 will fly three missions under the new capital plan, expanding cadence from one-off demonstration to a roughly annual operational tempo. The ATMOS WORKS division is the more interesting commercial bet. By carving the governmental and defence business into a dedicated unit, the company signals that it expects contracts for on-demand orbital logistics, sensitive payload recovery and sovereign data return — categories that have until now been almost entirely the preserve of state-owned agencies or cleared U.S. suppliers. Where it fits in the European funding picture ATMOS sits within a growing cohort of European space-tech companies that have attracted Series A capital in the past year, and its round follows a string of recent European deep-tech raises tracked by Sesamers, including orbital and robotics plays. At €25.7 million, the round is meaningful but not outsized by U.S. standards — Varda raised well over $100 million before reaching comparable operational scale. The implication is that European capital is willing to fund category-defining hardware, but expects milestone-by-milestone delivery rather than blitzscaling. For ATMOS, the milestones are concrete: three PHOENIX 2 flights, the launch of ATMOS WORKS, and the PHOENIX 3 design freeze. For European space policy, the question is whether sovereign return-from-orbit gets used widely enough — by public buyers and private manufacturers alike — to justify the infrastructure being built. The next data point will be PHOENIX 2’s maiden flight, slated for later in 2026. If it reaches orbit and returns on schedule, Europe will have something it has never had before: a home-grown, commercially operated downmass capability. Source: Tech.eu — ATMOS Space Cargo secures €25.7M Series A (22 April 2026). Additional reporting from the HTGF press release and ATMOS Space Cargo.

Munich-based quantum computing startup Peak Quantum has raised €2.2 million in pre-seed funding to advance a new generation of superconducting quantum processors designed to reduce the overhead of error correction. The round, led by UK-based Cloudberry Ventures, brings the company’s total backing to more than €5 million when combined with non-dilutive public support, and positions the 2024-founded spin-off as one of the European deep-tech names to watch as the continent accelerates its sovereign quantum hardware agenda. Alongside Cloudberry Ventures, the financing drew participation from United Founders, QAI Ventures, and Golden Egg Check, together with a group of business angels with operational backgrounds in semiconductors and deep tech. The capital will be used to scale the engineering team, push the technology through its next experimental milestones, and support the company’s operational role in a European pilot manufacturing programme for quantum chips. A spin-off built around error resilience Peak Quantum is a spin-off from the Walther-Meißner-Institute (WMI) in Garching, one of Europe’s most established research centres for superconducting quantum devices. The founding team combines academic pedigree with production know-how: Leon Koch (CEO), Alexander Schult (CFO), Dr Thomas Luschmann (COO), Dr Max Werninghaus (CSO), Ivan Tsitsilin (Head of Design) and Kedar Honasoge (Head of Production). The company is also embedded in Munich Quantum Valley and has drawn support from UnternehmerTUM, anchoring it within the city’s deep-tech cluster. The thesis behind the company is straightforward but technically demanding. Most superconducting quantum processors today rely on aggressive error-correction schemes, in which large numbers of physical qubits are grouped to form a single, more reliable “logical” qubit. The approach works in principle, but it explodes hardware requirements and energy consumption long before the systems reach industrially useful scale. Peak Quantum is instead developing qubits whose error resilience is built into the physics of the device itself. “More qubits do not help if each individual one is unreliable. We are developing processors where error resilience is an intrinsic physical property,” said CEO Leon Koch. If the architecture performs at scale, it could materially reduce the number of physical qubits needed per logical qubit, simplifying both fabrication and control electronics. Operating SUPREME: the EU Chips Act angle The timing of the round is closely tied to Europe’s industrial policy on advanced semiconductors. Peak Quantum has been selected as the operator of SUPREME, a planned pan-European pilot line for quantum chips funded under the EU Chips Act. Operations are scheduled to begin in April 2026, with the goal of establishing a shared industrial infrastructure for designing and manufacturing quantum processors inside the EU. For a pre-seed company, taking on a pilot-line mandate is unusual, and it reflects both the scarcity of European actors with the relevant fabrication experience and Brussels’ willingness to channel strategic hardware programmes through specialist start-ups rather than incumbents. For Peak Quantum, SUPREME provides privileged access to fabrication capacity and collaboration with research partners across the bloc — a structural advantage that complements the new private capital. Investor view “Europe has a real opportunity to be at the forefront of quantum hardware development. Peak Quantum is making a crucial contribution to this,” said Mahir Sahin, General Partner at Cloudberry Ventures, framing the investment in the broader context of Europe’s sovereignty ambitions in compute. The round also aligns with a wider pattern visible in recent European fundraising activity, in which quantum and photonics-adjacent start-ups have continued to attract capital even as generalist venture budgets tighten. Earlier this week, fellow quantum-photonics specialist Pixel Photonics closed €13.5 million to scale its single-photon detectors, and Qoro Quantum recently secured $750,000 to bridge classical and quantum workloads — evidence that investors remain willing to underwrite hardware-heavy quantum theses when they come attached to credible science and clear industrial roadmaps. What to watch next Three milestones will define whether Peak Quantum can convert scientific promise into industrial traction. The first is execution on SUPREME, where the company’s ability to hit throughput and yield targets will be closely scrutinised by EU stakeholders and future co-investors. The second is experimental validation of its error-resilient qubit designs at increasing qubit counts, which will determine whether the architectural bet translates into a defensible performance advantage. The third is commercial engagement: quantum processors ultimately need customers — from national labs to cloud providers and end users in chemistry, materials and optimisation — and the next twelve months will reveal how quickly Peak Quantum can build that pipeline. With €5 million in total funding, a pilot-line mandate, and a technical bet that sidesteps one of the field’s most stubborn bottlenecks, Peak Quantum enters the next phase of Europe’s quantum race with an unusually concentrated set of assets for a company barely two years old. Source: Tech.eu

Paris- and London-based Convelio has closed a Series C funding round to accelerate the automation of global fine art logistics and expand its storage footprint into the United States. The company, which has shipped an estimated $1.84 billion of art for major auction houses including Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips, intends to use the capital to deepen its AI-driven operations platform and open a flagship warehouse in New York. The round is led by a prominent French entrepreneurial family, with participation from existing backers Forestay, Mundi Ventures and Acton Capital. Terms have not been publicly disclosed. Founded in 2017 by chief executive Edouard Gouin and Clément Ouizille, Convelio set out to modernise a sector long dominated by legacy freight forwarders and bespoke, manual processes. Its proprietary algorithms generate instant quotes for the transport of paintings, sculptures and other high-value objects, while its in-house operations team manages packing, shipping, customs and installation. The company now serves around 3,000 art businesses worldwide. Building the software layer for the art market The global art market moves tens of billions of euros of objects each year, yet logistics remains one of its least digitised functions. Quotes are frequently produced by hand, condition reports live in email threads, and transport coordination happens across dozens of specialist carriers. Convelio’s pitch — and the thesis behind its Series C — is that this fragmentation can be resolved through a single software and operations stack. The company recently became the primary global logistics provider for Phillips, covering shipping, storage and release services in London, New York and Hong Kong. Phillips reported $927 million in global sales in 2025, making the partnership one of the most significant operational mandates awarded in the sector in recent years. According to chief executive Edouard Gouin, the Series C will help Convelio scale storage infrastructure, invest in automation across operations and serve clients with the same precision at global scale as it does locally. Why New York matters Convelio’s planned New York flagship warehouse is a strategic rather than incidental investment. The United States remains the single largest art market, and storage alongside fulfilment services carries significantly higher margins than pure transport. By anchoring a hub in Manhattan or the surrounding boroughs, Convelio positions itself to serve auction houses, galleries and private collectors with release-on-demand services — a capability previously concentrated among a small number of legacy operators. The company also plans to continue investing in its AI-powered collections management product, which helps institutional clients track provenance, condition and location across distributed holdings. A familiar cap table with a new anchor Forestay, Mundi Ventures and Acton Capital have all backed Convelio through previous rounds, including its €30 million Series B in 2022. The introduction of a French entrepreneurial family office as lead investor signals a shift toward longer-horizon capital — a pattern increasingly common among European scale-ups seeking to avoid premature exit pressure. European competitors in adjacent categories include Gander and ArtHaus, while US-listed Cadogan Tate remains a dominant legacy provider. Convelio’s positioning — software-first, vertically integrated, global — gives it room to differentiate even as the sector consolidates. What comes next Beyond the New York expansion, Convelio is expected to continue hiring in engineering and operations, with particular focus on automation of condition reporting, computer-vision-based damage detection and integration with auction house bidding platforms. For a company that began life as a marketplace connecting galleries with art shippers, the evolution into a software-and-services platform for global fine art logistics reflects a broader pattern in European vertical SaaS: starting with a narrow workflow and growing into the infrastructure layer of an entire industry. For more on European fundraising and scale-up stories, visit our fundraising hub. You can also read our recent coverage of Kelluu’s €15M Series A.

Finnish deeptech company Kelluu has secured €15 million in a Series A round led by the NATO Innovation Fund, marking the fund’s first investment in a Finnish startup. The round includes participation from Keen Venture Partners, Gungnir Capital and Finnish state investor Tesi, and will accelerate the commercial deployment of Kelluu’s autonomous hydrogen-powered airships across defence and civil markets. Headquartered in Joensuu and operating what it describes as the world’s northernmost airship factory, Kelluu builds 12-metre unmanned airships that combine the resolution of drones with the persistence of satellites. The aircraft use hydrogen for both lift and propulsion, allowing missions of more than 12 hours while carrying payload modules of up to six kilograms. Typical configurations include LiDAR, hyperspectral cameras and thermal imagers — enabling high-frequency monitoring of industrial sites, borders and critical infrastructure. A different kind of airborne intelligence Where conventional drones struggle with endurance and satellites lack resolution, Kelluu’s airships are designed for persistent, low-altitude coverage. The company sells the capability as a service: customers commission missions and receive processed data rather than purchasing hardware. The model has gained traction among mining operators, border authorities and NATO planners. Finnish mining company Terrafame already uses Kelluu’s fleet to generate 3D digital models of a 60-square-kilometre industrial site, helping monitor slope stability and optimise operations. On the defence side, Kelluu was recently integrated into NATO’s AI-driven command system and participated in REPMUS — one of the alliance’s largest exercises for unmanned maritime and aerial systems. According to chief executive Janne Hietala, the Series A will enable Kelluu to scale deployments, deepen its geospatial AI capabilities and meet demand from both civil and defence partners. NATO Innovation Fund makes its first Finnish bet The NATO Innovation Fund — the €1 billion multi-sovereign vehicle backed by 24 allied nations — has been steadily investing in dual-use deeptech companies across Europe. Its decision to lead Kelluu’s round signals continued appetite for autonomous systems with defence applications, particularly those offering sovereign alternatives to US and Chinese hardware. The fund’s participation also reflects Europe’s broader push to strengthen its defence-industrial base. Kelluu joins a growing roster of European unmanned-systems companies — from Tekever in Portugal to Helsing in Germany — attracting significant capital as governments rebuild strategic capabilities. Keen Venture Partners and Gungnir Capital both bring deeptech investment experience, while Tesi, Finland’s state-backed investor, continues its pattern of supporting domestic champions in critical industries. What the capital will fund Kelluu plans to use the proceeds to expand its autonomous airship fleet and commercial deployments, further develop its geospatial AI platform through Kelluu AI Labs, broaden its defence-sector partnerships across NATO member states, and scale manufacturing capacity at its Joensuu facility. The company positions itself not as a hardware vendor but as an aerial-data provider, and the investment will help it move further along that axis — investing in the software layer that turns raw sensor output into operational intelligence. A maturing European deeptech play Kelluu’s raise lands at a moment of renewed European focus on sovereign aerospace capability. With NATO exercises increasingly featuring unmanned systems and European governments raising defence budgets, persistent aerial monitoring is becoming a strategic requirement rather than a niche capability. For a company founded in a city closer to the Arctic Circle than to any major capital, Kelluu has carved out an unusually distinctive position: part airship manufacturer, part geospatial AI company, and now a NATO-backed European deeptech scaleup. For more coverage of European fundraising and deeptech, visit our fundraising hub.

Warsaw-based retail artificial intelligence startup Replenit has closed a $2.5 million pre-seed round, aiming to shift commerce platforms from predicting customer behaviour to reasoning about it in real time. The round was co-led by Polish venture firm Movens Capital and Vastpoint, with additional participation from Logo Ventures, DigitalOcean Ventures, Finberg and Caucasus Ventures. Angel capital came from Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and chief executive of the London-based voice artificial intelligence company ElevenLabs. Founded roughly a year ago by a team of six Turkish entrepreneurs — Ilyas Kurklu, Alp Karacaev, Omer Ozden, Caner Demir, Egemen Akdan and Cenk Karacaev — Replenit positions itself as a reasoning layer that sits on top of a retailer’s existing data and orchestration stack. Rather than issuing a forecast and leaving humans to translate it into action, the system interprets behavioural signals as indicators of intent and decides what to offer each shopper at a given moment. Ilyas Kurklu, co-founder and chief executive, framed the problem plainly when the round was announced: “Retailers can no longer rely on prediction alone. They need to understand intent, reason in context, and decide what to do next for each individual customer.” From prediction to decision The language matters. Much of the first wave of retail AI has focused on recommendation engines and propensity scores — outputs that still require a marketer or merchandiser to act on them. Replenit argues that the next step for commerce teams is an automated layer that moves from insight to action, triggering the right offer, message or replenishment prompt at the point of intent. The platform ingests signals such as browsing patterns, purchase timing, replenishment cycles and engagement history, and then draws on large-scale behavioural data to infer lifecycle needs. According to the company, early customers include L’Occitane en Provence and the flash-deal retailer iBOOD. L’Occitane reported a 235 per cent increase in post-purchase revenue after deploying Replenit’s engine, while iBOOD attributes 6.3 per cent of total company revenue to Replenit-driven decisions. Those figures are self-reported, and Replenit has yet to be tested at the scale of larger incumbents. They nonetheless point to the commercial logic behind the bet: decision automation is harder to replicate than dashboards, and retailers are under pressure to extract more margin from existing traffic as acquisition costs remain stubbornly high. A martech team with scale experience Replenit’s founding team brings more than 40 years of combined experience in business-to-business software and martech, having previously helped build and scale companies to unicorn status. The group is based across Warsaw, with technical operations in the Netherlands, and plans to open a presence in the United States by the end of 2026. Movens Capital and Vastpoint are familiar backers of early-stage Central and Eastern European software plays. The presence of Mati Staniszewski as an angel is notable: ElevenLabs has become one of the highest-valued artificial intelligence companies to emerge from Europe, and his participation signals continued interest from operators in backing reasoning-layer infrastructure rather than purely generative consumer tools. What the money will do The capital will be used to expand Replenit’s product and AI research teams in Poland and the Netherlands, deepen integrations with commerce platforms, and establish an initial commercial footprint in the United States. The company has indicated that hiring will focus on senior engineering roles and applied research, reflecting the computational demands of running decisioning in real time against live customer data. European retail technology has seen a resurgence of interest from venture investors over the past year, with several pre-seed and seed rounds closing for companies operating at the intersection of commerce data and generative artificial intelligence. Replenit joins a cluster of startups arguing that the value in this stack is moving from prediction accuracy to decision quality — a distinction that will matter more as retailers embed large language models deeper into customer-facing workflows. For a one-year-old company, a $2.5 million pre-seed is a measured cheque: enough to buy twelve to eighteen months of runway to prove that the reasoning-layer thesis translates into repeatable commercial outcomes. The next test will be whether Replenit can replicate its early customer results across a broader set of categories and geographies without the hands-on founder attention that early deployments typically attract. For more coverage of European funding rounds, visit our fundraising hub.

Europe’s quantum technology sector is attracting increasing attention from both private investors and public institutions, as governments across the continent position photonics and quantum computing as strategic priorities in the global technology race. With the United States and China accelerating their quantum investment programmes, European deeptech startups are now securing the capital needed to move breakthrough research out of the laboratory and into commercial applications. Münster-based Pixel Photonics has secured €13.5 million in combined funding to accelerate the commercialisation of its superconducting single-photon detector technology. The total comprises a €5 million seed round, led by Futury Capital, alongside €8.5 million from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator — split between €2.5 million in grants and €6 million in equity investment. Additional seed investors include the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation (SPRIND), Kensho Ventures, and High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF). EIC Accelerator validates European quantum ambitions The EIC Accelerator selection represents a significant endorsement of Pixel Photonics’ commercial potential. The company was chosen as one of just 61 recipients from approximately 1,000 applicants — the European Union’s most competitive funding instrument for breakthrough innovation. The dual structure of the funding, combining private venture capital with public institutional backing, reflects a growing pattern in European deeptech where blended financing models are enabling capital-intensive hardware startups to bridge the gap between research and market entry. “This funding enables us to transform what has so far been a highly specialised quantum technology into robust, scalable industrial products,” said Nicolai Walter, CEO of Pixel Photonics. The investment follows a trajectory of increasing institutional confidence in photonic quantum technologies. Futury Capital’s decision to lead the seed round positions the firm alongside established deeptech backers HTGF and SPRIND, both of which have track records supporting German hardware innovation from early-stage through to commercial scale. From university spin-off to quantum hardware contender Founded in 2021 as a spin-off from the University of Münster, Pixel Photonics develops waveguide-integrated superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (WI-SNSPDs) through its proprietary ARCTIC platform. The technology transforms what has traditionally been bulky, laboratory-scale equipment into compact, chip-based solutions capable of detecting individual photons with exceptional sensitivity and speed. The applications span several high-value sectors, including quantum computing, quantum key distribution (QKD) for secure communications, medical diagnostics, defence, and advanced microscopy. The company has already established strategic partnerships with notable quantum computing firms, including QuiX Quantum, PASQAL, and ORCA Computing, and has delivered detector systems for photonic quantum computer development alongside the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). The European quantum technology market continues to expand rapidly, supported by the EU’s Quantum Technologies Flagship programme and national initiatives across Germany, France, and the Netherlands. As quantum computing architectures mature and demand for high-performance single-photon detection grows, companies like Pixel Photonics occupy a critical position in the hardware supply chain — providing the detection infrastructure upon which quantum networks and computing systems depend. With the new capital, the company plans to scale production, expand its product portfolio — which includes the Dena rack-format and desktop detector systems — and accelerate international market entry. The team, led by CEO Nicolai Walter and CTO Dr Wladick Hartmann, is also preparing for its next funding round as it transitions from development-stage to full commercial operations. Summary Company Pixel Photonics Headquarters Münster, Germany Founded 2021 (University of Münster spin-off) Round Seed + EIC Accelerator Amount €13.5 million (€5M seed + €8.5M EIC) Lead Investor Futury Capital Other Investors SPRIND, Kensho Ventures, HTGF Use of Funds Scale production, expand product portfolio, accelerate market entry Also read: Latest European startup fundraising news ned funding to accelerate the commercialisation of its superconducting single-photon detector technology. The€5 million seed round, led by Futury Capital, alongside €8.5 million from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator — split between €2.5 million in grants and €6 mill

The European sales technology landscape is gaining momentum as artificial intelligence reshapes how companies train, manage, and optimise their commercial teams. From automated call analysis to personalised coaching workflows, a new generation of startups is building intelligent tools that promise to transform sales performance — and early-stage investors are taking notice. Berlin-based Zell has raised €500,000 in early-stage funding to scale its AI-powered sales management platform, which analyses sales conversations, identifies behavioural signals, and generates personalised coaching plans for sales teams. The round was backed by P3 Ventures and SkyDeck Europe, alongside UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck accelerator programme, Lendlease, and Cariplo Factory. Several angel investors also participated, including Nicola Pivaro, Flavio Di Palo, Pietro Tansini, Thomas Hunziker, Gabriele Sidoti, and Ricardo Waller. P3 Ventures and SkyDeck Europe back AI sales coaching vision The investment reflects growing investor appetite for AI-native tools that address the persistent challenge of sales team performance. Traditional coaching methods — manual call reviews, subjective assessments, and one-size-fits-all training — are increasingly viewed as inadequate for fast-scaling commercial organisations. Zell’s platform aims to replace these with data-driven, automated workflows. Founded by Alberto Garagnani (CEO) and Moritz Beck (CTO), Zell has developed an AI operator that listens to sales calls in real time, identifies key behavioural patterns, and delivers actionable feedback to both individual sales representatives and team managers. The platform goes beyond simple transcription by analysing tone, objection handling, and engagement signals to produce tailored coaching recommendations. The startup has already secured early customers across multiple markets, including Pack, Revenue Excellence Partners, Commerciali Digitali, Ladle, and HomeTown, with commercial traction spanning the United States, Germany, Italy, and Spain. This geographic breadth at such an early stage signals strong product-market fit for AI sales coaching solutions across diverse sales cultures and languages. Zell’s participation in the UC Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator programme and Cariplo Factory has provided the founding team with access to a global network of mentors, investors, and potential enterprise customers — a significant advantage for a Berlin-based startup targeting international expansion from day one. European AI sales technology market builds momentum The raise comes amid a broader wave of investment in AI-driven sales and revenue intelligence tools across Europe. The global sales enablement market is projected to grow significantly over the coming years, driven by demand for tools that improve conversion rates, reduce ramp-up time for new hires, and provide real-time performance insights. Zell’s approach — combining conversational AI analysis with automated coaching plan generation — positions it in a growing segment that sits at the intersection of sales enablement and workforce development. While established players in the conversation intelligence space focus primarily on recording and transcription, Zell differentiates by closing the loop with personalised, actionable coaching outputs. The fresh capital will be deployed towards product development, expanding the platform’s language and market coverage, and growing the engineering team. With operations already spanning four countries and backing from both European and US-based investors, Zell is well-positioned to capture early-mover advantage in the AI sales coaching category as European enterprises increasingly seek intelligent alternatives to manual sales management processes. Summary Company Zell Headquarters Berlin, Germany Founded 2024 Founders Alberto Garagnani (CEO), Moritz Beck (CTO) Round Pre-Seed Amount €500,000 Key Investors P3 Ventures, SkyDeck Europe, UC Berkeley SkyDeck, Lendlease, Cariplo Factory Angel Investors Nicola Pivaro, Flavio Di Palo, Pietro Tansini, Thomas Hunziker, Gabriele Sidoti, Ricardo Waller Use of Funds Product development, market expansion, engineering team growth

The European fintech sector continues to attract significant investor attention as AI-powered solutions reshape how finance teams operate. From treasury management to accounts payable and payroll, startups are racing to automate the operational backbone of corporate finance — and investors are backing the most promising platforms with conviction. London-based Round has secured $6 million in seed funding to scale its AI-powered finance automation platform, which streamlines treasury management, accounts payable, and payroll for growing businesses. The round was led by Alstin Capital, with participation from Backed VC, Love Ventures, and existing investor Passion Capital, which led the company’s $2.1 million pre-seed round in October 2024. Notably, approximately 10 per cent of Round’s existing customers also invested in the round, alongside angel investors including Paul Forster, founder of Indeed. Alstin Capital leads seed round as AI finance tools gain traction The investment signals growing confidence in AI-native finance infrastructure. Alstin Capital, an early-stage venture fund focused on B2B software, led the round as Round demonstrated strong product-market fit among fast-growing companies. The platform is already used by notable clients including Cleo, the AI-powered financial assistant, and PostHog, the open-source product analytics company. Founded in 2023 by Pac O’Shea and Hayyaan Ahmad, Round has built a platform that functions as an AI operator for finance teams. The technology automates invoice processing, approval routing, and payment execution for accounts payable, while its AI Treasury Manager agent automatically identifies optimal rates and sweeps funds across connected accounts. The platform integrates with more than 2,000 UK and EU bank accounts and offers access to BlackRock Money Market Funds yielding above 4.2 per cent on idle cash. “We are building for the finance team of the future, one that understands the importance of automation,” said Hayyaan Ahmad, co-founder of Round. The company reports that customers achieve a 75 per cent reduction in invoice processing time and a fourfold improvement in yield on idle cash, with full onboarding completed in as little as five days. Alongside the funding, Round announced two new products: an Agentic Workflow Builder that converts natural language descriptions into automated financial processes, and Autonomous Payroll, which streamlines the complete payroll cycle from file upload to payment execution. European AI finance automation market gathers momentum The raise comes at a time of accelerating investment in AI-powered finance tools across Europe. Accounts payable automation and treasury management represent a combined addressable market worth tens of billions of dollars globally, yet the majority of mid-market finance teams still rely heavily on manual processes, spreadsheets, and fragmented software stacks. Round’s approach — combining treasury, AP, and payroll into a single AI-native platform — positions it against a fragmented competitive landscape of point solutions. The company’s ISO 27001 certification and FCA-regulated custodian partnerships with Wealthkernel, BlackRock, and Barclays provide the compliance framework that enterprise finance teams require. The fresh capital will be deployed towards product development, expanding the engineering and go-to-market teams, deepening integrations with banking and financial systems, and scaling infrastructure. Round also plans to invest in community initiatives, including finance-focused hackathons and workshops designed to build its presence among CFOs and finance leaders. With total funding now exceeding $8 million, Round is well-positioned to capture a meaningful share of the AI finance automation market as European businesses increasingly seek intelligent, end-to-end platforms to replace legacy financial workflows. Summary Company Round (Round Treasury) Headquarters London, United Kingdom Founded 2023 Founders Pac O’Shea, Hayyaan Ahmad Round Seed Amount $6 million Lead Investor Alstin Capital Other Investors Backed VC, Love Ventures, Passion Capital, Paul Forster (Indeed founder) Total Funding ~$8.1 million Use of Funds Product development, team expansion, banking integrations, infrastructure scaling

Plymouth-based Altilium has secured £18.5 million from the UK government’s DRIVE35 Scale-Up Fund to build Britain’s first commercial refinery recovering lithium, nickel and graphite from end-of-life EV batteries.