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

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.