The Axie Infinity co-founder who survived a $620M North Korean hack is now building AI drone detection for Europe’s defence
The Axie Infinity co-founder who survived a $620M North Korean hack is now building AI drone detection for Europe’s defence

Stendr, a Norwegian counter-drone startup led by Aleksander Leonard Larsen, who co-founded blockchain gaming unicorn Sky Mavis, has raised a $5.4M oversubscribed pre-seed from RainFall, ACME, SkyFall, and a consortium of European defence and tech inves…

Auctor emerges from stealth with $20M led by Sequoia
Auctor emerges from stealth with $20M led by Sequoia

Half of enterprise software projects miss their deadlines. One in six exceeds budgets by more than 200%. The New York startup says the problem is not the software itself but the fragmented, knowledge-scattered process of implementing it, and it has Seq…

Synera raises $40M to bring agentic AI into engineering workflows at NASA, BMW, Airbus, and Hyundai
Synera raises $40M to bring agentic AI into engineering workflows at NASA, BMW, Airbus, and Hyundai

The Bremen startup’s platform deploys teams of AI agents that autonomously execute engineering tasks across more than 75 existing tools, without replacing any of them. Revaia led the Series B; Capgemini joined through its ISAI Cap Venture vehicle. All …

Helical closes $10M seed to turn bio foundation models into systems
Helical closes $10M seed to turn bio foundation models into systems

The Luxembourg-founded startup is already in production with multiple top-20 global pharma companies, including a public collaboration with Pfizer. Its $10M seed round is led by redalpine, with the CEOs of Cohere and HuggingFace among the angel investo…

France bets €500 million that quantum computing is the tech race Europe can finally win
France bets €500 million that quantum computing is the tech race Europe can finally win

Europe has spent a decade watching American and Chinese companies capture every major technology wave, cloud, mobile, social, AI. Quantum computing may be the exception. A cluster of French startups, backed by €500 million in government funding and und…

Round raises $6M to automate the finance workflows that still require a human to press a button
Round raises $6M to automate the finance workflows that still require a human to press a button

The London fintech, used by Cleo and PostHog, has closed a seed round led by Alstin Capital, with Backed VC and Love Ventures participating. The co-founder of Indeed also joined as an angel. Passion Capital, an early backer of Monzo, Tide, and GoCardle…

Eight, the Portuguese dating app,is raising a €3M seed round
Eight, the Portuguese dating app,is raising a €3M seed round

The app goes live each night between 8 and 9pm, connecting verified users through 30-second video intros and instant live calls. It is currently available in Portugal and the UK. CEO Afonso Simão previously founded Miofar, a fitness brand he grew to ov…

Maeconomy raises €1.5M to give building materials a digital identity
Maeconomy raises €1.5M to give building materials a digital identity

The Dutch startup is tackling one of construction’s most stubborn problems: the fact that most building materials lack traceability, making them impossible to reuse when a structure is demolished or renovated. Maeconomy, a Dutch startup, has raised €1….

Serve First secures €5.7M to scale its AI-driven customer experience platform beyond the UK
Serve First secures €5.7M to scale its AI-driven customer experience platform beyond the UK

The Milton Keynes startup, which tripled annual recurring revenue in the 12 months to July 2025, is using the new round to hire a Chief Revenue Officer and continue product development. Serve First, a British AI-driven customer experience platform, has…

Trent AI raises $13M to build multi-agent security for a world where AI systems are running themselves
Trent AI raises $13M to build multi-agent security for a world where AI systems are running themselves

The London startup emerged from stealth on 7 April with a layered agentic security solution and a seed round backed by LocalGlobe and Cambridge Innovation Capital. Its co-founders include a Cambridge professor who was previously Amazon’s director of ma…