Startup News, Fundraising & Events in Europe

London-based AI laboratory Ineffable Intelligence has emerged from stealth with a $1.1 billion seed round at a $5.1 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed on 27 April 2026. The financing is the largest seed round ever raised by a European company and one of the largest first-money-in rounds in the global history of artificial intelligence. The round was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Participating investors included Nvidia, DST Global, Index Ventures, Google, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, the British government’s recently established vehicle for backing strategic AI capacity on home soil. A bet on a different path to general intelligence Ineffable Intelligence was founded in 2025 by David Silver, the former Vice President of Reinforcement Learning at Google DeepMind and the principal architect of AlphaGo, AlphaZero and AlphaStar. He is joined by three further DeepMind alumni: Wojciech Czarnecki, Lasse Espeholt and Junhyuk Oh. All four have spent the past decade at the frontier of reinforcement learning research, the discipline behind some of the most consequential demonstrations of machine learning over the past ten years. The company describes its objective as building a “superlearner” — an AI system capable of acquiring knowledge directly from its own experience rather than from human-generated text or imagery. “Our mission is to make first contact with superintelligence,” Silver said in a statement accompanying the launch. “We are creating a superlearner that discovers all knowledge from its own experience, from elementary motor skills through to profound intellectual breakthroughs.” The framing is a deliberate departure from the dominant industry trajectory. Most leading AI laboratories, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind itself, have built large language models trained primarily on the corpus of the internet, then refined that training with human feedback. Ineffable’s wager is that the marginal returns on scaling text-based pretraining are diminishing and that the next leap in capability will come from agents that learn endlessly from the consequences of their own actions, in much the same way AlphaZero learnt the game of Go without studying any human matches. Why $1.1 billion at seed The size of the round is unusual even by the inflated standards of the 2026 AI capital cycle. Two factors appear to explain it. First, frontier reinforcement learning at the scale Ineffable describes is computationally extraordinarily expensive: the company will need to operate vast simulation environments and train very large models against them, an undertaking that consumes capital at a rate closer to physical R&D than to traditional software. Second, the round signals a strategic move by Europe’s investor and policy ecosystems to retain the most ambitious AI researchers on the continent. The presence of the UK Sovereign AI Fund alongside Sequoia, Lightspeed and Nvidia is the clearest expression of that intent. The British government has publicly framed the investment as a bet on breakthrough AI that “can discover new knowledge”, positioning the country as a willing co-investor in domestic frontier laboratories. For Ineffable, the implication is access not only to capital but to compute, regulatory engagement and the still-resilient academic talent base around UCL, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Founder pledge of historic scale Alongside the funding announcement, Silver disclosed that he is committing 100 per cent of any personal proceeds from his Ineffable equity to charity via the Founders Pledge network — described by the organisation as the largest pledge in its history. At the round’s $5.1 billion valuation, that commitment could ultimately exceed several billion dollars if the company succeeds. It is a meaningful gesture in a sector where the reputational stakes around concentrated AI wealth are escalating, and one likely to be referenced in subsequent founder-led commitments. Implications for the European AI landscape Ineffable’s emergence reshapes the European AI map in three concrete ways. It establishes London as the home of the continent’s largest-ever seed-stage company, complicating Paris’s recent narrative of frontier-AI primacy after Mistral’s earlier rounds. It validates a thesis — that reinforcement learning, not transformer scaling, is the next frontier — that has lately been losing capital share to language-model incumbents. And it confirms that the UK government is now willing to act as a balance-sheet co-investor in domestic AI laboratories, a posture much closer to the French model than to the predominantly grant-based regimes elsewhere in Europe. The execution risk is non-trivial. Reinforcement learning at frontier scale has historically required years of careful environment design before producing competitive systems, and Ineffable’s “first contact” framing sets a high bar against which it will be judged. But for now, with a billion dollars on the balance sheet, four of the discipline’s most accomplished researchers in the founding team and a sovereign co-investor at its back, Ineffable Intelligence is the most heavily resourced new entrant in the European AI cycle. Sesamers covers European fundraising rounds across deeptech, fintech and AI. Source: tech.eu.

Belfast's Cloudsmith has raised $72M Series C led by TCV, with Insight Partners participating, to expand its artifact management platform and secure the AI-era software supply chain.

Berlin’s VREY has raised €3.3M seed led by Rubio Impact Ventures to roll out rooftop solar software for Germany’s multi-family buildings.

Finland’s TheStorage has raised €3.6M seed led by Voima Ventures to scale sand-based thermal energy storage for industrial heat across Europe.

Paris-based Decade Energy has secured €22 million — including €16M in project finance from Eiffel Investment Group and venture equity from SET Ventures — to deploy 100MW of BESS infrastructure across French logistics depots.

Paris-based spacetech startup UNIVITY has closed a €27 million Series A led by Blast and backed by Bpifrance to fund its VLEO 5G satellite demonstrators and build sovereign European space connectivity.

Ghent-based HR tech startup Wenite has raised €1.8 million, including €1.2M in equity from imec.iStart, to scale its unified operating system for Europe's HR service providers.

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 sesamers.com/category/fundraising.

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 US 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 US 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’ fundraising hub. At €25.7 million, the round is meaningful but not outsized by US 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).

Paris-based Cobl has secured €6M led by Eurazeo to scale its multi-agent AI platform that generates sales proposals, RFP responses and case studies for B2B sales teams.

The global foreign exchange market processes an estimated $9.6 trillion in daily trading volume, yet a significant proportion of corporate and institutional treasury operations still rely on fragmented, manual workflows that drive up costs and obscure execution quality. London-based fintech MillTech has secured €51 million ($60 million) in a minority investment from Apax Digital Funds, the growth equity arm of Apax Partners, valuing the company at €277 million ($325 million). The capital will be deployed to accelerate the platform’s expansion into North America and deepen its AI-powered treasury management capabilities. Founded in 2019 as the technology and execution arm of Millennium Global Investments — a currency overlay specialist with more than three decades of institutional FX experience — MillTech has built a platform that consolidates the entire FX lifecycle into a single interface. Trade calculation, multi-bank execution, settlement, reporting and independent transaction cost analysis all sit under one roof, replacing the patchwork of spreadsheets, phone calls and single-bank arrangements that still dominate corporate treasury floors. The company’s agency execution model gives clients simultaneous access to competing quotes from over fifteen Tier 1 banks, delivering what independent audits have measured as cost savings exceeding fifty per cent compared with traditional custody or prime brokerage routes. Apax Digital backs FX automation at scale The investment from Apax Digital carries an unusual footnote: Apax Partners is itself a MillTech client, and Sir Ronald Cohen, co-founder of Apax, was an early backer of the business. That insider perspective likely informed the conviction behind the cheque. Apax Digital focuses on high-growth technology companies across fintech, software and digital services, and its portfolio includes businesses such as Paidy, Liberis and ThoughtMachine. Eric Huttman, chief executive of MillTech, described the investment as “an endorsement of the value our platform delivers and the sheer magnitude of our long-term potential.” The company has reported sustained revenue growth of 79 per cent in 2024 and 73 per cent in 2025, with the platform now supporting approximately $500 billion in annual trading volume and managing client hedging programmes exceeding $35 billion. The growth trajectory has been supported by product expansion. In June 2025, MillTech launched a cash management solution built in partnership with BlackRock’s CacheMatrix platform, giving treasury teams automated access to a marketplace of money-market funds alongside their FX hedging operations. More recently, the company introduced Co-Pilot, an AI-powered advisory tool that models hedging strategies and optimises cash deployment — a move that positions MillTech squarely in the emerging category of intelligent treasury automation. European fintech and the treasury modernisation wave MillTech’s raise reflects a broader shift in European fintech investment towards infrastructure plays that serve institutional and corporate clients rather than consumers. While retail-focused neobanks have struggled with profitability narratives, platforms addressing the $9.6 trillion daily FX market and the multi-trillion-dollar corporate treasury stack are attracting capital at healthy valuations. Competitors in the space include Kyriba, GTreasury and Bound, though MillTech differentiates through its agency execution model and the institutional credibility inherited from its Millennium Global parentage. The North American push is strategically significant. The United States and Canada represent the largest pools of corporate treasury activity globally, and currency volatility expectations for 2026 are creating fresh demand for automated hedging solutions that can demonstrate best execution and regulatory compliance. MillTech is already authorised and regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, registered with the US National Futures Association, and holds ISO 27001 certification — a compliance stack that removes friction from cross-border expansion. With roughly 250 client entities, more than seventy employees across London and Boston, and a roster of awards including EuroMoney’s World’s Best FX Risk Management Solution 2024, MillTech is building the kind of enterprise credibility that converts pilot programmes into long-term contracts. The Apax capital gives it the balance sheet to accelerate that conversion across the Atlantic. Summary Company MillTech Headquarters London, United Kingdom Founded 2019 CEO Eric Huttman Round Minority growth investment Amount €51M ($60M) Valuation €277M ($325M) Lead Investor Apax Digital Funds Use of Funds North American expansion, AI-powered treasury tools Annual Volume ~$500 billion Related reading on Sesamers: Fundraising news · Latest European startup funding rounds

Clean Food Group (CFG), the UK biotech manufacturer developing sustainable oils and fats through fermentation, has raised £4.5 million in a round led by Clean Growth Fund and New Agrarian, alongside participation from Döhler Ventures, the strategic investment arm of global ingredients group Döhler. The equity raise is complemented by a £700,000 non-dilutive grant from Innovate UK, bringing the total new funding to £5.2 million. The announcement, made at in-cosmetics Global in Paris on 14 April 2026, follows CFG’s transformational 2025 acquisition of a one-million-litre fermentation facility in Knowsley, Liverpool — purchased for around $20 million from the administrators of Algal Omega 3 Ltd. The site is designed to take CFG from pilot-scale production into sustained commercial manufacturing of its yeast-derived oils and fats. A non-GMO route to palm-oil alternatives CFG’s proprietary CLEAN OilCell™ platform uses a non-GMO yeast strain, Metschnikowia pulcherrima, originally isolated from wine grapes. The yeast metabolises food-waste feedstocks — principally surplus bread supplied through a partnership with Roberts Bakery — into lipid-rich biomass that can be processed into liquid oils, semi-solid fats and hard fats. The yeast cells are approximately 40 per cent oil by weight, and the platform’s configurability allows CFG to target multiple ingredient categories from a single asset base. The company’s flagship product, CLEAN Oil™, together with its CLEAN Fat™ range, is positioned at price parity with conventional agricultural oils — notably palm — but without the deforestation footprint, tropical supply chain exposure or regulatory risk associated with incumbent ingredients. In 2025, CFG’s CleanOil™ 25 product received regulatory approval for use as a cosmetics ingredient in the United Kingdom, United States and European Union, opening the first commercial channel for the technology. Use of proceeds The proceeds will complete the scale-up of the Knowsley plant, expand production capacity and accelerate commercialisation of CFG’s high-performance oils and fats across both cosmetics and food-and-beverage applications. According to Tom Ellen, Chief Financial Officer, the capital will enable Clean Food Group to “bring on-stream the world’s largest yeast-derived oils and fats facility” and deliver on the company’s long-term vision for sustainable manufacturing. CFG is working on commercial development with THG Labs and speciality chemicals group Croda, alongside strategic investor Döhler, and has built a demand pipeline with FMCG brands and ingredient manufacturers preparing for the phase-out of tropical oils in their supply chains. Company background Clean Food Group was founded in 2022 out of roughly eight years of academic research led by Professor Chris Chuck at the University of Bath. The company has previously received backing from institutional investor SEED Innovations, the EIT Food Accelerator Network, Innovate UK and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. Both lead investors — Clean Growth Fund and New Agrarian — specialise in sustainable food and climate technology, providing CFG with strategic capital aligned to its decarbonisation and food-systems thesis. Döhler Ventures brings both financial support and the distribution reach of one of the world’s largest natural ingredients groups. The market context Palm and other tropical oils remain embedded in thousands of cosmetics and food formulations, and regulatory pressure on deforestation-linked supply chains — from the EU Deforestation Regulation to a wave of corporate net-zero commitments — has sharpened demand for drop-in alternatives. The sustainable food market was valued at approximately $315 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $524 billion by 2032 at a compound annual growth rate of 6.7 per cent, according to the company. CFG’s wager is that price parity, non-GMO credentials and food-waste feedstock will prove more commercially durable than either precision-fermentation peers with higher cost structures or agricultural substitutes with land-use constraints. With Knowsley now the bottleneck to commercial reality, the £4.5 million round buys the company time and equipment to translate laboratory results into tonnes shipped. For investors, the round is a relatively modest growth-equity cheque for a capital-intensive biotech. It is also one of the clearer tests in 2026 of whether yeast-based oils can make the leap from pilot to profitable scale. Related reading on Sesamers: European fundraising coverage.

Wamo, a financial operating platform for small and mid-sized businesses with offices in Helsinki and London, has closed a €10 million Series A round to accelerate its expansion across Europe. The round was led by TCEE Fund IV, advised by 3TS Capital Partners, with participation from WealthTech-focused Oleka Capital and existing shareholders. It follows a €4.5 million bridge-to-Series-A raise in 2024. The fintech, regulated as a pan-European electronic money institution by Finland’s Financial Supervisory Authority, now serves more than 15,000 SMEs across the continent. Adoption has tripled over the past twelve months, with Wamo reporting particular momentum in Southern Europe and the Nordics and a fifteen-fold increase in Italian customers since 2025 under Country Manager Antonio Mazza. A single platform, not another digital bank Wamo bundles multi-currency business accounts, physical and virtual cards, invoicing, expense management and, increasingly, embedded lending into a single interface for SME operators. The company argues that fragmented tooling, rather than a shortage of neobanks, remains the principal obstacle for Europe’s SME segment — a pitch that investors appear to find credible given the region’s persistent underbanking of smaller employers. Founder and Group CEO Yanki Önen said European SMEs need “smarter infrastructure, not just digital banking”, and that the company is embedding artificial intelligence and automation across the stack “to reduce friction and give businesses clearer control over their finances”. Önen added that Wamo is targeting 100,000 customers and hyper-personalised onboarding and servicing experiences over the next phase of growth. Where the capital goes Proceeds from the Series A will support four priorities. First, geographic expansion into Italy and the Nordic region, both of which Wamo has identified as the strongest organic pull markets. Second, product build-out, including AI-enabled features for cashflow, reconciliation and expense intelligence. Third, scaling the company’s lending franchise: Wamo has already launched a business loan product in Finland and intends to extend credit across Europe in the second quarter of 2026 via strategic partnerships, with a stated target of €100 million in lending volume over the following twelve months. Fourth, team hires across engineering, compliance and commercial functions. Investor view Pekka Mäki, Managing Partner at 3TS Capital Partners, described SME banking in Europe as “still largely broken” and said the opportunity for a genuinely integrated platform is “enormous”. He pointed to early traction in Italy and Finland as validation of Wamo’s product-market fit and said the firm sees the company as “one of the most focused teams tackling this problem”. TCEE Fund IV, 3TS’s current growth-stage vehicle, has a track record of backing category-defining European software and fintech companies. Oleka Capital, which specialises in wealth and financial technology, brings additional sector depth to the cap table. Context for Europe’s SME fintech race Wamo joins a crowded field of European challengers targeting the SME wallet — from Qonto and Finom to Revolut Business and a wave of vertical-specific players — but differentiates on its emphasis on embedded lending, multi-market licensing and a unified product surface. Its Finnish e-money authorisation provides passporting across the EEA, a meaningful asset for the rollout into Italy and the Nordics. The €10 million Series A is modest compared with the later-stage rounds that defined the 2021-2022 SME banking cycle, but it is consistent with the more disciplined capital environment of 2026 and with Wamo’s stated preference for profitability over growth at any cost. The company says its unit economics have improved materially over the past year on the back of lending and interchange revenue. For SMEs still stitching together accounts, cards, invoicing and capital from separate providers, the bet is that a single, AI-augmented operating layer will prove more durable than yet another point solution. Wamo has twelve months to prove it across its next two markets. Related reading on Sesamers: European fundraising coverage.

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 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