Finches Raises €2 Million Pre-Seed Funding for AI Early-Warning-System in Agricultural Sourcing

Climate shocks and geopolitical crises threaten global food supplies: Finches proactively protects manufacturers from raw material shortages and costly factory downtime. 

• Bavaria-based startup Finches GmbH has raised €2 million in pre-seed funding. High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) led the round with Vanagon Ventures as co-lead, welcoming Bayern Kapital as a new investor alongside follow-on capital from existing investor UnternehmerTUM Funding for Innovators and a group of strategic industry angels. 

• Finches flags sourcing risks right where they start: directly in the field. The platform gives procurement teams actionable early warnings and concrete contingency options weeks before supply shortfalls hit. 

• With agricultural supply chains facing mounting volatility from climate change, pests, and geopolitical disruptions, demand for this level of foresight is soaring among raw material buyers. 

Finches has raised €2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), with Vanagon Ventures joining as co-lead. Bayern Kapital joined as a new investor, while existing backer UnternehmerTUM Funding for Innovators and a syndicate of strategic industry and tech angels doubled down with follow-on capital. Finches combines internal procurement data such as supplier profiles, cultivated acreage, and contracts with external signals like weather patterns, satellite imaging, local news, scientific insights, and field reports from on-the-ground agronomists. The platform transforms these inputs into targeted early warnings, identifying impacted regions and supply chains while giving buyers clear, actionable next steps. This enables procurement teams to proactively protect volume, quality, and margins long before crop failures or quality issues threaten production. 

For millennia, global agriculture relied on stable, predictable climate cycles. Today, rapid climate change, extreme weather, and geopolitical crises have effectively shattered that fundamental predictability. Companies reliant on agricultural raw materials face extreme volatility that legacy supply chain processes were never built to handle. Supply shortfalls start in the field, months before crops ever reach the factory gate, but traditional systems only spot them when it is already too late. Finches solves this by aggregating field observations into a unified database across growing regions and supplier networks. By pairing this ground truth with real-time data on weather, pests, satellite indicators, markets, and hyper-local news, the platform gives sourcing teams the extended lead time needed to act. Finches Intelligence launched in September 2026, with early customers including a leading organic baby food manufacturer and a North American Fortune 500 food conglomerate. 

The founders will use the fresh capital to accelerate product development and expand sales operations. CEO Catharina van Delden founded innosabi and built it into Europe’s leading innovation management platform, which Questel acquired in 2021. CTO, Dr. Stefanie Glenn, holds a PhD in genetics from Cambridge and brings extensive engineering and leadership experience in enterprise AI from her time at Google and BMW. CFO/COO Alexandra Vázquez Bea brings deep finance and food sector experience, having served as CFO/COO at Oetker Digital and led the IPO of Veganz Group AG. 

Catharina van Delden, CEO & Co-founder, Finches: 
“This  drought made one thing clear: European food producers can no longer count on getting the raw material volumes and quality they need every season. Sourcing raw materials has become a core issue of supply security. While risk signals usually emerge weeks ahead of time, procurement teams rarely see them in time to act. This funding lets us bringFinches to more companies, so they can line up backup suppliers, buy earlier, or reschedule production while there is still time.” 

Anna Stetter, Investment Manager, HTGF: 
“Finches addresses one of the most pressing challenges of our time: securing global agricultural supply chains in a changing climate. We were particularly impressed by how precisely the founding team understood the industry’s pain point and how quickly they developed a technological solution to it.” 

Susanne Fromm, General Partner, Vanagon Ventures:
“Finches tackles a huge problem that, despite its high stakes, largely goes unnoticed. The food industry is seeing supply chain predictability evaporate without a real answer—until now. Early bottleneck signals are actually visible months ahead of time; they’re just trapped in disconnected weather data, field reports, lab results, and market data. Finches brings it all together, buying procurement teams the lead time they need to act before it’s too late.” 

About Finches 
Finches GmbH, based near Munich, develops AI for agricultural procurement. The startup consolidates field, sourcing, and external data (such as climate and market information) to proactively warn companies in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, and cosmetics industries about supply chain risks. The company was founded in 2025 by Catharina van Delden (CEO) and Dr. Stefanie Glenn (CTO). In January 2026, Alexandra Vázquez Bea joined the executive team as CFO/COO and co-founder. Finches aims to establish risk-based, agent-driven procurement as a new industry standard. www.finches.ai

TODAY Secures €2.8M for its Agentic AI Platform that accelerates Financial Advisors’ growth with compliant agents.

• TODAY, the AI Sales Operating System for financial and insurance advisors, secures €2.8M in Seed funding co-led by High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and Insurtech Gateway. Seed X, Lucid Capital, former HDI-CEO Herbert Rogenhofer, and Tech11-Founder Pierre Dubosq also participated. 

• 3,500 advisors at insurers, distributors and brokers use TODAY to automate admin work, meeting notes, and to improve every client conversation. 

• The round comes as pension reforms, market consolidation and increasing regulatory load push advisors to serve more clients with the same resources. 

• Michael Gackstatter, TODAY Co-Founder and CEO: “While AI reshuffles financial advice, we scale the human touch and are accelerating our growth.” 

Copenhagen- and Berlin-based AI startup UseToday ApS (TODAY) has successfully closed a €2.8M Seed round. High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and Insurtech Gateway co-led the round, with SeedX, Lucid Capital and angel investors participating. The investment will accelerate the development and commercialisation of TODAY’s AI platform. Advisors using the platform see up to 10% more revenue, and save on average 5 hours per week on administrative work. TODAY was co-founded by Michael Gackstatter (CEO) and Artem Demchenkov (CTO), who previously held roles at Fintechs and InsurTechs including CLARK, Funding Circle and Billie. 

While consumers rapidly adopt AI and pension reforms reshape the provider landscape, advisors at banks, insurers and brokerages are under pressure to professionalize and scale their operations. Yet, existing technology hasn’t kept pace and compliant solutions are lacking. TODAY fills that gap with compliant AI agents that take real work off the advisors desk. Its Sales Operating System transcribes client meetings, handles routine backoffice tasks, coaches advisors on their sales success, and answers incoming calls. As a result, advisors capture on average 50x more insights from each client conversation than before.  

Closing the Seed funding represents yet another success for the start-up after partnering with leading insurers and brokers, resulting in over 3,500 advisors relying on TODAY. The funding now enables TODAY to expand within DACH and solve the entire advisor front- and backoffice.  

Michael Gackstatter, TODAY CEO:
“While AI reshuffles financial advice, we scale the human touch. Our agents take over the admin, so advisors can spend their time with clients. With our strong investors on board, we will bring this to every advisory team in DACH.” 

Tizian Hoppen, Senior Investment Manager at HTGF:
“Michael and Artem combine rare experience in scaling financial services businesses with an exceptional ability to execute at speed. As technological and demographic shifts make financial services sales increasingly complex and cumbersome, we are convinced that they are building the vertical AI layer that will remove this friction from sales professionals’ day-to-day work.” 

Robert Lumley, Co-Founder at Insurtech Gateway:
“Michael and Artem combine deep industry knowledge with a strong track record of execution. What impressed us most was how closely they work with advisers to build products that solve real operational challenges. TODAY is addressing a clear need for greater efficiency, stronger compliance and better customer outcomes across the advisory value chain. By helping firms acquire, retain and serve customers more effectively, while giving advisers more time to focus on clients, the team has built a highly compelling proposition. We’re delighted to support them on the next stage of their growth journey.”  

Mathias Jaeggi, Partner, Seed X:
“The next wave of AI in insurance won’t be about experiments; it will be about embedding intelligence into the daily workflow of every advisor. Michael and Artem understand this industry from the inside and have the track record to execute. TODAY has the opportunity to turn AI into a true productivity layer for advisors, and we at Seed X are thrilled to support the team on that journey.” 

About TODAY 

TODAY, based in Copenhagen and Berlin, was founded in 2024 with the mission “Peace of Mind at Scale”. Its AI sales operating system supports financial and insurance advisors before, during and after client meetings, so they save time and give their clients better advice. Advisors see up to 10% more revenue, save up to 5 hours per week and capture on average 50x more insight from client conversations. More than 3,500 advisors in DACH use TODAY in their daily work, from large insurers and distributors to independent brokers. TODAY was co-founded by Michael Gackstatter (CEO) and Artem Demchenkov (CTO), who previously held roles at Fintechs and InsurTechs including CLARK, Funding Circle and Billie. 

Zymofix to build flagship microbial manufacturing plant as it takes solid-state fermentation to industrial scale

The new Deinze facility will expand production following successful pilot-scale validation and growing customer demand

Zymofix, the Belgian microbial manufacturing company behind next-generation solid-state fermentation platform Zyft, today announces that it has selected Deinze, Belgium, as the location for its new flagship manufacturing site. The new facility marks the company’s move into industrial production and follows a Series A round led by First Imagine!, with participation from  existing investors VP Capital, HTGF and The Nest Family Office.

The expansion follows successful validation of Zyft at pilot scale and growing customer demand that now exceeds Zymofix’s existing production capacity. The new site will enable the company to increase production for existing customer programmes, onboard new projects and build the manufacturing infrastructure needed for its next phase of growth.

Operations will begin moving to the Deinze site over the coming months, marking Zymofix’s shift from technology development and validation into industrial manufacturing.

The new facility represents a €6 million CAPEX investment, partially financed through Zymofix’s equity round and partially through revenue generated by its existing customer programmes. The site will have a production capacity of 300 tonnes per year, enough to treat approximately 1 million hectares, with production expected to begin in Q4 2027. A further €25 million expansion, planned for 2028 subject to successful commissioning of the initial line, will raise capacity to 2,000 tonnes per year, treating approximately 10 million hectares.

Natural products, and microbials in particular, are playing an increasingly important role in the transition of key industries, such as crop protection, towards more sustainable solutions. Within this shift, Zymofix is targeting a key challenge in the commercialisation of microbial products: establishing viable manufacturing routes for microorganisms that are not always optimally suited to conventional liquid fermentation.

Zymofix developed Zyft to provide an alternative manufacturing route. Its proprietary next-generation solid-state fermentation and formulation platform cultivates living microorganisms on solid substrates in a controlled and scalable way. More than 170 strains spanning bacteria, fungi and yeasts have been tested on the platform, providing a broad technical base for customer manufacturing programmes.

Emile Redant, Co-founder & CEO, Zymofix said: “Finding a promising microorganism is only part of the challenge. The harder part is manufacturing it consistently, efficiently and at the volumes the market requires. Solid-state fermentation has significant potential, but historically it has been difficult to scale. We have spent the past four years developing Zyft to fix that problem and, having successfully validated the platform at pilot scale, the new facility in Deinze allows us to take the next step into industrial production.”

Zymofix currently works with more than 15 customers, with agriculture currently representing a major focus. Most of these customers are multinational agricultural-input companies for which microbial products form a strategic part of their portfolios.

Customer programmes include biostimulants, biofertilisers and biocontrol products, alongside opportunities in bioremediation and other industrial applications where microorganisms need to be produced cost-effectively at large volumes.

Rather than developing proprietary strains for these markets, Zymofix works as a manufacturing partner, supporting customers across process development, fermentation, formulation and scale-up.

Founded in 2022, Zymofix has grown to a team of around 35 people, reflecting the company’s progress from early technology development towards commercial manufacturing. The team is expected to grow to approximately 45 employees by the end of 2026 and 60 by the end of 2027, as the company expands its manufacturing, technical and commercial capabilities.

Boris Dorin, Partner, First Imagine! said: “Microbial products only reach the market if someone can manufacture them reliably, at industrial volumes and at a price the market will pay, and manufacturing is exactly where Europe is thinnest. Zymofix has done the hard part: it has taken solid-state fermentation from a laboratory technique to a validated platform that industrial customers already depend on. Building that layer is what First Imagine! is here to do, and we intend to stay with this company well past the opening of a first plant.”

Mathijs van der Knaap, Investment Manager Ventures, VP Capital said: “Since our initial investment, we have seen Zymofix progress from technology development and validation towards a manufacturing business with clear customer demand. The team has built a strong technical foundation and is now moving into the next stage of execution, with the opportunity to support wider adoption of microbial solutions across agriculture and other industries. We are pleased to continue supporting Zymofix through this next phase of growth.”

About Zymofix

Zymofix is an industrial biotechnology company specializing in scalable, cost-efficient manufacturing of beneficial microorganisms using biomass residues. Supported in its pre-seed stage by biotope by VIB, Zymofix later closed seed funding led by HTGF, with participation from VP Capital and The Nest Family Office. The company partners with product developers to bring field-ready microbial solutions to market across agriculture, bioremediation, and other sectors.

Kontext raises $4M to stop AI agents from going rogue at work

Kontext, the runtime security platform for AI agents, today announced $4 million in funding. The company is backed by 42CAP, a16z CSX, and HTGF, with 42CAP leading the financing. The funding will support the expansion of Kontext’s engineering team, continued development of its runtime enforcement platform, and help customers safely deploy AI agents with greater control and visibility.

The funding arrives at a critical moment for AI security. AI agents are moving beyond chat interfaces and software development, becoming personal assistants that directly integrate into the workplace, where they can write code, access files, and act with company credentials. A recent incident showed how quickly those risks can become real. In July, AI agents running in a cybersecurity evaluation circumvented their intended isolation, communicated through unauthorized channels, and compromised external infrastructure without direct human instruction. As businesses give agents greater access and autonomy, they need safeguards that control what those agents are allowed to do while they are running.

Kontext builds software that sits between AI agents and the tools and systems they act on. It evaluates agent activity in real time against security policies and risk signals, taking into account the agent’s identity, requested action, target resource, and assigned task. This gives organizations visibility into how agents behave, control over what they are authorized to do, and the ability to enforce clear boundaries.

An agent asked to fix a software bug, for example, may need permission to read a repository. That does not mean it should be allowed to send the code to an external service, modify unrelated infrastructure, or use the same access for a different task.

Teams can initially run Kontext in observe mode to understand agent behavior, identify risky activity, and see how policies would apply without interrupting work. When enforcement is enabled, Kontext can deny unauthorized actions before they execute and retain an auditable record of each decision.

“An AI agent can be properly authenticated, use an approved tool, and still take an action no one authorized,” said Jens Ernstberger, co-founder of Kontext. “As agents move from generating text to operating software, companies need a control point at the moment of action. Kontext connects identity with task context and policy to decide what an agent is allowed to do before it happens.”

Kontext was founded by Jens Ernstberger and Michel Osswald, who bring backgrounds in secure computing, applied cryptography, and AI systems. At Kontext, the team focuses on a specific failure mode in autonomous systems: agents can operate with valid credentials and approved tools while taking actions that exceed the authority of their assigned task. This work underpins Kontext’s task-aware approach to runtime enforcement.

“The identity and access tools built for the last twenty years assume a human is on the other end, clicking one thing at a time,” said Julian von Fischer, General Partner at 42CAP. “An AI agent authenticates once and then acts on its own, across a dozen systems, on a task nobody is watching step by step. That’s a structurally different problem, and the incidents we’ve already seen this year show it’s not theoretical. Jens and Michel bring years of secure computing and applied cryptography to it: most tools still stop at the credential, Kontext looks at the task the agent was actually given. We believe this infrastructure becomes essential the moment a company puts agents into production, which is why we’re leading this round.”

About Kontext
Kontext is a runtime security platform for AI agents. It gives teams visibility into how agents behave and control over what they are allowed to do. Kontext evaluates activity in real time using identity, task context, security policies, and cyber-risk signals. It can identify risky behavior, deny unauthorized actions before execution, and create an auditable record of what each agent attempted, what was allowed or denied, and why.

About 42CAP
42CAP invests in early-stage technology companies across Europe with global ambition. The team behind 42CAP are seasoned entrepreneurs turned investors. With Hybris and eCircle they previously built two of Europe’s largest B2B software companies culminating in $1.6b cash exits to SAP and Teradata respectively.
The 42CAP credo “Peers amongst Entrepreneurs” is reflected in our investment approach, with which we support B2B data- and technology-driven business models, product- focused founders and sustainable venture development.
More information at: https://42cap.com

Protection against sabotage: Arcos closes €5.5 million seed round for integrated security infrastructure

• Arcos has closed a €5.5 million seed financing round. Investors include HTGF, Bayern Kapital, Pact, Haufe, Robin Capital and strategic business angels.
• The Munich-based company combines infrastructure, signal processing and the operational handling of security incidents in one integrated infrastructure.
• Arcos will use the capital to grow its team, expand its product portfolio and focus initially on applications in critical infrastructure.

Arcos has closed a €5.5 million seed financing round. Behind it stands not only private capital but, in part, the public sector itself: the round includes High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), whose investors include the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and KfW Capital, as well as Bayern Kapital, Pact, Haufe and Robin Capital and strategic business angels. Their mandate is stated explicitly: a civil security provider that is fully operational from day one and makes the difference through modern technology.

The security industry is facing an unprecedented shift: in homes, commercial properties, railway stations, substations and data centres, sensors are being rolled out on a scale that did not exist before. At the same time, fewer and fewer staff are available. Sensors detect that something is happening. What matters is how quickly and reliably that turns into concrete action.

What was considered a worst-case scenario for years has become everyday reality: attacks on substations, burning cable ducts along railway lines, drones over airports and industrial sites. Attacks on infrastructure that nobody watches around the clock succeed because nobody is continuously looking. A structural shift at this pace can only be managed with new technology.

One security infrastructure instead of separate parts

Arcos builds and operates this infrastructure from start to finish: every signal from every connected source is understood, every decision is made in one place, every incident is handled through to closure, every step is documented. People decide on escalations, where judgement counts. Arcos’s infrastructure replaces the collection of separate systems that operators make do with today.
At Arcos, none of this is outsourced. Whoever operates a control centre themselves knows what really happens at three in the morning. Whoever builds the software for it themselves changes it the next morning. Users, operators and developers are the same people: what is missing in operations is built in the same place, not requested from a vendor. This way, the system gets better with every new sensor instead of more complicated with every extension.
It is built for breadth, not for the special case. The same control centre, the same software, the same processes serve the home, the commercial property, the construction site and the critical facility. What applies to one site applies to all. This is how solutions emerge as fast as the threat situation demands.

Next Steps

Having successfully completed several certification processes and built a qualified team, Arcos is well positioned operationally. With the financing, the company is expanding its team in Germany, extending its platform and preparing to scale in the critical infrastructure market. As a next step, Arcos aims to enter further European markets. Arcos will be present at Security Essen, the industry’s leading international trade fair, from 22 to 25 September. On 25 September, Louis Wübben will speak at the fair’s KRITIS forum on critical infrastructure.

Louis Wübben, Founder and Managing Director of Arcos:
“This industry helps decide whether the country functions, and it is changing faster than ever before. More sensors, fewer people. What is missing is someone who looks. That is exactly what we are building with our technology and the offering of a full-service provider.”

Moritz Steigerwald, Founder and Managing Director of Arcos:
“We combine signal processing and the operational process in one system. As a result, we see immediately in daily operations where workflows need to improve, and we can implement those improvements ourselves.”

Sebastian Borek, Manging Director at HTGF:
“Protecting critical infrastructure is a central task of our time. With Arcos, we are backing an outstanding team that will shape this rapidly growing market, while strengthening Europe’s security and technological sovereignty.”

Über Arcos

Arcos is a civil security provider. Arcos builds and operates the infrastructure of civil security: from the highly secured infrastructure where the signals converge to the technology it runs on. Arcos’s ambition is that what our societies depend on never goes unprotected. Arcos is based in Munich. Its investors include High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), Bayern Kapital, Pact, Haufe and Robin Capital as well as strategic business angels.

Press contact

Louis Wübben, Founder & Managing Director · louis@arcos.eu · arcos.eu

syte secures €9 million in Series A funding round

The platform accelerates construction and investment decisions using AI

syte, a provider of a land and real estate analytics platform founded in 2021, has successfully closed a Series A funding round of €9 million. syte combines diverse real estate and land data with analytics from its proprietary AI, enabling developers, banks, and brokers to assess early on what can be built on a given plot, which legal requirements apply, and whether a construction or renovation project is economically viable. The round is led by amberra, the venture studio of the Cooperative Financial Group Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken. NRW.BANK joins as an additional new investor. Existing investors, including the companies of the Schwarz Group, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), vent.io, and Vantage Value, reaffirm their confidence in the company and are investing again.

With this capital, syte is driving its European expansion and building on its technological leadership in automated land and real estate analysis. The focus is on automating the early planning phase of development projects – from assessing building potential, to reviewing zoning and building law, through to economic feasibility analysis. In doing so, syte addresses a key bottleneck in the real estate industry: while high construction and financing costs can only be infl uenced to a limited degree, faster, data-driven preliminary assessments can help identify suitable projects earlier and avoid planning mistakes. In the long term, syte aims to digitally map the entire process that precedes the actual construction of a property.

“How land and existing properties have been assessed and evaluated so far costs the real estate and financial industry a great deal of time and money. Whoever digitizes these processes will help determine what gets built in Germany and Europe going forward,” says Matthias Zühlke, CEO of syte. “With this new funding, we’re taking our technology to the next level: we’re continuing to automate the planning phases and expanding syte beyond the German market into Europe. With amberra, we have a strong investor at our side who understands how critical reliable data is in the real estate business, and who also gives us access to a network of hundreds of cooperative banks.”

Björn Schmuck, CEO of amberra, emphasizes: “The real estate business holds great strategic importance for the cooperative financial group. syte makes the potential of land and buildings visible early on, with the help of AI, and enables banks to advise faster and on a data-driven basis. The fact that several cooperative banks are already using the platform in real estate sales and client advisory shows its concrete value. We’re excited to support syte on its growth path and to expand our collaboration with the cooperative fi nancial group in a structured way.”

Johanna Antonie Tjaden-Schulte, Board Member of NRW.BANK, adds: “syte shows how artifi cial intelligence can transform established industries and make processes more efficient. Applications like this drive digital transformation forward in North Rhine-Westphalia. With our investment, we’re supporting syte in further developing this technology and bringing it to market. In doing so, we’re fostering innovations that help shape the future of our region as a business location.”

Johannes Weber, Partner at HTGF, comments: “HTGF was an early investor in syte, and we have seen the company develop its AI-powered solution into a fully fledged product now used by more than 200 customers. We look forward to continuing to support syte through the next phase of its European growth.”

syte helps its customers assess land and existing properties at an early stage. The platform reduces review processes that can otherwise take weeks in practice down to minutes. This creates a solid basis for decision-making on new construction projects or the development of existing properties, before time and capital fl ow into a project. syte is available across Germany and maps more than 62 million parcels of land. Over 200 customers use syte for valuations, planning, and advisory services: from assessing individual locations, to reviewing investment decisions, to analyzing property portfolios for renovation needs or identifying funding opportunities. Recurring revenue (ARR) has doubled compared to the previous year. In 2025, syte was awarded PropTech of the Year for its exceptional innovation.

About syte
syte is a software solution that digitally captures land and buildings across Germany and analyzes them in real time. The platform links various data sources to determine building potential, renovation and energy needs, economic viability, and funding options for every address. Over 200 customers use syte to make real estate decisions more informed and faster. The company was founded in 2021 in Münster and today employs more than 40 people. For more information, visit www.syte.ms.

About amberra
amberra is the venture studio of the Cooperative Financial Group Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken. Founded in 2023, amberra is building an ecosystem of bank-adjacent and non-bank services for the cooperative banks – through investments in and partnerships with startups, as well as by developing its own startups together with partners from the cooperative network. The company focuses on the areas of living, health, sustainability, and regional economy. amberra’s investment activities are based on the amberra Fund, with a total volume of €100 million.
For more information, visit www.amberra.de

Depot charging for electric trucks: Depotcharge wins BGL e.V. as a strong partner for a joint Germany-wide depot charging network and secures EUR 2.7 million for its international expansion.

BGL e.V. and Depotcharge launch BGL Charge, the nationwide depot charging network for road freight transport. E.L.V.I.S. AG supports the industry solution and brings its community on board.

• The Bundesverband Güterkraftverkehr Logistik und Entsorgung (BGL e.V.), which represents around 7,000 companies organised in its regional associations, makes Depotcharge the charging network for its members and brings a model to Germany that has been running in Switzerland with the transport association ASTAG since May 2026.
• Through the platform, logistics companies open unused charging points at their depots to other fleets. More than 200 companies with around 600 electric trucks are already registered.
• E.L.V.I.S. AG, with more than 250 partner companies at over 350 locations, supports BGL Charge and integrates its community into the industry solution.
• Depotcharge closes a pre-seed financing round of EUR 2.7 million. The lead investor is High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), joined by xdeck Ventures, Kopa Ventures, Prequel Ventures and business angels from logistics, e-mobility and the energy sector.

Electric road freight stands or falls with charging infrastructure. With BGL Charge, the Bundesverband Güterkraftverkehr Logistik und Entsorgung (BGL e.V.) and Depotcharge launch a solution that connects existing depot charging infrastructure into a shared, nationwide network. Logistics companies open unused charging points at their depots to other fleets and at the same time gain access to a growing network of truck-ready charging infrastructure. In parallel, Depotcharge closes a pre-seed financing round of EUR 2.7 million to accelerate its international expansion.

One industry solution instead of parallel networks

As electromobility ramps up, more and more logistics companies are investing in their own depot charging infrastructure. At the same time, many charging points sit idle during the day, while expensive public charging often has to be used on the go. BGL Charge connects this existing capacity into a shared network. Depot operators decide on their own prices, access rules and availability. BGL Charge handles marketing, access control, invoicing and payment processing, independent of charging hardware, backend or vehicle manufacturer. This creates a Germany-wide depot charging network that puts existing infrastructure to better use and significantly widens access to affordable charging. In doing so, BGL Charge makes operating electric trucks more economical and makes a concrete contribution to accelerating the electrification of road freight transport.

“Our members need charging infrastructure that is predictable, available and economical,” says Prof. Dr. Dirk Engelhardt, Spokesman of the BGL Executive Board. “With BGL Charge, we are creating a shared solution for the entire sector. The more companies share their depot capacity, the stronger the network becomes for everyone.”

E.L.V.I.S. strengthens the value for its partners

As a purchasing cooperative, E.L.V.I.S. AG pools the demand of its partner companies and represents their interests within BGL Charge. It thereby integrates its community into a larger industry solution and strengthens its partners’ position in a growing network.

“Our partner companies benefit from a significantly larger network of charging points and from additional demand at their own locations,” says Nikolja Grabowski, Member of the Executive Board of E.L.V.I.S. AG. “As a purchasing cooperative, we bring our partners’ interests into BGL Charge and strengthen their position in the market.”

Based on a proven model from Switzerland

The partnership follows a model that Depotcharge has already implemented successfully together with the Swiss transport association ASTAG. There, the association network ASTAG Charge powered by Depotcharge has been developing into the national depot charging network of the Swiss transport industry since May 2026.

“The idea behind Depotcharge is simple: logistics companies share their charging infrastructure with one another and unlock economic value across the sector. This principle translates ideally to associations, by members, for members, with a clear benefit for everyone involved,” says Joscha Specks, CEO and co-founder of Depotcharge. “In Switzerland, we have already implemented the model successfully with ASTAG. Together with BGL e.V. and E.L.V.I.S. AG, we are now bringing it to Germany. Our goal for the next two years is to build the leading charging network for electric road freight in the DACH region and the Benelux together with our association partners, and to bring industry and retail on board as well.”

Financing accelerates the roll-out

In parallel, the Munich-based company closes a pre-seed financing round of EUR 2.7 million. The lead investor is High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), joined by xdeck Ventures, Kopa Ventures, Prequel Ventures and business angels from logistics, e-mobility and the energy sector.

With the fresh capital, Depotcharge is expanding the platform further. The focus is on international expansion and the seamless integration of charging into dispatch operations, through reservation, open interfaces and connection to existing transport management systems.

“Charging has to fit into everyday transport operations as naturally as refuelling does today. Because we work independently of charging hardware, backend and vehicle manufacturer, any depot can be connected without major integration effort. This makes the network denser with every location and more valuable for everyone involved,” says Julius Wilhelm, co-founder and CPTO of Depotcharge.

In the Benelux countries, the company has been active with its own sales partner since September 2026. At the same time, Depotcharge is expanding its team with logistics expertise. Marc Clausing takes over sales as Chief Commercial Officer, bringing 21 years of experience and an extensive network in the industry.

“The adoption wave for electric trucks is now gaining momentum. In many use cases, the cost per kilometre is already attractive today. The bottleneck is charging infrastructure. While more than 60 percent of depot charging capacity remains unused, carriers depend on expensive public charging stations,” says Timo Bertsch, Senior Investment Manager at HTGF. “Depotcharge solves this problem by connecting existing depot charging infrastructure into a network. The team brings significant experience from building Digital Charging Solutions and has proven with the ASTAG cooperation in Switzerland that the model works.”

About Depotcharge

Depotcharge operates a manufacturer-neutral network for shared depot charging infrastructure in electric road freight. Logistics companies open unused charging points at their sites to other fleets and generate additional revenue from existing infrastructure, while Depotcharge handles access control, invoicing and payment processing. The company was founded by Joscha Specks and Julius Wilhelm, who together bring more than 20 years of experience in e-mobility and previously helped build Digital Charging Solutions, a joint venture of BMW, Mercedes-Benz and BP Europa SE. Depotcharge is active in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Benelux countries. The operating company behind the Depotcharge brand is Evolve Energy GmbH.

About Bundesverband Güterkraftverkehr Logistik und Entsorgung

BGL e.V. is the leading association for road freight transport, logistics and waste disposal in Germany, with offices in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Brussels. It represents the professional interests of currently around 7,000 companies organised in its regional associations. These companies operate primarily in road freight transport, logistics, forwarding, warehousing and waste disposal.

About HTGF – High-Tech Gründerfonds

Germany and Europe need a New Wirtschaftswunder, we are laying the foundations. ​We are Germany’s most active VC investor, funding deep-tech, life sciences and digital tech companies that secure technological sovereignty and build industrial strength. From the initial idea through to international scaling, we support bold founders as a multi-stage VC platform – seamlessly, reliably and for the long term. ​
350 active start-ups, 200+ exits and 5 unicorns. Over €10 billion in follow-on funding mobilised.​
Together with DTCF, we represent more than €3 billion in fund volume – and turn German and European innovations into global tech champions.​
More information at HTGF.de or on LinkedIn.

Former McKinsey and SCOR leaders raise $4m pre-seed to build trusted AI layer for energy infrastructure due diligence and M&A

• Backed by Episode 1 Ventures, Pi Labs, HTGF and industry leaders including the Co-Founder of Aurora Energy Research Cameron Hepburn and former CEO of Quantum Black Jeremy Palmer, Veridue is building a platform that cuts renewable energy due diligence from weeks to hours
• $4m pre-seed is one of the largest ever for energy software in Europe and will support rollout of the platform to renewable energy developers, IPPs and investors

Veridue, an AI-native due diligence and M&A platform that accelerates investment and project financing for renewable energy and data centres, has raised a $4 million pre-seed – one of the largest ever for energy software in Europe – led by Episode 1 Ventures, with participation from HTGF and Pi Labs, alongside prominent industry leaders including the Co-Founder of Aurora Energy Research Cameron Hepburn and former CEO of Quantum Black Jeremy Palmer.

The funding will support the rollout of the platform, which enables buyers to screen 100x more deals and complete due diligence in hours not weeks, while helping project developers bring assets to investment readiness faster – empowering both sides to move with greater speed and rigour at the same time.

Founded in 2024 by former McKinsey energy investment advisor Daniel Csonth, who brings more than $10 billion of energy M&A experience from across Europe, the US and Asia, and former SCOR data science lead Xander van den Eelaart, who pioneered agentic AI for energy asset insurance underwriting and contract review, Veridue was built by industry experts to transform the complex workflows behind energy infrastructure dealmaking.

Europe and the US are experiencing surging demand for renewables, driven by data centres, electrification and a renewed focus on energy security. Yet while capital appetite is strong, buildout is bottlenecked by slow, expensive and manual processes.

More energy infrastructure projects are seeking capital, IPPs are pivoting from greenfield development to acquisitions, and investors are evaluating a growing number of assets, a significant share of which prove to be distressed or not commercially viable. As a result, identifying attractive opportunities and distinguishing recoverable issues from fundamental risks is becoming increasingly difficult.

Lengthening grid connection queues, planning risk and long lead times are making ready-to-build and operating assets more attractive than starting from scratch.

At the same time, hybrid assets – such as Solar PV or Wind with BESS – and regulatory change are adding significant complexity to clean energy dealmaking. Co-located storage, merchant exposure and stacked revenue models are creating more sophisticated transactions that are harder to assess using traditional due diligence approaches.

“The infrastructure Europe needs — renewables, data centres, grid capacity — represents one of the most critical buildouts of our generation. Capital is ready. Projects are in the pipeline. What’s been missing is the ability to move deals at the pace the moment demands. Veridue is fixing exactly that,” said Timo Bertsch, Investment Manager at HTGF.

“We built Veridue as the solution we wished we had when we were the ones carrying the risk on a decision. It is not simply a chatbot pointed at a data room. It is AI trained on a proprietary dataset of real deals and their diligence outcomes, running on our own purpose-built agent layer to ensure results are deterministic with 100% traceable accuracy. We always combine the best of the latest AI models, our proprietary tech and human expertise. We have top energy industry experts in-house who validate the AI outputs and apply the judgement that comes from that comes from having spent decades across every side of transactions. Deal teams get the scale and speed of AI without compromising the rigour they are accountable for”, said Daniel Csonth, CEO and Founder of Veridue.

Veridue’s buy-side customers report the same bottlenecks: high deal volumes, non-viable assets and overstated project maturity make it challenging to identify and win good assets with limited team capacity. Issues uncovered late waste advisor fees and team time, ultimately creating high opportunity costs and leaving capital undeployed. On the sell-side, getting complex assets bankable or selling projects is increasingly difficult.

Purpose-built for energy infrastructure, Veridue provides institutional-grade due diligence and surfaces the risks, opportunities and insights that matter most to deal teams in a single click. This enables customers to:

• Screen more opportunities and identify the best assets
• Move with conviction weeks ahead of the competition or take deals off-market
• Win more deals
• Deploy more capital
• Achieve better exits or financing terms for their projects

For investors, IPPs, lenders and insurers, Veridue provides AI deal pipeline management, priority deal recommendations based on bespoke investment criteria and a comprehensive due diligence including project maturity analysis within hours, not weeks. Customers can simply email Veridue and get back familiar outputs such as due diligence reports or IRLs.

“Teams still doing diligence manually are already losing out to sharper, faster AI-enabled players. We see a high volume of deals, and Veridue helps us cut the time and cost to reach conviction and exclusivity, allowing us to identify better opportunities and deploy more capital into higher-quality assets”, said Daniel Szentirmai, CEO of Futureal Energy Partners.

For developers and sellers, Veridue offers a free institutional-grade data room that automatically organises itself into perfect folders and file names, plus an investment readiness report, a VDD and a gold-standard Teaser. This helps sellers get investor ready and bankable quicker, build credibility with buyers and lenders, and ultimately secure better offers.

Rather than having to purchase multiple point solutions and lose track of important deal information buried in emails, excel trackers, pdfs and siloed AI chat threads, with Veridue all sides of a transaction can run their entire process within a single AI-native solution – from origination and deal screening through VDR, Q&A, due diligence to IC memos, and beyond. “What stood out to us is the team’s deep understanding of the challenges in the renewables market. The founders have put two years into developing a focused, purpose-built solution designed around how energy infrastructure deals actually work, rather than a generic AI platform which simply couldn’t be trusted by deal teams. Veridue is leading in a market expected to spend at minimum $15T over the next 15 years, and that’s why we’re backing its unique offering”, said Adrian Lloyd, General Partner, at Episode 1.

About Veridue
Veridue is the AI-native due diligence and M&A platform purpose-built for energy infrastructure and data centres. It accelerates investment and project financing for investors, IPPs, developers, lenders and insurers – enabling buyers to increase returns by identifying higher-quality assets and winning more deals, while getting owners and sellers to bankability or a better exit, faster.

Veridue brings slow, manual and expensive transaction processes, which cannot keep pace with rising deal volumes and complexity, into the age of AI. Its platform acts as a single source of truth across the entire deal lifecycle, from origination and deal screening to VDR, Q&A, due diligence and beyond. Veridue combines the latest AI models with its own proprietary deterministic agent layer, trained across thousands of risk factors, and a human layer of expert judgement from its in-house energy transaction specialists — delivering organised data rooms, screened deals and full due diligence in hours instead of weeks.

The result is an independent, objective foundation for moving capital into bankable energy infrastructure at scale, enabling deal teams to move with greater speed and rigour at the same time.
For more information, visit: https://www.veridue.ai/

About Episode 1 Ventures
Episode 1 is a London-based venture capital firm backing pre-seed and seed-stage B2B software founders across the UK and Europe, with a singular focus on getting startups to a successful Series A. Since 2013 the firm has built a family of 65+ companies — including, Carwow, Lawhive, Ori, Raft, FatMap, Touch Surgery, Fluidstack, CloudNC, Mimica, Passfort, Mantic, StackOne, Refute — with 73% of its portfolio going on to raise a Series A.

What sets Episode 1 apart is its human-machine hybrid approach to sourcing and backing founders. Athena, the firm’s proprietary AI data platform built over four years by GP Adam Shuaib PhD, analyses the entire digital footprint of early-stage companies across a training set of more than 15,000 European startups, allowing Episode 1 to find exceptional founders earlier, reduce bias and make sharper portfolio decisions. Athena’s insights underpin the Outlier Quotient™, Episode 1’s framework for identifying non-consensus founders who don’t fit the conventional VC template — those marked by early-life adversity, unconventional career paths and distinctive ways of thinking. Over 40% of Episode 1’s founders would not have been found through traditional sourcing, and Outlier Quotient founders convert to Series A at three times the industry average.

Waste-to-Energy AI: Jaipur Robotics raises €4.3M to bring computer vision to waste plants worldwide

The Swiss startup is currently expanding its AI operating system to more Waste-to-Energy and other industrial plants across several continents.

Jaipur Robotics, the Swiss AI company transforming waste plant operations with computer vision and automation, today announced a EUR 4.3 million Seed round led by EquityPitcher Ventures and High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF). With a growing network of customers across Europe, Jaipur will use this funding to pursue market leadership, expand into new regions, and further verticalise and broaden the product depth.

“We envision a future where data from waste fully drives safety and automation,” said Ermes Zamboni, Co-Founder and CEO of Jaipur Robotics. “This round enables us to revolutionise entire plant operations.”

There are over 3,100 waste-to-energy plants worldwide in a market worth approximately EUR 40 billion, the majority of which still rely on manual monitoring and analogue processes. By turning waste data into actionable insights, Jaipur Robotics has proven its impact with measurable results*:

• > 80% fewer unplanned shutdowns: real-time hazard detection improves safety and reduces downtime
• > €1M in added value from improved waste mixing: calorific-value mapping optimises combustion and compliance
• Smarter crane operations: predictive guidance automates crane control and maximises productivity

*All figures per plant, per year.

With the largest European WtE dataset of over 50 million labelled images, the system analyses more than 5 million tonnes of waste a year and detects hazardous materials with 99% accuracy.

Anna Stetter, Investment Manager at HTGF: “What convinced us to co-lead this round is the combination of a dataset, a founding team with rare depth across mechanical engineering, deep learning, and industrial deployment, and outstanding, measurable results at customer sites.”

Silvan Gehmann, Investment Manager at EquityPitcher, added: “Ermes, Nikhil, and the team have built the right foundation to define this category globally. The spirit of being extremely close to the customer will continue to shape the big product vision of more and more autonomous plants.”

Stefano Rizzi, Director of the Division of Economic Affairs of the Canton of Ticino, congratulated Jaipur Robotics on this important achievement, “which rewards the quality of the project and the

work carried out by the team. In just a few years, Jaipur Robotics has successfully developed an innovative AI-based solution and brought it also to international markets. Its journey to this current stage of growth confirms the potential of our innovation ecosystem, thanks also to players such as Fondazione Agire and TiVentures, and its ability to support young companies throughout the different stages of their development.” The company is actively growing its team across AI, engineering, and commercial roles. Open positions are listed at www.jaipurrobotics.com/careers

About Jaipur Robotics

Jaipur Robotics AG develops computer vision and AI solutions for industrial sites such as Waste-to-Energy (WtE), cement, and biomass plants, making them safer, smarter, and more efficient. Founded in 2024 and headquartered at Technopole Ticino in Manno, near Lugano, Switzerland, it is one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the sector, with a 40-person team and two R&D centres in Switzerland and Asia. Learn more at www.jaipurrobotics.com

Media Contact
Julie Pham
Design & Marketing Manager, Jaipur Robotics
E-Mail: j.pham@jaipurrobotics.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/jaipurrobotics

About EquityPitcher Ventures

EquityPitcher Ventures invests in Series Seed and Series A startups in the DACH region. The focus is on AI and DeepTech startups with the goal of becoming global category leaders.

EquityPitcher Ventures has an extensive track record in robotics and infrastructure, with a total of 40 investments to date, and connects its portfolio with the most relevant business leaders in Switzerland and beyond. Additionally, they actively support scaling sales organisations and operations. Learn more at: https://equitypitcher.com/

INLEAP Photonics raises €20 million to scale laser-based drone defence

• UVC Partners leads seed funding round
• Strong demand drives investment in series production and international expansion
• Funding strengthens INLEAP Photonics’ position as a European provider of laser-based drone defence solutions

German deep-tech company INLEAP Photonics has closed a seed funding round led by UVC Partners, securing approximately €20 million in total for laser-based drone defence. Other investors from Germany and across Europe include HTGF (Germany), Balnord (Poland), Sentris (Estonia) and Scale Capital (Denmark).

The funding round comes at a time of growing urgency. Recent incidents, including the drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport, demonstrate the immediate and real threat posed by unmanned aerial vehicles to critical infrastructure. The demand for effective, safe and sovereign counter-drone systems has never been higher.

INLEAP Photonics addresses this need with efficient and safe laser-based drone defence solutions and is already working with customers and partners including the German Federal Ministry of Defence (BMVg) and the Bundeswehr Cyber Innovation Hub. The recently announced strategic partnership with STARK Defence further underlines the growing demand for sovereign, operationally proven C-UAS (Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems) developed in Germany.

In response to strong market demand, INLEAP Photonics will use the new capital to expand its production and testing capacity and continue growing its team.

“Our technology has reached the market and we are seeing strong order intake. We are now investing in manufacturing, quality assurance, sales and service to meet demand and deliver our systems at greater scale,” says Dr.-Ing. Marius Lammers, CEO and founder of INLEAP Photonics. “We will establish INLEAP Photonics as a leading European provider of laser effectors.”

UVC Partners leads seed funding round

UVC Partners is the lead investor in the new financing round. The investor base has also been expanded to include new backers such as Balnord, Scale Capital and Sentris, bringing additional expertise and networks to support INLEAP Photonics’ expansion across Europe.

“Drone defence is no longer a purely military issue. Airports, energy facilities and data centres require the same level of protection as defence installations. INLEAP Photonics is the only team whose technology meets the requirements of both environments: eye-safe for civilian use and robust enough for deployment in conflict zones. For us, this dual-use capability is the key lever for scaling,” says Amanda Birkenholz, Principal at UVC Partners.

Funding to accelerate series production, development and market expansion

With the proceeds from the seed round, INLEAP Photonics will accelerate the scaling of its technology for defence applications and the protection of critical infrastructure.

“Moving into series production requires more than simply adding capacity. Every unit must be manufactured, tested and accepted under the same defined conditions. This is why we are investing in standardised assembly and testing processes, rigorous quality assurance and reliable supply chains,” says Dr.-Ing. Felix Wellmann, CTO and founder of INLEAP Photonics.

Specifically, the capital will be invested in the following areas:

• Scaling series production: Establishing and standardising manufacturing and testing processes for INLEAP® FASTLIGHT® HELD and INLEAP® FASTLIGHT® SHIELD®
• Research and development: Further development of the core technology, particularly its eye-safe operating principle. This enables INLEAP® FASTLIGHT® SHIELD® to be deployed in urban and safety-critical environments and differentiates the system from all other solutions on the market.
• Sales and service: Expanding sales, customer support and market presence in Germany and across Europe. Further locations are planned in Germany and other European countries to intensify cooperation with public-sector customers and security-relevant organisations such as the Bundeswehr and to reach prospective customers more quickly.

• Quality assurance and certifications: Developing and implementing the required processes, evidence and certifications for reliable deployment in industrial and security-critical environments.

Laser systems technology for different operational scenarios

INLEAP Photonics develops and supplies high-precision, ultra-fast laser beam steering systems. INLEAP® FASTLIGHT® SHIELD® has been developed for controlled and eye-safe drone defence. The laser effector neutralises drones within seconds by precisely targeting identified weak points. The system is intended for military applications as well as civilian and critical infrastructure environments.

INLEAP® FASTLIGHT® HELD (High Energy Laser Drone) is a system for laser-based drone defence on an unmanned ground platform and extends the range of applications for mobile C-UAS scenarios. It is based on the same technological foundation and combines the laser effector with a compact, all-terrain UGV platform (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) and a C-UAS software platform. The new funding will enable INLEAP Photonics to further develop and scale both product lines.

REVIER Therapeutics Launches with €6 Million Seed Financing to Pioneer Class IIa HDAC Inhibitors for Cardiometabolic Disease

Revier Therapeutics, today announced the closing of a EUR 6 million seed financing and the launch of its operations. The Company has established the first therapeutic approach to selectively target class IIa histone deacetylases (HDACs) for the treatment of cardiometabolic diseases. The financing was led by the KHAN Technology Transfer Fund II, with participation from High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), VORNvc, and private investors through Revier Invest Heidelberg.

Funding from the round will support development of Revier’s preclinical cardiometabolic pipeline, including its lead program in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) and its second program in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) as well as the build out of its operational, scientific and clinical functions.

“Despite significant progress in cardiovascular medicine, millions of patients with HFpEF and ASCVD still to date face limited targeted treatment options,” said Prof. Eva van Rooij, PhD, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Revier Therapeutics. “We believe the next generation of cardiometabolic medicines needs to address the underlying disease-driving biology to deliver impactful and long-term solutions for patients. Our mission is to translate the scientific potential of class IIa HDAC inhibition into a pipeline of novel therapies and rapidly advance our lead programs toward the clinic to create long-term value for both patients and the broader healthcare ecosystem.”

HDACs are enzymes that play a functional role in a variety of severe diseases. Pioneering discoveries, including foundational work at Heidelberg University led by Prof. Johannes Backs, MD, Revier’s scientific founder, defined the specific impact of class IIa HDACs on cardiometabolic diseases.

Prof. Johannes Backs, MD, scientific founder of Revier Therapeutics added: “While first generation HDAC inhibitors broadly targeted multiple HDAC classes resulting in dose-limiting side effects, Revier’s first-in-class small molecules selectively target class IIa HDACs. These compounds specifically inhibit the disease-driving enzymatic activity while preserving the essential functions of class IIa HDACs and canonical class I HDACs. This precise mode of action is designed to be therapeutically effective while maintaining a beneficial safety profile.”

“Revier’s differentiated class IIa HDAC strategy in cardiometabolic disease has the potential to unlock the therapeutic promise of HDAC biology while overcoming limitations associated with earlier class I HDAC approaches,” said Michael Hamacher, PhD, Managing Partner and CFO at KHAN Technology Transfer Fund II. “Combined with an exceptional leadership team and deep scientific expertise, the company has a unique opportunity to deliver disease-modifying medicines and reshape the standard of care by providing durable benefit for patients with HFpEF, ASCVD and related cardiometabolic disorders.”

The Company’s seed financing includes support from a coalition of regional stakeholders and investors led by the business developer Daniel Stern (founder of Revier Invest Heidelberg), underscoring the strategic importance of biotechnology for both the local community and the state of Baden‑Württemberg.

In conjunction with the company launch, Revier announced its leadership team, bringing together renowned experts in cardiovascular science, drug discovery, clinical development and biotechnology.

Key leadership includes:

• Prof. Johannes Backs, MD, Scientific Founder – Director of the Institute of Experimental Cardiology at Heidelberg University, Director of the Helmholtz Institute for Translational AngioCardioScience (HI-TAC), and Professor of the German Center for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK).
• Prof. Eva van Rooij, PhD, Chief Executive Officer – A serial biotechnology entrepreneur and Professor of Molecular Cardiology at University Medical Center Utrecht, with extensive expertise in cardiovascular translational research.
• Mike Nolan, PhD, Chief Technology Officer – A corresponding author of the initial publications describing selective class IIa HDAC inhibitors with 20+ years of industry experience in drug discovery, innovative research platforms, and company creation.
• Matthias Dewenter, MD, Chief Scientific Officer – An expert in translational cardiovascular research and the preclinical development of novel therapeutic approaches for heart failure and cardiometabolic disease.
• Prof. Norbert Frey, MD, Chief Medical Officer – Director of the Department of Cardiology, Angiology and Pneumology at Heidelberg University Hospital, translational researcher, and clinical trial leader with decades of expertise advancing new treatments for cardiovascular disease.

About REVIER Therapeutics
Revier has established the first therapeutic approach to selectively target Class IIa HDACs to treat cardiometabolic diseases. Our orally available small molecules are designed to inhibit the pathogenic enzymatic activity while preserving healthy biological function and avoiding canonical HDAC inhibition. We are advancing a pipeline of novel disease modulators starting with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) as our initial indications. Our goal is to define a new class of treatments that directly improve cardiometabolic health and provide life-saving, long-term benefits for patients with related diseases.
Find more information at www.revier.bio.

About KHAN Technology Transfer Fund II (KHAN-II)
KHAN-II is an early-stage life sciences venture fund focused on first-in-class therapies for high unmet medical needs, partnering with academic innovators across Europe. Managed by Khanu Fondsverwaltung, a world-class drug discovery team, it leverages unique access to Max Planck and leading European research, and teams up with the Lead Discovery Center GmbH for effective drug development. KHAN-II is backed by the European Investment Fund (InvestEU Equity and ERP-EIF Facility), Akros Pharma, Max Planck Foundation, and Thyssen’sche Handelsgesellschaft.
Further information at: info@khanu.de

About VORNvc
VORNvc is a venture capital fund based in Dortmund set up by local savings banks, NRW.Bank and private investors. The experienced management team invests in technology-driven start-ups across multiple financing rounds. In addition to capital, VORNvc provides access to regional networks and SME expertise to drive the region’s economic transformation. Further information at: www.vorn.vc

About Revier Invest Heidelberg
A group of nine private investors from the Rhine-Neckar region, Lünen, and Detroit has recently established Revier Invest Heidelberg to provide growth capital for Revier’s continued expansion. In addition, its management team led by Daniel Stern is supporting the company’s business development activities throughout Baden-Württemberg, Revier’s home state and one of Germany’s leading innovation hubs.

Contact
info@revier.bio

Media requests
Trophic Communications
Verena Schossmann
+49 151 21941277
revier@trophic.eu

Computomics Raises EUR 6.3 Million to Scale Climate-Smart Plant Breeding

Convent Capital Agri Food Fund Leads Series B; existing investors including High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), MBG Baden-Württemberg and Amathaon Capital participate.

TÜBINGEN, Germany, 18 August 2026 – Computomics GmbH has raised EUR 6.3 million in new equity in a Series B financing round led by Convent Capital Agri Food Fund, which invested EUR 5 million. Existing investors including High-Tech Gründerfonds, MBG Baden‑Württemberg and Amathaon Capital participated, alongside founders and scientific advisors. The proceeds will be used to scale commercial delivery of the company’s climate‑smart breeding platform.

The financing comes in a summer in which European growers have lost yield to heat and drought across nearly every crop. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has revised down its 2026 yield forecasts for all spring and summer crops, with the largest reductions for maize and sunflower, and France is heading for one of its weakest maize harvests in decades. Varieties now entering the market were selected in a different climate than the one they will be grown in.

Computomics builds machine learning models that predict how a given genotype will perform under a given set of conditions, combining genomic data with environmental data such as temperature, rainfall and soil, and with field measurements. Breeders use the predictions to answer questions that trial data alone cannot answer in time: which candidates hold up under hotter and drier conditions, which are stable across environments rather than strong in one, and where a variety should be placed. Its ×SeedScore® platform runs those predictions at the scale of a commercial breeding program. Customers include commercial breeders working in field crops, forages, vegetables and specialty crops.

“Breeders have never lacked ambition about climate resilience. What they have lacked is a way to see it before the field tells them, which takes years they no longer have,” said Dr. Sebastian J. Schultheiss, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Computomics. “This financing is about getting that capability into far more breeding programs, faster.”

“We back companies whose environmental impact grows with their commercial success. Better breeding predictions mean fewer wasted seasons and varieties that hold up in the field, so the impact case and the business case point the same way. That alignment is why we led this round,” said Stephen McLoughlin, Partner at Convent Capital Agri Food Fund. “AI-based breeding of stress-resistant crops is part of the German federal government’s High-Tech Agenda for good reason: it is one of the levers that matter most as the climate shifts,” said Dr. Frank Hensel, Principal at High-Tech Gründerfonds. “HTGF has supported Computomics since the seed phase and congratulates the team on this growth financing.”

This operation benefits from support from the European Union under the InvestEU Fund.

About Computomics

Computomics GmbH, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Tübingen, Germany, applies machine learning to genomics for plant breeding. Its climate-smart breeding portfolio includes ×SeedScore® for predicting performance across genotype, environment and management, CropCompass and BreedScope. Pantograph, the company’s omics data hub, supports trait discovery through pangenome analysis, and MORPHEUS and MEGAN7 serve microbiome applications. The company works with commercial breeders and agri-food companies worldwide. https://computomics.com

About Convent Capital Agri Food Fund

Convent is a Dutch investment company founded in 2011, with the vision to create a thriving global economy that operates within the boundaries of our planet’s resources, driven by the principles of a circular economy. Through its Agri Food Fund, an SFDR Article 9 impact fund, Convent invests in pioneering Agri & Food companies that create positive environmental impact, backing management teams with both capital and hands-on support to scale their businesses. https://conventcapital.nl/

About Amathaon Capital

Founded in 2020, Amathaon is a Munich-based operational venture capitalist focused on early stage deep tech companies operating along the food production and biotech value chain. Amathaon focuses on sustainable solutions to enable the implementation of the European Green Deal and to address the growing global labor shortage in food and agriculture. In this way, Amathaon Capital supports founders to shape the most important parts of our food production. Further information at www.amathaon.com.

About MBG Mittelständische Beteiligungsgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg GmbH

MBG Mittelständische Beteiligungsgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg is one of the leading providers of equity and venture capital in Germany and acts as a partner to small and medium-sized enterprises. It currently provides about 270 million euros in equity and venture capital to more than 700 small and medium-sized enterprises in Baden-Württemberg. MBG supports growth and innovation projects, business succession and start-ups, primarily with mezzanine capital in the form of silent partnerships. In the venture capital sector, MBG manages several funds, including the Start-up BW Seed Fonds and the Start-up BW Innovation Fonds. MBG’s shareholders include chambers of commerce, trade associations and banking institutions. https://www.mbg.de

Media Contact

Uta Nickels, Marketing Manager
Computomics GmbH, Eisenbahnstr. 1, 72072 Tübingen, Germany
uta.nickels@computomics.com | +49 7071 568 3995

European AI startup kausable raises €12 million in Seed Round to build AI that needs no retraining

European investment in foundational AI

• €12 million seed round by European investors UVC Partners and Entourage to build sovereign European frontier AI
• Deep-tech startup with ties to Heidelberg University and Black Forest Labs
• Reasoning-first causal world model learns rapidly on its own and adapts to new situations without retraining
• Zero-shot forecasting model TipPFN validated in a joint research paper with researchers from Columbia University

AI systems need constant, costly retraining. European AI startup kausable raises €12 million in a seed funding round to solve this problem by developing reasoning-first frontier AI that adapts on its own efficiently to changing context without further retraining. The European frontier lab kausable has ties to Heidelberg University and Black Forest Labs (BFL), one of Germany’s most prominent AI companies.

The round is led by the German and Belgian investors UVC Partners and Entourage, with follow-on from the German investors HTGF and Mätch VC. kausable is also backed by various private angel investors from the AI industry and academia working at Black Forest Labs, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Noxtua, and the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). The financing round comes at a time of increased momentum for strategic digital sovereignty, as current geopolitical instability demonstrates the need for AI frontier models and sovereign systems developed in Europe.

Frontier AI built and supported in Europe

“The world evolves rapidly, and so should AI. However, even the most capable current AI systems are very static in how they interpret the world and need constant, time-consuming, and costly retraining. With kausable we solve this problem by developing a new kind of world model that learns efficiently and robustly on its own and adapts to the ever-changing world. This offers huge opportunities across highly dynamic domains, such as robotics, the energy sector, and finance. We’re proud and excited about our seed funding from our European investors UVC Partners, Entourage, HTGF, and Mätch VC; which also showcases at a crucial time that Europe can and should build and support frontier AI”, states Johannes Haux (CEO & Co-Founder kausable).

“The potential we see here is enormous: nearly every industrial company runs on complex systems it struggles to predict and control – and today, applying AI to each one is slow and expensive. kausable makes that effort collapse. That turns AI from a series of costly one-off projects into something that can be rolled out across an entire industrial landscape – which is why we led this round”, highlights Andreas Unseld (Partner at UVC Partners).

“Most AI models are trained to remember the past. kausable is building AI that can reason about the future. Instead of relying on ever-larger datasets and constant retraining, they’re developing a fundamentally different approach: systems that adapt, infer causality and solve problems they have never seen before. It’s an ambitious scientific bet, and exactly the kind of foundational AI company we’re excited to back,” emphasized Pieterjan Bouten (Co-Founder Entourage).

From Heidelberg University to frontier AI

Johannes Haux (CEO), Dr. Benjamin Herdeanu (CTO), and Gregor Ramien (COO) founded the European frontier AI lab kausable in 2025 based on their research at Heidelberg University and their working experience at start-ups as well as in highly-regulated industries such as cybersecurity and the banking sector. They raised their pre-seed round with 1.5 million EURO in the same year and recently developed TipPFN, a forecasting zero-shot model for complex, dynamic systems that predicts “black swans”, rarely occurring but highly impactful events, in different domains such as medicine or the energy sector. kausable’s reasoning first AI (their “world model”) learns similarly to humans: A robust, universal set of intuitions (the “world model”) helps the AI adapt quickly to changes in its environment with little new information. The team recently also co-authored a research paper with experts from Columbia University, validating the causal reasoning architecture underlying its frontier model.

kausable will use the new funding to expand its current nine-person team of highly qualified experts and to advance its rapid-learning frontier model.

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About kausable
kausable is a deep tech AI startup founded in 2025 by Johannes Haux (CEO), Dr. Benjamin Herdeanu (CTO), and Gregor Ramien (COO), three physicists with ties to Heidelberg University and Black Forest Labs (BFL). The company is developing a reasoning-first foundational AI model that learns from minimal data, requires no retraining, and adapts to scenarios that could not be anticipated at build time. The team has published research in collaboration with Columbia University and developed TipPFN, a zero-shot model for forecasting rare, high-impact events in complex dynamic systems.

In 2026, kausable raised 12 million EURO in their Seed Round from the European investors UVC Partners, Entourage, HTGF, and Mätch VC. Additionally, kausable is backed by private angel investors from the AI industry and academia. 

More information: kausable.ai

About UVC Partners
UVC Partners backs Europe’s most ambitious B2B tech founders building new category leaders. From DeepTech to AI, the firm has invested in breakout startups including Isar Aerospace, Proxima Fusion, Q.ANT, Aleph Alpha, Tacto, Flix, and FINN. 

With more than €700 million in assets under management, UVC Partners invests up to €15 million initially across multiple stages from early to growth. Over the lifetime of the investment, €30 million per company can be deployed. 

Beyond capital, UVC Partners’ investment team is a “tech team for tech teams” – supporting founders in building and scaling market-leading companies. Through its unique access to UnternehmerTUM – Europe’s leading innovation hub – the VC offers a powerful ecosystem of entrepreneurs, key corporate decision-makers, and top-tier researchers. UVC Partners’ value-creation team provides direct access to a network of 1,000+ companies – potential customers and strategic partners.

More information: www.uvcpartners.com 

About Entourage
Entourage is an early-stage venture capital firm founded by Showpad co-founder Pieterjan Bouten. Built by operators, Entourage backs the next generation of legendary founders from pre-seed to seed across AI, robotics, enterprise software and deep tech. More than capital, Entourage brings first-hand experience in building and scaling global technology companies, Its portfolio includes category-defining companies such as Aikido, Lexroom and Conveo.

About Mätch VC
Mätch VC is a European venture capital firm based in Stuttgart, focusing on deep tech in the pre-seed stage. As a partner from day one, the fund is typically the first name on the founders’ cap table. Alongside capital (€50 million fund volume), Mätch VC provides a unique network of 91 family-owned businesses, industry executives, and founders—including names like Trumpf, Ritter Sport, and Festool. Follow-on funding rounds for its portfolio companies are regularly led by global Tier 1 funds. Its portfolio includes Black Forest Labs (Frontier AI Lab), Blockbrain (Modular AI Platform), Atmos Space Cargo (Spacetech), and XOR (Cybersecurity), among others.

More information: https://www.maetch.vc/

IFA Berlin will host the CVC | Open Innovation Summit Europe 2026

European conglomerates, family-run businesses and small and medium-sized enterprises are working together to boost Europe’s technological and industrial competitiveness.

IFA Berlin, the world’s leading event for home and consumer tech, will host the CVC | Open Innovation Summit Europe 2026. From 2 to 4 September, around 80 executives from Europe, the US and Asia will gather at the Messe Berlin exhibition centre.

The focus will be on how European conglomerates, family-owned businesses and SMEs can better combine capital, innovation and strategy in order to bring new technologies into use more quickly and strengthen Europe’s competitiveness.

The carefully selected group of participants includes members of executive boards and management teams, owners and executives of family-run businesses, as well as those responsible for corporate strategy, corporate venture capital, transformation and open innovation. On Friday 4 September 2026, the first official day of the IFA, joint programme events organised by the IFA and the summit are planned.

“IFA is a place where new technologies become visible and can be experienced first-hand. As hosts of the CVC | Open Innovation Summit, we are also bringing onto our platform those who finance innovations, scale them within companies and bring them to international markets. In doing so, we are creating a direct link between technology, industry, strategic capital and practical implementation”, says Leif Lindner, CEO of IFA Management.

Working together to boost Europe’s competitiveness

Many European companies have recognised the pivotal technological and geopolitical changes. The greater challenge today lies in implementation: how can artificial intelligence, automation and new business models move from the pilot phase into core business operations? How do governance, capital allocation and decision-making processes need to be adapted? And how can corporate groups, family businesses, SMEs, investors and start-ups collaborate more effectively?

Other key areas of focus include Europe’s technological sovereignty, critical infrastructure, industrial resilience and international partnerships between Europe, the US and Asia.

The Summit itself is structured as an open innovation project. The participating companies and institutions develop the programme jointly, define key research questions and contribute specific experiences and challenges from their organisations and portfolios.

The European co-hosts for 2026 include, amongst others, BorgWarner, Evonik, High-Tech Gründerfonds, MANN+HUMMEL, SIGNAL IDUNA, and Swiss Post.

As co-host, HTGF brings its experience from over 800 funded start-ups and its perspective as a multi-stage VC platform – from seed stage to growth financing. With more than 45 corporates, mid-sized companies, and family offices as fund investors, it has been operating for over 20 years at precisely the intersection this summit is about: between ambitious founding teams and established companies looking to bring innovation into their core business.

Several of the organisations involved are collaborating in this constellation for the first time. Within just a few months, this has resulted in a joint European work programme.

“Europe will not secure its competitiveness through individual companies, investments or pilot projects”, says Philipp Willigmann, Chairman and Convener of the CVC | Open Innovation Summit. “New forms of collaboration are needed between large corporations, family-owned businesses, SMEs, investors and technology companies. The Summit creates a confidential space in which executives can work together to determine how capital, innovation and strategy can be brought together more effectively.”

“The Summit brings together decision-makers from CVC, innovation, and strategy at large global companies to address systemic challenges and align corporate innovation, venture activities, and strategic capital. It’s about honest discussions among decision-makers who genuinely want to drive innovation and development forward,” says Dr. Tanja Emmerling, Partner at HTGF.

“Germany and Europe have outstanding technologies, strong companies, and a unique industrial base. What matters now is speed in execution. AI in particular offers the opportunity to rethink industrial processes, value chains, and entire business models. A New Wirtschaftswunder doesn’t come from waiting, but from the close alignment of capital, industry, and the start-up ecosystem,” adds Sebastian Borek, Managing Director of HTGF.

A working summit rather than a traditional conference

The CVC | Open Innovation Summit is deliberately designed as a working meeting rather than a traditional conference. Participants do not simply come to listen, but contribute their own questions, experiences and proposed solutions in small, facilitated working sessions.

The working groups will address topics including the introduction of artificial intelligence, governance and decision-making processes, strategic capital allocation, corporate-start-up partnerships, and the transition from pilot projects to operational business.

HTGF brings to this discussion the perspective of how innovation can be built and scaled across different stages of development and financing, and brought to application faster in collaboration with industrial partners.

Selected insights will be compiled into white papers following the summit. These are intended to serve as a basis for further corporate dialogue, partnerships and joint initiatives. The aim is to turn this exchange into concrete follow-up activities and measurable impact.

The summit is supported by selected technology, knowledge, legal and ecosystem partners, including Deloitte, Dentons, RSM Ebner Stolz, the Bundesverband Beteiligungskapital, Berlin Partner and AsiaBerlin.

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Application to take part

The CVC | Open Innovation Summit Europe is a curated, invite-only event. It is aimed in particular at board members and senior management, owners and executives of family-owned businesses, as well as those responsible for corporate venture capital, strategy, transformation and open innovation.

Selected technology entrepreneurs, investors, academics and policy-makers will also be included in the programme.

Interested executives can apply to attend. Confirmation will be provided by the summit’s co-hosts.

Application to take part:

https://luma.com/wjp9t6oq

IFA Berlin 2026

IFA Berlin 2026 will take place from 4 to 8 September 2026 at the Messe Berlin exhibition centre.

The participating exhibitors are listed here: Exhibitors 2026 | IFA Innovation For All

Members of the media can register for IFA 2026 here: IFA Press Accreditation

About the CVC | Open Innovation Summit

The CVC | Open Innovation Summit is an independent, non-commercial platform that brings together executives from international corporations, family-owned businesses and SMEs with investors, technology companies and policy-makers from Europe, the US, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

The long-term ambition is to establish a globally trusted platform where executives can combine capital, innovation and strategy to help shape the future of business and society.

The Summit is organised in collaboration with an international group of corporate and institutional co-hosts and led by Philipp Willigmann as Chairman and Independent Convener. u-path supports the operational and international development of the platform and, through Inside CVC, produces an accompanying podcast on corporate innovation, strategic capital and transformation.

Further information:
www.cvc-summit.com
www.u-path.com

Inside CVC Podcast:
https://insidecvcbyupath.buzzsprout.com

About th co-hosts
The CVC | Open Innovation Summit Europe 2026 is being organised in collaboration with a strong group of European companies and institutions. The co-hosts include, amongst others: BorgWarner | Evonik | High-Tech Gründerfonds | MANN+HUMMEL | SIGNAL IDUNA | Swiss Post

About HTGF – High-Tech Gründerfonds 
Germany and Europe need a New Wirtschaftswunder, we are laying the foundations. ​We are Germany’s most active VC investor, funding deep-tech, life sciences and digital tech companies that secure technological sovereignty and build industrial strength. From the initial idea through to international scaling, we support bold founders as a multi-stage VC platform – seamlessly, reliably and for the long term. ​ 
350 active start-ups, 200+ exits and 5 unicorns. Over €10 billion in follow-on funding mobilised.​ 
Together with DTCF, we represent more than €3 billion in fund volume – and turn German and European innovations into global tech champions.​ 

More information at HTGF.de or on LinkedIn.  

About IFA Berlin
IFA Berlin is the world’s leading event for home and consumer technologies and celebrates over a century of innovation. Since 1924, IFA Berlin has been the premier global platform where technology leaders, innovators, and industry experts come together to showcase groundbreaking products and shape the future of consumer electronics and home appliances. The event takes place every September in Berlin. Journalists can register for IFA 2026 here. For more information on IFA Berlin 2026: www.ifa-berlin.com/de/

Press contacts

IFA Berlin
IFA Berlin Presseabteilung
press@ifa-management.com

Sonja May
Director PR & Corporate Communications
s.may@ifa-management.com

Thalissa-Jennifer Klaps
PR Manager
t.klaps@ifa-management.com

CVC | Open Innovation Summit Europe
Philipp Willigmann
Chairman & Convener
philipp.willigmann@u-path.com

Steve Schmith
Marketing & Communications
steve.schmith@u-path.com

Isabelle Born
Head of Marketing & Communications
i.born@htgf.de

University of Sheffield spinout Pixel-Flo raises £5.25 million Seed round to tackle critical bottleneck in MicroLED manufacturing 

Pixel-Flo, a University of Sheffield spin-out addressing a critical bottleneck in MicroLED display manufacturing with its proprietary Continuous-Flow Mass Transfer technology, has raised £5.25 million in Seed funding.

The round was led by Northern Gritstone with additional investment from SCVC, the Parkwalk Northern Universities Venture Fund, and German investment firm, HTGF.  

Pixel-Flo is developing the cost reduction breakthrough critically needed for MicroLED display manufacturing, through its highly scalable, cost-efficient approach. MicroLED is the next wave of display technology, offering 2-5x higher brightness and 2-4x greater efficiency than traditional displays. However, volume adoption of microLED is currently limited by the fundamental scalability challenges of mechanical mass transfer techniques. By comparison, Pixel-Flo’s proprietary fluidic self-assembly technology offers extremely high continuous throughput, delivering the high-performance of MicroLED at radically reduced processing and material cost. This will allow MicroLED enabled products from smartwatches to TVs to be made available at mass market price points. 

Pixel-Flo was founded by Dr Rick Smith, Dr Suneal Ghataora, and Simon Jones. The company builds on novel semiconductor photonic research in Dr Smith’s lab, drawing on long-running LED research from the University of Sheffield’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Simon Jones’s extensive display-industry commercial experience. The latest oversubscribed funding round will support Pixel-Flo’s transition from laboratory development towards industrial scale-up, expanding their team and relocating to new lab and office space. Pixel-Flo’s international expansion ambitions are underscored by its recent hiring of a Taiwan-based Business Development VP, Sanger Hsu, focused on early customer engagement in a critical market for display technologies. Last year, Pixel-Flo was part of the NG Studios cohort, Northern Gritstone’s deeptech venture builder. 

Rick Smith, CEO and Co-founder of Pixel-Flo, said: “This investment allows us to expand our team and demonstrate our unique technology on a commercial coating system, enabling partnership and evaluation by display manufacturing partners. We are proud to have a fantastic international consortium of complementary investors led by Northern Gritstone supporting our international ambitions to enable huge new market opportunities for microLED.”   

Duncan Johnson, CEO of Northern Gritstone, said: “Pixel-Flo is a great example of the deep-tech innovation with global ambitions emerging from the Northern Arc that Northern Gritstone strives to support. As a graduate of our NG Studios venture building program, the company combines world-class science with a clear path to commercial impact. By developing a scalable, lower-cost solution, Pixel-Flo’s MicroLED mass transfer assembly process has the potential to unlock MicroLED displays for the mass market.”  

John Williams, SCVC General Partner, said: “Deep Tech is full of breakthrough technologies looking for a problem to solve. Pixel-Flo inverted that — an elegant solution to the bottleneck that has held microLED back, a display technology that outperforms on every metric. The syndicate around them reflects what the management team has already built.” 

Anne Umbach, Senior Investment Manager at HTGF, added: “From my experience in displays and printed electronics, I know all too well how challenging it is to scale new display technologies. Pixel Flo’s approach targets precisely this critical bottleneck in the micro-LED market — and this team has what it takes to deliver a key technology for the next generation of displays.” 

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About Pixel-Flo 
Pixel-Flo develops a process for enabling scaled-up MicroLED display manufacturing. Founded on groundbreaking academic research from the University of Sheffield, the spinout’s Continuous-Flo mass transfer manufacturing process addresses a key industry bottleneck in traditional mass transfer methods, which scale poorly with panel area. Their Continuous-Flo platform is based on two Pixel-Flo owned technology elements: MicroLED ink and the equipment extension of industry-standard coating tools. Pixel-Flo’s Continuous-Flo technology extends the industry-standard coating approach, reducing processing costs with panel size, lowering material costs, and improving wafer utilisation. For more information, please go to: https://pixel-flo.com/ 

About Northern Gritstone 
Northern Gritstone is an investment company dedicated to supporting ambitious science and technology businesses in the North of England. Its philosophy is ‘profit with purpose’ combining strong returns for investors with wider positive, societal and economic impact, including high-skilled job creation and regional growth. Chaired by Lord Jim O’Neill, the company has made 50 investments to date in some of the UK’s most exciting future businesses. 

Northern Gritstone works alongside NG Innovation Services (NGIS), its high-performance growth experts for early-stage science and technology companies. The five functions within NGIS, which includes NG Studios, connect ambitious company founders with funding and expertise to quickly scale their businesses. 

About SCVC 
SCVC is a Deep Tech specialist investor and the official funding arm of Science Creates, investing from pre-seed to Series A in category-defining Deep Tech. Its team of exited founders — whose ventures have created over $2 billion in enterprise value — takes a hands-on approach, partnering closely with startups to turn breakthrough science into globally impactful companies. 

About Parkwalk (Northern Universities Venture Fund) 
Parkwalk is the UK’s most active investor in university spinouts, backing transformative technologies developed by the country’s leading universities and research organisations. Parkwalk focuses on investing in companies addressing real-world challenges with IP-protected innovations across DeepTech, HealthTech and CleanTech. 

As the leading growth EIS fund manager, with £400 million in assets under management, Parkwalk has invested in over 200 companies via its EIS Funds, as well as through enterprise funds managed for the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Bristol, and Imperial College. Parkwalk also manages the Northern Universities Venture Fund in collaboration with Northern Gritstone, targeting opportunities emerging from the Universities of Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, and Sheffield. 

The University of Sheffield 
The University of Sheffield is a leading Russell Group university, with a world-class reputation, ranked within the Top 100 universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2026). Over 30,000 students from 150 countries study at Sheffield and in a truly global community, they learn alongside over 1,500 of the world’s leading academics. Sheffield’s world-shaping research feeds into its excellent education. Students learn at the leading edge of discovery from researchers who are tackling today’s biggest global challenges.  

At its core, Sheffield is a place where independent thinkers can come together in pursuit of a shared ambition. To ask bold questions, push boundaries, and make a difference. This is what makes the University of Sheffield one of the best in the world. From the first documented use of penicillin as a therapy in 1930, to building Europe’s largest research-led manufacturing cluster, Sheffield’s inventive spirit and top quality research environment sets it apart.  

Current research partners include Boeing, Rolls-Royce, Unilever, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Siemens and Airbus, as well as many government agencies and charitable foundations. Sheffield was named University of the Year for Student Experience by The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2026 and its Students’ Union, which is home to more than 350 societies and clubs, has been ranked the best Students’ Union among all UK universities in the National Student Survey (NSS). Over 300,000 Sheffield alumni from 205 different countries make a significant influence across the world, with six Nobel Prize winners included amongst former staff and students. 

Textile Circularity Needs Smart Sorting: reverse.fashion Secures Seven-Figure HTGF Investment

• The Berlin-based AI startup reverse.fashion secures a seven-figure investment from High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF).
• Using intelligent, AI-powered sorting technology, the company streamlines textile categorisation, reduces processing costs, and increases revenues for its customers.
• Focus on market entry: The fresh capital will be used to scale existing pilot projects and drive forward the ongoing market launch of the new industrial sorting solution line.sort.

Berlin-based AI startup reverse.fashion has closed a seven-figure extension of its pre-seed financing round. reverse.fashion will use the fresh capital to drive the commercial rollout of its AI-powered sorting solution — and thereby remove one of the biggest bottlenecks on the path to a circular economy in the textile industry.

Smart Sorting as the Key to Circular Fashion

The transition to a genuine circular economy in the textile industry requires highly efficient sorting processes to accurately direct used textiles to their optimal recovery channels. Existing manual processes are reaching their economic and capacity limits. This is precisely where reverse.fashion steps in with automated sorting systems: using artificial intelligence, the systems precisely categorise and digitise textiles according to condition, style, brand, size, and material composition, among other criteria. This allows garments to be sorted accurately for resale or high-quality recycling.

“By significantly increasing sorting quality and throughput, our customers boost their productivity by 40% while simultaneously achieving a revenue increase of around 20%,” says Dr. Karsten Pufahl, co-founder of reverse.fashion.

Successful Pilots and the Launch of line.sort

The extended pre-seed funding enables the company to reach its next strategic milestone: commercial market entry. In the coming months, the already successfully running pilot projects with the software product co.sort will be intensively continued. At the same time, the market rollout of the full solution line.sort has just kicked off, with the goal of establishing automated sorting processes across the industry at scale.

“With the successful pilot phase and the current market entry, we are entering a new chapter for the company. We are all the more pleased to have HTGF as an experienced partner by our side,” says co-founder Mario Osterwalder of reverse.fashion.

“Rising regulatory requirements such as EPR and EU mandates are driving the transformation of the textile industry. reverse.fashion addresses a central bottleneck with its AI technology and creates the foundation for greater efficiency and profitability. We are very much looking forward to accompanying this visionary team on its journey,” says Dr. Anne Umbach, Senior Investment Manager at HTGF.

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About reverse.fashion
reverse.fashion was founded in 2024 as a spin-off from the Technical University of Berlin (Chair of Micro and Precision Devices, Prof. Dr. Dirk Oberschmidt). The technology is based on intellectual property (IP) developed during joint research projects between TU Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin), and circular.fashion GmbH. The company was founded by Dr. Karsten Pufahl, Paul Doertenbach, and Mario Osterwalder and currently employs 12 people.