Aspirity Partners, a London private equity firm, has agreed to take a majority stake in Onomondo as part of an investment of more than €100 million. EIFO, the Danish state fund that has backed the Copenhagen company since 2021, is adding to its stake.
Onomondo connects machines rather than people. It has native access to nearly 700 mobile networks and runs what it calls the world's largest private LTE network at sea, across more than 450 Maersk vessels; its 500-plus customers include Carlsberg and Husqvarna.
The deal still needs regulatory approval and should close in the first quarter of 2027. Most of this week's money went to layers like this one, the part of a system nobody sees until it fails: device connectivity, durable software, shared data, sorted scrap.
(Ritzau)
Startups & Funding
Aptadir raises a €40 million seed to switch silenced genes back on
Milan's Aptadir Therapeutics closed a €40 million ($45 million) seed round led by London's 4BIO Capital. EXTEND, Italy's national tech transfer hub for biotech and Aptadir's pre-seed backer, followed on, alongside CDP Venture Capital, Angelini Ventures, and XGEN Venture.
Aptadir's DiRs are RNA molecules that block DNA methylation at a single gene, so a gene the cell has silenced can work again. The first target is Fragile X syndrome, where one silenced gene causes the condition.
The programme is preclinical. The science comes from Beth Israel Deaconess, Italy's CNR, and City of Hope, and the round is among the largest ever raised by an Italian health startup.
(GlobeNewswire via Yahoo Finance)
Inbolt raises €11 million so robots can cope with a misaligned part
Paris-based Inbolt raised €11 million led by Shift4Good, with Bridges Climate Transition Partners, BNP Paribas Développement, and Ora Global, bringing its total to €30 million. Its software gives industrial robots 3D vision and lets them correct their movements in real time.
Even highly automated lines stall when a part sits slightly out of place or a tool wears down. Inbolt runs on more than 200 robots in over 100 factories, for customers including Bosch, Ford, Stellantis, and Toyota, and now wants data centre and electronics assembly work.
Zenithon raises $10 million to simulate fusion reactors faster
London's Zenithon raised $10 million from BACKED, Lunar, Seraphim, MMC, and SOSV to train what it calls world models for extreme physics. The models learn how a fusion reactor, rocket engine, or chip fab behaves and predict how a design will perform without running the full simulation.
When one simulation takes days, an engineering team only tests a small share of possible designs. Dan Brunner, co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, is an adviser, and the money goes on compute and hiring, mostly in San Francisco.
(Tech.eu)
Products & Technology
The team behind Apache Flink raises $20 million for software that survives crashes
Berlin's Restate raised a $20 million Series A led by Singular, with Redpoint Ventures and Capital One Ventures, for $27 million in total. Its founders, Stephan Ewen, Igal Shilman, and Till Rohrmann, built Apache Flink, the open-source stream processor many banks run on.
Restate makes AI agents and backend services durable: when a step fails, the work resumes where it stopped. "Durability has to become a property of the infrastructure itself," says Ewen, who is opening a San Francisco office.
(Tech.eu)
Mistral backs the Naples company that runs its Kubernetes clusters
Clastix raised a €2.9 million seed led by CDP Venture Capital, with Mistral and Vertis. The Naples company built Capsule and Kamaji, open-source tools that let many teams share one Kubernetes fleet, and sells them combined as kMetal.
Mistral's CTO Timothée Lacroix calls Clastix "the backbone" of Mistral's training and inference clusters, and NVIDIA and Fastweb are customers too. It is a small round for a supplier one of Europe's main AI labs depends on.
Four drugmakers pool antibody data without showing it to each other
Berlin's Apheris and Ginkgo Bioworks' data unit have started an antibody consortium with AbbVie, argenx, Lundbeck, and Takeda. Members contribute proprietary sequences toward a 10,000-antibody dataset that predicts which candidates can be manufactured and formulated.
Apheris runs the federated training, so each company gets models trained on the full set while its own sequences stay private. The first dataset reaches members in early 2027, under independent oversight from Oxford's Charlotte Deane.
(GEN)
Climate & Energy
Stegra needs more money for Boden and gets a new CEO
Stegra said on Wednesday that finishing its hydrogen steel plant in Boden will cost more than its new owners assumed in June; estimated costs are "significantly higher", mostly from restarting work that was scaled back. Affärsvärlden puts the gap at SEK 10 billion or more, about €880 million, on top of the €1.4 billion rescue we covered in July.
Former Saab chief Håkan Buskhe takes over from Henrik Henriksson on 1 November.
The largest shareholders say they will help find the money; Kinnevik says it will not. Google agreed last month to pay in advance for the plant's steel, so demand for the steel is not the problem; finishing the plant is.
(SVT)
Metycle borrows $150 million to make scrap copper predictable
Cologne's Metycle secured a $150 million (€131.7 million) credit facility from Rivonia Road Capital. It buys mixed scrap, sorts it at a hub in Maasmechelen, Belgium, with AI and laser spectroscopy, and sells copper and aluminium to buyers' specifications.
Grids, data centres, and electric motors all need copper, and new mines take years.
"Secondary metals do not lack demand. They lack predictability," says CEO Rafael Suchan; Metycle traded €103 million of metal in the past year, up 150%.
Research & Deep Tech
Vienna films the closest relatives of our cells crawling
Christa Schleper's group at the University of Vienna, with ISTA and partners in Braunschweig and Japan, filmed two cultured Asgard archaea changing shape within minutes. The cells grew and pulled back long protrusions at up to 4.8 micrometres a minute and used them to crawl across glass.
Actin inhibitors stopped the movement, and no other prokaryote is known to crawl this way. Asgard archaea are the closest known prokaryotic relatives of eukaryotes, and the paper gives a concrete picture of how the first complex cell could have formed.
(Nature)
Google DeepMind watermarks AI-designed proteins
A London team at Google DeepMind built SynthIDBio, which hides a detectable signature in AI-designed protein sequences and structures. Watermarked binders against VEGF-A and PD-L1 bound as well as unmarked ones in the lab, and detection was near perfect.
The authors report that running a design back through ProteinMPNN, a common open tool, strips the mark. Detection keys also have to stay with trusted parties, so this is a proof of concept for biosecurity, not yet a working system.
(Nature)
One to Watch
Blackswan Space has fifteen months to prove its docking eyes in orbit
Vilnius-based Blackswan Space raised €2.5 million led by Iron Wolf Capital, all from Lithuanian and Estonian investors, for €3.2 million in total. Its RPO Kit is a plug-in payload that lets a satellite see, track, and approach another object on its own.
The kit flies as a hosted payload in Q4 2027, then goes on Orbit Fab's ASTRAL refuelling mission for ESA and the UK Space Agency in 2028.
CEO Marius Klimavičius is expanding into the US to sell to American servicing companies. Watch whether the Q4 2027 demo flies on schedule, because the ASTRAL slot depends on the kit working in orbit first.
(Payload)