SAP has agreed to buy TechWolf, a Ghent company whose AI maps the skills inside a company's workforce. The price is undisclosed, but TechWolf says it is the largest acquisition of a venture-backed software company in Belgian history.
TechWolf was founded in 2018, employs more than 120 people and raised over $50 million, partly from SAP, ServiceNow and Workday. SAP wants its skills graph as a "grounding layer" for Joule, its HR agent, and says it makes "token usage more efficient."
It is SAP's second AI purchase this year after Prior Labs in May, and the deal should close in the fourth quarter.
Several deals this week paid out people who already held shares. TechWolf's backers get an exit, and RobCo's employees get to sell part of their stock, a small answer to the complaint that European startup equity rarely turns into cash.
(Tech.eu)
Startups & Funding
RobCo passes $1 billion and lets employees sell
Munich's RobCo now carries a valuation above $1 billion, double what it was nine months ago. The deal mixes new money with a secondary sale for long-serving employees; Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective joined Sequoia, Lightspeed and Lingotto.
RobCo rents out robots for machine tending, palletising and welding with no upfront cost. Its CEO Roman Hölzl has moved to the US, its fastest-growing market, and the autonomous robot Alfie launches in Munich on 4 March 2027.
Rivercell raises €22 million to predict how cells respond to drugs
Paris-based Rivercell came out of stealth with a €22 million seed round led by HV, with HCVC, Alven and Bpifrance. It runs its own wet lab, generating time-resolved single-cell data on how cells respond to drugs and genetic edits.
That data trains a model meant to predict the response before anyone runs the experiment. "The missing piece is data," says CEO Yann Fleureau, and the round pays for a bigger wet lab in Paris.
Pandektes raises €13.5 million to compete with LexisNexis and Karnov
Copenhagen's Pandektes closed a €13.5 million Series A led by Munich's Alstin Capital. It collects and structures legislation, court decisions and administrative rulings, a market where a few incumbents have held most countries for decades.
It has over 500 customers in Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, up from about 100 at its seed in February 2025, and revenue grew sixfold in a year. About two in three trial customers pay, and the next step is selling its data to other legal AI builders through an API.
Products & Technology
Namespace raises $42 million seven months after its Series A
Zurich's Namespace raised a $42 million Series B led by Scale Venture Partners. It sells the machines where code gets built and tested, for developers and, increasingly, coding agents.
Founder Hugo Santos spent nearly nine years on Google's infrastructure. The money goes to owning "more of that underlying compute stack", because agents write code faster than standard cloud setups can test it.
MintNeuro sells the chip inside other companies' brain implants
MintNeuro, an Imperial College London spin-out, raised $5 million led by Odyssey Ventures. Its chips sense nerve signals, process them and stimulate in return, so implant makers no longer have to adapt generic parts or design their own silicon.
It has delivered working chips and has a multi-year supply deal with Motif Neurotech, whose implant targets treatment-resistant depression. Amber Therapeutics is also integrating it.
(Tech.eu)
Climate & Energy
VoltR raises €22 million to give used battery cells a second life
VoltR, from Angers, secured €16 million in equity from Bpifrance's SPI fund and Decathlon PULSE, plus €6 million in grants. It tests cells taken from used batteries and rebuilds them into new packs for tools, e-bikes and storage.
More than 20,000 of its batteries are already on the market. CEO Maxime Bleskine plans to multiply capacity by six within two years, adding a step between first use and recycling in a supply chain Europe mostly imports.
Turn2x raises €20 million after its Spanish plant starts selling
Munich's Turn2x closed a €20 million Series A led by Antwerpen Ventures. It makes synthetic methane from green hydrogen and biogenic CO2, in 9 MW units placed directly at biogas sites.
Its plant in Miajadas, Extremadura, has run commercially since 2025, and its whole output is sold on long-term contracts. Turn2x says offtake across its pipeline tops €1 billion.
RED III requires renewable fuels of non-biological origin to make up 42% of industrial hydrogen by 2030.
Research & Deep Tech
Vienna's thorium nucleus now keeps time
Three weeks ago we covered TU Wien and PTB exciting the thorium-229 nucleus with a continuous laser. In this week's Nature, Thorsten Schumm's group closes the loop: a laser locked to the nuclear transition in a room-temperature crystal runs as a clock, compared against an ytterbium ion clock.
It approaches 10⁻¹⁵ instability over a day, which is not yet better than the best atomic clocks. It already sets new limits on how dark matter could couple to the strong force; partners included Austria's metrology office and a Czech institute in Brno.
(Nature)
GSI weighs a bond in element 106
A team at GSI Darmstadt and Mainz, with partners in Prague, Liverpool and Jyväskylä, measured how strongly seaborgium holds carbon monoxide. The bond is 4 kJ/mol weaker than in tungsten, the lighter element above it.
That reverses the trend down the periodic table, as relativistic theory predicted. Chemistry this heavy is usually calculated, and seldom measured.
(Nature)
One to Watch
Poland opens a $125 million fund for its own space companies
Poland launched its first space-tech venture fund on 6 October in Kraków. BGK, the state development bank, backs it, and its investment arm Vinci will put $2.5 million to $25 million each into 15 to 20 companies with revenue already coming in.
ICEYE's co-founder Rafał Modrzewski advises portfolio firms, and the target areas include Earth observation, optics and propulsion. No first investment has been named; watch which of Poland's roughly 400 space companies gets the first ticket, and whether it goes to hardware or data.
(Dealroom)