Machenta, a London robotics startup, came out of stealth with a $40 million seed round co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures. It is the largest seed round for a UK robotics company to date.
Edward Johns, a professor of robot learning at Imperial College London, founded it with his PhD student Vitalis Vosylius. The work started in Johns' lab six years ago.
Most robot-learning systems need many demonstrations, often collected with real hardware, before a robot can do a new job. Machenta trained its model entirely in computer-generated environments, with no real-world data, and says a robot can then pack, assemble or tidy after watching a task once.
The claim still has to hold up on factory floors. If it does, the costly part of deploying robots, collecting demonstrations for every new task, shrinks to a single example.
(Tech.eu)
Startups & Funding
Nevis raises $70 million from EQT Ventures, Schwab and Storonsky's fund
Nevis, a New York company founded in late 2024 by three former Revolut executives, raised a $70 million Series B led by EQT Ventures. Charles Schwab and QuantumLight, the fund of Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky, joined, and Sequoia, ICONIQ and Ribbit put in more.
It uses AI to automate the back-office work of financial advisers. The company says revenue grew more than 25 times this year and that assets on the platform rose from $50 billion to $700 billion.
Total funding is now $110 million, and a large incumbent in wealth management is now on the cap table.
(TNW)
Phononic Vibes raises €25 million to make noise barriers lighter
Phononic Vibes, a 2018 spin-off from Politecnico di Milano, raised €25 million led by Jolt Capital, its fund's first investment in Italy. Eureka! Venture, CDP Venture Capital and Simest joined, and 360 Capital sold the stake it held since the seed round.
Conventional noise barriers follow the mass law: more silence takes more material. Phononic Vibes designs acoustic metamaterials whose shape does that work, and its products weigh up to 30% less for the same performance.
Deutsche Bahn certified its transparent barrier for the German rail network, and Mercedes-Benz uses its parts. It manufactures in Italy and now leads a group of older European makers, including Matis, founded in 1979.
Arctic RAVN fills a €2 million loan in five days, before its first launch
Arctic RAVN, an Espoo drone-electronics maker set up in 2025 inside the venture studio Finnish Defence House, raised €2.5 million in convertible loan commitments. It had aimed for €2 million and has not yet launched a product officially.
It makes speed controllers, flight controllers, motors and frames, assembled in Finland from European and NATO-sourced parts. Western militaries still depend heavily on Chinese-origin drone parts.
The company says it has spent over €1 million scaling speed-controller production and aims to make tens of thousands of units before the end of 2026, much of it already reserved by unnamed European defence firms.
Products & Technology
Helsing moves into air defence with Contra and two interceptors
Helsing, the Munich defence AI company, unveiled Contra, software that links existing radars and launchers to track and engage what it says are hundreds or thousands of drones and missiles at once. It also showed two container-launched interceptors: the jet-powered AD-1 Inferno, which can loiter and re-engage, and the rocket-powered AD-2 Ambush, rated at Mach 2.5 over 20 km.
The problem it targets is cost. Air defences now fire missiles worth millions of euros at drones worth a few thousand.
Helsing gave no prices, saying only that it will "significantly" undercut existing interceptors, built on two separate European supply chains. Anduril, Lockheed Martin and CHAOS Industries have also shown cheaper interceptors recently.
Volare opens a 5,000-tonne insect protein plant in a former print hall
Volare, a 2021 spin-off from Finland's VTT research centre, opened Volare 01 in Pori. The plant can make 5,000 tonnes of insect protein and 2,000 tonnes of oil a year from food-industry side streams fed to black soldier fly larvae.
It came in on schedule and inside its €15 million budget, partly because it sits in a former newspaper printing hall. It runs with four people per shift.
European insect farming has been through a shakeout. Volare has sold much of its capacity in advance, to the fish-feed maker Skretting and an unnamed chemicals group, and raised €7.1 million through Springvest to plan a second plant about five times larger.
Climate & Energy
Thirty organisations ask Brussels for €1 billion to drill for natural hydrogen
Natural hydrogen forms underground through geological reactions and could be a primary energy source, if enough of it can be found and extracted. So far most finds have been accidental.
Mantle8, a Grenoble company backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures that uses subsurface data to predict where hydrogen accumulates, organised an open letter signed by more than 30 organisations. It was handed to Commission officials at European Hydrogen Week on 28 October.
The letter asks for a €1 billion programme to drill about 50 exploration wells in at least 10 member states, plus clear rules on permits and access to geological data. Explorers today face uncertainty over its regulatory status.
(Tech.eu)
Research & Deep Tech
Berlin and Bonn chemists turn silicone back into its monomer
Silicone resists heat and chemicals, which is why it is used everywhere and why almost none of it is recycled. Most ends up in landfill or incinerators, and chemical recycling mostly yields cyclic siloxanes rather than the original building block.
A Technische Universität Berlin team, with theorists at the University of Bonn, used a silylium ion to start a reaction in which phosgene-type reagents cut the silicon-oxygen bonds under mild conditions. The process returns dichlorosilane, the monomer industry uses to make new silicone, and worked on commercial oils and elastomers.
Phosgene is toxic, so scale-up will need careful plant design. The chemistry for a closed silicone loop now exists.
(Nature)
Ulm makes a single molecule talk to light as a qubit
Quantum networks need qubits that hold a spin state and pass it to photons. Defects in diamond do this well, but they are hard to produce identically.
Researchers at Ulm University, with the local startup NVision Quantum Technologies, embedded a carbene molecule in a matched host crystal and addressed single molecules optically. The molecules emitted stable light for over an hour and kept spin coherence for milliseconds at 4.5 kelvin.
Every copy of a synthesised molecule is the same, which diamond defects are not. That makes chemistry a credible route to quantum network hardware.
(Nature)
One to Watch
Whether natural hydrogen makes it into the new EU Hydrogen Strategy
The Commission opened a four-week consultation on its new Hydrogen Strategy on 26 October, running in parallel with the renewable energy framework to 2040. Responses close on 23 November.
The call for evidence mentions natural hydrogen, but only as a research topic. Watch whether the final text gives it legal recognition and exploration money, as Mantle8's coalition asked, or leaves it as a research line while the US and Australia start drilling.