Hypersonica, a Munich-area defence startup founded in 2023, raised a €100 million Series B co-led by Lightspeed and General Catalyst. Plural and 201 Ventures, who backed its €23.3 million Series A in February, joined again.
It builds hypersonic deep-strike missiles that fly above five times the speed of sound, and says its approach cuts development cost by more than 80%. The first test flight took place at Andøya in northern Norway, and the company targets deployment in 2029.
The round sits inside the UK-German Deep Precision Strike programme under the Trinity House Agreement, for which the UK has allocated £770 million over four years, according to the company. Governments have started to fund the requirement, and a private company is now taking the delivery risk.
(TNW)
Startups & Funding
Pliant raises $80 million to let AI agents move money
Pliant, a Berlin B2B payments company founded in 2020, raised an $80 million Series C led by Seaya Nova and Speedinvest. It says it has passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
AI agents such as Claude and ChatGPT connect to its cards and payment accounts through the Model Context Protocol, with permissions and audit trails built in.
Seaya Nova's Vinoth Jayakumar puts the case plainly: when agents move money, someone still has to be licensed, auditable and liable. Pliant holds a European e-money licence and issues cards in 13 currencies across 32 countries.
(TNW)
Kabilio raises €10 million to put AI agents in Spanish accounting firms
Kabilio, a Barcelona bookkeeping platform, raised €10 million led by Picus Capital and Visionaries, with CDTI, Spain's public innovation agency, taking part. Its accounting-firm customers grew from about 100 to nearly 500 in a year.
A new agent, in beta this month, collects invoices and bank statements, reconciles accounts and chases missing documents by email or WhatsApp. The accountant sets its permissions client by client and signs off the result.
The company says the software saves accountants about 60% of bookkeeping time.
(TNW)
Granter raises €1.6 million to help Portuguese firms win public funding
Granter, a Portuguese startup, raised €1.6 million led by 3XP Global's Impact Innovation Fund, which draws on a state programme run by Banco Português de Fomento. Deel and Celtis Venture Partners also took part.
Its AI assistant finds public funding calls, drafts the application and manages the funded project. Granter says it has supported more than 140 businesses, with applications worth over €30 million.
It plans to expand to Spain, Germany and Italy. A small firm without a grants consultant now has a cheaper way in.
(Tech.eu)
Gallium Defense raises €7.1 million for a cheaper drone-detection radar
Gallium Defense, founded in Paris in April 2026 by three former BCG colleagues, raised a €7.1 million seed led by Keen Venture Partners and 360 Capital. Its GDS-10 is a software-defined radar built to spot FPV drones up to 10 km away.
It cuts antenna cost more than tenfold by adapting gallium-based amplifier parts from 5G networks. The company has shown detection at 10 km under controlled conditions, and commercial orders open in the first quarter of 2027.
Its plan is to supply the large defence primes rather than compete with them.
(Tech.eu)
Products & Technology
Aformic raises $6.95 million to put its factory robots into data centres
Aformic makes self-driving forklifts and carts that navigate factories without floor markers, run by its Qursor routing software. It spun out of the Polish automation group AIUT and keeps an engineering and production centre in Gliwice, while its headquarters are in South Carolina.
The seed round was led by Veteran Ventures Capital. Aformic reports more than $34 million in orders, with customers including Toyota, Hitachi and 3M.
New robots will target construction and maintenance work in AI data centres, where builders cite a shortage of skilled labour.
(TNW)
Tumbleweed raises €6.9 million to sell microgravity as a routine service
Tumbleweed, a spacetech company working across Vienna and Delft, closed the largest spacetech seed round in Austria, led by PactVC. It sells pre-certified laboratory Pods that fly on its Oasis orbital platform.
Its first mission, Oasis Alpha, launched on SpaceX Transporter-17 on 7 July with experiments from four first-time space customers. The company says customers with no space experience ran experiments in three to four months for around €30,000.
Three missions are planned for 2027, and Oasis Beta, with re-entry, for 2028.
(Tech.eu)
Climate & Energy
Microsoft drops a lease at Nscale's Essex site because the power arrives after 2030
Microsoft cancelled a deal to lease compute at Nscale's data centre in Essex, the UK's largest planned AI site. The reason given is that the site is unlikely to have grid power until after 2030.
Aker, which owns about 23% of Nscale after investing about $350 million in March, calls it a minor contract in a larger portfolio. Nscale, which closed a $3.36 billion pre-IPO round in October, still targets a New York listing at $35 billion.
Money was not the constraint here. Grid connection was, and it will shape which sites Nscale and its rivals can sell.
(Tech.eu)
Research & Deep Tech
Quint Computing raises €9.1 million for a quantum chip that prevents errors in hardware
Quint Computing, a German spin-out from FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg founded in October 2025, raised €9.1 million led by Vsquared, on top of a €2.2 million EIC Pathfinder grant. It belongs to the Munich Quantum Valley ecosystem.
Its patented superconducting processor design aims to stop a large share of errors at the hardware level, instead of adding correction layers on top. The company claims that, once fully implemented, this could reduce complexity and energy use by a factor of 100.
That is a claim, and the chip has yet to prove it.
(Tech.eu)
Vitroscope raises $7 million to keep human tissue alive under flow
Vitroscope raised $5 million in seed funding co-led by Cerberus Ventures and YZR Capital, plus $2 million from the Research Council of Norway. Its benchtop vitro.alive platform controls oxygen, pH and temperature, and runs six parallel experiments.
With Instant Bio, it held vascularised human brain organoids under perfusion for seven days. The aim is time-resolved data from living tissue for drug discovery, instead of single snapshots.
A 96-experiment version, vitro.scale, is planned for 2028.
(Tech.eu)
Apolarion takes CHF 150,000 to disinfect seeds with plasma
Apolarion, an EPFL spin-off, received CHF 150,000 (about €164,000) from Venture Kick. Its modular device uses cold atmospheric plasma, made from air and electricity, to neutralise pathogens on seeds while preserving germination.
It is a chemical-free alternative to coatings and heat treatment. The company has published no performance numbers yet, and first field trials are the next step.
(Tech.eu)
One to Watch
1nhaler's cardboard inhaler heads to a clinical trial
1nhaler, a Scottish startup, raised £2.2 million led by Archangels, with Scottish Enterprise and BBB Investments. Its single-dose dry powder inhaler is made mainly of cardboard, is the size of a credit card and unfolds into three dimensions.
The money pays for contract manufacturing of trial material, a small clinical trial and a manufacturing study with Harro Höfliger. Co-founder and CEO Lisa McMyn is working towards a regulatory filing in late 2027 for the lead product, salbutamol for asthma.
(Tech.eu)