CorPower Ocean, Tebi, dottxt, and Neuphonic

🚀 Welcome to another edition of the Who Got Funded newsletter.

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I'm Onofre—product manager by day, entrepreneur by night, based in Aarhus, Denmark. Each week, I spend 3-4 hours reading startup news and sharing the key takeaways in this newsletter.

As always, thank you so much for reading!

Estimated reading time: ⌛️ 6 min 45 sec.

SERIES B AND LATER
Stockholm-based CorPower Ocean secures €32 million to drive commercialisation of wave energy

🇸🇪 Stockholm-based CorPower Ocean, a pioneering leader in wave energy technology, has secured €32 million in Series B1 funding.

Founded in 2009, CorPower Ocean has developed a wave energy device capable of surviving difficult storm conditions while generating power efficiently in normal ocean environments.

Earlier this year, the company demonstrated in Aguçadoura, Portugal, that their CorPower C4 device is resilient enough to survive powerful Atlantic storms while producing significant energy relative to its size and cost. I really liked this video, where the company explains how their C4 device works.

The wave energy market was valued at about $75.2 million in 2023 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.3%, reaching approximately $368.2 million by 2032.

It’s a small market for VC investment, as anything below $1 billion is generally seen as too small for VCs to pursue.

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Series B (and later) interesting stories:

🇬🇧 Cambridge-based Nuclera raises €69.1 million Series C for eProtein discovery system.

🇸🇪 Swedish startup Aira raises €63 million to combat fossil fuel dependency in European households.

🇩🇪 Berlin-based Vay gets €34 million in venture debt to launch teledriven car-sharing services.

🇫🇷 Paris-based Stoïk raises €25 million Series B to expand its cyber insurance platform in Europe.

🇩🇪 Munich-based Satellite wildfire detector OroraTech raises €25 million Series B.

SERIES A
Amsterdam-based Tebi, an all-in-one financial operating system for retail and hospitality businesses, secures €20 million

🇳🇱 Amsterdam-based Tebi, an all-in-one financial operating system for retail and hospitality businesses, has secured €20 million in funding.

This startup was co-founded in 2021 by Arnout Schuijff, former Adyen co-founder and CTO, and Rob Vonk, Adyen’s former VP of Technology.

What started as a side project for Schuijff, when he first built a sales app for a bar-owner friend in 2012, has now grown into a business processing over €100 million annually. What a plot twist, right? 🤪 

Tebi's mobile-first platform includes point of sale, payments, inventory management, a kitchen display system, reservations, QR ordering, and bookkeeping. The platform was built on an accounting backbone, providing a single source of truth for users' financial data.

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Series A interesting stories:

🇬🇧 London-based Omnea raises €18.4 million for AI-powered procurement and supplier risk management.

🇬🇧 London-based Autone, which aims to forecast demand, boost sales, and reduce waste and manual tasks, raises €15.7 million.

🇫🇷 Paris-based Gladia raises €14.7 million to launch multilingual real-time audio transcription and analytics engine.

🇮🇸 Reykjavik-based AviLabs raises €8 million to renovate airline passenger disruption management.

SEED
Paris-based dottxt raises €11 million to make LLMs speak the language of every application

🇫🇷 Paris-based dottxt, a platform for interacting with LLMs, announced €11 million in funding after completing pre-seed and seed rounds in just 7 months.

Let me start by stating what the mission of this startup is. According to the funding press release, dottxts’s ultimate mission is to “make AI programmable so its potential meets the reliability demands of real-world systems.” Not very specific, yet understandable.

This startup wants to act as an enabler of AI for every application. By allowing the user to request information with a specific structure, dottxt transforms LLMs into tools that integrate seamlessly with existing digital ecosystems.

This structured generation capability ensures that AI outputs are not just conversational, but also highly functional for business operations, making the data produced by LLMs immediately actionable and reliable.

The code that this startup open-sourced one year ago has received over 3 million downloads, 600,000 of which were in the last month. Very, very nice to see!

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Seed interesting stories:

🇬🇧 Cambridge-based Shift Bioscience raises €15 million to advance AI-driven ageing research.

🇫🇷 French telecom startup Constellation Technologies & Operations raises €9.3 million to offer internet access from space.

🇮🇪 Irish startup Zerve raises €7 million seed to streamline developer data workflows.

🇫🇷 Strasbourg-based Aerleum raises €5.5 million to revolutionize CO₂ Capture and conversion technology.

🇨🇿 Prague-based Sports tech Eyeball.Club secures €5 million seed to streamline youth recruitment.

🇬🇧 London-based Cult Mia expands seed funding to over €4.6 million to accelerate global expansion.

🇬🇧 London-based Diesta gets €3.5 million to transform the way insurance companies process B2B premium payments.

🇫🇷 Paris-based Mendo raises €3.5 million to accelerate adoption of GenAI in companies.

🇬🇧 Manchester-based Concretene secures €3.5 million to roll out carbon-saving construction tech

🇨🇭 Swiss startup Albatross bags €3 million to transform user engagement with AI-driven personalization.

🇫🇮 Finnish startup LOUHE.ai raises €3 million to innovate solutions for cyber-physical security needs.

🇮🇸 Reykjavik-based Moombix raises €2.27 million to scale its online music learning platform.

PRE-SEED
London-based Neuphonic raises €3.5 million to revolutionize Voice AI with an ultrafast text-to-speech solution

🇬🇧 London-based Neuphonic, a startup redefining human-AI communication with the “world’s fastest text-to-speech technology,” has announced that it successfully raised €3.5 million in pre-seed funding.

This startup is targeting the Text-to-Speech (TTS) market, projected to exceed $12 billion by 2031, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.96%.

According to the funding press release, this startup is patenting a very, very cool solution. They’ve developed an algorithm that enables real-time, incremental speech generation with ultra-low latency of just 25 milliseconds, while the nearest competitor has at least 130 milliseconds of latency.

Neuphonic was founded by Jiameng Gao and Sohaib Ahmad, who met at Cambridge University. As multilingual first-generation immigrants, their experiences with language barriers and cultural nuances inspired them to create Neuphonic and enhance text-to-speech technology. A really cool startup that we’ll follow closely!

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More pre-Seed interesting stories:

🇬🇧 Cardiff-based Antiverse secures €4.2 million to advance generative AI antibody design.

🇬🇧 London-based, female-founded app WYA secures €3 million to enhance nightlife safety.

🇫🇷 Paris-based Edgee raises €2.66 million to launch open source edge computing platform.

🇨🇭 Zurich-based sallea raises €2.38 million to enable sustainable, cruelty-free whole cut meat and fish production.

🇩🇪 Berlin-based Nomos raises €1.9 million to empower European businesses and consumers with dynamic electricity plans.

🇮🇹 Milan-based Stema nabs €1.6 million to address Europe’s STEM talent shortage.