Formo, Neat, CardiaTec, and Actionable

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

My name is Onofre, and I'm an entrepreneur living in Aarhus, Denmark. Every week, I dedicate 3 to 4 hours of my free time to reading startup news, which I then summarize in this newsletter.

I hope you enjoy this content. Thank you so much for reading. ✌️ 

Estimated reading time: ⌛️ 6 min 0 sec.

SERIES B AND LATER
Berlin-based Formo raises €55 million in Series B funding to scale its plant-based cheese

🇩🇪 Berlin-based animal-free cheese startup Formo has raised €55 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to €104 million. Nice! 🧀 

Just in case you're wondering, the vegan cheese market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 12.6%, from $2.75 billion in 2022 to $7.1 billion by 2030 (according to GVR). Not bad at all, right?

This startup is creating vegan cheese from Aspergillus oryzae (koji), a fungus traditionally used in Japanese cuisine. They claim that their cream cheese uses 96% less water than regular cream cheese, making it highly environmentally friendly.

If their products taste good enough, I’d say this startup has everything it needs to succeed, as I believe there's a growing trend of consumers steadily transitioning toward more sustainable and animal-free products.

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Series B (and later) interesting stories:

🇬🇧 London-based Form3, a leader in payment technology, has raised a €71.1 million Series C extension.

🇬🇧 Manchester-based MirrorWeb raises €57 million to help firms meet their digital communications archiving needs.

🇬🇧 Cambridge-based PhoreMost raises €39.1 million to rapidly identify how to develop novel drugs.

🇫🇷 French biotech Abolis Biotechnologies raises €35 million to boost microbial ecosystem engineering.

🇫🇷 French clean tech startup Calyxia nets €31.6 million to tackle microplastics pollution.

🇳🇱 Netherlands-based Morphotonics score €10 million Series B for nanoimprint tech.

SERIES A
Paris-based Neat, a startup that helps companies sell insurance products to their customers, secures €49.6 million

🇫🇷 Paris-based insurtech startup Neat, which helps other companies sell insurance products to their customers, has raised €49.6 million (approx. €30M in equity and €20M in debt).

Let’s start by understanding what this startup is doing. Neat specializes in embedded insurance products, allowing partner retailers to offer insurance to their customer base. In return, retailers earn a commission on each product sold without having to manage the complexities of the insurance industry directly.

Neat currently works with 1.500 distribution partners who have collectively sold over 1 million insurance products, making this startup a great example of success in the insurtech space. Nice! 🎩 

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Series A interesting stories:

🇩🇪 Munich-based Reverion raises €56 million for serial production of renewable power plants.

🇩🇪 Düsseldorf-based Retraced secures €15 million Series A to make fashion supply chains more sustainable.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Glasgow-based Solasta Bio raises €12.6 million Series A for green insecticides.

🇬🇧 London-based tem. nabs €12.4 million to make renewable power affordable for UK businesses.

🇨🇿 Prague-based HR startup Sloneek secures €3.6 million for European expansion.

SEED
Cambridge-based CardiaTec raises €5.8 million for computational cardiovascular drug discovery platform

🇬🇧 Cambridge-based CardiaTec, a biotech decoding the biology behind cardiovascular disease, has announced a €5.8 million seed round.

Did you know that cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, killing about 17.9 million people each year and accounting for 32% of all global deaths? It’s brutal.

Despite its huge impact, therapeutic innovation in this area has stagnated, largely due to a limited understanding of the disease’s underlying biology (according to the funding press release).

Precisely, this startup leverages large datasets, known as multi-omics, to identify novel and more targeted therapeutics. They have already partnered with 65 hospitals across the US and the UK, and I believe that is in itself a huge milestone. 🏥 

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Seed interesting stories:

🇩🇪 Berlin-based Ucaneo secures €6.75 million to accelerate development of CO2 removal tech.

🇬🇧 Oxford-based Purple Transform raises €5.3 million for AI rail data analytics.

🇧🇪 Antwerp-based Beebop.ai raises €4.9 million to integrate residential devices into the power systems.

🇨🇭 YCombinator-backed Cerrion raises €4.5 million to boost AI Video tech in manufacturing.

🇸🇪 Stockholm-based Wingbits bags €3.1 million to create flight tracking network that shares revenue with its community.

🇳🇴 Oslo-based Vind AI raises €3 million for wind park design platform.

🇸🇪 Stockholm-based no-code app builder Starhive raises €2.7 million to drive global expansion.

🇳🇱 Amsterdam-based Brineworks secures €2 million to drive down cost of e-Fuel feedstocks.

🇵🇹 Lisbon-based Bling Energy raises €2 million to make solar energy more accessible.

PRE-SEED
Paris-based Actionable raises €2 million to enhance customer satisfaction prediction by leveraging AI

🇫🇷 Paris-based Actionable, a startup specializing in predictive analysis of customer satisfaction, announced a €2 million round just 5 MONTHS after its launch. 🚀 

Let me just say that I love the intersection this startup is focusing on: customer satisfaction and AI. Actionable aims to transform the measurement of customer satisfaction into a continuous, precise, and operational approach, offering companies the ability to predict customer satisfaction on a daily basis.

According to the funding press release, 7 companies from different sectors and sizes have already been attracted by Actionable’s proposal: Miracle, Ouigo, Audience, United Heroes, Ticketac, Rips, and Vibe.co. Good stuff.

What remains unclear to me, however, is whether these companies are already paying for the platform through a license, which would be a huge milestone for the startup since it would indicate early traction.

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More pre-Seed interesting stories:

🇺🇦 Ukraine-founded PLATMA raises €1.8 million for AI-powered no-code platform.

🇩🇪 Berlin-based Key Ward, a no-code SaaS platform for AI integration and complex data management, has emerged from stealth with a €1 million pre-seed.