Hawk, NexGen Cloud, pyannoteAI, and Dosen

🚀 Welcome to the 9th edition of the Who Got Funded newsletter in 2025.

I'm Onofre, an entrepreneur based in Aarhus (Denmark), and as you know, I dedicate 3–4 hours each week to exploring European startup funding stories and summarizing the most exciting ones for you, so you can save some of your valuable time.

Thank you so much for reading.

Estimated reading time: ⌛️ 7 min 45 sec.

(If you could share this newsletter with your friends, it would mean the 🌍️ to me).

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SERIES B AND LATER
Munich-based Hawk raises €51.8 million to improve fraud detection for banks by using AI

🇩🇪 Munich-based Hawk, a startup using AI to help banks detect financial crime more accurately and with less manual work, has successfully raised €51.8 million.

‘The results (of leveraging AI) are compelling—we’ve been able to increase alert prediction accuracy to almost 90% in some cases, while reducing false positives by 50%. We’re also uncovering twice as many previously undetected cases of ‘novel’ criminal activity,’ said Tobias Schweiger, CEO of Hawk.

Founded in 2018, Hawk uses traditional rules combined with explainable AI (an AI that explains its decision-making process) to tackle legacy system challenges—reducing overwhelming false positives and boosting detection accuracy. Today, Hawk serves over 80 customers worldwide, including some Tier 1 banks.

👉️ Read more here.

+ Series B (and later) funding stories:

🇩🇪 Berlin-based Enpal, a startup helping households switch to green energy, has raised €110 million.

🇪🇸 Madrid-based Jobandtalent, a platform that connects companies with temporary workers, has raised €92 million.

🇹🇷 Istanbul-based Sipay, a fintech offering an all-in-one platform for digital wallets, payments, and financial services, has raised €68.6 million.

🇫🇷 Paris-based Pennylane, an all-in-one financial platform for small businesses and accountants, has raised €66 million.

🇫🇷 Rennes-based Sekoia.io, a cybersecurity startup using AI to help companies detect and respond to online threats faster, has raised €26 million.

🇩🇪 Aachen-based Clinomic, a startup making hospital intensive care smarter with an AI assistant called Mona, has raised €23 million.

🇬🇧 London-based TransFICC, a startup helping banks trade bonds and other financial products faster and more efficiently, has raised €22.5 million.

🇬🇧 London-based Untamed, a cat food startup using high-quality, human-grade ingredients, has raised €11.6 million.

SERIES A
London-based NexGen Cloud raises €41 million to expand sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe

🇬🇧 London-based NexGen Cloud, a company building powerful cloud infrastructure for AI applications, has successfully raised €41 million in a Series A funding round.

If you read this newsletter often, you know we've seen companies like this before. AI is exploding, which means there's a huge demand for solid underlying infrastructure.

Since the launch of Hyperstack, its flagship platform, in 2023, this scale-up has reportedly achieved total revenue of €83.9 million for 2023 and 2024, with revenue from AI cloud operations growing by 380%. The platform has also seen a 2272% year-on-year increase in transactions. Not bad, huh?

NexGen Cloud became an early mover in the GPU cloud space by developing its own Application Programming Interface (API) to enable channel partners to deliver enterprise-grade AI compute through Hyperstack. It was a very simple, yet powerful, business idea.

👉️ Read more here.

+ Series A funding stories:

🇬🇧 Shrewsbury-based Different Dog, a fresh dog food subscription service using hand-cooked, human-grade meals, has raised €11.7 million.

🇫🇷 Paris-based Klara, a startup helping companies train and upskill frontline workers, has raised €10 million.

🇫🇷 Paris-based Qevlar AI, a startup using autonomous AI to help cybersecurity teams detect and respond to threats faster, has raised €9 million.

🇫🇷 Paris-based Faume, a platform helping fashion brands sell second-hand clothes under their own labels, has raised €8 million.

🇬🇧 London-based Ryft, a startup helping businesses handle complex payments more easily and affordably, has raised €6.6 million.

SEED
Paris-based pyannoteAI raises €8 million to ensure that AI not only recognises words but also understand who is speaking

🇫🇷 Paris-based pyannoteAI, a startup helping AI understand not just what’s said but who is speaking, has successfully raised €8 million in seed funding.

This startup has created a speaker intelligence platform that distinguishes speakers with reportedly unmatched precision, regardless of the spoken language. If true, that would be huge.

Understanding voice beyond words remains a major technical challenge due to the inherent complexity of spontaneous speech — which is messy and full of interruptions, hesitations, and false starts — as well as the vast amount of information conveyed by voice beyond just the words themselves.

It's great to see a European startup taking the lead in this vertical! 🇪🇺 

👉️ Read more here.

+ Seed funding stories:

🇵🇱 Warsaw-based Ingenix, which uses AI to simulate clinical drug trials and speed up drug development, has raised €9 million.

🇩🇪 Berlin-based Miss Moneypenny Technologies, the startup turning digital wallets into powerful tools for customer engagement, has raised €7.3 million.

🇩🇪 Berlin-based REMATIQ, an AI-native platform for automated product compliance in MedTech, has raised €5.4 million.

🇬🇧 London-based Treble Peak, a platform making private equity investments more accessible, has raised €5.8 million.

🇬🇧 London-based Dealstack, which helps private equity firms automate time-consuming tasks like tracking ownership and contracts, has raised €4.8 million.

🇩🇪 Berlin-based FaradaIC Sensors, which makes tiny chips to detect gases like oxygen and carbon monoxide, has raised €4.5 million.

🇸🇪 Stockholm-based Starhive, which uses AI to help companies manage their IT equipment more efficiently, has raised €4.4 million.

🇩🇪 Berlin-based Unosecur, a cybersecurity startup tackling identity threats with AI, has raised €4.4 million.

🇮🇹 Milan-based Medicud, a medtech startup focused on surgical recovery, has raised €1.3 million.

PRE-SEED
Dublin-based Dosen raises €2 million to tackle ‘quiet quitting’ thorugh better career pathways

🇮🇪 Dublin-based Dosen, a platform using AI to boost employee engagement and fight ‘quiet quitting,’ has successfully raised a €2 million pre-seed round.

Who hasn’t felt demotivated at work at some point in their career? I’d say the vast majority of us have.

According to the press release, the cost of underperformance in the workplace is substantial, with U.S. businesses losing an estimated $500 billion annually due to disengaged employees. Not a bad TAM, huh?

In my opinion, what this startup is doing is smart: they blend company data—like goals, roles, and structure—with employee inputs such as values, skills, and ambitions. The result? Tailored learning journeys that align personal growth with business objectives, boosting performance and productivity.

👉️ Read more here.

+ Pre-Seed funding stories:

🇬🇧 London-based Damisa, a fintech startup simplifying international payments with stablecoins and smart wallets, has raised €2.6 million.

🇮🇸 Reykjavík-based Optise, a startup using AI to help B2B companies improve their websites and boost sales, has raised €1.9 million.

🇬🇧 London-based Sagittal AI, which built an AI assistant that works like a team member to help developers with tasks, has raised €1.9 million.

🇬🇧 London-based Nettle, which uses AI to speed up insurance risk assessments, has raised €1.7 million.