Who Got Funded? Week 20, 2024

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

My name is Onofre, and I'm an entrepreneur living in Aarhus, Denmark. Each 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: ⌛️ 4 min 20 sec.

SERIES B AND LATER
Frontend cloud leader Vercel announced €229 million round to accelerate AI and security innovation

🇺🇸 San Francisco-based Vercel, a platform provider for building cloud-based web applications, announced that it has secured €229 million Series E at a valuation of €3 billion.

The company plans to use the funds to develop a generative AI tool to create user interfaces from text descriptions. Not a bad intersection to explore, right?

Vercel's platform is used by over 1 million developers monthly and has recently surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue. Nice growth!

You can read more about this deal here.

More Series B (and later) interesting stories:

🇺🇸 Restaurant365 raises €160 million at over $1 billion valuation to supersize its food service software stack.

🇺🇸 Kyle Vogt, former CEO of Cruise, announced his new VC-backed robotics startup, The Bot Company, which has raised €137.6 million.

🇺🇸 AI data platform Weka achieves unicorn status with €128.5 million Series E at €1.47 billion valuation.

🇬🇧 PolyAI raises €46 million to further optmise its conversational AI for unbeatable customer service automation.

SERIES A
Aachen-based Cylib raised €55 million to scale its next-gen lithium-ion battery recycling tech

🇩🇪 Two-year-old Cylib, a sustainable battery recycler, raised €55 million, the largest funding for a European battery recycler.

Huge milestone for this startup. And I completely understand the need for companies like Cylib. As a society, we don’t want to be dependent on scarce mineral resources like lithium. We need companies that can recycle batteries at scale and in a very efficient way, and we need them now!

You can read more about this deal here.

More Series A interesting stories:

🇩🇪 Karlsruhe-based Codesphere raises €16.5 million to reduce infrastructure costs in DevOps.

🇬🇷 Greek maritime software Harbor Lab raises €14.7 million to streamline port cost management.

🇫🇷 Toulouse-based space tech Infinite Orbits bags €12 million to build first life extension satellite.

🇩🇪 Berlin-based Caeli Wind snaps €11 million to expand its digital platform for wind energy sites.

🇬🇧 London-based Purple Dot raises €9.2 million to allow brands to take control of their sales timelines.

🇬🇧 London-based Tiney raises €8.3 million to reverse the decline in childminder numbers.

SEED
Edinburgh-based Malted AI closed €6.9 million to tackle the error rates and computing costs associated with LLMs

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scottish startup Malted AI has secured €6.9 million to enable enterprises to deploy small language models (SLMs) that solve domain-specific problems with 10-100x cost savings.

I find this startup's approach to the AI market very interesting. They envision a future where enterprises use their product to transform less efficient LLMs into more specific SLMs that solve very concrete problems. They are taking an intriguing approach to the market, so we'll keep an eye on this startup!

You can read more about this deal here.

More Seed interesting stories:

🇩🇪 Berlin-based cleantech Trawa raises €10 million to cut SME energy costs and emissions.

🇫🇷 French biotech HEPHAISTOS-Pharma gets €4.5 million to develop next-gen of immunostimulants against cancer.

🇫🇷 Paris-based Tulyp raises €1.5 million aiming to revolutionise digital trade finance for SMEs.

PRE-SEED
Berlin-based agtech Hexafarms secured €1.3 million for AI-optimised commercial food production

🇩🇪 Hexafarms, an agtech company leveraging AI to optimize greenhouses for the future of food production, has secured €1.3 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Austria-based VC Speedinvest.

This startup seems interesting to me because it uses AI in an unconventional way: optimizing greenhouse and vertical farm operations, reducing resource losses by 30%, and forecasting crop yields with 95% accuracy.

You can read more about this deal here.

More pre-Seed interesting stories:

🇺🇸 Massachusetts-based Active Surfaces, a flexible solar panel startup spun out from MIT, raised €5.14 million in pre-seed funding.