TravelPerk, Qblox, CuspAI, and Proofs

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: ⌛️ 5 min 30 sec.

SERIES B AND LATER
Barcelona unicorn TravelPerk acquires AmTrav, gets €125 million to accelerate in US market

🇪🇸 TravelPerk, a global business travel management platform founded in 2015, has announced a new funding round of €125 million (in debt) and the acquisition of the industry-leading company AmTrav.

Wow! I would say that it’s not common to see Spanish companies acquiring American companies. This acquisition helps TravelPerk double its revenue in the US.

TravelPerk is one of the greatest examples of successful startups in Spain. They are targeting a market valued at $329 billion in 2023: the business travel market.

The goal of TravelPerk is to become the biggest business travel platform for SMB and mid-tier companies globally. Nice!

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Series B (and later) interesting stories:

🇺🇸 Toronto-based Waabi, founded by a Spaniard, raises €187 million to put 18-wheel robotrucks on the roads.

🇬🇧 EV charging startup Char.gy raises €118.2 million to support the charging infrastructure across the UK.

🇬🇧 Klarna rival Zilch raises €117 million with aim to triple sales and accelerate path to IPO.

🇬🇧 London-based Finbourne Technology raises €65 million Series B to unlock the power of financial data.

🇩🇪 German satellite launch service company Isar Aerospace extends Series C by €65 million.

🇬🇧 PQShield raises €34.6 million Series B for post-quantum cryptography

🇪🇸 Madrid-based Tinybird snaps €28 million to expand real-time data analytics platform.

🇬🇧 London-based THIS raises €23.6 million to lead the meat alternatives revolution in the UK.

SERIES A
Delft-based Qblox secures €24.2 million Series A funding to accelerate quantum control stack development

🇳🇱 Quantum startup Qblox have closed a €24.2 million Series A funding round to further develop its quantum control stack.

According to the funding press release, this company is “currently serving over one hundred customers”, which seems impressive to me since we are talking about something as futuristic as quantum technology.

If I understand it correctly, Qblox is creating an integration layer between industrial applications and quantum computer builders. Interesting!

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Series A interesting stories:

🇺🇸 AI video generation platform for businesses HeyGen raises €56 million in Series A funding.

🇬🇧 London-based SurrealDB secures over €18.6 million aiming to disrupt database technology.

🇫🇷 Paris-based Ramify raises €11 million to become the go-to wealth management platform for a new gen of investors.

🇵🇱 Warsaw-based Quantum Innovations raises €9.4 million to develop cardiac surgery monitoring tech.

🇮🇹 Milan-based Avaneidi secures €8 million Series A to advance storage tech and data security.

🇪🇸 Madrid-based space tech FOSSA Systems snaps €6.3 million for its industrial IoT satellite constellation.

🇪🇪 Tallinn-based Bisly raises €6.2 million to expand its emissions-slashing smart building platform.

🇩🇪 Munich-based StoryBox secures €5.5 million to lead the future of AI-powered B2B video content creation.

SEED
Cambridge-based CuspAI secures €28 million to champion AI-designed materials for climate change

🇬🇧 CuspAI, an AI company building a platform for next-generation materials to tackle global sustainability and clean energy challenges, has secured €28 million in seed funding.

AI, next-gen materials, clean energy... many buzzwords surround this startup. The truth is that this company is leveraging generative AI, deep learning, and molecular simulation to streamline the material design process.

By looking at the founding team, it becomes clear to me that this startup has the potential to become a great company.

I also like that they are targeting a market projected to be worth $4 trillion by 2050: the Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) market.

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Seed interesting stories:

🇬🇧 London-based SAVA raises over €7.4 million to build preventative, personalised, precision health monitoring at scale.

🇩🇪 Hamburg-based Atmio gets €5.1 million to enable natural gas companies to target methane leaks.

🇪🇸 Spanish startup IENAI Space raises €3.9 million for small satellites.

🇳🇱 Amsterdam-based defense tech Avalor AI raises €2 million to enhance military unmanned systems.

PRE-SEED
Warsaw-based Proofs raises €2.4 million to dramatically reduce time to build proof-of-concept apps

🇵🇱 Proofs, which uses AI agents to dramatically accelerate the proof-of-concept phase in software sales, has raised €2.4 million in pre-seed financing.

It took me a little bit of time to understand what this startup is doing… but after getting the overall idea, I honestly think it is targeting a very real problem faced by API-first* companies such as Stripe or SAP.

API-first companies face a slow and expensive process when building proof-of-concept apps for potential customers. They need to build integrations.

If Proofs finds a way to help those companies build integrations faster and cheaper, they will find a very interesting market. 🚀 

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

*If you don’t know what an API-first company is, you can check it out here.

More pre-Seed interesting stories:

🇧🇪 Ghent-based Donna raises €1.5 million to be the AI assistant for sales reps on the go.