Funding
There is just one week left for founders to submit their applications to be considered for Bits & Pretzels European Pitch Contest where they can put their business in the spotlight in front of 1,500 potential investors from across Europe at the annual Bits & Pretzels festival that takes place in Munich in September.
Zama, the open-source cryptography company building Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for Blockchain, announced a $57 million Series B funding round co-led by two US-based investment firms Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, bringing Zama’s total funding to over $150 million, and its valuation to north of a billion USD.
OutSee, a genomics and drug discovery company pioneering a unique AI-based predictive genomics approach to target discovery, announced it has secured £1.8 million in seed funding, led by Ahren Innovation Capital and with additional investment from Kadmos Capital, Empirical Ventures, and Panacea Ventures.
Tadaweb has secured $20 million to scale its Small Data Operating System for publicly available information (PAI) and open-source intelligence (OSINT). The software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform is used by defence, national security, public safety, cyber threat intelligence, and corporate security organisations across Europe and the US to boost the efficiency of analysts and investigators by reducing time to insight from days to minutes.
Renow, the Nordic startup modernising how returned and second-hand goods are handled and resold, has raised €1.8 million in seed funding to expand its AI-powered recommerce platform across Northern Europe, opening new hubs in Sweden and Norway, and aiming to launch in the Danish and Beneluxian markets.
The landscape for growth-stage fundraising has fundamentally changed. Today’s Series C and D rounds, typically involving raises of $50–100 million or more, are significantly tougher than in recent years. Investors have become more selective, valuations more restrained, and expectations for business performance far more rigorous.













