African-Startups.com has been created to be more than just another startup news website. It is positioned as a curated intelligence layer for Africa’s startup ecosystem. Alongside major developments, funding announcements, and ecosystem updates, the platform will focus on practical insights, case studies, founder journeys, structured market intelligence, investor profiles, venture capital landscape reports, policy and regulatory developments, cross-border collaborations, and flagship events.

Africa’s startup landscape is vibrant, fast-moving, and shaped by diverse regulatory frameworks, currencies, and geopolitical dynamics. Therefore, African-Startups approaches its coverage with an understanding of local context, regional differences, and the unique constraints and opportunities that shape entrepreneurship across Africa, rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all framework.

Although Africa’s startup ecosystem is attracting increasing regional and international attention, many startups, founders, ecosystem builders, and innovations emerging across the continent still do not receive the visibility they deserve. 

According to Partech, African tech startups raised €3.4 billion ($4.1 billion) across 570 transactions in 2025, including €2 billion ($2.4 billion) in equity funding across 462 deals. By contrast, in Europe, PitchBook recorded €66.2 billion ($77.9 billion) in venture deal value across 10,206 deals over the same period.

African-Startups aims to bridge this gap by highlighting how African startups continue to adapt, build, and scale with remarkable resilience. Founders across the continent are developing practical solutions to real-world challenges while navigating fragmented operating environments, varying regulations, funding gaps, and infrastructure constraints. Through its coverage, the platform aims to spotlight this innovative spirit and ensure the world takes notice.

“MeOut Group has always believed that great innovation ecosystems are built on connection between founders and capital, between local ambition and global opportunity. We have spent over a decade doing exactly that across more than 150 countries, and through the Global Startup Awards we have already been deeply embedded in Africa’s entrepreneurial landscape. We have seen first-hand how the right infrastructure can transform a fragmented landscape into a thriving ecosystem.

“Africa has all the ingredients for a generational leap in tech and entrepreneurship, and African-Startups.com is our long-term commitment to making those connections happen at scale” says Attila Sándor, Founder, Chairman and CEO of MeOut Group.

By launching at the EU-Startups Summit, one of Europe’s premier tech and startup events that brings together nearly 2400 founders, investors, startup enthusiasts, corporates, thought leaders and media from across Europe, the platform also reflects the growing synergy between the African and European startup ecosystems.

African-Startups.com aims to help bridge these two vibrant innovation landscapes and to serve as a platform where entrepreneurs, investors, and ecosystem builders from both continents can foster partnerships, investment opportunities, market access, and shared learning.

Looking ahead, African-Startups.com also plans to launch its very own flagship event, the African-Startups Summit, in 2027. Inspired by the EU-Startups Summit, the event is expected to bring together founders, investors, operators, and ecosystem builders from across the continent and beyond.

The annual event will feature keynote sessions from leading African founders, thought leaders and ecosystem stakeholders, fireside chats, and panel discussions focused on opportunities, challenges, and the future of innovation across African markets.

The highlight of the summit would be the startup pitch competition, where some of the most promising African early-stage startups will pitch in front of the audience and a jury of well-known investors.

“When I started EU-Startups in 2010, Europe was still highly fragmented when it came to startup and innovation coverage. That was one of the key reasons why I founded EU-Startups: to help bridge that fragmentation and shape a stronger, shared European innovation narrative across the continent and globally.

“Today, I believe some of the most important lessons in innovation are emerging from African markets, where entrepreneurs are building practical solutions to regional and global challenges. That is why we have teamed up with MeOut Group to launch African-Startups.com. Our goal is to do the same for Africa’s startup ecosystem, but in a way that reflects the continent’s diversity, challenges, and potential.

“Alongside daily news coverage, the platform will also report on investor profiles, the VC landscape, and the innovation shaping Africa’s startup ecosystem. We are also planning to launch the African-Startups Summit next year,” adds Thomas Ohr, Founder and CEO of EU-Startups.

The launch also aligns with MeOut Group’s broader vision to help shape a truly global innovation ecosystem by supporting entrepreneurship, innovation, and meaningful cross-continental connections. African-Startups.com extends the group’s media footprint into Africa and complements its existing platforms, initiatives, and communities focused on startups and innovation.

One such platform is the Global Startup Awards (GSA), the world’s largest independent startup ecosystem competition, bringing together innovators, investors, and changemakers from more than 154 countries. Each year, the GSA Global Grand Finale gathers over 1,100 participants from more than 100 nationalities, including venture capital firms, investors, diplomats, and representatives from over 1,000 organisations.

This year, Global Grand Finale Edition 11 was held in Valletta, Malta, alongside the EU-Startups Summit, bringing global startup talent and European opportunity together in one place.

The Global Startup Awards expanded its footprint in 2021 with the launch of the African Startup Awards, the first continent-wide tech innovation programme of its kind. It scouts for startups across all 55 African countries, with a mission to find, fund, and grow the future shapers of the digital age from across Africa.

Together, these platforms already play an important role in recognising and connecting entrepreneurial talent across regions. African-Startups.com strengthens that mission by adding a dedicated editorial and storytelling layer focused on Africa’s founders, ventures, and innovation communities.

Rahul Raj, a seasoned technology journalist, leads the editorial direction at African-Startups.com. He has more than a decade of experience covering startups, venture capital, and innovation ecosystems. As Editor-in-Chief, he will lead the platform’s editorial vision, focusing on credible journalism, ecosystem insight, and greater visibility for Africa’s founders and innovators.

Backed by MeOut Group and drawing on EU-Startups’ more than 15 years of experience in innovation and entrepreneurship across Europe, African-Startups.com aims to inform, connect, and elevate one of the world’s most important innovation frontiers.

The post African-Startups.com launches as sister publication of EU-Startups for Africa’s startup ecosystem appeared first on EU-Startups.

The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Visionaries Club and new investors Stéphane Kurgan (former COO of King) and Andrey Khusid (founder of Miro). The investment brings Adfin’s total funding to more than €25.5 million ($30 million) in less than two years.

Tom Pope, Adfin co-founder and CEO, said, “Adfin is building the agentic finance platform for money movement: automating the workflows finance teams use to get paid, manage their money, and, in time, much more. And we’re doing it the way our customers keep telling us they want: safe, auditable, trackable, with humans firmly in control. By owning both the underlying financial infrastructure and the agentic workflows on top, we’ll let finance teams deploy agents in a way nobody else can.

“Why does this matter? If you’re getting paid faster and optimising how you manage cash, you’re building a better business. Money movement isn’t admin, it’s the bloodstream of every company. We believe this so strongly that we’ve rewritten our mission around it: Adfin exists to help the world build better businesses.”

Founded in 2024 by Pope and Ciprian Diaconasu, Adfin claims to be the first platform designed from the ground up for the specific demands of invoice payments. It enables businesses to get paid faster and at lower cost, across all payment methods and communication channels. 

According to the company, in the UK alone, almost two-thirds (63%) of invoices sent by SMEs are paid late. This strains working capital, slows growth, and puts jobs at risk. 

Adfin claims to give SMEs the tools to get paid on time. It combines proprietary new payment infrastructure with agentic AI to decide the best course of action for each client and automate the tedious tasks that were preventing businesses from doing what they do best: managing client relationships. 

The company reports that this infrastructure has already achieved “outstanding” results for Adfin customers. Currently, only 9% of their invoices are paid late, which is nearly seven times better than the 63% rate for the UK overall, says Adfin. It currently serves over 1,500 businesses across the UK, including accounting and law firms, as well as growing companies in professional services, trades, and care.

Julia André, Partner at Index Ventures, said, “Index backs founders who have the rare ability to obsess over a problem and build category-defining businesses. We see that same pattern in Tom and Ciprian. We backed them at pre-seed and seed, and we’re tripling down, because their results speak for themselves.”

With this funding, Adfin plans to expand the Adfin product into end-to-end cashflow management, step up hiring across engineering and sales, and prepare for international expansion.

The post Index Ventures backed-Adfin raises €15.3 million to help businesses automate revenue collection with AI appeared first on EU-Startups.

The round was led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks, N49P, and other leading funds. 

“The best product founders are overly technical and bold. They build products that let users express themselves in the ways they actually want to work. They design without constraints and push the limits of what is possible today so they will be first tomorrow. We are proud to partner with Gabriella and Nim in their mission to reinvent product building,” said Pietro Bezza, Managing Partner at Connect Ventures.

Founded in 2024 by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, Dessn is an AI design-in-production platform that lets product teams design, prototype, and explore directly inside their real codebase. 

“Every other AI design tool tries to recreate product. Dessn brings users into the real thing – your actual app, your actual components, your actual design system – and lets designers and product managers (PMs) prototype directly on top of it. Together, with zero technical setup,” mentioned the company in the press release. 

The company states that the main challenges for product teams arise because designers and PMs focus on mocks, docs, and screenshots, while developers work in code, and users experience the product in production. The gap is where most product teams lose time, fidelity, and good ideas, notes Dessn. 

According to the company, historically, the only way to access production was to know how to code, set up a local environment, and interact with the product through a developer’s interface. Dessn claims to flip the model. Instead of starting in a design tool and trying to translate back into code, Dessn starts from the codebase and builds a design environment around it. 

Designers and PMs create prototypes directly using their company’s actual components, design system, and production context, without needing to open an IDE or run any code locally. Dessn calls this “the localhost problem“, and solving it is what separates the product from MCP-style integrations or “upload your design system theme” workarounds, says the UK startup. 

Explaining the security features, Dessn stated that it is SOC2 Type II certified. The company states that each project runs in its own isolated microVM and is not trained on. It never writes, modifies, or pushes code back to the user’s repo. It only requires read-only access to the user’s codebase. When users connect to a repository, Dessn’s control plane requests only the scoped access that the users approve (read-only).

The company states that, today, teams at Color, Wispr, Mercury, and others utilise Dessn to prototype directly in production, with some users dedicating over five hours daily to the product.

Talking about what comes next, Hachem said, “LLMs are non-deterministic: the same input can produce many different, valid outputs. That means your product isn’t a single fixed thing. It’s a space of possibilities. Once Dessn can render your components and design system, every possible version of your product already exists in the model. The job becomes to explore it, which is the most fun part of building.”

The post London’s Dessn raises €5 million to help product teams design and prototype inside real codebases appeared first on EU-Startups.

“No patient should have to guess what was just said. We are fundamentally turning the thinking in healthcare around: starting not with the institution, but with the patient. Our ambition is for all Europeans to better understand their care journey at the most vulnerable moments in life. It should be as easy as opening Google Maps today, where you once struggled with a paper map held upside down on your lap,” said Tobias Polak, co-founder, Ditto. 

Founded in 2024 by Tobias Polak, Bart Voorn, and Merlijn van Breugel, Ditto helps patients and their families make sense of what was said in a medical consultation. The app has been available free of charge since the summer of 2025 via ditto.care, the App Store and Google Play.

The company states that conversations with doctors are often brief, and when difficult news is delivered, part of the brain shuts down. This results in uncertainty with patients being unable to explain what happened at home, and family members unsure of how to assist.

Ditto claims to be the first app to address this problem from the patient’s perspective using AI. The company states that with the Ditto app, patients gain greater control, clarity and a better grasp of their care journey, while healthcare professionals spend less time on repetition and follow-up questions.

The patient records the consultation using the Ditto app or takes a photo of a letter from their doctor. Within minutes, a clear summary is generated, which can be translated into simple English, Turkish or Arabic if required. The summary can be reviewed at the patient’s convenience and securely shared with family, without any central data storage.

Explaining the privacy and data security features the company offers, Ditto says that it has a privacy-by-design approach to how it handles data. It claims that it can never read or access what the user does or stores in the app, and that the app is protected by biometric login or passcode.

“Your health information never leaves your phone unless you choose to share it or get an AI summary. After processing, we delete all data on our side, such that only the summary on your device remains. We don’t store medical data on our servers,” mentioned the company. 

Ditto also states that it never trains on the user data and uses EU infrastructure only. The audio is transcribed in the Netherlands by NEN-certified Juvoly, and AI summaries are generated on EU-based Azure servers. The company is GDPR and AVG compliant in its handling of personal data.

Dr Lucas Mittelmeier of Heal Capital said, “Hundreds of startups build AI that help doctors document and manage their work. Ditto builds the equivalent for patients, and its traction proves they have hit a nerve. We believe this will become the European platform for how people navigate their care.”

With this fresh capital, the company plans to invest in European expansion and new features to support patients and those around them: from the right questions to ask before a consultation to a visual care journey that guides both patient and family.

The company reported that nearly one hundred thousand people have downloaded the app since its launch last summer. The Dutch Patients’ Federation has adopted the initiative, and Menzis, a health insurer, is the first to recommend Ditto to all its policyholders, it states. Recently, Ditto also won the 2026 Dutch National Healthcare Innovation Award, an initiative by Zorginnovatie.nl and sponsored by ING.

The post Rotterdam’s Ditto raises €7.6 million to make “what did the doctor say?” easier to answer appeared first on EU-Startups.

The round was led by Syndicate One, with participation from Aikido founders Roeland Delrue and Willem Delbare, Showpad co-founder Louis Jonckheere, and serial entrepreneur Thomas Van Overbeke. The funds NewSchool, RDY, and 100IN also participated.

“Code today is written faster than ever, often with the help of AI. But whether the product actually works the way users expect is a different story. Holmes covers that exact gap: not whether the code is right, but whether the product holds up in real use,” says Robin Praet, co-founder of Holmes.

Holmes was founded by three Belgian tech entrepreneurs with successful exit experience: Robin Praet, Robbrecht Delrue and Sofie Buyse. Praet and Delrue were co-founders of Smartendr, an ordering solution for the hospitality industry, which OrderBilly acquired in September 2025. Buyse was Henchman’s first hire, an AI tool for legal professionals, which LexisNexis acquired for €136.1 million ($160 million) in June 2024.

Holmes is an autonomous quality assurance (QA) platform that learns how people use a product, tests those flows continuously, and runs inside the tools development teams already use. The company is built for teams shipping at AI speed, and claims that it catches problems before they reach users.

“No software company builds a large QA team from day one. But every company eventually reaches the moment when manual testing starts holding back their growth. That’s the moment we built Holmes for,” said Robbrecht Delrue, co-founder of Holmes. 

According to the company, the QA process has become a bottleneck. Engineers manually write and maintain tests, while QA testers click through products to check that everything still works. AI tools like Claude and Codex already help developers write code faster, but what looks correct in the code can still cause problems in a real-world environment, Holmes states. This results in teams having to choose between sacrificing the speed provided by AI or letting bugs slip through the cracks.

Holmes notes that it works differently from traditional testing tools. Rather than relying on engineers to manually write and update tests, Holmes learns how a product works and how people use it. Based on that, the platform understands the full journey a user takes through the product, from start to finish, and creates tests that automatically and continuously verify those journeys, even as the product changes.

The company evaluates the user-facing flows of the web application, including sign-up, login, checkout, search, navigation, forms, and more. Five specialised AI agents handle happy paths, edge cases, responsive layouts, accessibility, and error recovery.

“At Henchman, I ran into it myself: QA is work everybody knows is critical, but nobody wants to own. Skilled QA testers are hard to find and expensive to hire, so testing usually falls on product managers and developers, on top of everything else they’re already doing. And when they lose focus for even a moment, those bugs end up in front of users. That’s why we built Holmes: it takes testing off their plate and runs it continuously in the background, so the team can keep building without worry,” says Sofie Buyse, product manager at Holmes. 

The company works with a group of tech leaders who advise the team on product development, including Dieter Wachters (Senior Director of Engineering, Collibra), Haroen Vermylen (co-founder and CTO, Luzmo), Jaap Vergote (co-founder, Upsellplus), and Ivo Minjauw (CPO, Lighthouse).

Holmes is also working with 30 design partners, shaping the product, with broader access rolling out in the coming months. 

The post Belgium’s Holmes launches with €1.1 million pre-Seed to catch software bugs before they reach users appeared first on EU-Startups.

The financing was committed by ABN AMRO, DNB, Eksfin, Nordea and SEB. The committed financing includes an additional €670 million ($790 million) uncommitted accordion feature to fund a further 115MW expansion at the Narvik AI data centre.

Josh Payne, Founder and CEO of Nscale says, “Together, these developments position Nscale at the forefront of global AI infrastructure, delivering scalable, high-performance capacity to meet rapidly growing demand for our services.”

Founded in 2024, Nscale is a global hyperscaler engineered for AI infrastructure. Through vertically integrated AI solutions and modular, first-principles data centre design across Europe, North America, and beyond, Nscale delivers the compute foundation for enterprise AI training, fine-tuning, and inference at scale.

Today’s financing follows Nscale’s recently signed agreement with Microsoft in April 2026, reinforcing the scale and strategic importance of the Narvik campus for the company.

The agreement adds more than 30,000 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs to Narvik campus, delivering high-performance AI compute capacity to Norway by 2027. ‍This builds on Nscale’s previously announced NVIDIA Vera Rubin rollout in support of Microsoft.

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The post ‘Ever Wondered’ if startups need better stories? Ex-BBC and Daily Mail tech journalists launch AI-era comms firm appeared first on EU-Startups.

The round was led by HV Capital, with participation from Prudence, Mercia, MMC and AFG, and continued support from Speedinvest, Seedcamp, and Anthemis. The company’s total funding now exceeds €33.9 million ($40 million). 

“We are building the intelligence layer that this industry has never had. Firms that move now will define competitive advantage for the next decade,” said Dr Kate Jarvis, CEO and co-founder of Fifth Dimension. 

Founded in 2023 by Dr Jarvis and Johnny Morris, Fifth Dimension unifies fragmented institutional and market data into a single intelligence layer with agentic AI that delivers analysis, surfaces risk, and prepares decisions proactively.

According to the company, generic AI tools and internal builds have largely failed institutional real assets operators. Managing a single asset can involve years of financing history, dozens of stakeholders, and layers of covenant and compliance data that general-purpose tools are not designed to handle, Fifth Dimension states. 

“Professionals across real assets rely on data scattered across ERPs, deal platforms, data rooms, spreadsheets and PDFs. Until now, this institutional data has never been consolidated into a single, consistent, auditable view. The result: deal cycles are compressing as data volumes grow, and the gap between what institutional operators need and what their tools deliver continues to widen,” mentioned the company. 

Fifth Dimension claims to integrate with a firm’s existing systems, including Yardi, Dealpath and SharePoint, without requiring data migration. The platform deploys in two weeks and unifies structured data and unstructured documents into a single intelligence layer.

Next, Fifth Dimension’s agentic AI, Ellie, prepares analyses, screens deals, drafts IC memos, monitors portfolio variance, and proactively surfaces risk. Every conclusion is sourced, cited and audit-defensible. Institutional knowledge compounds over time and is inherited by new starters on day one.

The company says the platform is powered by proprietary AI models trained on real estate workflows, not a single general-purpose provider.

Fifth Dimension reports that its clients witness 5x more capital deployed with the same team and register a 5% increase in net operating income. It also states that complex deals are underwritten in days, not weeks, and that the month-end close has been reduced from 10 days to 3. 

Fifth Dimension is certified ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II. Each client’s data remains entirely within their environment, supported by detailed audit trails for every action and output. Thereby ensuring firms meet the governance standards demanded by stakeholders and regulators.

“Real assets are the world’s largest, most complex asset class, yet the tech stack behind it hasn’t kept up. Fifth Dimension is building the layer operators have been missing, with the guardrails institutional capital requires,” said Lina Chong, Partner, HV Capital. 

With the funding, the company plans to accelerate expansion across the US and Asia Pacific, including a new Singapore office, and deepen the platform’s agentic AI capabilities for real assets investment decisions. It will also be used for continued product development, team growth, and expansion to more institutional operators across real assets worldwide.

Fifth Dimension is headquartered in London with offices in New York and Singapore. The firm mentions that it has trillions in assets running on its platform and serves global investment managers, asset managers, lenders and family offices across multiple asset classes. Firms including BXP, Realty Income, Peachtree Group and Madison International Realty have centralised their portfolio intelligence on Fifth Dimension.

The post London’s Fifth Dimension raises €22 million to scale AI-powered decision intelligence for real assets appeared first on EU-Startups.

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us in sunny Malta – your energy and enthusiasm made this our biggest and most exciting edition yet!

The Pitch Competition received over 1,600 applications from some of the most promising early-stage startups in Europe. After a thorough and competitive selection process, 15 exceptional finalists were invited to pitch on our main stage for a chance to win a prize package worth over €1 million (wow!) and the coveted title of Pitch Competition Champion.

The Prize Package

This year’s stakes were high! Valued at over €1 million, the prize was juicier than ever! Packed with funding opportunities and credits for great tools and services to supercharge a startup’s growth, this prize was set to transform the winner’s entrepreneurial journey. Let’s see what was in it:

• €250k Funding Opportunity with Look AI Ventures. The winner will get fast-tracked and invited to pitch directly in front of Look AI Ventures‘ investment committee, and after the due diligence process, there will be a funding opportunity of up to €250k.
• $220k Funding Opportunity with Techstars. The winner will be fast-tracked for a priority interview to join Techstars. This ensures that the startups’ business plan will be reviewed by the Techstars investment team and the most relevant program managing director. Following a positive due diligence process, the startup will have the opportunity to join a Techstars accelerator programme, including a $220k investment.
• Up to €434k in Funding from Malta Venture Capital, matching the investment of Look AI Ventures and/or Techstars, if the winning startup is either based in Malta, open to relocating to Malta or considering a subsidiary in Malta.
• Up to €100k in Cloud Credits from IONOS to support your startups’ hosting and scaling needs with a trusted European cloud provider.
• $24k in Credits from Cyscale. The winning startup will receive cloud security credits to monitor and secure its cloud environment, helping to detect misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and potential threats.
• $24k Draper University scholarship (up to 2 co-founders, $12k per founder), including a guaranteed interview with the Draper University selection committee and investment fund and, upon selection, a full scholarship covering the programme costs, with accommodation and co-working space in the heart of Silicon Valley. Flights, visas, and personal expenses not included.
• $12k in Credits from LUA AI to build an AI agent that helps automate tasks and interactions.
• Gain €12k in value at Make, including €6k in Credits (Make Teams, 3.6m credits) and €6k in consultation services, to build no-code automated workflows using Make’s visual automation platform.
• Up to $12k in Credits from Notion (6 months free Business Plan with unlimited AI), access to Notion Perks (exclusive discounts on other software) and to Notion Champions Community.
• 90% discount on HubSpot for Startups Pro Suite (worth up to $25k), including access to HubSpot’s Free CRM and Sales, Marketing, and Operations tools. The prize also includes a $1,000 matched credit for LinkedIn and Google Ads via HubSpot, as well as up to $150,000 in savings from HubSpot partners. T&C apply.
• €10k in JetBrains licenses for essential development and team tools, including award-winning tools such as IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and JetBrains AI, trusted by 50,000+ startups worldwide.
• €10k in Remote Credits to support international hiring and help teams access global talent. Credits are valid for 12 months.
• €9,900 D-ID Video Maker Enterprise plan, 5-user package with one year of free use.
• €5k in value for an exhibition table at the EU-Startups Summit 2027, including 3 event tickets, and a 3-year CLUB membership.

The Jury

The selected teams received valuable feedback from a jury of well-known venture capital investors. This year’s judging panel included:

• Angelo Burgarello, Managing Partner at Look AI Ventures
• Emilie Vallauri, Global Portfolio & Platform at Techstars
• Miguel Borg, CEO at Malta Venture Capital

Pitching on the Main Stage

From CleanTech and DroneTech to HealthTech and AI, the 15 finalists represented the diverse, bold future of European innovation.

The startups that took the stage were: Agilica, Agnia Aerospace, AlterEcho, Arclight Aerospace, Asvel, Cooled Motors, DAITABLE, eMomentum, Entrelacs, Muun Health, Snoika, Systellar Space, Vecify, Warden Machinery, and Xydra Labs.

Each pitch delivered unique ideas, powerful missions, and scalable solutions, making the jury’s decision harder than ever. The level of competition was sky-high, and the Maltese sun wasn’t the only thing generating heat!

And the winner is … AlterEcho!

OUR EVENT SPONSORS

Malta Enterprise is Malta’s economic development agency, facilitating economic growth, investment, and innovation by offering a range of support services for local and foreign enterprises setting up a productive presence in Malta. As a key player in Malta’s economic landscape, it contributes to the nation’s prosperity by attracting investments, supporting businesses, and driving innovation, thereby reinforcing Malta’s position as an attractive destination for entrepreneurs and investors alike. Malta Enterprise actively cultivates a vibrant startup ecosystem, playing a pivotal role in fostering a conducive environment for startups and offering tailored support and incentives to empower emerging businesses.

M. Demajo Group is a leading business player in Malta, with a successful history spanning 115 years. The Group’s growth and diversification have resulted in a wide coverage of business sectors through a commitment to long-term results.

M. Demajo Group’s workforce is 500 strong, and their various activities have been developed through organic growth, acquisitions, partnerships, and startups. Its strong financial situation and ethical standards, its business reputation, and its renowned track record as a business partner are all key factors in its continued expansion.

The IONOS Cloud Start-up Program provides young companies with up to €100,000 in cloud credits for up to five years after their founding. Start-ups benefit from a sovereign IT infrastructure “Made in Germany,” offering 100% GDPR compliance and full legal certainty. IONOS Cloud guarantees technological freedom without vendor lock-in. Long-term support is also ensured: exclusive discounts after the first year enable a seamless transition into the IONOS Cloud ISV Partner Program. In this way, digital sovereignty becomes a strategic competitive advantage from founding to scaling.

The post Meet AlterEcho: The winner of the EU-Startups Summit 2026 Pitch Competition! appeared first on EU-Startups.

The round was led by United Ventures and Italian institutional investor CDP Venture Capital, with continued participation from Inventure VC. This funding round brings Algorithmiq’s total funding to €36 million. The company claims this represents Italy’s largest-ever venture capital investment in a quantum startup.

Dr Sabrina Maniscalco, CEO and co-founder of Algorithmiq, commented, “2026 is a year in which more meaningful applications of quantum will become a reality, and we want to be at the centre of that change. This strategic move and funding injection give us the template to hit scale and continue to serve and work with the biggest quantum players in the world. Our quantum software makes quantum computers actually useful, and we’re delighted to be taking that message global from our new headquarters in Milan. 

“As quantum computing matures, the question is shifting from who can build the biggest machine to who can make the machines matter. That challenge sits at the intersection of science, software, and industrial execution, and it is increasingly where the real competitive edge may lie.”

Founded in 2020 by Dr Maniscalco, Guillermo García-Pérez (CSO), Matteo Rossi ( CTO), and Boris Sokolov (lead researcher), Algorithmiq develops quantum software that makes quantum computers useful, enabling breakthroughs in chemistry, materials science, and life sciences through physically meaningful, energy-efficient quantum computation.

According to the company, relocating its global headquarters to Milan reflects Italy’s “burgeoning” quantum technology ecosystem and a broader European effort to bridge the gap between research and the commercialisation of DeepTech. Algorithmiq says it will maintain significant operations in Finland, where it was previously headquartered. 

The decision follows Italy’s National Quantum Strategy, launched in 2025, with a commitment to support the creation of a robust quantum infrastructure in Italy. Access to national and pan-European capital backing for quantum, coupled with the Italian government’s progressive policy commitments, makes Milan a highly attractive strategic base for expansion across European and global markets, stated the company. 

The company states that the current quantum computing story has mainly focused on the fierce competition to build hardware. However, it believes that as this industry matures, building better machines remains essential, but it is no longer enough: without major advances in algorithmic efficacy, quantum hardware risks becoming impossible to commercialise and therefore muted in its real-world impact.

Rather than competing in the capital-intensive race for hardware, Algorithmiq mentions that developing and scaling the algorithmic layer that helps quantum machines become tools of industrial value. Algorithmiq’s decision to establish Milan HQ reflects a deliberate European bet on quantum’s software layer as the primary area of future innovation in the sector, says the company. 

Algorithmiq is the software counterpart to the top quantum hardware companies, collaborating with Google, IBM, Microsoft, AWS, Rigetti, Cleveland Clinic, and CERN.

Jacopo Drudi, Partner at United Ventures, added, “With quantum, Europe has the opportunity to set the pace rather than follow it. Italy has always been at the frontier of the mathematical and physical sciences — from Leonardo to Fermi to Marconi — and that foundation gives us a structural advantage in this next technological revolution. Bringing a world-class international team like Algorithmiq to Milan is a win not just for United Ventures, but for the country. We are building a continental tech titan, and for European quantum talent looking to come home, Italy now has a place where they can do their best work.”

Milan will serve as the base for Algorithmiq to further its commercial operations as the software partner to the world’s leading quantum hardware companies. From Italy, Algorithmiq also plans to expand its rapidly growing team and leverage the region’s growing strategic focus on quantum.

Algorithmiq has recently become the sole winner of the €1.7 million ($2 million) Wellcome Leap Q4Bio Challenge, making it the first company ever to prove that end-to-end quantum-classical algorithms can simulate complex therapeutics. 

In 2025, Algorithmiq also became the first company globally to achieve quantum advantage for a useful scientific problem using an Algorithmiq-designed model on IBM quantum hardware. This followed the launch of its commercially available quantum product, an algorithm for noise mitigation designed for researchers and industry practitioners alike, on IBM’s Qiskit Functions Catalogue.

The company noted that it achieved an “exceptional” performance in 2025, with Algorithmiq securing significant commercial deals with Microsoft, IBM, and Rigetti. In 2023, the company raised €13.7 million in a Series A round led by Inventure VC.

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