AI Startups Flourish in European Tech Hubs: Zurich, Berlin, and Paris Lead the Way

The Hottest Startups in Zurich in 2024

The Swiss capital might be most associated with fintech, but its startups are also focussing on medical robotics, AI-powered language learning, and the batteries of the future. Home to fine cheese, breathtaking scenery and footballing politics (FIFA HQ overlooks Lake Zurich), Switzerland's largest city is also a financial juggernaut. The central square of Paradeplatz is its beating heart, where the Swiss banking system pumps venture capital funding into a thriving tech ecosystem -- around CHF 72 million (more than $1 billion) was poured into Zurich startups alone in 2023. Fintech is a natural major player, but if the banking industry is the ecosystem's engine, innovation is its fuel. Many of the city's most exciting startups began life as student projects at its world-leading universities, which provide a steady flow of great thinkers. "Zurich is a city of ideas, people, and capital," says Frank Floessel, head of entrepreneurship at ETH Zurich, a public research university focused on science, technology, and engineering that 'spins out' an average of 25 startups every year. "We have plenty of talent and know-how. We rank among Europe's smartest and most innovative cities. And we have the necessary funding to transform groundbreaking ideas into market-ready solutions." While remote surgery isn't yet common, scalpel-wielding robots can often be found performing keyhole surgery. Nanoflex Robotics is aiming to transform emergency treatments such as a thrombectomy, the removal of a blood clot. It's the procedure used for ischemic strokes, a worldwide leading cause of disability. "Today, the only option is to transfer the patient to a hospital capable of performing a thrombectomy -- but every second the brain lacks oxygenated blood, brain cells die," says Nanoflex founder Matt Curran. In the US, nearly a third of the population lives more than an hour away from a thrombectomy capable center. Alongside founders Christophe Chautems and Bradley Nelson, Curran has created a compact robotic platform that includes a magnetic field generator on wheels. Positioned next to a patient's head in a cath lab, a neurosurgeon (often working miles away) can subtly change the direction of the magnetic field to bend the tip of the catheter more easily, travel through affected vessels, and restore blood flow to the brain. In 2023, Nanoflex worked with Mayo Clinic Arizona on its proof-of-concept -- the medical center's chair of neurosurgery controlled its robot in Zurich from Phoenix in a non-clinical setting. In March 2024, Nanoflex's first robotics system was installed at the Jacobs Institute, a medical device innovation center in Buffalo, New York. It raised a total of $19.8 million (£14.4 million) -- including a $12 million (£9 million) Series A round in February 2023. nanoflexrobotics.com The standard lithium-ion battery contains liquid electrolytes which work well at stable room temperature but less so in the freezing cold or at high heat. Working at Swiss research institute Empa, Moritz Futscher and Abdessalem Aribia discovered that stacking several thin-film cells on top of each other not only provides one-minute charging times and greater energy capacity -- it also creates a battery that can withstand extreme conditions. Launching BTRY in 2023 alongside Yaroslav Romanyuk, Futscher and Aribia are now focusing on IoT applications in environments such as cold medical transport and steam plants. The trio are also looking to the skies: some aerospace applications require batteries to function across a 200°C temperature range. "Compared to current batteries, ours reduces the need for heating elements and safety measures," says Futscher. Having raised CHF 1.8 million ($2.1 million) in pre-seed funding, BTRY is beginning its first pilot production tests. btry.ch Frustrated with the tedium of corporate expense management, five accountants -- Philippe Sahli, Thomas Inhelder, Lars Mangelsdorf, and Melanie Gabriel -- founded Yokoy in 2019 (initially under the name Expense Robot). The fintech leverages AI to simplify invoicing, automating the reimbursement process by instantly matching card payments with expenses. "We felt the pain of manual work," says Sahli. "Nobody trains as an accountant to spend hours matching receipts to company card transactions." Twenty million expense reports and invoices later, Yokoy's 700 global clients include Breitling, Austria Airlines, and On Running -- the Swiss sportswear brand has slashed its costs by almost 79 percent since automating its spend management process, says Sahli. In 2023, Yokoy raised $80 million (£60.9 million) in Series B funding, led by Sequoia Capital. yokoy.io BreezeLabs founders Patrick Helfenstein and Matthias Heuberger say that up to 90 percent of runners in the US -- estimated to be about 50 million -- use a wearable device to track their performance. Yet heart rate is typically the only measurement that these devices track. BreezeLabs has developed an app that monitors runners' breathing patterns instead. It does this through a headphones' built-in microphone, while delivering deeper cardiovascular insights. BreezeLabs' smart filtering dampens traffic noise, with audio data fed to a trained machine learning model that estimates a runner's breaths per second. Since launching in February 2023, it's collected data from more than 100 test runners ("one of the world's biggest datasets entirely consisting of breathing samples," says Helfenstein). BreezeLabs has secured CHF 500,000 ($584,000) in funding from the University of Basel. breezelabs.ai When coder Philipp Hadjimina was priced out of one-to-one Greek language lessons ("incredibly expensive in Switzerland," he says), he built his own chatbot. Quazel launched on Hacker News in September 2022 -- and 50,000 users tried it within two days. Renamed Univerbal in January 2024, it had more than 250,000 downloads. Users can talk to an AI 'tutor' in 22 languages through on-screen chat prompts, creating naturalistic, unscripted conversations based on large language models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Open Source. "It's always surprised me that most who want to learn a language do so via vocab games and memorizing grammar rules, but completely neglect speaking," says Hadjimina. Founded alongside Samuel Bissegger and David Niederberger, Univerbal has raised $2 million (£1.5 million) in seed funding. univerbal.app "Clean water, down to the last drop" is the mission statement of Fajer Mushtaq and Silvan Staufert, the founders of Oxyle. Launched in 2020, the ETH Zurich spin-off takes aim at per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS): synthetic chemicals long used in everyday goods for their water, grease, and oil-resistant properties -- and toxic to humans. "We're driven by a shared vision to address water contamination and 'forever chemicals,'" says Mushtaq, whose inspiration stems from encountering water scarcity during her upbringing in India. Common among non-stick cookware and water-repellent fabrics, PFAS exposure has been linked to cancers and immune system suppression. They're also lost into wastewater and discharged into streams -- ending up in drinking water. But Oxyle's modular reactors -- applied at water treatment plants and reaching up to 100 cubic meters in size -- break down 99 percent of PFAS into harmless mineral components, lowering levels below regulatory limits. Machine learning then adapts treatment to real-time PFAS fluctuations. Since raising CHF 12 million ($14 million) in pre-seed funding, Oxyle has partnered with major water technology companies in Europe (including Belgium's Waterleau) to commercialize its solution. Its future target is helping to clean US waters. oxyle.com A trio of Google researchers are the minds behind DeepJudge: an AI-powered search for legal teams that scans hundreds of millions of documents, freeing time spent searching for paperwork accumulated across emails, memos and contracts. "We're connecting users to the entirety of their collective knowledge," says Paulina Grnarova, who launched the startup in 2021 alongside Yannic Kilcher and Kevin Roth. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology -- and DeepJudge's proprietary large language model -- surfaces the most relevant, up-to-date information via summary. Once deployed, nearly 80 percent of users within an organization regularly engage with DeepJudge -- saving countless hours trawling inboxes. In June 2024, it raised $10.7 million (£8.1 million) in an oversubscribed seed funding round led by New York private equity firm Coatue. Clients using the AI-powered search tool include Swiss law firms Lenz & Staehelin and Homburger. deepjudge.ai Data clean-rooms offer neutral, secure environments for organizations to share insights on markets and customers without sharing first-party data -- any personal information is restricted, encrypted, and anonymized. A supplier of this is Decentriq. Its platform has been used by Publicis Groupe, Switzerland's Federal Department of Defense and the Swiss National Bank. "We wanted to create a neutral space -- a 'Switzerland of data'," explains Decentriq founder Maximilian Groth, who launched the startup alongside Stefan Deml in 2019. The pair have raised more than $21 million (£15.9 million), including a $15 million (£11.4 million) Series A round led by Eclipse Ventures, and a CHF 2.2 million ($2.5 million) grant from the Swiss government. decentriq.com Launched in 2020 by Thomas Krapf and René Papesch, Riskwolf's platform leverages AI and real-time data to create so-called parametric insurance solutions. This means that payouts are based on the probability of a loss-causing event (a 7.0 magnitude earthquake, for example), rather than actual losses. A key use case is changing weather patterns, says Krampf: Kashmir apple farmers now have parametric weather coverage that pays out in days rather than months. "Traditional underwriting can have missing or outdated data histories," says Krapf. "Conversely, we have much more affordable data and processing power thanks to the growth of cloud technology and satellite sources." Having raised a combined CHF 3 million ($3.5 million) through an Innosuisse grant and equity investment, Riskwolf now works with insurers across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The company has also set its sights on IoT, economic data, credit risk and price indices to explore future parametric products. riskwolf.com Beginning life as an ETH Zurich research project, Petar Tsankov, Pavol Bielik, Martin Vechev, and Andreas Krause launched LatticeFlow in 2020. Its platform automatically stress-tests AI models, analyzing how predictions are made, and finding patterns that lead to systematic errors: think blindspots and hallucinations. "Traditionally, this process is addressed in an ad-hoc, manual, and reactive manner," says Tsankov. "We proactively uncover these, effectively enriching the data." Clients include manufacturing firms and defense organizations, notably the US Army. The company has raised total funding of $14.8 million (£11.2 million), including a $12 million (£9.1 million) Series A round led by Atlantic Bridge and OpenOcean. latticeflow.ai

The Hottest Startups in Berlin in 2024

The German capital attracts talent from all over the world, and its startups are building endless AI-generated audio apps, virtual pet apps, and sensors for early wildfire detection. German innovation is not limited to the country's capital. In fact, some of this year's most prolific startups are based hundreds of miles away. The AI startup Alpha Alpha hails from Heidelberg. Helsing, which sells AI to Europe's militaries, was set up in Munich. Yet both companies operate Berlin offices. The city attracts too much talent to ignore. Universities, such as TU Berlin, churn out Generative AI founders and the capital is such a magnet for international talent that many offices operate in English, not German. It's also a very young city -- half of its population is under 45, something that Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, who grew up in Berlin, remarks on. "I founded my last startup back in 2009 and I remember vividly how much energy, time, and focus it required -- having a large population of younger, diverse and international, and highly motivated professionals that have that energy and hunger gives Berlin an edge," he says. "Plus, Berlin has the best döner kebab." By 2050, the carbon credit market is expected to be a $250 billion industry. Startup BlueLayer is catering to that growth by developing tailor-made software for the companies and NGOs poised to benefit. Its clients -- including conservationists such as Permian Global -- run projects ranging from reforestation to direct air capture, and use the startup's software to process their data, and communicate with buyers and investors, while helping credit providers get their credits verified with international registries. Launched in 2022, BlueLayer has raised $10 million (€8.9 million) in investment and counts three of the top 10 issuers of credits globally among its clients. "It's classic automation software," says Vivian Bertseka, one of BlueLayer's three co-founders along with Alexander Argyros and Gerardo Bonilla, "but for an industry that used to operate almost exclusively on Excel." bluelayer.io Cambrium, founded in 2020 by Mitchell Duffy and Charlie Cotton, is using AI to design proteins such as collagen. Instead of sourcing them from animal products, the startup grows them in tanks. "We're one of the companies trying to straddle hardcore software engineering [and AI] with putting physical stuff in the real world," says Cotton. The company has received $11.6 million (€10.3 million) in investment so far, including from Google's AI venture fund Gradient Ventures. Skincare products using Cambrium's first protein, a collagen called NovaColl, are expected to hit shelves later this year. Cambrium.bio In 2020, three veterans of Chinese tech behemoth, Tencent, joined forces to build foundation models specifically for search. Attracted to Berlin by the city's open source culture and software engineering talents, the trio behind Jina now claim 9,000 users and 400 paying customers, who turn to the company when they want to build either a public or internal search system for their data. Jina's models promise to convert PDFs, Word documents or images into a language that AI models can understand well enough to enable an intuitive Google-style search. A legal company may no longer have to search for documents using a case number. Instead, Jina AI CEO and co-founder Han Xiao explains that they could simply ask: "Find the case where Microsoft loses to Google". After raising $39 million (€34.8 million) from a series of early stage VC funds including Canaan Partners, Xiao and his co-founders Nan Wang and Bing He plan to expand to the US, raise revenue from the company's $500,000 (€447,000) per year, and boost user numbers. "We want to compete with OpenAI," says Xiao. jina.ai Endel is a paid-for app that uses generative AI to create one endless piece of music, which constantly adapts to its user's surroundings. The app utilizes the phone accelerometers to generate a beat that syncs with its listeners' footsteps. If they start jogging or skipping, the tempo catches up. Calling itself a "sound wellness" startup, Endel is part of the trend for functional sound, where music has a purpose -- to help people exercise, fall asleep or focus. "We want to create a technology that harnesses the power of sound and helps you achieve a certain cognitive state," says CEO Oleg Stavitsky, one of Endel's six co-founders. Launched in 2018, the company has since raised $22.1 million (€19.1 million) in funding, including from Amazon's Alexa venture fund, and claims one million monthly active users. In 2023, the company struck a deal with Universal Music Group to use their technology to create new "soundscapes" using established artists' work. endel.io To understand Slay's success, credit has to be given to Pengu, the company's virtual pet app that has become the startup's most popular product with more than five million users. Founded by Fabian Kamberi, Jannis Ringwald, and Stefan Quernhorst, Slay created Pengu to be part game, part social platform, where friends or couples can collaboratively raise a digital penguin. The company, which has raised $7.6 million (€6.8 million) in total, including from Accel, is currently scaling Pengu's ability to personalize its interactions, hooking a series of LLMs to a 3D engine to create that visual experience. Pengu might respond to a child telling them they are being bullied by gifting them a drawing or sending personalized notifications to cheer them up. slay.cool Ovom Care is a fertility startup using data and machine learning to take the guesswork out of reproductive medicine. Since launching in 2023, co-founders Felicia von Reden, Cristina Hickman, and Lynae Brayboy have opened the company's first fertility clinic in London -- sidestepping the onerous regulatory process in Germany -- and already claim to be treating hundreds of people. Alongside the physical clinic, patient app and clinic management system, Ovom also offers machine-learning algorithms that analyze patients' blood tests, data from wearables, gamete analysis and ultrasound images to tailor the type and timing of treatment. "We're now going into the era of precision medicine," says CEO von Reden. "We're tailoring [fertility] using technology". That idea has attracted €4.8 million ($5.3 million) in seed funding led by Alpha Intelligence Capital. Within the next year, the company plans to attract medical tourists from all across Europe to its second clinic in Portugal, where treatment costs are expected to be cheaper. ovomcare.com When Carsten Brinkschulte's daughter started protesting against climate change in 2018, the serial telecoms entrepreneur started to think about how he could leverage his experience for the good of the planet. The result was a startup called Dryad, launched in 2020, designed to be an early wildfire detection network. "Think of us like the Vodafone of the forest," says Brinkschulte, one of the company's seven co-founders. Dryad's solar-powered mesh networks enable sensors to send alerts when they detect fire, even in remote areas where there is no signal. So far the company has sold 20,000 wildfire sensors and related hardware to 50 countries across the world, from Canada to Thailand, and to clients ranging from local governments to utility companies that want to protect their infrastructure from an inferno. Dryad has raised €22 million ($24.6 million) so far, including from German deep tech fund eCAPITAL. dryad.net The rise of energy-hungry AI prompted the International Energy Agency to warn that the electricity consumed by data centers could double in just two years. As environmental groups discuss the risk that the technology poses to the climate, startup Ultihash has been developing a practical way to slash the data center needs of companies performing energy-intensive machine learning or training their own models. Founded in 2022, Ultihash has developed an algorithm that CEO and co-founder Tom Lüdersdorf claims can slash companies' data storage needs by up to 60 per cent, meaning they need less data center space and reduce their carbon footprint. The company has raised $2.5 million (€2.2 million) despite still being in stealth mode. Lüdersdorf plans to launch the product later this year, after beta testing with more than 300 companies. ultihash.io According to TheBlood's co-founders, Isabelle Guenou and Miriam Santer, menstrual blood is an under-appreciated asset for diagnostics, containing data-rich endometrial tissue, live cells, immune cells and proteins, which are not found in ordinary blood. The pair launched the company in 2022, with the aim to use menstrual blood in an attempt to fill healthcare's gender data gap. Since then, the firm has analyzed more than 1,000 menstrual blood samples, selling testing kits for between €35 ($39) and €120 ($133) to women who are looking for more data to inform fertility or endometriosis treatment. TheBlood also plans to license biomarker analysis or data sets to pharmaceutical companies. So far, the company has raised €1 million ($1.1million) in total, including from healthcare-focused venture firm ROX Health. theblood.io To create generative AI, algorithms have to infer relationships between data -- text, images or audio -- that isn't labeled or organized. That's where so-called vector databases come in, helping developers extend the long-term memory of LLMs by making it easier for those models to search and analyze large amounts of data, while keeping computational costs down. Launched in 2021 by co-founders André Zayarni and Fabrizio Schmidt, Qdrant is catering to AI software developers, promising a vector search engine and database for unstructured data with an easy-to-use API. In the past three years, the company has reached 7 million downloads and 10,000 users worldwide, raising $37 million (€33.2 million) in the process including from US venture capital firm Spark Capital. qdrant.tech

The Hottest Startups in Paris in 2024

The French capital has become the home of Europe's growing AI industry -- but alongside giants like Mistral are startups building EV charging infrastructure and trying to revolutionize social media. In the past two years the French capital has been in the throes of AI fever and has launched some of Europe's most talked-about startups, including Mistral, which is currently valued at $6.2 billion (£4.7 billion). That's partly down to the support the industry has received. President Emmanuel Macron has given French AI startups some emphatic political backing, while telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel has provided much investment and will to finance national ambition. In September 2023, Niel invested €200 million ($212 million), splitting that money between funding for startups such as Mistral, an AI research lab called Kyutai and a cloud supercomputer powered by Nvidia. "I'm the old guy who likes entrepreneurs and the idea was always the same: how we can help this talent to stay here, creating companies," says Niel. Niel, a prolific French businessman who owns telecommunications company Iliad, believes European AI companies now have a unique opportunity to act. "If you want to create a search engine now from scratch, you cannot win because you weren't there 25 years ago. It's exactly the same with AI," he says. To compete with the US, Europe has to move fast. "[Or] in the end, we will be the nicest place in the world for museums -- that's good but maybe we can try to do something a little bit different." In almost every European country, there is a startup vying to rival OpenAI. Yet few make a claim as serious as Mistral. To date the company has raised €1 billion ($1.11 billion) including a €15 million ($16 million) investment from Microsoft. Since launching in April 2023, its three co-founders, CEO Arthur Mensch, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample have marshaled the startup to release 12 models, including its flagship multi-language text generation model, Mistral Large. With 27 million downloads from public repositories, Mistral's clients (such as telecoms company Orange, and Hugging Face) use the startup's models to personalize promotional messages or power their own virtual assistants. Mistral's free-to-use chatbot, Le Chat, functions much like OpenAI's ChatGPT and is designed to give the public a way to experiment with Mistral's open-source technology. "We've been promoting open source as the one way to make the technology go faster and be safer because there's more scrutiny on it," CEO Mensch told CNBC in a rare interview, adding Europe is at a turning point in its race to compete with tech superpowers. "We have willpower and we'll make it happen," he insists. mistral.ai Companies that neglect sustainability are facing two major risks: regulation and reputation. That's according to Rachel Delacour, CEO of Sweep, who co-founded the sustainability-focused data management platform in 2020 alongside Yannick Chaze and Raphael Güller. "Every company out there must transition to the low carbon economy," she says, adding it's now a competitive advantage for a business to be able to track sustainability targets across their operations. "Eventually your customers, your employees, your supply chain will ask what you are doing." The startup is already working with hundreds of clients, including L'Oréal and UK energy group SSE, which license the company's platform in order to pool data from across their entire supply chain and identify their sustainability weak spots. A client manufacturing water bottles that must be hand-washed, for example, would be able to see how much more water-efficient its product would be if customers could clean them in the dishwasher, says Delacour. This year the startup is focused on expanding to the US after raising a total of $100 million (£76 million), with investment from Tony Fadell, creator of the iPod. sweep.net Dust is yet another buzzy Paris-based AI startup. Launched by co-founders Gabriel Hubert and OpenAI alumni Stanislas Polu in 2023, Dust creates custom AI bots for companies. So far, most of its clients, which include 500 teams at companies such as PennyLane and Watershed, are experiencing fast growth but don't yet have strict processes in place. That means teams are more likely to be empowered to play around building a specialist content writer or feedback analyser AI assistant themselves, says Hubert. Armed with €20 million ($22 million) in funding, the idea behind the startup is that office workers don't need just one multi-purpose AI assistant, instead they need a series of highly-specialized models to choose from to perform different tasks. "That level of customization is really what gets them a report when they need it, a [spreadsheet] when they need it or an executable, interactive graph," Hubert says. dust.tt When news leaked that a group of engineers who worked on advanced models at Google's AI division, DeepMind, were preparing to start their own company in early 2024, investors raced to lend their support. Initially known as Holistic AI, the company only changed its name to H in May 2024. It has already secured $220 million (£152 million) in investment, including from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel and venture capital firm Accel. Although it's unclear if the company has any clients -- or even products -- yet, its elusive co-founder and CEO, Charles Kantor (a former venture resident at Stanford University), has promised his team are developing "full" artificial general intelligence or AGI that would "boost the productivity of workers". So far little is known about H's mission, although the reputation of its co-founders, DeepMind scientists Laurent Sifre and Karl Tuyls, both considered leaders in their field, means there is significant excitement to find out. hcompany.ai Within five months of founding Bioptimus, the company's six co-founders launched the world's largest open-source foundation model for cancer detection. Trained on hundreds of millions of images, H-optimus-0 identifies cancerous cells and genetic abnormalities in tumors, says co-founder and principal research scientist, Zelda Mariet. For her, this is just the beginning. Current models are really good at performing very focused jobs such as analyzing images of cancer tissues, she says. But Mariet wants Bioptimus to build a model that can also analyze a patient's DNA, cells and tissue to understand how they are all connected. Right now, the company is still in the exploratory phase, after raising $35 million (£26.6 million) from investors such as French bank Bpifrance and telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel. bioptimus.com The European Commission has forecast that at least 30 million electric cars will be on European roads by 2030 and EV charging startup Electra is preparing for that moment, aiming to deploy 2,500 ultra-fast charging sites by that date. Since launching in 2020, it has hit 300 sites across Europe -- each with six charging points -- including in Paris, Brussels and Pisa. The idea is to make operating an EV seamless and hassle-free. Drivers use Electra's app to book charging slots in advance with charging sites automatically recognizing regular users. "What Tesla did with cars, is what we're trying to do with infrastructure," says Aurélien de Meaux, CEO and one of three co-founders, alongside Augustin Derville and Julien Belliato. So far, Electra's eye-catching charging stations have enabled more than one million 20-minute charging sessions, with French users paying between €0.39 and €0.52 per kWh. The company has raised €304 million ($338 million), including from investment group Eurazeo and French bank Bpifrance. go-electra.com Amo is the latest French startup trying to reinvent social media. The company is led by CEO Antoine Martin, who sold his last social media business Zenly to Snap in 2017 for upwards of $200 million (£152 million). Since launching in 2023, Amo has launched three separate social media apps designed to re-focus online relationships with friends, instead of influencers: Tilt (two-sided video), Bump (for location sharing) and ID (collaborative mood boards). Already, Amo has raised €18 million ($19.9 million) from investors including VC New Wave, which also backed Paris-based social media startup BeReal before it was acquired by app publisher Voodoo. amo.co After years spent working as an engineer at Nestlé, Amine Raji became frustrated with the outdated technology the food industry used to detect bacteria. "That's why you have so many food recalls and sanitary outbreaks," he says, adding that 420,000 people die every year due to foodborne illnesses. In an effort to end that, the three co-founders behind Spore.Bio -- Raji, Maxime Mistretta and Mohamed Tazi -- created the Vision device to identify bacteria in seconds. It works by shining a light on the bacteria (a practice called biophotonics) so machine learning algorithms can identify what type of bacteria is present by studying its reaction. Since launching in January 2023, five food factories are using the prototype, paying a fixed monthly fee for the hardware. The company has raised €8 million ($8.8 million) from investors including Google DeepMind's Mehdi Ghissassi and VC firm LocalGlobe. spore.bio NcodiN is working to become a critical cog in the complex world of semiconductor manufacturing. "We make the world's smallest lasers," says Francesco Manegatti, co-founder and CEO. These lasers, 500 times smaller than the standard size, make it possible for NcodiN to build what's called an optical chip, which will feature devices a quarter of the size of a single human hair. Working in the clean room of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), NcodiN has so far raised €4.5 million ($4.9 million) for its plan to build these sophisticated optical chips, which will one day enable supercomputers to transfer data quickly and efficiently between different electronic parts. The company is in talks with some of the major chip manufacturers about testing, and is targeting 2028 to deliver its first volume of wafers to clients. ncodin.com Astran wants to shield companies from severe cyber attacks. Its product, Continuity Cloud, uses Astran's proprietary technology to encrypt and distribute its clients' sensitive data when they are under attack. Astran's backend combines "algorithms in a patented architecture that enables your critical data to be encoded and fragmented before being stored in multiple clouds at the same time," says CEO Yosra Jarraya, who co-founded the company with Yahya Jarraya and Gilles Seghaier in 2021. Astran's customers include aerospace company Airbus and French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, while the company has raised $5 million (£3.8 million) to date. Investors include Paris-based seed fund Galion.exe and SISTAFUND, which backs female founders. astran.io