Creandum

We’re excited to announce the close of Creandum VII 🇪🇺 €500m fund - oversubscribed and raised in record time 🎓 Backed by 30 of the world’s top investors, including the largest university endowments and foundations 🔎 Focused on Seed and Series A investments in Europe 🤩 Backing Europe’s next generation of game-changing founders Here’s a little video we made to introduce the new fund... Johan Brenner, Staffan Helgesson, Carl Fritjofsson, Peter Specht, Simon Schmincke, Daniel Blomquist, Sabina Wizander, Hanel Baveja, Beata Klein, Fredrik Cassel  

💸Capi Money is unlocking global trade for SMEs in emerging markets and we’re thrilled to announce today that we’re leading their Series A round taking the total amount raised to $18m. The round is joined by Janngo.africa, some great angels as well as by existing investors Y Combinator and firstminute capital, Four Cities Capital, The Raba Partnership, Kara Ventures , Rebel Fund, Maiora Ventures, and Pioneer Fund doubling down. For millions of small businesses across developing countries, paying international suppliers is frustrating, expensive, and slow. Capi Money is changing that with a platform that allows importers to pay invoices in under 48 hours—reliable, fast, and free of middlemen. What got us excited? 👉 The team: Mitch R., Scott Liddle, and Tom W.. bring unmatched expertise, scaling experience, and execution speed. 👉 The opportunity: A $400bn+ import market in sub-Saharan Africa alone, with expansion plans beyond. 👉 The product: An intuitive, self-serve platform built to reduce costs and eliminate inefficiencies for businesses. Capi Money has already achieved multi-million-dollar revenues in just 13 months with a small but mighty team. We are looking forward to continuing the journey with them! Keen to join the ride? Capi Money is hiring, check out open roles here: https://lnkd.in/eee3AffW Read more about the Creandum funds’ investment in Simon's blog post (link in the comments 👇)

We’re thrilled to welcome Nelson Casata as our latest addition to the investment team, based in London—with a strong focus on the French tech ecosystem. Nelson’s journey is anything but ordinary. From training in one of France’s top basketball academies (alongside future NBA players) to building a sneaker resell side hustle while at university, his background is a rare mix of competitiveness, entrepreneurial instinct, and cultural insight. Having worked and lived in Paris for the past three years, gaining valuable startup and VC experience at Doctolib, Seedcamp and Headline, Nelson brings local knowledge, connections and expertise to the Creandum team, boosting our presence in this important ecosystem. While Creandum has been active in France for a number of years, leading Swan's seed round in 2020 (and participated in subsequent rounds) and joining H Company’s seed round in 2024, amongst others, we are excited to bolster our efforts in France as one of Europe’s most vibrant tech scenes with Paris a leading hub for AI. 🇫🇷 Big week in Paris with the AI Summit. Make sure to connect with Nelson Casata, Hanel Baveja, Johan Brenner and Staffan Helgesson who are all in town this week. Welcome to the team, Nelson!

🇫🇷Swan adds €42m to its Series B 🇫🇷 When Nicolas Benady pitched Swan to us in 2020, they were pre-launch with no website - but had already signed two clients and had 50+ inbound requests. 🏦Before we met them, no one had cracked how to embed financial services into products without needing significant resources to overcome the complexities of a heavily regulated space. Nicolas and his co-founders, Nicolas Saison and Mathieu Breton, knew payments inside-out, having co-founded several successful payments companies. They understood the pain points firsthand and approached the problem differently with a real focus on great product design. 💳Fast forward to today, Swan has transformed from a vision of simplified banking infrastructure into a full-stack platform powering financial services, like accounts, cards and payments, for companies across Europe. Swan now has over €1.5 billion in monthly transactions, counts 150+ partners—like Pennylane, IESA, Factorial, Sesame HR, and Yuki—and operates in 30 European countries. Swan stands at the forefront of the next wave of innovation in banking where banking services move out of standalone banking apps and get embedded directly into applications and platforms. We’re delighted to welcome on board Eight Roads who are leading this round and to participate alongside our friends at Lakestar, Accel, Hexa and Bpifrance. 🚀To become part of this rocketship, check out open roles at swan.io 🗞️Read more about the round in Romain Dillet's article in TechCrunch. Link in the comments. cc Simon Schmincke, Hanel Baveja, Nelson Casata, Luka Caratsch

🚀 Exciting news from the team at atla. Check out the world's best small language model-as-a-judge 👇 👇

Congrats Fredrik Hjelm and the entire Voi Technology team on reaching this significant milestone. A great achievement, fueled by all your hard work and persistence!

💊 Lindus Health is transforming the clinical trial industry to bring medical treatments to market faster and more cost effectively. When we first met Meri Beckwith, Michael Young and Nik Haldimann, we were blown away by their vision and knew we had to back them, leading their Series A alongside Peter Thiel. Their secret weapon is their software-first approach and use of AI in trial design and patient-trial-matching which speeds up the entire process. Since launch, they’ve enrolled over 36,000 patients in trials across North America and Europe. 🚀 Today, they’re announcing their $55m Series B round, led by Balderton Capital, which we’re thrilled to join alongside Visionaries Club, firstminute capital and Seedcamp. Congratulations to Meri, Michael, Nik and the whole team. You can read more about our original investment in Fredrik Cassel  's August 2023 blog (linked in the comments).

🌱 PROJECT EADEN is revolutionizing plant-based meats with their proprietary fiber spinning technology. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Creandum is reaffirming its commitment to sustainable food innovation by participating in Project Eaden's €15 million Series A after having led their seed round in 2022. For this round, co-founders Jan Wilmking and Dr. David Schmelzeisen chose an incredible group of strategical investors: Climate fund Planet A Ventures, German retail giant REWE who will list them in 2,000 supermarkets in early 2025 and DTCF | DeepTech & Climate Fonds. With this support, Project Eaden is gearing up to revolutionize plant-based food across Europe—starting with their ultra-realistic ham launching this year. We're excited to continue supporting their journey to make sustainable food choices irresistible for everyone. cc Carl Fritjofsson

🤖 Sereact is at the forefront of bringing AI to robotics and we’re excited to announce today that we’re leading their €25m Series A funding round. Ralf Gulde, Marc Tuscher and team have pioneered the development of Vision Language Action Models for robotics, enabling robots to intelligently perform tasks they have not been specifically trained on, and to be operated by natural language prompts. Their solutions can be deployed in hours and big name customers are signing up, including the likes of BMW Group, Daimler Truck AG, bol and Active Ants B.V. This real world implementation provides valuable data to continuously improve their models far beyond what synthetic training data alone can achieve. We love their hardware-agnostic approach with the potential for their models to be applied across all types of robotics platforms in future. We stand in great company backing Sereact alongside Point Nine and Air Street Capital, as well as superstar angels including Nico Rosberg, Mehdi Ghissassi, Ott Kaukver, Lars Nordwall, Torsten Reil and Niklas Köhler. Read more about the investment in Johan Brenner's blog and Yazhou Sun's piece on Bloomberg (links in the comments 👇 )

From the team that brought you Nord Security, we are excited to welcome out of stealth - nexos.ai nexos.ai is an AI orchestration platform that allows businesses to access, deploy and manage multiple LLMs through a single interface. AI is a massive opportunity across all areas of business but managing multiple LLMs for the right tasks at the right cost is a growing headache. nexos.ai solves this by providing access to more than 200 AI models through a single, secure API. It has the potential to become one of the most important parts of the AI stack. Tomas Okmanas and Eimantas S. are exceptional founders and, together with their team, have a proven track record of building some of Europe's fastest growing businesses. We love the team and vision and couldn't be more excited to be backing them alongside our friends at Index Ventures, Dig Ventures and some incredible business leaders, including Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Olivier Pomel, Ilkka Paananen and Avishai Abrahami. Read more about nexos.ai in Carl Fritjofsson's blog and in Paul S.'s article in TechCrunch (links in the comments 👇 )