The companies, which are Bani, MasteryHive AI, Regxta and Termii, were picked from nearly 2,600 applications, joining 11 other African startups to form a final cohort of 15 startups drawn from across Africa.

Their selection gives Nigeria the largest share of startups in the new cohort and underlines the country’s strong presence in Africa’s dynamic technology sector.

Each of the four companies is building products to solve financial and business challenges.

1. Bani provides cross-border payments infrastructure for African businesses trading internationally. The company aims to reduce delays in settlements between markets.

2. MasteryHive AI focuses on automating transaction reconciliation, fraud checks and anti-money laundering monitoring for financial institutions.

3. Regxta uses alternative data to score credit applicants and combines this with a digital agent network to offer services to small businesses that often struggle to access finance.

4. Termii builds communications systems used by banks and fintech firms for alerts, login codes and payment notifications.

Other startups in Google Accelerator Africa cohort 10, spanning fintech, agritech, health tech, mobility and software services, with artificial intelligence being the core of most of their products, include Anda Africa, Coamana, Duck, Emaisha Pay, Loop, Maad, Meditect, ReportsAI, Safiri, Vambo AI and VunaPay.

Gbolade Emmanuel, CEO of Termii said: “At Termii, we’re building AI-powered infrastructure that ensures financial transactions don’t fail, from login PINs to payment OTPs and fraud alerts.

“The Google Startup Accelerator is helping us accelerate our AI roadmap and scale globally, and even in the first week, access to technical support and insights has been incredibly valuable for our next phase of growth.”

The programme began on April 13 and will run until June 19, 2026. It combines virtual and physical sessions, with founders receiving mentoring, technical training and support from industry experts.

Folarin Aiyegbusi, head of Startup Ecosystem, Africa, said: “We are absolutely thrilled to welcome these exceptional founders into Class 10. African startups are driving essential economic growth and social development.

“Our role is to serve as a supportive partner, providing these developers and founders with the technical infrastructure, mentorship, and global network they need to scale their solutions and amplify their real-world impact.”

Google said the accelerator, launched in 2018, has now supported 106 startups from 17 African countries. Those companies have raised more than $263 million and created over 2,800 jobs.

The African startup sector also showed resilience last year, attracting $3.9 billion in funding as founders continued to build businesses in finance, agriculture, healthcare, transport and software services.

The company disclosed the raise alongside updates on its growth, revenue, user base and partnerships with global investors and technology firms.

OpenAI said the round drew support from strategic partners including Amazon, NVIDIA and SoftBank, with continued backing from Microsoft. Other participants included firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, D. E. Shaw Ventures, TPG and T. Rowe Price Associates.

Part of the capital also came through bank channels, with more than $3 billion raised from individual investors.

OpenAI added that its shares will be included in exchange-traded funds managed by ARK Invest, expanding access to the company’s equity ahead of a potential public listing.

The company also expanded its revolving credit facility to about $4.7 billion, supported by a syndicate of global banks. OpenAI said the facility is still undrawn.

In its statement, OpenAI pointed to rapid growth in revenue and usage. It reported monthly revenue of $2 billion and weekly active users exceeding 900 million across consumer AI products, alongside more than 50 million subscribers.

The company said, “We are now generating $2B in revenue per month. At this stage, we are growing revenue four times faster than the companies who defined the Internet and mobile eras, including Alphabet and Meta.”

OpenAI also noted adoption across both consumer and enterprise segments. It said enterprise customers now account for more than 40% of revenue, with expectations that this could match consumer revenue by the end of 2026.

Usage across its tools is increasing, with the company reporting commendable engagement in search, which it said has nearly tripled over the past year. It also stated that its advertising pilot has generated more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue within six weeks of launch.

On the developer side, OpenAI said its APIs process over 15 billion tokens per minute, while its coding tool Codex now serves over 2 million weekly users, with usage rising quickly in recent months.

The firm also referenced its latest model, GPT-5.4, which it said is driving higher engagement across agent-based workflows and enterprise applications.

Compute capacity is foremost to its expansion. OpenAI said its infrastructure strategy now spans multiple cloud providers and chip partners, including Oracle, CoreWeave and Google Cloud on the cloud side, and additional hardware collaborations beyond its long-standing reliance on NVIDIA systems.

The company described its approach as building a wider infrastructure base to support demand, rather than depending on a single provider.

OpenAI also outlined its comprehensive product direction, referring to plans to integrate its tools into a unified AI system. It said it is working towards a combined platform that brings together ChatGPT, Codex, browsing and agent features into a single interface.

The company stated that its long-term aim is to make AI tools easier to use across both personal and workplace settings, while allowing developers and businesses to build on top of its systems.

OpenAI added that its growth shows a mix of consumer adoption, enterprise deployment, developer usage and compute capacity, which together support continued expansion of its products and services.

The $122 billion funding round is one of the largest private capital raises in the technology sector and enables OpenAI to scale further as it prepares for greater market developments.

The New York-based startup says the platform places intelligent software assistants across daily operations, including sales, purchasing, inventory and finance. Its goal is to remove the manual work still used in food distribution.

Investors such as a16z Speedrun, Anterra Capital, Offline Ventures and Long Journey Ventures supported Anchr in the seed funding round. Executives from OpenAI also joined the investment.

Food distribution sits behind everyday commerce. Every restaurant order, supermarket shelf and catering delivery depends on it. However, much of the industry still runs on text messages, spreadsheets and ageing software.

Distributors handle hundreds of billions of dollars in perishable goods each year. Despite that scale, many teams still manage key processes manually.

Orders are typed into systems by hand, purchasing decisions rely on scattered spreadsheets and finance teams usually reconcile invoices across several disconnected platforms.

Anchr believes that gap creates an opportunity.

Most distributors rely on enterprise resource planning systems built to record past activity. Those systems log transactions but rarely guide future decisions. They do not forecast demand, optimise inventory in real time or warn teams about shrinking margins.

Other platforms focus mainly on digital ordering. For example, Choco and Pepper help customers place orders online. However, they stop there. Purchasing, reconciliation and margin analysis are still outside their scope.

As a result, many distributors use a patchwork of tools. Instead of simplifying operations, that mix often adds complexity.

Anchr’s platform sits on top of existing systems. Rather than replacing ERP software, it connects to it. The company says the software then handles tasks across order intake, purchasing, inventory planning, invoicing and collections.

Work that once required hours of manual input can now run automatically, with information carried across each step.

“The biggest opportunity to leverage AI isn’t in industries with modern infrastructure,” said Tzar Taraporvala, co-founder and Co-CEO of Anchr. “It’s buried deep in the operational backbone of the economy. Food distributors manage millions of dollars of inventory with systems that were never designed to handle today’s complexity.

“We built Anchr to become the intelligent layer that works alongside teams every single day, automating away the tedious, unsexy parts of the job to create truly material value for a margin-strapped business.”

The founders know the problem well, as Taraporvala and Smayan Mehra have built companies together for more than twenty years. Their interest in supply chain systems grew after seeing how disconnected many of them are.

A breakthrough came when they worked with a seafood distributor in Boston. The team spent months studying operations on the factory floor. What they found was unforgettable.

Staff entered orders into ERP systems at three in the morning, purchasing decisions came from fragmented spreadsheets and finance teams balanced invoices across several platforms.

For the founders, the inefficiencies were apparent and expensive.

Early users of the platform are already reporting measurable changes. One distributor recovered about 40% of daily working time across eight sales representatives. The profit came after automating order intake from text messages and emails.

Another company cut aged inventory losses by $30,000 in a single month. Better purchasing decisions, guided by live demand signals, helped achieve that.

Elsewhere, a customer expects to increase average basket size by roughly $65 per order. The system analyses menus and catalogues to suggest additional products.

In an industry where profit margins usually sit in low single digits, even small improvements can add up quickly.

The company’s early growth shows that urgency. Within 12 weeks of joining Speedrun, Anchr says it had already booked seven-figure revenue. Its customer base now ranges from regional distributors to a publicly traded company valued at about $5 billion.

“If the first era of enterprise software digitised record-keeping, we believe the next era will automate it. We call that shift Enterprise Resource Automation (ERA) – and Anchr is building this inevitable operating layer” said Smayan Mehra, co-founder and Co-CEO, Anchr.

With the seed funding, Anchr plans to expand automation across every layer of distributor operations. The aim is to create a system that supports every decision affecting product movement or financial flow.

Beyond food distribution, the founders see similar opportunities in other supply chains where physical goods move through fragmented systems.

“The magic here is compounding: when sales, purchasing, inventory, and finance share context, the whole business runs differently. Anchr is building an AI-native operating layer that turns fragmented steps into an integrated workflow and the early customer outcomes show what that unlocks,” said Troy Kirwin at a16z Speedrun.

The company says its system replaces traditional marketing agencies with a network of AI agents that manage SEO, paid advertising, GEO and website optimisation end-to-end, helping businesses grow without the cost and complexity of agency support.

The funding round was led by Goodwater Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Atreides, SignalFire and Kearny Jackson. The round also drew backing from WNBA stars Diana Taurasi, Breanna Stewart, Kelsey Plum and Nneka Ogwumike.

Brooklyn-based Mega says it is targeting a long-standing problem faced by smaller businesses trying to compete in the digital marketplace.

Many SMB owners rely on marketing agencies but usually find it hard to see clear returns. Agencies can be expensive, results vary widely, and campaigns typically require manual execution and long turnaround times.

At the same time, the rapid growth of AI marketing tools has created another challenge, where many platforms still require business owners to learn complex software before they can see results.

Mega says its platform is designed to remove that limitation by delivering marketing execution directly through software.

The company’s core product is an AI-powered growth engine built for businesses generating between $500,000 and $20 million in annual revenue. It operates through a network of specialised AI agents that handle SEO, paid advertising, generative engine optimisation (GEO) and website management.

According to the company, the system plans, executes and continuously optimises campaigns while generating performance reports automatically. In practice, Mega says a business can sign up and still see its marketing run in the background even if the owner never logs into the platform.

The company’s entry into the marketing technology space happened almost by accident. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the founding team had been building a video game company. When ChatGPT launched, they began experimenting with AI tools to improve their own marketing efforts.

The results were striking. Organic traffic to their projects increased more than 100-fold, while paid customer acquisition costs dropped by around 80%.

When co-founder Lucas Pellan shared the tools with other founders, demand quickly followed.

“We realised early that business owners do not want another AI chat tool that requires hours of prompting,” Pellan said. “What they want are customers. So we built a system that actually does the work. Our AI agents execute marketing tasks end-to-end and continuously improve performance so SMBs can achieve predictable growth.”

Mega says about 55% of its marketing work is fully automated, while 35% is mostly automated with human oversight and the remaining 10% handled entirely by human specialists. The company says this hybrid approach allows it to scale operations while maintaining quality control.

Each campaign also feeds data back into the system, allowing the platform to improve ad targeting, creative generation, bidding strategies and optimisation across its entire customer base.

The company’s own growth has been fast. Mega says it expanded from zero to $10 million in revenue within 10 months. Its customers include home services companies, law firms, healthcare providers, ecommerce brands and software businesses.

In one case, Mega helped a Texas-based medical spa increase search traffic by 174 times, while a personal injury law firm saw its search visibility grow 243 times, pushing several key terms into the top three search rankings.

A direct-to-consumer health brand using the platform generated $120,000 in website revenue and surpassed its sales performance on Amazon without increasing advertising spend.

Darin Chase, a home services business owner who uses the platform, said the system has simplified his company’s marketing operations.

“Since working with Mega we finally have a predictable flow of leads,” he said. “We’re also able to focus on other projects because Mega handles the marketing side.”

Mega believes the opportunity in the SMB market is huge. Tens of thousands of marketing agencies currently serve smaller businesses across North America, however, many companies still see difficulty with inconsistent lead generation, limited transparency on results and weak returns on marketing spend.

With digital marketing channels becoming more competitive and expensive, the company argues that AI-driven automation can help narrow the gap between small businesses and large enterprises.

“Mega represents a fundamental shift in how SMBs approach marketing, moving from paying for effort to paying for measurable, repeatable growth,” said Vivek Subramanian, partner and chief product officer at Goodwater Capital.

“We’re excited to support Lucas and the team as they build an AI-native growth engine that businesses can deploy easily.”

With the funding, Mega plans to expand its platform beyond SEO, paid advertising and websites. The company is developing tools to manage the full revenue engine for SMBs, including email marketing, outbound campaigns, organic social media, lead qualification, sales operations and reporting.

Its long-term goal is to provide a fully automated growth infrastructure that allows small and mid-sized businesses to compete with enterprise-level marketing capabilities without the associated cost and complexity.

But the thing is, capital wasn’t just flowing. There was a concentration, with large checks, especially for artificial intelligence companies. 

About 74% of January funding went to deals of $100 million or more, and 57% went to AI-related startups alone. 

However, if you stood back and looked at markets and capital flows in early 2026, you’d see something quite different, fundamental change. 

Tech isn’t responding to an upswing in funding anymore. It’s adapting to new investor priorities, and market situations that are very different from the era of easy capital that impacted the late 2010s and early 2020s.

So what changed?

For most of the past decade, cheap money allowed tech growth, interest rates in certain economies were at historical lows, investors hungry for yield and growth poured capital into startups before they had profit, let alone profits. 

Risk was quite blurry during that era, valuations were amplified and growth at all costs was made workable, if fragile, a strategy.

Today, it doesn’t work that way anymore.

Interest rates globally are higher than they’ve been for years. Monetary policy became tougher after pandemic stimulus faded, inflation returned in many regions, and central banks moved quickly to raise rates to rein in prices. 

That made capital more expensive and investors much pickier.

Funding isn’t gone, it’s just concentrated

Despite the narrative of a “funding winter,” KPMG’s latest data shows global VC investment hit more than $138 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, ending the year with one of the strongest totals on record. 

But that masks an important trend where capital isn’t broadly distributed anymore. Investors are placing large investments on a narrow set of opportunities.

Take AI. It wasn’t just one sector among many. In 2025, AI startups drew outsized rounds, dozens of companies raised hundreds of millions, or even billion-dollar-plus investments. 

The funds aren’t trickling down to every idea with a good pitch. They’re clustering around a few big names and high-conviction focus.

That shift is unignorable. It means the cost of money isn’t just higher, the bar for attracting it is, too.

A tale of two tech markets

Investors are talking about discipline, transparency, and profitability. According to a global investor survey, 61% of investors still see technology as the top sector for capital growth over the next few years, but they want transparent disclosures about strategy and returns, especially around AI. 

In the first week of February 2026, global indexes experienced turbulence as software and tech stocks were sold off. Valuations slipped due to investor anxiety over whether heavy AI spending by big tech firms, think multibillion-dollar capex plans, will translate to profit. 

Big names like Alphabet and Microsoft have seen their stock prices fluctuate at times because markets are questioning the returns on massive AI investments outweighing near-term costs.

At the same time, alternative corners of tech are attracting fresh interest. There’s a noticeable shift toward smaller-cap and value-oriented companies as investors rotate out of speculative growth names and into sectors they deem safer or more resilient. 

Layoffs and recalibration

Again, looking at the workforce, 2025 saw a large number of layoffs in the tech industry, from startups to giants. 

Thousands of jobs were cut as companies recalibrated their cost structures and refocused priorities. Those layoffs reveal the stress on growth models that relied on scale and user acquisition over cash flow and efficiency.

For founders, this has been painful and humbling. People who raised capital on promises of growth now find investors demanding sharper unit economics and quicker paths to profit.

That’s not a backlash against innovation but a higher level of financial discipline driven by macro conditions.

Where tech still finds money

Despite all of this, there are good areas.

AI commands attention. There were more than 55 U.S. AI startups raising $100 million or more in 2025 alone, showing that deep technology with good enterprise value still attracts serious capital. 

These are not small checks but major commitments by major investors.

Even beyond AI, the VC world saw robust exit activity, mergers and acquisitions and IPOs contributed to healthy exit values as companies matured and found liquidity. 

And while data from regional ecosystems varies, many markets are resilient. In Africa, for example, funding rebounded strongly in 2025, with total capital rising and diversified instruments, including debt, playing a bigger part. 

The reality for most founders

So what does this all mean for tech founders and executives?

For one, the era of ‘raise more at any cost’ is clearly over. Investors are looking for companies that can articulate solid paths to cash flow and sustainable growth. They care about what you do with capital, not just how fast you can spend it.

Second, capital is still available, but it’s more selective. AI and related infrastructure are prime targets, but other sectors must prove strong business models to win larger commitments.

Third, the shift isn’t a simple downturn but a reset. Tech is learning to grow within macro challenges. That’s a healthier paradigm in the long term, even if it seems harsher in the short term.

Some founders feel blindsided because they raised a comfortable round only to find subsequent meetings turning into critiques of burn rates and go-to-market strategy. That is real, but it’s also a reflection of markets that now price risk differently.

Tech hasn’t lost its spark, far from it. Funding is still high, deals continue to get done, and innovation is very much alive. 

What has changed is the price of patience, clarity and discipline. Cheap money didn’t just drive ideas, it impacted expectations, which should ultimately lead to tech growth.

Now those expectations are adjusting to a world where capital is not easy money. It’s selective, expensive and demanding.

And that is important, because founders today must build fast, and build wisely.

Disclosed by Africa: The Big Deal, the amount raised was well below the $276 million recorded in January 2025 and also under the average monthly total of $263 million seen over the past 12 months. 

Still, it was higher than January figures from earlier years, including 2023 and 2024, when funding volumes were far lower.

What stood out in January was not just the money, but the number of deals. 

Only 26 startups across the continent announced funding of $100,000 or more. That figure is unusually low and the weakest monthly count since at least 2020. 

A small group of companies accounted for much of the funding announced during the month. In Egypt, fintech firm valU secured $64 million in debt from the National Bank. 

Nigeria-based mobility financing company MAX raised $24 million through a mix of equity and asset-backed debt.

Several other firms closed double-digit rounds. NowPay, another Egyptian fintech, raised $20 million in equity. Moroccan proptech start-up Yakeey announced a $15 million Series A round. 

Terra Industries raised $12 million, while Côte d’Ivoire fintech company Cauridor announced a round of more than $10 million.

There were also transactions that did not count towards the funding total. Flutterwave acquired Nigerian startup Mono in an all-stock deal valued at about $30 million. 

Tech talent company Savannah was acquired by Commit, and Izili Group took over off-grid solar firm Qotto.

January is usually a slow month for startup funding, both African and international, especially after a busy December, and similar dips were recorded at the start of 2023, 2024 and 2025, not just 2026. 

Even so, the thin deal flow this time has shown how tough investors have become.

Fintech continued to attract the largest share of capital, but deals in property technology, mobility and defence showed that interest was spread across sectors. 

Egypt and Nigeria led activity, while Morocco and Côte d’Ivoire featured through fewer but sizeable transactions.

The startup is targeting a problem many companies feel but rarely insure against, which is cloud outages that shut down operations, stall payments and damage trust within minutes. 

Mantas says downtime is no longer a technical issue. It is a clear financial risk, and it should be treated as one.

The seed round drew backing from Nuwa Capital, Suhail Ventures, Plus VC, OQAL Angel Syndicate and a group of strategic angel investors. 

The funds will be used to build out its product, strengthen risk models and begin early deployments across the Middle East, North Africa and North America.

Cloud infrastructure now underpins everything from payments to flight bookings. When it fails, the impact is swift. But most companies still rely on service-level agreements, legal clauses or internal fixes that do little to cover actual losses. 

That gap is seen in how businesses respond after an outage, confusion first, financial pain later.

Mantas is taking a different route. Its policies are based on parametric insurance. That means payouts are triggered automatically once verified outage conditions are met, without drawn-out claims or negotiations. If the cloud goes down and the agreed threshold is crossed, the payment follows.

“Cloud downtime is now one of the largest unpriced liabilities in the digital economy, as outages at AWS and Azure in late 2025 demonstrated,” said Basil Mimi, CEO and co-founder of Mantas. 

“Businesses have engineered their systems for scale and speed, but the financial layer has not kept up. Parametric insurance allows us to turn cloud outages into a measurable and insurable risk, giving companies certainty at the exact moment they need it most.”

The company focuses on digital-first sectors where constant uptime is necessary. These include fintech, airlines, e-commerce platforms, software providers and regulated enterprises. 

Alongside coverage, Mantas provides real-time monitoring that shows firms how exposed they are and where weaknesses sit, before something breaks.

The idea behind the company came from a moment. Mimi was trying to order food when an outage rippled across systems. What looked minor quickly turned into reputational damage and financial loss for the business involved. 

From his background as a software engineer, what l stood out was that the outage could be measured, but the loss was not insured.

That mismatch is growing. Cloud usage is becoming more concentrated, especially around a few large providers. In North America, outages are increasingly wide-ranging rather than isolated. 

In the Middle East, governments and companies are moving fast into cloud-first setups. In both cases, financial protection has lagged behind dependence.

Investors say this link between real-world infrastructure behaviour and insurance is what sets Mantas apart.

“Downtime is often treated as a technical issue, but for digital businesses it’s increasingly a financial one. Mantas’ approach stood out to us because it ties insurance coverage directly to how infrastructure behaves in the real world, rather than how it’s described on paper. 

“That’s an important step forward for this type of risk.” said Arnav Danthi, principal at Nuwa Capital.

Plus VC also pointed to the team’s execution and focus.

“At Plus VC, we back exceptional founders building category-defining companies, and Mantas is a strong reflection of that conviction. The company is redefining cyber insurance through its technology-driven MGA model, combining tailored coverage with predictive analytics to address one of today’s most critical risks, cloud downtime. 

“What impressed us most is the team’s deep domain expertise, strong execution mindset, and their ability to translate complex risk data into actionable insights that help businesses proactively mitigate exposure. 

“We are excited to support Basil, Abdallah, and the Mantas team as they scale this differentiated platform regionally and beyond,” said Hasan Haider, founder and managing partner at Plus VC.

Ayat Alsabbagh, Principal of Suhail Ventures also said: “We are proud to be partnering with Mantas in leading the shift towards data-driven business protection. 

“The combination of Mantas real-time analytics with parametric insurance will significantly help companies minimise losses from cyber threats and cloud outages in a rapidly growing market. We believe Mantas is setting a new standard for securing enterprise continuity through innovative insurance solutions.”

Mantas plans to expand its insurance coverage as cloud systems become more connected and failures spread faster across services. The goal is to help businesses that lean into complex digital infrastructure, so they are not left exposed when that infrastructure fails.

The round was co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, joined by EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital and six unicorn founders. 

Their support comes only months after the company’s two young founders topped AndroidWorld, an influential benchmark for mobile-device automation, beating long-established research groups from Google DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research and Alibaba.

Unlike web developers, mobile teams usually wait weeks to push even small updates through. Minitap argues that this drag has held the industry back for years. 

The company says its platform lets teams work at a pace closer to the web, cutting feature-delivery cycles from six weeks to a few days.

Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, Minitap’s co-founder and CEO, said the long delays in mobile development impacted their motivation. “We spent two years building our first viral mobile product, today, and I’m embarrassed by that timeline,” he said. He added that “Mobile is 60% of internet usage but moves at 10% of web speed. Every consumer app company (Duolingo, Calm, Hinge etc) ships 5x more experiments on web than mobile. We built Minitap to close that gap for everyone.”

His co-founder, Luc Mahoux-Nakamura, stressed the need for faster testing across consumer apps. “Every consumer mobile company needs to experiment faster. The companies that run 10x more experiments will win their markets. We’re building the infrastructure that makes that speed possible.”

The pair grew up in a small village in Burgundy, studied side by side, and later built several projects together before launching Minitap. Their path included early products, time in military school, engineering research, and work on drone infrastructure, an experience they now say gave them a rare mix of skills.

Investors appear to agree. Daniel Dippold, founder and CEO of EWOR, described the team’s speed and technical range as a competitive advantage. 

“Nicolas is leading one of the fastest teams I’ve seen. It comes from years of working together, knowing mobile inside out, and understanding how to build AI systems that hold up. The combination of AI research capabilities, mobile development skills, and sheer hunger of will is unprecedented and ideal for solving this specific problem.”

Minitap’s platform is built on two key components: mobile-use, an open-source framework that allows automated systems to operate smartphones like real users; and minitap cloud, an infrastructure capable of spinning up thousands of mobile configurations at once. 

Together, these tools help teams generate code, test it across devices, flag errors, and deliver working features far faster than traditional workflows.

Their speedy progress on AndroidWorld brought attention earlier this year. Within their first 40 days, they reached the top of the benchmark and later released their framework openly, drawing more than 1,900 GitHub stars.

The seed round also attracted founders behind companies such as Hugging Face, Last.fm, Adjust, SumUp, FlixBus and Worldcoin, alongside operators from OpenAI, DeepMind, LangChain and LlamaIndex. Investors say the founders’ momentum was difficult to overlook. 

Katie Jacobs Stanton of Moxxie Ventures said: “When you see two 23-year-olds from rural France beat Google in 40 days, you recognize something rare. Nico and Luc are solving a massive problem that they uniquely understand and are moving at an urgent speed.”

Today, Minitap is being used by consumer mobile teams that want to run more experiments without expanding their engineering headcount. The company says its tools will eventually allow product managers to describe a feature, drop in a design, and have code generated and tested in a single afternoon.

Mercuri partner Esha Vatsa believes the long-term potential is vital. “Minitap is one of the first companies that is bringing agentic AI to mobile use and possibly the very first that is taking a full-stack approach to enable the use of AI coding agents for mobile app development. This is a substantial challenge and a huge opportunity that Nico and Luc are uniquely positioned to solve.”

Minitap founders say their vision is to enable the development of mobile apps that adapt themselves automatically, running experiments, studying user behaviour, generating improvements and rolling out new versions with minimal human involvement.

The company’s platform, which serves over two million users monthly, aims to reduce the typical 79-day purchase decision cycle to under a single day.

Shopping online has become a complex, time-consuming task. Consumers bounce between tabs, sift through over-optimised product listings, and struggle to separate real reviews from marketing spin. 

Onton’s founders saw the stress firsthand. “We are building the future of decision making online,” said Zach Hudson, CEO and co-founder of Onton. “People deserve a way to shop that feels intelligent, transparent, and effortless. Onton is designed to remove the friction that slows everyone down and to give users absolute confidence in their choices.”

The startup’s platform combines a novel neurosymbolic AI foundation with a new interface, enabling users to search using natural language, images, or both. It consolidates information from across the web into single, trustworthy product listings. 

Users can also leverage creative tools like Imagine and Surfaces to visualise and instantly find items they dream up. Onton reports a conversion rate three times higher than the industry average, with over 20% of users engaging weekly.

Onton’s journey began when co-founders Alex and Zach recognised a similar problem which was spending countless hours hunting for products. 

Alex spent 30 hours searching for a mid-century gray couch, while Zach had been researching trust in online reviews. After meeting at a YC Startup School event, they combined their expertise, launched early versions of the product, and scaled monthly users from one million with four employees at the start of 2025 to ten today, with five more hires expected soon.

The current funding round, led by Footwork and joined by Liquid 2, Parable Ventures, and 43, brings Onton’s total capital to approximately $10 million. The investment will support product expansion, team growth, and international scaling.

Consumers are demanding smarter search tools. Unverified online content, disappearing trusted product recommendations, and brands locking information behind walled gardens have created new pressures. 

Onton was built as an intelligent assistant rather than a simple search engine, helping users cut through the noise and make fast, confident decisions.

Users report tangible benefits. One described finding quality products aligned with his interests without spending hours researching. Another confirmed that Onton reassured her items were unique, allowing her to purchase with confidence rather than continuing endless browsing. Heavy users are conducting over 100 searches and product generations monthly.

Onton plans to expand beyond home décor and furniture into apparel and electronics, guided by existing user demand in online shopping. The company will continue refining its knowledge graph, enhancing its data pipeline, and preparing a personalised search experience adaptable to individual needs. 

Its ultimate goal is to become a global decision-making tool for any product in any category, anywhere in the world.

The round, led by Elaia with participation from Speedinvest, Founderful, 1st Kind, 10X Founders, 2100 Ventures, and the Sequoia Scout Fund, pushes Mimic’s total funding past $20 million. 

The fresh capital will speed up the development of its foundation AI model, humanoid robotic hands, and large-scale industry deployments.

Mimic’s goal is to create robots that can match human finesse in handling intricate tasks on factory floors, from assembling small components to managing logistics processes where precision and adaptability are essential. 

While traditional robots are great at repetitive actions, they lack the flexibility to manage the unpredictable nature of real-world environments.

“Humanoids are exciting, but there aren’t many industrial scenarios where the full-body form factor truly adds value,” said Stephan-Daniel Gravert, co-founder and chief product officer at Mimic Robotics. 

“Our approach pairs AI-driven dexterous robotic hands with proven, off-the-shelf robot arms to deliver the same capabilities in a way that is much simpler, more reliable and rapidly deployable.”

The company’s technology is trained on real human performance. Skilled operators wear Mimic’s proprietary data-collection gear during everyday factory work, capturing precise motion data without interrupting production. 

These recordings are then used to teach Mimic’s AI models through imitation learning, allowing robotic hands to replicate human movements with impressive accuracy.

“Our general purpose AI models allow us to automate manual labour in a way that simply was not possible before,” said Elvis Nava, co-founder and chief technology officer. “Thanks to our unique focus on human-like dexterity and human data, we are competitive at the robot foundation model layer as well as the application layer.”

Global manufacturers and logistics providers are already testing Mimic’s technology. Pilots are underway with several Fortune 500 companies, including major automotive brands. 

The firm’s offering comes at a time when many industrial economies are faced with labour shortages, an ageing workforce, and high costs that make automation more urgent than ever.

Analysts estimate the humanoid and dexterous robotics market could reach $38 billion by 2035, part of a robotics sector projected to be worth up to $1 trillion by 2040.

Founded in 2024 as a spin-off from ETH Zurich, Mimic’s 25-member team combines engineering, research, and industrial expertise. The company has also received support from Switzerland’s federal innovation agency and was selected for the AWS Generative AI Accelerator programme.

“We’re at an inflection point in robotics where learning-based systems meet real industrial needs,” said Stefan Weirich, co-founder and CEO of Mimic Robotics. “We make dexterity deployable at scale, closing the gap between what AI can do in the lab and what factories actually need. Europe has the talent, the infrastructure, and the demand, and we’re building the company that brings all of this together.”

Investors have commended Mimic’s technical and commercial potential. Clément Vanden Driessche, Partner at Elaia, noted, “Elaia is thrilled to lead the seed round in Mimic. The world-class team at Mimic is addressing one of the most challenging problems in physical AI: dexterous manipulation. Mimic’s breakthrough approach integrates a proprietary robotic hand, state-of-the-art foundation models for robotics, and novel data acquisition and training methods.”

Vincent Faber, investment manager at Elaia, added, “This enables autonomous, versatile manipulation and unlocks a previously untapped segment of the automation market, where the demand for flexible solutions continues to grow.”

Meanwhile, Andreas Schwarzenbrunner, general partner at Speedinvest, said, “At Speedinvest, we’ve always believed that Europe’s strength lies in marrying world-class engineering with foundational research. With Mimic, we see exactly that: a platform that unlocks human-level dexterity with frontier AI and solves billion-dollar problems on factory floors today. This is the moment Europe steps forward to compete and lead in the new era of AI and robotics.”