The 26 startups to watch in 2026
Robots, rockets, drones, AI gizmos — and maybe an IPO candidate or two
Sector
Neura Robotics
London, UK
Founded in 2023 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin
Total funding:
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Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Founded in 2018 by Daniel Metzler (CEO) & Josef Fleischmann (CTO)
Total funding: €550m
The rocketmaker’s first Spectrum rocket exploded seconds after leaving the launchpad last year — no drama, the company said, as most debut flights do. Now it’s gearing up for round two, possibly within weeks. What’s at stake for Europe? Plenty. SpaceX launches roughly 150 rockets a year, including ones carrying European satellites. Outside the government-backed Ariane programme, no European startup has reached this milestone. Cutting dependence on Elon Musk — and reclaiming a sovereign path to orbit — is now a top priority for policymakers.
Isar Aerospace
Oslo 🇳🇴 & San Francisco 🇺🇸
Founded in 2014 by Bernt Børnich (CEO)
Total funding: €122m
The US–Norwegian startup aims to become the first to place a humanoid “robot butler” in American homes this year. The machine, called Neo, won’t come cheap: $499 a month, or a one-off $20,000. Early adopters should note one caveat. At launch, Neo will rely heavily on remote human operators wearing VR headsets — meaning buyers will, in effect, be inviting strangers into their homes. Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal, who tested the robot last year, found it took about a minute to fetch water from the fridge and five minutes to load three items into a dishwasher.
1X Technologies
London, UK 🇬🇧
Founded in 2023 by Ula Rustamova (CEO) & Irene Jia (CTO)
Total funding: €6.6m
Last year, the London-based startup raised €6.6m in pre-seed funding to develop a wearable arm patch that provides real-time readings of hormones including cortisol, progesterone, oestrogen and testosterone. The round drew attention as a European record for a female-led team. “We celebrated that for about 0.2 seconds,” says founder and chief executive Ula Rustamova. “Then it was back to work.” Level Zero Health is betting it can create an entirely new market, much as continuous glucose monitors did in the late 1990s. Human trials are due to begin this year, a crucial step toward regulatory approval in Europe and the US. Rustamova is clear-eyed about the challenge. “It’s going to be really hard and take years,” she says. “But I can’t imagine a better problem to work on.”
Level Zero Health
Paris, France 🇫🇷
Founded in 2023 by Arthur Mensch (CEO), Timothée Lacroix (CTO) & Guillaume Lample (chief scientist)
Total funding: €2.8bn
Europe has pinned its AI hopes on Mistral. The startup is now tackling sensitive projects with the French military and gearing up for a sprawling new HQ in Paris. Can it ever reach ChatGPT-level fame? That’s a big doubt. But last year, Mistral scored a massive vote of confidence: a €1.3bn investment from European chip titan ASML. As a customer, ASML illustrates the AI company’s “co-creation” strategy — embedding engineers in enterprises to improve AI models with company data, earn from services and still offer its open-source AI for free.
Mistral AI
Paris, France 🇫🇷
Founded in 2026 by Yann LeCun (executive chairman)
Total funding: €0
“LLMs aren’t the future — world models are.” That is the credo behind a buzzy new venture from former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun, which aims to build AI systems that can plan complex actions rather than merely predict the next word. LeCun has long argued that scaling large language models will not deliver human-level intelligence. “We are not going to get to human-level AI just by scaling LLMs,” he said on Alex Kantrowitz’s Big Technology podcast last year. AMI will not lack resources. It launches with deep pockets (a €500m fundraise at a €3bn valuation is rumoured) and a seasoned chief executive: Alexandre LeBrun, founder of French healthtech Nabla, while LeCun takes the chair. At the very least, AMI’s effort to sell a radically different vision of AI will be one to watch.
Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs
Berlin 🇩🇪 & New York 🇺🇸
Founded in 2022 by Fabian Kamberi (CEO), Stefan Quernhorst & Jannis Ringwald
Total funding: €20m
Are you ready to make an AI friend? This may be the year we learn whether these companions are unsettling or genuinely appealing. Berlin and New York based Born is among a growing group of companies building bots that can communicate via chat, photos, videos, voice notes and video calls.
Born
Oulu, Finand 🇫🇮
Founded in 2013 by Petteri Lahtela, Kari Kivelä & Markku Koskela. Tom Hale is CEO.
Total funding: €1.3bn
Europe doesn’t churn out many tech category leaders — Oura is one of the rare exceptions. The Finnish smart ring maker, which promised to hit $1bn in revenue in 2025, has sparked a whole new product category. Its sleek bands are no longer just investor bling; they’re showing up on the paws of everyday users. Expect to see the smart ring segment get more crowded in 2026.
Oura
London, UK 🇬🇧
Founded in 2021 by Demis Hassabis (CEO)
Total funding: €556m
DeepMind’s drug-discovery spinout, Isomorphic Labs, is preparing to begin human trials of medicines designed by AI. Launched in 2021 out of AlphaFold — the landmark AI that accurately predicts protein structures — the company is nothing if not confident, with a stated mission to “solve disease”.
Isomorphic Labs
London, UK 🇬🇧
Founded in 2023 by Josh Payne (CEO)
Total funding: €1.48bn
Little known a year ago, the British AI infrastructure company broke into the big leagues in 2025, emerging as a key player in the race to expand compute capacity. It secured backing from Nvidia, struck deals with Microsoft and OpenAI, raised a $1.1bn Series B and is already reported to be lining up another $2bn.
Nscale
Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Founded in 2023 by Francesco Sciortino (CEO), Jorrit Lion (chief scientist), Martin Kubie (chief engineer), Jonathan Schilling (head of labs) & Lucio Milanese (chief external affairs officer)
Total funding: €182m
Fusion may still be years from proving viable, but it is hard to ignore one of the biggest bets in technology. Germany’s Proxima, which raised a record €200m Series A last year and has since signed an MoU to build a commercial power plant in Bavaria, is among a small group of European companies chasing the prize. The technical hurdles remain formidable. “If you’re setting out to build a talking monkey that stands on a pedestal, you don’t build the pedestal first,” says cofounder Martin Kubie. “We’re focused on the talking monkey.”
Proxima Fusion
Stockholm, Sweden 🇸🇪
Founded in 2024 by Charles Maddock (CEO), Arian Hanifi (CTO) & Sebastian Thunman (COO)
Total funding: €5.2m
Will users abandon Chrome for an AI-powered browser? That is the bet being placed by Sweden’s Strawberry. Speaking to Sifted last year, CEO Charles Maddock said the company’s browser will embed multiple AI agents able to perform tasks, share context across tabs and act as “junior interns” for everyday work. The startup has even given users an AI companion — one with a notably surly expression. “He looks pissed,” Maddock joked on LinkedIn, after a commenter said they wouldn’t want to meet it in a dark alley.
Strawberry
Munich, Germany 🇩🇪
Founded in 2021 by Torsten Reil (co-CEO), Gundbert Scherf (co-CEO) & Niklas Köhler (president)
Total funding: €1.36bn
Europe’s defence tech leader, building drones for the air and submersibles for the sea. Expect scrutiny this year, as the company aims to prove it can master aircraft manufacturing and scale quickly and cheaply. Christian Noske of VC firm NGP Capital told Sifted in December to watch out for more Helsing acquisitions in 2026.
Helsing
London, UK 🇬🇧
Founded in 2020 by Carl Pei (CEO)
Total funding: €620m
What comes after the smartphone? Many are searching for an answer, but only a handful of companies are capable of delivering it. In Europe, the obvious contender is London-based phone maker Nothing, which says it will usher in a new generation of “AI-native” devices in 2026, powered by operating systems “significantly different” from those in use today.
Nothing
Helsinki, Finand 🇫🇮
Founded in 2025 by Peter Sarlin (Chair)
Total funding: €100m
Tech entrepreneur Peter Sarlin, who sold his previous company Silo AI to Silicon Valley semiconductor company AMD in 2024 for a then-record sum, is back with a new venture, NestAI, which aims to become “Europe’s leading physical AI lab”. The startup raised €100m in 2025 to develop defence applications. One of its backers is Nokia, the Finnish group that — as the Financial Times recently noted — is once again reinventing itself after a long history spanning paper, televisions, mobile phones and data centre hardware.
NestAI
Stockholm, Sweden 🇸🇪
Founded in 2023 by Anton Osika (CEO) & Fabian Hedin (CTO)
Total funding: €508m
Few in Europe exude Silicon Valley swagger like Anton Osika. With his AI-powered coding platform, he’s making it easier than ever to build websites, games and app prototypes. After three funding rounds last year, 2026 will test whether the product can prove its long-term staying power. Running LLM-based businesses is costly, and while Lovable’s strict cap pricing keeps free tiers viable, heavy users may be tempted by deep-pocketed rivals who can run AI at a loss. Ever the salesman, Osika says he wants to create Europe’s first trillion-dollar company.
Lovable
Paris, France 🇫🇷
Founded in 2019 by Eléonore Crespo (co-CEO) & Romain Niccoli (co-CEO)
Total funding: €360m
The Paris-based financial planning software unicorn has been among the more adept European companies at weaving AI into its products. Best known for building Excel-like forecasting tools for chief financial officers, the company plans to launch a new AI agent in 2026 that, according to co-CEO Eléonore Crespo, will function less like a feature and more like a hyper-intelligent coworker.
Pigment
Vilnius, Lithuania 🇱🇹
Founded in 2019 by Laurynas Mačiulis (CEO), Dalius Petrulionis (CTO), Julijanas Želudevičius (senior engineer) & Martynas Milaševičius (production manager)
Total funding: €3m
A wildcard pick. Astrolight is constructing a ground station, with support from the European Space Agency, that will use laser beams to download data from satellites in a fast and secure manner. This is interesting work in its own right. But it’s the location that really turns heads: Astrolight is setting up in Kangerlussuaq, a town in Greenland, which of course is the subject of an increasingly fraught tug-of-war between the US and Europe.
Astrolight
London, UK 🇬🇧
Founded in 2017 by Alex Kendall (CEO)
Total funding: €1.2bn
The UK startup is pitting its driverless technology against some massive US and Chinese competitors. This spring, it aims to trial its self-driving cars in London in partnership with Uber.
Wayve
London, UK 🇬🇧
Founded in 2019 by Glen Gowers (CEO) & Oliver Vince
Total funding: €74m
The company sends teams to extreme environments — from Cameroon’s rainforests to the Arctic — to collect biological samples, which are digitised and fed into AI models. The aim: build a digital map of life that can be mined for new medicines. “We’ve collected a massive dataset of how life on Earth works,” says cofounder Oliver Vince. “Now we can teach AI to understand biology.” That matters because human progress in biology is brutally slow, Vince argues. In January, Basecamp and a consortium of tech and academic partners unveiled foundation models trained on 10bn previously unknown genes from over a million species — the first AI capable of designing potential new medicines across modalities, from small molecules to complex cell and gene therapies.
Basecamp Research
Berlin, Germany 🇩🇪
Founded in 2020 by Fabio (CEO) & Marcel Schmidberger (COO), and Erik Ziegler (CTO)
Total funding: €52m
Burnout is hollowing out healthcare. Doctors and nurses are drowning in paperwork, and many are walking away. Enter Voize. The startup’s transcription tool cuts admin time for nurses — and it’s spreading fast, now used in more than 1,000 facilities across Germany. CEO Fabio Schmidberger knows Voize is one of many AI scribe startups. But healthcare, he argues, has room for specialisation. “This is an industry with countless niches. We’ve chosen to focus on nurses — the largest share of healthcare staff in any country.”
Voize
Zurich, Switzerland 🇨🇭
Founded in 2021 by Stef van Grieken (CEO), Jelle Prins, Elise de Reus, Eli Bixby & Harmen van Rossum
Total funding: €96m
The Swiss-Dutch startup says its AI platform can save $7m–$22m per drug candidate and shrink discovery timelines by up to 12x. Founded in 2021, it’s now running 50+ projects with six of the world’s top pharma companies, including Johnson & Johnson, AbbVie, and Novo Nordisk. In 2025, it teamed up with Novo Nordisk to develop therapeutic candidates it says “could be the next GLP-1 smash hits after Wegovy and Ozempic.” It wouldn’t be a shock to see the company raise again this year.
Cradle
Cambridge, UK 🇬🇧
Founded in 2024 by Chad Edwards (CEO) & Max Welling (CTO)
Total funding: €113m
It’s Google, but for materials. As China tightens its grip on the substances that power everything from factories to electric cars, the Cambridge startup is betting AI can find the next generation of alternatives. The company claims the world’s “most-cited founding team”, with veterans of DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, and Meta, says CEO Chad Edwards. The board reads like an AI hall of fame: Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and AMI chair Yann LeCun.
Cusp AI
Berlin, Germany 🇩🇪
Founded in 2019 by Jan Oberhauser (CEO)
Total funding: €222m
n8n, one of the startups racing to develop a horizontal AI management layer, sells software that helps businesses automate repetitive digital tasks with little or no coding. Unlike many AI startups focused on specific sectors, it positions itself as a cross-industry platform, competing with US-based Zapier and Canada’s Gumloop. CEO Jan Oberhauser says flexibility is n8n’s key advantage: the platform integrates AI models from multiple providers, including Google and Anthropic.
n8n
Ghent, Belgium 🇧🇪
Founded in 2022 by Willem Delbare (CTO & CEO), Roeland Delrue (COO & CRO) & Felix Garriau (CMO)
Total funding: €74m
Europe’s fastest cyber unicorn. “And second fastest ever globally after Wiz,” says Madeline Lawrence, the company’s chief growth officer (Wiz, in case anyone needs reminding, was bought by Google last year for $32bn). Aikido CEO Willem Delbare sees huge opportunity: software is now being built at lightning speed, AI-generated code is the norm and autonomous agents are rewriting systems faster than humans can review. That adds up to a booming market for new security products.
Aikido Security
Tallinn, Estonia 🇪🇪
Founded in 2013 by Markus Villig (CEO)
Total funding: $1.9bn excluding debt
If one of the rumored US mega-IPOs — which may include SpaceX and Anthropic — goes ahead this year, could it prompt a European company to take the plunge? Estonian Uber rival Bolt reportedly lined up an adviser for a potential IPO last year. The key question now: list in Europe or the US?
Bolt
Copenhagen, Denmark 🇩🇰
Founded in 2022 by Sander Janca-Jensen (CEO), Rasmus Hellmund Carlsen, Peter Lüth (CTO) and Rasmus Busk
Total funding: €202m
Denmark’s fastest unicorn is also Europe’s fastest-growing by team size. The fintech, which offers payment terminals and software to SMBs, aims to triple annual recurring revenue by year end. “We went to market with something that was extremely simple,” CEO Sander Janca-Jensen told Sifted. “None of us comes from payments so we just had the angle of: ’Let's make it easy to understand and extremely cost centric and customer friendly.’”
FlatPay
Read the rest of the Sifted Predicts series
The 10 forces set to shape European tech in 2026
The hottest sectors to watch in Europe in 2026
The European hubs to pay more attention to in 2026
