Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become pivotal themes in Europe’s startup ecosystem, yet recent insights from PitchBook highlight a concerning trend: one-fifth of private market players in the region are scaling back their DEI commitments. This shift comes despite growing evidence linking diverse leadership to stronger financial performance and innovation.
In 2024, as the debate around DEI intensifies, some startups and investors continue to push boundaries by championing inclusivity. These funding rounds showcase not just financial milestones but also a commitment to creating opportunities for underrepresented founders and teams. From female-led startups to ventures founded by minority groups, these companies are breaking barriers while delivering transformative ideas.
The startup ecosystem in 2024 has seen a flurry of diverse funding rounds, with groundbreaking innovations leading the way. From AI-powered platforms to sustainable solutions, here’s a roundup of this year’s standout funding stories, celebrating businesses that have defied the odds and attracted significant investor confidence.
9fin (UK)
Founder/s: Steven Hunter, Huse El-Sheikh
Founded year: 2016
Total funding: $87M
9fin, an AI-powered analytics platform for debt capital markets, works with the mission to organise the world’s leveraged finance information and make it accessible and useful through its data, news and predictive analytics platform. Leveraging proprietary machine learning and computer vision, 9fin is the faster, smarter way to find leveraged finance intelligence, centralising everything that’s needed to analyse a credit or win a mandate in one place.
Recently, the company raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Highland Europe. Existing investors Spark Capital, Redalpine, Seedcamp, 500 Startups, and Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital participated in the round.
Kriya (UK)
Founder/s: Anil Stocker
Founded year: 2010
Total funding: $181M
B2B payments fintech startup Kriya is a fintech platform that allows businesses to provide access to B2B payments and credit through integrations and instant credit decisions. It has processed billions in payment volumes and forged strategic partnerships with prominent institutions, including Barclays UK and the British Business Bank. Currently, Kriya operates in the UK, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, and Belgium. Its contributions to the business landscape include facilitating the collection of over £27 billion in B2B payments and advancing more than £3.5 billion in credit to suppliers and buyers.
In January, the fintech platform received a $50 million funding facility from Viola Group. The company intends to use the funds to roll out embedded B2B Payments to UK and European mid-market and enterprise merchants to help them acquire and service business customers.
Aqemia (France)
Founder/s: Maximilien Levesque, Emmanuelle Martiano
Founded year: 2019
Total funding: $118M
French pharma tech startup Aqemia has developed an AI-powered technology touted to accelerate the discovery and design of molecules with the potential to become drugs that fight different diseases. It has developed a streamlined technology integrating physics-based algorithms and generative AI to expedite drug discovery processes.
Earlier this year, Aqemia snapped €30 million in a Series A round led by Wendel Growth alongside Bpifrance, Eurazeo, and Elaia. It will leverage the capital to accelerate the growth of its wholly-owned pipeline of drug discovery projects and assets as well as further scale its proprietary GenAI and deep physics drug discovery platform.
Robin AI (UK)
Founder/s: Richard Robinson, James Clough
Founded year: 2019
Total funding: $69.8M
Robin AI, a London-based startup offering an AI-powered legal copilot, leverages the power of generative AI to automate and speed up the process of drafting and negotiating contracts. In addition, it quickly extracts information from across entire contract repositories through a simple search. Its co-pilot is available as a Microsoft Word add-in and is claimed to cut the time it takes to review contracts by 85%, allowing businesses’ legal teams to move faster, save money, and invest their time more strategically.
In January 2024, Temasek led a $26 million Series B round alongside QuantumLight, AFG Partners, and Plural, followed by a late VC round in November 2024, backed by the University of Cambridge, Willett Advisors, and PayPal Ventures, bringing the total funding to $69.8 million. The funding will allow Robin AI to expand its team in the US and open an office in Singapore to expand into the Asia Pacific.
TrusTrace (Sweden)
Founder/s: Madhava Venkatesh, Shameek Ghosh, Saravanan Parisutham, Hrishikesh Rajan
Founded year: 2016
Total funding: $31.6M
Swedish SaaS company TrusTrace provides a platform for supply chain traceability and compliance, enabling brands and suppliers worldwide to standardise how supply chain and material traceability data is captured, digitised, and shared. By providing access to validated supply chain data, TrusTrace empowers brands to identify, understand, and improve the impact of their supply chain. The data can be used for risk management, compliance, product claims, and footprint calculations, offering the ability to share data confidently and easily about product origin, impact, and much more.
Earlier this year, the Swedish company bagged $24 million in funding from Circularity Capital, Industrifonden, and Fairpoint Capital. The investment will be used to accelerate its growth, building on the service it already provides to several global brands.
SOLASTA Bio (UK)
Founder/s: Shireen Davies, Julian Dow
Founded year: 2020
Total funding: $23.5M
UK-based agri-biotech startup SOLASTA Bio specialises in the next generation of green insecticides. Its kind-of-a-kind technology platform helps create neuropeptide-based insect control products that are nature-inspired rather than selected from a synthetic chemistry library. These products effectively target insect pests while preserving beneficial pollinators such as bees in an environmentally friendly and sustainable manner.
In September, the female-founded company secured $14 million in Series A funding, after raising £4 million last year. The investment came from Forbion, FMC Ventures, Corteva Inc. Cavallo Ventures, Rubio Impact Ventures, Scottish Enterprise, UKi2S, SIS Ventures, and the University of Glasgow. SOLASTA Bio will use the funding to accelerate the development of the first-of-its-kind peptide-based, nature-inspired bioinsecticides.
Female Invest (Denmark)
Founder/s: Emma Due Bitz, Camilla Falkenberg, Anna-Sophie Hartvigsen
Founded year: 2019
Total funding: $17.5M
Founded by a trio of women, Female Invest is a finance app that empowers women through accessible subscription-based learning, financial news, and community. It provides women with the skills necessary to manage their finances and achieve financial independence. Designed to help women maximise their financial potential and start investing, the platform boasts over 73,000 paying members across 123 countries and a thriving online community of over 512,000 followers across social media platforms.
In July, Female Invest landed €9.4 million led by Educapital and Rubio. Additionally, the company launched a crowdfunding campaign exclusively for its members on Seedrs, which raised an extra €900k.
Samp (France)
Founder/s: Shivani Shah, Laurent Bourgouin
Founded year: 2019
Total funding: $11M
French deeptech startup Samp has developed a first-of-its-kind AI-generated digital twin solution to accelerate the transformation and decarbonisation of industrial sites. Its mission is to help industrial sites adapt to the growing imperatives of sustainability, safety, and staff shortages. By integrating image captures from industrial sites, these digital twins offer a global and precise 3D vision of the state of infrastructures, allowing teams and stakeholders to make informed decisions before any inspection, maintenance, or modification.
In September, Samp scooped €6 million in funding from Promus Ventures, and Kvanted to scale up and deploy its innovative solution internationally. It will help Samp meet the growing demand by developing the sales team in France and Europe, continuing R&D to stay at the forefront of AI and 3D developments, and preparing for international expansion outside Europe.
Passionfruit (Germany)
Founder/s: Jen Phan
Founded year: 2022
Total funding: $7.1M
Female-led German Passionfroot helps creators grow their businesses by providing tools to save time on admin tasks and share ideas. It enables B2B companies to scale creator campaigns effortlessly across platforms like LinkedIn, newsletters, and YouTube, all within a single interface. Marketers can explore the marketplace, receive AI-powered recommendations based on their industry, budget, and goals, and connect with influential B2B creators. Passionfroot automates time-consuming tasks, such as discovering the right creators, analysing their metrics, negotiating, managing collaborations, and handling payments, saving over 50 hours per campaign.
In October, the company secured $3.8 million in seed funding led by Supernode Global along with Sequoia and Accel scout funds, and prominent angels such as the Linktree CPO and further Execs from Hubspot, Notion, Miro, and Anthropic. With the fresh funding, the company will invest in expanding the platform’s capabilities and grow its presence in the US.
Hexafarms (Germany)
Founder/s: David Ahmed, Huijo Kim, Felix Kirschstein
Founded year: 2021
Total funding: $1.6M
Agtech startup Hexafarms develops software for indoor commercial food production. The company’s SaaS harvests data and leverages AI to monitor, control, and optimise greenhouses and vertical indoor farms in real-time. Its AI models can forecast crop yield four to eight weeks in advance with accuracy as high as 95%. Their vision is to empower farms across the globe to run as efficiently as possible. The app provides growers with accurate, tailored information regarding harvest time and highlights issues that can be addressed to optimise plant biology in the production process.
With the intention to invest in its AI and machine learning capabilities, increase the accuracy of predictions, and grow its portfolio of crops, Hexafarms scooped €1.3 million in pre-seed funding in March. The round was led by Speedinvest, with participation from Mudcake and techstars.
Earlybird AI (UK)
Founder/s: Claudine Adeyemi, Boris Bambo
Founded year: 2022
Total funding: $898K
Earlybird AI is an employment support software company that uses AI and voice technology to transform how employment support is delivered to unemployed and low-paid frontline workers, improving engagement, efficiency, and effectiveness. The company has introduced voice capabilities to support languages such as Arabic, helping people whose first language is not English to more easily access high-quality
In July, the London-based startup landed £625K in pre-seed funding from Google for Startups, Impact Shakers, Resolution Ventures, Ada Ventures, Syndicate Room’s Access, Lightbulb Trust, and a range of women angel investors, including Andrea Sinclair, Berthe Haile, and Pip Wilson. The company intends to use the funds to enhance its technological capabilities, boosting its tech team led by co-founder and CTO, Boris Bambo, and expand its reach by growing its customer base.
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