Newsletter: VC Breakfast Club

/deals

Space situational‑awareness platform Spaceflux raised a £5.4M seed round led by the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (run by Future Planet Capital) with support from Foresight Group and Blackfinch Ventures. Co‑founders Dr Marco Rocchetto, Marcel Debczynski and Prof Ingo Waldmann started the London firm in 2022. The investment will help scale its global network of AI‑powered telescopes tracking satellites and debris.

Hospitality technology startup Inntelo AI secured €576K pre‑seed funding led by Haatch and the British Business Bank, with participation from Look AI Ventures and angels. Co‑founders Asif Alidina (CEO) and Shahzain Badruddin (CTO) built the London‑based company to use AI for revenue and occupancy forecasting.

London SaaS company TRIFFT raised €550K pre‑seed funding led by Lighthouse Ventures with BD Partners, Gi21 Capital and Koopeo. The AI‑driven loyalty platform was founded in 2024 by Jason Smith, Jakub Minks and Matúš Nickel. The round will allow the team to hire engineers and integrate generative AI into its loyalty and gamification tools.

Oxford‑based food‑tech company Modern Baker raised £2.5M Series A funding from Adjuvo to scale production and licensing of its SUPERLOAF and develop new “clean‑label” ingredient technologies.

Fractional‑talent marketplace Connectd raised $7M in funding led by Anker Capital with participation from Stena & Swerve and existing investors.

Biotech data‑analysis startup ScienceMachine secured a $3.5M pre‑seed round led by Revent and Nucleus Capital with backing from Juniper and Opal Ventures . The London company offers an AI “bioinformatician” named Sam to help researchers analyse genomic data. Founders Lorenzo Sani (CEO) and Benjamin Tenmann (CTO) plan to use the funds to expand their team and build new features.

Federated AI platform Bitfount raised $8 M Series A funding led by Parkwalk Advisors with participation from Ahren Innovation Capital, Pace Ventures, Foresight Group and Portfolio Ventures. Founded in 2020 by Dr Blaise Thomson and Dr Naaman Tammuz, Bitfount enables privacy‑preserving collaboration on sensitive healthcare data.

Managed‑service‑provider software platform Inforcer closed a €29.8M Series B round led by Dawn Capital, joined by existing investor Meritech Capital. Co‑founders Jamie Daum, Will Connor and Richard Thompson built Inforcer to standardise and manage Microsoft 365 policies across multiple tenants. Funding will help scale sales, AI‑driven security tools and U.S. expansion.

Investment platform Lightyear raised $23M Series B funding led by NordicNinja, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Metaplanet, Skaala and new investors Superangel, Specialist VC and Bolt founder Markus Villig. London‑based co‑founders Martin Sokk and Mihkel Aamer (formerly of TransferWise and Skype) offer a low‑cost trading app with AI‑powered market insights. Funds will expand product offerings and marketing across Europe.

Social app for crypto traders Bloom raised $1.6M pre‑seed funding led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Stani Kulechov, Outlier Ventures, Delta Blockchain Fund, CoinTelegraph, APX, Plassa Capital and Paul Taylor. CEO and founder Charlie Varley said the London‑based platform will use the funds to finish development and launch growth campaigns.

Fintech platform Monet, designed to help creative agencies manage cashflow, secured £17 M in early‑stage funding comprising equity and debt. The round was led by Monzo/Starling co‑founder Paul Rippon, Modern Capital’s Michael Fischer, Dan Adler, Force Over Mass and other angels.

Agentic AI platform Xelix secured $160M Series B funding led by Insight Partners with participation from Passion Capital and LocalGlobe. CEO and co‑founder Paul Roiter built the London firm to automate accounts payable audit and fraud detection, processing more than 115 million invoices a year. Funding will accelerate product development and enterprise expansion.

Solar‑subscription company Sunsave raised a £113M Series A round comprising equity led by Norrsken VC and IPGL, plus a £100 M debt facility from Crédit Agricole CIB. Founders Alick Dru and Ben Graves aim to make rooftop solar accessible with no upfront costs and plan to expand into EV chargers, heat pumps and energy optimisation software.

/spotlight

Procurement AI startup Magentic raised $5.5 M led by Sequoia Capital with participation from The Westly Group, First Momentum Ventures and angel investors from SAP, Airbus, McKinsey, Hugging Face, Ironclad and Rosberg Ventures. Co‑founders Robin Van Aeken (CEO) and Odhran O’Donoghue (CTO) are building AI agents that hunt cost savings in unstructured procurement data. Proceeds will grow the product and team.

/funds

On 15 July 2025 London‑based Evantic Capital, founded by former Sequoia partner Matt Miller, announced that it had raised $355 million for its first venture fund (target $400 million). The fund will back B2B startups at Series B and growth stages across Europe and North America.

/tech

• Britain’s most powerful AI supercomputer, Isambard‑AI, was switched on at the University of Bristol on 17 July 2025. The £225 million facility, built with HPE and NVIDIA, can perform in one second what the global population could in 80 years and is part of the national AI Research Resource. Isambard‑AI increases UK compute capacity to 23 AI ExaFLOPs, making it the 6th fastest supercomputer in Europe and enabling breakthroughs in robotics, big data, climate research, drug discovery and medical imaging.

/flywheel

• Deep‑tech hub Science Creates (Bristol) and life‑sciences incubator Pioneer Group (London) announced a strategic collaboration on 22 July 2025. The UKRI delivery partners will integrate accelerator and venture‑building programmes, co‑promote lab space and facilities across regional hubs, share deal flow and events and align national support.

• On 13 July 2025 the Advanced Propulsion Centre and Zenzic launched the Mobilise accelerator. The programme provides over £3.2 million in grants (up to £180k per company) and tailored business support to 17 automotive SMEs developing zero‑emission and connected‑mobility technologies.

• Also on 13 July 2025 the UK government announced a £138.1 million investment into zero‑emission vehicle innovation and opened DRIVE35 grant competitions from 14 July. 

• Barclays Eagle Labs opened applications on 14 July 2025 for its Funding Readiness Programme. The Autumn 2025 course teaches founders about equity, debt and grant financing, prepares them for investor meetings and provides one‑to‑one mentoring from growth experts.

/breakfast

• Are VCs moving earlier?

• 6 female VCs you need to know

• How ElevenLabs took over AI Audio in a whisper

📸 /techbrunch

Every week I use AI to reimagine a tech story from the week.

This week, Astronomer CEO and head of HR got caught on camera at a Coldplay concert, and the Twitterverse/Linkedinasphere went wild. Astronomer then hired Gweneth Paltrow for a brilliant ad leveraging the attention. I imagine the future of product launches becoming stale.

• Caption this in comments?