Newsletter: VC Breakfast Club

£68M+ Raised by Navro, Arondite, Sprive, Ceto and More

AuthorAuthor

Ines & Mike H
May 04, 2025

Welcome to the VC Breakfast Club Newsletter - the local frontpage of UK venture.

We help founders share their funding news and stitch together the UK’s venture flywheel.

If you’re announcing a raise, let us know. If you’re fundraising, get in touch.

First off this week, an announcement! We’re (super) excited to announce we have a new contributor joining our ranks: Ines Almeida - an Investment Analyst at Cambridge Future Tech. Ines works in deep tech venture building with a focus on health and medtech innovation. She’ll be writing with us to connect emerging science and real-world solutions, starting off with an article this week on photonic chips.

/deals

💸 Navro raised €36M Series B to expand its payments curation platform, simplifying global payouts and collections for businesses via one API, with support for 140+ currencies across 200+ countries.

🛡️ London-based DefenceTech startup Arondite raised €10.5M to develop AI software that connects autonomous defence systems, enhancing operational control, safety, and real-time insights across critical military and infrastructure applications. Led by Index Ventures.

🏠 London-based fintech Sprive raised $7.3M to expand its mortgage overpayment platform, which helps UK users pay off home loans faster via automation, cashback rewards, and better deal discovery from linked everyday spending.

⚓ Ceto, a Newcastle-based maritime analytics startup, raised $4.8M led by Dynamo Ventures to expand its predictive tech that helps shipping companies prevent breakdowns, reduce emissions, and manage operational risk.

📊 Astrato, a London-based cloud-native BI platform, raised £3.7M led by Big Pi Ventures to scale its AI-powered, no-code analytics layer that turns data warehouses into live, self-service, embedded decision tools.

👥 Dex, a London-based startup using AI to match talent with employers, raised $3.1M pre-seed from a16z and others to scale its recruitment assistant platform and expand beyond closed beta.

🏗️ Materials Market, a UK marketplace for heavy building materials, raised £2M from Fuel Ventures and Active Partners to scale hiring and operations, aiming to digitise a fragmented £40B industry and expand nationwide.

🏘️ Property Sense, a PropTech platform for Build-to-Rent operators, launched a £1M Series A round via Crowdcube to scale its leasing middleware, double headcount, and expand its self-serve technology across the UK market.

📞 London-based Ulla Technology raised £500k to launch its AI-powered, privacy-first meeting assistant, which transcribes, identifies speakers, and generates secure, industry-specific summaries for legal, government, and corporate clients.

🧬 Spotlight Pathology raised £425k to advance its AI-powered blood cancer diagnostic platform, aiming to speed up diagnoses, reduce clinician workload, and secure regulatory approval across the UK, EU, and US.

🕵️ AVIEL Intelligence, founded by ex-Google engineer Joe Tallett, raised £350k to expand its AI-powered platform that engages scammers directly, helping banks preempt fraud through real-time intelligence rather than reactive analytics.

🚧 Aichitect, a London-based AI platform streamlining construction workflows, raised £300k in pre-seed funding led by SFC Capital to scale its data-driven planning and design tools across the UK and global markets.

/funds

♻️ Vinted has launched Vinted Ventures, a new VC arm writing €500k–€10m cheques to back European re-commerce and e-commerce startups, with a particular eye on UK ventures reshaping consumption and circular economy models.

📦 Verb Ventures has launched a £21M second fund to back late-seed to Series A B2B marketplaces and data platforms tackling inefficiencies in global supply chains. Its first investment: AI-powered procurement platform SkySelect.

/tech

/flywheel

/breakfast

📸 /techbrunch

Every week we use Midjourney to reimagine a TechCrunch story from the week.

This week, Warren Buffett will step down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO … coincidentally rumors circulate that Elon Musk is looking for a replacement as CEO at Tesla. I imagine if they switched roles. Captions welcome.

“My favorite holding period is forever”.

  • Caption this in comments?

And that's a wrap! Tune in for Tuesday deep-dives & Sundays breakfast roundups.

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