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Startup Funding Recap August 7 2026: AI, Climate, and Deep Tech

Climate and Clean Energy

The largest raise of the day came from the clean energy and electrification space, reflecting continued investor appetite for infrastructure-scale solutions.

  • Chargepoly (Aix-en-Provence, France): $25M, led by Meridiam through its Meridiam Green Impact Growth Fund, with participation from Fideve Groupe. The company specialises in electrification of heavy-duty and commercial vehicle fleets.
  • Naked Energy (Crawley, UK): $11M to fund a new UK solar-thermal manufacturing facility, led by Great British Energy through its Energy Engineered in Britain program. The facility is expected to create up to 140 jobs.
  • Mitti Labs: $10M Series A, led by Aramco Ventures. The company plans to expand its footprint in India and launch greenfield projects in the Philippines and Indonesia.

Seed and Pre-Seed Rounds

Early-stage activity was robust, with founders raising capital across spatial computing, AI infrastructure, and healthcare verticals.

  • Vangrid (Netherlands): $9M seed to build a decentralised spatial intelligence network designed to run on smartphones, targeting the Physical AI market. No lead investor disclosed.
  • Inevitable AI Group (IAIG): $6M pre-seed, led by Aleph. The AI-native venture studio, founded by Nimrod Lehavi and Ofer Bar-Or, is building and launching dozens of AI-native SaaS businesses.
  • Relu (Leuven, Belgium): $2M strategic investment from Dental Innovation Alliance (DIA), a North Carolina-based VC focused on dental and multi-site healthcare. Relu automates dental design and planning workflows for dental labs and plans to use the capital to accelerate US expansion.

Deep Tech and Hardware

Several hardware-oriented startups closed rounds aimed at commercialising proprietary sensor and imaging architectures.

  • SeeTrue Technologies (Joensuu, Finland): $2M round led by ZEISS Ventures, with participation from Superhero Capital and North Karelia Growth Fund (managed by Redstone Nordics). The company is commercialising an ultra-low-power eye-sensing architecture targeting next-generation eye-tracking applications.

Context and Trends

Today's funding activity reinforces a few durable themes. Clean energy infrastructure, particularly around electrification of commercial transport and solar-thermal manufacturing, continued to attract institutional and government-backed capital. The presence of Great British Energy and Meridiam as lead investors signals that public-private co-investment in climate hardware is becoming a standard mechanism rather than an exception.

On the software side, the pre-seed raise by Inevitable AI Group reflects a broader structural bet: that the falling cost of building software, driven by AI tooling, makes the venture studio model more capital-efficient than ever. Pairing that with Vangrid's spatial intelligence seed round, it is clear that investors are placing early chips on the infrastructure layer of Physical AI before clear winners have emerged.

The day also highlighted geographic breadth. Significant rounds landed in France, Finland, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, and South Asia, suggesting that early-stage deal flow outside traditional hubs such as London and Berlin remains healthy heading into the second half of 2026.

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