Kertos bets the EU AI Act makes AI-native compliance a must-buy; €14M Series A
Munich's Kertos raised €14M led by Portage, betting Europe's AI Act and NIS2 push firms to automate compliance with AI agents.
Lire le casstartups.centerUNE ARCHIVE CASESTUDIES.CHAT
Chaque entreprise
a un début.
Comment les entreprises ont démarré, trouvé leur place et affronté la suite.
Toutes les archives, dans l’appLes articles sont disponibles en anglais et en chinois simplifié. Les titres et textes conservent leur langue de publication.
Cas publiés
2,000 CAS PUBLIÉS · MIS À JOUR RÉGULIÈREMENTEmalex raised $250M for a Phase 3 Tourette drug trial as late-stage funding dried up
Amid an 80% funding gap between early- and late-stage biotech, Emalex closed a $250M Series D to run one of the field's largest Tourette syndrome drug trials.
Lire le casTerraform Industries' Terraformer makes the first synthetic natural gas from air
Casey Handmer's startup ran sunlight, air and water through a two-container rig to make its first pipeline-grade synthetic gas, and utilities agreed to buy it.
Lire le casVroom's no-lot used-car bet ended when funding dried up in 2024
Vroom bet customers would buy used cars entirely online; after failing to raise capital it axed 90% of staff and wound down e-commerce in January 2024.
Lire le casTBPN's live-tech-show bet: OpenAI buys 'SportsCenter for Silicon Valley'
TBPN bet a daily three-hour tech livestream could become Silicon Valley's default media home; OpenAI acquired the show in April 2026 to shape the AI narrative.
Lire le casBuddy.ai raises an $11M seed after 186 investor meetings for its kids' AI English tutor
Ivan Crewkov, whose smart speaker died when Amazon launched Echo, built Buddy.ai, a child-facing AI tutor, and raised $11M led by gaming fund BITKRAFT in 2024.
Lire le casHaitiPay builds M-Pesa for Haiti but loses to telecom-backed MonCash
Pascale Elie launched Haiti's first fintech after the 2010 earthquake, but regulatory capture by Digicel/Voilà left HaitiPay with 100K users vs MonCash's 1.5M.
Lire le casAstranis' small-GEO bet: from a crippled first satellite to a $1B+ commercial backlog
Astranis bet small, cheap GEO satellites built at factory pace would beat giant bespoke birds; its first failed on orbit, yet the backlog now tops $1B.
Lire le casCrewline bets contractors will retrofit rollers into self-driving machines
EF-backed Crewline turns vibratory rollers self-driving in an hour; $7.1M seed from Initialized and Nebular, Austin downtime 6h to under 1h.
Lire le casCorti's emergency-call AI bet: from Copenhagen's 112 lines to 100M patients a year
Copenhagen's Corti trained AI on 112 calls to hear cardiac arrest dispatchers missed, then became the copilot inside 100M patient encounters a year.
Lire le casTrella's freight bet: Uber alumni match MENAP shippers and truckers, $42M led by Maersk
Four ex-Uber, Vezeeta and OLX operators built a Cairo trucking marketplace and won a $42M round led by Maersk's venture arm.
Lire le casE2B bets agents need their own cloud: $32M raised, 88% of Fortune 100 signed up
Czech duo open-sourced sandboxed cloud computers for AI agents, raised $32M, and claim 88% of the Fortune 100 signed up.
Lire le casPika bets viral Discord-first AI video wins; 500K users, $135M, then Sora arrives
Two Stanford PhD dropouts built a consumer AI video tool in Discord; 500K members in 4 months, $135M raised.
Lire le casRevalia Bio raises $14.5M betting that revived human organs beat animal trials
A Yale spinout runs drug trials on revived donor organs instead of animal models, and signed two top-10 pharma customers before its seed round closed.
Lire le casXurya bets zero-capex rooftop solar wins Indonesia; $55M round, 300 projects
Indonesia's Xurya rents rooftop solar to factories and malls with no upfront cost; a US$55M Norfund-led round (2024) and 300+ projects by end-2025.
Lire le casWooCommerce: free-plugin bet powered ~30% of online stores, sold to Automattic
WooThemes gave away an e-commerce plugin, sold themes and extensions around it, and grew it to millions of downloads before Automattic's 2015 buyout.
Lire le casIdeogram bets X virality on AI text rendering: 90K users in a week, $80M Series A
Ex-Google Brain founders ship an image model that renders legible text; the #ideogram tag floods X, 90K users in a week, $80M Series A.
Lire le casSpeak raises $78M at a $1B valuation to take speaking-first AI tutoring to Spanish, French
Six months after a $500M-valuation extension, Speak raised $78M led by Accel, choosing efficacy over gamification and not building a test-prep product.
Lire le casUalá's financial-inclusion bet: prepaid card 2017 to $3.2B LatAm digital bank
Barbieri's free prepaid card pulled Argentina's unbanked into finance; by 2026 Ualá served 11M clients in three countries, valued at $3.2B.
Lire le casAlbedo's Clarity-1 proves satellites can live and image in very low Earth orbit
Albedo flew the first commercial VLEO satellite, validating a 10 cm imaging chain once reserved for billion-dollar government systems.
Lire le cas