Verve Ventures

Axelera AI has launched Europa, its next-generation AI Processing Unit (AIPU) built for physical AI and enterprise AI workloads. Enterprise AI compute is running into hard limits. Rising cloud costs, strict power budgets and data sovereignty requirements are pushing organizations to run persistent inference on infrastructure they control. Europa is designed for exactly that. It is available as standalone silicon, as a half-height PCIe card (Axelera Edge 232p) and as a full-height PCIe card (Axelera Server 250p). Alongside the chip, Axelera is introducing AxeleraScript (AxScript), a Python-based domain-specific language. It gives developers kernel-level programmability at full performance. Most AI accelerators only support a fixed list of models. AxScript removes that limit and supports custom networks, proprietary operators and new architectures across CNNs, LLMs and VLMs. 👉 Europa delivers up to 6x higher energy efficiency (tokens/s/watt) than GPU-based alternatives, enabling high-performance inference within real-world power and thermal limits. 👉 It is backed by over 30 customers and partners and ships in fully validated systems from Dell Technologies (XE5) and Supermicro (111AD), with compatibility across HPE, Lenovo, 2CRSi, Advantech, Axiomtek and SECO infrastructure. 👉 Using AxScript with AI assistance, a single engineer ported the Qwen3.5 model in one day. We are proud to have backed Axelera AI since 2023, in line with our investment thesis in Future of Computing & AI. Europa shows what European silicon can deliver when efficiency, sovereignty and developer access are designed in from the start. Congratulations to the Axelera AI team on this launch. #AxeleraAI #Europa #AIInference #EdgeAI #AIHardware #Semiconductors #DeepTech #VentureCapital

Piomic Medical has closed a USD 25 million growth financing, led by a CHF 10 million commitment from Swisscanto (CH) Private Equity Switzerland Growth II, the private equity growth fund of Zürcher Kantonalbank's asset management arm. Chronic, hard-to-heal wounds are a growing clinical and economic burden as populations age, and wound care remains one of medtech's most underinvested categories. Piomic's COMS® platform is a device-based therapy system built to close that gap. Its lead product, the COMS® One Therapy System, is now advancing through MAVERICKS, among the most comprehensive IDE pivotal trials to date in wound care, alongside the investigator-initiated NAZARÉ study in Europe. 👉 The round is Swisscanto's first-ever medtech investment, backed by a CHF 10 million lead commitment within the USD 25 million raise. 👉 COMS® One holds FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and, under the newly finalized CMS FY 2027 IPPS rule, keeps eligibility for the Alternative Pathway to transitional Medicare payment, a rare position among wound care technologies. 👉 Andy Weymann, MD, former Chief Medical Officer of Smith+Nephew, joins the board as an observer, adding senior clinical and commercial experience as Piomic moves toward US approval. We are proud to have backed Piomic Medical since 2022, aligned with our investment thesis in Frontiers in Health & Biotech. Congratulations to the entire Piomic team, and welcome to Andy Weymann and new investors. #Piomic #COMS #WoundCare #MedTech #RegenerativeMedTech #BreakthroughDevice #DeepTech

TURN2X has closed a €20 million Series A to scale its e-Methane technology across Europe. TURN2X converts renewable electricity into e-Methane, a synthetic drop-in replacement for fossil gas. It runs through the pipelines and furnaces Europe already has, no new infrastructure required. The round was led by Antwerpen Ventures, with continued backing from LEA Partners, First Momentum Ventures and Verve Ventures. Industry veterans joined as angels, including the former COO of Linde Engineering, the former head of project finance at Stegra, and the former CEO of one of Europe's largest gas grid operators. 👉 Fossil gas prices have more than doubled in Europe, and storage levels sit at their lowest for this time of year on record. Europe needs a sovereign gas supply. 👉 Recent attacks on energy infrastructure in Germany show why TURN2X plants are built as resilience cells: wind and solar power e-Methane production and storage that keeps running when the grid doesn't. 👉 Rising grid fees and renewable volatility demand a way to store and move large energy volumes. Batteries handle short-term storage well, while e-Methane is built for long durations and long distances. With this round, TURN2X will roll out commercial plants across Spain and further geographies, and keep driving down the production cost of e-Methane. We are proud to have backed TURN2X since 2023, aligned with our investment thesis in Resilience in Energy and Resources. Congratulations to the entire TURN2X team, and thank you to the customers, partners and investors behind this round. #TURN2X #eMethane #EnergySecurity #EnergyResilience #CleanEnergy #DeepTech

Congratulations to our portfolio company Atana Elements on winning the Exploration Excellence award at the Mining Magazine Awards 2026. The energy transition runs on critical minerals. But discovery of developable resources has been declining for years, even as demand accelerates. Atana Elements takes a different approach. They apply modern AI/ML workflows alongside subsurface techniques from the forefront of oil & gas, brought over to critical mineral exploration. The result. Discovery and advancement of the Salar de Jama lithium project in Argentina, identified, explored and monetized in under 3 years. That is 2 to 3x faster than what is common in the rest of the industry. The judges called it a major lithium exploration success and an innovative and exciting approach. This award is recognition for the team at Atana Elements. It is also the industry acknowledging where exploration is heading. Strong company this year too. Anglo American took home Surface Mining Excellence. Fortescue won Safety Excellence. We have backed Atana Elements since 2026 as part of our focus on resilience in energy and resources. #Mining #Exploration #CriticalMinerals #Argentina #MineralExploration #Resources #DeepTech #VentureCapital

Lexroom has acquired Query Juriste in France and Praven Intelekt in Bulgaria. The moves bring Lexroom to five European markets: Italy, Germany, Spain, France, and Bulgaria. Legal AI is jurisdiction-specific. Generic language models struggle across legal systems built on distinct legislation, case law, and professional workflows. Lexroom's answer was not to translate one product into new markets, but to acquire two teams that already had the trust of local lawyers. Query Juriste connects lawyers to millions of French and European legal documents. Praven Intelekt built Bulgaria's first specialized legal AI platform, giving Lexroom its first presence in Central and Eastern Europe. Both founding teams stay on to lead local growth. Etienne Le Guay, Query Juriste's co-founder, now leads Lexroom's French operations. Siyanna Lilova, Praven Intelekt's co-founder, becomes Head of Central and Eastern Europe. 👉 The acquisitions bring Lexroom to five countries, continuing its pace of one new market launched per quarter. 👉 Query Juriste connects Lexroom to more than 5 million French and European legal documents, already used daily by around 1,000 legal professionals across roughly 300 law firms. 👉 Praven Intelekt adds 900+ subscribed law firms in Bulgaria, and Lexroom's combined platform now serves 20,000+ law firms and legal professionals, connected to more than 13 million legal sources. This aligns with our Future of Computing & AI investment thesis. We are proud to have backed Lexroom since 2025, and congratulate the Lexroom, Query Juriste, and Praven Intelekt teams on building the legal infrastructure Europe needs, one jurisdiction at a time. #LegalTech #LegalAI #ArtificialIntelligence #VentureCapital #DeepTech #Europe #Lexroom #FutureOfComputing@

Case45's AI cancer biomarkers were just validated in two studies featured on the cover of The Lancet Oncology. Case45 is a Verve portfolio company since 2024. Together, the two studies cover 5,880 patients across nine phase III randomized trials in early breast cancer. Doctors currently decide how aggressively to treat a breast cancer patient largely from a pathologist's manual read of a biopsy slide, plus a handful of standard tests. That leaves a lot of information about how the tumor and the patient's immune system are interacting on the table, and it means some patients end up getting more, or less, treatment than they actually need. Case45's AI reads the same biopsy images hospitals already produce. No new tests, no new equipment. It analyzes more than a million cells per slide to map how many immune cells are present in and around the tumor, then turns that map into a prediction of how the cancer is likely to behave and which patients benefit most from a given treatment. 👉 Case45's model was never trained, fine-tuned, or threshold-optimized on a single patient from any of the nine trials, the strictest test of whether an AI prediction actually holds up on patients it has never encountered before. 👉 In the 4,262-patient APHINITY trial, the AI reclassified 11.6% of tumors that manual scoring had called low risk. Those patients turned out to benefit far more from an added therapy, with the five-year survival gap between treated and untreated patients widening to 92.5% vs. 87.5%. 👉 A separate result from the 262-patient NSABP B-41 trial showed the same kind of AI signal also predicts which patients respond to treatment given before surgery, not only after it. We are proud to have backed Case45 since 2024, aligned with our investment thesis in Frontiers in Health & Biotech. Two Lancet Oncology publications, including a cover feature, are a rare form of validation for an AI diagnostic. Congratulations to the Case45 team and to every trial investigator and patient whose data made this result possible. #DigitalHealth #Oncology #PrecisionMedicine #ArtificialIntelligence #CancerResearch #HealthBio #DeepTech

Update on Verve's investment thesis by Lorenzo Fabritius, Senior Investment Associate of Resilience in Energy & Resources Investment.   2 Sept 2026, 12:00 - Register to receive the webinar recording! Link in first comment.

Metafuels has opened the world's first demonstration plant for its Aerobrew methanol-to-jet technology, at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villigen, Switzerland. Metafuels is a Verve portfolio company since 2024. Aviation is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize. Sustainable Aviation Fuel is one of the most important levers to cut CO₂ emissions in the years ahead. The technology exists. The real challenge is making it available at industrial scale. Metafuels built Aerobrew to close that gap. The Swiss SAF technology company converts renewable methanol, produced from green hydrogen and captured CO2, into drop-in synthetic jet fuel. It works with existing aircraft, engines and airport infrastructure, no new fleets or fueling systems required. 👉 This is the world's first methanol-to-jet demonstration plant of its kind, now running under real operating conditions in partnership with PSI. 👉 Earlier this year, Swiss International Air Lines and Lufthansa Group partnered with Metafuels to support the development and market introduction of its technology. 👉 The next milestone is Turbe, Metafuels' planned commercial-scale plant at the Port of Rotterdam, aimed at bringing e-SAF to industrial production. "Opening this plant is the moment our technology moves from development into operation," said Metafuels CEO Saurabh KAPOOR. "Achieving this together with PSI shows what is possible when world-class research and entrepreneurship pull in the same direction." This opening shows what can happen when aviation, science and entrepreneurship come together, and it highlights the role Switzerland's innovation ecosystem plays in shaping the future of flight. We are proud to have backed Metafuels since 2024, aligned with our investment thesis in resilient energy and resources. Congratulations to the entire Metafuels team on this important milestone. #Metafuels #SAF #SustainableAviationFuel #ClimateTech #DeepTech #Aviation #CleanEnergy

bp has used Flyability's Elios 3 drone to inspect its offshore platforms since 2023. Flyability is a Verve portfolio company since 2021. Offshore oil and gas assets need constant checks of tanks, risers and other confined spaces. Traditionally, that means sending workers into environments with limited oxygen, at height or over open water. Flyability builds the Elios 3 to handle it differently. The Lausanne-based scale-up wraps the drone in a collision-tolerant cage so it can fly directly into cluttered, hazardous industrial spaces. No human ever has to enter. Pilots operate it safely from the deck. 👉 Since 2023, the Elios 3 has saved BP over 1,700 hours of confined space work. Fewer hours in confined spaces means fewer workers exposed to injury risk. 👉 The Elios 3 is now used by 8 of the 10 largest oil and gas producers, including bp, Shell and Chevron. That is broad validation in an industry with some of the toughest safety and reliability requirements anywhere. 👉 Its cage lets the drone inspect tanks, risers and platform structures that scaffolding or rope access take days to reach. Offshore drone inspections typically run in hours instead of the 3 to 7 days a manual crew needs. We have backed Flyability since 2021, aligned with our thesis in industrial tech and robotics that take people out of harm's way. BP's continued use of the Elios 3 years into the relationship is what durable operational adoption looks like in a demanding industry. #Flyability #ElioS3 #IndustrialTech #Robotics #OilAndGas #OffshoreSafety #DeepTech 

Solar deployment and farmland are increasingly in competition for the same land. Insolight's translucent, adjustable photovoltaic modules solve this directly. Crops continue growing underneath the panels while the installation generates power, and the optical layer can be adjusted to manage light reaching the plants below. This lets farmers add a second income stream without giving up productive use of their land. The installation in Piemonte, Italy covers 3 hectares and 2.1 MWp of installed capacity, one of the larger agrivoltaic sites Insolight has delivered to date. The system was built with a full partner network, including Axial Structural Solutions, STP PROGETTI, JA Solar Europe and INDUTEC INSTALACIONES Y ENERGÍA, showing the model scales beyond a single pilot site. We have backed Insolight since its Seed round in 2017. This aligns with our climate and deep tech investment thesis, backing infrastructure that lets renewable energy expansion and food production grow together rather than compete for land. Congratulations to the Insolight team and all partners involved. #Agrivoltaics #AgriPV #SolarEnergy #RenewableEnergy #SustainableAgriculture #EnergyTransition #DeepTech