It’s been a full and energising couple of months at Connect - from our AGM and Founder Retreat to backing new Product Founders and celebrating big moments across the portfolio. We also welcomed two new team members: Claire, our new Head of Marketing, and Rosie, our Operations Manager - hey Claire and Rosie 👋.

Funding news 👊

Welcoming two new investments

Leading Ewake’s 🇫🇷 €2M pre-seed round - an engineer’s new best friend

‍Meet Ewake - their AI agents work alongside dev teams to predict, prevent, and resolve production issues before chaos hits. We led a €2M pre-seed round to back Poone Mokari and Omid Gosha’s vision for always-on reliability and a future where engineers spend more time building and less time firefighting.Pietro shares why we partnered with Ewake on their mission here.

Leading Nexcade’s 🇬🇧 $2.5M pre-seed round - built for the people who keep global trade moving
We partnered with Dan Bailey and Tasho Kjosev to build Nexcade, an AI automation platform helping the teams who keep global trade moving work faster, smarter, and more profitably. Nexcade’s multi-agent system tackles the messy, exception-heavy workflows freight forwarders face every day - automating quotes, bookings, and communications so teams can focus on high-value work. In an industry defined by complexity, Nexcade brings clarity, speed, and margin back to the heart of freight. Find out more from Rory about our partnership with Nexcade.

Portfolio Wins 🤘

Celebrating success

Aikido 🇧🇪 🇺🇸 Top rankings and a leap across the pond

It’s been a busy time for our friends at Aikido, being ranked #1 in TechRound’s Top 40 Cybersecurity Companies of 2025, being ranked as the second-fastest growing company in Europe on Sifted’s Future 50 Leaderboard, making Accel’s list of Top 100 European AI companies, as well as announcing an office opening in San Francisco with a true ‘Silicon Valley’ style welcome.

TrueLayer 🇬🇧 acquired Zimpler

TrueLayer announced the acquisition of Zimpler, creating a European Pay by Bank powerhouse. The acquisition further strengthens TrueLayer as a formidable force in the European payments industry and cements its position as Europe’s Pay by Bank category leader.

Dust 🇫🇷 Made the rising star lists

Alongside great new customers and accelerating revenue growth, Dust also joined Aikido on Accel’s list of Top 100 European AI companies, as well as being listed at 29 on Sifted’s 100 Rising AI Startups in Europe for 2025. Safe to say: this dust isn’t settling.

Hopkins 🇩🇪 One of Europe’s fastest-growing startups

Hopkins was named on the Sifted 250, which takes readers on a tour of Europe’s 250 fastest-growing startups. The report ranks by revenue growth over the latest three financial years. Congratulations to Hopkins.

Built by Few 👷

Product news and launches

ai-coustics 🇩🇪 now available on Hugging Face

ai-coustics can now be found on Hugging Face, making its speech enhancement models easily accessible for developers and researchers to test, experiment, and integrate into their own workflows.

Aikido 🇧🇪 Attack: Introducing the future of pentesting

Aikido’s new Aikido Attack brings autonomous AI agents to security testing, delivering human-level insight at machine speed. Continuous, on-demand, and built for developers - the way it should be!

Plain 🇬🇧 launched four AI features built to automate support

Plain is unveiling four AI features designed to reduce escalations, speed up resolutions, and give teams more space to focus on the work only humans can do: Cursor Lookup for code-accurate answers, Ari for dependable automation, Sidekick as an inbox co-pilot, and Insights for clear, actionable themes.

Typeform 🇪🇸 rolls out AI engagement platform to turn forms into workflows

Typeform launched an AI-powered engagement platform that unifies form creation, automation, and analytics. It helps SMBs move from responses to real actions in minutes - not days.

Connect Community  🧳

Connect on Tour

disConnect: Founder Retreat 2025 🌤️🌴

At the end of October, we hosted our disConnect Retreat just outside Barcelona - three days of reflection, connection, and learnings with founders from across our community. Focused on mindset, self-awareness, and authentic leadership, the retreat gave founders space to reset, recharge, and return with renewed clarity and conviction. 😌

‍Sitar on Stage 🎤

Last month, Sitar spoke at the CultTech Association Summit, spotlighting the rise of creative tech and the new generation of product-driven founders redefining how culture is created, consumed, and monetised. She followed this a few weeks later at the HubSpot AI Summit, joining a panel on early-stage AI investing to explore funding strategies, technical diligence, and what helps founders stand out. 💡

Where else have we been? ✈️

We’ve been busy bees so far this quarter. Claire co-hosted the European VC Platform Summit in Berlin 🇩🇪, Rory joined Lanes & Planes at Oktoberfest (lederhosen included) 🍻, Pietro caught up with product founders such as TrueLayer’s Luca Martinetti and Mosaico’s Gabriele Lini at Italian Tech Week 🇮🇹 and, finally, we just got back from a packed and productive week at Slush. 🇫🇮

Firm Update ✨

What’s new at Connect?

‍Two new team members

Amid all the action, we welcomed Claire and Rosie to the Connect Family! Rosie will be heading up our operations and Claire will be leading our marketing efforts. Pietro shares more about why the role of marketing is key for ensuring founders know exactly who we are, what we stand for, and what it’s like to work with us from day one.

P.S.

Here’s what to save offline for your next flight, drive, or quiet time:

📺 Watching: PLUR1BUS on Apple TV

🎧 Listening: AGI Is Still A Decade Away by Andrej Karpathy

📚 Reading: Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang