It’s been a jam-packed few weeks for Team Connect, most recently hosting Built By Few in Milan, gathering some of Italy and Europe’s best product founders and minds in one room. We’ll dig into that further below 👇.

In the meantime, it’s been a busy time for Connect’s portfolio with new product launches from TrueLayer, Aikido and Hopkins - to name a few. We’ve got plenty to cover, so let’s dive in!

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Built by Few: Milan

Lessons from Italy's Top Product Founders 🇮🇹

Built By Few hit the road again, this time to Milan. We gathered with some of Italy’s top product thinkers, including founders we backed at their earliest stages: Luca Martinetti (TrueLayer), Carlo Gualandri (Soldo), Gabriele Lini (Mosaico), and, from outside of Connect’s portfolio, a true Italian product legend - Arduino’s Massimo Banzi. You can check out our short recap video here.

Each shared their journey - how they experimented, iterated, and what it takes to build enduring, user-loved products from Europe. You can dig into more of their content here. And finally, of course, we closed the event with antipasti and aperitivo in true Milanese style 🫒🍷.

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Portfolio Wins 🤘

Celebrating success

Aikido 🇧🇪 launched ‘Aikido Infinite’: Self-securing software

When recently announcing their Series B, Aikido made a promise that the next chapter would be about self-securing software. They’ve delivered on that promise, introducing Aikido Infinite: software that protects itself as it’s built and released. And, of course, it wouldn’t be an Aikido launch without co-founder, Roeland Delrue, starring in a Matrix-style video. At the same time, Aikido was named one of VivaTech’s Top 100 Rising European Startups of 2026.

TrueLayer 🇬🇧 announced it’s now on Amazon and eBay

Pay by Bank is moving from being a fintech conversation to everyday consumer behaviour - that’s when real adoption usually begins. TrueLayer launched on some of the biggest global merchants such as Amazon and eBay, and was further propelled into the everyday consumer narrative with the BBC covering the changing way that people are paying online via TrueLayer. In the meantime, they also officially completed the acquisition of Zimpler, expanding their Pay by Bank network across the Nordics.

Hopkins 🇩🇪 launched Caseflow, Agentic software infrastructure to serve every lawyer

We backed Hopkins at Seed and, five years later, Hopkins is now the largest independent B2C law firm in Germany. Last week they opened up their brilliant agentic software infrastructure to serve every lawyer: waitlist open now here. Hopkins was also named in the 2026 Financial Times fastest-growing companies.

ai-coustics 🇩🇪 native integration inside LiveKit

ai-coustics launched the native integration inside LiveKit, bringing audio intelligence directly into the real-time stack. The launch event took place in San Francisco and brought together many builders shaping the future of voice AI. We backed ai-coustics from day zero, so it’s great to see them execute on their mission to become the audio intelligence layer for voice AI.

Dust 🇫🇷 made Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.6 available in Product Update 22

Through its latest product update, Dust has introduced Anthropic’s latest models into its Agent Builder, enabling faster reasoning, improved accuracy, and more capable agents. Alongside Aikido and Truelayer, Dust was another Connect company to be named on VivaTech’s Top 100 Rising European Startups of 2026.

Plain 🇬🇧 introduced ‘Bring your own agent’

Plain is going agentic with its AI suite by leveraging its superior infrastructure. Teams can now connect any third-party AI agent through its API. Founder & CEO, Simon Rohrbach, explains why they have built Plain to be programmable and why that bet is paying off here.

Ogment AI🇨🇭Your infrastructure, your sovereignty

MCP is becoming the universal connector between AI and business systems. Ogment is how enterprises get there, with governance built in from day one. Having led their pre-seed, we are pleased to see Ogment releasing its new platform for governed MCP infrastructure.

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Connect Community  🧳

Connect on Tour

Back in Belgium for Supernova🇧🇪

Rory and Sitar were in Antwerp this week, as part of the Supernova conference, to connect with local product builders from Belgium and the wider ecosystem.

While in town we co-hosted two events with friends:

#1 Supernova Pre-Drinks with Pitchdrive, Frontline, AWS
#2 Investor Breakfast with Peak & Alstin Capital

If you know anything about Connect, then you’ll know we were already big fans of the Belgian startup ecosystem (Aikido and Accountable to name a couple 😉).

Sitar joined Mike Butcher at the inaugural Pathfounders event 🎤

Sitar joined a panel at the inaugural Pathfounders event. Mike Butcher invited Sitar - OG of the venture capital scene in Europe (his words, not ours) - to dive into a panel discussion on AI, power, and the road to 2026. Check out the recap here.

Built By Few: Rest of 2026

With Milan and Ghent under our belt so far, there’s plenty more to come in 2026.

We’ll be back on the road soon and our flagship event, bringing together 250+ product leaders from across Europe, will take place in London later this year.

To express your interest in both the London event and also our additional satellite events across Europe, please use the link here.

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P.S.

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

📺 Watching: Shrinking on Apple TV

🎧 Listening: Uncapped #41 | The Benchmark Partnership by Jack Altman

📚 Reading: 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History - and How It Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin