🌻 Spring has sprung and so has a new name in the portfolio: Zellify. Meanwhile, there’s a packed round of portfolio news and product updates, as well as Team Connect heading out to Barcelona for the next Built By Few. Here's everything worth knowing. 👇

Funding News

Welcoming a new addition to the Connect Family 🇸🇪

Marcus and Nils are exactly the type of founders we back at Connect: high-velocity, product-obsessed, and relentlessly focused on their customers. Just 20 years old, they’re childhood best friends who’ve been building together since their early teens.Last summer, they launched Zellify and have already turned a €200K investment into close to $10M in GMV, with customers like Lifesum, Opal, Blinkist, and Teknasyon.Consumer subscription is an underserved category in venture. The data infrastructure for it is even more underserved. Zellify is building the data network that powers the next wave of consumer growth, starting with a product that gives consumer app developers full attribution and a route around App Store fees, no engineering resources required.Sitar shares more on why we led the seed here.

Portfolio Wins 🤘

Celebrating successes, product news, and launches

Aikido 🇧🇪 the Ghent team that keeps shipping

Aikido continues to set the pace. They most recently released Aikido Endpoint - a developer-first security agent designed to protect against AI-driven supply chain attacks - which addresses precisely the kind of threat traditional tooling wasn’t built to catch. Aikido also launched a native integration with Lovable, bringing automated security scanning directly into the AI app-building workflow. Additionally, the team landed in Scaling Europe’s top 50 fastest-growing startups in Europe for 2025.

Mosaico 🇮🇹 launched v0.3.0

It's only been a few months since we led the pre-seed round in Mosaico - the Rust-based data platform for Robotics and Physical AI - and Gabriele, Francesco, and Federico are not slowing down. They just launched v0.3, which introduces major structural changes and enhanced security for the platform. A cleaner, more secure architecture built to move faster.

ai-coustics 🇩🇪 dropped Quail Voice Focus 2.1

ai-coustics, the audio intelligence company that builds a software-based "reliability layer" for Voice AI, just released a major upgrade to their flagship speaker isolation model designed to make Voice AI agents more reliable. Getting AI voice agents to work well in the real world starts with clean audio and that's exactly what this release tackles. It’s clear to see they are just getting started.

Dust 🇫🇷 now connects directly to Amplitude

One more win for Dust, the enterprise AI platform that acts as an "operating system" for deploying specialised AI agents. Agents can now talk directly to Amplitude, meaning anyone can ask questions about product data in plain English and get answers, no analytics expertise required. It’s a big win for product teams. By bridging the gap between raw data and plain-English queries, Dust is essentially removing the "SQL tax" that often slows down decision-making.

TrueLaye  🇬🇧 is closing the missing piece of Pay by Bank

For years, recurring payments were the gap that held Pay by Bank back from full mainstream adoption and Bank on File is finally closing it. The full launch is just around the corner: Wave 1 covers utility payments, telco, train ticketing and regulated financial services, with Wave 2 - including one-click checkout - already in the works. TrueLayer also earned Great Place to Work certification in Ireland, the UK, and Italy, showing they’re building both a great product and a great culture at the same time.

Connect Community  🧳

Connect on Tour

Built By Few is Barcelona Bound 🇪🇸‍

You’ve seen us in Ghent and you’ve seen us in Milan. Next, we’re heading to Barcelona, bringing together more of Europe’s most thoughtful product founders and builders for our third Built By Few of 2026. oining us as speakers at the event are builders from Typeform, Supersonik, and Pinterest - founders and operators with strong opinions, deep user obsession, and the ambition to build at real scale.

To express your interest in joining us in Barcelona, you can do so here.

Sitar at Newton Venture Program: Backing founders before the outcome is obvious 🔥

Sitar recently joined the Newton Venture Program for a fireside chat.

Her central conviction: great investing isn't about frameworks but about spending real time with founders, not decks, because the differences between them are radical. On Founder-Market Fit, her framing was precise: it's not sector experience, it's the strength of a founder's hypothesis on the problem.

She closed with two challenges worth sitting with - don't let AI replace your thinking, and if you're not comfortable with uncertainty, you're in the wrong industry. Check out more of her takes and a deeper dive into the discussion.

AI Socratic comes to London - hosted at Connect HQ 💡

For the first time, AI Socratic - a global community of top-tier AI engineers, researchers, and founders working on frontier AI - came to London. We hosted them at Connect HQ last week.

They brought together some of the best minds in London’s AI scene for an evening of deep discussion: frontier models, cutting-edge research, coding agents, AGI, robotics, philosophy, geopolitics, and more.

The kind of room we always want to be in. An overview of that discussion can be found here.

A team moment worth mentioning 💪‍

After a fast-paced Q1, we came together for some well-earned downtime with dinner and good company. We're feeling energised and excited for what's to come for Team Connect and our community of product founders throughout the rest of 2026.

P.S.

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

📺 Watching: Project Hail Mary at the Cinema

🎧 Listening: Ben Horowitz On What Makes a Great Founder by Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan

📚 Reading: All That Glitters by Orlando Whitfield