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Unit1 Studio, a UK
company producing mixed-reality avatar concerts, has secured £20 million in new
funding to expand its technology and grow its roster of avatar concert
productions. The funding includes an oversubscribed equity round led by
Balderton Capital, alongside additional financing for concerts in development. Existing backers
Mercuri, Gilston Music and artist manager Paul McGuinness also joined the round.

Unit1 is developing
technology designed to make avatar concerts easier and more economical to
produce and replicate across different venues. While productions such as ABBA
Voyage have demonstrated demand for avatar-based live experiences, the cost of
developing and relocating similar shows has limited their wider adoption.

The company says it
has now developed a way to transfer avatar concert productions between venues
more quickly and at lower cost, potentially allowing the same production to
operate in multiple locations without requiring extensive redevelopment.

Unit1’s productions
combine visual effects, CGI and live performance elements to create
mixed-reality shows featuring artists who may no longer tour or whose
performances can otherwise be difficult for audiences to experience live. The
company is targeting both newer audiences discovering music from previous
decades and established fans looking for different ways to experience artists’
work.

Barney Wragg,
founder of Unit1 Studio, said the company aims to broaden access to avatar
concerts by reducing the cost and complexity involved in developing and moving
productions between venues:

Unit1 is, and will
always be, about expanding the connection between fan and artist regardless of
time or geography. ABBA Voyage proved audiences love avatar concerts but the
development and relocation costs have meant the opportunity of avatar concerts
is not being realised. Our ability to develop these shows at a fraction of the
cost and replicate them to any location finally makes these shows a commercial
reality.

The new funding will
support Unit1’s work creating and operating mixed-reality avatar concerts, with
the production financing specifically intended to expand its roster of concerts
currently in development.

The CEO of language translation AI
scaleup DeepL has downplayed reports that the company is likely to IPO soon,
saying there are a “lot of advantages” to being a private company right now.

Speaking on the Tech.eu podcast,
Jarek Kutylowski, DeepL CEO and founder, discussed a range of issues including
European sovereignty, its acquisition of Mixhalo, its deal with legaltech Harvey, job cuts, and the fallout from its decision to use Amazon
Web Services and no longer process data exclusively on its own servers.

A report in the media last year said
that Cologne-based DeepL, which provides an AI text translation and
voice-to-voice translation service, was exploring an IPO that
could come as early as this year.

But Kutylowski played down a
suggestion that DeepL could IPO soon, pointing to the expected IPOs of OpenAI
and Anthropic as factors deterring it.

Kutylowski said: “I think right now
public markets are a pretty tricky place for AI companies and tech companies in
general.

“This year we have seen massive
shifts in the markets. I am someone who rather considers stability an important
part of a company’s development.

“I do not think that it would be an easy
space to be in the public markets as an AI company, especially with the
upcoming IPOs of the big giants in this space.

“I think there is going to be a lot
of turmoil, and there’s going to be probably a lot of collateral damage here
and there depending on which direction the market sways. I think being a
private company actually has quite a lot of advantages right now.”

Romania-founded startup FintechOS, which provides
AI and software services for banks and insurance firms, has raised $28m in equity and debt
funding from its current investors, it said today.

The 2017-founded startup, which is headquartered in
London and also has offices in Bucharest and New York, has received equity funding
from its existing investors, including Bek Ventures, IFC, Cipio Partners and
Molten Ventures, alongside a debt facility from Santander Corporate Investment
Banking.

FintechOS has raised more than $150m in total. It says it will use the funding to expand in the
US, help it win more European clients, and scale up its AI tech.

FintechOS is a B2B software firm that helps
banks and insurance firms launch and manage financial products without them
having to replace their core items, acting as a tech layer on top of banking
and insurance systems, providing AI and other tech services.

The startup said it had reached profitability in
the first half of 2026, driven by US growth, it said. Cyril Desouza, CFO, FintechOS, said: “Reaching
profitability was not an accident, it was the outcome of a deliberate,
multi-year effort to get our cost base, our margins and our delivery practice
right before we pushed harder on growth again.
Now that discipline is paying off twice over:
the business has
reached profitability, and we’ve already made the
shift back into high growth, which is exactly the combination that lets us take
on a round like this one.”

Metris Energy, an AI-native platform for managing energy assets, has raised $5 million
in a seed round led by PT1 Ventures, Octopus Ventures, AENU and Blackfinch Ventures, with participation from Plug and Play and Love Ventures. The round
brings the company’s total funding to $7.5 million.

Launched
in 2025, Metris initially focused on helping solar portfolio operators
reconcile data spread across inverters, meters, SCADA systems, CRMs,
spreadsheets and finance tools. The company has since expanded its focus,
aiming to provide a unified data layer for the wider energy sector.

Metris
is targeting the fragmented systems used by power producers to manage their
assets. As energy grids become more decentralised and revenue streams such as
flexibility, curtailment management, community energy and corporate PPAs
emerge, the data required to access and manage them is often spread across
multiple systems.

The
company’s platform brings together data from asset systems, metering, SCADA,
GIS and energy markets to create a continuously updated record of physical
energy assets. This gives asset owners a real-time view of their portfolios and
provides the underlying data for automated workflows, natural-language queries,
revenue management and AI agents.

Alongside
the funding, Metris has launched Metria AI, a new AI interface designed to
execute complex tasks that were previously handled manually by operations
teams.

Natasha Jones, founder and CEO of Metris, said the company is addressing the lack of a
unified system that allows asset owners and AI agents to view and act on energy
portfolios.

Metris
was founded on the core belief that the winners of the energy transition won’t
be the owners of the most kW of capacity, but those who can view, control and
monetise them best. There’s no unified layer that lets asset owners, or the AI
agents now entering this space, actually see and act on their portfolio. That’s
the gap we’re closing with Metris.

Metris
says it has recorded eightfold year-on-year revenue growth and now manages more
than 10,000 solar plants representing 500MW of capacity for power producers.

The company will use the new funding to
expand the platform’s agentic capabilities and extend it into wind and Combined
Heat and Power (CHP) systems. Metris also plans to expand across Europe, with a
particular focus on Germany, where it has already onboarded several new
customers.

Belgian venture capital firm NewSchool VC has
closed its first fund at €10 million to invest in early-stage B2B technology
companies. NewSchool Fund I reached its target after raising €6.1 million at
its first close last September.

The fund is backed by around 50 investors,
including six family offices such as The Millers Office, as well as
entrepreneurs from the Belgian business community, including Willem Delbaere
and Roeland Delrue of Aikido Security, Jean-Louis Van Houwe of Monizze and Luc
Coopman of Cobofisk. NewSchool founder Christophe Morbee has contributed 25 per
cent of the fund himself.

NewSchool focuses on B2B technology companies
at the pre-seed and seed stages. The fund has made 32 investments to date, with
three more in the pipeline. Around 75 per cent of its investments are in
Belgium, with the remainder spread across Germany, the Netherlands, Norway,
Spain, Switzerland, France and the UK.

Morbee founded NewSchool after several years as
an angel investor. He is also CEO of Belgian payroll and HR provider besox,
which has 110 employees and around 4,000 SME clients. NewSchool uses this
network to connect portfolio companies with potential customers.

NewSchool combines capital with support in
areas including go-to-market, sales and storytelling, with a focus on
technology companies looking to automate established industries.

Europe is an engineer’s continent, with
technically strong teams. What’s often missing is someone who takes charge of
go-to-market, sales and storytelling. That’s where we focus, alongside the
capital we provide. There’s still enormous room to automate old industries. We
see plenty of opportunity there for the years ahead,

said Morbee.

NewSchool’s portfolio includes Warren,
Spotable, Cashfeed, Ravical, Donna, Dalton, Feedelity, Alice Law and Exhibitly.
The fund has also recently invested in Swiss company Talentir and Paris-based
Outline.