AMI Labs / Advanced Machine Intelligence — Founded in France on 3 December 2025, with Yann LeCun and Alexandre LeBrun at the centre of the founding story and a founding team including Laurent Solly, Pascale Fung, Saining Xie, Michael Rabbat and Min Lin. AMI is a Paris-based frontier AI lab building “world models”: AI systems designed to understand, predict and reason about the physical world, not just autocomplete the internet with confidence. Its ambition is to power safer, more controllable AI for robotics, industry, healthcare and other real-world domains where hallucinations are less “funny chatbot moment” and more “please don’t crash the machine.” In short: AMI wants AI to graduate from word games to common sense—always a bold move for software.

Anduril Industries — Founded in 2017 in the United States by Palmer Luckey, Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, Joseph Chen and Brian Schimpf, Anduril is a defense-tech company building autonomous systems for the U.S. and allied militaries. Its products span drones, counter-drone systems, undersea vehicles, surveillance towers and Lattice, the AI software platform that connects sensors, operators and machines so defense doesn’t run on 17 incompatible screens and a prayer. Anduril’s pitch is to bring Silicon Valley speed to national security: build fast, manufacture at scale, and make defense technology feel less like a Cold War procurement museum. In short: Anduril makes robots, software and very expensive flying things for people whose job descriptions include “please stop the incoming drone.”

Quantum Art — Founded in 2022 in Israel by Dr. Tal David, Dr. Amit Ben Kish and Prof. Roee Ozeri, Quantum Art is a Weizmann Institute spin-off building full-stack trapped-ion quantum computers. Its tech combines scalable hardware, multi-qubit gates and reconfigurable multi-core architectures to tackle problems in optimization, simulation, AI, finance and materials science—the kind of workloads that make normal computers quietly ask for a holiday. Based in Israel, the company wants to turn quantum computing from “beautiful physics experiment” into commercially useful machines. In short: Quantum Art is trying to make computers that think with ions, lasers and terrifyingly clever math, so the rest of us can eventually solve harder problems without pretending we understand the word “superposition.”

Vaultree — Founded in 2020 in Ireland by Ryan Lasmaili, Tilo Weigandt, Shaun McBrearty and Maxim Dressler, Vaultree is a Cork-based cybersecurity company tackling the awkward moment when encrypted data has to be decrypted to become useful. Its platform focuses on data-in-use encryption, letting organisations search, analyse, share and run AI/ML on sensitive data while keeping it encrypted, rather than briefly naked and hoping nobody notices. Vaultree’s technology targets sectors where “just trust us with the database” is not a compliance strategy: finance, healthcare, government and enterprise data teams. In short: Vaultree wants companies to use their data without exposing it—like giving secrets a bulletproof suit and still letting them attend meetings.

Sirona Technologies — Founded in Belgium in 2022 by Thoralf Gutierrez and Gauthier Limpens; the company is also publicly described as launched in January 2023. Sirona is a Brussels-based climate-tech startup building Direct Air Capture machines that remove CO₂ from the atmosphere and turn it into permanent, verifiable carbon-removal credits. Its approach is modular, scalable and engineering-heavy, with a pilot plant planned in Kenya and a wonderfully ambitious goal of reaching 1 million tons of CO₂ removed annually by 2030. In short: Sirona is trying to build giant air cleaners for the planet—because apparently asking emissions politely to leave was not working. Climate tech, but with machines, basalt, and serious “former Tesla engineer” energy.

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Marblism — Founded in 2024 in the United Kingdom by Ulric Musset; some public company profiles also list Cyril Pluche as co-founder. Marblism is a Y Combinator-backed AI startup building “AI employees” for small businesses: digital workers that handle jobs like lead generation, inbox management, social media, SEO, customer support and other repetitive tasks that humans keep promising to do “right after lunch.” Originally known for prompt-to-app generation, Marblism now focuses on giving SMEs an always-on AI team without the hiring process, payroll admin or awkward office birthday cake. In short: Marblism sells overtime-loving AI colleagues so founders can stop being CEO, marketer, SDR, support agent and mildly panicked intern all at once.

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Mistral AI — Founded in April 2023 in France by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, Mistral AI is Paris’ answer to the question: “Can Europe build frontier AI without asking Silicon Valley for permission?” The company develops open-weight and proprietary large language models, plus products like Le Chat and La Plateforme for developers, enterprises and governments. Its mission is to make frontier AI “open to all,” which sounds noble—and also like a very expensive way to spend time in data centers. Mistral is positioning itself as a full-stack European AI champion, from models to enterprise software and infrastructure. In short: less baguette-and-beret cliché, more GPUs, APIs and existential meetings about model weights.

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IFREQ — the project was created in 2023 by Philippe De Liedekerke as founder. IFREQ is a Belgian sportech platform trying to make football scouting less “my cousin saw a kid once” and more data-driven. Players join paid test sessions where their technical, physical, tactical and mental abilities are scored, creating a performance identity card for clubs and recruiters. With 20,000+ players already on the platform and 50+ having moved toward professional football, IFREQ wants hidden talent to stop being hidden just because nobody with a clipboard showed up. In short: Moneyball for football hopefuls, minus Brad Pitt, plus shin guards.

Peec AI — Founded in Germany on 13 January 2025 by Marius Meiners, Tobias Siwonia and Daniel Drabo, Peec AI is a Berlin-based marketing analytics platform for the age of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. It helps brands track how often they appear in AI-generated answers, benchmark visibility against competitors, and understand which sources make the bots love—or ignore—them. In other words: Peec AI is SEO after Google stopped being the only oracle in town. With rapid funding momentum and thousands of customers, it gives marketing teams a dashboard for the new nightmare: “Our website ranks on Google, but does the robot mention us?” Welcome to Generative Engine Optimisation, where even your brand awareness now has to negotiate with a chatbot.

Mevo — Begun in 2016 in the United States as a product line inside Livestream, and later incorporated as Mevo Inc. in Delaware in March 2019 by Max Haot, Mevo makes wireless live-streaming cameras for creators, churches, schools, sports teams and anyone who wants a multi-camera setup without a broadcast truck parked outside. Its cameras and apps let users stream, record, switch angles, zoom and control production from a phone or desktop, pushing video to platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and Vimeo. Mevo became independent after Vimeo/Livestream, then was acquired by Logitech in 2021. In short: Mevo turns “we need a professional livestream” into “put three little cameras on tripods and try not to block the Wi-Fi.”

EMAsphere — Founded in Belgium in 2015 by former CFO Hugues Vandepeutte and Didier Vankeerberghen. EMAsphere gives CFOs automated, reliable financial and operational reporting. Its SaaS platform connects to accounting, CRM, ERP and HR systems, pulls the numbers out of spreadsheet swamp, and turns them into dashboards, KPIs, consolidation, cash monitoring, budgets and forecasts. In other words: less copy-paste archaeology, more “we actually know what’s happening.” Used by over 10,000 companies, EMAsphere helps finance teams trade Excel-induced headaches for real-time control

Opendoor — Founded in 2014 in the United States by Eric Wu, Keith Rabois, Ian Wong and JD Ross, Opendoor is a digital real estate platform that helps people buy and sell homes with far less drama than the traditional “tidy the house, hide the laundry, pray for an offer” ritual. Sellers can request an offer online, sell directly to Opendoor, and choose their closing timeline; buyers can browse and purchase homes through the platform. In short, Opendoor tries to make residential real estate feel more like e-commerce—and less like a multi-month group project with strangers, paperwork, and emotional damage.

Airbnb — Founded in 2007 in the United States by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk, Airbnb began after two San Francisco roommates rented out air mattresses to conference-goers—proof that “we have no hotel rooms left” can become a global business plan. Today, Airbnb is a marketplace for stays, experiences and services, connecting guests with hosts in more than 220 countries and regions. It lets travelers book everything from city apartments to cabins, villas and “sure, why not?” treehouses, while giving hosts a way to monetize unused space. In short: Airbnb turned the spare room into an asset class, and made millions of people wonder whether their weekend away should involve a lockbox code.

June Energy — Founded in Belgium in 2015 by Vincent De Dobbeleer, Georges Lieben and Jannes Van de Maele, June Energy is an Antwerp-based digital energy assistant that helps households stop donating money to confusing utility tariffs. Its platform compares Belgian energy suppliers every month and can switch customers to a better electricity or gas contract, while products like June Switch and June Dongle help users track costs and consumption. June says it is independent, serves 20,000+ customers, and aims to make energy cheaper, greener and less headache-inducing. In short: June is the friend who reads the energy fine print so you can keep the lights on without needing a PhD in kilowatt-hours.

Bsit — Founded in 2015 in Belgium by Donatienne van Houtryve, Géraldine Biebuyck and Dimitri De Boose, Bsit is Brussels’ answer to the universal parental emergency: “We need a babysitter, preferably yesterday.” The app connects parents with trusted local babysitters, using profiles, reviews, recommendations, identity checks, booking tools and in-app payment to make childcare less of a WhatsApp panic spiral. Bsit calls itself Belgium’s biggest babysitting community, with 300,000+ registered babysitters, 3M+ babysitting hours completed, and 650,000+ ratings and reviews. In short: Bsit helps parents find reliable childcare fast, so date night, late meetings, or plain old exhaustion no longer require a logistical war room

Atai Life Sciences — Founded in Germany in 2018 by Christian Angermayer, Florian Brand, Srinivas Rao and Lars Christian Wilde, Atai Life Sciences is a clinical-stage biotech trying to give mental health treatment a badly needed software update—except with chemistry, clinical trials and far more regulatory paperwork. Now combined with Beckley Psytech as AtaiBeckley, the company develops rapid-acting, durable therapies for conditions such as treatment-resistant depression and social anxiety, including investigational psychedelic-based neuroplastogens. In plain English: Atai wants to turn compounds once associated with festival stories into rigorously tested medicines. Big mission, tiny molecules, enormous FDA binders.

Lendable — Founded in 2014 in the United Kingdom by Martin Kissinger, Victoria van Lennep, Paul Pamment and Jakob Schwarz, Lendable is a London-based fintech making consumer credit faster and less medieval. Its AI-led platform connects borrowers with institutional investors across personal loans, credit cards and car finance, using automation and data to make approvals quicker, pricing sharper and paperwork less soul-destroying. The company’s own site says the idea was simple: getting a loan should take hours, not days. In short, Lendable is trying to make borrowing money feel less like begging a bank in a fluorescent-lit branch, and more like a modern digital service.

Kraken — Founded in 2011 in the United States by Jesse Powell and Thanh Luu — with some public company profiles also crediting Michael Gronager as an early co-founder — Kraken is one of the original grown-up crypto exchanges. Born after the Mt. Gox chaos convinced Powell the industry needed better security, Kraken set out to make trading digital assets feel less like sending money into a volcano with Wi-Fi. Today, the platform offers crypto trading, staking, futures, and even stocks in some markets, serving millions of users worldwide. In short: Kraken helps people buy and trade crypto without needing a pirate map, a hardware wallet under the mattress, and three energy drinks.

Rain — Founded in 2019 in the United States by Alex Bradford, with Gilberto Garcia Jr also publicly listed as co-founder, Rain is a financial-wellness and earned-wage-access platform for employers and workers. It lets employees access wages they have already earned before payday, plus tools such as a debit account, savings, budgeting, bill reduction and financial coaching. Basically, Rain tries to make “I worked the shift, but my money is still in payroll jail” a thing of the past. Employers get a benefit that can improve retention and reduce financial stress; employees get fewer overdraft-fee horror stories. Payday, but with less medieval waiting.

Shippr — Founded in 2017 in Belgium by Romain Syed, Alexina Smet, Kevin Delval, Quentin Goossens and Harold Waterkeyn, Shippr is a Brussels-born logistics platform for professional same-day delivery. It connects businesses with vetted transport partners for everything from cargo bikes to vans and refrigerated trucks, covering use cases like retail deliveries, food, pharma, spare parts, store-to-store transfers and urgent “please arrive today or everyone panics” missions. Its platform helps companies book, track and manage deliveries without building their own mini-DHL in the basement. In short: Shippr turns messy urban logistics into something businesses can actually control—less clipboard chaos, more “your delivery is on its way.”

IVEX — Founded in November 2017 in Belgium by Mario Henrique Cruz Torres, Quentin de Clercq, Tom Holvoet and Jeremy Schuermans, IVEX builds testing and validation software for autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems. Born from KU Leuven research, the company helps carmakers and mobility players check whether smart vehicles are actually behaving safely—before they meet pedestrians, cyclists, Belgian roundabouts, or reality in general. Its tools cover scalable ADAS/AD testing, data analytics, scenario detection and trajectory checking, with the grand mission of reducing road casualties to zero. In short: IVEX is the nervous but very useful safety inspector sitting next to the self-driving car, asking, “Are we absolutely sure this is a good idea?”

ClearSpace — Founded in 2018 in Switzerland by Luc Piguet, Muriel Richard-Noca and Catherine Johnson / Perroud-Johnson, ClearSpace is an EPFL spin-off tackling one of orbit’s least glamorous problems: space junk. Now headquartered in Luxembourg, the company develops in-orbit services to remove dead satellites, extend satellite life and make space operations more sustainable. Its flagship ClearSpace-1 mission, backed by the European Space Agency, aims to prove that orbital cleanup can be a real service, not just a sci-fi intern’s job. In short: ClearSpace is building the tow truck for space—because even satellites eventually become abandoned scooters, only faster, pricier and harder to kick out of the way.

Launcher Space — Founded in 2017 in the United States by Max Haot, Launcher was a Hawthorne, California aerospace startup building rocket technology for the small-satellite era. Its work centered on the E-2 liquid rocket engine and Orbiter, a space tug / hosted-payload platform designed to move and test hardware in orbit. In 2023, Launcher was acquired by Vast, with Haot joining Vast’s leadership and the team’s engines, spacecraft know-how and manufacturing talent folded into Vast’s bigger plan for commercial space stations. In short: Launcher started by trying to make small rockets less painfully expensive, then got recruited into the “let’s build actual places to live in space” department. Tiny satellites, giant ambitions, very little room for duct tape.

Trellis Technologies — Founded in 2019 in the United States by Daniel Demetri, Trellis is a San Francisco-born insurtech platform that makes shopping for home and auto insurance less like decoding a government form in a thunderstorm. Its technology uses machine learning, real-time bidding and conversational AI to help consumers compare and switch insurance, while giving banks, fintech apps and other partners embedded insurance experiences through products like Savvy. In March 2026, Trellis was acquired by Gen Digital to plug its AI-powered insurance matching into Gen’s financial wellness marketplace. In short: Trellis helps people find better insurance without requiring three browser tabs, two headaches and a blood sacrifice to the deductible gods.

Battri — Founded in France on 30 May 2022 by Maxime Trèves, Battri is a lithium-ion battery recycling company based in Saint-Laurent-Blangy, in France’s “Battery Valley.” It collects, diagnoses, dismantles and mechanically recycles used lithium-ion batteries and production scrap, recovering critical materials like lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite. Its service also covers door-to-door logistics, compliance handling, traceability and recycling certificates, which is useful because batteries are not exactly the kind of thing you casually toss in a van and hope for the best. In short: Battri wants Europe’s electric future to come with fewer holes in the ground and fewer mystery battery piles in warehouses. Clean mobility, but with a cleanup crew.

Klarna — Founded in 2005 in Sweden by Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson, Klarna is the Stockholm fintech that made “buy now, pay later” sound less like a bad life choice and more like a checkout button. Today it is a global digital bank and flexible-payments platform, helping consumers split payments, shop through its app, earn rewards and manage purchases, while merchants use Klarna to reduce checkout friction and sell more. It listed on the NYSE in 2025 under ticker KLAR. In short: Klarna sits between shoppers, stores and card statements, trying to make payments smoother—while gently reminding everyone that “later” does, annoyingly, still arrive.

SpaceX — Founded in 2002 in the United States by Elon Musk, SpaceX is the rocket company that looked at government-grade aerospace costs and said, “What if we simply made the rockets come back?” It designs, manufactures and launches rockets and spacecraft, including Falcon, Dragon and Starship, with the stated goal of making humanity multiplanetary. Along the way, it pioneered reusable orbital boosters, delivers cargo and astronauts to space, launches satellites, and powers Starlink, its space-based internet network. In short: SpaceX sells trips to orbit, Wi-Fi from the sky, and the recurring feeling that physics is being negotiated with by a very determined engineering team. Mars remains the big dream; landing the booster without exploding remains the daily flex.

Aerospacelab — Founded in 2018 in Belgium by Benoît Deper, Aerospacelab is a Walloon “New Space” company building satellites, payloads and avionics without treating every spacecraft like a one-off museum piece. Based in Mont-Saint-Guibert, it designs, manufactures and operates satellite systems for Earth observation, telecoms and technology missions, with a big bet on vertically integrated, scalable production. It is also building a satellite megafactory in Charleroi to crank out spacecraft more like industrial products and less like artisanal orbit croissants. In short: Aerospacelab wants to make space infrastructure faster, cheaper and more European—because apparently even satellites now need a supply chain upgrade and a better production line.

xAI — Founded in March 2023 in the United States by Elon Musk, with an original AI-heavy founding team that included Igor Babuschkin, Jimmy Ba, Christian Szegedy, Yuhuai Wu, Greg Yang and others, xAI builds frontier AI models under the Grok brand. Its official mission is to build AI that helps humanity “understand the universe,” which is a charmingly modest way of saying: make a chatbot, then point it at physics, markets, coding, media generation and whatever else fits inside a data center. Today, xAI offers Grok for consumers, developers, businesses and government, plus massive compute infrastructure like Colossus. In short: xAI is Elon’s AI moonshot—except the moonshot answers questions, generates images, argues on X, and occasionally needs adult supervision.

Smovin — Legally founded on 3 March 2016 in Belgium by Michael Philippart de Foy and Jim Hees; the product is commonly described as launched/created in 2017. Smovin is a proptech SaaS platform that helps landlords, real-estate investors and property managers run rentals without living inside a spreadsheet cave. It centralizes leases, tenant data, rent tracking, payment reminders, indexation, accounting sync, communications and portfolio performance, so owners can see what is paid, late, profitable or quietly becoming a problem. Now part of Skoyen Software, Smovin manages 20,000+ properties and targets a sector still far too attached to Excel gymnastics. In short: Smovin is the calm adult in the room when rent, tenants and paperwork start forming a small rebellion.

Perlego — Founded in 2016 in the United Kingdom by Belgian founders Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis, Perlego is a London-based edtech company often described as the “Spotify for textbooks.” Its subscription digital library gives students, professionals and institutions access to over 1 million academic and professional books across 1,000+ topics, with reading online, offline via app, and study tools built in. The mission is simple: make learning materials affordable without forcing students to choose between textbooks, rent and instant noodles. Perlego works with publishers so content stays legal, searchable and fairly paid for—basically turning the textbook shelf into a cloud service, minus the back pain and the £80 “you only need chapter 3” tragedy.

Legacy — Originally launched in 2018 as a Swiss-based company by Khaled Kteily; Y Combinator later lists Legacy as founded in 2019 in the United States by Khaled Kteily and Sarah Steinle. Legacy is a digital fertility clinic focused on male reproductive health, offering at-home sperm testing, DNA-fragmentation analysis, fertility insights and sperm freezing. In other words: it lets men check and preserve their fertility without the awkward clinic waiting-room experience and the “please produce a sample now” energy. The company’s mission is to make sperm health normal, accessible and medical-grade—because family planning should not be treated as exclusively a women’s admin task. Science, logistics and tiny swimmers, finally in one box.

Passbolt — Founded in December 2016 in Luxembourg by Kevin Muller, Cédric Alfonsi and Rémy Bertot, Passbolt is an open-source password and credential manager built for teams that need collaboration, control and security without sending secrets around in Slack like it’s 2009. The platform lets organisations manage and share passwords, API keys, SSH keys, TOTPs and other sensitive credentials with end-to-end encryption, granular permissions, auditability and flexible hosting, including self-hosted or European cloud options. In short: Passbolt is the sober adult in the room when teams say, “Don’t worry, the password is in a spreadsheet somewhere.” Open source, compliance-friendly, and proudly Luxembourg-made.

Revolut — Founded in 2015 in the United Kingdom by Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko, Revolut is a financial “super app” that started by making foreign exchange less painful and grew into a one-stop shop for spending, saving, investing, transferring money, and generally making traditional banks feel like they still use fax machines. From its London origins, Revolut has expanded globally with a mission to make money management faster, cheaper, and dramatically less beige. It is banking for people who think waiting three business days is a personality flaw.