The Ground A laser — A drone game-changer?

London-based startup Nous has raised $17 million to expand internationally, as nearly 250,000 UK households now use its AI agent to manage bills, switch providers and automate everyday household administration. Pathfounders Podcast host Mike Butcher spoke to CEO and founder Greg Marsh to get the download.To get first access to Pathfounders content, join Pathfounders Network: pathfounders.com/network

Can this startup kill hallucinations and agentic overreach? London-based Metis Reasoning — the startup founded by Thore Graepel, another DeepMind alumnus — will base itself in the Kings Cross AI cluster and is said to be raising a large VC funding round. He spoke to Pathfounders editor Mike Butcher about his plans. See also our story on Pathfounders.

Eileen Burbidge is one of the best-known figures in UK venture capital. As a co-founder of Passion Capital, she backed companies including Monzo, GoCardless and Marshmallow, after an earlier career spanning Apple, Yahoo and Skype. Now she’s starting again with NFG, her new VC vehicle targeting £20 million to invest at the earliest stages. She spoke to Pathfounders’ editor Mike Butcher. 

Swedish healthtech startup Tandem Health has raised $100 million in Series B funding, led by EQT’s €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund, taking its total funding to $160 million. Tandem started with an AI scribe designed to take the administrative burden off doctors. But its ambitions are now much bigger: it wants to build an AI-native operating system for healthcare. @Pathfounders Mike Butcher spoke to Dr Katie Baker, Tandem Health’s Director for the UK and Ireland and a former NHS GP.

Mistral just raised €3 billion in a Series D, valuing it at more than €21 billion, the largest equity fundraising ever completed by a European technology company.With this, Mistral still intends to build frontier AI models, but will also invest heavily in compute, infrastructure and sovereign AI, positioning itself as an alternative for governments and companies that want more control over their technology and their data.So is Mistral still trying to become Europe’s OpenAI or Anthropic, taking a leaf out of the Chinese playbook, or is it building something potentially much more defensible in the long term?To unpack the round, the valuation, and what it means for the future, Paul Murphy, Mistral’s earliest investor at Lightspeed, spoke to Pathfounders Editor, Mike Butcher. P.S. Apply now to join the Pathfounders Network of vetted founders, investors and key players in Europe, plus first access to exclusive content. Launching soon!https://pathfounders.com/network

Nine-month old German defence-tech startup Ground A has raised a €9.1 million pre-seed round to for its laser-based counter-drone system. Pathfounders editor Mike Butcher speaks to co-founder and CEO Dr Tobias Brune about how this device could change the battlefield.

The energy transition depends on scarce critical minerals used in batteries, hydrogen electrolysers, solar panels and electronics. Oxford, UK-based startup Milvus Advanced believes there is another option besides digging more mines: engineering abundant nano-scale materials that can mimic critical minerals such as platinum, iridium and indium.Pathfounders editor Mike Butcher speaks to founder and CEO Dr Assia Kasdi about the science behind Milvus, its move from laboratory experiments to kilogram-scale production, and whether engineered replacements could reduce the West’s dependence on fragile global supply chains.

What happens when an AI model is told to solve a cybersecurity test and decides the easiest route is to escape its sandbox, reach the open internet and hack another company?In this episode of the Pathfounders podcast, Mike Butcher is joined by Meryem Arik, co-founder and CEO of Doubleword; Rory Blundell, CEO of Gravitee.io; and Ivan Burazin, co-founder and CEO of Daytona, to examine the extraordinary OpenAI–Hugging Face security incident which occurred recently. Did the models genuinely go rogue or simply follow their instructions too effectively? Why did sandboxing and conventional enterprise security fail? Are frontier AI companies increasingly using stories about their powerful models as "danger porn" to hype their capabilities?The podcast explored the growing security risks created by autonomous agents, why agents should never inherit a human user’s identity and permissions, and how businesses can protect themselves through isolated environments, tighter authorisation and stronger governance.Subscribe to Pathfounders for conversations on AI, startups, venture capital and geopolitics.

When we talk about drones, the conversation often jumps straight to warfare, surveillance or consumer gadgets. But one of the most important uses may be less dramatic but far more economically significant: inspecting the critical infrastructure that keeps modern life running. Energy grids, gas pipelines, pylons and remote assets still often rely on helicopters and manual inspection, which is expensive, slow, and can be dangerous. Beagle Systems, a startup based in Hamburg, is trying to change that Co-founder Oliver Lichtenstein joins Pathfounders Editor for this Pathfounders Live Podcast, recorded in front of an audience in Berlin. ​This fireside conversation covers: ​• ​Oliver's journey to founding Beagle Systems and scaling in a complex regulatory landscape​​• Why drones are becoming the default tool for critical infrastructure inspection​• How autonomy and AI are transforming what's possible in the field​• What the next wave of drone technology actually looks likeThank You To Our Event Partners: ​Infra Onehttps://www.infra.oneFull fund setup for multi-LP structures. Ideal for long-term venture or private-equity vehicles with multiple investors.​PT1https://www.pt1.vcPT1 is a European venture capital platform investing in early-stage tech that’s upgrading the physical world in three core clusters: \ Electrification & energy transition\ Built world AI & automation\ Climate & infrastructure resilience. With initial tickets ranging from €300k to €4M, we back the boldest founders across the UK and Europe who are redefining how we build, power and sustain our world. At PT1 we don’t just fund startups - we actively support to add value where it matters most. Combining deep domain expertise with data-driven insights, we leverage our AI-enabled deal flow engine to identify and accelerate future category winners. Championed by our network of 100+ industry experts – from unicorn founders to corporates and industrial veterans – we provide startups with collective wisdom, hands-on guidance, strategic acceleration sprints and the backing needed to scale.

We’re looking at what could become a major reset coming for Britain’s AI strategy. According to the Financial Times, Andy Burnham, who is tipped to be the next UK Prime Minster, is exploring a shift away from the current policy towards one built around UK AI sovereignty, regional growth and re-skilling, as opposed to the more AI-forward approach we’d become used to under Sir Keir Starmer, who had wooed US tech giants like OpenAI and Anthropic, while promoting of home-grown AI companies. Indeed, it even launched a £500 sovereign AI fund. But are we about to see the rise of a far more tech-sceptical UK administration? Featured on this podcast:Host: Mike Butcher, Founder & Editor, Pathfounders.com and former Editor-at-large of TechCrunch. https://x.com/mikebutcherhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mikebutcherGuest: Alys Key, an Editor, Writer and Journalist, who writes the Substack newsletter, UK2.0.https://x.com/@alys_keyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/alyskey/Guest: Meryem Arik, Co-founder and CEO at Doubleword, which builds high-performance open source model inference infrastructure for AI at scale.https://x.com/@MeryemArik9https://www.linkedin.com/in/meryemarik