We are thrilled to announce our latest investment in Timeseer.AI, a pioneering data reliability and observability platform for time-series data. Timeseer.AI’s innovative platform is designed to orchestrate OT/IoT data across organizations, ensuring high-quality, on-demand data for their customers. This investment aligns perfectly with our mission to support cutting-edge technologies that drive advancements in AI enterprise automation.

Addressing the Data Quality Challenge

The explosive growth of IoT/OT data, coupled with the urgent need to integrate AI/ML models into operations at scale, creates a perfect storm for data quality platforms – the effectiveness of AI models is highly dependent on the quality of the underlying data. If not addressed, companies could end up in a vicious cycle of a “garbage in, garbage out” problem in their operations.

Timeseer.AI steps in to address this challenge by empowering data teams to automatically detect, analyze, and resolve data issues before they can adversely affect operations and critical business decisions.

Innovative Solution for Diverse Industries

Mateusz Lukasik, Partner at OTB Ventures, highlights the significance of Timeseer’s software: “Low quality of IoT/OT data is a primary bottleneck in the widespread adoption of AI models in industrial settings. Timeseer’s vertical-agnostic software can automatically address this issue on a large scale across multiple industries.”

The Timeseer.AI team was established by a group of industrial data ops veterans and serial entrepreneurs with the know-how, and the ambition to solve one of the most daunting challenges in the industrial data infrastructure.

We are proud to join the existing investors in supporting a world-class founding team led by Bert Baeck, CEO and co-founder, as they continue to advance their product.

Welcome to the OTB Ventures portfolio, Timeseer.AI.

Investment Announcement: with Synthara AG

We are happy to share our investment in the Swiss semiconductor startup Synthara AG, which has successfully raised over $11 million. Congratulations to Manu V Nair, Alessandro Aimar, and the whole Synthara team 👏

Synthara’s groundbreaking ComputeRAM™ technology enables general-purpose embedded chips to handle a wide variety of hasztag#AI-rich applications, significantly lowering costs and time to market. This innovative approach opens new opportunities for both chipmakers and device makers, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the hasztag#semiconductor industry.

The emerging in-memory computing (IMC) paradigm is set to transform the industry. Synthara enables easy integration of the underlying principles of hasztag#IMC technology into existing chip designs without any disruptive alterations to the architecture. That makes Synthara very well positioned to spearhead the change within the industry, providing immediate performance gains at a limited energy budget across multiple product categories and unlocking new use cases, like real-time voice processing on the edge in hearing aids. – commented Karol Szubstarski, partner at OTB Ventures.

We are excited to join the round with Vsquared Ventures, Onsight Ventures, and Deeptech Labs alongside European and Swiss grant funding.

Read more in Tim Smith article for Sifted: https://lnkd.in/eyDG-N9A

SpaceTech startup Kurs Orbital secures €3.7 million to democratise in-orbit servicing and logistics through its autonomous rendezvous and docking ARCap Module.

We aim to provide the market with a system that is truly performant and flexible, that allows the servicing spacecraft to be fully autonomous, both in space operations and from ground control. This round is critical for our next step – delivering powerful and cost-effective rendezvous technology to the market said Volodymyr Usov Kurs Orbital’s CEO and Co-founder.

Kurs Orbital team, building off a long and rich legacy of designing and creating rendezvous and docking systems in an agency context, immediately struck us as the right combination of deep and unique expertise combined with a fresh look at the technology and market. It is a great example of our investment strategy in the wider in-space servicing market. Said Wojtek Walniczek partner at OTB Ventures.

Congratulations also to our fellow investors Credo VenturesGalaxia | Polo Nazionale di Trasferimento Tecnologico dell’AerospazioIn-Q-TelInovo.vc

Founded in 2021, Berlin-based akirolabs empowers procurement organisations to unlock 4 – 5x higher sustainable business value beyond traditional cost savings. The funding round was led by OTB Ventures, HTGF and D11Z Ventures and strengthened by angel investments from industry. The funds will be used to evolve akirolabs SaaS product and enhance its AI capabilities, as well as to further scale customer growth and business operations. 

akirolabs highlights that while digitalization in procurement was primarily focused on operational and tactical solutions for efficiency and savings, industry benchmarks indicate a much higher value potential in strategic procurement. This potential is often untapped due to capability gaps. Current macroeconomic challenges and recent black swan events have amplified and accelerated the need for more strategic procurement. To address this challenge, akirolabs offers an AI-powered strategic procurement SaaS solution, enabling its customers to unlock and achieve up to 4-5x times higher value from procurement, – beyond savings. 

About akirolabs

akirolabs develops an AI-augmented SaaS platform for collaboratIve strategic procurement. akirolabs is based upon a world-class and industry proven strategic procurement process, methodology and toolkit, embedded into an intuitive cross-functional collaboration workflow and enriched with all relevant internal and external business insights.

Dresden-based startup is developing advanced computer chips capable of accelerating AI performance in compact smart devices at scale. 

 We’re delighted to be part of closing this very impressive seed round of over €7 million together with JOIN CAPITALSquareOne Venture Capital and Onsight Ventures.
 
Aron Kirschen, CEO and co-founder of SEMRON: “The current state of the semiconductor industry reveals a stark absence of a compelling strategy for the future, and even for today’s AI demands. At SEMRON, we are not just focusing on decreasing energy consumption and enhancing performance. Our vision encompasses a radical shift towards cost reduction, increased flexibility, and the capability to run vast AI models with billions of parameters on a mere fingertip of silicon.”

Addressing the Future of Semiconductor Industry & AI

“The emergence of the new deep learning models and their widespread adoption puts increased pressure on traditional computing architectures and exposes the limitations of the Moore’s law. The full potential of 
AI remains untapped, especially on the edge devices. Semron is bridging the gap with its revolutionary 3D-scaled AI chip, that enables to run enormous LLM models on a small form factor without depleting the battery. It unlocks totally new use-cases for a vast number of devices such as smartphones, VR headsets & IoT devices. We are thrilled to team up with Aron & Kai-Uwe and join the journey to redefine the semiconductor industry” said Karol Szubstarski, partner at OTB Ventures.

About Semron

SEMRON, based in Dresden, Germany, is a deep tech startup at the forefront of the next revolution in Artificial Intelligence. Specializing in the development of cutting-edge semiconductor technology, SEMRON is dedicated to crafting the world’s most powerful and energy-efficient computer chips, designed to enhance AI performance in compact smart devices. The company’s innovative approach utilizes a three-dimensional space in chip design, allowing for unprecedented improvements in efficiency. 

ATMOS successfully extends its initial seed financing round from June 2023, which was oversubscribed at €4 million, in preparation for assembling the first prototype of its Phoenix return capsule to fly into space and back. OTB Ventures joined the consortium of experienced space tech investors: High-Tech Gründerfonds, the Amadeus APEX Technology Fund, Seraphim, E2MC, VENTIS and another.vc.

ATMOS develops and manufactures space capsules capable of safely returning any cargo from space, representing the first sustainable solution for many payloads and experiments. The capsules have been designed to offer microgravity on-demand, ranging from three hours to three months in orbit. These capsules open up unprecedented opportunities for a wide array of applications, including biomedical and material sciences research, In-Orbit Demonstration and Verification (IOD/IOV), and manufacturing products in space.

The additional funding is strengthening ATMOS’ current participation in ESA’s Commercial Cargo Initiative tender. Assuring the space agency’s financial requirements are met while accelerating the time to market for ATMOS’ Phoenix space capsule to fly into LEO and return a microgravity experiment for its first demonstration mission. 


OTB is a very experienced space and deeptech investor with successful portfolio companies like ICEYE or ClearSpace. I met Wojtek first at an ESA Investor Forum, and while OTB usually invests at Series A, this early investment into ATMOS is a great sign of trust. Said Sebastian Klaus, CEO and Co-Founder of ATMOS Space Cargo. This seed extension will accelerate our time to market for our life sciences service with Phoenix and larger projects like LEO Cargo Return.

As part of our in-space economy strategy we have thoroughly analysed future enabling platforms that decisively shape and grow this emerging sector. ATMOS Space Cargo struck us as one of the most compelling and innovative new companies, in a market ripe for dynamic growth. Said Wojciech Walniczek, Partner at OTB Ventures. This technology, through a unique combination of cost, frequency and flexibility, intends to “close the loop” for commercially-viable access to space-based R&D and manufacturing, with the ability to spur a new wave of innovation initially in biosciences and pharma, later in semiconductors, material sciences, and other areas. We believe that Atmos Space Cargo can do to space manufacturing and return what SpaceX did to launch and space transportation. The founders of ATMOS are a group of visionaries and effective executors teamed up around inspiring shared mission. We are extremely happy to join forces with this exceptional consortium of investors to support this Team at a crucial development stage.

The goal: Deepen AI comprehension of the business landscape and scale out firmographic data APIs into enterprises and big data startups

21 Feb 2023 – Veridion (formerly known as Soleadify) announces a $6 million round to finance their proprietary AIs that are specifically trained to understand the global business landscape, enabling their clients, including tier 1 consultancies and market intelligence firms, to access reliable data on 80 million businesses worldwide, saving thousands of hours of manual research and achieving record accuracy and refresh rates.

The round was funded by LAUNCHub Ventures, OTB Ventures, Underline Ventures, and existing investors Day One Capital and GapMinder Venture Partners.

Veridion leverages the power of AI to revolutionize big data and to comprehend billions of webpages every week in order to build and maintain a highly accurate, global scale, near real-time, single-source-of-truth database of company data made available through a Complex Search API and a Matching & Enriching API.

They are one of the first companies to deploy AI at this scale for data acquisition, setting them apart from the traditional firmographic data players that buy data from government registries as well as simple web-scraping alternative data providers.

Firmographic data is information that can be used to categorize organizations by a host of information such as business activity, products or services offered, location, employees, industry, technology offered etc. Enterprises are missing reliable, up-to-date information about market participants and a lack of those crucial insights leads to sub-optimal decisions and challenges when navigating through dynamically changing environments.

Veridion is positioned to be a firmographic intelligence leader, boasting a database of over 60 data points on over 80 million businesses with record accuracy rates and the highest refresh rate on the market.

Veridion saw solid growth figures in 2022, with over 3x increase in recurring revenue and an impressive zero churn in clients. Their biggest clients include, among others, tier 1 consultancies with specialised procurement and insurance teams, one of the largest global insurtech platforms, procurement platforms, and top tier market intelligence companies. There are multiple reasons for this, key among which is their highly granular data, the control their APIs offer on confidence scores and their internal matching engine which allows them to pinpoint businesses at unprecedented rates.

The name change is intended to highlight the company’s unique standing in the market, their commitment to being a single source of truth and reflect the company’s ambitious plans for future growth.

Florin Tufan, founder and CEO, Veridion:

“We believe that the next generation of business decision engines, regardless of industry or vertical will require a completely new format of data. Predictive models will rely on AI more than human intuition and will be capable of processing exponentially more data as their core resource. For this, the data needs to be fresh, granular, easy to work with, and integrate-able across a wide array of processes. This has been our focus from the beginning and with this round, we’ll be able to double down on our approach.”

The firmographic data market in which Veridion operates is also known as the business information market and was valued at $211 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow towards $291 billion by 2027, with new technologies like AI representing a game-changer for big data. According to Gartner’s Data Quality Market Survey, the average financial impact of bad data on organisations in 2022 was estimated to be around  $12.9 million per year.

Recent developments in ML capabilities unlocked the doors for Veridion to be positioned quite differently from other market participants. Players such as Delphai, Planck Data and Grata have collectively raised over $110M in the past 7 years of operations and development. While companies like these cover local markets and company records in the 10 – 20 million range, Veridion boasted over 70M company records within their first two years of activity.

Delphai covers primarily private markets for M&A, prospecting, and supplier sourcing, segments where Veridion brings about in-depth data on hundreds of millions of products and services and business activities in all commonly used taxonomies wordwide such as NAICS, NACE, SIC, etc on companies from all around the world. Planck Data is focused on commercial underwriting but only covers the US market as opposed to Veridion’s global coverage and Grata, which is focused primarily on deal sourcing also lacks the in-depth perspective that Veridion brings on specific company descriptions, risk signals and other rapidly expanding data points that Veridion extracts on the companies they oversee.

The biggest name in firmographic data is Dun & Bradstreet, with over 200 years of experience in the field. Dun & Bradstreet and Veridion may serve slightly different market segments, but their differences are pronounced when it comes to data products and capabilities. Veridion offers a distinct advantage in its coverage of the SMB landscape, with regularly refreshed data and in-depth product-level information and retail locations. The NLP-based approach employed by Veridion also enables the extraction of unique data attributes for specific industries, such as specific underwriting and supplier risks, enabling the company to better meet the needs of its clients through custom data solutions.

After validating their data with large enterprise clients in commercial insurance underwriting, supplier discovery, and private market analysis, Veridion is releasing self-service APIs to enable faster data integration for potential clients and open up to new markets in data-centric SaaS or other early-stage solutions.

Veridion plans to continue building its US footprint by opening a New York office in 2023 to more closely support its growing base of clients in the region. They were advised on the financing round by Cytowski & Partners, a US-based law firm.

Rumen Iliev, Partner, LAUNCHub:

“Access to accurate and timely company data opens a new way to success in today’s business landscape. It equips smart enterprises with the knowledge and understanding necessary to outcompete their competitors. By leveraging the power of Veridion’s algorithms and AI, Data Teams across the globe are able to gather firmographic data with speed, accuracy, and coverage that surpasses human capabilities. This newfound competitive advantage will propel their business towards even greater success in the future”

Karol Szubstarski, Partner, OTB Ventures

“Veridon is leading the way to a future where companies all over the world can build and rely on data of the highest quality. OTB Ventures is thrilled to support the company in their recent financing.”

About Veridion

Veridion is a new-age data vendor that specialises in Firmographic Data. They maintain a weekly-updated database of over 80 million Company Profiles. Their data covers every aspect of a business from identification, locations, and classification to product offerings, ESG topics, and more. Veridion employs advanced scrapers and machine learning to comprehend the ever-expanding business landscape and offer the resulting data through APIs tailored for data science teams to enable making business decisions at scale. In 2020, Veridion (then Soleadify) secured $1.5M in seed funding from European Venture firms.

Press release The Recursive
Press release Tech Funding News
Press release UK Daily News

Series A round is led by OTB Ventures and Swisscom Ventures

Renens, Switzerland, January 19, 2023. ClearSpace, the Swiss-based leader of in-orbit servicing and active space debris removal, is delighted to announce that it has finalised a EUR 26.7 million series A financing round, to further accelerate the movement toward the sustainable use of space.

ClearSpace is ramping up operations ahead of the world’s first space debris removal mission, ClearSpace-1, scheduled to launch in 2026.

This new financing round was led by OTB Ventures backed by the European Investment Fund under InvestEU programme and Swisscom Ventures, with participation from the Luxembourg Future Fund, Lakestar, In-Q-Tel, Happiness Capital and 600 T Space Investments. As part of the financing, ClearSpace is establishing an operational presence in Luxembourg that will benefit from the strong space and satellite focus there.

The company recently announced a satellite life-extension collaboration with satcom operator Intelsat, building upon the technology being developed under the EUR 110 million space debris removal mission, ClearSpace-1, secured from the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2020. ClearSpace-1, which is supported by Omega as Elite Partner, will be the first of numerous missions ClearSpace is planning for both low-earth and geostationary orbits.

The global space market is booming, driven by strategic and commercial interest from governments, technology innovations opening up new markets for the private sector, and reduced satellite launch costs.

Citigroup predicts that the space industry should reach USD 1 trillion in annual revenue by 2040.

Meanwhile, decades of unsustainable practices have congested the near-Earth orbital regime with a plethora of dead and defunct satellites and rockets. According to ESA, there are 32,480 debris items orbiting the Earth that are tracked by space surveillance networks and more than 130 million currently untrackable objects ranging in size from 1 mm to greater than 10 cm are included. This space junk not only pollutes our fragile near-Earth environment, but it also represents a critical risk to active satellites that can (and have been) destroyed in high-speed collisions with such debris.

ClearSpace was founded in 2018 with the sole aim of making space operations more sustainable. The company is developing technologies and services that are needed to extend the life of active satellites, for example when they run out of fuel, and to safely remove them from orbit when they have reached their end of life. Such services are critical for maximising the value from space-based assets, and for preventing the dangerous build-up of space debris objects.

ClearSpace Co-founders, CEO Luc Piguet and CTO Muriel Richard-Noca said “We began this company 4 years ago with the goal of making space operations sustainable and are delighted to be joined on our journey by our new partner investors. The market is now developing, much faster than we had expected, and we look forward to accelerating our activities to meet the urgent needs of space sustainability.”

Adam Niewiński, GP & Co-founder at OTB Ventures said “Funding new science and technology developments is crucial to growing the space sector and catalysing further investment into the economy. Private investment in space companies, especially from venture capital, has steadily broken annual records over the past decade. With the backing from our limited partners, which include the European Investment Fund (EIF), we look to invest in leaders of the new space sector, that will dominate the next phase of space operations. Tens of thousands of artificial objects are tracked in orbit around the Earth, with many times that expected to be in orbit but are too small to be tracked. ClearSpace is developing key technologies for satellite proximity and rendezvous operations in space, which is essential for the sustainable future of space.”

Dominique Megret of Swisscom Ventures said “Swisscom Ventures is delighted to back our Swiss made champion ClearSpace in its mission to make space operations sustainable, ClearSpace is a deep tech landmark, and we look forward to working with the team going forward.”

The Luxembourg Future Fund (LFF) Board said “The Luxembourg Future Fund (LFF) is very happy to participate in this important financing round to support ClearSpace in its unprecedented mission of in-orbit servicing and space debris removal. Supporting companies like ClearSpace in their quest to ensure more sustainable space operations is of crucial importance in light of the growing space industry. We are excited to see ClearSpace develop operations here in Luxembourg and forge close bonds with both private & public players within Luxembourg’s vibrant and growing space sector. ClearSpace marks the final LFF co-investment and yet another innovative new space investment as part of the LFF portfolio and we welcome the company to Luxembourg with open arms.”

ClearSpace was advised on the financing round by Silverpeak LLP (financial) and Niederer Kraft Frey Ltd/Tavernier Tschanz (legal).

About ClearSpace

ClearSpace SA, is an In-Orbit Services (IOS) company, created in 2018, intending on revolutionizing how space missions are conducted.  ClearSpace is creating the technologies that will support a wide range of IOS applications, from disposal and in-orbit transport to mission extension, assembly, manufacturing, repair, and recycling. ClearSpace aims to support institutions and commercial operators alike, to enhance sustainable space operations and promote a circular space economy. In 2020, the company was awarded a service contract by ESA to develop ClearSpace-1, using state of the art technology and advanced on-orbit techniques to demonstrate the feasibility of removing debris from orbit. The ClearSpace-1 mission is also supported by Omega as Elite Partner.

ClearSpace is growing rapidly with teams in Switzerland, the UK and Germany, and is actively engaged in the initial phases of two other in-orbit servicing missions in addition to ClearSpace-1.