Orange Quarter

Put your hands in the air if you had fun at our event in New York last week 🙋 Another great night sharing the room with some of New York's best Engineers and most exciting AI founders. This time, we also shared the room with humanoid robots 🦿 a gaming zone 🎮 basketball court 🏀 and even a soccer pitch ⚽️ (football pitch for our UK audience). Thanks to everyone who came along. If you want to be a part of the next one, reach out to Brad.

Orange Quarter has a tool for companies in the Tech/AI space that actually helps you source, vet and hire cracked engineers. AND it's trained to filter based on your company's location, funding-stage, business goals and even your culture... Access it here: https://lnkd.in/ejjNp6Yt 👀🤫 P.S. The “tool” is our team of experienced recruiters who have real relationships with the cracked talent defining the next era of tech

Notable early-stage AI/Tech funding rounds across London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and New York last week… New York: 🇺🇸 Avantos.ai raised $25M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners to scale its AI-native client management OS for financial services (Founders: Bassam Chaptini & Rabih Ramadi) 🇺🇸 QuadSci.ai raised $8M Series A led by Crosslink Capital to build an AI-powered revenue acceleration layer using product telemetry (Founders: Sean Murray & Dan Harmeson) London: 🇬🇧 SatVu closed a £30M round backed by the NATO Innovation Fund (with other participants including the British Business Bank) to scale thermal intelligence from space (Founders: Anthony Baker & Tobias Reinicke) 🇬🇧 FYLD raised £32M Series B led by Energy Impact Partners with participation from Partech to expand its AI-driven frontline operations + safety platform (US expansion focus) (Founders: Shelley Copsey, Karl Simons OBE & Anish Patel) 🇬🇧 Ineffable Intelligence is reportedly in talks to raise a $1B Seed led by Sequoia Capital valuing it at $4bn, positioning it as a true outlier “research-lab-scale” seed (Founder: David Silver) 🇬🇧 SurrealDB raised an additional €19M Series A extension with Chalfen Ventures and Begin Capital to scale its multi-model database built for AI applications (Founders: Tobie Morgan Hitchcock & Jaime Morgan Hitchcock) Germany: 🇩🇪 Plato closed a $14.5M Seed led by Atomico (with Cherry Ventures also participating) to modernise distributor workflows with AI-native sales/ERP automation (Founders: Benedikt Nolte, Matthias Heinrich & Oliver Birch) 🇩🇪 cognee raised €7.5M Seed led by pebblebed, scaling an open-source “memory layer” for AI agents (Founders: Vasilije Markovic & Boris Arzentar) 🇩🇪 happyhotel raised €6.5M Series A led by Reimann Investors to build AI agents that automate hotel revenue management (Founders: Rafael Weißmüller, Sebastian Kuhnhardt & Marius Müller) The Netherlands: 🇳🇱 Xyall (Eindhoven) secured €7.6M led by Capricorn Partners to roll out automated tissue dissection globally (Founders: Guido du Pree) 🇳🇱 Aizy (Breda) secured €2M in additional funding (founder-led, with existing investors participating) to expand its AI performance marketing platform (Founder: Stefan Nuijten) The $1B “seed” round for Ineffable Intelligence was reported by the FT as being in discussions rather than formally closed, but remains one of the most significant early-stage rounds we’ve seen in the UK. We hire the talent defining the next era of tech. If you’re building AI, Data, Engineering, Product or Leadership teams and want to make sure your next hire moves the needle, reach out.

As you've (hopefully) heard, we've rebranded. Read more: https://lnkd.in/evwEAVD8 The rebrand isn’t just an updated brand guide or a new website. It reflects what we’re building across London, Berlin, Amsterdam and New York, a growing network of early-stage tech founders and incredible tech talent That's going to look like: – Events in all four locations – Real hiring data and insights specific to tech – Direct access to consultants who specialise in building teams in your niche If you're hiring this year, or just want access to real funding-stage, role-specific, location-specific hiring data... subscribe to the Substack (link at the top ☝️)

Notable early-stage AI/Tech funding rounds across London, New York, Berlin & Amsterdam last week… 🇺🇸 Take2 AI (New York) raised $14M Series A led by HUMAN CAPITAL to scale its AI agent network automating end-to-end healthcare recruiting (Founders: Yaniv Shimoni + Kaushik Narasimhan)  🇳🇱 ONODRIM (Amsterdam) raised a standout €40M Seed (Founders Fund / Lakestar / General Catalyst) to build a European defence/industrial tech platform (Co-founders: Aistis Šimaitis, Alexander Blessing & Christian Garrett) 🇬🇧 tem (London) raised $75M Series B led by Lightspeed to scale AI-native energy transactions and expand internationally (Founders: Joe McDonald, Jason Stocks, Bartlomiej Szostek & Ross Mackay) 🇩🇪 metiundo GmbH (Berlin) raised €40M from Octopus Energy Generation to accelerate rollout of smart metering + digitised energy/water data infrastructure (Founders: Dennis Nasrun & Felix Mücke) 🇬🇧 Electric Twin (London) raised $14M (incl. a new round led by Atomico) to scale its “synthetic audiences” platform for faster, higher-confidence decision-making (Founders: Alex Cooper & Ben Warner) 🇺🇸 Didero (New York) raised $30M Series A co-led by Chemistry & Headline to put manufacturing procurement on agentic “autopilot” (Founders: Tim Spencer, Lorenz Pallhuber & Tom Petit) 🇬🇧 Mozart AI (London) raised $6M Seed led by Balderton to accelerate its AI music-creation tooling (Founders: Sundar Arvind, Arjun S Khanna & Pascual Merita) 🇩🇪 Andercore (Berlin) raised $40M Series B to expand its AI-driven industrial trade platform across Europe (Founder/CEO: Philipp Andernach) We hire the talent defining the next era of tech with offices in New York, Amsterdam, London & Berlin 🌐 If you're hiring across Engineering, Product, AI or Data, reach out to one of our consultants. We can share a short list of relevant profiles aligned to your stage, market, and growth plan.

Last week we hosted a tech-themed pub quiz for AI + Tech Founders & Builders in London (shoutout to our host-with-the-most, Thomas Stanley). Huge thanks to everyone who came and special mentions to our winners on the night, Tigris 🥇 We’ve already started planning the next one. If you’re a: - AI or Tech founder in London - London-based engineer …and want to meet more people in the industry, reach out to Thomas or Finn for details on our upcoming events.

Last week we had a couple of team milestones worth celebrating 🎈 Hugo Douglas-Freeman just passed two years with us in Berlin. Rory Whelan celebrated his fourth year in our Amsterdam office. We’re lucky to have some seriously good recruiters at Orange Quarter. We spend a lot of time talking to companies about building top-tier teams, so it’s nice to take a moment to celebrate the one we’ve built here too. Hugo and Rory have both spent years working with early-stage companies across Europe, from finding incredible engineers who go on to become founding hires, to placing Heads of Engineering who help set the direction for established teams building new tech products. Congratulations to you both, here's to many more 🍻

Notable early-stage AI/Tech funding rounds across UK, EU and US last week... 🇺🇸 Pasito (New York) raised $21M Series A led by Insight Partners to scale an AI-first benefits operations platform (Founder: Pauline Roteta, CFA, CFP®). 🇬🇧 Bound (London) raised €20.7M Series A led by AlbionVC to pursue EU regulatory approval and scale automated FX risk management (Founders: seth m phillips & Dan K.). 🇩🇪 Qontext (Berlin) raised $2.7M pre-seed led by HV Capital to build an independent “context layer” for AI systems (Founders: Lorenz Hieber & Nikita Kowalski). 🇳🇱 Lucend (Amsterdam) raised €2.7M Seed led by Remarkable Ventures Climate to scale transparent AI for data-centre optimisation (Founders: Jasper de Vries & René Gompel). 🇺🇸 Daytona (New York) raised $24M Series A led by FirstMark to productionise secure execution of AI-generated code in sandboxes (Founders: Goran Draganić, Ivan Burazin & Vedran Jukic). 🇬🇧 Lawhive (London) raised €50M Series B led by Mitch Rales alongside GV (Google Ventures), TQ Ventures & Balderton to scale its AI-native consumer legal services model (Founders: Pierre Proner & Jaime V.) 🇩🇪 enclaive (Berlin) raised €4.1M Seed co-led by Join Capital GmbH and APEX Ventures to scale confidential computing across multi-cloud (Founders: Andreas Walbrodt & Sebastian J. Gajek) 🇳🇱 Duna (Amsterdam) raised €30M Series A led by CapitalG to expand compliant, AI-native business identity + onboarding (Founders: Duco van Lanschot & David Schreiber). What we can see from a hiring lens is the concentration of capital on teams that can deliver production-grade AI in regulated or high-stakes environments (legal, identity/compliance, security, infra). That’s pulling forward demand for senior applied ML + platform engineers, security/privacy specialists, and product leaders who can operationalise AI with governance, while keeping teams intentionally lean. If you're building in the US, EU or UK and hiring across AI, Engineering or Product, we'd love to hear from you — we can share a short list of relevant profiles aligned to your stage, market and growth plans.

We’re hosting a pub quiz in London next Wednesday (11th of February)!! Thomas Stanley, Joe Walsh & Molly Engwerda are bringing together a group of AI and Tech founders/investors for a quiz night And to make things interesting, the questions are tech-themed, which should make for some friendly competition (emphasis on should) among a few leading tech companies in London Food & drink will be provided on the night 🍻 📨 If you’re interested, reach out to one of the hosts above for more details

Let us (re)introduce Orange Quarter. The look has changed, but the work we deliver hasn't. This rebrand isn't just because our look needed updating, but because the tech market we work in has changed dramatically over the last few years. The way companies build, hire, and grow looks very different to when we started Orange Quarter 11 years ago. This rebrand is a reflection of that shift and the kind of work we’ve been doing behind the scenes as the market has changed. If you knew Orange Quarter before, this is how to remember us. If you’re meeting us now, welcome. Take a look at the new site → https://lnkd.in/eEuhMpNQ