Automation startup ecosystem
We track 18 organisations in this sector across 6+ countries.
Showing 18 of 18 Automation
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Automation results
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11x
11x is the breakout star of the UK's agentic AI wave, known for building "digital workers" that replace full job functions rather than merely assisting them. Founded in 2022 by Hasan Sukkar, the company frames its product as autonomous employees rather than software tools. That positioning is controversial, but it resonates with revenue teams seeking to eliminate manual drudgery and scale outreach without linear headcount growth. The flagship product, Alice, is an AI Sales Development Representative that can source leads, research accounts, craft highly personalized outreach, and follow up continuously. In late 2024, 11x launched Jordan, a multilingual AI phone agent that conducts real-time voice conversations for qualification and support in more than 30 languages. Together, these agents can run a large portion of the outbound funnel end-to-end, from initial outreach to handoff, with human oversight focused on high-value exceptions. By early 2026, 11x had exploded in valuation after a Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz, a rare win for a UK-first startup. The company processes millions of interactions for high-growth tech companies such as Otter.ai and Airwallex and is expanding its footprint in San Francisco to preempt US-based competitors. The roadmap centers on "digital teams" that coordinate multiple agents across tasks: one agent identifies a lead, another calls, a third negotiates logistics, and a final agent drafts the contract. This orchestration layer is the company's strategic bet on becoming the default system for revenue operations. The company's roots include Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, which accelerated its US network and credibility, and its UK engineering base sits in the London Bridge tech hub. Investor support spans US and European capital: a16z led the Series B, Benchmark led the Series A, Lux Capital participated early, Quiet Capital backed growth, and 20VC provided influential local support. In 2026, 11x is the UK's most visible play on AI-native revenue teams, aiming to become a category-defining platform for autonomous sales operations.
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360 Capital
360 Capital is a French-Italian venture capital firm founded in 2006, with offices in Paris and Milan. The firm manages approximately EUR 700M and invests from seed through growth stage, focusing on deep tech, industrial automation, cybersecurity, and enterprise software. 360 Capital has backed unicorns including Exotec (warehouse robotics), as well as Sigfox, Believe, and Scality. Led by partners with deep operational backgrounds, the firm provides strategic support in scaling hardware-software businesses and navigating European industrial ecosystems.
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Apify
Apify turns the web into an API by providing a platform where developers build and monetize “actors” that extract data from websites. It has become a critical part of the AI data supply chain, powering scraping, monitoring, and automation at scale. The company bootstrapped to profitability before raising capital and maintains a strong open developer ecosystem. By 2026, Apify is a global leader in web automation infrastructure.
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Dorus Olgers
Partner at Newion investing in European B2B software founders. He backs enterprise SaaS and automation companies across the Benelux and DACH regions and supports portfolio companies on growth and operational execution.
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Fawzi Goussous
Fawzi Goussous is the Founder and CEO of Qualia Solutions, an award-winning AI company delivering custom AI agents, voice assistants, and business automation solutions. He leads a team focused on practical AI deployments for enterprise clients across Cyprus and the broader MENA region. He is a confirmed speaker at the Cyprus AI Expo 2026, where he presents on applied AI deployment and intelligent automation for business.
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H
H (formerly Holistic) represents France’s second-wave AI builders: less focused on text generation and more focused on action. Founded in 2024 by a team that included former DeepMind researchers such as Charles Kantor and Laurent Sifre, the company drew attention with a seed round that eclipsed prior European records, signaling investor appetite for agentic AI. H’s core thesis is that the next leap is not bigger language models but AI systems that can plan, execute, and verify multi-step workflows across real software interfaces. The company frames this as “RPA 2.0,” using vision-language models to interact with screens and applications rather than brittle scripts and APIs. The firm’s early months were turbulent, including leadership turnover in late 2024, but the product roadmap accelerated. In November 2025 H launched Runner H, a vision-language agent that can see a desktop and operate mouse and keyboard actions to complete tasks such as booking travel, compiling invoices, or processing customer tickets. The release of Surfer-H-CLI soon after gave developers a programmable surface for building web agents, which helped H win mindshare with the European developer community. An acquisition of Mithril Security in 2025 signaled a focus on secure, private agent deployment — a crucial requirement for enterprise adoption, where the biggest fear is an autonomous agent mishandling data or credentials. H is deeply embedded in the Paris AI ecosystem, with early incubation support from Aglae Ventures and strong ties to the Paris AI Hub around Sorbonne and Ecole Polytechnique. Its backers read like a who’s-who of strategic supporters: Accel led financing, Eric Schmidt invested personally, and strategic relationships with Amazon and UiPath position H as a bridge between cloud infrastructure and automation workflows. French tech patrons Xavier Niel and Bernard Arnault provide both capital and political signal value. By early 2026, H is widely watched as a potential category leader in action-oriented AI, competing to become the default “application layer” for autonomous digital workers across Europe’s enterprises.
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Intelligent Automation Expo 2026
Conference track at ExCeL London covering RPA, AI-driven process automation, and the future of work, co-located with major tech expos. Attracts enterprise operations leaders and automation buyers from finance, healthcare, and manufacturing. Relevant for startups building intelligent automation, workflow orchestration, and AI-powered business process tools.
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Intelligent Automation Expo 2027
Intelligent Automation Expo 2027 runs 3-4 February at Olympia London, part of TechEx Global. Aimed at Chief Automation Officers, heads of enterprise AI and transformation leaders, the event covers human-in-the-loop productivity, enterprise automation use cases, AI agent orchestration and generative AI interfaces in operations.
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Intertool x Schweissen 2026
Austria's largest manufacturing and welding trade fair at Messe Wels, drawing 30,000+ industrial buyers and 500+ exhibitors across automation, robotics, additive manufacturing, and metalworking. Free with pre-registration or about EUR 25 on-site. Strong for automation, tooling, and industrial IoT startups seeking DACH factory pilots.
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Intertool x Schweissen 2028
Intertool x Schweissen returns to Messe Wels 25-28 April 2028, covering industrial manufacturing and automation technology for more than 11,000 trade visitors. The biennial fair combines Intertool's machine tool and automation focus with the Schweissen welding technology exhibition.
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Jan Oberhauser
Jan Oberhauser is Founder & CEO of the workflow-automation company n8n. A founder in the German startup ecosystem, Jan leads the workflow-automation company n8n.
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Jarosław Łukasiewicz
Debuting Business Angel of the Year 2024 and CEO of Luma Automation, Jarosław brings industrial operating experience into startup investing. He backs founders applying AI and automation to legacy sectors where measurable efficiency gains matter most. His focus spans deep tech, industrial IoT, and Industry 4.0 solutions for manufacturing and logistics.
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Kamil Stanuch
Data and automation specialist and LP at Erebor Capital, Kamil represents a new wave of Polish angels focused on lean, automation-heavy products. He frequently co-invests in data-intensive startups and AI-native software companies. His activity includes early involvement and advisory support in products such as Tidio and other LLM-agent startups.
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Odense Robotics
Odense Robotics is Denmark's national robotics and automation cluster, connecting companies, universities, and public partners in the Odense region. The hub supports startups through business development, talent programs, and investor matchmaking, and it helps scale a dense robotics supply chain anchored by global leaders. Odense Robotics also promotes Denmark internationally as a robotics hub and drives collaboration in areas like drones, cobots, and industrial automation. It is a key engine behind Denmark's robot valley reputation.
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Rossum
Rossum specializes in intelligent document processing, moving beyond basic OCR to cognitive data capture. Its AI reads invoices, shipping manifests, and other structured documents with human-like accuracy, automating workflows for logistics, manufacturing, and finance. The company is scaling rapidly in the US market and positioning itself as the backbone for enterprise document automation. By 2026, Rossum is one of the Czech ecosystem's most credible soonicorns.
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Tines
Tines is a Dublin-founded enterprise software company building workflow automation for security, IT, and operations teams. The product became well known in cybersecurity because it gives frontline analysts a low-code way to automate repetitive response tasks without needing to maintain brittle custom scripts. Teams can connect alerts, ticketing tools, identity systems, cloud platforms, and communication apps into visual workflows that investigate incidents, enrich context, trigger approvals, and execute remediation steps automatically. That lowers manual workload while preserving auditability and human control over higher-risk actions. Over time, Tines has expanded beyond pure security orchestration into broader internal operations, making the platform useful anywhere a company needs reliable API-based workflow execution across multiple tools. Its traction reflects a larger shift in enterprise software toward operator-owned automation rather than centralized engineering bottlenecks. In the European ecosystem, Tines is also a strong example of an Irish infrastructure startup that scaled into a global category while staying connected to the region's talent and capital networks.
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UiPath
UiPath is the Bucharest-born enterprise automation company that defined the robotic process automation (RPA) category and rode it to one of the largest European software IPOs ever: the company listed on the NYSE (PATH) in 2021 at a roughly USD 35 billion valuation, making co-founder Daniel Dines the first Romanian tech billionaire. Founded in 2005 by Daniel Dines and Marius Tîrcă as an outsourced desktop-automation shop, the company pivoted in the mid-2010s into selling a platform for orchestrating software robots that mimic human workers against legacy enterprise applications, and used aggressive community-led adoption to become the de facto RPA standard at thousands of Fortune 500s. Post-IPO, UiPath has extended into AI-powered document understanding, process mining (via the 2022 Re:infer acquisition), and — most importantly — agentic automation, a 2024 platform launch that orchestrates LLM-based agents alongside traditional robots inside the same workflow engine. The company is now headquartered in New York but continues to run its largest engineering center out of Bucharest, and it remains the single most influential reference story for Romanian deep-tech.
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Universal Robots
Universal Robots was founded in Odense in 2005 and pioneered collaborative robots that are safe, flexible, and easy to program for small and mid sized manufacturers. The company introduced affordable robotic arms like the UR5 and helped establish the global cobot category. After strong growth, Universal Robots was acquired by Teradyne and continued expanding its product line and ecosystem. It is a cornerstone of Denmark's robotics cluster and a global automation leader.
