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✅ 44 startup applications.
✅ Stages: 70% Pre-seed | 28% Seed | 2% Series A & B
✅ Geographies: 27% UK | 23% US | 11% Spain | 39% Rest of the world.
🤯 101 submissions in 2026.
If you're a business angel or VC and would like to see the list of startups, scroll to the end of this post.
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📍 HQ: Zurich, Switzerland
🏭 Industry: Robotics, AI
☘ Stage: Pre-Seed
🚨 Problem: Integrating industrial automation with humanoid robots requires a large upfront investment today, due to the need to record a high amount of teleoperated data train large AI models.
🔛 Solution: Binabik builds an agentic operating system for humanoid robots that allows us to reuse skills and models across tasks, drastically reducing the amount of data required.
📱Product:
🫰 Business model: B2B Humanoid Robot-as-a-Service.
🎯 Ideal Customer Profile: Companies needing flexible automation in industrial and professional environments.
📊 Traction: 1 pilot contract signed, 1x CLA signed.
🏚 Market: $50b humanoid robotics market by 2035.
👥 Jorge Peña (CEO) - 2x startup CTO, ex-ETH.
👥 Pascal Sager (CTO) - ETH AI Center
👥 Giovanni Toffetti (CPO) - ex-IBM researcher
👥 Harry Edelman (COO) - ex-MIT and startup founder
👥 Lei Fu (Tech Lead) - PhD Agentic Robotics
💰 Round: $4.5M pre-seed round
📍 HQ: Valencia, Spain
🏭 Industry: AI Strategy and Execution OS
☘ Stage: Pre-Seed
🚨 Problem: Companies have plans, but no system that turns strategy into execution. Up to 90% fail to execute. In the AI era, execution speed is survival.
🔛 Solution: The AI Strategy and Execution Orchestrator that designs the right strategy in hours, aligns teams, and drives weekly execution through built in accountability.
📱Product:
🫰 Business model: Annual SaaS subscription
🎯 Ideal Customer Profile: 20 to 250 employee companies CEOs with operational overload
📊 Traction: $505k in sales, 57 implementations, and $105k generated in the last 4 months. In final-stage discussions with a Big Four consulting firm to become a key channel sales partner.
🏚 Market: $22B SAM, focused on mid-market companies across Spain, LATAM, and the US.
👥 Joe Moliner (CEO): 23+ years C-level, 5 startups (2 exits). Strategy for 120+ organizations including PwC, GAF, and the Organization of American States.
👥 Diego A. Fliess (CTO): 25+ years software, MIT Certified CTO. Co-founded 4 startups (1 exit). Scaled $250K to $6M. Built product factories for Microsoft and Kraft Foods.
👥 Diego Pérez (Head of Product): 16+ yrs product design. Led teams to $60M raised and $44M exits. Shipped products for 12M+ users, including Marsh McLennan SaaS ($25B revenue).
💰 Round: €350K pre-seed (final spots). Planning €3M round in 8–12 months.
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📍 HQ: Madrid, Spain / Stockholm, Sweden
🏭 Industry: AI-powered Recruiting / HR-Tech SaaS
☘ Stage: Seed
🚨 Problem: The $100B white-collar recruiting market runs on a 20-year-old monopoly: LinkedIn Recruiter. It searches by keywords, not talent quality, so recruiters can’t tell a top performer from an average one. Top candidates ignore InMails, and sourcing is still 100% manual.
🔛 Solution: Agentic talent sourcing platform that combines an 800M+ profile database with a proprietary Talent Score (trained on 125K+ assessed candidates for Nova’s proprietary network of top talent), multi-channel automated outreach, and AI agents that handle sourcing end-to-end.
📱Product: Reducing manual work by +95%.
🫰 Business model: 1) SaaS B2B: credit-based annual contracts + self-service tiers. Usage-based pricing. 2) Memberships B2C: paid network.
🎯 Ideal Customer Profile: Enterprise corporations, large scale-ups, and recruitment agencies with white-collar hiring needs.
📊 Traction: €1.5M total ARR. Nova Recruiter (launched Dec 2025): €200K ARR+, 15 paying clients in 2 months including 4 enterprises.
🏚 Market: B2B: $9B SAM, expanding to $100B TAM as AI enables “services-as-software” in white-collar recruitment. B2C: $2B SAM.
👥 Ramón Rodrigáñez (Co-CEO) - Fulbright Scholar (Columbia), ex-BCG consultant, Industrial Engineering. Previously founded 2 startups.
👥 Andrea Marino (Co-CEO) - Bocconi + CEMS. 7+ years in HR-Tech before Nova, previously founded a food-tech startup.
👥 Lars-Henrik Molin (Chairman) - 5 exits in the talent sector, including Universum Global and Jobline.
💰 Round: ~€2M Seed.
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