Creandum

Happy for the team at Lovable, announcing their recent raise at a >USD 13bn valuation. It's not even 2 years since Creandum led the seed round. A remarkable story and a reminder what a stellar founding team, exceptional hiring, ambition and not least speed of execution can achieve. 22 months from launch to 900 million monthly visits on Lovable projects and builders inside 2/3 of Fortune 500 companies. And continued amazing revenue growth, another 3x last 8 months. Built for the billions of people with ideas and creativity who need one place to turn it into beautiful applications with zero friction and all integrations they need natively available. In 8/10 cases, users start building with real commercial value in mind. This is just the beginning. We're just so excited for what's coming.

Congratulations Anton Osika, Fabian Hedin and the entire team at Lovable on raising a $400M Series C at a >$13bn valuation. Hard to believe it's not even 2 years since Fredrik Cassel and Creandum led the seed round. Lovable serves as a remarkable story and a reminder of what a stellar founding team, exceptional hiring, unreasonable ambition, and not least speed of execution can achieve. 22 months from launch to 900 million monthly visits on Lovable projects and builders inside 2/3 of Fortune 500 companies. And continued amazing revenue growth, another 3x last 8 months. Built for the billions of people with ideas and creativity who need one place to turn it into beautiful applications with zero friction and all integrations they need natively available. We're extremely proud to back a company building software with the ability to have such a profound impact on people lives - helping people discover new skills, find opportunities to start their own businesses, or simply finally bringing their own ideas to life. We have builders in every role within Creandum now, all thanks to the Lovable team. But this still only feels like the beginning. We cannot wait for what the team has in store next! Sophia Nabil Ellie Stuvland Felix Haas Nad Chishtie

We are excited to announce OLIX's $312m Series B. OLIX's mission is to build the infrastructure for frontier AI. Instead of forcing a single chip to do everything, we build specialised silicon and an optical network to connect it, unrolling models across racks like an assembly line. A different answer to the industry's supply chain constraints, built on components available at scale today. Alongside the round, OLIX has appointed Professor Nick McKeown to our board of directors. Nick is one of the defining figures of modern networking and co-invented software-defined networking, OpenFlow and P4. He is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and winner of the 2025 Marconi Prize. He co-founded several companies, including Nicira, acquired by VMware, and Barefoot Networks, acquired by Intel, where he went on to lead the company's networking business. We have also appointed Matt Briers as Chief Financial Officer. Matt was the CFO of Wise for nine years, joining in 2015 from Google when the company had around 500,000 customers and was loss-making through taking it public in a 2021 direct listing on the London Stock Exchange. Wise’s direct listing was the first by a technology company in London and the exchange's largest technology listing, valuing Wise at £8.75 billion, approximately $12 billion. He built the finance function that carried Wise from private company to the public markets while it remained profitable throughout. The speed of progress is a testament to the OLIX team's incredible execution.

Today Passionfroot announced their $15M Series A led by Insight Partners - and we at Creandum are proud to double-down. The creator economy is filled with graveyard startups - because the creator economy is frickin’ hard. Passionfroot figured it out. 🍊 Building a product in this space is product building on hard mode. Satisfy the top creator talent in the world, and serve the most demanding enterprise brands - in a market dominated by expensive white glove services. A deterministic product cannot do this - but Passionfroot has built an the AI and payments infrastructure that delivers human service levels at superhuman scale. The team is ripping - revenue up 13x YoY, profitable, serving the AI winners of tomorrow like ElevenLabs, Figma, Replit, Framer and Gamma - and thousands of the world's most influential creators. Incredibly proud of Jennifer Phan, Lorenzo De Nobili, Alex Kham and the team for continuing to build a category-defining business 🍊🧡 If you want to work in the most exciting industry in the most exciting city🗽in the world - we’re hiring in New York!

Two months ago we were all in awe of what Ferdinand and the team had already achieved in 2026: Augustus became an officially federally chartered US bank, which made Ferdi the youngest bank CEO in America. Today they announced an $180M Series B raise at a $1B valuation. An incredible achievement that reflects not only the calibre of this team, but the true scale of what they’re building: the Global Dollar Bank.  We’ve seen a lot change since we backed Augustus at seed stage (well before it was called Augustus), but the thesis has always remained constant: the infrastructure for money needs to be rebuilt for the reality of modern enterprise - it needs to be global, instant, always-on 24/7, and ready to embrace the transformation that AI and transacting AI agents will bring to global markets. Global, instant, and always-on 24/7 is also how I’d describe the Augustus team. Ferdinand Dabitz, Simon Wimmer, Joshua Becker, Peter Mosebjane Lieck and the 50+ people behind them are steadfast on their vision and will move mountains to make things happen - whether it be developing the technology that facilitates worldwide access to a global dollar, or be it navigating the complex regulatory hurdles that allows them to bring these upgrades to market. We are proud to be playing a small role supporting this team as they build the Global Dollar Bank of the future, and I am already looking forward to what my next update on their progress will be in the next couple of months… Huge congrats Ferdi and team!

When Richard and I took some trains throughout CEE to meet aI first founders last summer, there was one meeting that stood out by a mile. Today, we are incredibly excited that our Series A in EquiLibre Technologies is finally public! Martin, Rudolf and Matej are such a great proof that world-class technical excellence, paired with truly outsized ambition, can win in the most competitive markets we humans have ever created. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq. The Czech national team might already be out of the World Cup - but this team out of Prague is winning in the US - every. single. week. This post would feel incomplete without mentioning our friends at Credo Ventures who initiated our first meeting with Martin and nudged us just in time when the door to engage opened up a tiny bit - cheers to you Ondrej & Jakub. Once that happened Staffan immediately cleared every meeting on his calendar for two days and we went all in. A very proud moment of how everyone at Creandum always puts the pedal to the metal when the moment is right. Fun Fact: For the IC, Martin drove all the way from Prague to Berlin to give an in-person lecture in our office to our investment team on RL and HFT and then drove back to deploy a new model with his team that same night. EquiLibre Technologies x Creandum for the win & the TechCrunch article in the comments. PS: If you are building ai first companies in CEE especially beyond LLM applications -> Richard and I are on the road in 3 weeks again to find you!

We recently led the Series A in EquiLibre Technologies! EquiLibre operates at the intersection of AI and finance - using self-learning AI agents to trade on the world's largest financial markets. ♠️ Founded by former DeepMind researchers - Martin Schmid, Rudolf Kadlec, and Matej Moravcik - EquiLibre stems from an experiment to see whether AI could beat the world's best at no-limit poker. Using AI to beat humans at chess (a game of perfect information) had already been solved, but poker is far more complex (a game of imperfect information). The secret to solving this was reinforcement learning. ♦️ The magic of reinforcement learning is that nobody teaches the AI what to do. There's no instruction guide, no expert sitting down inputting a strategy. You show it what winning looks like, and let it figure out the rest on its own; through trial and error, and probabilistic learning, the result is a mix of strategies and game-theoretic approaches no human would ever think to try. ♣️ Markets are the ultimate exercise in imperfect information: messy, fast-moving, and full of other players constantly changing their behaviour. There's no fixed way of playing that guarantees a win. So like a poker player who can't always bet the same way with the same hand, EquiLibre's agents develop mixed strategies - ever-shifting probabilistic approaches that keep them unpredictable and hard to exploit. The results so far speak for themselves: billions of dollars in volume traded daily on the world's most liquid markets - and they've never had a down-month. ♥️ However alluring that stat is, the reason we’re so excited about EquiLibre is the bigger vision. The work they're pioneering in financial markets today opens the door to the other industries where applied reinforcement learning will have step-change impact tomorrow. Proud to back the EquiLibre team and their vision. Welcome to the Creandum family. 🚀 Read more in Anna Heim's great write up on TechCrunch - link in the comments. Staffan Helgesson Jakob Stein Cameron Sellers Ghazwa K. Richard Keuntje

Congratulations Jan Philipp Haas, Philipp Hoefer, Henry Thompson and the entire team of Conductors on Conduct's $60M Series A, co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ. Two years ago we met three founders out of Palantir Technologies with a sharp thesis and a relentless determination to tackle one of the largest, least visible problems in enterprise software: the decades of customisation now crippling the systems that run the world's biggest companies. What Conduct does is deceptively simple to describe and remarkably hard to build: they help companies innovate faster by putting IT leaders back in control of their systems, so they can get back to focusing on producing more trucks, shipping more parcels, and operating more efficient flights - the important things! To see SAP joining now as a strategic investor is testament to how well the team is executing. We had real conviction back then when we led the Seed round, and we have even more now, which is why we're doubling down our investment in this round. But what impresses us more is the team itself: scaling this fast while holding an exceptionally high bar and putting great talent in every seat - all while having a good time. Truly one of the most capable and determined teams we know! Onwards. The best is still ahead! 🚀 Peter Specht Richard Keuntje Peter Stilwell