Benfica is considering blocking American investor Tim Leiweke’s €10+ per share acquisition of a 16% stake in Benfica SAD, citing article 13 of club statutes that allow rejection of acquisitions by investors with competing interests. Leiweke and his daughter lead a consortium that recently invested €100 million in Italian club Venezia FC.
Ricoh’s document management subsidiary PFU announced a 3.3 million euro investment plan in Portugal through 2031, transforming Lisbon into a strategic innovation hub for the EMEA region. The expansion focuses on AI-powered document digitalization, intelligent data capture software, distribution channel strengthening, and entry into healthcare, education, justice, and public administration sectors. PFU currently operates in Lisbon with a 14-person team providing technical support across the EMEA region.
Lauxera has oversubscribed a 520 million euro fund aimed at accelerating European medtech companies’ expansion into the United States market.
Stilta, an AI company founded by Oskar Block, has raised nearly 100 million SEK from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The company focuses on using AI to manage and maintain patents. Block, who previously gained fame as a teenager for winning large sums on sports betting and later attended Y Combinator, left McKinsey to focus on the venture.
Grampet Group presented the LEON train, the first domestically-built diesel train in Romania in 80 years, during a ceremonial journey from Bucharest to Brașov carrying international astronauts. The three-car LEON features 145-155 seats, dual 390 kW MTU engines, speeds up to 120 km/h, and modern amenities. Grampet plans to expand passenger operations with the LEON model and 80 ICE4 units purchased from Denmark. The event highlighted Romania’s aerospace and technological potential with visits to the Air Force Academy where an auditorium was named after Prunariu.
Monzo, the London-based digital bank, has achieved £1bn in gross profit for the first time and announced its third consecutive year of profitability with a 20% rise in adjusted profit before tax to £172.6m. The fintech is expanding aggressively across Europe, having launched in Ireland in April with 100k customers on the waitlist and announcing Spain as its next market with offices in Barcelona and Madrid. The bank recorded 3m new customers this year and saw business banking customers grow 45% to over 905k.
Munich-based agri-PV startup Feldwerke secured €12 million in revolving credit facility financing from a French renewable energy debt fund. The facility will enable Feldwerke to construct approximately 100 MW of agrivoltaic installations over the next 18 months. Founded in 2023, Feldwerke has already installed over 20 MW of capacity and aims to reach 1 GW by 2030.
Happy Horizon announced the acquisition of B&S Media Internetmarketing, a digital marketing agency serving over 500 SMB clients in northern and eastern Netherlands. The acquisition marks the second phase of Happy Horizon’s buy and build strategy, with financial details undisclosed. The deal is supported by MG Partners, Happy Horizon’s external investor since 2020.
D-Orbit, an Italian spacetech scaleup, collaborated with Disney Italia to send a 3D-scanned replica of the Mandalorian helmet to orbit aboard the Wayfinder mission on March 30, 2026, launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base via SpaceX’s Falcon 9 as part of the Transporter-16 mission. The helmet was deployed at approximately 510 kilometers altitude in sun-synchronous orbit and captured unique images with Earth in the background using cameras developed internally by D-Orbit.
Redis launched Redis Iris, a context and memory platform designed to replace RAG infrastructure for enterprise agentic AI. The platform addresses the structural problem that AI agents generate orders of magnitude more data requests than human users, requiring a different retrieval architecture. Iris includes data integration via CDC pipelines, semantic context retrieval with auto-generated MCP tools, agent memory capabilities, and Redis Flex storage engine running 99% of data on SSDs at sub-millisecond latencies.