Here is yet one more sign of the travel industry’s noticeable boom: a major growth round for one of the B2B startups servicing it. Lighthouse, a data analytics platform for hotels and others in the hospitality industry, has closed a Series C of $370 million. The KKR-led round catapults Lighthouse to a valuation of over $1 billion.
The funding will be used to continue building out more data sets, analytics tools and AI functionality, the company said. It may also be using this large capital injection for acquisitions to evolve its business: the company has made four acquisitions to date, and one from earlier this year — Stardekk — has built all-in-one hotel software for managing reservations and more.
The company is based out of London, and this is one of the biggest rounds for a startup based in the city, as well as one of the biggest rounds for the travel sector, for this year.
For those tracking how Europe’s startup ecosystem is performing at the moment, Lighthouse’s funding track record is instructive: the company raised $80 million in 2021, at a peak moment for fundraising.
This latest round is an affirmation from investors that it’s been doing the right things in the last several years.
In Europe, startups have been beaten by slower activity across a number of segments of tech, geopolitical turmoil and slow economic growth. Lighthouse has aimed its business at a global market (currently estimated to be worth some $15 trillion annually), and its focus on business intelligence and applying newer technology like AI to providing it, underscores how data-driven businesses continue to see opportunities.
The company’s core set of tools are not directly related to taking bookings or managing staff and accounts per se. Instead, its focus is on business intelligence, specifically analytics and insights. It says that it crunches 400 terabytes of travel and market data daily, and “leverages AI” to provide insights to customers, with products targeting large hotel chains, and others targeting smaller operations.
It says it has more than 70,000 hospitality providers using its tools, with some of the big names including Holiday Inn, Radisson and NH Hotel Group.
The round is a testament to the demand among hotels for better tooling to improve its pricing and overall offer to customers, at a time when we have more choice than ever before, and more ways of finding and booking hotels.
“We’re just getting started in making hospitality data and tools more powerful, accessible, and affordable,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of Lighthouse, in a statement. “I couldn’t be more energized by what we’re working towards.” We’re hopefully speaking with him later today to hear more.
The company’s previous round included Spectrum Equity, F-Prime Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, and Highgate Technology Ventures, and all of these investors are also participating in this latest Series C.
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Cloud giant Snowflake has agreed to acquire Datavolo, a data pipeline management company, for an undisclosed sum.
Snowflake unveiled the deal at the close of the market bell on Wednesday, when it also announced its Q3 2025 earnings. The purchase hasn’t yet closed, and it’s subject to customary closing conditions, Snowflake noted in a release.
Joseph Witt and Luke Roquet, who met while working together at Hortonworks, founded Datavolo in 2023. Witt was previously CVP at Cloudera, while Roquet was Cloudera’s CMO and, before that, a business development executive at AWS.
Datavolo uses Apache NiFi, an open source project for data processing developed by the NSA, to power a platform for automating data flows between various enterprise data sources. Data “processors” extract, clean, transform, and enrich data, including for generative AI use cases.
With Datavolo, which managed to raise $21 million in venture capital from investors including Citi Ventures and General Catalyst prior to the acquisition, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy envisions creating more versatile data processing pipelines for Snowflake customers. For example, he says, Datavolo might enable users to replace single-use data connectors with flexible pipelines that let them move data from cloud and on-premise sources to Snowflake’s data cloud.
“By bringing Datavolo into the Snowflake fold, we are expanding how much of the data lifecycle Snowflake captures — unlocking both simplicity and cost savings for our customers, without any sacrifice to data extensibility,” Ramaswamy said in a statement. “We are excited to have the Datavolo team join Snowflake as we accelerate what is the best platform for enterprise data — unstructured and structured, batch and streaming — and dedicated to the success of the open source community.”
Witt says that Snowflake will support and help to manage the Apache NiFi project following the close of the acquisition. “Data engineering at scale can be incredibly costly and complex, and our aim has always been to simplify experiences for our customers so they can achieve value faster,” he added in a press release. “By joining forces with Snowflake, we can empower our customers with the immense scale and radical simplicity of Snowflake’s platform, ultimately unlocking data engineering for more users.”
Thanks in part to AI, the demand for data management technologies has surged. Fortune Business Insights estimates that the market for global enterprise data management could be worth $224.87 billion by 2032.
Data management was a challenge for enterprises long before the AI boom, though. According to a 2022 survey from Great Expectations, a platform for data quality, 91% of organizations said that data quality issues were impacting their performance.
Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising to see firms like Datavolo rise to prominence.
Today was a newsy day for Snowflake, which reported better-than-expected earnings that sent its stock climbing 19%. In addition to buying Snowflake, the company announced a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to integrate the AI startup’s models in its Snowflake Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence, and Cortex Analyst products.
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Billionaire Gautam Adani and several executives at his company, the Indian conglomerate Adani Group, have been indicted over an alleged scheme to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials in exchange for contracts to a 12 gigawatt solar power project.
The indictment, unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn, charges Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani, and Vneet Jaain with conspiracies to commit securities and wire fraud and substantive securities fraud as part of an effort to raise money in the U.S. to build in India “one of the world’s largest solar energy projects,” the Department of Justice said.
“The defendants orchestrated an elaborate scheme to bribe Indian government officials to secure contracts worth billions of dollars,” U.S. attorney Breon Peace said in a statement.
Also named in the indictment were Ranjit Gupta and Rupesh Agarwal, former executives of Azure Power, and Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, and Deepak Malhotra, former employees of Canadian institutional investor Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec.
Alongside the Department of Justice indictment, the SEC also charged Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani, and Cabanes, also a former board member for Azure Power Global, for their participation in the bribery scheme and for violating federal antifraud laws in raising $175 million from U.S. investors.
The Adanis allegedly told investors that Adani Green bonds had a “robust anti-bribery compliance program” and the company “would not pay or promise to pay bribes,” Sanjay Wadhwa, acting director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, said in a statement.
The Adani Group was the focus of a Hindenburg Research investigation published in 2023, which alleged the conglomerate operated “a large, fragrant fraud in broad daylight,” and that it hid and laundered money through a series of shell companies set up in countries including Cyprus, the UAE, and Singapore.
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As the world races to add more power plants to satiate AI’s thirst for electricity, investors have been plowing money into nuclear fusion, the pie-in-the-sky technology that appears to be inching its way toward commercial viability.
The latest exhibit: Tokamak Energy, a UK-based startup that’s working to refine its squeezed-doughnut approach to fusion power. The company announced Tuesday that it had raised $125 million to continue development of the reactor design and expand its TE Magnetics division.
Tokamak Energy has been working on fusion since 2009, when it was spun out from the UK Atomic Energy Authority. The startup is pursuing what’s known as magnetic confinement fusion, which uses magnets to corral searing-hot plasma inside a reactor. This forces the plasma into a doughnut shape, but unlike other approaches, Tokamak Energy’s spherical tokamak takes that doughnut and squeezes it at the circumference. Its ST40 prototype generated a record-setting 100 million degree C plasma in 2022.
Tokamak Energy is aiming to operate a pilot power plant starting by 2034, the Telegraph reported, which puts it approximately on par with several other fusion startups, though several years behind frontrunners like Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
To help bridge the gap until commercial fusion revenue rolls in, Tokamak Energy launched a division, TE Magnetics, to sell its expertise in high-temperature superconducting magnets, a business model that’s becoming more widespread among fusion startups.
The company has raised a total $275 million from private investors, including this week’s raise, which was led by East X Ventures and Lingotto Investment Management, which manages the Agnelli family fortune, with participation from British Patient Capital, BW Group, Furukawa Electric Company, and Sabanci Climate Ventures.
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H, the Paris startup founded by Google alums, made a big splash last summer when, out of the blue, it announced a seed round of $220 million before releasing a single product. Three months later, still without a product, that splash started to look like a catastrophic flood when three of the company’s five co-founders left over “operational and business disagreements.”
But the company has kept swimming, and today it’s announcing its first product: Runner H, an “agentic” AI aimed at businesses and developers across tasks like quality assurance and process automation. It’s built atop the startup’s own, proprietary “compact” LLM based on just 2 billion parameters.
H has set up a waitlist for Runner H on its site. CEO Charles Kantor said that it will be releasing APIs to those on the list over the coming days to use agents “off the shelf” that have been pre-built by H, as well as for developers to create their own. Access to the API will also come along with access to something called H-Studio to test and manage how these services work.
Initially, using those APIs will be free, and later there will be a payment model introduced.
Even using compact LLMs, building and running AI is not cheap, especially as competition continues to raise money to develop their own products. TechCrunch has also confirmed that H is raising a Series A to build what Kantor describes as part of the second era of AI — with LLM companies like OpenAI being part of the first era.
“We are lucky to be in the position of building our own models,” Kantor said. “But this second era will be as capital intensive as first one.”
(Recall the $230 million H has already raised — it appears to have added another $10 million since announcing it earlier this year — was a mixture of equity and convertible debt. The long list of investors in that round included individuals like Eric Schmidt, Yuri Milner and Xavier Neil; VCs such as Accel and Creandum; and strategic backers like Amazon, Samsung and UiPath.)
Kantor told TechCrunch that H has quietly been working with a handful of customers in areas like e-commerce, banking, insurance and outsourcing, who have been helping it hone the product.
“Everything [in H] is not based on our creativity but customer feedback,” he said.
Runner H will initially focus on three specific use cases: robotic process automation (RPA), quality assurance, and business process outsourcing.
RPA is an area that has existed for years, using basic scripts to automate the most repetitive tasks that humans have had to perform — such as reading forms, checking boxes, and sending files from one place to another. In fact, a lot of RPA has never been built with AI baked in, even after AI started to develop advanced skills. The idea with Runner H is that it will be able to run RPA across forms, sites, and other templates even when they have been modified (something that might have broken previous scripts), and across a much wider range of sources.
Quality assurance can cover a wide range of applications, but Kantor said that one of the most popular so far has been reducing the “maintenance burdens” around website testing — validating page availability, simulating real user actions, or ensuring compatibility across payment methods — in particular when modifications have been made.
BPO is a catch-all area that will cover not just fixing and improving billing processes, but also speeding up how an agent can use and access data from different sources, and more.
There has been a race among foundational AI companies around how many parameters are going into LLMs. (GPT 4 for example has 175 billion parameters.) But Runner H is taking a very different approach with just 2 billion parameters, both for its LLM and for its computer-vision based “VLM.” Kantor’s argument is that this makes them significantly more efficient in terms of cost and operations, key when working on winning and keeping business deals, and H’s own operational costs.
“We are specialists,” he said. “We are building for the agentic era.”
The company also claims that it works: it says that its compact models outperforms Anthropic’s “Computer Use” by 29% (based on WebVoyager benchmarks) as well as models from Mistral and Meta.
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Belgium-based Odoo decided to use open-source tools as a way to attack the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software market, going up against giants like SAP. Fast forward a couple of decades and it’s now picking up €500 million in secondary investment — or around $527M at current exchange rates — led by CapitalG (Alphabet’s venture fund) and Sequoia Capital plus other investors.
The new funding sees its valuation rising to €5 billion ($5.26B). Yes, you read that right.
Odoo hasn’t needed to raise primary capital in eight years, because with over five million users and 40% growth per year, business is very good indeed. It’s projected to exceed €650M ($685M) in billings in the next 12 months and is aiming to hit a cool €1B ($1.05B) by 2027. It was previously valued at €3.2B ($3.37B) prior to this round.
So why is Odoo raising a chunk of cash now? The company said the investment will be used to accelerate R&D and product development — likely with its eye on how AI might disrupt ERP business as usual.
As we reported recently, traditional ERP software tools — usually provided by IT systems suppliers — are coming under attack from AI. Cogna is a U.K. startup that raised $15 million to get AI to write enterprise software apps on its own, for example.
Odoo, which was founded back in April 2002, is the brainchild of Fabien Pinckaerson who founded the company from his farm. He now lives in India, steering the business from there.
Pinckaers told CNBC he is in no rush to take the company public, despite its high valuation and revenues.
Pinckaers built Odoo up from humble open source project beginnings to a business software juggernaut that comprises over 80 apps spanning a range of functions such as accounting, CRM, manufacturing and marketing, along with an app store of 50,000+ community developed apps, serving a large community of developers and partners.
The majority of Odoo’s business is in (free-to-access) open-source software, with 20% coming from software licensed for a fee (aka, its paid “Odoo Enterprise” products) for users that want things like extra features.
“Fabien and his team have built a one-of-a-kind business from their ambitious vision for a unified suite of tightly integrated business apps,” said Alex Nichols, partner at CapitalG, said in a canned statement accompanying the funding.
Writing on his company’s blog, Pinckaers added: “ERPs are traditionally expensive and resource-intensive to implement, often failing to meet the actual needs and evolving requirements of SMEs. We have developed a unique value proposition that is playing a pivotal role in the market.”
Odoo last raised funding back in 2014, when it pulled in a $10M Series B round.
Also participating in this rare new round are Alkeon, AVP, BlackRock, HarbourVest Partners, and Mubadala Investment Company.
Previous investors include Noshaq, Summit Partners, and Wallonie Entreprendre, which all sold secondary shares to CapitalG and Sequoia as part of this round. Summit will remain Odoo’s largest institutional shareholder.
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