2025 was an eventful year for startups, as capital was hard to secure and unexpected challenges and market shifts required founders to stay focused and ready for pivots. Yet, despite the pressure, many companies successfully closed funding rounds and entered 2026 with stronger positioning than before.
Vestbee spoke with founders who raised capital in 2025 across defence, deeptech, AI, and e-commerce infrastructure. While their businesses operate in very different markets, their experiences showed some common patterns: the growing importance of real-world validation, moving away from “clear lab results” and towards the actual needs of the market and the growing pull of defence and dual-use applications.
PowerUP Energy Technologies: market validation is everything for hardware startups
PowerUP Energy Technologies is a Tallinn-based startup developing modular hydrogen fuel cell generators that convert hydrogen into electricity without carbon emissions, heat, or noise. Originally engineered for European Space Agency missions, the technology has since been adapted for terrestrial environments where reliability and low operational footprint are critical. PowerUP’s generators have been deployed in extreme conditions, including conflict zones, serving both defence and commercial use cases.
In November 2025, PowerUP raised €10 million in a Series A round co-led by Mercaton and ScaleWolf, with participation from SmartCap Green Fund and other investors. According to CEO and founder Ivar Kruusenberg, the successful Series A close was the defining milestone of the year, particularly as fundraising remained challenging across deeptech. Internally, PowerUP restructured its sales strategy, shifting towards value-adding resellers and distributors. That change began delivering results in the second half of 2025, when revenues started to climb. On the technical side, additional European Space Agency projects further reinforced the reliability of the company’s systems.
“The surge in focus on defence and security had the most profound impact on us. We saw a clear trend toward the electrification of defence, and we adapted by refocusing our sales efforts to serve this sector better. A key moment was deploying our generators to Ukraine; the field feedback was invaluable and gave us strong confidence to pursue the defence market more aggressively,” Kruusenberg says.
In 2026, PowerUP will stick to a fast-growth strategy — expanding the team (especially in the after-sales support, which is critical for hardware companies), securing supply chains for higher production volumes, and ensuring access to hydrogen in new markets. PowerUP is moving towards the next steps in their scale-up journey — from strictly R&D milestones towards more market-oriented sales numbers.
“My advice to other founders is to focus on commercial validation early — innovation attracts interest, but sales numbers close rounds,” Kruusenberg emphasizes.
Filuta AI: staying ahead in a rapidly shifting technology landscape
Filuta AI is a Czech startup founded in 2022 that builds autonomous AI agents for digital simulations. Its proprietary composite AI platform is used to automate complex testing scenarios, with applications spanning gaming, aviation, automotive, and defence. In June 2025, the company raised $4.2 million in seed funding led by Rockaway Ventures, with participation from Tarpan Capital and Lion Beat Capital.
Filip Dvorak, founder & CEO at Filuta AI shared that 2025 was a year of acceleration for the company. AI-assisted coding was a decisive factor that pushed engineering productivity 20–30 times higher than before. That shift translated directly into business results: KPIs were exceeded and revenues grew by an order of magnitude within a single year. On the market side, the strongest pull came from composite AI deployed in dual-use applications — demand in this area shaped both product priorities and internal organisation in the company.
Looking to 2026, the company is preparing for scale. Maintaining the current pace of revenue growth will require a larger team, particularly in sales roles, alongside more formalised processes. The challenge, as Filuta AI sees it, is to grow without losing speed or technical edge.
The key lesson from 2025 is vigilance. In a field evolving as quickly as AI, yesterday’s state-of-the-art solutions can become obsolete almost overnight. Filuta plans to stay deliberately close to the technological frontier, recognising that falling behind now can happen faster than at any previous point in the industry’s history.
Juo: building Europe’s subscription infrastructure for physical goods
Juo is a Warsaw-based startup founded in 2025, providing a software infrastructure that enables e-commerce businesses to run subscriptions for physical products. The platform integrates with established e-commerce tools and manages the entire subscription stack, from billing and integrations to customer interfaces and subscription logic. Juo positions itself as the backbone for brands looking to scale recurring revenue beyond digital products.
In November 2025, the company raised €4 million in seed funding led by Market One Capital and Peak.
CEO Leszek Zawadzki told Vestbee that Juo achieved every strategic goal it set for 2025: multiplying ARR, scaling the team, and closing a successful seed round. The biggest challenge was maintaining product velocity and customer satisfaction while scaling, particularly as the platform expanded into new use cases for physical-product subscriptions.
Market dynamics worked in Juo’s favour. Tools once limited to digital subscriptions are increasingly being adopted by physical-goods businesses, creating space for specialised infrastructure players. While AI plays a role in this shift, Juo has taken a measured approach, keeping product decisions grounded in human judgment and customer feedback.
Looking to 2026, the company is betting on Europe’s growing importance in global commerce. US companies expanding into the EU face increasing regulatory, payment, and localisation complexity, especially as payment systems consolidate around local market logic. Juo is also closely watching the emergence of agentic commerce, expecting the coming year to separate genuine value creation from speculation.
The main lesson Juo carries into 2026 echoes the VC trends and approach European investors have taken this year :
“2025 showed that nothing has changed in one aspect: if you solve a genuinely important problem and listen well to your customers' needs, you'll build a big business. By smartly combining human talent and genuine insight that comes from irreplaceable work close to customers, together with the enormous possibilities that AI offers, we want to continue growing at an even faster pace,” Zawadzki shares.
Teletactica: resilience under real-world pressure
Teletactica is a Ukrainian defence technology startup founded in 2023. It builds rugged, jamming-resistant communication systems designed for complex environments where GPS is unavailable and infrastructure is limited. Its core products position Teletactica as an alternative to conventional military radios, including modular video and telemetry modems and compact antenna systems.
In July 2025, Teletactica raised $1.5 million in seed funding from MITS Capital and Green Flag Ventures.
Yevhen Zhebko, co-founder and CEO, told us that two trends impacted Teletactica in 2025 — the rapid escalation of electronic warfare and a growing need for affordable, field-ready ISR and counter-UAS platforms. Resilient communication became necessary, not only something that is “nice-to-have”. The company responded by making its systems modular, scalable, and easy to integrate, compressing R&D cycles and embedding directly into operational platforms rather than shipping standalone hardware.
The operating environment left little room for slow iteration. As Teletactica puts it, jamming, shifting threats, and high operational tempo required near-constant adaptation, while the team still had to build engineering and manufacturing processes that could hold under pressure.
That intensity led to breakthroughs. The startup validated its communication stack in highly contested environments and moved beyond telemetry and video modems into areas such as MESH networking. In parallel, it began assembling a multi-layered ecosystem around its core technology, adding filters, amplifiers, and antennas designed to work as a single system.
“The clearest signal of progress came from the market: the most meaningful shift was seeing Tier-1 and industrial partners start to view us not as a startup experimenting with ideas, but as a dependable technology provider they can build on,” Zhebko tells us.
In 2026, the company expects resilient communications to be treated as a strategic capability across both military and industrial systems. Teletactica plans to deepen its integration into complex platforms, broaden applications through new technologies, and expand international cooperation.
“The defining lesson of 2025 was exposure. Operating under real-world stress instantly showed product weaknesses, team constraints, and even strategic blind spots that would have remained invisible in controlled conditions. We are classic B2B2C. As our success is tied directly to UAV manufacturers, our focus always should be on how to win end users. That’s why we learned to test early, test in the field, and never rely on “clean lab results.”
