Hone: Viennese founder raises $60 million seed investment in the Valley four months after founding. The AI startup Hone, centered on Viennese Stanford graduate Moritz Stephan, is receiving a capital injection led by the VCs Benchmark and Index Ventures. He was just 17 years old when brutkasten first reported on him in 2017. At the time, Viennese Moritz Stephan had launched his first startup project together with Konstantin Klinger, now co-founder and CEO of the multimillion-funded London startup Seamflow. With the book delivery service Lobu, the two students at Vienna's Sir Karl Popper School for gifted students wanted to take on Amazon and co. locally, and shortly afterward they secured a small investment commitment on 2 Minuten 2 Millionen. Stephan was reported on again in 2020 as co-founder of the Wiener Neustadt space tech startup Tumbleweed, founded in 2016, which wanted to build a wind-powered Mars rover. However, according to his LinkedIn profile, he left the startup that same year. No wonder, since he had been enrolled at the elite Stanford University since 2019. Another founding, this time with Y Combinator participation, and several jobs followed, including at Sarah Buchner's Trunk Tools and most recently at the AI scaleup Cognition. In May of this year, Stephan finally launched the AI startup Hone together with co-founders Oliver Brady and Carlo Kobe, with whom he had already founded a company before. Hone's product promise: "AI Engines" that take ownership of concrete results within the company. "Chatbots give answers. Agents complete tasks. Engines deliver results, and we give them responsibility for creating real value - measured in dollars rather than in tokens or vibes," says the startup's claim. "You align them with a business metric, and the engine takes care of the rest. It onboards itself, builds the necessary agents, capabilities, and knowledge stores, collaborates with the right people, and gets better and better through experience." Rules set by companies specifying where human confirmation is needed - for example, when handling sensitive data - are intended to provide the necessary security. With "AI Engines," Hone says it is ultimately closing a "major gap" between what frontier AI is capable of and what companies actually get out of it. "Five more Moritzes" The concept has now also convinced a series of investors: Benchmark and Index Ventures, two US VCs, are leading a $60 million financing round only four months after founding. Elad Gil, Hanabi, Definition, Diffusion, Lux, SV Angel, and Align complete the financing round. In a blog post by Index Ventures about the investment, it says they had already gotten to know Stephan as an exceptional talent during his time at his previous employer, Cognition. "Widely regarded as an execution machine, he was a one-man development team. His name became synonymous with excellence and productivity within the company; only half-jokingly, people said that Cognition needed 'five more Moritzes,'" write Shardul Shah and Mark Xu of Index, among others. October 22, 2026 VERBUND X Venture Day 2026: beyond borders. This year's VERBUND X Venture Day, with more than 200 guests from 15 countries and over 130 different organizations, was once again marked by collaboration - and that (also) on the major topic of European sovereignty. "From innovation to scaling and from scaling to a stronger Europe" - with this one sentence, one could summarize the major goal for the European energy sector, says VERBUND X managing director Franz Zöchbauer in his introductory remarks at VERBUND Venture Day 2026, which took place for the first time at the new energy launchpad partner WU Vienna. "We have the solutions, but it takes too long for them to reach the market. We have to scale, but no player can do that alone. It takes an ecosystem, and here people count," says Zöchbauer. Collaboration within the ecosystem as a motto at VERBUND Venture Day is not new, but the discourse in which the motto is embedded this year certainly is: here, too, the major topic of European sovereignty dominates. The title of this year's event is "Scaling beyond borders." 10.25 trillion euros for the energy transition. Zöchbauer expresses the ambition behind the demanded scaling in numbers: according to estimates, 10.25 trillion euros are needed to transform Europe's energy system by 2040. "That is 70 times the volume of the Marshall Plan or the volume of 25 years of global VC investments," says the VERBUND X managing director. So it is an epochal investment opportunity. But he reminds his audience: "Numbers don't change the world. People do."