Fluency, an AI tool that automatically detects and analyses work processes, has raised $9 million in seed funding led by Accel, valuing the company at over $30 million. DST Global Partners, Mixture of Experts, Carya Venture Partners, Archangel Ventures and NextGen Ventures also participated. Founded in 2023 by Finnlay Morcombe and Oliver Farnill in Melbourne, Fluency aims to replace management consultants by identifying manual and repetitive work to highlight AI adoption opportunities. The platform can be deployed in under an hour and captures activity from all employee applications without integrations, potentially saving six to 12 months of work. The company now serves over 50 customers including AON, PVH Corp and Houghton Mifflin. Fluency previously raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round after participating in the Startmate accelerator.

San Francisco-headquartered Y Combinator is leading the round, investing alongside Australia's NextGen Ventures, Antler, and Meat & Livestock Australia.

Female-led dutch startup ShanX Medtech secures €24 million to combat antimicrobial resistance. Eindhoven-based MedTech startup ShanX Medtech (SXM), which provides in-vitro diagnostic platforms for antibiotic susceptibility testing, has closed a €15 million Seed funding round to scale, boost clinical validation, and prepare for market launch. The oversubscribed funding round includes multiple funding instruments, including equity, grants and the Innovatiekrediet. The equity investment was led by the Borski Fund, NextGen Ventures, CbusineZ (an independent investment fund closely associated with healthcare insurer CZ), Brabantse Ontwikkelings Maatschappij (BOM), Invest-NL, and a prominent strategic angel fund. The company was also recently awarded €8.85 million European Commission Contract (HADEA/2025/CPN/0006), developed by the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (DG HERA) in collaboration with the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA). This brings the total financing secured by ShanX to €24 million. Dr Sophia E. Shanko, founder and CEO of ShanX Medtech, said, "We founded ShanX Medtech because of a single patient story, one that revealed how much is at stake when diagnostic results arrive too late. "Our vision is to equip every clinician with the ability to act decisively, guided by diagnostic evidence in real-time. This funding brings us significantly closer to delivering ultra-rapid AST directly to both laboratory and point-of-care environments; faster, simpler, and more accessible than ever before." Founded in 2019 and based at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, ShanX Medtech develops In-Vitro Diagnostic (IVD) solutions that deliver direct-from-sample antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST). By using novel chemistry to monitor microbial metabolism, SXM claims to deliver results within an hour with limited user involvement. According to it, this represents a significant improvement over current methods, which require trained expertise and time to yield actionable results. FLORA(TM) is the company's proprietary chemical composition that monitors pathogen metabolism in real-time. With this new capital, the company aims to accelerate the final development, clinical validation, regulatory approval, and commercial launch of the SXM diagnostic platform. Simone Brummelhuis, Partner at Borski Fund, said, "Following an extensive market analysis of innovations addressing antimicrobial resistance, ShanX's technology clearly emerged as best-in-class. While the company's initial go-to-market strategy focuses on a well-defined women's health application in urinary tract infections, the underlying platform offers substantial potential across a wide range of clinical indications. "We are proud to support Sophia and her exceptional team in realising their ambitious vision. The oversubscribed financing round, together with multiple multi-million-euro commercial contracts, underscores both the strength of the technology and the founder's proven commercial execution."