London-based Embedd has closed a €2.3m ($2.7m) pre-seed round led by Seedcamp, with eight further funds joining the cap table. Valuation and ownership terms were not disclosed.
Embedd builds infrastructure for what the industry has taken to calling physical AI: the software layer that lets factory equipment, vehicles and robots talk to the silicon underneath them. The company was founded by Ukrainian entrepreneurs Michael Lazarenko, Maxim Gorinov and Valentin Gololobov, whose previous hardware venture was hit first by pandemic-era chip shortages and then by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The round announced on 24 August totals €2.3m ($2.7m) at pre-seed stage. Seedcamp led. Cocoa, Connect Ventures, 2100 Ventures, Vesna Capital, U.ventures, Underline Ventures, Common Magic and Roosh Ventures all took part.
Nine institutional names on a sub-€3m first round is a crowded register by pre-seed standards. Neither the post-money valuation nor the founders' retained equity was disclosed, so the dilution taken to assemble that syndicate is not on the public record. Seedcamp's lead position typically comes with a board or observer seat at this stage, though Embedd has not confirmed any governance terms.
The technical problem Embedd is attacking is repetitive integration work. Every intelligent machine has to make its software communicate with dozens of chips that share no common language, and engineers currently do that by reading thousands of pages of documentation and hand-writing the code. Embedd builds a digital twin of the hardware, gives AI agents the context to run the integration, and generates the code that makes each chip usable by the software above it.
The company says the approach has let customers ship production-ready software for chips up to six times faster. It launched commercially in April 2026 and has since signed contracts with several semiconductor companies, including Microchip Technology, where Embedd is enabling support for the Zephyr real-time operating system.
"The next wave of AI will power factories, vehicles, robots and critical infrastructure, but today, every change in hardware creates huge complexity for software teams," Lazarenko said, describing the friction as already slowing innovation across the sector.
The capital will go towards developing the platform and widening the company's work with semiconductor manufacturers. That customer base matters to the equity story: selling integration tooling to chipmakers puts Embedd in front of the same corporate venture arms that have been active in European semiconductor rounds, and gives the founders an obvious pool of strategic investors for a seed round.
For now the company remains four months into commercial trading with a syndicate of early-stage funds and no disclosed valuation to anchor the next raise.
Original source: EU-Startups — https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/08/london-based-embedd-raises-e2-3-million-to-build-the-software-infrastructure-for-physical-ai/
