Sofia-based e-commerce tech startup Rush has been acquired by Shop Circle, now being fully managed by the company. The process will take a few months in order to fully implement the new strategy. Rush was founded in 2019 by Kiril Kirilov and Stanislav Stankov. The app aims to help e- commerce businesses, individual merchants, and dropshippers to transform their shipment tracking pages into marketing opportunities. Its integration with Shopify offers a SaaS solution for order tracking and notifications, facilitating post-purchase communication between Shopify merchants and their customers. https://ain.capital/2024/04/11/rush-is-acquired-by-shop-circle/

Romanian electric ridesharing platform ELEC attracted over EUR 1 million in investment funds to become an electromobility ecosystem. The startup will use the funds to develop its own software and integrate ridesharing, rent-a-car, and electric charging services into the same platform. https://www.romania-insider.com/romanian-elec-funding-electromobility-april-2024

Early Game Ventures (EGV), one of the most important venture capital managers in Romania, announced on April 10 that it sold CODA Intelligence, a Romanian provider of next-generation automated cybersecurity solutions and one of the first investments of EGV I fund managed by EGV, to the global supplier PDQ. https://www.romania-insider.com/early-game-ventures-exit-coda-intelligence-april-2024

Munich-based Proxima Fusion, the first spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), announced that it has raised €20M in a seed funding round led by redalpine and oversubscribed. The Bavarian government-backed Bayern Kapital, German government-backed DeepTech & Climate Fonds, and the Max Planck Foundation also participated in the funding. Existing investors, including Plural, UVC Partners, High-Tech Gründerfonds, Wilbe, and TOMORROW of Visionaries Club, have doubled down on their pre-seed investments. The company will use the funds to build the first generation of fusion power plants based on quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarators with high-temperature superconductors. https://siliconcanals.com/news/startups/germanys-proxima-fusion-bags-20m/

Berlin-based Zolar, which supplies solar panels to consumers, has raised a €100m debt vehicle from BNP Paribas to offer financing solutions to its residential customers. Zolar provides consumers with panels and offers a flexible instalment loan to help finance it. Consumers can choose between making a one-time upfront payment or a flexible monthly fee. Zolar’s new debt vehicle is an asset-backed security (ABS). Zolar has raised $241m (€300m) from backers such as Partech, Heartcore Capital and green search engine, Ecosia. https://sifted.eu/articles/zolar-climate-debt-solar-news

Leading MarTech scaleup, Lunio, has been selected by Digitl, the leading consultancy and marketing technology service provider, as its strategic partner to protect the German marketing industry from invalid traffic (IVT). The strategic partnership comes at a time when German advertisers are increasingly losing control and visibility over their ad spend due to the rise of smart bidding and fully automated campaign types such as Google’s Performance Max. With audience targeting decisions increasingly determined by algorithms – and Lunio estimating 10 – 25% of paid media budgets across search, shopping, social and programmatic are routinely wasted on fake ad engagement – the collaboration will play an important role in ensuring data fed to automated systems comes from real users with genuine conversion potential. https://www.martechcube.com/martech-scale-up-lunio-fuels-german-expansion-with-a-strategic-partner/

Venture capital (VC) firm Wingman Ventures has rebranded as Founderful, with an announcement that it has raised $85m for its new fund, with a goal of $120m. The Zurich-based VC firm, which focuses on pre-seed startups, has a vast portfolio of 40 startups which it has already injected $60m into. The new rebrand and fund, Fund II, will see Founderful “laser-focused” on the Swiss tech market. Founderful said it is looking to invest in everything from robotics and AI, to computer vision technologies and construction tech. The firm was founded in 2019 by Swiss unicorn GetYourGuide co-founder Pascal Mathis, former Switzerland lead at Creathor Ventures, Alex Stöckl, and EAT.ch co-founder Lukas Weder. https://www.globaldata.com/newsletter/details/founderful-raises-85m-to-boost-switzerland-s-global-tech-presence-despite-country-s-venture-capital-decline_341924/