New AI transformation company raises funding to advance AI adoption in Europe
Hg has agreed to invest, with participation from Anthropic and angel investors, in a new AI transformation company built to help European businesses move AI beyond pilots to measurable operational impact.
The independent company will build on Claude, with forward deployed engineers working directly inside organisations on AI adoption and AI-native product build.
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Welcome to Hg’s monthly update, designed to keep you updated with news from Hg and our
network of portfolio companies. Follow us on LinkedIn.
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Elias Apel has seen Lucanet as a customer, then CFO, and now CEO. He tells Hg’s Sebastian Zureich why finance needs deterministic software for audit-grade calculations and AI for the reasoning around them, and where AI can and can’t stand on its own.
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Tristan Ratchford joined hg catalyst from Datadog, where he led the team behind its autonomous AI SRE agent. On Affinity’s Carried Interest podcast, he explains why he made the move. AI companies are fighting for distribution, and across around 60 portfolio companies, Hg already has it.
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At SaaS Summit Benelux, Blinqx founder and CEO Ruud Van der Kruk explained how he is rebuilding a 700-person group around AI. Blinqx now has 40 AI agents live in its products, and its R&D teams are 3.3x more efficient than at the start of 2025.
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Lucanet’s new Intelligence Core pairs language models with its validated calculation engines, so every figure an agent returns is traceable for auditors. In early pilots, reporting cycles fell from 4-7 days to 1-2 and XBRL tagging from days to hours. Kevin Smith, CTO of Lucanet, explains why trustworthy AI in finance has to be exactly right.
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Our thesis on mission-critical software hasn't changed, but the opportunity around it has. Hg Wealth's new whitepaper, Mission-Critical Software in the Age of AI, sets out how we think AI affects that thesis, and answers the questions we hear from wealth clients, operators and software leaders.
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LISTENING RECOMMENDATIONS
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Dive into some of the podcasts that we are listening to!
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New Bain series with Andrew Ng built around conversations with global CEOs on what worked and what failed and how they manage organizational change.
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Aaron Levie argues constraint on enterprise AI isn’t model intelligence but diffusion into regulated workflows.
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“Since its founding, 3E has built a detailed, physics-based understanding of how renewable assets perform, backed by decades of operational data and insights that compound over time. That is the ideal foundation for building new AI products that deliver measurable value to customers.” Read more
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Three portfolio companies built GTM agents in six weeks, with early results of around 15% more calls, 60% fewer touches per appointment and 25% more selling capacity. We brought 100+ commercial leaders together in Copenhagen to see them, and Street Group won the 10X Challenge. Read more
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This months Wave by Vento in Turin brought together prominent leaders from the European tech ecosystem. A highlight was hearing Merete Hverven, CEO of Visma discussing how complexity is an advantage and Hg’s Tim Harrison and Christopher Kindt sharing lessons from more than 1,600 AI products across the portfolio. Read more
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CHROs and people leaders from across the portfolio met in Dublin to work through how AI is reshaping the operating model, with career ladders giving way to lattices. We also launched the Hg HR AI Hub, a shared catalogue of AI tools organised by HR workflow. Read more
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Since 2020, The Foundation has committed $50m to more than 40 partners, reaching over 80,000 people. At their annual reception, Rishi Sunak told young people at the Hg Foundation’s annual reception to be learn-it-alls, not know-it-alls. He joined co-CEO Steven Batchelor to discuss AI and opportunity. Read more
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The acquisition adds contract management to Provigis and Twind, giving CTAIMA a single record for each contractor across the full lifecycle. The platform now covers 500,000+ contractors and suppliers working with around 4,000 companies. Read more
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The Access Group rebuilt its 20-year-old legal case-management system for the web in six to nine months, moving customers’ 700 to 800 bespoke commands across without a separate migration. Across its 250 products, squads are now pods of three or four and sprints have halved to one week. Read more
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The transaction priced on 22 October 2026, with the refinanced tranche extended from September 2029 to July 2032, reinforcing the Company’s prudent capital structure approach. Read more
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"Our ARR reached 3.1 billion euros at the end of the third quarter, representing organic year-over-year growth of 12.9%, while year-to-date, Adjusted EBITDA has grown 15.9% organically year-over-year." Read more
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Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) passed €1.3 billion at the end of Q3, up 24% year on year. New Industrial AI bookings for the first nine months of 2026 are already more than three times those for the whole of 2025. Read more
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