The financing round was extended by existing strategic and business investors, and was joined by the main business group based in Milan Techshop and new national institutional investors.
Ireland-headquartered AI security software startup Octostar has raised €6.1m in an expanded seed funding round.
The Galway-based company – which also has a research and development center in Bergamo, Italy and offices in London, UK – provides investigative intelligence tools for use in homeland security, law and finance.
The financing round was extended by existing strategic and business investors, and was joined by the main business group based in Milan Techshop and new national institutional investors.
The company describes itself as “one of only two European alternatives” in the field of intelligence to US companies such as Palantir, at a time when European governments have placed a renewed focus on the sovereignty of technology and intelligence.
“Nations are rethinking their supply chains for intelligence and security technologies, while they desperately need AI that can be used ASAP,” said Giovanni Tummarello, CEO, chief product officer and co-founder of Octostar.
“The question is no longer whether independent alternatives are needed, but how quickly they can be implemented. We are ramping up delivery faster than we expected to meet that demand.”
Since January, according to Octostar, there have been completed new deployments within the EU national legal and judicial bodies, and 15 are expected by the end of 2026. It also conducted national security deployments throughout the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions.
“The demand for autonomous, AI-native intelligence platforms is growing rapidly and Octostar is one of the very few teams delivering on that demand,” said Gianluca D’Agostino, founder and managing partner of The Techshop.
Octostar was founded in 2023 by Tummarello, Robert Fuller, Varun Sharma and Simone Scarduzio. Its stated offerings include link analysis, communication intelligence, document intelligence and AI-powered agents in an autonomous, scalable architecture.
The company said its platform is “designed to combine advanced analytics capabilities with full data and usage sovereignty”, can operate in ‘air-gapped’ environments without cloud and internet access, and can be independently customized by customers according to their needs.
Octostar is also supported by Platform94, an Irish Government- and EU-backed initiative to help companies in the north-west of Ireland to “scale internationally and achieve their global ambitions”.
Digital sovereignty is an important topic in Europe at the moment. Governments are enacting new software policies to steer away from long-term use of US products – and to acquire companies that may be important themselves – while European software companies offer alternatives to other Microsoft and Google applications.
Don’t miss out on the information you need to succeed. Sign up for Daily BriefSilicon Republic’s digest of must-know sci-tech news.
