The funding round was extended by existing strategic and venture investors, and joined by Milan-based venture capital group The Techshop as well as new national institutional investors.

Ireland-headquartered AI security software start-up Octostar has raised €6.1m in an extended seed funding round.

The Galway-based company – which also has a research and development centre in Bergamo, Italy and offices in London, UK – provides investigative intelligence tools for use in national security, law enforcement and finance.

The funding round was extended by existing strategic and venture investors, and joined by Milan-based venture capital group The Techshop as well as new national institutional investors.

The company describes itself as “one of only two European alternatives” in the investigative intelligence space to US companies such as Palantir, at a time when European governments have placed renewed focus on sovereignty in tech and intelligence.

“Nations are re-evaluating their technology supply chains for intelligence and security, while they’re in extreme need for AI that can be utilised ASAP,” said Giovanni Tummarello, CEO, chief product officer and co-founder of Octostar.

“The question is no longer whether sovereign alternatives are needed, but how quickly they can be deployed. We are scaling delivery faster than we ever anticipated to meet that demand.”

Since January, according to Octostar, it has completed three new deployments within EU national law enforcement and judicial bodies, with 15 expected by the end of 2026. It also previously delivered national security deployments across the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions.

“The need for sovereign, AI-native intelligence platforms is accelerating fast and Octostar is one of the very few teams delivering on such demand,” said Gianluca D’Agostino, co-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, communications intelligence, document intelligence and generative AI-powered agents in a fully sovereign, extensible architecture.

The company said its platform is “built to combine advanced analytical capabilities with full data and use-case sovereignty”, can operate in ‘air-gapped’ environments without cloud and internet access, and can be modified independently by clients to their own requirements.

Octostar is also backed by Platform94, an Irish Government- and EU-backed initiative to help companies in Ireland’s north-west to “scale internationally and achieve their global ambitions”.

Digital sovereignty is a key topic in Europe at the moment. Governments are mandating new software policies to deviate from longstanding use of US products – as well as acquiring potentially significant companies themselves – while European software companies are offering workspace alternatives to Microsoft and Google applications.

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