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Startup City Weekly Brief
Be first to read the latest tech news, Industry Leader's Insights, and CIO interviews of medium and large enterprises exclusively from Startup City
Startup City: Specials Magazine
The future of customer support belongs to companies that balance intelligence with empathy. Onepilot is leading this space with a next-generation model that blends advanced AI with skilled human agents to deliver faster, affordable and reliable support without losing the personal touch. Unlike legacy BPOs that rely on third-party tools, Onepilot leverages its own proprietary tech stack, which includes a learning management system, knowledge base, quality assurance platform, and workforce analytics. This seamless setup boosts agent productivity by 30% and cut management cost by 50% versus traditional BPOs. Since it integrates directly with 20+ platforms like Zendesk and Intercom, clients can keep their existing tools. By owning the entire value chain, Onepilot tailors its operation to each client’s unique needs while ensuring quality, speed and transparency, fulfilling its mission to make outsourcing more flexible and efficient. Agile Support Powered by AI and Human Expertise Traditional outsourcing ties businesses to fixed-headcount contracts, which might lead to overstaffing, wasted costs and inefficiency. By understanding these limitations, Onepilot’s five co-founders built a model that makes support scalable. These limitations are addressed through its pay-per-ticket or productive-hour pricing model, which allows businesses to maintain complete control over their support operations. Businesses can then scale their team up or down on demand. Trained agents can be deployed within hours for round-the-clock coverage, cutting costs by up to 20% during downtime. Onboarding is completed in less than two weeks, and teams can be doubled within 48 hours, making it ideal for seasonal surges, market launches and unpredictable ticket volumes.
AI Assistant Writing Solution
In the webtoon industry, renowned for its rigorous demands and tight deadlines, Cream emerges as a trailblazer. The pioneering startup is making waves by merging the virtual and tangible worlds with its flagship AI-assistant artist, AiD. This AI-driven tool is designed to help webtoon creators achieve consistency in their characters, setting a new standard in storytelling. Founded by CEO Ji-seong Kim, a luminary with roots in IT Convergence Engineering from the prestigious Pohang University of Science and Technology, Cream leverages AI to address one of the most complex challenges for webtoon artists—maintaining consistency across characters and scenes. It all started with a simple yet ambitious goal—to simplify the creative process for artists, enabling them to focus on storytelling and production. Kim embarked on a journey to leverage AI not just as a tool but as an assistant for webtoon creators. This journey culminated in the launch of AiD—an AI-driven assistant that offers personalized lining, coloring, and shading services that artist can access via a user-friendly web interface. Creators often find themselves bogged down by the intricacies of line art and coloring, which, although necessary, can stifle creativity and extend production timelines. AiD addresses these challenges head-on, allowing them to focus more on storytelling and less on labor-intensive art production. By submitting just 7 images of a character, creators can use AiD to generate line drawings and colored panels that remain true to their original vision, all while reducing their time and effort.
Blockchain Solution
Supertrends
A Powerful Search Engine for Business Innovation Insights
Lars Tvede, Founder & Chairman
Lars Tvede, an engineer and economist with a long career in tech and finance, has written 18 books and founded 13 companies. Throughout his work, he made a key observation: financial information was readily available and well-structured, accessible at the flip of a switch on Bloomberg terminals. However, there was no such user-friendly solution for mapping and predicting scientific and technological advancements. Navigating this crucial information always proved to be a constant hassle and mess. So, in 2019, he founded Supertrends to fix this problem. “At first, I thought we could do it in two years, but it took five”, he says with a laugh. However, it is now finished and rolling out. Supertrends: Mapping Human Innovation At the heart of Supertrends lies a comprehensive timeline of human innovation. It boasts 16,000 key innovations spanning a staggering 3.3 million years. “Creating this involved 75,000 AI prompts and queries, combined with extensive verification,” explains Lars Tvede. “But Supertrends isn’t just about the past. It predicts the future too, with 4,000 predictions currently mapped on the timeline. Each prediction is meticulously explained and placed in its proper context. And the system keeps evolving, adding an average of three new predictions every day.” To ensure accuracy and credibility, Supertrends collaborates with a panel of 160 experts – leading entrepreneurs, scientists, and industry association managers. These experts review the AI-generated outputs, refining formulations or predicted breakthrough dates. They also provide justifications for any contextual changes they make. Supertrends even taps into their insights for podcasts and blog content through scheduled interviews. Behind the Scenes: A Symphony of Automation Mapping the current scientific and technological landscape involves a sophisticated blend of methods. Every day, an algorithm meticulously scans approximately 5,000 leading science and technology media sources in 30 languages, searching for 3,000 specific keywords. A natural language processing (NLP) model then summarizes these daily findings into around 300 unique feature stories. Other AI models eliminate redundancies within these stories and automatically check if any of them align with the predicted innovations. If a predicted innovation finds real-world confirmation, the system automatically reclassifies it from a prediction to an actual event. As Tvede aptly states, “Millions of small, automated routines run the system every day.”
CXO INSIGHTS
The Next Wave of Cybersecurity Champions: A Perspective into the Rising Cyber Startup Ecosystems in Germany and Europe
Willi Mannheims, Managing Partner, eCAPITAL ENTREPRENEURIAL PARTNERS
Building A Sustainable Future Through Technology And Clean Energy
Giacomo James Beretta, Investment Specialist, Alecla7
Building Brands And Communities In The Nightlife Industry
Adrian Andjelkovic, Marketing & Communications Manager, Best Nights VC
Impact Driven Venture Capital Navigating Innovation And Global Markets
Andy Lurling, Founding Partner, LUMO Labs
360 Capital's Approach to Innovation, Investment, and Startup Growth
Alessandro Zaccaria, Partner, 360 Capital
Redefining the Role of Venture Capital in Reshaping Construction
Gonzalo Galindo Gout, President, Cemex Ventures
Startups and the SDGS-From Purpose to Profit
Jordi Montserrat, Co-MD, Venture Kick
IN FOCUS
The European Tech Ascent: Comparing Growth Trajectories and Investment Climates
Europe's startup ecosystem has transformed into a global powerhouse, marked by interconnected growth, diverse hubs, and strong early-stage development.
AI Outsourcing and the New European Startup Playbook
European startups are leveraging AI outsourcing for technological equality with larger firms, enabling scalable operations, enhanced customer experience, and compliance, transforming the competitive landscape.
EDITORIAL
Europe's Customer Service Revolution Looks Nothing Like America's
AI-powered customer service in Europe is diverging sharply from the surveillance-heavy, cost-cutting models dominant elsewhere. The companies gaining traction aren't just deploying chatbots—they're building privacy-first support ecosystems where agentic AI, human expertise and compliant data operations function as integrated infrastructure.
Cloud-native contact platforms are enabling the shift. Legacy call centres are being replaced by composable CCaaS architectures that deploy multimodal AI agents, handling voice, video and messaging simultaneously, while maintaining GDPR compliance by design. This is an architectural reimagining.
Agentic automation is reshaping workflows decisively. AI now triages intent across languages, routes complex queries to specialists and surfaces real-time sentiment analysis that human agents use to navigate emotionally charged interactions. The hybrid model eliminates the false choice between scale and quality.
Regulatory pressure is accelerating European differentiation. GDPR, the AI Act and sector-specific mandates have made data sovereignty a non-negotiable requirement. Companies are prioritising vendors with transparent governance, on-premises deployment options and cultural fluency across European markets. This is strengthening nearshore providers who understand that compliance is a competitive advantage.
The investment reflects this maturation: Europe's AI for customer service segment is expected to reach $20.8 billion by 2033, growing at a 22.5 percent annual rate.
For a region often dismissed as slow to adopt, Europe is building something more durable: a customer service infrastructure that respects people whilst serving them efficiently. That's not caution, it's strategy.
This edition of Startupcity Europe explores how the region’s innovation landscape is shifting toward more disciplined capital and purpose-driven venture building. It features Marc-Olivier Luecke of Atlantic Labs and Laura Orestano of SocialFare SEED, whose perspectives reflect the evolving priorities shaping Europe’s startup ecosystem.
We hope this edition offers practical clarity and a forward-looking perspective for leaders navigating Europe’s evolving innovation landscape. The insights shared aim to support stronger decision-making, sharper ecosystem alignment and more resilient venture-building strategies across the region.
