Custodea, an artificial intelligence data platform built for European small and medium-sized enterprises, has closed a €350,000 seed funding round from backers in its network. The startup tackles a persistent challenge facing SMEs: business information strewn across disconnected software tools, forcing teams to rely on manual spreadsheet work and exports to piece together a coherent operational picture.
The platform ingests data from dozens of business applications—Exact Online, HubSpot, Personio and others—and stores it in a dedicated private environment where it stays continuously refreshed. From there, organisations can feed the unified dataset into familiar tools like Excel, Power BI, Looker, Tableau and dbt, or use it to train and run AI models and agents. Custodea also bundles an AI assistant capable of querying a company's own data to surface insights on revenue patterns, outstanding payments and other business metrics.
Data governance sits at the platform's core. All integrations operate in read-only mode by default, and companies retain full authority over who accesses their information and can revoke permissions instantly. Custodea runs its entire infrastructure within European Union borders, positioning itself as a counterweight to the prevailing reliance on US-based cloud providers that dominates the region's software landscape.
Gregory Aerts, co-founder of Custodea, framed the mission in terms of levelling the playing field between resource-constrained SMEs and well-funded enterprises with dedicated data teams. "With Custodea, I want to help close the technology gap between large corporations – with large budgets and dedicated data teams – and SMEs. Data is power, and with Custodea, we are putting that power into the hands of SMEs: data they fully own, stored and managed within the EU and ready to power AI. We are launching SMEs into the AI era," he said.
The seed capital will fund the company's platform rollout and expansion across European markets.
Source: Tech.eu
