- Odense-based Velatir has secured €5 million in seed funding to develop a real-time control layer for enterprise AI applications.
- The company had no customers at the start and, in seven months, had 80 customers in six European countries and is now nearly at $1 million in annual recurring revenue.
- Michael Sørensen, who had worked for the Danish military intelligence service for 14 years, later looked at Meta’s global infrastructure and is now using that experience to guide the company’s AI growth.
Before examining Meta’s global data centre security, Michael Blicher Sørensen had spent 14 years with the Danish defence. During this time, he served as an intelligence officer and also represented Denmark in NATO’s Electronic Warfare Working Group, focusing in both roles on system activity and oversight.
This focus is now at the core of Velatir, the Odense startup he co-founded in 2023, which has raised €5 million in seed funding, led by Spintop Ventures and Ugly Duckling Ventures, who had previously invested.
Norrsken Evolve, one of the original backers, also took part, together with two new angel investors: Jan Oberhauser, the founder of the workflow automation platform n8n, and Thomas Visti, former CEO of Universal Robots and Mobile Industrial Robots.
A matched loan was offered by Denmark’s export and investment fund, EIFO.
“Everybody expected AI to improve operations. In reality, it has introduced significant complexity. It was meant to simplify processes but has made many aspects more complicated,” Sørensen, chief executive and co-founder of Velatir, tells Tech Funding News.
More than one hundred AI tools, but no unified oversight
Velatir provides a control feature compatible with current AI tools, enabling companies to monitor usage, data flow, and risk in real time for both their employees and autonomous agents.
According to Sørensen, an average company uses over 100 AI-connected services, a number that can become difficult to manage when autonomous agents are involved. For instance, a bank that uses an internal copilot could employ Velatir to detect employees entering customer data into approved AI tools before a compliance problem arises.
“Some solutions are built for Claude, others for Microsoft, but this approach requires multiple tools for each application. What is truly needed is a foundational control layer,” Sørensen says.
The AI governance market that Velatir is targeting is still small, even though the need is urgent. One estimate puts its global value at $308.3 million in 2025, rising to $3.59 billion by 2033 as new regulations like the AI Act push companies to solve these problems. While CrowdStrike and SentinelOne focus on endpoint protection and Microsoft offers AI oversight in its higher-tier enterprise products, newer companies like FriskAI andWhite Circle are also tackling this issue in their own ways.
Velatir considers it essential to use only infrastructure owned by Europeans, rather than relying on major cloud providers, particularly when data is transferred across borders.
“Sovereign cloud is a common phrase, and it often means American platforms with a European label. We built Velatir on European-owned and hosted infrastructure from the very beginning. It is the harder path, but the only viable one for us,” added Christian Møller, chief operating officer and co-founder at Velatir, who previously led AI Act and DORA compliance work at one of Europe’s largest financial groups.
Two weeks of due diligence and a full house of returning backers
This funding round follows a pre-seed round of DKK 10 million, which is approximately €1.3 million, that took place in February and was also led by Ugly Duckling Ventures.
The due diligence process was completed in just two weeks, which was a testament to the strength of our team, according to Sørense.
Louise Lachmann, general partner at Ugly Duckling Ventures and Velatir’s board chair since the pre-seed round, said: “Every once in a while, a company hits the market at exactly the right moment. I have rarely seen a team execute with this combination of speed, discipline, and ambition, turning an urgent problem into commercial traction in just a few months.”
Helen Agering of Spintop Ventures and Johan Attby of Norrsken Evolve agreed, stating that Velatir’s progress is greater than that of most companies in the field, which is still awaiting a definitive market leader.
From 0 customers to 80 in seven months
Although Velatir had no customers in January 2026, by August it had acquired 80 customers across the banking, insurance, law, government, and utilities sectors in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, France, and the UK. The company is now nearing $1 million in annual recurring revenue.
Since January, the team has increased from having zero members to 30, and the aim is to have between 50 and 60 employees by the end of the year. The new funding will be used to carry out hiring and will also help to accelerate the company’s expansion in Europe.
An office in Stockholm will open on October 1, and plans are in place to set up four or five further offices throughout Europe next year, with priority given to regions with the highest demand, such as France, the Netherlands, and the Nordics.
Sørensen believes that having sovereign status alone is not sufficient to secure deals.
“The reason our platform is not appealing to customers is not that it is EU sovereign, but rather because of the value we provide to them; nevertheless, our sales cycles are very short since, once we reach the onboarding, sourcing, and procurement stages, we are sovereign,” he concludes.
The extent to which this benefit will prove valuable in the long term will depend on whether it continues to hold as more AI companies make similar claims, regardless of where their servers are situated. Indeed, this factor could turn out to be more important than the €5 million investment.
