Expanse, an AI infrastructure company, today announced a €4.5 million ($5.3 million) Seed funding round in order to expand its engineering team, accelerate product development and reach wider industry adoption.
The round was led by Crane Venture Partners, with participation from PXN Ventures, AIP Seed, and angel investors including former DeepMind researchers.
“Today, every AI workload begins with an educated guess,” says Ismaeel Bashir, co-founder and CEO of Expanse. “Engineers shouldn’t have to predict exactly how much compute their code will need before they press run. The machine should carry the uncertainty, not the person.”
Expanse’s Seed round can be placed amid broader 2026 investment in the infrastructure and software layers intended to make AI compute more available and efficient.
EU-Startups has reported London-based Callosum raising €85.4 million to route workloads across different AI models and chips, Vienna’s Ora Computing securing €3.5 million for model compression and inference efficiency, Helsinki-based Verda raising €100 million for AI cloud infrastructure, and London-based Nscale closing a €1.7 billion Series C for vertically integrated compute infrastructure.
Other adjacent rounds include €16 million for Switzerland’s AI Infrastructure Capital AG, €5 million for Danish AI infrastructure startup Velatir and €1.7 million for Prague cloud platform Zerops.
Together, these 2026 financings amount to approximately €1.91 billion, or around €1.92 billion including Expanse, although the total is heavily weighted towards Nscale’s round.
The UK is particularly represented in this group through Nscale and Callosum, the latter of which, like Expanse, is developing software intended to allocate AI workloads more efficiently across available compute.
Today’s news comes just one day after Crane Venture Partners announced their €419 million active across four new investment vehicles.
“The future of AI won’t be defined only by who builds the biggest clusters, but by who uses them most intelligently,” adds Scott Sage, co-founder and Partner at Crane Venture Partners. “Expanse gives organisations something they don’t have today: certainty. By predicting exactly what every workload needs before it runs, customers recover existing capacity, reduce waste and extend the life of some of the world’s most valuable infrastructure. We believe that’s a new and important category in AI infrastructure.”
Founded in 2025, Expanse’s software predicts what an AI workload needs before it runs, helping organisations reduce over-allocation, prevent failed jobs and unlock more value from the GPU infrastructure they already own.
Expanse was founded by four University of Edinburgh graduate engineers who previously built and operated large-scale compute infrastructure across quantitative finance and national supercomputing facilities.
While at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), co-founder Ismaeel Bashir developed a multimodal HPC resource prediction system that predicted resource requirements across HPC workloads. Together, Bashir and co-founders Nikodem Bieniek, Eren Mendi, Yafet Melake recognised that even the world’s most sophisticated compute environments still relied on manual estimation to allocate resources efficiently.
Unlike traditional monitoring and observability platforms, which explain what happened after a workload has finished, Expanse says they work before execution begins. Installed directly into an organisation’s cloud or on-premises infrastructure, its models analyse workloads without code or telemetry ever leaving the customer’s environment, allowing organisations to optimise performance while maintaining data sovereignty.
Andy Barrow, Managing Director of PXN Ventures, says: “The widespread adoption of AI by businesses and everyday users has led to an unprecedented focus on the infrastructure required to service this technology and many of the challenges that engineers face. As Expanse has identified, one of those challenges is optimisation and helping businesses to make better use of their compute resource, which can lower running costs and increase scalability. PXN is proud to be backing Ismaeel and the team, who are tackling this head on.”
In one production deployment, Expanse identified nearly €6.9 million ($8 million) of idle compute capacity in a single month.
Expanse will use the funding to expand its engineering team, accelerate product development and bring its platform to more organisations across AI infrastructure, quantitative finance, life sciences, research and high performance computing.
