BottleCapAI, a new European AI company founded by Tomas Mikolov, one of the world’s most influential AI researchers (creator of Word2Vec, RNNLM), Jaroslav Beck, serial entrepreneur and co-creator of Beat Saber (Acquired by Meta) and David Herel, an AI researcher of the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, today announced a $7.5 million seed round led by 20VC. Additional investors in the round include the founders of Lovable, ElevenLabs, Hugging Face, Supercell, Synthesia, Pigment, Canva, and Datadog.
Large language models have improved rapidly in recent years, but efficiency remains a growing concern. The dominant approach across the industry has been to increase scale by adding more parameters and more compute. While this strategy has delivered short-term gains, it comes with rapidly rising costs and diminishing improvements in reasoning capability.
BottleCapAI is tackling this concern head on, building architecture-first foundational LLMs, with efficiency as a core design principle rather than an afterthought. BottleCapAI combines foundational research and product development under one roof, enabling rapid translation of research breakthroughs into real-world applications (B2B and B2C).
“If something works in the lab, we turn it into a product immediately. This time we created an efficient foundational language model we call “CAP1” which is going to power a wide range of our future apps,” said Jaroslav Beck (Co-founder / CEO).
Along with announcing its funding round, BottleCap is also launching its first consumer product, “Pulse: Community News”, which is now available to download on iOS.
What is Pulse: Community News
Pulse began as an internal tool designed to help the BottleCap team aggregate information and AI news, supporting them in prioritising research focus. They realised this application would benefit millions of people, so have made it available to download on iOS for free. The app surfaces and highlight the most relevant posts and news across topics such as AI research, technology, and economics. In addition to headlines, Pulse provides community sentiment insights, helping users understand how people are reacting to news and developments in real time.
By aggregating and summarizing community opinions, Pulse aims to provide context that headlines alone often miss.
Pulse is powered by CAP1, BottleCapAI’s first in-house foundational model, build from ground up for efficiency. The company says Pulse is the first of many applications planned on top of its novel architecture.
“ At a time when much of AI progress is driven by who can spend the most on GPUs, they chose to start BottleCapAI from Europe, with a different set of first principles. An efficiency-first approach to foundational models, grounded in deep research and translated rapidly into real products. This is how enduring AI companies are built, and why we believe the next great frontier AI company can be built in Europe “ said Julien Codorniou, GP at 20VC.
Looking Ahead
With its seed funding, BottleCapAI plans to continue advancing its efficiency-focused LLM research, expand its product portfolio, and grow its team across research and product roles. The company is headquartered in Europe and operates with a global outlook.
“Novel architectures are necessary for further progress of language modeling. The best models that exist today are combining algorithms that have been predominantly developed over the last two decades - clearly, more algorithms will be discovered in the future and a focus on efficiency will be the key for the future of AI. This is just the beginning and this is why we are building BottleCap.” Said Tomas Mikolov (Co-Founder / Chief Scientific Officer)
Business angels participating in the round include Anton Osika (Lovable), Cliff Obrecht (Canva), Ilkka Paananen (Supercell), Xavier Niel (Iliad), Ivo Lukačovič (Seznam.cz/ windy.com), David Singleton (Stripe), Olivier Pomel (Datadog), Akin Babayigit (Tripledot Studios), Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli (Pigment), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), Sheila Gulati (Tola Capital, Microsoft), Nico Rosberg , Andreas De Neve (Techwolf), Jeroen Van Hautte (techwolf), Mika Vormoo (Techwolf), Des Traynor (Intercom), Steffen Tjerrild Hansen (Synthesia), Kieran Flanagan (HubSpot), and Shiv Rao (Abridge) as well as Rockaway VC, Pebblebed, Inception Fund, Foreword Ventures, 20Growth and 20Product.