Encube, a Stockholm-based DeepTech startup, is emerging from stealth with €19 million in funding to transform how hardware products are designed and manufactured, helping teams avoid costly design complexity, speed up development and lower production costs.
The round was backed by Kinnevik, Promus Ventures, and Inventure.
“Hardware development is a balancing act between how a product looks, functions and what it costs to produce. In Europe, we excel at the first two, but our manufacturing know-how is disappearing. At Sandvik and Aker, I saw firsthand how quickly production costs ballooned and competitive edge eroded, when early design decisions weren’t made with manufacturing in mind. We built Encube to change that,” says Hugo Nordell, CEO and Co-founder of Encube.
Encube’s launch funding arrives amid a surge of European investment in AI applied to industrial and manufacturing processes.
In 2025, Resourcly (Germany) raised €2.7 million for an AI-driven inventory platform, while 36ZERO Vision (Germany) secured €3.6 million to scale its data-efficient inspection software. Larger growth rounds, such as PhysicsX (UK) with €117 million and Pelico (France) with €34.7 million, show increasing investor appetite for AI-native engineering infrastructure. At an earlier stage, Bonx (France) and CloEE (Finland) attracted €7.3 million and €520k respectively for factory-focused software.
Within this funding landscape, Encube’s raise sits in the upper mid-range and reflects growing confidence in AI platforms that integrate design and manufacturing intelligence rather than focusing on narrow production tasks. Headquartered in Sweden, Encube also stands out within the Nordic deep-tech ecosystem, where few 2025 industrial AI startups have raised at comparable scale.
“Encube is one of the most promising innovations I’ve seen in hardware engineering in the last 30 years. The software’s ease of use and the speed of its simulations represent a major leap forward,” says Ralf Usinger, Global Head of Engineering Applications at Beyond Gravity.
Founded in 2021 by former Sandvik and Aker executive Hugo Nordell, together with Skype and Klarna veteran Johnny Bigert,, Encube is a European DeepTech startup developing AI-powered tools and workflows for hardware development. The company also conducts research in AI for hardware design, aiming to address complex challenges in the development process.
Validated by companies such as Volvo Group, Beyond Gravity and Scania, Encube develops an AI-powered platform that makes it faster and easier for hardware teams to understand which product design choices drive manufacturing complexity and how to avoid them.
This allegedly results in shorter time to market, lower cost of production and allows teams to explore exponentially more design directions than otherwise possible.
“Securing competence in our engineering and industrialisation functions is very challenging. Many of our key people are approaching retirement. Encube really helps us navigate the risk this creates for us,” says Jonas Hellman Peterson, Head of Sales Engineering at Birn Group.
Adding to industry pressures, tightening European sustainability regulations are requiring manufacturers to rethink how products are designed and built. Smarter product development and digital workflows at the design stage are becoming essential to improve both economic performance and environmental impact.
In hardware development, up to 80% of a product’s cost is determined once the design is locked. However, the company says many design decisions have an impact on manufacturing costs and the carbon footprint in ways that are not immediately obvious until they enter the production phase.
As a result, businesses are left with a difficult choice: either accept decreased profitability or redo the designs and delay market launch.
“We rely entirely on third parties to manufacture our robots. Encube makes it much easier for us to uncover and mitigate product risk early in development together with our suppliers and customers,” says Mattias Vanberg, Director of Development at Cognibotics.
Encube says they solve this challenge in two ways.
- First, with a collaborative software platform that helps entire organisations align and make faster, better product decisions, all directly in the browser on any device.
- Second, with AI-powered capabilities embedded inside the platform. These capabilities enable teams to eliminate common bottlenecks in hardware development projects.
One example of such a bottleneck is the need to manually identify design changes over time so that the team can determine if a change causes problems later. Another is to analyse how complex a design will be to manufacture, including what design choices drive this complexity.
“AI is fundamentally transforming how products are designed, enabling engineering teams to simulate, iterate and collaborate at unprecedented speed. Encube is pioneering this shift by embedding manufacturing intelligence directly into the engineering workflow, shaping the future of product development. We’re excited to partner with Hugo and the team on this journey,” says Tatiana Shalalvand, Investment Director at Kinnevik.
With a long-term ambition to help rebuild, secure and strengthen European industrial competitiveness, Encube will use its new financing to expand its commercial footprint across Europe, deepen existing partnerships and accelerate investments in hardware-focused AI, positioning the company to ride the current AI wave more aggressively.
“We’re incredibly proud to have been the first investors in Encube and our growing conviction in this stellar team has only been outpaced by the speed of their progress. We’re convinced that Encube is going to accomplish for industrial manufacturing what Figma did for web design and redefine how physical products are made,” says Adrian Arnsvik Bjurefalk, Principal at Inventure.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/10/swedens-encube-emerges-from-stealth-with-e19-million-to-reshape-hardware-development/
