E86 [AI-Translated] Transactions of the Month - Market Snapshot Februar | Rapidata | Optiml | Metafuels | L.E.S.S.

In this episode of Burn Rate – The VC Insider Podcast, Max Meister and Guy Giuffredi break down the most important startup deals from February 2026 in the Swiss venture ecosystem. In the Burn Rate Market Snapshot, they review a quieter Swiss funding month with around CHF 100 million invested across 15 disclosed rounds, discuss positive ecosystem signals from ETH, EPFL, the Swiss Startup Association and the startup support ranking, and touch on Constructor Capital’s first fund closing. The European view also points to a selective but active market environment, with capital continuing to concentrate around AI infrastructure and deep tech. In the Deep Dive, they analyze four very different but highly substantive transactions: Rapidata (USD 8.5M Seed) as an AI infrastructure play for programmable human feedback, Optiml (EUR 8M Seed) as a real-estate decision intelligence platform for decarbonization and capex planning, Metafuels (USD 24M Series A) as a climate-tech company building synthetic aviation fuel, and L.E.S.S. (USD 22M Series C) as a photonics and industrial scale-up focused on nano-active fiber lighting. The episode highlights how Swiss startups are scaling across very different layers of the value chain — from AI infrastructure and proptech to climate tech, photonics, and industrial deep tech.