Custodea secures €350K to give European SMEs greater control over their data

Custodea has raised €350,000 in seed funding from investors in its own network to build an AI data platform for European SMEs. The pitch is simple: stop forcing smaller companies to stitch together bits of business data from accounting tools, CRMs, HR systems and spreadsheets just to find out what is going on.

The platform pulls information from dozens of systems, including Exact Online, HubSpot and Personio, into a private data environment. That data stays continuously synchronised, so companies do not have to rely on manual exports or awkward migrations to keep reports current. Custodea says businesses can then connect that unified data to tools like Excel, Power BI, Looker, Tableau and dbt, or use it to feed AI models and agents.

There is also an AI assistant built into the product. It can answer questions and analyse a company’s own data, including revenue trends and outstanding invoices. That matters because the real bottleneck for many SMEs is not the absence of software. It is the mess.

Co-founder Gregory Aerts frames the company as a way to narrow the gap between large corporations, which can afford dedicated data teams, and smaller firms that cannot. Custodea says the platform is read-only by default, customers control access, and permissions can be revoked at any time. Its infrastructure sits entirely inside the European Union, which the company is selling as an alternative for businesses that want to keep using their existing software without giving up control of the data behind it. The funding will go toward launch and expansion across European markets.