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The Linkup Story
The conviction started with a simple observation: AI agents were going to need the web, but the web had not been designed for them.
In late 2024, generative AI was already reshaping enterprise software, but a structural bottleneck was emerging. LLMs and autonomous agents needed real-time, verified, structured information to avoid hallucinations and ground their outputs in current reality. Traditional search engines, designed to send humans clicking through links, were ill-suited. Web scraping was operationally fragile, legally exposed, and economically unsustainable for content publishers. Google had just been fined €270M in France for using news publishers' data without authorization; News Corp had filed suit against Perplexity for the same reasons.
This was the gap Linkup was built to fill.
Philippe Mizrahi (CEO, Polytechnique, MS Columbia, ex-Lyft Group Product Manager on autonomous vehicles), Boris Toledano (COO, HEC + ISAE-SUPAERO, ex-McKinsey and Carrefour AI), and Denis Charrier (CTO, 15+ years in software architecture, founder of Niland — acquired by Spotify in 2017) had aligned on a thesis few competitors had grasped: rather than scraping or aggregating, Linkup would establish direct partnerships with premium content providers, guaranteeing legal access, fair compensation for publishers, and reliability for AI systems.
For Mathieu Viallard, partner at Axeleo Capital, the combination clicked immediately: a critical infrastructure gap, a regulatory wave aligned with the business model, and a founding team mixing technical depth, business acumen, and prior exit experience.
The Seed Investment: November 2024
Axeleo Capital invested in Linkup's €3M seed round in November 2024, alongside Seedcamp and Kima Ventures. The thesis Axeleo articulated at the time was sharp: the future of AI lies in more specialized, industry-focused models, and these models require curated, high-quality content rather than the raw, ad-saturated web layer designed for human readers. Linkup's approach aligned precisely with that conviction.
The funds were deployed against three priorities: refining proprietary models and web indexing, building strategic partnerships with content providers, and scaling infrastructure for large enterprise deployments.
From €3M Seed to $10M: 15 Months of Execution
In February 2026, Linkup announced a $10M seed round led by Gradient, with participation from Elaia, Leblon Capital and an impressive circle of founders from Mistral, Datadog, Deel, and Dataiku. Axeleo Capital followed on.
But what makes this round meaningful is not just the capital raised : it is the product story behind it. Linkup had made a sharp pivot. The company moved away from a content-partnership model toward becoming the foundational search infrastructure for AI agents. Rather than indexing curated publisher content, Linkup rebuilt search from the ground up around what the team calls "atoms of information" — discrete facts indexed and served to AI agents, rather than entire web pages — providing the precise context required to avoid hallucinations.
The pivot was not a departure from the original thesis — it was a sharper execution of its core insight. The problem was never just content rights; it was that AI systems lacked a reliable, real-time information layer. Linkup solved it differently than anticipated, but more completely. Ranked #1 on OpenAI's SimpleQA factuality benchmark, it is now positioned as the world's most accurate search for AI applications.Alongside the funding, the company launched Linkup /fast, positioned as the world's most accurate sub-second web search API — a direct response to the latency constraints of production AI agents.
Why This Deal Matters
Linkup embodies the type of bet Axeleo seeks at seed stage: an infrastructure layer that becomes critical precisely as a market category matures. As AI agents move from prototypes to mission-critical workflows in 2026, the search and grounding layer they rely on becomes one of the most defensible categories of the modern AI stack.
“What Philippe, Boris, and Denis are building is the connective tissue between agents and the real-time web. It is also a business model that aligns with the direction regulation is taking on copyrighted content. Rare combination.” noticed Mathieu Viallard
Linkup is now measuring itself against the global AI search incumbents — and holding its own. The quality of execution shown by Philippe, Boris, and Denis since day one gives us every reason to stay close as they take Linkup into its next phase of growth. A trajectory worth watching.