US-based AI company Sprouts.ai acquired the search and data technology and AI intellectual property of Vienna-based StartUs Insights in August 2026. The purchase price was not disclosed. Parts of the StartUs Insights team will also join Sprouts.ai.

StartUs Insights was founded in Vienna in 2016 by David R. Prasser. What began as a startup focused on connecting and discovering emerging companies evolved into an international business and innovation intelligence data platform.

Over time, the company’s proprietary technology became increasingly central to its offering. StartUs Insights developed systems capable of collecting, structuring and searching large volumes of unstructured company and technology data. These included AI-based information extraction and natural-language search, with the goal of building one of the world’s most comprehensive tools for identifying companies, technologies and market trends.

AI Became a Core Part of the Platform

In recent years in particular, artificial intelligence became a key component of the company’s technology stack. StartUs Insights used Large Language Models and AI-driven data processing to extract information from unstructured sources to make its growing datasets available for research and innovation intelligence.

Under Prasser’s leadership, StartUs Insights grew to more than 50 employees, with 20 people most recently working across technology and data.

Over the years, the company served more than 1,500 international customers through its SaaS-based Discovery Platform and supported approximately 2,000 innovation, scouting and research projects. Companies StartUs Insights worked with included Roche, Siemens, Samsung, Shell and Mitsubishi.

A significant share of the company’s insights on startups, emerging technologies and industry trends was also published weekly on its corporate blog, which most recently reached more than 200,000 readers per month.

StartUs Insights’ Technology to Strengthen Sprouts.ai’s Data Processing and Semantic Search Capabilities

Sprouts.ai plans to use the acquired technology and data to expand its AI-ready datasets and semantic search capabilities.

The US company develops an AI-based go-to-market platform for enterprise customers, combining data intelligence with autonomous agents across the sales funnel. Sprouts.ai integrates with platforms including Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics and works with AI environments such as Copilot and Claude. The company describes its offering as a unified GTM intelligence platform.

“The technology, data and team from StartUs Insights are highly complementary to our mission of building AI-ready datasets and the world’s leading semantic search engine for enterprise GTM,” says Karan Chaudhry, Co-Founder and CEO of Sprouts.ai.

“The fact that the technology we built will now be further developed within an AI company is a very fitting conclusion to this chapter for me,” says Prasser. “At the same time, I am more interested than ever in what happens when increasingly powerful AI systems meet companies, business models and entire industries – and how organizations can use this development strategically rather than simply trying to keep up with it.”

New Company Focused on AI Advisory, Data Intelligence and Startup Investments

Prasser will continue to focus on artificial intelligence, emerging technologies and innovation. He is currently supporting companies and startups with AI product development as well as questions related to data, technology and data-driven business models.

In parallel, he is consolidating his investment and advisory activities under his new company, Tilly & Elliot GmbH.

“In addition to hands-on support for startups and scaleups working on AI, physical AI and data-driven business models, Tilly & Elliot will also support selected early-stage startups with its own capital,” says Prasser.