Investment: “Expanse raises €4.5 million”
Expanse, an AI infrastructure company, has raised a €4.5 million Seed round to expand its engineering team, accelerate product development and drive wider adoption of its predictive AI infrastructure platform. The round was led by Crane Venture Partners.
Other participants in the round include PXN Ventures, AIP Seed and a group of angel investors, among them former DeepMind researchers.
Founded in 2025 by four University of Edinburgh graduate engineers — Ismaeel Bashir, Nikodem Bieniek, Eren Mendi and Yafet Melake — Expanse is U.S. and U.K.-based and develops software that predicts what an AI workload requires before execution. The company’s models run inside an organisation’s cloud or on-premises infrastructure so code or telemetry does not leave the customer environment, enabling optimisation while maintaining data sovereignty.
Expanse says its platform helps organisations reduce over-allocation, prevent failed jobs and unlock additional value from existing GPU infrastructure. In one production deployment the company identified nearly €6.9 million of idle compute capacity in a single month. Co-founder and CEO Ismaeel Bashir previously developed a multimodal HPC resource prediction system while at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, which informed the team’s approach.
The funding will be used to grow Expanse’s engineering team, speed up product development and bring the platform to more organisations across AI infrastructure, quantitative finance, life sciences, research and high performance computing.
“Today, every AI workload begins with an educated guess,” says Ismaeel Bashir, co-founder and CEO of Expanse. “Engineers shouldn’t have to predict exactly how much compute their code will need before they press run. The machine should carry the uncertainty, not the person.”
“Expanse gives organisations something they don’t have today: certainty. By predicting exactly what every workload needs before it runs, customers recover existing capacity, reduce waste and extend the life of some of the world’s most valuable infrastructure. We believe that’s a new and important category in AI infrastructure,” adds Scott Sage, co-founder and Partner at Crane Venture Partners.
