European early-stage investor Seedcamp has announced the $180M close of its “Fund VI”.

It’s a long way from a London university lecture hall 15 years ago in September, when Founding Partner and co-CEO Reshma Sohoni stood up and introduced the first Seedcamp cohort (Incidentally, this was the same day TechCrunch launched in Europe, and my first day as a full-time TC journalist).

Seedcamp’s Fund VI is almost double the size of Seedcamp Fund V, raised some 2.5 years ago ($95 million, raised in 2020), and thus the largest fund to date. The new fund will back about 100 companies. Although the fund is sector agnostic, Seedcamp tends to steer clear of capital-intensive startups in areas like mobility, preferring to stick to software platforms in areas such as Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity, open source software, healthtech, and fintech.

The new fund intends to lead rounds from the Angel and Seed stage (up to $1 million), while also being able to participate in rounds up to Series B, given it now has much higher fire-power. This means Seedcamp will benefit from exits at a later stage than previously.

While later stage funds have found it a little tougher to raise in this uncertain market, Seedcamp’s laser-like focus on early-stage has kept it a favourite amongst investors. It also benefits from a 15 year heritage and a pretty unrivalled network across Europe.

Institutions backing Seedcamp include LGT, Reference Capital, Harbourvest, Legal & General. Angels include the likes of Michael Pennington (Gumtree), Will Neale (Grabyo), Paul Forster (Indeed), Ilkka Paananen (Supercell), Shakil Khan (Spotify), and Kärt Siilats (GoBeyondCapital).

Former Seedcamp Founders include Taavet Hinrikus (Wise), Daniel Dines (UiPath), Jeppe Rindom (Pleo), and Johnny Boufarhat (Hopin). 

Seedcamp’s portfolio now consists of over 460 companies including 9 unicorns: UiPath (NYSE: PATH), Wise (LON: WISE), Revolut, Pleo, Hopin, Grover, Viz.ai, wefox, and Sorare.

Some of Seedcamp’s rising stars include Synthesia, Buyonomics, Griffin, Ramp, Sylvera, Superscript, Primer, Appwrite, PortalOne, and Peppy. 

Its most notable exits include Skew (to Coinbase); Kitch (to Delivery Hero); and Nordigen (to GoCardless).

Seedcamp is also launching the Seedcamp Expert Collective, a community of 100+ operators who have been involved in companies including Uber, Stripe, Cloudflare, Revolut, Deliveroo, NextDoor, Skyscanner and Wise.

A LONG HISTORY

For many years, Seedcamp was more or less the only early stage investor game in town. At least in Europe.

There’s perhaps a “sliding door” moment when Seedcamp could have simply aped US-style accelerators, and churned out plenty of also-ran companies. And yes, for about half it’s life-span it did indeed have “cohorts”.

But then something different happened, and perhaps something uniquely European.

Instead of taking on the rather centralised and aggressive “Tech Bro” culture of Silicon Valley, Seedcamp morphed into a highly collaborative “community” network of former Seedcamp-backed founders, European Super-Angels, and even other VC funds that wanted access to its pipeline, built on this networked approach.

To illustrate this, I once asked Paul Graham backstage at a TechCrunch Disrupt conference if he would ever scale YCombinator to Europe. He indicated that YC would simply stay in the Valley, and “everyone would come here”. While that approach served YC just fine, it meant it was never going to be able to engage with Europe’s distributed and complex ecosystem. Seedcamp was on the ground’ in the early days, in a way most funds, and even most European funds were not.

This was echoed in something co-CEO Carlos Espinal told over an interview: “We will continue to be community-led. The second one is being entrepreneurially-minded. Which means that we’re carving our own path and not cloning what other people are doing. We’re coming up with things that I think work for the European ecosystem, that work for the founders that are based in France or Romania or anywhere else. And the last one is a teamwork centric. When we started, basically, we didn’t know anything. So that actually shaped the culture rather than assuming that we were some successful magnate that came in wanting to bestow wisdom on others.”

In an era where every VCs seems to talk endlessly about their ‘data-driven approach’ to investing, Seedcamp pioneered it’s own version: people-driven.

Seedcamp’s reputation as a VC which founders could simply fill in a form to access has served it well, but it’s this network that has been its most powerful asset.

And because the fund keep its stakes below 10%, it can bring in Angels into a round, writing small cheques, and thus extending and incentivising this network effect.

The fact that it matured in this organic manner is testament to the curation of Sohoni and Espinal, who have justifiably earned their reputation as calm, thoughtful investors and advisors, as well as being fully signed-up to the “European project”.

Sohoni said the new fund had been over-subscribed: “Fundraising is never easy, but we were oversubscribed, which tells you the consistency of the network. We have always been pre-series A. That’s defined us and it’s a consistent record of 15 years of delivering the impact.”

She added: “We planted a lot of flags back in the day, and some of that talent we backed ended up with the US. Now that talent is coming back to Europe and in a kind’ve reverse brain drain. They remember that we backed European role models, and access to capital and knowledge to European founders.”

Partners Tom Wilson and Sia Houchangnia joined Seeedcamp a while ago to scale up the Seedcamp offering. More recently Antonia Whitecourt and Natasha Lytton have become Directors. Felix Martinez is now promoted to Principal, and Kate McGinn is promoted to Associate. 

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Now a Cambridge, UK startup has come up with a radical new technology device that, it claims, is affordable, portable, requires minimal training, and also measures CO2.

Healthtech company TidalSense has now closed a £7.5m ($9.3m) fundraising round led by UK-based investors BGF and Downing Ventures.

The Cambridge-based company says its handheld medical device (N-Tidal) detects changes in lung function sensitively and enables quicker, more accurate and automated diagnosis of COPD. The ability to measure asthma problems is in the product road-map.

COPD is the third leading cause of death worldwide, causing 3.23 million deaths in 2019 according to the World Health Organization. And because of the rise in pollution levels across the world, it’s likely to get worse.

Despite the 1840s technology, the market for Spirometers is projected to be worth $616 Million in 2023 and is further poised to grow at a CAGR of 5.4%, to hit US$ 1042.3 million by 2033.

However, Spirometers are easily fooled when patients vary how hard they blow, and they cannot easily distinguish between different types of respiratory conditions or provide information on the severity of the condition. Plus it will also take about 30 minutes to test a patient with a Spirometer. In England alone, 200-250  per 500,000 of the population are awaiting a diagnostic test driving waiting times of up to 5-10 years. 

TidalSense says its N-Tidal device can measure a patient’s breathe in less than five minutes, and send the data to a Cloud-based platform via 2G networks.

Indeed, I tried the device out myself, and, sure enough, it measured the state of my lungs in (more like) less than 3 minutes.

TidalSense team

In an interview with TechCrunch, co-founder Dr Ameera Patel (pictured, right), CEO of TidalSense and an asthma sufferer herself, told me: “This hardware has been developed for eight years. There’s several patents on it now. The sensor measures every single molecule of carbon dioxide that comes out of your lungs. What we’ve discovered with collecting all this data is that we can tell really sensitively when your lungs are getting worse.”

She says the problem is that people don’t know when they’re symptomatic: “They don’t know when they’re getting sicker. This device will tell me immediately and I’ll know to increase my inhalers. It’s the difference between being able to manage your symptoms and suddenly landing in hospital because you had no data on the lead-up to things getting worse.”

The company says it has benchmarked the device on over 1000 patients, collecting over 2.3 million breaths from patients through clinical studies and trials.

“We’re getting really really high accuracies on diagnosing COPD because fundamentally, in COPD, your lung structure changes. From the data we built very accurate diagnostic tests, which we’re looking to commercialise with the funding,” Patel added.

Tim Rea, Head of Early Stage Investments at BGF commented in a statement that “this solution is a prime example of where advanced  machine learning techniques can be applied to deliver faster diagnostics, greater efficiencies and better patient outcomes.” 

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The new system, which includes a heat shield and a water vehicle designed to soften the spacecraft’s landing, will be incorporated into the company’s in-space manufacturing satellite platform called ForgeStar.

As opposed to ablative heat shields, like those used on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which require replacement after each mission, Space Forge says it built its “Pridwen” heat shield to be large enough to radiate away the heat generated by atmospheric reentry. The shield, made out of a high-temperature alloy, was designed to fold inside the launcher for lift-off and unfold when the spacecraft makes its return to Earth.

Moving away from ablative heat shields is one way Space Forge hopes to set itself apart from its competitors.

“It’s old technology,” Space Forge co-founder and chief technology officer Andrew Bacon explained. “The idea of ablative heat shields, something that eats itself as it returns, it’s [1950s] technology.”

Image Credits: Space Forge

The company has also developed an uncrewed water vehicle, “Fielder,” which will maneuver itself under ForgeStar and “catch” it in a soft landing. The idea is to reduce stress on sensitive payloads inside the vehicle as much as possible, while also reducing the need for spacecraft refurbishment.

Space Forge is one of a handful of companies vying to be among the first to exploit the potentially astronomical market for materials made in space. The five-year-old startup has ambitious plans to enable the fabrication of semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, certain alloys and more. While astronauts on the International Space Station have proven that these materials can be manufactured in orbit, manufacturing them at scale — and returning them to Earth — has yet to be achieved.

Image Credits: Space Forge

“The space station is a great laboratory, but it’s not a factory,” Bacon said. Nor is in-space manufacturing as simple as turning a Dragon capsule, the most-used cargo and crew vehicle in history, into an orbital factory. The capsule simply isn’t optimized for it — on cost or engineering, he explained.

“SpaceX have done fantastic work in reducing the cost of launch, but they haven’t really reduced the cost of return,” he said.

In addition to cost, the mechanics of Dragon’s reentry could pose problems for some materials, like live biological cultures. “We’ve spoken to biological customers who’ve lost their three-year in-development experiments in the last millisecond of landing,” due to the high-shock of landing, Bacon explained.

The company says it’s on-track to launch its inaugural mission this year. That mission, whose customer is the European Space Agency as part of its Boost! Commercial Space Transportation Services program, will demonstrate Space Forge’s manufacturing technique and prove out other key technologies, including safe reentry technology. While Bacon declined to specify the potential launch date or launch provider, he did say that the company chose a U.S. launch provider with proven flight heritage.

The company first attempted to launch a spacecraft on Virgin Orbit’s January mission from Cornwall, U.K., but that payload — and everything else — was lost when Virgin’s launcher experienced an anomaly and failed to reach orbit.

Space Forge closed a $10.2 million seed round in 2021, co-led by U.S.-based firms SpaceFund and Type One Ventures, and Berlin-based World Fund. Space.VC, Starbridge Venture Capital, Quiet Capital, Kencoa Aerospace, Trousdale Ventures, Newable Ventures, Dylan Taylor and FJ Labs also participated.

As for the company’s next funding round? “Expect an announcement soon,” Bacon said.

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Building and maintaining relationships is hard, and COVID-19 definitely didn’t help. Multiple studies have shown that adults have gotten even more lonely since the start of the pandemic.

Founders are trying to find tech solutions. There are many startups looking to combat loneliness — some formed years before the pandemic — including senior-focused ElliQ and Replika, which creates an AI companion, and Infection AI’s Pi, an emotional support bot. But a newer entrant really caught my eye this week: Amorai.

The startup has built an AI relationship coach to help people grow and foster real-life connections by offering advice and answers to relationship questions. The company was founded by former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg and was incubated in Andrew Ng’s AI Fund. The company just raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding that took only 24 hours to raise, Nyborg told Vox’s Recode Media podcast back in April.

While combating loneliness is a great mission — and some groups of people may be more open to chat with a bot than a human — this feels like it has the potential to go so wrong so fast. But what do I know? So I pinged an expert.

Turns out I’m not the only one a little wary of this concept. Maarten Sap, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and researcher for the nonprofit Allen Institute of AI, shared my concern. Sap’s research focuses on building social commonsense and social intelligence into AI. He’s also done research in the development of deep language learning models that help understand human cognition. Essentially, he knows a thing or two about how AI interacts with humans.

Sap told me that while the idea of creating a tech solution to help foster real-life relationships is admirable — and there is definitely proof that there will be solid use cases for AI in combating these types of issues — this one gives him pause.

“I’m saying this with an open mind, I don’t think it will work,” he said. “Have they done the studies that show how this will work? Does [Amorai] increase [users’] social skills? Because yeah, I don’t know to what extent these things transfer over.”

The biggest thing that gives him pause, he said, is the worry that this type of application will either give all of its users the same advice, good or bad, and that it would be hard for AI to get the nuances right about certain relationships. Also, would people trust advice from AI over another person anyway?

“The idea of the pickup artists sort of came to mind,” Sap said. “Is this going to give you advice to tell a bunch of straight men to nag women or try to sleep with them? Or are their guardrails for this?”

If the model is designed to learn off of itself, it could create an echo chamber based on the types of questions people are asking. That, in turn, could point the model to a problematic direction if left unchecked. Bing users might have already learned this the hard way when its AI told people they were unhappy in their marriages.

Sap said that one way this could definitely work would be if there were a human touch to this. Human oversight to ensure that the app is giving the right advice to the right people could make this a powerful tool. But we don’t know if that is the case because the company isn’t answering questions or accepting interviews.

This round also highlights how deep the FOMO in AI really is. Someone who researches this stuff every day can’t see how this company could really work, and yet Amorai raised funding in 24 hours pre-launch in a bad market.

Of course, investors know more about the company than what is released, and sure, these concerns can serve as feedback for the startup. But like a lot of AI startups, I have to assume it’s building with good intentions, despite having nothing concrete to prove it.

I also don’t believe this was a small pre-seed round — something I usually assume when a company doesn’t disclose the total of funding; if it was big, you’d want people to know — but in this case, I think it’s likely the opposite. It’s a lot of pressure to raise a lot of money before executing or finding product-market fit.

“When I hear about these kinds of ideas and startups, it comes from a good place, but it often is just the tech solutionist mindset,” Sap said.

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Reminder: Today is the deadline for the Meta’s lead privacy regulator in Europe to adopt a final decision on a nearly decade-long complaint against Facebook’s transfers of personal data from the EU to the US that could see the company ordered to stop the flow of data.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) confirmed to TechCrunch it will adopt its final decision today.

However we understand there will be further delay (of just over a week) before the decision is made public. The date we’ve been told the order will officially be published is May 22 — assuming details do not leak out beforehand.

The delay in publishing the adopted decision is because Meta will be given time to review the document to identify confidential and/or commercially sensitive info it may want redacted, we were told, and owing to a public holiday affecting another involved EU regulator.

The May 12th date for adoption of the DPC’s final decision on the complaint follows a timetable set by a dispute resolution decision taken by the European Data Protection Board last month.

Applying mechanisms baked into the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Board stepped in to settle disagreement between a number of EU regulators over the substance of the decision — taking a binding decision on Meta’s transfers and giving the DPC one month to implement it.

We don’t yet know what’s been decided since the Board’s dispute resolution decision has not been made public as we’re waiting on the final DPC decision (which will implement it) — so the fate of Facebook’s European data flows still hangs in the balance.

That said, Meta is widely expected to be ordered to suspend data flows, given the company received a preliminary suspension order from the DPC, back in fall 2020.

At that time the company obtained a stay on the DPC’s procedure which helped delay the GDPR enforcement timetable until the Irish courts dismissed Meta’s challenge. Further delays kicked in later, when the DPC’s draft decision on the case faced objections from other EU data protection authorities — with those disputes settled finally by the EDPB’s binding decision last month.

This means the regulatory process is at least running out of road (but expect Meta to challenge any suspension order in the Irish courts).

The company has continuously sought to play down the saga — claiming in its last statement that it “relates to a historic conflict of EU and US law, which is in the process of being resolved”. Which is a reference to a draft agreement between EU and US lawmakers for a new high level transatlantic data transfer framework aimed at resolving the conflict between US surveillance practices and EU data protection rights.

However this EU-US Data Privacy Framework, as the agreement has been named, is still in the process of being reviewed by EU institutions which have raised concerns that it does not have strong enough safeguards. And, just this week lawmakers, in the European Parliament reiterated a call for the Commission to take more time to improve the proposal — suggesting there could be further delays in adoption of an agreement Meta appears to be banking on to save its data transfers bacon.

While the data suspension question is the headline issue for this GDPR case, other major elements to look out for in Ireland’s final decision later this month include whether or not Meta will be ordered to delete European users data if it’s found to have been unlawfully transferred to the US.

Back in March, MLex reported that at least two data protection authorities were pushing for that — and that Meta was lobbying EU institutions against any such move.

Add to that, leaked internal documents last year suggested the tech giant’s data management practices are, to put it politely, a mess. So how easily Meta could identify and isolate European users’ data, if ordered to delete it, is one big (expensive) consideration/complication.

Meta could also of course be issued with a fine if it’s found to have unlawfully transferred data.

The GDPR allows for penalties of up to 4% of global annual turnover, although — to date — Meta has had considerable success at being fined far less than the theoretical maximum.

Privacy rights advocacy group, noyb — whose founder, Max Schrems, is behind the complaint against Facebook’s EU-US data flows — wrote to the EDPB in January to complain over the size of a fine the DPC hit it with at the start of this year, over unlawful ads data processing, arguing the €390 million penalty was paltry vs the scale of the infringements (in fact he suggested it fell short by more than €3.5BN).

Ireland had actually proposed a far lower level of fine for that breach — of between €28M to €36M — but the regulator was forced to increase it in order to implement the EDPB’s binding decision.

Without that Board intervention Meta would have faced even weaker GDPR enforcement for unlawfully processing millions of Europeans’ personal data for behavioral advertising. So it will be interesting to see what level of penalty (if any) is included in Ireland’s final decision on Facebook’s data transfers.

That said, financial penalties imposed on tech giants are typically less interesting than operational orders which have the chance to force changes to abusive business models. And while Meta is still data-mining European users for behavioral ad targeting it was at least forced to offer an opt out as a result of the aforementioned GDPR enforcement. Something it has never offered before.

How Meta might be forced to amend its business model to fix unlawful transatlantic data transfers is an open question.

But there’s no doubt it will throw everything it’s got at fighting any order to suspend in the courts so it may well find a way to delay having to for act long enough for the goalposts to be moved by the arrival of a new US data adequacy agreement.

If not, the costs will be real.

In an earnings call with investors last month the company admitted that an order to suspend data flows from Europe could hit 10% of its global ad revenue.

Obviously it’s hoping it does not come to that — and banking on the new EU-US data transfer mechanism being adopted just in the nick of time. (A company spokesman declined to discuss contingencies if it is ordered to suspend data flows, pointing back to the “progress” policymakers have made towards a new pact.)

But even if the high level deal arrives soon enough to prevent a Facebook shut down in Europe from happening this year, Schrems suggests the new high level framework is “likely” to be struck down by the bloc’s top court, as the two predecessor arrangements were — so he estimates Meta would only buy itself another “two years or so” before the issue rears its head again.

For a longer term solution, he has suggested Meta will need to federate Facebook’s infrastructure. But such a major retooling of its business would obviously be very expensive too.

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In a series of votes in the European Parliament this morning MEPs have backed a raft of amendments to the bloc’s draft AI legislation — including agreeing a set of requirements for so called foundational models which underpin generative AI technologies like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The text of the amendment agreed by MEPs in two committees put obligations on providers of foundational models to apply safety checks, data governance measures and risk mitigations prior to putting their models on the market — including obligating them to consider “foreseeable risks to health, safety, fundamental rights, the environment and democracy and the rule of law”.

The amendment also commits foundational model makers to reduce the energy consumption and resource use of their systems and register their systems in an EU database set to be established by the AI Act. While providers of generative AI technologies (such as ChatGPT) are obliged comply with transparency obligations in the regulation (ensuring users are informed the content was machine generated); apply “adequate safeguards” in relation to content their systems generate; and provide a summary of any copyrighted materials used to train their AIs.

In recent weeks MEPs have been focused on ensuring general purpose AI will not escape regulatory requirements, as we reported earlier.

Other key areas of debate for parliamentarians included biometric surveillance — where MEPs also agreed to changes aimed at beefing up protections for fundamental rights.

The lawmakers are working towards agreeing the parliament’s negotiating mandate for the AI Act to unlock the next stage of the EU’s co-legislative process.

MEPs in two committees, the Internal Market Committee and the Civil Liberties Committee, voted on some 3,000 amendments today — adopting a draft mandate on the planned artificial intelligence rulebook with 84 votes in favour, 7 against and 12 abstentions.

“In their amendments to the Commission’s proposal, MEPs aim to ensure that AI systems are overseen by people, are safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory, and environmentally friendly. They also want to have a uniform definition for AI designed to be technology-neutral, so that it can apply to the AI systems of today and tomorrow,” the parliament said in a press release.

Among the key amendments agreed by the committees today are an expansion of the list of prohibited practices — adding bans on “intrusive” and “discriminatory” uses of AI systems such as:

• “Real-time” remote biometric identification systems in publicly accessible spaces;
• “Post” remote biometric identification systems, with the only exception of law enforcement for the prosecution of serious crimes and only after judicial authorization;
• Biometric categorisation systems using sensitive characteristics (e.g. gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship status, religion, political orientation);
• Predictive policing systems (based on profiling, location or past criminal behaviour);
• Emotion recognition systems in law enforcement, border management, workplace, and educational institutions; and
• Indiscriminate scraping of biometric data from social media or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases (violating human rights and right to privacy).

The latter, which would outright ban the business model of the controversial US AI company Clearview AI comes a day after France’s data protection watchdog hit the startup with another fine for failing to comply with existing EU laws. So there’s no doubt enforcement of such prohibitions on foreign entities that opt to flout the bloc’s rules will remain a challenge. But the first step is to have hard law.

Commenting after the vote in a statement, co-rapporteur and MEP Dragos Tudorache, added:

Given the profound transformative impact AI will have on our societies and economies, the AI Act is very likely the most important piece of legislation in this mandate. It’s the first piece of legislation of this kind worldwide, which means that the EU can lead the way in making AI human-centric, trustworthy and safe. We have worked to support AI innovation in Europe and to give start-ups, SMEs and industry space to grow and innovate, while protecting fundamental rights, strengthening democratic oversight and ensuring a mature system of AI governance and enforcement.

A plenary vote in parliament to seal the mandate is expected next month (during the 12-15 June session), after which trilogue talks will kick off with the Council toward agreeing a final compromise on the file.

Back in 2021, when the Commission’ presented its draft proposal for the AI Act it suggested the risk-based framework would create a blueprint for “human” and “trustworthy” AI. However concerns were quickly raised that the plan fell far short of the mark — including in areas related to biometric surveillance, with the Commission only proposing a limited ban on use of highly intrusive technology like facial recognition in public.

Civil society groups and EU bodies pressed for amendments to bolster protections for fundamental rights — with the European Data Protection Supervisor and European Data Protection Board among those calling for the legislation to go further and urging EU lawmakers to put a total ban on biometrics surveillance in public.

MEPs appear to have largely heeded civil society’s call. Although concerns do remain. (And of course it remains to be seen how the proposal MEPs have strengthened could get watered back down again as Member States governments enter the negotiations in the coming months.)

Other changes parliamentarians agreed in today’s committee votes include expansions to the regulation’s (fixed) classification of “high-risk” areas — to include harm to people’s health, safety, fundamental rights and the environment.

AI systems used to influence voters in political campaigns and those used in recommender systems by larger social media platforms (with more than 45 million users, aligning with the VLOPs classification in the Digital Services Act), were also put on the high-risk list.

At the same time, though, MEPs backed changes to what counts as high risk — proposing to leave it up to AI developers to decide if their system is significant enough to meet the bar where obligations applying, something digital rights groups are warning (see below) is “a major red flag” for enforcing the rules.

Elsewhere, MEPs backed amendments aimed at boosting citizens’ right to file complaints about AI systems and receive explanations of decisions based on high-risk AI systems that “significantly” impact their rights.

The lack of meaningful redress for individuals affected by harmful AIs was a major loophole raised by civil society groups in a major call for revisions in fall 2021 who pointed out the glaring difference between the Commission’s AI Act proposal and the bloc’s General Data Protection Act, under which individuals can complain to regulators and pursue other forms of redress.

Another change MEPs agree on today is a reformed role for body called the EU AI Office, which they want to monitor how the rulebook is implemented — to supplement decentralized oversight of the regulation at the Member State level.

While, in a nod to the perennial industry cry that too much regulation is harmful for “innovation”, they also added exemptions to rules for research activities and AI components provided under open-source licenses, while noting the law promotes regulatory sandboxes, or controlled environments, being established by public authorities to test AI before its deployment.

Digital rights group EDRi, which has been urging major revisions to the Commission draft, said everything it had been pushing for was passed by MEPs “in some form or another” — flagging particularly the (now) full ban on facial recognition in public; along with (new) bans on predictive policing, emotion recognition and on other harmful uses of AI.

Another key win it points to is the inclusion of accountability and transparency obligations on deployers of high risk AI — applying on them a duty to do a fundamental rights impact assessment and mechanisms by which people affected can challenge AI systems.

“The Parliament is sending a clear message to governments and AI developers with its list of bans, ceding civil society’s demands that some uses of AI are just too harmful to be allowed, Sarah Chander, EDRi senior policy advisor,” told TechCrunch.

“This new text is a vast improvement from the Commission’s original proposal when it comes to reigning in the abuse of sensitive data about our faces, bodies, and identities,” added, Ella Jakubowska, an EDRi senior policy advisor who has focused on biometrics. 

However EDRi said there are still areas of concern — pointing to use of AI for migration control as one big one.

On this, Chander noted that MEPs failed to include in the list of prohibited practices where AI is used to facilitate “illegal pushbacks”, or to profile people in a discriminatory manner — which is something EDRi had called for. “Unfortunately, the [European Parliament’s] support for peoples’ rights stops short of protecting migrants from AI harms, including where AI is used to facilitate pushbacks,” she said, suggesting: “Without these prohibitions the European Parliament is opening the door for a  panopticon at the EU border.”

The group said it would also like to see improvements to the proposed ban on predictive policing — to cover location based predictive policing which Chander described as “essentially a form of automated racial profiling”. She said it’s worried that the proposed remote biometrics identification ban won’t cover the full extent of mass surveillance practices it’s seen being used across Europe.

“Whilst the Parliament’s approach is very comprehensive [on biometrics], there are a few practices that we would like to see even further restricted. Whilst there is a ban on retrospective public facial recognition, it contains an exception for law enforcement use which we still consider to be too risky. In particular, it could incentivise mass retention of CCTV footage and biometric data, which we would clearly oppose,” added Jakubowska, saying it would also want to see the EU outlaw emotion recognition no matter the context — “as this ‘technology’ is fundamentally flawed, unscientific, and discriminatory by design”.

Another concern EDRi flags is MEPs’ proposal to let AI developers judge if their systems are high risk or not — as this risk undermining enforceability.

“Unfortunately, the Parliament is proposing some very worrying changes relating to what counts as ‘high-risk AI. With the changes in the text, developers will be able to decide if their system is ‘significant’ enough to be considered high risk, a major red flag for the enforcement of this legislation,” Chander suggested.

While today’s committee vote is a big step towards setting the parliament’s mandate — and setting the tone for the upcoming trilogue talks with the Council — much could still change and there is likely to be some pushback from Member States governments, which tend to be more focused on national security considerations than caring for fundamental rights.

Asked whether it’s expecting the Council to try to unpick some of the expanded protections against biometric surveillance Jakubowska said: “We can see from the Council’s general approach last year that they want to water down the already insufficient protections in the Commission’s original text. Despite having no credible evidence of effectiveness — and lots of evidence of the harms — we see that many member state governments are keen to retain the ability to conduct biometric mass surveillance.

“They often do this under the pretence of ‘national security’ such as in the case of the French Olympics and Paralympics, and/or as part of broader trends criminalising migration and other minoritised communities. That being said, we saw what could be considered ‘dissenting opinions’ from both Austria and Germany, who both favour stronger protections of biometric data in the AI Act. And we’ve heard rumours that several other countries are willing to make compromises in the direction of the biometrics provisions. This gives us hope that there will be a positive outcome from the trilogues, even though we of course expect a strong push back from several Member States.”

Giving another early assessment from civil society, Kris Shrishak, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), which also joined the 2021 call for major revisions to the AI Act, also cautioned over enforcement challenges — warning that while the parliament has strengthened enforceability by amendments that explicitly allow regulators to perform remote inspections, he suggested MEPs are simultaneously tying regulators hands by preventing them access to source code of AI systems for investigations.

“We are also concerned that we will see a repeat of GDPR-like enforcement problems,” he told TechCrunch.

On the plus side he said MEPs have taken a step towards addressing “the shortcomings” of the Commission’s definition of AI systems — notably with generative AI systems being brought in scope and the application of transparency obligations on them, which he dubbed “a key step towards addressing their harms”.

But — on the issue of copyright and AI training data — Shrishak was critical of the lack of a”firm stand” by MEPs to stop data mining giants from ingesting information for free, including copyright-protected data.

The copyright amendment only requires companies to provide a summary of copyright-protected data used for training — suggesting it will be left up to rights holders to sue.

Asked about possible concerns that exemptions for research activities and AI components provided under open source licenses might create fresh loopholes for AI giants to escape the rules, he agreed that’s a worry.

“Research is a loophole that is carried over from the scope of the regulation. This is likely to be exploited by companies,” he suggested. “In the context of AI it is a big loophole considering large parts of the research is taking place in companies. We already see Google saying they are ‘experimenting’ with Bard. Further to this, I expect some companies to claim that they develop AI components and not AI systems (I already heard this from one large corporation during discussions on General purpose AI. This was one of their arguments for why GPAI [general purpose AI] should not be regulated).”

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But in the midst of chaos, opportunity often lingers. A growing number of startups are capitalizing on the U.K.’s struggling health care system, raising money for platforms that provide access to private medical imaging services, or go some way toward solving staffing shortages.

And then there’s MediShout, a London-based company that proclaims to be a “one stop app” for reporting operational deficiencies in hospitals, allowing staff to track status updates and new orders similar to how one might do with their Uber ride or Amazon order.

Founded by Dr. Ash Kalraiya back in 2013, MediShout unifies all helpdesks and medical suppliers within a single app. It began as a side-project as Kalraiya continued his role as a full-time orthopaedic surgeon, however Kalraiya brought in doctor Ali Bahsoun as co-founder and chief product officer (CPO) in 2020 to kickstart MediShout as a full-time business. The startup went on to raise £167,000 ($211,000) in angel funding, before closing a £1 million ($1.25 million) pre-seed round of funding from Episode 1 in September, 2020.

Kalraiya told TechCrunch that he expects MediShout to be profitable next year, and to spur its next phase of growth it has now raised a further £4.3 million ($5.4 million) in seed funding.

MediShout founders Ash (CEO) and Ali (CPO) Image Credits: MediShout

‘Like ordering on Amazon’

Under the hood, MediShout essentially aggregates suppliers, helpdesks, and operational departments, and seeks to supplant incumbent tools such as faxes, emails, paper forms, and helpdesk software (e.g. ServiceNow).

“As a surgeon on the frontline, I witnessed operational problems preventing best patient care daily,” Kalraiya said. “Patient care would routinely be delayed or cancelled due to preventable problems like faulty lightbulbs, broken printers, or missing equipment.”

At a time when health care providers are already under significant pressure, equipment failure is an extra burden they really don’t need. For example, a faulty endoscope can take up to nine hours to fix across multiple different members of staff, due in part to the workflows of multiple department and equipment suppliers. This may involve paperwork, phone calls, and countless logistical measures to arrange delivery and collection of the device. And this is all before we even consider unexpected hurdles and bottlenecks.

“The big issue is not only does staff time get wasted, but often (medical) procedures get cancelled as communication was too slow and devices don’t get returned fast enough,” Kalraiya said.

Kalraiya says that in this instance, MediShout can cut the amount of time in half to around 4.5 hours, with all the reports and updates filed digitally through an app and all relevant stakeholders notified automatically.

“The supplier sends back messages and status updates in real time which all hospital staff can see,” Kalraiya said. “No paperwork is required, and staff don’t have to call their supplier to chase up. This process is now like ordering on Amazon, where everything is digitized and data can be viewed in real time.”

Medishout app Image Credits: MediShout

The main problem that MediShout is looking to solve is that hospitals typically use hundreds of different systems from different suppliers, each with very different processes and approaches to communication — this spans facilities, porters, equipment, sterile services, IT, HR, and more.

“This makes healthcare ecosystems extremely complex and difficult for staff to navigate, so they can’t provide efficient care to patients,” Kalraiya said. “We solve this issue by providing the world’s first app which unifies all helpdesks, supplier and operational departments.”

MediShout’s biggest customers are medical device and facilities management companies, which pay MediShout via a monthly subscription to plug into its platform which then digitizes and bridges their services for hospitals, most of which are part of the NHS.

“One supplier is currently scaling us to more than 100 hospitals in the U.K. and abroad,” Kalraiya said. “We do also sell directly to hospitals, in particular the NHS.”

Kalraiya also said that it has some AI work currently in its R&D phase, which — when commercialized — could help predict when future issues may occur. For this, the company can look at, say, all the medical equipment data from hospitals, including details on equipment that has broken over the past 15 years.

“Based on usage and repair frequency we started to predict when equipment like ECG (electrocardiography) machines were likely to break down,” Kalraiya said. “You can then do planned maintenance to prevent breakdowns occurring.”

MediShout, which has 22 employees today, is currently operational in the U.K. and Ireland, though with its fresh cash injection it’s looking to expand further afield into mainland Europe.

“I’ve worked as a surgeon in many countries, and these [operational] problems exist everywhere,” Kalraiya added.

MediShoud’s seed round was led by Nickleby Capital, with participation from KHP Ventures, Episode1, and several individuals from Atomico’s Angels program.

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Builder.ai tapped into a new wave of businesses wanting their own native apps with a turnkey approach, accelerated by the rapid digitization of life during the pandemic. That led to led to a $100 million Series C funding round last year led by Insight Partners, taking the company’s total funding to $195 million.

It’s now landed a strategic collaboration with Microsoft, which includes an undisclosed equity investment in the startup. TechCrunch’s source’s indicate the investment was “significant”, though we couldn’t get anything more than that.

The collaboration will mean the two companies collaborating on AI solutions. Builder’s “Natasha” AI will be available to users of Teams, and made available when they are looking to build apps and software. Microsoft’s Q2 results showed Teams has hit more than 280 million monthly active users.

Builder.ai’s CEO Sachin Dev Duggal said in a statement: “From my first meeting with Microsoft to the moment we agreed to collaborate more strategically, one thing has been really clear-Microsoft’s commitment to helping everyone unlock their true potential.”

There will also be integrations across Azure OpenAI Service and other Azure Cognitive Services with Builder.ai’s software assembly line and adoption of the Microsoft Cloud and AI, alongside partnerships across the Microsoft Developer Platforms.

“We see Builder.ai creating an entirely new category that empowers everyone to be a developer and our new, deeper collaboration fuelled by Azure AI will bring the combined power of both companies to businesses around the world,” added Jon Tinter, Corporate Vice President, Business Development, Microsoft.

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Most U.S.-based tech investors are likely familiar with smaller-ticket investor marketplaces AngelList and Carta. In Europe, Germany’s Bunch and the UK’s Vauban (acquired by by US-based Carta last year) have attempted to do similar job. But the back-story to this is that although launching many years ago, AngelList struggled with Europe’s regulatory environment.

UK Angel investor marketplace startup Odin has been operating pretty much publicly for the last 18 months, albeit in a mostly invite-only manner, but could possibly said to be Europe’s real answer to AngelList.

It’s now going fully public and announcing a $3m seed funding raise, backed largely its own community of angel investors, but also taking investment from VC fund Haatch, and the family offices O’Shaughnessy Ventures, Material V and IPQ Capital.

Angel syndicates, founders and VC’s use Odin to raise money from their own networks. The platform says it handles legal, banking, payments and KYC/AML, among other aspects of startup fundraising. It’s also planning to launch a marketplace for angels to discover different syndicates and funds.

Mary Lin, co-founder and CEO of Odin says 5,000 people have invested via the platform in startups and VC funds across Europe, Asia & the US, with 300+ companies receiving investment, mainly at pre-seed and seed.

Investors can invest in startups with small amounts, from around $1,000 via the platform. Odin then turns the Angel investors into a single legal entity. Odin’s business model is to charge fees for administration, while founders, Angel syndicates and VCs pay a fixed fee, plus a percentage of funds raised. Odin says Angels have been able to use the platform to invest alongside VCs such as Founders Fund, Andreessen-Horowitz and Index Ventures.

The majority of Odin’s business comes from the UK, but it’s also possible to use it from continental Europe, where the platform aims to grow further.

The startup claims almost 250 angels have backed Odin, including Sarah Drinkwater (Atomico Angel, ex head of Google Campus), Matt Penneycard (co-founder of Ada Ventures), and June Angelides MBE (VC at Samos investments).

Odin’s co-founders are Patrick Ryan and the aforementioned Lin.

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Clearview AI, the US startup that’s attracted notoriety in recent years for a massive privacy violation after it scraped selfies off the Internet and used people’s data to build a facial recognition tool it pitched to law enforcement and others, has been hit with another fine in France over non-cooperation with the data protection regulator.

The overdue penalty payment of €5.2M has been issued by the French regulator, the CNIL — on top of a €20M sanction it slapped the company with last year for breaching regional privacy rules.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets out conditions for processing personal data lawfully. Clearview has been found to have breached a number of requirements set out in law — by France’s CNIL and several other regional data protection authorities, including authorities in the UK, Italy and Greece, garnering several tens of millions in total fines to date.

Whether Clearview will ever pay any of these fines remains an open question, since the US-based company has not been cooperating with EU regulators.

In a press release today, the CNIL said Clearview has failed to complied with the order it issued last October — when it imposed the maximum possible size of penalty it could (€20M) for three types of breaches of the GDPR.

That 2022 order followed an earlier finding, in December 2021, when — after investigating complaints — the CNIL decided Clearview had breached the GDPR by unlawfully processing several tens of millions of citizens’ data; and failing to provide locals with data access rights.

It was Clearview’s failure to comply with the CNIL’s December 2021 order that led, in October 2022, to the French watchdog adding a third breach finding to its tally — lack of cooperation with the regulator — and issuing the biggest fine it possibly could under the GDPR. (The regulation allows for fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover or €20M, whichever is higher.)

The CNIL’s order also instructed Clearview not to collect and process data on individuals located in France without a proper legal basis; and to delete data of individuals whose information it had processed unlawfully, after fulfilling any outstanding data access requests.

At the time the CNIL committee responsible for issuing sanctions gave Clearview a two month deadline to comply with the order — with the threat of further fines if it did not do so (at a cost of €100,000 per overdue day).

Safe to say, the demonstrably uncooperative US company has failed to play ball yet again — hence the latest CNIL fine, which appears to be billing Clearview for 52 days of non-compliance.

“Clearview AI had two months to comply with the order and justify compliance to the CNIL. However, the company did not send any proof of compliance within this time limit,” the regulator writes. “On 13 April 2023, the restricted committee considered that the company had not complied with the order and consequently imposed an overdue penalty payment of €5,200,000 on Clearview AI.”

We’ve reached out to the CNIL with questions.

Clearview was also contacted for a response. Its PR agency, the LAKPR Group, responded with its (now) customary denial that the EU law applies to its business:

Clearview AI does not have a place of business in France or the EU, it does not have any customers in France or the EU, and does not undertake any activities that would otherwise mean it is subject to the GDPR.

(NB: The GDPR applies to the personal data of EU peoples so Clearview would need to have never scraped locals’ selfies off the Internet for the bloc’s data protection law not to apply and, notably, its statement does not say it has never processed Europeans’ data.)

Clearview’s statement re: what it couches as “the misinterpretation by some in France, where we do no business, of Clearview AI’s technology to society” is attributed to its CEO, Hoan Ton-That. In it he goes on to repeat a claims that he only created the facial recognition technology for “the purpose of helping to make communities safer and assisting law enforcement in solving heinous crimes against children, seniors and other victims of unscrupulous acts”; adding: “We only collect public data from the open internet and comply with all standards of privacy and law.”

While France’s CNIL may have to whistle for the millions owed by Clearview, the fine announcements do have the effect of essentially preventing the AI company from setting up shop in France — i.e. unless it’s willing to pay up when the CNIL’s debt collectors come calling.

Add to that, and perhaps more importantly, all these GDPR penalties act as a deterrent to other entities in the region from using Clearview’s services — since they risk being fined themselves, as happened back in 2021 with a Swedish police authority caught using Clearview unlawfully, for example.

So while EU people’s data is still not being protected from abusive processing by privacy-hostile AI companies like Clearview, the GDPR may at least be helping to limit damage by making it defacto impossible for it to do business in the region. Although there’s no doubt the saga underlines the challenge of enforcing a regional rulebook on uncooperative foreign entities in an age of big cross-border data flows.

There’s more EU regulation incoming for AI too, with the bloc’s lawmakers very busy hashing out the final details of the AI Act: A regulation on use of artificial intelligence which was proposed by the Commission back in 2021. The draft version of this risk-based framework includes a prohibition on the use of remote biometrics in public places — which Clearview may have helped inspire.

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