Europe

Twitter’s painstakingly layered infosphere looks to be light-speeding back to chaotic noise under new owner Elon Musk. The billionaire is no fan of meritocratic signals nor, it seems, a friend to genuine information — preferring anyone pay him $8/m to have their account on his microblogging social network badged with a check-mark that looks like

When people think about the cloud computing industry, three names come to mind — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. And yet, smaller cloud companies are still doing well. OVHcloud, a French company that has been around since 1999, is one of them. Of course, cloud computing wasn’t even a thing in 1999.

Startups might be in a funding midwinter, but the ray of sun shining on some VCs speaks of a different trend. EQT Ventures, the venture fund arm of Sweden’s investment giant EQT making early-stage bets on startups primarily in Europe, has closed its latest fund and filled its coffers with €1 billion (and $1.1 billion

Meet Plain, a new startup that wants to reinvent support tools. While the customer support space is a competitive industry with big tech companies like Intercom and Zendesk, Plain believes it has a different approach as it focuses on API integrations to make your company’s product and your support platform work hand in hand. Plain

We knew it was happening, but U.K.-based online furniture and home accessories retailer Made.com has officially entered administration, confirming previous reports with the appointment yesterday of PricewaterhouseCoopers as administrators. While Made.com had revealed that it was in discussions with potential buyers, nothing materialized in time and the company ceased taking new orders in late October,

A multi-year investigation into TechCrunch’s parent entity Yahoo — looking at compliance with key transparency requirements of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), including in relation to cookie banners displayed on its media properties — has taken a step forward today after Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced that it has submitted a

The $68.7 billion gaming mega-merger between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard is facing in-depth competition scrutiny in the European Union. EU regulators had been taking a preliminary look at the proposed deal, after the transaction was notified to the bloc’s regulators at the end of September. But today the Commission confirmed it will open a deeper

Stockholm-based startup Atlar raised a $5 million (€5 million) seed round led by Index Ventures. The company has been working on an application programming interface (API) that facilitates bank-to-bank payments for European businesses. In addtion to Index Ventures, La Famiglia VC, Cocoa and various business angels also participated in the round, such as Revolut CFO

If you’ve ever had to sit through corporate training videos while you feel your will to live slowly ebb out of every pore of your body, a new startup has some good news for you. Describing itself as “the TikTok of workplace learning,” 5Mins recently raised a round of funding in a bid to introduce

The European Commission has put forward proposed rules for short term rental platforms focused on boosting transparency and mandatory data-sharing — in what looks like a ‘softly does it’ approach to addressing concerns attached to the rise of vacation rentals on platforms like Airbnb. While P2P vacation rental platforms remain popular options for European citizens

French startup PhotoRoom has raised a $19 million Series A funding round. The company develops a popular photo editing app for e-commerce vendors and small businesses. In particular, it helps you remove the background behind objects you are about to sell so that your photos look more professional. Balderton Capital is leading the Series A

Dropit, a retail technology platform that bridges the digital divide by unifying merchants’ online and in-store inventories, has raised $25 million in a Series C round of funding. Founded in 2014, London-based Dropit counts retail brands including L’Occitane, Abercrombie & Fitch and Estée Lauder as customers, in addition to shopping malls. At its core, Dropit

Danish startup Pleo has announced that it plans to lay off around 15% of the company’s workforce. As the company currently has nearly 1,000 employees, it could affect up to 150 people. Pleo develops expense management tools for SMBs around Europe. “I’ll be honest. Pleo today, at the point of almost 1,000 employees and with

A recently presented European Union plan to update long-standing product liability rules for the digital age — including addressing rising use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation — took some instant flak from European consumer organization, BEUC, which framed the update as something of a downgrade by arguing EU consumers will be left less well

While there are differing perspectives on the degree to which no-code and low-code development tools could eventually supplant human software developers, it’s clear that any software that takes care of the technical “heavy lifting” is having a huge impact within businesses — in terms of opening app-building to more personnel, plugging the talent gap and

An incoming privacy policy change announced by TikTok yesterday for users in Europe — which, for the first time, names China as one of several third countries where user data can be remotely accessed by “certain” company employees to perform what it claims are “important” functions — has landed months ahead of expected movement on

Commercial electric vehicle company Arrival has gotten a warning from the Nasdaq Stock Market because its stock price is trading too low. The company issued a press release Thursday saying it received a notification at the start of the week that it was not in compliance with the Nasdaq’s requirement to trade ordinary shares above

New Zealand-based StretchSense, a maker of hand motion capture technology, believes virtual and augmented reality are going to replace the smartphone as the dominant way we interact with digital worlds and each other. And when that happens, we’ll need natural ways be immersed in those spaces, which means being able to touch and control virtual

Lugano, Switzerland-based venture capital fund Privilège Ventures just launched its fourth fund. The CHF 20 million (just over $20 million) fund is earmarked for women-led early-stage startups across Europe. “We don’t just want to support women,” Jacqueline Ruedin Rüsch, founding general partner at Privilège Ventures said in an interview with TechCrunch. “The data shows women

When Berlin-based Y42 launched in 2020, its focus was mostly on orchestrating data pipelines for business intelligence. That mission has expanded quite a bit over the course of the last couple of years and today, Y42 announced the launch of what it calls its “Modern DataOps Cloud.” Built on top of data warehousing service Snowflake

Workflow automation may not be what gets you out of bed every morning, but it has long been a hot topic in the world of enterprise software. There are few businesses, after all, that don’t have dozens and dozens of repetitive workflows that are currently done manually that could be automated. Munich-based Flowers Software, which

Volocopter, a German startup building electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles, has secured $182 million for the second signing of its Series E round. That’s on top of the $170 million Volocopter raised for the same round in March at a $1.87 billion post-money valuation. Volocopter is currently in full swing testing its two-seater

Last year YASA, a British electric motor startup with a revolutionary “axial-flux” motor, was acquired by Mercedes-Benz to develop ultra-high-performance electric motors for Mercedes’s AMG.EA electric-only platform. YASA’s axial-flux electric motors had previously garnered a reputation for efficiency, high power density, small size and low weight. However, the team behind YASA did something quite clever.

Made.com, a U.K.-based ecommerce company that sells furniture and related home accessories across seven European markets, is bracing for insolvency as it confirmed plans to appoint administrators after failing to find a buyer. Founded in 2010, Made.com emerged as something of a darling in the U.K. startup sphere for the way it worked with select

Surprise! Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter is already shaping up to be confusing and contradictory. Whether this dynamic ends up being more self-defeating for him and his new company than harmful for the rest of humanity and human civilization remains tbc. On the one hand, a fresh report today suggests Musk is preparing major staff

Talking to Valentina Milanova, the still just 28-year-old founder of U.K. femtech Daye, is best described as an exhilarating experience. During our interview, she talks in and around her topic — building a startup supporting women’s sexual and reproductive health — non-stop for the best part of an hour, barely pausing for breath and without

Meet Evy, a French startup that is working on extended warranties and product protection insurance. The company raised a $6.5 million seed round (€6.5 million) from Sequoia, La Famiglia VC, Global Founders Capital and several business angels. Evy wants to bring an AppleCare experience to other brands and retailers. Essentially, the startup wants to create

The European Union’s flagship reboot of long-standing ecommerce rules — aka the Digital Services Act (DSA) — has now been published in the bloc’s Official Journal. You can find the full (and final) text of DSA here. Le Digital Services Act (#DSA) est publié aujourd’hui au Journal Officiel! 📖 Ce texte majeur fera d’Internet un espace

A Google regulatory filing appears to have confirmed rumors in recent months that the European Union’s competition division is looking into how it operates its smartphone app store, the Play Store. However TechCrunch understands that no formal EU investigation into the Play Store has been opened at this stage. The SEC Form 10-Q, filed by

The UK government has denied a fresh parliamentary delay to the Online Safety Bill will delay the legislation’s passage. The legislation is a core plank of the government’s 2019 manifesto promise to make the UK the safest place in the world to go online, introducing a regime ministers want to will drive a new era