Europe

Tech Nation is trailing in second place in the race to remain the U.K.’s government-backed “startup champion” after the latter put the £12 million contract out to tender, according to TechCrunch’s sources. First in line at this point in time — in a decision which is due in December — is banking giant Barclays. Tech

Disperse, a U.K.-based construction tech company that offers an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform to help project managers track work and capture data from building sites, has raised $16 million in funding. Founded out of London in 2015, Disperse effectively creates a digital version of an entire construction site, including visual snapshots that track the progress

French startup Bump has signed a multiyear financing partnership with DIF Capital Partners in order to roll out more charging stations for electric vehicles and double down on growth in general. It is an equity and quasi-equity $180 million deal that will be progressively unlocked from 2022 to 2030. Yesterday, ZePlug also announced a significant

Companies are facing hundreds of millions of dollars in fines these days for failing to comply with data protection and data privacy rules, and that’s driving wave of organizations, and their users, to get more serious about data protection. One of the byproducts of that has been the emergence of new technology to meet that increase

U.K. residents travelling to Norway or Iceland will soon have their mobile roaming fees capped, representing part of a recent trade agreement between the countries. The U.K. signed a free trade agreement last July with Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, a triumvirate of markets notable for the fact that they are not members of the European

The U.K. government has announced plans to make it easier for telecoms operators to access telegraph poles on private land, representing part of a broader push to bring high-speed broadband to all corners of the country. The announcement was made as part of the U.K.’s so-called “mini budget,” which was partly set up to address

Days ahead of the Italian general election, the country’s privacy watchdog has sent Facebook’s parent (Meta) an urgent request for information, asking the social media giant to clarify measures it’s taking around Sunday’s election. The risk of election interference via social media continues to be a major concern for regulators after years of rising awareness

Hadean, a U.K.-based distributed, spatial computing startup that’s setting out to build the infrastructure for the burgeoning metaverse, has closed a $30 million seres A round of funding from a high-profile cast of investors including Epic Games and Tencent. Founded out of London in 2015, Hadean started out with a broad mission to put “supercomputer

Rad Power Bikes, a popular American e-bike brand that has raised over $300 million in the past two years, will start offering bikes as a subscription service next week. The company is partnering with Cycle, a Berlin-based e-bike subscription service that caters to couriers and last-mile delivery, to pilot the offering in Berlin. Starting September

Spain’s homegrown on-demand delivery app, Glovo — which since the end of last year has been majority owned by Germany’s Delivery Hero — has been fined €79 million (~$79 million) for breaches of labor laws related to the employment classification of couriers, local press reported yesterday. El Pais reported that the record sanction for the

It was back in 2019 that we reported on Visionaries Club, a new, Berlin-based, European VC focusing on B2B, founded by Sebastian Pollok and Robert Lacher. At the time, Visionaries Club had launched two new €40M micro funds for seed and growth-stage B2B. Pollok was previously a VC at e.ventures in San Francisco and also

From healthcare to manufacturing, traditional industries have been getting a digital makeover over the past decade. But some sectors have been left behind. Maritime shipping, argued Fabian Fussek, CEO and co-founder of Kaiko Systems, is the “last frontier of digitzation.” Kaiko Systems is a Berlin-based startup trying to digitize operations on commercial vessels. Around 90%

A new startup wants to make it easier for any company to sell phone and data plans as part of their own branded mobile network subscriptions — and to help, it has secured the backing of big-name investors including Google’s early-stage venture capital arm Gradient Ventures and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Gigs, which was founded

Managing cap tables and equity at high-growth companies can be a complicated (and sometimes messy) business, a fact that founders and employees often discover too late. That’s given rise to a wave of companies building software to help, and today a European leader in that pack is announcing some funding to fuel its own growth.

Somehow, some way, the third quarter is nearly over. That means we’re gearing up for a wave of venture capital data that will start to drop in less than two weeks’ time. We’re itching to get our hands on the final numbers because the third quarter of 2022 is a pretty damn important data point.

Meet Nilos, a startup that wants to bridge the gap between crypto wallets and traditional business bank accounts. The company provides a dashboard that displays all your transactions — whether those are fiat transactions or crypto payments. From this platform, you can initiate payments and reconcile operations across multiple accounts. The startup raised a $5.2

Changes are incoming to draft online safety legislation in the UK which continues to attract controversy over the impact on free speech. The draft Online Safety Bill has already been years in the making but new prime minister Liz Truss signalled earlier this month that she wants “tweaks” to ensure it does not harm freedom

When it comes to fintech, consumers have commanded the most attention in the last decade, with banking, credit, investing and other legacy services getting the disruption treatment. But at the same time, there’s been a growing trend for building more for the B2B market, and today one of the newer hopefuls in that space is

Swedish last-mile delivery companies Instabox and Budbee have have announced plans to merge in a 18 billion krona ($1.7 billion) deal. The two companies, which were both founded out of the Stockholm area in 2015, serve as the delivery and logistics partner for major brands including multinational clothing retailer H&M, offering delivery services directly to

Meet Prediko, a new startup that sits at the intersection of e-commerce, fintech and software as a service. If you’re manufacturing items or even just buying and reselling finished goods, chances are inventory management is one of the biggest pain points when it comes to running your business. For instance, when you launch a new

Tech-talent marketplace MVP Match has raised €5 million ($5 million) seed funding from Stage 2 Capital to double down its strategy for pairing companies with talent from across the globe. The Germany-based startup plans to use the funding to build new hubs in Africa and Europe, grow its team, and relaunch its proprietary platform to

The voluntary carbon market remains a Wild West. There are few standards, a myriad of approaches, while buyers and sellers are crying out for clarity. And there are lots of different approaches. In tokenization there are startups like Single.Earth and Flow Carbon. In marketplaces there is CarbonXchange, Aircarbon. In afforestation there is Land Life Company

Autonomous and electric truck maker Einride is rolling into Germany, representing its first new market in Europe outside its native Sweden. Founded out of Stockholm in 2016, Einride has raised some $150 million in funding to commercialize a cab-less autonomous cargo truck, one that can be controlled remotely if required by human operators. It’s a

HICX, a supplier experience management platform designed to give companies visibility into their supply chain, has raised $30 million in a round of funding led by U.S. private equity firm Wavecrest Growth Partners and Canada’s Espresso Capital. The funding constituted a mixture of $22 million equity and $8 million in debt. Founded in 2004, London-based HICX

U.K.-based fintech Lightyear is extending its stock-trading offering to include a wide selection of U.K. and European stocks, as well as exchange traded funds (ETF). The news comes just a couple of months after Lightyear launched outside the U.K. for the first time, arriving in 19 European markets, with the support of $25 million in

European Union lawmakers have proposed a new set of product rules to apply to smart devices that’s intended to compel makers of Internet-connected hardware — such as ‘smart’ washing machines or connected toys — to pay fulsome attention to device security. The proposed EU Cyber Resilience Act will introduce mandatory cybersecurity requirements for products that

Sigmoid, a startup helping firms in the U.S., U.K. and Europe comb through their data and derive better insights from it, has raised $12 million in a new financing round following a strong year of growth, it said Thursday. Sequoia Capital India led the San Francisco-headquartered startup’s Series B funding, which included some secondary shares

EU lawmakers are moving in on the metaverse and making it plain that, whatever newfangled virtual world/s and/or immersive social connectivity that tech industry hype involving the term may refer to, these next-gen virtual spaces won’t escape one hard reality: Regulation. There may be a second metaverse certainty too, if the Commission gets its way:

There is a fight emerging in Central and Eastern Europe, and all the way down into the South Eastern regions. Investors such as Inovo, Credo, LauncHUB, Vitosha, Venture Friends, Marathon VC, are all VCs of varying sizes who are – as we speak – roaming everywhere from Eastonia and Poland all the way down to

French biotech company WhiteLab Genomics has raised $10 million in funding for an AI platform designed to aid the discovery and development of genomic therapies. Founded out of Paris in 2019, recent Y Combinator (YC) graduate WhiteLab Genomics provides gene and cell therapy companies with predictive software simulations to expedite the design of gene and