Europe

In the new era of remote and hybrid working, companies need to manage people who either relocate to join, or work remotely. For obvious reasons, that has created a huge headache for HR directors. Back in 2014, FlatClub had an apartment rental platform. But a chance encounter encouraged them to pivot in 2017 to become

Runa Capital, which launched there in 2010, says it has raised $55 million towards its fourth fund, aiming for a hard cap of $250 million. And after 12 years in the US, the normally Palo Alto-based VC says it is now relocating its HQ to Luxembourg, to re-focus its attention on the European market, as

The days of European startups relocating to the U.S. if they want to grow (and raise money to do so) have been receding in the rearview mirror for a while now, so much so that even in these leaner times — where all fundraising and tech bets are tightening up — we’re still seeing some

A series of commitments offered by Amazon in the EU, where regulators are investigating competition concerns linked to its use of third-party data, has been dubbed “weak, vague and full of loopholes” in a critical submission signed by a dozen civil society and digital rights groups, non-governmental organizations and trade unions. The submission, which was

Modulous, a U.K. startup that makes it easier for housing developers, architects and construction firms to configure and design modular homes to address the ongoing housing crisis, has raised £10 million ($11.7 million) in a series A round of funding. Founded out of London in 2018, Modulous said that it’s seeking to tackle a global

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. For the first time, France was one of the top represented countries in Y Combinator’s Summer 22 batch. Three of the eight French startups

COVID-19 has reshaped our lives in many ways and given rise to a plethora of services tailored to these newborn needs. Waysia, an Asian grocery delivery platform, is one such startup that retooled in response to the pandemic. Previously known as Alorsfaim, Waysia started in Paris four years ago as a platform delivering from Asian

A new enterprise fibre network is ready to deliver up to 100 Gbps (gigabits-per-second) high-speed internet to London businesses, as part of a £250 million ($290 million) investment in the city’s infrastructure. Vorboss was founded out of London back in 2006 initially as a software provider, but with the advent of cloud computing and due

Amazon has made a string of startup acquisitions over the years to build out its robotics business; now, the e-commerce leviathan is taking an interesting turn in that strategy as it expands its industrial warehouse capabilities. Amazon is acquiring Cloostermans, a company out of Belgium that is a specialist in mechatronics. It’s been building technology to

Anyone who has worked in a role even tangentially connected to the public markets will at least have heard of Bloomberg Terminal, an industry standard platform used by professionals to gain real-time data and insights into the financial markets. Indeed, Bloomberg Terminal is an incredibly useful — if expensive — tool for traders, brokers, analysts

London-based regulatory technology (regtech) startup SteelEye has raised $21 million in a Series B round of funding. Founded in 2017, SteelEye works with banks, hedge funds, brokers, asset managers and more, to help them comply with strict regulatory procedures and requirements in their respective industries. SteelEye essentially brings compliance to the cloud via a SaaS

Berlin-based agriTech startup Klim is in a hurry to get farmers adopting so-called ‘regenerative’ methods — which are touted as less harmful to soils and biodiversity than conventional farming — arguing this evolution offers the best chance to shrink the global carbon footprint of agriculture fast enough to tackle the climate crisis. Its digital platform,

A new nonprofit “startup” is emerging from stealth today with $15 million in funding from Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin, with a focus squarely on studying and treating Long COVID. While the global pandemic may have neared something close to a conclusion for many, millions of people around the world are still suffering long-term effects from

For those watching the slow motion unpicking of surveillance advertising in the European Union here’s a fresh development on the long and winding road to a long-overdue legal reckoning: Multiple grounds for appeal lodged by industry body, the IAB Europe, against a breach finding earlier this year against its self-proclaimed “best practice” framework for obtaining

French startup Sorare originally launched a fantasy football (soccer) game. This year, the company is expanding to new sports. After partnering with Major League Baseball earlier this year, the company is announcing a new partnership with the National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Basketball Players Association (NBPA). Thanks to this multi-year partnership, Sorare will launch

Companies like Redwood Materials (raised $792M), Li-Cycle, (Canada, raised $667.7M) and Green Li-ion (Singapore $15M) have made a name for themselves in recycling batteries. The activity of recycling existing lithium batteries remains one of the hardest nuts to crack as the world tries desperately to move to more renewable, clean, sources of energy. Right now

Applications in the metaverse often feel like more of a marketing gimmick than something that a critical mass of consumers would use, let alone pay for. But turn to the enterprise and there appears to be a very lucrative opportunity that’s well into finding traction. Today, one of the early movers in building solutions for

European trading platform Bitpanda originally started as a cryptocurrency exchange. Over the past few years, it has expanded to other asset types, such as stocks, ETFs and precious metals. And now, users can buy and sell commodities, such as natural gas, oil, aluminum and wheat. The timing of this release lines up with important fluctuations

As well as the traditional carbon offset resellers and exchanges such as Climate Partner or Climate Impact X the tech space has also produced a few, including Patch (US-based, raised $26.5M) and Lune (UK-based, raised $4M). Now, Ceezer, a B2B marketplace for carbon credits, has closed a €4.2M round, led by Carbon Removal Partners with

Fermentation has a long, rich history in food production, from beer and wine to yogurt and cheese, leavened bread and coffee, miso and tempeh, sauerkraut and kimchi, to name just a few of the tasty things we can consume thanks to a chemical process thought to date back to the Neolithic period. But if this

Microsoft’s $68.7 billion all-cash deal to bag gaming giant Activision Blizzard faces closer antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. where the country’s market watchdog has just announced it will move to an in-depth investigation — unless the pair submit suitable proposals to address its concerns in the next few days. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has formally cleared the proposed $8.1 billion merger between cybersecurity giants NortonLifeLock and Avast, a month after provisionally greenlighting the deal. The merger has been hanging in the balance since plans were first revealed last August. The CMA revealed in March that it was launching an investigation, stating

The UK could be gearing up to hit a handful of tech firms with enforcement orders (and potentially fines) related to a children’s online privacy and safety Code which has been in force for a year. “The ICO are currently looking into how over 50 different online services are conforming with the code, with four

I’ve been tracking PsycApps, a startup that came up with a gamified mental health game called eQuoo, since 2016, and this company — and its founder — is nothing if not persistent in “pivoting into the wind”. The last we heard it had been approved by the U.K.’s National Heath Service and was even distributed

Snapchat’s parent Snap became the latest tech company to announce a huge round of layoffs, confirming ongoing rumors yesterday that it was cutting 20% of its global workforce, affecting at least 1,200 people. The reasons for Snap’s massive scaling back exercise are perhaps obvious, as it’s the same economic reasons why countless other businesses have

Planted, a Swiss startup that’s cooking up alternative proteins using biostructuring and fermentation to serve “clean” cuts of vegan meat — such as the plant-based chicken breast plated up above — has raised again, nabbing CHF 70 million (~$72M) in Series B funding after a $21M pre-B round a year ago. The Series B was

Mavenoid, a Swedish company that provides both human- and AI-enabled support and troubleshooting tools for hardware companies, has raised $30 million in a series B round of funding. Founded out of Stockholm in 2017, Mavenoid works with hardware and consumer electronics companies including HP, Husqvarna, and Jabra, serving to automate technical support and onboarding for

NetEase, a Chinese technology company and billion-dollar video-game publisher, has acquired French video-game studio Quantic Dream. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The deal means that NetEase now has its first studio in Europe, and comes just a few months after the Hangzhou-based company launched its first hub in the U.S., located in Austin,

A new company is looking to do for B2B hardware sales what a growing number of companies have been doing in the consumer sphere, by making it easier for businesses to pay for equipment in instalments through rentals and subscriptions. While companies such as Klarna and Affirm have been pushing payment services that help consumers

Blank-check companies may be little more than a quick way to de-horn unicorns Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 12 hours Yesterday, we asked how low SPAC-led public debuts could go, and the answer was very close to zero. Some now-public companies that rode blank-check companies to the public markets have seen 90% or more of their