Europe

I have limited boating experience, but I do know that being a few degrees off your desired heading can be the difference between enjoying a relaxing dinner with friends and waiting in the dark for a Coast Guard rescue. Similarly, in a down market, SaaS startups that help clients make incremental improvements to cash flow

UK health tech startup, Babylon Health is pulling in its horns in its home market, blaming challenging global and macroeconomic conditions for the termination of a couple of multi-year contracts it had inked with two NHS Trusts in England in recent years — including one from the start of 2020 that had been trumpeted as

Just over a year after launching a major project targeting thousands of sites blatantly flouting cookie tracking rules in Europe, local privacy campaign group noyb has fired off another batch of complaints targeting a hardcore of website operators that it says have ignored or not fully acted upon earlier warnings to bring their cookie consent

Vadym Synegin Contributor Vadym Synegin is a Ukrainian impact entrepreneur, philanthropist and investor in fintech and crypto projects with more than 15 years’ experience as an entrepreneur in Europe and the UAE. Ukrainians have often pioneered market-leading companies and built products that positively impact society, especially in the fintech sector. Despite the hurdles of war,

Last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the economy is “in a period of transition,” on the grounds that “we have a very strong labor market. When you are creating almost 400,000 jobs a month, that is not a recession.” Today, we learned that the U.S. added 528,000 new jobs last month and the

When it comes to geospatial and mapping data and how they are leveraged by organizations, satellites continue to play a critical role when it comes to sourcing raw information.  Getting that raw data into a state that can be usable by enterprises, however, is a different story. Today, a Berlin-based startup called LiveEO, which has

Microsoft is being called out for blocking users of the end-to-end encrypted email service, Tutanota, from registering an account with its cloud-based collaboration platform, Teams, if they try to do that using a Tutanota email address. The problem, which has been going on unrectified for some time — with an initial complaint raised with Microsoft

An innovative new medical startup in Romania helped doctors from three countries collaborate to treat Ukrainian cancer patients made refugees after Russia’s brutal invasion. The “Tumor Board” project was initiated by doctors from the US, Romania and Moldova to provide life saving treatments for displaced Ukrainians with cancer. A collaboration of Heal 21 Association and

Cera, a U.K. provider of healthcare inside people’s homes augmented by a platform that allows carers to monitor a patient’s health and potentially flag problems, has raised $320 million (£260 million) in an equity and debt financing round, split roughly 50/50. The equity side of the funding round was led by Cera’s existing investor Kairos

Barely a day goes by without news of layoffs emerging from the tech world — from cybersecurity to gaming, no industry is impervious. It’s not limited to any particular size of company, either — everything from fledgling startups and scaleups, to billion-dollar public entities such as Netflix have all “downsized” or put their hiring plans on

A ruling put out yesterday by the European Union’s top court could have major implications for online platforms that use background tracking and profiling to target users with behavioral ads or to feed recommender engines that are designed to surface so-called ‘personalized’ content. The impacts could be even broader — with privacy law experts suggesting

If the world wants to feed 10 billion people in 2050, it’ll need to find a better way to grow food. Today, about half the world’s habitable land is devoted to agriculture, yet even that amount can’t provide everyone with the sort of diet enjoyed by people in developed countries. If everyone wanted to eat

The healthcare crisis — more evident now as summer heatwaves put pressure on hospitals — is resulting in a staffing boom. But healthcare professionals in Europe can end up with bad terms and pay due to the many hiring agencies offering medical staff on short-term contracts. As you can imagine, this means this area is

All is not well with the proposed acquisition of UK start bus platform Zeelo by Mass transit group Swvl. Back in April, we covered how a possible $100 million acquisition was on the cards, and, indeed, both companies confirmed it was, though not the price. Swvl, an Egyptian-born startup that provides shared transportation services for

Jumping into a flatpacked, chipboard room wasn’t my usual experience of the U.K.’s legendary Glastonbury Music Festival. But here I was, doing my best to dance around and test out this crazy new way of putting myself into the so-called Metaverse. It turned out to be a legit experience, as Bristol, U.K.-based startup Condense, showed

Remember Natural Language Processing? NLP arose several years ago but it was only in 2018 that AI researchers proved it was possible to train a neural network once on a large amount of data and use it again and again for different tasks. In 2019 GPT-2 from Open AI, and T5 by Google appeared, showing

With the after-effect of the pandemic set to play out for years, VCs specializing in health, wellness and general ‘joy’ would appear to have rising fortunes. Funds such as Able Partners and Joyance have appeared in recent years to invest in startups that make people’s lives healthier, or at least more fun. In Europe this

As regulation, platform dynamics and consumer choice continue to eat into the adtech stalwart known as cookies, it’s leaving a gap in the market for advertising solutions that can work well without relying on cookie functionality. Today, an adtech out of Spain that’s doing just this has raised a big round of funding to double

Infobip, a cloud communications startup which – like Twillio – handles things like SMS, email, voice and WhatsApp messenger for customer engagement, has completed its acquisition of VoIP provider Peerless Network. Although the deal was announced last November, TechCrunch can exclusively reveal that it was worth north of $200 million. Last year info big raised

Sono Motors unveiled this week the final production design of the Sion EV, a solar electric vehicle that’s been in the making since the Munich-based startup launched in 2016. It’s been a long and bumpy road for Sono Motors, a journey that involved a couple of crowdfunding campaigns, a near insolvency and a debut on

Amazon has announced that it’s increasing the prices for its Prime subscription service in Europe, with fees rising by as much as 43% in some markets. The announcement comes some six months after the ecommerce giant announced a similar price increase in the U.S., where the annual price jumped 17% from $119 to $139. The

World Fund, a newcomer in climate-VC land, is taking the lead in a $128 million round for IQM, with hopes the Finnish quantum computing company will one day deliver carbon cuts by the megatonne. Quantum computing trades the bits of conventional computers for quantum bits, and in theory, quantum machines may be better suited for

The UK’s App Drivers and Couriers Union (ADCU) staged a 24-hour strike Wednesday to demand Uber be held accountable for the findings of the Uber files, a trove of thousands of leaked confidential documents that show how the ride-hail company broke laws, secretly lobbied governments and exploited driver safety to expand aggressively from 2013 to

Fonoa, a tax automation platform used by companies such as Uber and Zoom, has raised $60 million in a series B round of funding. Founded out of Dublin, Ireland, in 2019, Fonoa targets digital services companies that operate globally, automating many of the processes involved in managing sales tax, VAT, and goods and service tax

Just Eat Takeaway is cutting 390 jobs from its workforce in France, constituting part of a broader global restructuring effort as the food delivery giant looks to reverse its recent downturn. Just Eat Takeaway is the result of a $7.6 billion merger between the U.K.’s Just East and Dutch rival Takeaway.com back in 2020. Shortly

Urban, a popular UK-based startup that allows customers to find self-employed massage therapists who can be booked to attend customers’ homes, has been named in an investigation into alleged abuse by unlicensed freelance therapists. The startup has raised $35.7M from investors that include the likes of Felix Capital, Passion Capital, the London Co-Investment Fund, angels from

Apparently not, if venture capital activity on the continent is any indication Alex Wilhelm Anna Heim 14 hours Did no one tell European venture capitalists and startup founders that we’re supposed to be on the cusp of a global recession? With startups and VCs all heralding the doom of investment activity across the world, you’d think a

Meatable, a Dutch biotech company developing cultivated “lab-grown” meat products, has revealed images of its inaugural pork sausage for the first time. Founded in 2018, Meatable is one of several companies developing cell-cultured meat products, one of several solutions touted to help combat climate change. Countless cultivated meat companies have entered the fray and attracted venture

Conversational commerce isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, with countless companies using live chats, messaging apps, chatbots, voice assistants and more to encourage consumers to part with their cash. As part of that broader movement, the mighty WhatsApp, a dominant force in the messaging world, has been pushing deeper into the business arena with myriad tools

Opendoor opened the door, so to speak, to the idea of applying technology to the concept of house flipping to both scale the opportunity and make it considerably more efficient. While its share price is being hammered at the moment in a wider downturn for tech stocks overall, it’s a strong enough concept that it’s