Europe

Amazon tried but then ultimately stepped away from building its own cost-intensive Grubhub and DoorDash competitor in the U.S. back in 2019. Now three years on, it’s taking a different approach to tackling the space to build in one more sweetener to encourage more sign-ups to its Prime subscription service. Today, the e-commerce giant and

The burgeoning low-code and no-code movement is showing little sign of waning, with numerous startups continuing to raise sizable sums to help the less-technical workforce develop and deploy software with ease. Arguably one of the most notable examples of this trend is Airtable, a 10-year-old business that recently attained a whopping $11 billion valuation for a

The U.K. government is pushing to make “foreign interference” such as disinformation a priority offence under its proposed Online Safety Bill, forcing technology firms to remove contravening content shared by foreign state actors. The move follows recent legislation announced by the U.K. that is designed to deter foreign state actors seeking to “undermine U.K. interests,”

Despite the economic downturn and perilous position many startups find themselves in, some industries are seeing continued momentum in terms of inwards investments — one of those is climate tech. In 2021 alone, some $40 billion was invested across more than 600 deals, a trend that is seemingly continuing into 2022 with significant capital plowed

Amazon has agreed to simplify the process required for cancelling its Prime membership subscription service across its sites in the European Union, both on desktop and mobile interfaces, following a series of complaints from regional consumer protection groups. The coordinated complaints about Amazon’s confusing and convoluted cancellation process for Prime were announced back in April

European Union lawmakers have agreed a way forward on regulating the traceability of crypto assets being traded in the bloc. The rules are intended to curb the use of crypto for money laundering and terrorism financing by bringing in compliance requirements for crypto service providers, such as trading platforms. The provisional agreement on a new

Five years ago, the European Union passed rules which largely ended mobile roaming fees for citizens traveling with their devices across borders within the bloc. Today lawmakers are reupping the regulation that lets EU citizens “roam like at home” for a full decade, meaning European consumers can keep avoiding most extra fees when travelling within

The U.K. is planning to tweak an existing law to allow text and data mining “for any purpose,” in a move that’s designed to boost artificial intelligence (AI) development across the country. The announcement constitutes part of a broader strategy to “level up” AI and transform the U.K. into what it calls a “global AI

Consumer rights groups in Europe have filed a new series of privacy complaints against Google — accusing the advertising giant of deceptive design around the account creation process which they say steers users into agreeing to extensive and invasive processing of their data. The tech giant profiles account holders for ad targeting purposes — apparently

Snežana Gebauer Contributor Snežana Gebauer, a partner with StoneTurn, has 20 years of experience in managing complex international investigations for major law firms, Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies and sovereign nations. The economic sanctions that have been imposed following the war in Ukraine pose an intricate set of challenges for private equity (PE). Sanctions are

Entrepreneur First made a name for itself a decade ago in its home base of London, and then further afield, for the novel approach it takes to tech investing: rather than seek out interesting, scaling startups like typical VCs, it backs founders and their very, very early stage startup ideas — so nascent in fact

An independent review of UK legislation has concluded the country urgently needs new laws to govern the use of biometric technologies and called for the government to come forward with primary legislation. Among the legal review’s ten recommendations are that public use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology be suspended pending the creation of a

When users on websites and apps find they have problems, developers have various tools to record what they are doing in order to find out what went wrong. But these can involve cumbersome methods like screenshots, and back-and-forth emails with customers. ContentSquare and Medallia are products that primarily target marketers and product managers rather than developers, who

Last week I wrote about an AI startup that’s building technology that can alter, in real time, the accent of someone’s speech. But what if the AI goal instead is to make it possible for people speaking in whatever way they do, to be understood just as they are, and to remove some of the

Until recently, Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Wise, and Sten Tamkivi, co-founder of Teleport, had banded together as a sort of “mini Angel brand” known as “Taavet+Sten.” Tamkivi has done around 50 angel deals, Hinrikus has, reportedly, done as many as 150. But they were effectively pooling their personal capital as angel investors. However, evidently this

Incredibuild, an Israeli startup that has picked up a lot of traction in the worlds of gaming and software development for a platform that drastically speeds up (and reduces the cost of) the shipment of code and related collateral during building and testing — has raised some capital to speed up its own development. The

Last year we covered how “&Open” (yes, “ampersand open,” pronounced “And Open”) had raised a raised $7.2 million seed to make it easier for brands to send gifts to customers to boost loyalty and engagement. According to one study customers who feel emotionally connected to a brand after receiving gifts have a 306% higher lifetime

As companies grow they expose more of themselves online and become harder to defend in terms of cybersecurity. One report estimates that 30%-40% of a company’s IT infrastructure isn’t even known about by the security team. So startups have appeared with an ‘offensive’ profile in order to similate cyber attacks. One such is Amsterdam-based Hadrian,

Europe has no shortage of buy now, pay later startups and a quick search is revealing. Berlin-based fintech startup Mondu has taken in €39.9 million to expand its B2B BNPL solution. Madrid’s RITMO scored over €184 million. Tranch in the U.K. is launching BNPL to a B2B market with €4 million. Berlin-based Billie raised about

Another strike against use of Google Analytics in Europe: The Italian data protection authority has found a local web publisher’s use of the popular analytics tool to be non-compliant with EU data protection rules owing to user data being transferred to the U.S. — a country that lacks an equivalent legal framework to protect the

Paris-originated VC Breega wasn’t enormously well-known in the VC world (it only closed its 1st fund in 2015) until, perhaps, it started attracting attention with its second €110 million Seed fund, just under a year go. It’s portfolio now includes a number of scale-ups including Moneybox, Cuvva, Coverflex and Libeo. Perhaps part of its ‘secret

Germany’s competition regulator is looking into possible abuses related to how Google operates its Maps product. It’s the latest proceeding the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has opened against Google — with earlier (ongoing) investigations into the tech giant’s News Showcase licensing practices and its data terms. However the Maps proceeding is the first initiated under tougher

It’s been a tough few years for Omio, the Berlin-based travel search and booking platform that saw 98% of its revenues evaporate overnight when COVID-19 hit Europe back in Spring 2020. But the company kept on trucking and has found some light at the end of the tunnel: Today it’s reporting revenues which have rebounded

Google has quietly dropped its appeal in France against an antitrust fine of half a billion euros levied against it last summer for major breaches in how it negotiated to remunerate local news publishers for displaying copyrighted content. A major reform to European Union rules around digital copyright which was agreed back in 2019 —

A Ukrainian deeptech startup is launching a charity NFT project to sell AI-generated artworks with the twin goal of raising money to support people affected by Russia’s war of aggression and also — it hopes — keep attention locked on the conflict as it approaches its fourth month, with many in the country concerned that

Data quality has been shaping up as a salient and increasingly critical part of the world of data science: Enterprises are sitting on growing troves of information, but it’s only useful if we can trust it to be accurate and usable. To that end, Validio, a startup building tools to improve and ensure data quality

A long-running EU engagement with TikTok — initiated following a series of complaints over child safety and consumer protection complaints filed back in February 2021 — has ended, for now, with the video sharing platform offering a series of commitments to improve user reporting and disclosure requirements around ads/sponsored content; and also to boost transparency

Personio — a startup out of Munich, Germany that styles itself as a Workday and ServiceNow focused on the small and medium businesses of the world — went on a funding tear through the Covid-19 pandemic after its recruiting, payroll, people management, development and training, workflow automation and other HR tools found traction particularly among

Given the dire predictions about the impending (and basically already here) Climate Crisis, the world can’t get enough ClimateTech funds right to power new innovation that can address the issue. FTSE 250-listed investment firm IP Group has been investing in the area previously but has clearly ‘read the runes’ and re-shaped its existing investment strategy,

The e-commerce market is on track to pass $5.5 trillion in revenues this year, which speaks not only to how much consumers are shopping online these days, but also to how many businesses there are out there now selling to them. Today, a startup from Gothenburg, Sweden called Juni is announcing $206 million in funding