Europe

Italian climate startup Energy Dome, which has developed a “CO2 Battery” for storing renewable energy, has closed a €40 million (~$44M) Series B round — bringing the total raised for its novel energy storage solution to €54M (or just shy of $60M). The round was co-led by Eni Next, the corporate VC arm of Italian

Bosch will acquire the assets of U.S. chipmaker TSI Semiconductors to expand its semiconductor business with silicon carbide chips (SiC), the German engineering and technology giant said Wednesday. The acquisition includes a $1.5 billion investment over the next few years to upgrade TSI Semiconductors’ manufacturing facilities in Roseville, California. Starting in 2026, the first chips will

Twitter was only confirmed yesterday as one of 19 major tech platforms subject to centralized oversight by the European Union’s executive starting this fall, when so-called very large online platforms (VLOPs) are expected to be compliant with the Digital Services Act (DSA). But the Commission has not wasted any time warning the Elon Musk-owned social

The energy-intensive process of separating and purifying chemicals and gases is a big reason why industries like plastic manufacturing cause so much pollution. UniSieve wants to reduce their carbon emissions and operational costs with its tech, which uses a high-precision membrane with special crystals that can filter specific molecules and ions. Today the Zurich-based startup

Anthemis Group is undergoing a restructuring that resulted in its letting go of 16 employees, or about 28% of its employees, earlier this year, the fintech-focused venture firm has confirmed to TechCrunch. A spokesperson for London-based Anthemis said the move was an effort “to better reflect current market conditions and to set up the business

I stood outside a 50s truck stop diner and gas station under a dark, dusky sky. A bright neon sign that said Norm’s Drive In illuminated the space. Behind a psychedelic school bus parked in the dirt lot, monstrous limbs with huge eyeballs, long lashes and smiley faces for irises extended upwards. Little aliens ran

BeReal is piloting its new Bonus BeReal feature in the UK. Expected to roll out soon in other countries, this allows users to post more than once per day — you get two Bonus BeReal posts if you manage to upload on time during the two-minute daily window, and one extra post if you miss

Woodoo, a startup working on alternative materials for various industries, has raised $31 million. The company is manufacturing composite materials based on wood so that they can replace common materials like glass, leather and steel. Around two-thirds of the amount raised is an equity funding round led by Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital with One Creation,

The pandemic era taught many of us that bikes are a great way to get around cities. Doubly so if they are e-bikes, replete with batteries to help reduce the amount of sweat required to get somewhere. Swytch Technology, a startup that builds e-bike conversion kits, isn’t targeting your average cyclist in the United States

Meet Primo, a French startup that recently raised a $3.4 million funding round to build a software-as-a-service product that handles the IT needs of small and medium companies. Primo keeps track of your fleet of devices and can then help you manage it without a dedicated IT manager. Headline and Global Founders Capital are leading

Founders Pledge is a London-based charitable initiative, where entrepreneurs enter a legally binding commitment to donate a portion of their personal proceeds on liquidity to charity when they exit. Launched all the way back in 2015 the initiative was designed to help social entrepreneurs build and scale their efforts. The minimum commitment for entrepreneurs is

EU lawmakers in the European parliament are closing in on how to tackle generative AI as they work to fix their negotiating position so that the next stage of legislative talks can kick off in the coming months. The hope then is that a final consensus on the bloc’s draft law for regulating AI can

Largely because of their age, houses in Europe can be notoriously hard to heat. Most were built for an era when the knowledge about energy consumption just wasn’t available in the way it is today. With energy becoming more expensive, and energy security ratcheting-up as a geopolitical issue, tech startups looking at this problem have

Proton, the Geneva, Switzerland-based company behind the end-to-end encrypted email service Proton Mail, as well as Proton VPN, Proton Drive and Proton Calendar, is announcing a brand new product today. And it’s a password manager called Proton Pass. Like other Proton products, the company is insisting on the privacy and security features of this new

Microsoft has kickstarted settlement discussions with European not-for-profit trade association Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), some six months after CISPE filed an antitrust complaint alleging that Microsoft was using its dominance in business software to tether customers to its Azure cloud platform. The news comes less than a month after news emerged that Microsoft

French startup Kate has raised a $7.6 million (€7 million) funding round from a bunch of business angels. As I wrote in my previous article on Kate, the company has ambitious goals when it comes to everyday mobility. It plans to use the funding to develop an alternative to regular cars (electric or not) by

Local retailers have to manage delivery providers themselves or build in-house. Both are expensive and complex. Delivery providers include DPD, Royal Mail, Hived and Veho. UK startup Evermile claims to simplify and automate deliveries, bringing enterprise-grade logistics to small businesses. It’s now raised $6M in a Seed funding round led by 10D with participation from

Munch-based climate tech startup Tanso, which sells software to help industrial manufacturers carry out sustainability reporting and carbon accounting, has banked €6.5 million in early stage growth funding. The investment breaks down into a €4 million seed raise, led by Cologne-based investor Capnamic, with existing investors including as UVC Partners also participating; and €2.5M it

As the European Union gears up to enforce a major reboot of its digital rulebook in a matter of months, a new dedicated research unit is being spun up to support oversight of large platforms under the bloc’s flagship Digital Services Act (DSA). The European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency (ECAT), which was officially inaugurated in

Electric and autonomous trucking company Einride is expanding to the U.K., representing the latest in a line of European market expansions. Einride said that it’s looking to target the 1.6 billion tonnes of goods that are transported by road freight in the U.K each year. Its first U.K. deployment will be in partnership with PepsiCo

Zeekr, the premium electric vehicle brand under China’s Geely Automobile Holdings, has confirmed plans to expand into Europe this year. The company will begin selling its Zeekr 001 luxury shooting brake and Zeekr X urban SUV in Sweden and the Netherlands starting in the fourth quarter of 2023, with plans to expand quickly to other

The global management consulting industry is worth billions of dollars but to this day it’s been tough to disrupt with technology. Traditional consulting firms provide high-quality services but the cost a lot and have rigid terms. And while there are plenty of portals offering low-quality freelance consulting services, these are generally unsupervised that would never

A UK credit card rewards startup aimed at millennials and Gen Z consumers has stumbled upon a combined business model that has now secured it £12.5 million ($15.4m) in an equity round from investors. Yonder is a credit card closest in operation to AMEX or Chase Sapphire in the US, however, it combines that credit

As the economy has gotten tougher, plenty of companies have switched to buying in assets to renting them. There’s a tortuous acronym for this which is XaaS or “Everything-as-a-Service”, also referred to as “Servitization”. An example of this would be ServiceNow which automates services for enterprise operations. A new-ish player in this space is Equipme,

French startup Fleet has been growing nicely over the past four years as the company has deployed nearly 10,000 devices with long-term leasing contracts. The company hasn’t raised any outside funding and is reinvesting as much of its revenue in the company as possible. Originally, Fleet had a very simple product offering. Companies of all

European accelerators are going through an interesting time right now. For instance, TechStars Stockholm was all set to launch and then abruptly shut down. And I think it’s now commonly accepted that most accelerators outside of YCombinator can too be often ‘less than adequate’, to put it diplomatically. Perhaps an exception to this oft-repeated phrase,

Apple has signed a multi-year deal with Canal+, a leading French premium television channel and streaming service. Starting on April 20, all existing and future Canal+ subscribers in France and some other European countries will be able to stream Apple TV+ content for no additional cost. This is an odd deal as Canal+ isn’t just

A shiny new data transfers deal between the European Union and the United States aimed at fixing costly legal uncertainty over exports of personal data isn’t in place yet but the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee is predicting the incoming EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (DPF) won’t survive a legal challenge — just as its two

In the past couple of weeks, already an ice age ago in AI hype terms, a number of very well known names in tech (Elon Musk! Woz!) signed an open letter calling for a halt on the development of AI models more powerful than OpenAI-s GPT-4 — arguing humanity needs time for planning and management

Spain’s data protection authority, the AEPD, has followed Italy’s lead and announced a preliminary investigation of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI over suspected breaches of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). At the end of last month, Italy’s DPA ordered OpenAI to stop processing locals’ data — over a range of suspected breaches of the GDPR