Europe

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of Work Bank, plans to make an equity investment of up to €25 million ($26.43) into the Partech Africa Fund II (PAF II) by the Paris-based VC firm Partech. The IFC said in the disclosures that it’s eyeing a stake not exceeding 20%. The agency said

Larger banks and other financial service providers are getting a lot more serious when it comes to competing with upstarts that are disrupting their businesses with fresher approaches and newer technologies. Today, one of the companies helping those larger banks with that task is announcing a big round of funding to double down on that

Last year, U.K. cybersecurity startup CybSafe, a “behavioral security” platform, raised a $7.9 million Series A. This SaaS product with a per-user-based, subscription licensing model has a “behavior-led” platform that manages people-related security. In other words, it uses behavioral science and data analytics to help employees be more cybersecurity aware. Users get microlearning content and

The reconfiguring of Russia’s digital landscape in the wake of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine continues to play out at a macro and micro level. Here’s a development on the latter front: Local tech giant Yandex has quietly removed national borders from its maps product. Users of Yandex’s maps app, which is popular in countries

Google is expanding a verification program for financial services ads that it launched in the UK last summer after seeing what it describes as a “pronounced decline” in reports of ads promoting financial scams. First in line to get the requirement, as part of a phased expansion of the policy, are Australia, Singapore and Taiwan.

In recent years startups have turned their attention to what’s known as ‘home setup services’. This is where utilities and moving-in are all aggregated into one package which is managed digitally, (hopefully), making two whole moving home process a lot easier and a lot less stressful. Updater in the US launched over 10 years ago

WhatsApp has been warned by European regulators it has one more month to fix its confusing terms of service, the Commission said today. The Meta-owned messaging platform has been under investigation by the bloc following a series of consumer protection complaints lodged against it by the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Network, led by Sweden’s national

Amid rising uncertainty about how financing will look for tech in the months and maybe years to come, one of the newer kids on the VC block in Europe is today announcing the closing of its latest and largest fund to date. Felix Capital — the London-based firm founded and headed by Frederic Court —

Oleksandr Yaroshenko Contributor For more than three months, Ukraine has been engulfed in the flames of a war with Russia. That might look like a red flag from an investor’s point of view, but everything is not so black and white in the country’s tech sector. Tech companies with Ukrainian roots and core markets in

European Union co-legislators have reached provisional agreement on a common charging solutions for smartphones, laptops, tablets and other small and medium sized electronics — some 15 different categories in all — agreeing that, by autumn 2024, USB Type C will be the common charging port for in scope devices. Laptop makers have been given a

The appropriately named endurance (so: running, triathlon, cycling, etc.) events marketplace Let’s Do This (a YC alumni) appeared a couple of years ago listing all kinds of endurance activities globally and attracting the backing of stars such as Usain Bolt and Serena Williams, alongside more standard venture investors such as EQT. Founded by Alex Rose

With a heritage that goes back to the fabled times of 2000 A.D. (since when it has backed 160 European teams) Paris-based early stage fund Alven, has something of a reputation to keep up. After investing in unicorns such as Qonto, Dataiku, Algolia, Stripe and Ankorstore, it now has €2B in assets under management. But

E-learning — whether it’s in the form of a supplement to physical materials or live lessons; or the primary or even only medium being used — is now an indelible part of the educational experience; and now a startup out of Spain that’s built a platform to help deliver e-learning in more places is announcing

Traditional venue photography providers like DEI Global, MagicMemories, Picsolve and Sharingbox are reliant on fixed equipment, permanent staffing costs, and on-site printed products. So Amsterdam, Netherlands-based Smiler came up with a different approach. Freelance photographers can simply use the platform to roam around events, selling event photography formally attached to the venue and allowing customers

Ofcom, the UK’s soon-to-be social media harms watchdog under incoming Online Safety legislation, has warned tech platforms that they are failing to take women’s safety seriously. Publishing new research (PDF) into the nation’s online habits today, Ofcom said it has found that female Internet users in the UK are less confident about their online safety

For this week’s Pitch Deck Teardown, I’m (virtually) traveling to Sweden to take a look at the $3 million seed round raised by developer tool startup Encore. The company is creating what it calls a software development platform for the cloud. It reportedly raised from Crane Venture Partners with Acequia Capital, Essence Venture Capital and Third Kind Venture

After setting out to examine digital healthcare from the inside by launching its own women’s health clinic as an app last year, French startup Nabla is executing the next step in a planned pivot to b2b — announcing today that it’s opened its machine learning tech stack to other digital health businesses and healthcare providers

Peer-to-peer car sharing company Turo is expanding to New York State and France in June, the company said on Wednesday. The expansion comes at a time when post/mid-Covid tourism is beginning to heat up, but renting a car will be difficult and expensive due to ongoing semiconductor shortages and supply chain issues. Turo’s launch in

Who will be liable for harmful speech generated by large language models? As advanced AIs such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 are being cheered for impressive breakthroughs in natural language processing and generation — and all sorts of (productive) applications for the tech are envisaged from slicker copywriting to more capable customer service chatbots — the risks

We’ve long documented the challenges that DevOps and operations teams in specific areas like security face these days when it comes to data observability: a wide range of services across the landscape of an organization’s network translates into many streams of data that they need to track for performance, security and other reasons. That’s leading

French startup Upway has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Exor Seeds and Sequoia Capital. The company sells second-hand electric bikes that have been refurbished and are ready to roll. In many ways, Upway reminds me of online marketplaces for cars. The startup provides a seamless experience for buyers who want to

So-called “tech for good” accelerators addressing such worthy-sounding subjects as ESGs and SDGs have appeared in the last few years. Some observers have dismissed these efforts as scalable only put to a point. However, the evidence is mounting that they are increasingly attracting some of the world’s best talent, because the world’s best talent does

Given the likely global recession, small businesses are reaching for new kinds of financing. Thus, the Buy Now Pay Later business model is now expanding into this B2B world at a rate of knots. Playter has raised backing to do this, as has Hokodo, Billie and Tranch, to name a few other players. But in

While the likes of Pipe are reaching multi-billion valuations, European revenue-based financing is experiencing as much of a boom as it is in the US. UK-based startup platform Bloom has now secured a £300m / $377m financing round led by Credo Capital and Fortress Investment Group LLC (NYSE:FIG), making it one of the better-funded revenue-based

Fintech startup and alternative credit asset manager Viola Credit has closed its latest $700 million fund, which provides asset-based lending capital to fintech, proptech and insurtech startups. If this fintech play reminds you of Silicon Valley Bank, think again. The latter provides corporate lending, also known as venture lending. Instead, Viola provides lending capital to fintech

The U.K.’s competition watchdog has just announced another investigation into Google over potential antitrust abuses around adtech. This is the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) second probe of Google’s adtech practices — after it said it would investigate an ad deal between Google and Facebook referred to internally as ‘Jedi Blue’, back in March. (That

Between one-to-one therapy and free online forums, people search for a range of solutions to mental health therapy online. Especially since the pandemic increased anxiety and depression rose by 25% globally (according to WHO) and also deepened an epidemic of loneliness. Among players in the online group emotional support space there is Pace (which raised

It’s crunch time in the world of instant grocery delivery, with the latest turn representing a big blow specifically in Europe. Berlin-based Gorillas, which raised nearly $1 billion dollars at around a $3 billion post-money valuation only seven months ago — today announced that it would be laying off some 300 employees and exiting four

It continues to be a very rough week for e-commerce companies in Europe. In the latest development, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Getir — the $12 billion quick commerce upstart that provides grocery essentials and sundries and promises delivery of them in minutes — is cutting 14% of its staff globally. It’s been estimated that

If you’re working for an advertising agency or you’re in charge of a brand, editing and exporting a video ad that works across all social and web platforms can be a lengthy and time consuming task. French startup Aive speeds up the process quite drastically as it can automatically generate all formats and all durations