Europe

Is the beauty industry ready to wean itself off single-use plastic? Shellworks is betting on it. Targeting cosmetics brands, the London-based biotech startup has scooped up a $6.2 million seed round to prove it can scale its petroleum-free, compostable packaging, which “performs like plastic” but breaks down in about a year, the company claims. Shellworks’

Robotics are playing a growing role in the world of e-commerce logistics and fulfillment — where they are seen not just as a way to speed up operations but to drastically reduce the costs of running them — and today a startup developing software and hardware specifically in the area of robot picking is announcing

A host of major European tech founders and investors are today backing the launch of OneUkraine, a new charity providing sustainable humanitarian relief for the Ukrainian people. OneUkraine will be supporting Ukrainians at home and abroad, delivering humanitarian aid, and aiming to rebuild the tech and broader infrastructure of Ukraine by SMEs and startups on

Swedish payment giant Klarna is going to cut hundreds of jobs in the coming days. Today’s news comes a few days after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company was going to cut its valuation in order to raise fresh capital. The company currently employs around 7,000 people. Cutting 10% of the company’s workforce

The UK’s data protection watchdog has confirmed a penalty for the controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI — announcing a fine of just over £7.5 million today for a string of breaches of local privacy laws. The watchdog has also issued an enforcement notice, ordering Clearview to stop obtaining and using the personal data of

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. Deep tech has become a hot topic in Europe, with hopes that the region can have an edge over the rest of the world

CleverTap, a retention marketing platform which has raised $76.6M to date, is to fully acquire Bulgarian-originated but San Francisco-based Leanplum, a customer engagement platform which has raised $131.2M, for an undisclosed amount. The news was broken by South Eastern European startup news site The Recursive. Sunil Thomas, CleverTap Cofounder and Executive Chairman said: “Like many

The next bottleneck in lithium-ion battery supplies isn’t cobalt, even though China has a stranglehold on the market, and it’s not nickel, either, despite nickel prices nearly doubling in the past five months. Cobalt can be partially replaced with nickel, nickel can be partially replaced with manganese, and both can be completely replaced with iron

Technology turned out to be a boon for pets during the pandemic. Without ready access to vets, pet owners turned to mobile apps to keep track on their pet’s health, often via educational content, and in some cases that was linked to insurance providers. The behavior has lit up the VC world as startups roll

If meme stocks can be a thing, what’s to stop audio meme sharing from going viral!? Hoping to storm the ear-bending arena of social audio and win friends amid the gamer/creator crowd is Voicy — a Netherlands-based startup that’s building a platform for user-generated audio snippets (typically a few seconds long), offering tools to create

In the developed world, almost anyone can get financing for, say, a car lease. But in an emerging economy like South Africa, the only people who own cars or can even get a car lease are the people who already have something to collateralize, or a payslip to work off. As a result, small businesses,

Berlin-based Zolar has bagged €100 million (~$105M) in Series C funding to expand its supplier network for small solar systems to meet rising demand for clean energy. Germany is particularly exposed to the energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine as it remains heavily dependent on Russian gas imports — meaning consumers there face

It’s been a year since Octave Klaba, the founder of OVHcloud, acquired Shadow following a commercial court order. After a stabilizing period, the company is now ready to launch a new plan, a new service and a new B2B offering. Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. People can pay a monthly subscription fee

Here’s a rare sight: Google has been hit with a €10 million fine by Spain for serious breaches of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which found it had passed information that could be used to identify citizens requesting deletion of their personal data under EU law, including their email address; the reasons

Meet Palette, a software-as-a-service startup that is going to be particularly interesting if you’re also running a software-as-a-service startup. The company has built a modern tool to design, manage and optimize sales commission plans for your internal team. Earlier this year, the startup raised a $6 million funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Liquid

While valuations of public software-as-a-service businesses have been taking a hammering of late, as investors cool on the sector amid a wider, post-pandemic tech stock sell off, SaaS startups still need to raise funding to scale their budding businesses — or, well, they hope they’ll be able to do so on reasonable terms despite these

Koyeb has evolved quite a lot since I first covered the startup. The company is still focused on serverless infrastructure. But it now offers a general purpose serverless platform that you can configure through a simple ‘git push’ command, or using Docker containers. The company’s serverless platform is now available as a public preview with

The world of web development continues to become increasingly more democratized — and more creative — thanks to innovations in “headless” systems that give more flexibility around how a site can look and function: a middle ground between using rigid templates and building and maintaining every single component of a web’s tech stack from the

Instant grocery startups sprang up and grew like weeds during Covid-19, fueled by consumers opting to practice social distancing and ready to order their food and sundries at the tap of an app; and VCs seeing an gap in the delivery market that had yet to be definitively filled. Now, perhaps inevitably, comes the consolidation.

Google is facing a new class-action style lawsuit in the UK in relation to a health data scandal that broke back in 2016, when it emerged that its AI division, DeepMind, had been passed data on more than a million patients as part of an app development project by the Royal Free NHS Trust in

New data about the real-time-bidding (RTB) system’s use of web users’ info for tracking and ad targeting, released today by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), suggests Google and other key players in the high velocity, surveillance-based ad auction system are processing and passing people’s data billions of times per day. “RTB is the

When it comes to commerce innovation, physical retail often feels like it gets the short end of the development stick against newer, faster-growing, more quantifiable (and still far from perfect) digital channels. But physical retail is far from disappearing altogether, and today a company that’s built a solution very specifically targeted at improving data around

While (former) startups like Lemonade came along to attack the tired world of insurance, the travel insurance market is now coming in for the same treatment from the likes of Safetywing (covered by TC here) and Battleface. In an ideal world, travel insurance would be easier to understand, would pay out quickly when things go wrong,

With Elon Musk’s recent interest in Twitter, Facebook’s growth flattening, and TikTok’s meteoric rise, it feels like the world of social media is back into some kind of inflection point period. Consumers seem hungry to try out new platforms again, and entrepreneurs are delivering. Last year the Supernova app launched as a ‘ethical alternative to

Cryptocurrency startup BVNK (pronounced ‘bee-vee-en-kay’) has closed a $40 million Series A funding round at a $340 million post-money valuation. Interestingly, Tiger Global is leading the round despite being in the news because they’ve experienced a $17 billion loss during this year’s tech stock sell-off. Other investors in today’s funding round include The Raba Partnership,

The problem with waiting for quantum computing to bring in the next wave of AI is that it’s likely to arrive a lot slower than people would like. The next best options include increasing the speed of existing computers somehow – but there’s now an important added ijmperative: power-efficient systems that mean we don’t burn

The rise of digital payments has changed the nature of how people do business with each other; and open banking — a movement in banking where incumbents are finally adopting newer technology such as APIs to open their systems to modern integrations — is leading to a wave of new payment methods, all of which

More consolidation is apace in the world of payments: Nexi, the Italian fintech that scooped up rivals Danish-based Nets and then Italy’s SIA to create a $12.5 billion European payments giant, has made another acquisition, this time to dig deeper into financial services for small and medium businesses in the region. It has fully acquired

The United Kingdom has a small but growing space industry, with the number of space-related organizations increasing by an average of 21 percent each year since 2012, but there is one key component it’s lacking — launches. There have been no space launches from U.K. soil, but that’s about to change. The U.K. has announced

The European Union has formally presented its proposal to move from a situation in which some tech platforms voluntarily scan for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to something more systematic — publishing draft legislation that will create a framework which could obligate digital services to use automated technologies to detect and report existing or new