Europe

VC firm Educapital recently announced that it has reached the first close of its second fund. The team has already secured $105 million (€100 million) and now wants to reach $160 million (€150 million) to invest in edtech startups as well as companies working on the future of work. I caught up with Marie-Christine Levet,

The UK government has confirmed it will move forward on a major ex ante competition reform aimed at Big Tech, as it set out its priorities for the new parliamentary session earlier today. However it has only said that draft legislation will be published over this period — booting the prospect of passing updated competition

French startup Sencrop just raised an $18 million Series B funding round led by JVP. The company helps farmers mitigate all sorts of risks, from extreme weather events to diseases that affect various crops. It is both a hardware and software play with a forecasting service that you can access through a subscription product. Weather

Shopify put a spotlight on the role and significance of logistics and fulfillment in e-commerce when it snapped up Deliverr for $2.1 billion last week to gain its own, direct foothold into providing those services for its e-commerce customers a la Amazon. Now, an up and coming startup in fulfillment in Europe has closed a

Fintech startup Yapily is announcing that it plans to acquire finAPI — the transaction is subject to regulatory approvals before it closes. Both companies offer open banking solutions in Europe. With this move, Yapily is consolidating its position in Europe and growing its business in Germany, more specifically. The terms of the deal are undisclosed,

Hugging Face 🤗 has closed a new round of funding. It’s a $100 million Series C round with a big valuation. Following today’s funding round, Hugging Face is now worth $2 billion. Lux Capital is leading the round, with Sequoia and Coatue investing in the company for the first time. Some of the startup’s existing

Facebook’s rebranded parent, Meta, has become the next tech giant to be confirmed as subject to a special competition abuse control regime in Germany, following a 2021 update to its digital competition rules that are focused on large digital companies which are considered to be of “paramount significance for competition across markets”, as the law

The food delivery business, and tech companies leading the charge, were hot commodities at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic as people stayed indoors and turned to apps to fill their bellies with pre-made meals. Now with that trend cooling off, those companies are feeling the chill. In the latest development, big changes and drama

Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek said on Friday that he’s pouring $50 million into the music streaming service, driving its stock price up by more than 3% to a high of $108.98 per share during regular trading hours.  The momentary rise, however, is a blip on the radar for Spotify, which has taken a beating this

Just over a year after launching a dedicated unit focused on digital markets inside the national competition watchdog, the UK government has put some meat on the bones of what this new Big Tech regulator will focus on — including confirming it will have the ability to levy fines of up to 10% of global

Digital therapeutics plus pills? Iceland’s Sidekick Health has developed a gamified digital care platform that’s designed to support healthcare outcomes by applying personalized behavioral lifestyle nudges, including alongside clinical treatments like drugs, to augment, extend and support patient care for a range of chronic diseases and conditions from cancer to cardiovascular health, diabetes and arthritis

French startup Alan has raised a new €183 million funding round ($193 million at today’s exchange rate). The company sells its own health insurance products and has expanded to other medical products and services. In other words, Alan wants to build a healthcare super app and a one-stop shop for all your questions and needs

The European Union’s flagship reform for tackling Big Tech platform power, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), will come into force in early 2023, Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager has said — rowing back from an earlier suggested timeframe of this fall. But she also implied that enforcements against unruly Internet “gatekeepers” could flow soon after the

Germany-based rental car giant Sixt has confirmed it’s been hit by a cyberattack that has caused widespread disruption to its global operations. According to a statement from Sixt, which has more than 2,000 locations across more than 110 countries, the company first detected “IT irregularities” on April 29, before subsequently confirming the cyberattack and containing

Keyboard startup Fleksy has launched a new self-serve SDK to expand its reach for indie developers wanting to add custom keyboard software to their apps. The Barcelona-based mobile keyboard software maker has been pursuing a white label licensing approach to selling its customizable keyboard tech for several years but it’s now looking to expand its

Google has announced a package of additional controls for users of its productivity suite, Google Workspace (neé G Suite), in Europe — which it’s rolling out by the end of this year and next. It says these extra control will enable organizations — both public and private sector — to “control, limit, and monitor transfers

Bunq, a European challenger bank based in Amsterdam, has announced that it plans to acquire Tricount, a popular mobile app to manage group expenses. Bunq isn’t disclosing the terms of the transaction and the acquisition is pending regulatory approval. Tricount is a simple yet effective way of tracking expenses as a group. For instance, if

When it comes to building databases and other backend software development, different organizations and developers do not always speak the same language. Today a startup called Prisma that’s built a platform — based around a server-side library — that lets users write in the languages that are most intuitive to them, but lets that work

Payments remains a very fragmented business around the world: depending on where you’re buying or selling something (and whether you are selling online or offline) you will have different “standard” payment methods, currencies and settlement schemes and more. Today, a startup called Kevin that’s taking one piece of that puzzle — payments made from account

The European Commission has shared the preliminary findings of an antitrust case focused on Apple Pay on iOS devices. According to antitrust investigators, Apple abused its dominant position as competitors can’t provide NFC-enabled contactless payments on the iPhone to develop other mobile wallets and compete fairly with Apple Pay. The Commission says NFC is a

Used-car digital platforms have been proliferating across the world for a handful of significant reasons, but most of those are related to our recent pandemic. Among those reasons is the rapid digitization of the used car industry, as startups have flooded the market with easier-to-use platforms that the older e-commerce-style ones lacked. The other is

In further fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Yandex, the company that’s sometimes referred to as the ‘Google of Russia’, has signed a term sheet to sell its media division to VKontakte (VK), aka the local Facebook equivalent. Yandex confirmed it has signed a term sheet to divest its news aggregator (News) and blogging/infotainment platform

Mass transit group Swvl has confirmed to TechCrunch its deal to buy UK start-up Zeelo, estimated to be a $100 million acquisition, according to sources. The Egyptian-born startup that provides shared transportation services for intercity and intracity trips, recently expanded into Turkey with its acquisition of Volt Lines. Earlier this year it went public (NASDAQ:

It was last year that we covered the $11.2M fundraise for Sienna Network, the ‘privacy decentralized’ startup. The network is built on the Secret Network, which allows asset holders to switch to privacy-oriented tokens. Privacy-based financial blockchain projects are crucial if “DeFi” is to work properly, otherwise normal financial transactions – which are normally private

Vercom, a cloud communication platform (CPaaS – ‘Communications Platform as a Service’) has acquired marketing automation startup MailerLite – based out of Lithuania – for $90 million. MailerLite only took in private, non-institutional funding. MailerLite says is had 1.4m users and subsidiary products MailerSend and MailerCheck. The $90MM+ merger gives MailerLite and Vercom a more

A ruling by the European Union’s top court today is set to unblock a raft of litigation brought by consumer protection organizations seeking to apply the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standard against tech giants such as Facebook and Twitter over issues like whether they gather properly informed consent to process people’s data. In

Ben Franklin once famously said that in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. But that doesn’t make dealing with either particularly natural and easy. Tech is rushing in to fill that gap, and today a Berlin-based startup called Taxfix, which has built a popular mobile assistant to address

Motherboard/Vice had an explosive report on Facebook’s business yesterday that’s sure to raise fresh questions over the lack of enforcement of European privacy laws against the adtech giant. The report is based on a leaked internal document written last year by privacy engineers on its Ad and Business product team. The document, which is entitled ABP

French startup Eden AI has raised a $1.6 million pre-seed round (€1.5 million) to build a programming interface that lets you access AI engines from multiple vendors. The company unifies those APIs and offers a simple way to try them out, and mix and match. Over the past few years, small and large cloud vendors

Since the (relatively speaking) easing of the pandemic, pharmacies have come under increasing strain as people clamor for their drugs. This is particularly an issue in he UK where traditional mom-and-pop pharmacies have started to close and larger chains haven’t kept pace with demand. The problems are even leading to incidences of abuse by customers.