Europe

French startup Alma is trying to build a new “buy now, pay later” giant in Europe. The company has closed a $130 million Series C round (€115 million). It has also raised $109 million (€95 million) in debt financing. Tencent, GR Capital and Roosh Ventures are investing in the startup for the first time. Some

Meet Insify, an insurtech startup that raised a $17 million (€15 million) Series A round led by Accel. The company wants to modernize the insurance market. Instead of focusing on the consumer market like many insurtech startups, Insify has picked a different path. It’s a pure B2B play as Insify focuses on Europe’s small and

French startup Alan currently insures more than 200,000 people with its own health insurance contracts. The company is expanding its business in two different ways — it wants to offer more services to turn its insurance app into a health superapp, and it is announcing today that it wants to sell its infrastructure and tech

European cloud computing companies have raised the alarm over what they say is a “critical loophole” in the EU’s flagship plan to tackle anti-competitive behaviors by gatekeeping digital giants. In an open letter sent to competition commissioner and EVP Margrethe Vestager this week, 41 European cloud enterprises called for an urgent clarification to be made

Last year we covered Longevica, which had raised $13 million after researching supplements to increase human longevity. Later that year we covered its launch of an open research tool for scientists to tracks the effects of more than 1,000 pharmacological compounds for testing drugs. This is just one example of the boom that is going

Jean-Paul Smets Contributor Jean-Paul Smets is the CEO of Rapid.Space, a hyper open cloud provider offering virtual private servers (VPS), content delivery networks (CDN) and global IPv6 (SDN). Picture this scenario as a young enterprise: You are a customer of Azure, AWS, or the Google Cloud Platform, assuming they are the frontrunners. While traveling in

European Union lawmakers have today presented a Chips Act: Their plan, trailed last fall, to bolster regional sovereignty in semiconductor production and supply chain resilience through a package of targeted support for chip production inside the bloc, including in areas like R&D and via funding for startups and scale-ups working on cutting edge tech in

Hearts Radiant, a Spanish startup that’s building a “longevity coach” for seniors — with the goal of extending quality of life through app-based personalized coaching designed to combat and even prevent frailty — has closed a seed round of funding as it gears up to launch in the US, eyeing Florida’s 4M+ over 65s. We

Companies like Opendoor opened the door to a new way of buying and selling properties by inserting a strong middle player who could buy in houses or apartments and redevelop them at scale, and then sell them to new homeowners at a profit. Now Clikalia, another player in the so-called iBuyer space, has raised €75

The bill for Apple’s antitrust stand off in the Netherlands over dating apps’ payment methods has ticked up by another €5 million — and now stands at €15M, the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) confirmed today. The penalty relates to an order by the competition authority requiring Apple to allow local dating apps to

Meet Numeral, a French startup that wants to upgrade corporate bank accounts. While clients interact with Numeral using a modern application programming interface (API), the startup connects directly to bank servers to upload payment files and interact with outdated information systems. By abstracting that layer of complexity, you can treat your bank accounts like another

What does Meta/Facebook’s favorite new phrase to bandy around in awkward earnings calls — as it warns of “regulatory headwinds” cutting into its future growth — actually mean when you unpack it? It’s starting to look like this breezy wording means the law is finally catching up with murky adtech practices which have been operating

As the automotive industry inches slowly ahead on the road to self-driving vehicles, we’re seeing the emergence of startups aiming to fill in some of the technical gaps in autonomous systems as they exist today. In the latest development, Annotell, a startup out of Sweden that makes software to assess the performance of autonomous systems’

With the so-called “Great resignation” many frontline workers (nurses, truck drivers etc) are re-assessing their lives in the wake of the pandemic, while older companies are struggling with this new world order. Employees also also now demanding better communication, so appy-fying those comms makes sense. France-based Snapshift started out as a staff management web solution

Studytube, a Dutch online learning platform, has acquired Springest, a European training-booking marketplace. Simultaneously it’s closed a $30 million Series B investment round led by Energy Impact Partners (EIP) and existing investor Verdane Capital. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Studytube offers mid-sized and large enterprises an online learning and development platform through a

With startups getting into nuclear technology, it’s no surprise to see more fund-raising happening. Now, Kyoto Fusioneering, a fusion energy startup based out of Japan but increasingly expanding abroad, has raised 1.33 billion yen (US$ 11.7 million) in its latest round of funding. The company has now raised 1.67 billion yen (US$ 14.7 million) to

E-commerce has continued to boom in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but running an e-commerce business has also become significantly more chaotic, with unpredictable supply chains, logistics hiccups, and overall higher costs upending even the best-laid plans. To underscore the demand for solutions to address this, today a startup called Wayflyer — which has

A piece of compliance theatre that the behavioral ad industry has for years passed off as “a cross-industry best practice standard” — claiming the consent management platform allowed advertisers to keep tracking and surveilling European Internet users without having to worry about pesky EU privacy laws — has today been confirmed to breach the bloc’s

Last year product analytics and digital adoption platform Pendo  pulled in $110 million investment from private equity firm Thoma Bravo, and that was not long after a $150 million tranche of funding. So the company — which allows companies like Okta, Salesforce, and Zendesk to onboard new customers or get employees to adopt new software as well as

Stating the obvious: customer discovery is essential for startups that hope to achieve product-market fit. Unfortunately, most of us are not skilled when it comes to talking to strangers. Each member of a startup’s founding team was hired for a specific reason, but customer outreach rarely leads the list. Early-stage startups that hope to refine

Earlybird, best known as the Berlin-based VC which has backed a myriad of German and European startups such as Soundcloud and N26, is today expanding its reach in Europe with the creation of a team and adjunct fund based out of Paris, France. The timing is decent. According to most annual European surveys, France regularly

GWI, a UK-based tech company — formerly GlobalWebIndex — that’s built up a SaaS business which disrupts traditional offline market research methods with a global network of data contributors, mobile surveys and a self-serve platform for surfacing rich consumer insights to customers that include tech giants like Google, has closed a $180 million Series B

As is commonly the case, datasets used inside companies almost always come from diverse sources and in different, unstructured formats. Connecting them up can lead to a be a very large headache. But if it can be done, there are all sorts of benefits, especially in finance, such as fraud detection, KYC/AML checks etc. This

Our behavior at restaurants and venues has changed massively in the last two years because of the pandemic, but many of us have realized the huge advantages of being able to order via phones from the table, or even pay, instead of the usual ‘credit card dance’. French startup Sunday, which didn’t even exist in

French startup Pennylane has raised a $57 million Series B round (€50 million) from existing investors, such as Sequoia Capital, Global Founders Capital and Partech. The startup wants to replace legacy accounting solutions in France — and in Europe. If you’re an accountant, you might be familiar with tools like Cegid and Sage. Essentially, Pennylane

Last year we covered how early blockchain startup Propy planned to use the technology to smooth real-world real estate sales by introducing the concept of smart contracts. It went on to actually sell an apartment as an NFT, using the NFT to effectively rubber stamps the legal process. However, that apart was in Ukraine. Today

Remember the backlash over that impossible-to-understand privacy policy update pushed out by WhatsApp last year? A consumer protection complaint over the messaging platform’s aggressive push to make users accept impenetrable terms changes related to its use of their data continues to rumble on in the European Union — now shifting up a gear into a formal

Zapp, the instant grocery delivery startup that launched in 2020 in London, has picked up a substantial round of funding to go head-to-head with Getir, GoPuff, Jiffy, Deliveroo and the many others hungry for a share of the on-demand convenience market. It has raised $200 million, a Series B round of funding that Zapp said

One of the most popular applications of artificial intelligence to date has been to use it to predict things, using algorithms trained with historical data to determine a future outcome. But popularity doesn’t always mean success: predictive AI leaves out a lot of the nuance, context and cause-and-effect reasoning that goes into an outcome; and

I could spend hours discussing early-stage startup operations and community-based marketing, but deal flow is my blind spot. But when investment banking firm UBS picked up financial robot-advisor Wealthfront for $1.4 billion in an all-cash deal this week, I noticed. “At those prices, the company’s exit price is a win in that it represents a