Europe

French startup Leocare has raised a big Series B funding round led by Eight Roads. Overall, the company has raised $116 million. It’s an equity and debt round, which means that part of this amount is a cash-for-equity transaction, while the rest is a credit line. The company is raising today’s Series B less than

The company formerly known as Facebook is delaying a rollout of end-to-end encryption across all its services until “sometime in 2023”, according to Meta’s global head of safety, Antigone Davis, penning an op-ed in the British newspaper, the Telegraph this weekend. While Facebook-owned WhatsApp has had E2EE everywhere since 2016, most of the tech giant’s services

Meet Cron, a new calendar app for the Mac that wants to bring some innovation to this space. The startup directly mentions Sunrise as an inspiration for those of you who still remember it. Sunrise used to be a popular calendar product that was acquired by Microsoft. Cron has attended Y Combinator’s winter back of

Warsaw-based Packhelp has been riding the boom in ecommerce and on-demand delivery to scale a business that helps even the smallest brands wrap their wares in eye-catching custom packaging, while counting giants like H&M and UberEats among its customers, too. Since being founded back in 2015 — launching its custom packaging design platform in 2016

Startups geared towards men’s sexual health have been doing a brisk trade for a few years now. But while the early wave of tech businesses mostly aimed to provide (easier) access to pharmaceuticals for treating health issues like erectile dysfunction (e.g. Roman), perhaps also offering hormone tests and bespoke vitamins claimed to reduce hair loss

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), an expert steering body which advises EU lawmakers on how to interpret rules wrapping citizen’s personal data, has warned the bloc’s legislators that a package of incoming digital regulations risks damaging people’s fundamental rights — without “decisive action” to amend the suite of proposals. The reference is to draft

Switzerland-based privacy tech startup, Nym Technologies, which is trying to commercialize an old idea for privacy-centric infrastructure (mixnets) by combining it with buzzy crypto incentives, has closed $13 million in Series A investment from Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto-focused fund, following a $6M raise we covered back in the summer (also loosely pegged as a Series A).

The battle between the appetites of European Union Member States’ governments to retain their citizens’ data — for fuzzy, catch-all ‘security’ purposes — and the region’s top court, the CJEU, which continues to defend fundamental rights by reiterating that indiscriminate mass surveillance is incompatible with general principles of EU law (such as proportionality and respect

An electric vehicle is, essentially, just ‘software on wheels’, and requires lots of moving parts, not physical but, of course, virtual. That software needs to continually optimize the performance, efficiency, and safety of the EV it’s running. But a problem has arisen: Not enough auto-makers unpack their software for others to help improve it. So,

The UK government has named five projects that have scored public funding under a ‘tech safety’ challenged announced in September — when the Home Office said it wanted to encourage the tech industry and academia to develop novel AI/scanning technologies that could be implemented on end-to-end encrypted (e2ee) services to detect child sexual abuse material

The UK’s data protection watchdog has written to Apple and Google seeking details of how they assess apps to determine the age ratings they apply following concerns raised by an online child safety charity. The move follows the coming into force of the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code this September — which puts requirements on

Overwolf, a platform that enables creators to build, share, and monetize items inside games, has raised a $75 million Series D funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Previous investors including Griffin Gaming Partners, Insight Partners, Intel Capital, Liberty Technology Venture Capital, and Marker also participated. The funding will be pumped into Overwolf’s CurseForge Core,

The cloud may be the direction that much of enterprise IT is moving today, but it still remains a major source of security issues, with some 98% of all enterprises in a recent survey reporting that they have contended with a cloud-related security breach in the last 18 months. Today, a startup called Laminar is

Funding for European startups is at a record-high so far for this year, with €73.7 billion raised in the first three quarters, and the full year on track for more than 8,000 deals, according to research from PitchBook. To keep up with the pace, London firm Balderton is today announcing its latest fund, a $600

Remote and hybrid working are the order of the day, and now a startup called AnyDesk that helps enable that to be pulled off smoothly — regardless of the architecture of a company’s network, or where a person happens to be working — is announcing a round of $70 million to fuel its growth. The

French startup Lifen has raised a $58 million (€50 million) funding round. The startup has been working on digital infrastructure for the healthcare industry, starting with medical reports. 600 healthcare facilities are using the product to send and receive medical documents. And each customer is using Lifen intensively as it represents 2 million medical documents

Entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) often struggle to deal with several siloed functions, such as company secretary, bookkeeping, banking, tax, payroll, employment services, insurance and more. French entrepreneurs Julien Labruyere and Adrien Barthel founded Sleek in 2017 to help entrepreneurs incorporate and operate businesses in Singapore and Hong Kong. The startup built a

UK-based software testing startup Virtuoso has raised a $13.3 million Series A round led by Paladin Capital. The round was joined by Mubadala Capital as well as existing UK investors Crane Venture Partners, Forward Partners, and Downing Ventures.  Virtuoso says its SaaS software testing platform, which launched in 2019, uses machine learning and Robotic Process

Cyber security startup Immersive Labs — which recently closed a $75 million Series C funding round giving it a significant war chest — is acquiring US-based cyber startup Snap Labs in an undisclosed deal, although Immersive says it’s a “multi-million dollar figure” and will be a mix of stock and cash. Snap Labs is understood

Mimica, which (perhaps oddly enough) automates Robotic Process Automation, has raised a $6 million Series A funding from Khosla Ventures. The company will use the funds to establish a sales team in the US and build out its product. Previous Seed investors included the UK’s Entrepreneur First accelerator and the Episode 1 VC. Mimica’s first

Google has won an appeal against a class action-style privacy litigation at the UK Supreme Court — avoiding what could have been up to £3BN in damages had it lost the case. The long-running litigation was brought by veteran consumer rights campaigner, Richard Lloyd, who, since 2017, has been pursing a collective lawsuit, alleging Google

Business education is, let’s face it, finding it hard to keep up with a $3 trillion global tech startup economy that’s booming right now. High-growth companies are time-starved and so are their executives, but the courses they are offered are long, often boring, and varying in quality. Ideally, business education should be more on-demand, targeted,

We last heard from Ometria, an “AI-powered” customer marketing platform allowing brand and retailers to personalize marketing messages, in 2019 when it raised $21 million in a Series B. It’s now completed a $40M Series C round, led by InfraVia Growth, with participation from existing investors Octopus Ventures, Sonae IM, Summit Action, Adjuvo, Columbia Lake

As investors continue to pour billions into super speedy on-demand grocery delivery — trying to dislodge the dominance of traditional supermarket giants via a hyper convenience lever (whipping up some local opposition to their 24/7 dark stores and delivery methods in the process) — other entrepreneurs are spotting opportunities to slow things down a little.

Blackshark.ai, the Austrian startup behind the digital globe you fly over in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, has raised a $20M round A to develop and scale its replica-Earth tech. The potential applications for a planetary “digital twin” are many and various, and the company has a head start even on mapping giants like Google. The world

Google’s challenge to a 2017 EU antitrust finding against its shopping comparison service (Google Shopping) has been largely dismissed by the General Court of the European Union. It’s an important win for the Commission’s antitrust division, which — in recent years — has brought a string of enforcements against big tech, including multiple decisions against

Meet Amenitiz, a Barcelona-based startup that describes its products as the operating system for independent hoteliers, B&Bs and cottages. In more technical terms, Amenitiz has been building a vertical software-as-a-service product that combines everything you need to run a hotel. The company just raised a $7.5 million (€6.5 million) seed round led by Point Nine.

fuboTV is making a significant move in Europe with plans to acquire Molotov, a French startup with a leading television streaming service. fuboTV also operates a TV streaming platform, but it is currently only operating in the U.S., Canada and Spain. The transaction is a cash-and-stock deal that values Molotov at $190 million (€164.3 million).

As more data moves to the cloud, it often still lives in multiple places on a business’ network, making it difficult for organizations to understand and access the right data they need and easier for data breaches to occur. Collibra, which provides tools to find, understand, access and analyze data, announced today that it raised

Instant grocery and essentials delivery is already a very crowded field in Europe; but today competition was turned up another notch: Gopuff — the U.S. leader in the space with a service that delivers food and essentials for a flat fee of $1.95, 24 hours a day — launched officially in the U.K.. It plans