Europe

Making sure mental wellness is part of your routine can be difficult, especially if you are already busy and stressed. MindLabs wants to make it easier with a combination of on-demand or live video classes and community features. The company announced today it has raised a $3.5 million seed round, almost eleven months after its

Will Uppington Contributor Will Uppington is the CEO and co-founder of TruEra. The European Commission announced first-of-its-kind legislation regulating the use of artificial intelligence in April. This unleashed criticism that the regulations could slow AI innovation, hamstringing Europe in its competition with the U.S. and China for leadership in AI. For example, Andrew McAfee wrote

Increasingly, companies are being encouraged by governments to engage in carbon accounting, but of course, only a small number of companies actually do. Even those probably count only 10% of their emissions because they don’t account for the emissions of their supply chain, which, when looked at, probably accounts for 90% of their total emissions.

Wayve, a U.K.-based self-driving startup that is notable for its use of deep learning and cameras rather than more-costly Lidar and other sensors to guide vehicles, is gearing up for its next stage of development with a strategic backer in its pocket. Today Ocado — the online grocer that also powers online grocery systems for

Ride-hailing giant Uber is facing a legal challenge over its use of real-time facial recognition technology in a driver and courier identity check system that it uses in the UK. The App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU) announced the legal action Tuesday, alleging that Uber’s biometric identity checks discriminate against people of color. The union

Both Anchor and Descript have made their names as being among the most significant Podcast creation platforms of recent times, but hoving into the rear-view mirror recently has been Podcastle, an all-in-one platform that can cover off recording, production and publishing, all on the one platform. It’s now raised $7 million in an early-stage funding

  Book sales during the pandemic went up, and it seems the amount we are reading did, too. And Inkitt, the startup that operates a free, popular platform of the same name for anyone to write and publish stories — stories that Inkitt then analyses using data science to determine which of them to take

The European Parliament’s lead and shadow rapporteur for a major reboot of the bloc’s digital rulebook have called for an investigation following the Facebook whistleblower leaks. One of the MEPs has also called for incoming EU rules to directly tackle business models that favor “disinformation and violence over factual content”. In a joint statement, the

Berlin-based climate tech startup, ‘Made of Air‘, has closed a €5 million (~$5.8M) seed funding round, led by Norwegian sustainability-focused family fund, TD Veen. Also participating are Patrick Pichette (former CFO of Google & chairman of the Board of Twitter), EQT Group, Thomas Von Koch (CEO & cofounder of EQT Group), Tuesday Capital, the co-founders

Former Vice President Al Gore has invested $600 million of equity into UK energy startup Octopus Energy Group via his Generation Investment Management vehicle, taking a stake of approximately 13% in the business. The investment means Octopus has attained a valuation of around $4.6 billion. Octopus has made a name for itself in energy circles

Audio social network Clubhouse, video sharing platform Vimeo and anti-ad fraud startup DoubleVerify are among a clutch of tech companies and organzations preparing to sign up to a beefed-up version of the European Union’s Code of Practice on Online Disinformation, the Commission said today. Back in May the EU’s executive said it would be strengthening

The future of office work, post-COVID-19, is driving plenty of startup activity. Not just around core business needs like comms (Zoom, Slack et al) — but entrepreneurs are also competing to come up with the perfect tool to recreate the social serendipity of office life in order to make dispersed workers feel a bit more

“Every form of digital communications has its unique benefits, and delivering high quality at scale requires both extensive technical capabilities and deep subject matter expertise“, comments Oscar Werner, Sinch CEO, in a statement. “Together with Pathwire, we will be able to offer a best-of-breed product set, across messaging, voice and email, that empowers businesses and

A U.K. law firm is bringing a class-action style claim over a patient health data scandal that dates back to 2015 and involves the Google-owned AI company DeepMind, after it was quietly passed medical information on more than a million patients by an NHS Trust as part of an app development project. Law firm Mishcon

Datacenters are taking on ever-more specialized chips to handle different kinds of workloads, moving away from CPUs and adopting GPUs and other kinds of accelerators to handle more complex and resource-intensive computing demands. In the latest development, a startup called Speedata, which is building a processor (fabless) to cover the specific area of big data

Incident.io has raised a $4.7 million funding round led by Index Ventures and Point Nine. When your company is facing an outage or a data breach, Incident.io provides the right framework to communicate about the issue — both internally and externally — and make sure it is resolved as quickly as possible. In addition to

Platforms for dentists are booming right now as many governments gradually make it harder to access dentistry via social care, especially in the UK. But the most lucrative market is cosmetic dentistry and this is where startups are often playing, such as aggregating private clinics under a simple booking platform. Toothfairy is a UK startup

European Union lawmakers are consulting on how to regulate the short term rental market across the bloc — asking whether a single set of pan-EU rules or something more locally flavored is needed to rule over platforms like Airbnb. The Commission says it wants to support an expansion of competition and players in the sector

Millennial consumers are emerging as a key demographic in the insurance market, and today a Swedish startup that’s building a business catering specifically to their needs and priorities is announcing a round of funding to fuel its growth. Hedvig, a neo-insurer that provides property, travel, contents, and accident insurance geared to the lifestyles of younger

Heydoc, a system for managing the medical data and admin tasks in medical practitioners, has closed a $8.3m Series A round led by Smedvig Capital with existing investors Hambro Perks, Triple Point Ventures and InHealth Ventures also participating. This brings the total amount raised to date by Heydoc to $12m.    Heydoc mainly operates in the UK but plans to expand internationally. It competes mostly with

After rebranding from White Hat and raising $44 million earlier this year, tech apprenticeship startup Multiverse has raised another round of funding. The company today announced that it has closed $130 million in a Series C round. The funding had been rumored in recent weeks while the round was being closed.  D1 Capital Partners and

The UK’s competition watchdog has cleared Facebook’s acquisition of Kustomer, a maker of CRM tools. The purchase was announced last November — with a price-tag we reported as $1BN — but is pending closing after facing regulatory scrutiny. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an inquiry on the proposed merger this summer, at

The meteoric rise of collaborative design startup Canva — now valued at $40 billion — and conversely, the viral interest we’ve been seeing in the market for NFTs where you can “buy” a share of a limited-edition digital asset, are two examples of how the tech world today revolves around — and values — catchy

Covid-19 really put the kibosh on live events in the last 18 months, but in the world of tech, it also meant that live event startups that found a way to survive and grow throughout the period got a lot of attention. In the latest development, Dice — a London company that has built a

Sunday, a startup that didn’t exist just a few months ago, has raised a $100 million Series A funding round. Today’s funding round is led by Coatue with participation from partners of DST Global. Investors in the restaurant, hospitality and tech industries are also participating. I already wrote a lengthy profile of Sunday when it

The UK government has announced a national AI strategy — its first dedicated package aimed at boosting the country’s capabilities in and around machine learning technologies over the longer term. It says it hopes the strategy will lead to an increase in the number and types of AIs being developed and commercialized in the UK

The UK published its first ever national AI strategy this week. The decade-long commitment by the government to levelling up domestic artificial intelligence capabilities — by directing resource and attention toward skills, talent, compute power and data access — has been broadly welcomed by the country’s tech ecosystem, as you’d expect. But there is a

Startups have spent the last decade trying to offer every variation of Airbnb that they can imagine. But Ukio thinks it has found a way through the ever-growing tangle of housing rental competitors — and regulators — right as remote work becomes the norm. It offers rentals of one month or longer, featuring a turnkey

Well that was fast. London grocery delivery upstart, Jiffy — which was only founded in April this year — has nabbed $28 million in Series A funding around half a year after initial £2.6M seed raise. It says it’s now raised a total of $35M. The grocery delivery startup operates a network of its own

Open banking — a new approach to payments and other financial services that disrupts traditional card-based infrastructure by linking directly into banks — is having a moment. On the heels of open banking startup TrueLayer hitting a $1 billion valuation in its latest round after seeing strong traction for its services, today another open banking