Europe

Video sharing social network TikTok has removed more than 500,000 accounts in Italy following an intervention by the country’s data protection watchdog earlier this year ordering it to recheck the age of all Italian users and block access to any under the age of 13. Between February 9 and April 21 more than 12.5M Italian

The UK government has published its long-trailed (child) ‘safety-focused’ plan to regulate online content and speech. The Online Safety Bill has been in the works for years — during which time a prior plan to require age verification for accessing online porn in the UK, also with the goal of protecting kids from being exposed

Quix, a platform for Python developers working on streaming data, has secured a £2.3 Million ($3.2M)Seed funding round led by Project A Ventures in Germany, with participation from London’s Passion Capital and angel investors. The Quix Portal is also providing developers with a free subscription to a real-time data engineering platform. Quix attracted angel investors

While much of the world eagerly watches to see if the vaccination rollout helps curb and eventually stamp out Covid-19, one of the companies that has been helping to manage the spread of the virus is announcing a big round of funding on the heels for strong demand for its technology. Huma, which combines data

The Hamburg data protection agency has banned Facebook from processing the additional WhatsApp user data that the tech giant is granting itself access to under a mandatory update to WhatsApp’s terms of service. The controversial WhatsApp privacy policy update has caused widespread confusion around the world since being announced — and already been delayed by

While consumers and businesses continue to use their purchasing power to spin the wheels of the globalized economy, one of the companies that’s built a technology platform to help that economy operate more smoothly is announcing an investment to double down on growth. Zencargo, which has built a digital platform to enable freight forwarding —

Last week we saw some major backing of the Secret Network blockchain, as significant blockchain players Arrington Capital and Blocktower Capital invested in the privacy-first smart contract platform. What this is signaling is the rise of privacy-oriented financial blockchain projects, which are crucial if “DeFi” (decentralized finance) is to have any kind of future. We

Whether learning online or taking a class in person, every student knows all too well how important it is to have good notes from your classes as a key way to remember and apply what you’ve been taught. Now, an Amsterdam-based startup called StuDocu, which has built a big and profitable business by way of

E-bike startup Cowboy has launched the Cowboy 4, its newest generation of urban electric bikes. The bike will come in two different frames, a traditional frame, and a step-through.The C4 is basically an upgrade on the previous version 3, while the ‘C4 ST’ is a step-through model which the company is predicting will appeal to

NFTs were arguably already taking off when Beeple sold his NFT artwork for $69m. But another crypto project attracted attention when it bought an original Banksy artwork for $95,000. The group literally burnt the artwork and sold its NFT on the OpenSea platform for $400,000. Although the stunt was covered by CBS News, BBC News,

During the pandemic, we’ve seen the rise of ‘Zoom investing’ – where VCs literally use remote video conference tools like Zoom and Google Meet to take pitches from entrepreneurs. Now a new European Seed fund plans to leverage that emerging behavior and bake it into their model. Mattias Ljungman, the former co-founder of Atomico formed

Kahoot, the popular Oslo-based edtech company that has built a big business out of gamifiying education and creating a platform for users to build their own learning games, is making an acquisition to double down on K-12 education and its opportunities to grow in the U.S. It is acquiring Clever, a startup that has built

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals. Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words. This is your chance to put Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen on the Techcrunch

It’s widely known that video streaming boomed during the pandemic, as millions of people were faced by boredom during lockdowns. But an unintended consequence of this was the growing environmental impact of millions of video streams which meant server farms needing to draw increasing amounts of power from the grid. Indeed, there were even calls

Inspired by his own problems with skin ailments, tech founder Daniel Jensen decided there had to be a better way. So, using an in-house tech platform, his Copenhagen-based startup Nøie developed its own database of skin profiles, to better care for sensitive skin. Nøie has now raised $12m in a Series A funding round led

If the pandemic has been good for anything it’s been good for the therapy business and for startups targeting mental health, with VCs kept very busy signing checks. To wit, here’s another one: Madrid-based ifeel has bagged €5.5 million (~$6.6M) in Series A funding, led by Nauta Capital. The startup was founded back in 2017

Metacore, a Finnish mobile games company, seems to have an amazing “relationship” with Supercell, another (quite successful) Finnish mobile games company. Back in September 2020, Metacore raised $17.7 million in equity from Supercell and another $11.8 million line of credit, sometimes also called a debt round. That amazing relationship appears to be ongoing. Because Metacore

It was way back in 2018 that Omni:us appeared to disrupt the insurance market by applying AI to this most legacy of all industries. It has now gone on to raise $44.1 million. In a similar vein, Shift Technology in France has raised $100 million. Now a UK startup aims to do something similar, but

Disqus, a commenting plugin that’s used by a number of news websites and which can share user data for ad targeting purposes, has got into hot water in Norway for tracking users without their consent. The local data protection agency said today it has notified the U.S.-based company of an intent to fine it €2.5

Stride VC, a London-based seed investment fund, has raised its second fund, which will be £100M ($138.6M) – identical to its first fund. The fund will invest primarily in London startups but also look at select European opportunities. The breakup of the LPs in the fund is 10% fund of funds, 60% other institutional, 28%

In March 2020, Tame had a digital event suite for offline corporate events. But with the pandemic hitting, it did a hard pivot into providing a highly customizable virtual events platform, primarily used by companies for their sales events. The result is that it has now raised a seed round of $5.5m, a large round

The pandemic has hammered the travel sector over the past 12 months so you’d be forgiven for feeling a bit of pre-COVID-19 déjà vu at this news: Business trip booking platform TravelPerk is announcing a $160M Series D. The round, which is a mix of equity and debt funding, is led by London-based growth equity

Venture Day Minsk (organised by tech startup hub Imaguru) is run annually, but because of the pandemic and the political situation in Belarus it has gone virtual. Even Imaguru itself has had to switch to online-only operations after Lukashenko’s thugs shut down its physical space. If you want to support them, check out their startups,

The European Commission has announced that it’s issued formal antitrust charges against Apple, saying today that its preliminary view is Apple’s app store rules distort competition in the market for music streaming services by raising the costs of competing music streaming app developers. The Commission begun investigating competition concerns related to iOS App Store (and also

Blade, the French startup behind cloud gaming service Shadow, has been acquired by Octave Klaba’s fund following a commercial court order. Klaba is better known as the founder of OVHcloud, a French cloud hosting company. He’s acquiring Blade (and Shadow) through his investment fund Jezby Ventures — not OVHcloud. Shadow is a cloud computing service for

A US/Israeli startup, Sorbet — which is tackling what companies do with the financial risks as employees accrue Paid Time Off (PTO) — has raised $6 million in a Seed funding round led by Viola Ventures, with participation by Global Founders Capital, Meron Capital. The economics of Paid Time Off is relatively hidden in the

Gr4vy, (pronounced ‘gravy’) is a cloud-native payments company with a “payment orchestration platform (POP)” that merges a Cloud platform with payments infrastructure. It’s also announcing a Series A funding round of $11.1M, led by Nyca Partners (a VC with a bench of partners who are ex-Visa ), with participation from Activant Capital (a fintech investor),

Gaming and streamed video have been two of the biggest pastime winners during the last year+ of pandemic living. Today a startup that has created an app that brings those two entertainment formats together is announcing a notable seed round of funding as it prepares to come out of closed beta. PortalOne, a hybrid gaming

Erase All Kittens (EAK) is an EdTech startup that created a ‘Mario-style’ web-based game designed for kids aged 8-12. However, the game has a twist: it places an emphasis on inspiring girls to code (since let’s face it, most coding tools are created by men). After reaching 160,000 players in over 100 countries, it’s now

Institutions need to keep their crypto assets somewhere. And they aren’t going to keep it on some random, or consumer-grade crypto operation. This requires more sophisticated technology. Furthermore, being in the EU is going to be a key barrier to entry for many US or Asia-based operations. Thus it is that Berlin-based digital asset custody