Europe

SunRoof is a European startup that has come up with a clever idea. It has its own roof-tile technology which generates solar power. It then links up those houses, creating a sort of virtual power plant, allowing homeowners to sell surplus energy back to the grid. It’s now closed a €4.5 million round (Seed extension)

French startup OpenClassrooms has raised an $80 million Series C funding round led by Lumos Capital Group. The company operates an online education platform in French and English. Users can choose among 54 training programs and get a diploma at the end of the program — some of those program lead to French-state-recognized bachelor and

The director of a new unit set up this month inside the UK’s competition watchdog — with a dedicated focus on tech giants’ impacts on digital markets — has been giving a hint of how it could operate, once it’s on a statutory footing and imbued with powers to sanction problem platforms and potentially even

Interactive voice advertising startup Instreamatic, which can insert interactive voice ads into an audio stream, has raised $6.1 million in a Series A funding led by Progress Ventures led the round, joined by Accomplice, and Google Assistant Investments. SF-HQ’d Instreamatic lets brands that advertise through streaming music apps and podcasts (for instance) have interactive voice-based

TikTok will open a center in Europe where outside experts will be shown information on how it approaches content moderation and recommendation, as well as platform security and user privacy, it announced today. The European Transparency and Accountability Centre (TAC) follows the opening of a U.S. center last year — and is similarly being billed

Faculty, a VC-backed artificial intelligence start-up, has won a tender to work with the NHS to make better predictions about its future requirements for patients, based on data drawn from how it handled the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2019, Faculty raised a $10.5M Series A funding round from UK-based VCs Local Globe, GMG Ventures, and,

As businesses continue to look for better ways to work more efficiently, a pioneer in the space of low-code tools to help automate how apps work together is announcing a round of funding on the back of impressive early traction. Berlin-based n8n — which provides a framework for both technical and non-technical people to synchronize

Cuckoo Internet, which is aiming to be an insurgent startup in the broadband provider space in the UK, has closed a $6 million investment round led by RTP Global, along with participation from JamJar Investments. It will also launch on price-comparison site uSwitch. RTP Global was an early backer of Yandex, Delivery Hero, and Datadog.

Alphawave IP is a global semiconductor IP company that focuses on the way semiconductors communicate — something which is going to be crucial as 5G data networks roll out and start to power everything from homes, industry and autonomous vehicles, for instance. It’s therefore interesting to note that the Toronto-born company is planning a London

Things have been looking up for Belfast since the end of the Troubles. The city has undergone infrastructure improvements over the past two decades, tourism has boomed thanks to attractions such as the shipyard where the RMS Titanic was built and Game of Thrones shooting locations, and employment has risen steadily in the city since

A biotech company that has spent 11 years researching supplements to increase human longevity plans to launch its supplements later this year. Longevica says it has attracted a total of $13 million from investors including, Alexander Chikunov, a longevity investor, who is also president of the company. Longevica says it created a biotechnology platform for

The European Union’s lead data protection supervisor has called for remote biometric surveillance in public places to be banned outright under incoming AI legislation. The European Data Protection Supervisor’s (EDPS) intervention follows a proposal, put out by EU lawmakers on Wednesday, for a risk-based approach to regulating applications of artificial intelligence. The Commission’s legislative proposal

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 Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Bielefeld, Frankfurt on the

A French startup that set out to bring a new approach to driver education and road safety, and then used that foothold to expand into the related area of car insurance, is today announcing a big round of funding to continue building its service across Europe. Ornikar, which prepares people for driving tests by providing

A new wave of apps have democratized the concept of investing, bringing the concept of trading stocks and currencies to a wider pool of users who can use these platforms to make incremental, or much larger, bets in the hopes of growing their money at a time when interest rates are low. In the latest

On-demand access to electric mopeds — the small, motorised scooters that you sit on, not kick — has been a small but persistent part of the multi-modal transportation mix on offer to people in cities these days. Today, a startup out of The Netherlands is announcing some funding with ambitions to make e-mopeds more mainstream,

Late-stage Fintech startup Pleo, which offers expense management tools and ‘smart’ company Mastercards, says it plans to raise a Series C round of funding this summer. It’s also launching a B2B bill payments service this week. Co-founder and CEO Jeppe Rindom told me via a call: “We have money until 2022, but we’ve seen incredible

European Union lawmakers have presented their risk-based proposal for regulating high risk applications of artificial intelligence within the bloc’s single market. The plan includes prohibitions on a small number of use-cases that are considered too dangerous to people’s safety or EU citizens’ fundamental rights, such as a China-style social credit scoring system or certain types

Restaurants rode a wave of usage of food delivery services like Deliveroo, Uber Eats and DoorDash in the last year, discovering new revenues and ways to connect with diners to offset the fact that in-person trade for many of them had disappeared overnight. But they also discovered something less appetizing: dealing with the mess of

French startup BlaBlaCar has raised a new $115 million funding round (€97 million). While the company is better known for its long distance carpooling marketplace, BlaBlaCar has also added a bus marketplace with the acquisition of Ouibus and an online bus ticketing platform with the acquisition of Busfor. Existing investor VNV Global is leading the

The FoodTech industry is effectively now going into fast food. Sweetgreen in the US is a ‘fast-casual’ restaurant chain that serves healthy “bowl food”. It’s raised $478.6M. A similar firm is Sweetfin. Both employ a lot of tech in their back-end to improve efficiencies. Into this area has come European startup Poke House, which is

Dott has raised a new $85 million Series B funding round — this round is a mix of equity and asset-backed debt financing. Belgium-based investment company Sofina is leading the investment. Dott is a micromobility startup that is better known for its colorful electric scooters that you can find across several European cities. The company

A stunning first quarter in venture capital funding was not restricted to the United States; Europe also had one hell of a start to the year. According to data from Dealroom and Crunchbase News, an investor, and an analyst from PitchBook, European startups put together an impressive fundraising haul. The venture capital world kicked off

The buy now, pay later model, popularized by companies like Klarn and Affirm has been one of the big e-commerce winners in the last year, giving consumers who might be stretched financially another option to pay for things when they buy them online. While that has prompted the UK financial authority to re-examine how it

Fintech startup N26 is launching N26 Insurance as it plans to offer insurance products that you can access from the company’s mobile app and website. The first insurance product is a smartphone insurance plan for German customers. But the startup doesn’t plan to stop there. N26 says it is also working on private liability insurance,

A startup out of Berlin that’s built and grown a successful online language learning platform based around live teachers and virtual classrooms is announcing some funding today to continue expanding its business. Lingoda, which connects students who want to learn a language — currently English, Spanish, French or German — with native-speaking teachers who run

Automation has become a big theme in enterprise IT, with organizations using RPA, no-code and low-code tools, and other  technology to speed up work and bring more insights and analytics into how they do things every day, and today IBM is announcing an acquisition as it hopes to take on a bigger role in providing

Graphic designer Paul Rand once famously said that the public was more familiar with bad design than good design. While he was referring to most of the design in the world being “bad”, these days that phrase might take on a second meaning: people typically only notice and talk about (and usually complain about) design

Ocado, the UK online grocer that has been making strides reselling its technology to other grocery companies to help them build and run their own online ordering-and-delivery operations, is making an investment today into what it believes will be the next chapter of how that business will grow: it is taking a £10 million ($13.8

Facebook is to be sued in Europe over the major leak of user data that dates back to 2019 but which only came to light recently after information on 533M+ accounts was found posted for free download on a hacker forum. Today Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) announced it’s commencing a “mass action” to sue Facebook, citing