Europe

On the heels of Deliveroo raising more than $2 billion ahead of its debut on the London Stock Exchange this week, another hopeful in the food delivery sector has closed a super-sized round. Glovo, a startup out of Spain with 10 million users that delivers restaurant take-out, groceries and other items in partnership with brick-and-mortar

Zapp, one of a number of startups currently battling it out in London and beyond by promising to let you order everyday items on-demand from its own delivery-only stores, has quietly raised a new round of funding from leading VCs, TechCrunch has learned. According to multiple sources, Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed and Europe’s Atomico (the VC

Meet Leeway, a French startup that is building an end-to-end software-as-a-service solution for your contracts. Leeway lets you centralize all your contracts in a single repository, go through multiple negotiation steps and trigger a DocuSign event for the signature. The company raised a $4.2 million seed round from HenQ, Kima Ventures as well as several

By now you’ve probably heard of ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) ratings for companies, or ratings for their carbon footprint. Well, now a UK company has come up with a way of rating the ‘ethics’ social media companies.   EthicsGrade is an ESG ratings agency, focusing on AI governance. Headed up Charles Radclyffe, the former head of AI

MessageBird, the omnichannel cloud communications platform recently valued at $3 billion, is continuing to ramp up its M&A activity. Following last year’s acquisition of Pusher, a company that provides real-time web technologies, it is announcing that it has acquired “video-first” customer engagement platform 24sessions, and customer data platform Hull. Terms of the two new deals

Meet Stockly, a French startup that keeps the inventory of various e-commerce websites in sync. When you see an out-of-stock item on an e-commerce website, chances are you leave that website and try to find the same item on another site. If you operate an e-commerce website, Stockly lets you sell items even when they’re

Vienna-based GoStudent, which connects students to tutors on a virtual learning platform, has raised a €70M Series B funding round led by new US investor Coatue. Coatue has been making ‘raids’ into the European startup scene for the past year or so. It was joined by existing investors Left Lane Capital and DN Capital. This

Cazoo, the UK used-car sales portal that has been on a major fundraising tear in the last year, will be next company to pursue more growth by way of a SPAC: the company today announced that it will list on the NYSE by way of a business combination with AJAX I, a special purpose acquisition

Cazoo is picking up significant capital today by teaming up with a SPAC in the U.S. at a $7 billion valuation, but it’s the end of the line for another big European name in used-car sales. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Berlin-based Frontier Car Group, which builds used-car marketplaces with a focus on emerging

Meet Singular, a new VC firm based in Paris that just finished raising its initial fund. The firm was founded by two former Alven partners — Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan. They have some ambitious goals and an interesting investment model that could help them remain involved even during late-stage rounds. Overall, the firm raised

Denmark-based Motosumo has scored a $6M Series A raise led by London’s Magenta Partners, alongside existing investors. The new funding will go on doubling its network of spin class instructors across Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, expanding its tech team and upping its marketing. The 2015-founded fit-tech startup has developed a system for measuring

Early this month Google quietly began trials of ‘Privacy Sandbox’: Its planned replacement adtech for tracking cookies, as it works toward phasing out support for third party cookies in the Chrome browser — testing a system to reconfigure the dominant web architecture by replacing individual ad targeting with ads that target groups of users (aka

Breega, a VC firm based in Paris, has announced the final closing of its third fund. The firm has managed to raise $130 million (€110 million). This is Breega’s third fund and is officially called Breega Capital Venture 3. The firm’s previous fund launched in 2015 with €45 million ($53 million at today’s exchange rate).

In January, localized payments provider PPRO became the latest fintech-as-a-service startup to hit a billion-dollar valuation when it closed $180 million in funding. As a mark of how payments and e-commerce continue to be major areas of focus in the global economy, today PPRO is extending that round by another $90 million and adding in

Gorillas, the Berlin-HQ’d startup that promises to let you order groceries and other “every day” items for delivery in as little as ten minutes, has raised $290 million in Series B funding, at a valuation that surpasses $1 billion. The round is led by Coatue Management, DST Global, and Tencent, with participation from Green Oaks,

Online branded payments now run the gamut of anything from Spotify vouchers, Netflix vouchers, Neosurf, PaySafe cards, and everything in between. Consumers use them to pay for a variety of things. In Europe, they are an increasingly big business. Now, European branded payments company Recharge.com has raised €10m ($11.8m) in a debt funding round led

Everybody says they want to build user-centric companies and products, but how exactly is that achieved? Talking and listening to users, of course — a task that is both unnecessarily time-consuming and cumbersome to organise, according to Axel Thomson, a former product manager at U.K. recipe-box subscription unicorn Gousto. His burgeoning startup, dubbed Ribbon, wants

Leveraging networks of “experts” online started out as a very manual online business. But it’s rapidly becoming more efficient as machine learning is applied to the whole business model. Indeed, in the UK alone $60bn is spent a year on using outside expertise. Large players in this space include GLG, Third Bridge, Guidepoint, and AlphaSights.

A German court that’s considering Facebook’s appeal against a pioneering pro-privacy order by the country’s competition authority to stop combining user data without consent has said it will refer questions to Europe’s top court. In a press release today the Düsseldorf court writes [translated by Google]: “…the Senate has come to the conclusion that a

Augmented Reality pioneer Blippar – which has had a tortuous history after early investors pulled out and the company had to scramble for new backers – has now closed a $5 million funding round, after 18 months of re-positioning as a B2B company in the AR space. The pre-Series A round was co-led by Chroma

U.K. challenger stockbroker Freetrade has raised a $69 million Series B round led by Left Lane Capital. The growth fund of L Catterton and existing investor Draper Esprit also participated. Freetrade operates a stock trading app and has managed to attract 600,000 users in the U.K. — they generated £1 billion in quarterly trade volume.

Polish startup Tylko, a modular furniture company that employs Augmented Reality as part of its sales cycle, has closed a €22 million ($26m) investment Series C funding round, led by Israel-based Pitango Growth and Finnish Evli Growth Partners, following previous investors TDJ Pitango and Experior Venture Fund. Additionally, Brian Walker, former CEO of Hermann Miller,

London-based fintech startup Revolut has announced that it is applying for a bank charter in the U.S. The company has submitted a draft application with the FDIC and the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation. If the company manages to get a charter in California, it would let the company operate throughout the U.S.

The historical trajectory of venture capital has been to move to earlier and earlier finding rounds in order to capture the greatest potential multiple on exit. In the US, we’ve seen an explosion of Pre-series A funds, and similarly in Europe. But there’s been an opportunity to tie a lot of that activity together and

Digitail, a cloud service for veterinary surgeries and customers, has raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by byFounders and Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), joined by Partech and a series of angels including Dr. Ivan Zakharenkov (SmartFlow). The startup was already backed (pre-seed round in 2019) by Fast Track Malmo. Digitail is currently

Clubhouse, the buzzy but still invite-only social audio app that’s popular with the Silicon Valley technorati, is being investigated by France’s privacy watchdog. The CNIL announced today it’s opened an investigation into Clubhouse following a complaint and after it got some initial responses back from Alpha Exploration Co., the U.S.-based company behind the app. It

Diem, a London, U.K.-based fintech startup, has raised a seed round of $5.5 million led by Fasanara Capital, and angel investor Chris Adelsbach, founder of Outrun Ventures. Additional investors include Andrea Molteni (early investor in Farfetch), Ben Demiri (co-chairman at fashion tech PlatformE) and Nicholas Kirkwood (founder of the eponymous brand). Diem is a debit

“Snap, Inc. is a camera company,” Snap notes on its homepage, and while a lot of its effort up to now have been about using that camera ethos to help people share images of their lives with their social circles on its flagship app Snapchat, today the company made an acquisition to further that camera

More details have emerged today about the European Commission’s legislative proposal for a pan-EU ‘digital green pass’ to show verified COVID-19 status. The plan is controversial from a human rights and civil liberties perspective, given the clear risk of discrimination. But privacy and security experts are also raising concerns about the technology architecture that will

Seon, which lets online businesses fight online fraud like fake accounts has raised a $12 million Series A round led by Creandum, with participation from PortfoLion, part of OTP Bank. The funding appears to be one of Hungary’s larger series A rounds to date. Seon is a fraud-detection startup that establishes a customers’ ‘digital footprint’ in