Europe

European lawmakers are eyeing binding transparency requirements for Internet platforms in a Digital Services Act (DSA) due to be drafted by the end of the year. But the question of how to create governance structures that provide regulators and researchers with meaningful access to data so platforms can be held accountable for the content they’re

Connect Ventures, the London-based seed-stage VC that was an early investor in Citymapper and Typeform — and more recently backed scaling startups such as Curve and TrueLayer — is announcing a new $80 million fund to continue investing in “product-led” founders. Backing the new fund is a combination of existing and new LPs including Top

Hoxton Ventures, a London-based early-stage VC firm best known for backing British unicorns Babylon Health, Darktrace and Deliveroo, announced its second fund last week, coming in at just under $100 million. The firm’s self-proclaimed strategy is to seek out startups that can scale globally into “large, category-defining leaders” in nascent industries — A strategy that

More than a year after Amazon announced that it would be lead a $575 million investment into UK food delivery startup Deliveroo, the country’s competition regulator, the CMA, has finally announced that it has provisionally cleared the deal, without any additional remedies (that is, requests to alter the terms), saying that it does not pose

Curve, the London fintech that is re-bundling various financial products by letting you consolidate all your bank cards into a single card and app, is partnering with Samsung in the U.K. to power its forthcoming debit card, which is scheduled to launch later this year. Dubbed “Samsung Pay Card” — and obviously a bid by

Zopa, the 15-year-old peer-to-peer lending company, is announcing that it has been awarded its full U.K. bank licence, as it gears up to launch a fixed-term savings account, followed by a credit card. Dubbed “Zopa Bank,” the new challenger bank will sit alongside its existing peer-to-peer lending business, under Zopa Group, creating what the veteran fintech

The future of Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV), the U.K. early-stage investment firm now majority owned by Legal & General, is in flux after three of its founders have lost their seat on the board, TechCrunch has learned. ADV’s investments include Push Doctor, WeFarm and Perlego, amongst many others. Rumours began circulating earlier this month within the

France released StopCovid three weeks ago. The government is holding a press conference today to give an update on the app. In particular, this conference is a good opportunity to share some numbers. Over the past three weeks, 1.9 million people downloaded the app on the App Store or Play Store. Out of those 1.9

TikTok is the latest platform to sign up the European Union’s Code of Practice on disinformation, agreeing to a set of voluntary steps aimed at combating the spread of damaging fakes and falsehoods online. The short video sharing platform, which is developed by Beijing based ByteDance and topped 2BN downloads earlier this year, is hugely

Fly Ventures, the Berlin-based VC that invests in seed-stage European startups within enterprise and deep tech, has raised a new €53 million fund. The firm writes initial cheques of between €500,000 and €1.3 million, and says it is on the hunt for startups developing “novel, advanced technology at the cutting edge of their respective sectors.”

French regulation on hate speech on online platforms has been widely deemed as unconstitutional by France’s Constitutional Council, the top authority in charge of ruling whether a new law complies with the constitution. It won’t come into effect as expected in the coming weeks. As a reminder, the original law said that online platforms should

France’s top court for administrative law has dismissed Google’s appeal against a $57M fine issued by the data watchdog last year for not making it clear enough to Android users how it processes their personal information. The State Council issued the decision today, affirming the data watchdog CNIL’s earlier finding that Google did not provide

The European Commission has reiterated its commitment to pushing ahead with a regional plan for taxing digital services after the US quit talks aimed at finding agreement on reforming tax rules — ramping up the prospects of a trade war. Yesterday talks between the EU and the US on a digital services tax broke down

Mapillary, the Swedish startup that wants to take on Google and others in mapping the world via a crowdsourced database of street-level imagery, has been acquired by Facebook, according to the company’s blog. Terms of deal aren’t being disclosed. The Mapillary team and project will become part of Facebook’s broader open mapping efforts. Mapillary also

Meet Vivid, a new challenger bank launching in Germany that promises low fees and an integrated cashback program. The two co-founders Alexander Emeshev and Artem Yamanov previously worked as executives for Russian bank Tinkoff Bank. Vivid doesn’t try to reinvent the wheels and is building its product on top of well-established players. It relies on

Hoxton Ventures, the London-based early-stage VC firm best known for backing British unicorns Babylon Health, Darktrace and Deliveroo, is announcing its second fund, which has closed at a little less than $100 million. That’s more than twice the size of the firm’s $40 million debut fund back in 2013, when new VCs setting up shop

Spain-based CounterCraft, which builds b2b tools for gathering counterintelligence on evolving security threats, has closed a $5M Series A. The all cash round is led by Adara Ventures, with eCAPITAL and Red Eléctrica Group joining as new investors, and with participation from existing backers including Evolution Equity, ORZA, and Wayra. CounterCraft was founded back in

Onna, the “knowledge integration platform” (KIP) that counts Dropbox and Slack as backers, has raised $27 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Atomico, with participation from Glynn Capital. Previous investors Dawn Capital, Nauta Capital and Slack Fund also followed on. Founded in 2015, Barcelona and New York-based Onna integrates with a plethora

European Union countries and the Commission have agreed on a technical framework to enable regional coronavirus contacts tracing apps to work across national borders. A number of European countries have launched contacts tracing apps at this point, with the aim of leveraging smartphone technologies in the fight against COVID-19, but none of these apps can

If you’ve tried to rent a Jump bike or scooter in London, Paris, Brussels or Rome over the past few days, you may have noticed that they’ve suddenly vanished, as Fluctuo reported on its Twitter account. The reason is that Lime has closed the acquisition of Uber’s micromobility subsidiary Jump in Europe today, a few

Pale Blue Dot, a newly outed European venture capital firm focused on climate tech, announced this week the first closing of its debut fund at €53 million. Targeting pre-seed and seed stage startups, the firm says it will consider software and technology investments with a strong positive climate impact. Current areas of focus include food/agriculture,

TransferGo, the London-based international money transfer service, has raised another $10 million in funding, as it discloses that its customers numbers has surpassed two million. The round was co-led by Seventure, and Vostok Emerging finance, with follow-on funding from Hard Yaka, Revo Capital, and Bootstrap Europe. The startup is also announcing it has launched in

‘Europe’s most wired’ politician outlines her top cyber issues Scott Bade 7 hours Scott Bade Contributor Scott Bade is a former speechwriter for Mike Bloomberg and co-author of “More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First.” More posts by this contributor Huawei’s terrible week Startups are transforming global trade in the COVID-19 era In

One of the first national coronavirus contacts tracing apps to be launched in Europe is being suspended in Norway after the country’s data protection authority raised concerns that the software, called ‘Smittestopp’, poses a disproportionate threat to user privacy — including by continuously uploading people’s location. Following a warning from the watchdog Friday, the Norwegian

APX is an early-stage accelerator in Berlin, but it’s not quite your average accelerator — it’s essentially a joint venture between giant European publishing house Axel Springer and Porsche, the German automaker. Earlier this month, we sat down with APX managing director Jörg Rheinboldt to discuss what makes APX different and how it’s weathering the

Facebook wants to be the go-to platform for all of your social needs, but a big move it made last month to take ownership in the world of GIFs — the short, looping videos that people use to convey sentiments in online conversations — may not go as it hopes. The UK Competition and Markets

Byta, the music sharing service for pre-releases and other use cases where there is a need to share sound files privately, has picked up around $1.4 million in seed funding. The round was led by the Canada Media Fund, with participation from of private investors. They include musician Scott Kannberg, one of the original members

As schools stay closed and summer camp seems more like a germscape than an escape, students are staying at home for the foreseeable future and have shifted learning to their living rooms. Now, Norwegian educational gaming company Kahoot — the popular platform with 1.3 billion active users and over 100 million games (most created by

IQM Finland Oy (IQM), a European startup which makes hardware for quantum computers, has raised a €15M equity investment round from the EIC Accelerator program for the development of quantum computers. This is in addition to a raise of €3.3M from the Business Finland government agency. This takes the company’s funding to over €32M. The

French startup iBanFirst has raised a $23.8 million (€21 million) Series C round from Elaia and Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund. Previous investors include Serena, Breega and Xavier Niel. iBanFirst lets you pay suppliers and get paid by clients all around the world in dozens of currencies. iBanFirst was in the process of raising its funding