Europe

By now we’re all familiar with text messaging groups for multi-person co-ordination. I’ve lost count of how many WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook messenger groups I’m on! Other apps like Threema have started to be used in a business context and startups like Staffbase have decided to become full-blown ‘workforce messaging’ platforms. The thinking now amongst

Facebook has been left red-faced after being forced to call off the launch date of its dating service in Europe because it failed to give its lead EU data regulator enough advanced warning — including failing to demonstrate it had performed a legally required assessment of privacy risks. Late yesterday Ireland’s Independent.ie newspaper reported that

To get a better sense of what lies ahead for the European startup ecosystem, we spoke to several investors and entrepreneurs in the region about their impressions and lessons learned from 2019, along with their predictions for 2020. We asked for blunt responses — and we weren’t disappointed. These responses have been edited for clarity

The GSMA, the organization behind MWC, the world’s largest mobile trade show, has announced that it is officially canceling the show. MWC usually attracts over 100,000 attendees from 200 countries to Barcelona. This year’s show was supposed to take place on February 24-27. Several publications received a statement about the cancellation. “The GSMA has cancelled

The UK government has taken the next step in its grand policymaking challenge to tame the worst excesses of social media by regulating a broad range of online harms — naming the existing communications watchdog, Ofcom, as its preferred pick for enforcing rules around ‘harmful speech’ on platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok in

Vezeeta, a healthcare platform operating in the Middle East and Africa, has raised a $40 Million Series D funding round led by UAE-based Gulf Capital, alongside further investment from existing Riyadh-based investor Saudi Technology Ventures (STV), which previously led Vezeeta’s Series C round in September 2018. Vezeeta’s other investors include BECO Capital, Silicon Badia, Vostok

German fintech startup N26 is shutting down its operations in the U.K. Customers who have opened a bank account in the U.K. will have to transfer their deposits, spend everything with their card or withdraw money at an ATM as all accounts will be automatically closed on April 15, 2020. Many European fintech companies take

London’s tech scene is playing musical chairs. In people news from the investors scene, the UK’s Angel CoFund (ACF) has now made two key appointments to the team and board. Former ACF Chairman George Whitehead moves to the position of Partner. Alliott Cole, the current CEO of Octopus Ventures, joins the fund as non-exec Director.

Impala has raised another round of funding just a few months after raising an $11 million Series A round. This time, the startup is raising a $20 million Series B round led by Lakestar. Latitude Ventures is also participating in the round. The company is building a service that works pretty much like Plaid, but

Over the last few years, Facebook has been busy building out AI capabilities in areas like computer vision, natural language processing (NLP) and ‘deep learning,’ in part by acquiring promising startups in the space. Understandably, this has seen the U.S. social networking giant look to the U.K. for AI talent, including an acqui-hire of NLP

‘It’s a category that’s been underserved for a long time,’ says principal Hannah Seal Natasha Lomas @riptari / 10 hours U.K. startup Daye is rethinking female intimate care from a woman’s perspective, starting with a tampon infused with cannabidiol that tackles period pain. It’s also quietly demolishing the retrograde approach to product design that women

An algorithmic risk scoring system deployed by the Dutch state to try to predict the likelihood that social security claimants will commit benefits or tax fraud breaches human rights law, a court in the Netherlands has ruled. The Dutch government’s System Risk Indication (SyRI) legislation uses a non-disclosed algorithmic risk model to profile citizens and

Scape Technologies, the London-based computer vision startup working on location accuracy beyond the capabilities of GPS, has been acquired by Facebook, according to a regulatory filing. Full terms of the deal remain as yet unknown, although a Companies House update reveals that Facebook Inc. now has majority control of the company (more than 75%). However

Russ Heddleston Contributor Russ is the cofounder and CEO of DocSend. He was previously a product manager at Facebook, where he arrived via the acquisition of his startup Pursuit.com, and has held roles at Dropbox, Greystripe, and Trulia. Follow him here: @rheddleston and @docsend More posts by this contributor First mover advantage: Does it matter

Meet AssoConnect, a French startup that is building a software-as-a-service application to give you all the tools you need to manage your nonprofit organization (association in French). The company just raised a $7.7 million (€7 million) funding round with XAnge and ISAI leading the round. Various business angels, such as Nicolas Macquin, Rodolphe Carle, Michaël

A/O PropTech is a new European VC officially launching today, after raising €250 million of so-called “permanent capital” to invest in technology companies disrupting real estate. It’s this “permanent” approach — seeing the firm structured more like a corporate with various shareholders, rather than a traditional venture capital fund that typically has a life cycle

Launched at CES 2020, NURVV, a biomechanics startup, has closed a $9m Series A round, led by Hiro Capital, the sports/Esports VC fund, along with co-investment from Ian Livingstone CBE (Games Workshop co-founder) and Cherry Freeman (co-founder of LoveCrafts). It turns out that if you can figure out how to protect a smartphone from smashing,

Facebook’s use of the Onavo spyware VPN app it acquired in 2013 — and used to inform its 2014 purchase of the then rival WhatsApp messaging platform — is on the radar of Europe’s antitrust regulator, per a report in the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper reports that the Commission has requested a large volume

Moteefe, the e-commerce platform for on-demand production of merchandise has raised $5 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Gresham House, and Force Over Mass Capital. It brings total funding to date to $12.5 million, and will be used to expand into new geographies including Australia and LATAM. The U.K. company also plans

Antler is a ‘company builder’ which emerged a couple of years ago, running startup generator programs and investing from an early-stage, bringing together a heady mix of technologists, product builders, and operators together with its own technology stack. Now, plenty of ‘company builders’ have come and gone. It’s a bit like Apocalypse Now: everyone goes

The growing ubiquity of open source software has been a big theme in the evolution of enterprise IT. But behind that facade of popularity lies another kind of truth: companies may be interested in using more open-source technology, but since there is a learning curve with taking on an source project, not all of them

Early stage European VC firm, Blossom Capital, is fresh from closing a $185M fund— a big jump up on its prior close. The firm makes just a handful of investments per year, mostly at the Series A stage, working very closely with founders in its portfolio — a strategy it refers to as “high conviction”

Dan Jones, the former General Partner at Global Founders Capital (the venture arm of Rocket Internet) and previously an investor with Fidelity, is thought to be nearing the first close of a new early-stage venture capital fund. Dubbed “Jigsaw,” the VC firm appears to be co-founded with Dan Smith, who previously ran Anthemis Exponential and

Fintech startup N26 recently reached a new milestone as it now has five million customers. The company launched onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt five years ago. The premise was simple. A young startup wanted to build a bank that didn’t suck. Given the company’s impressive growth rate and its 4.8-star rating in the App Store, it’s

Azimo, the money transfer service that is HQ’d in London but has the majority of its staff based in based in Poland, has secured €20 million in debt from the European Investment Bank (EIB), the lending arm of the European Union. The financing is supported by the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), the financial

Miles Kirby Contributor Miles is the managing director of AV8 Ventures and is based in London. He is focused on investments at Seed and Series A. It’s a somewhat crude yardstick by which to measure innovation in deep tech, and the result perhaps reflects historic bias as much as it does actual leadership in innovation

When siblings Labinot and Mimoza Bytyqi fled the war in Kosovo in 1999, arriving as refugees on the West Coast of the US, they would have had no idea they’d go on to launch a technology company together. But as adults, the pair set up attacking the $6.7 billion telepresence and video communication category which

Skymind Global Ventures (SGV) appeared last year in Asia/US as a vehicle for the previous founders of a YC-backed open-source AI platform to invest in companies that used the platform. Today it announces the launch of an $800 million fund to back promising new AI companies and academic research. It will consequently be opening a

After opening an office in the city last year, Indian ride-hailing firm Ola said it would officially begin operations in London on February 10. London is one of the world’s biggest markets for ride-hailing services, and the expansion is a key development in Ola’s international strategy as the company widens its competition with Uber, another

Maze wants to reinvent usability tests by letting you turn design prototypes into tests in just a few clicks. It could become the equivalent of a developing test suite for developers, but this time for designers — it could be something that you run before shipping an update to make sure everything works fine. The