Europe

As much as 40% of all food produced each year goes nowhere near a human mouth, resulting in economic, environmental and social costs of an estimated $2.6 trillion. While there are a multitude of social, cultural and even technological reasons for these staggering statistics, we’ve seen a slew of startups emerge with propositions on how

Meet Renaissance Fusion, a Grenoble-based startup that has been working on nuclear fusion for the past couple of years. The company recently raised $16.4 million (€15 million) in funding in a seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital. Several European investors also participated in the round, such as HCVC, Positron Ventures and Norssken. “We are proud

In the wake of a seminal wave of new artificial intelligence startups such as OpenAI, a new U.K. company claims it can track and rank banks on their ability to develop and deploy AI platforms. Evident, a benchmarking and intelligence company, says its inaugural Index can rank the 23 largest banks in North America and

If you live in France and you want to add a security system to your home, you don’t have a ton of options. You can contact a home security company like Verisure and Homiris. But you’ll end up paying expensive subscription fees with long-term contracts. You can also buy your own security camera and connected

Twitter owner and self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist“, Elon Musk, is facing a legal challenge in Germany over how the platform handles antisemitic hate speech. The lawsuit, which was filed yesterday in the Berlin regional court by HateAid, a group that campaigns against hate speech, and the European Union of Jewish Students (EUJS), argues that Musk-owned

Madrid has renewed the operating licenses for scooter-sharing services in the city. The city council has chosen three operators for the next three years — Dott, Lime and Tier. This trio of companies will sound familiar as these companies also won tender processes in several European cities in recent years. Madrid even says that it

Meet Oneleaf, a new startup that wants to make hypnosis mainstream. The startup has designed an app that helps you get started with hypnosis and follow various programs to quit smoking, reduce anxiety or lose weight. Oneleaf raised $4.6 million (€4.2 million) from Frst, Kima Ventures, Raise Ventures and several business angels. Bpifrance also contributed

Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. In this week’s episode Darrell and Becca are joined by Sebastian Siemiatkowski, the co-founder and CEO of Klarna. Sebastian talks about what led him to found the startup and how it has navigated multiple market cycles since. He also dives into how Klarna

Another penalty for Spain’s homegrown on-demand delivery app and dark store operator, Glovo — which has been fined close to €57 million (~$62M) for breaching local labor laws by falsely classifying 7,800+ of its delivery couriers in Madrid as self-employed, per local newspaper El Diario. Citing sources familiar with the Labor department’s investigation of Glovo,

Pasqal, a Paris-based quantum computing startup, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round let by Singapore’s Temasek. In addition to Temasek, existing investors Quantonation, the Defense Innovation Fund, Daphni and Eni Next, as well as new investors European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, Wa’ed Ventures and Bpifrance (through its Large

Veteran tech giant PayPal is facing an antitrust investigation in Germany — where the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has announced it’s looking into its rules on surcharges. The regulator is concerned that restrictions PayPal imposes on merchants could be harming competitors and inflating costs for consumers by restricting price competition. Clauses in PayPal’s terms the

Shadow is making its first acquisition as it announced that it would snatch up Genymobile, the company behind Genymotion. Shadow is better known for its cloud computing service that works particularly well for cloud gaming. It also offers a cloud storage service based on Nextcloud. As for Genymobile, the French startup has been around for

European startups have always suffered from the perennial startup problem: how to exit? However, in Europe the problem has always been particularly acute. How many large European industrial or corporate giants acquire or acqu-hire? Not that many, and not nearly enough. It’s part of the reason so many European startups end up heading to the

Cookie consent banners that use blatant design tricks to try to manipulate web users into agreeing to hand over their data for behavioral advertising, instead of giving people a free and fair choice to refuse this kind of creepy tracking, are facing a coordinated pushback from the European Union’s data protection regulators. A taskforce of

A €390 million privacy fine for Meta announced earlier this month in the European Union — for running behavioral ads on Facebook and Instagram in the region without a valid legal basis — was several billion dollars smaller than it should have been, and orders of magnitude too tiny to be a deterrent for others

Another bill has come in for Meta for failing to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — but this one’s a tiddler! Meta-owned messaging platform, WhatsApp, has been fined €5.5 million (just under $6M) by the tech giant’s lead data protection regulator in the region for failing to have a lawful

The teenage market for apps is a tough nut to crack and stay relevant in. Just ask Snapchat. Equally, teens are going through a stage in life where almost every social interaction seems to carry portent of some kind of other. This would explain in part why apps like SendIt, NGL, and Nocapp (some are

Here’s a fashion rental startup with a twist: London, U.K.-based Curated Loop — which soft-launched a high-end fashion rental marketplace last week after bootstrapping to launch an MVP — is sourcing statement pieces from independent designers’ sample stock to style itself as an edgier alternative to more conventional rivals. Its approach means items available for

Meet Kate, a French company that wants to create a tiny car that you can use for your daily commute and various errands. In addition to CEO Matthias Goldenberg and CTO Pierre Escrieut, Kate is also co-founded by Thibaud Elzière, the serial entrepreneur behind Hexa, the startup studio formerly known as eFounders. While Kate is

The U.K. government has confirmed it will expand criminal liability powers contained in draft online safety legislation which is currently making its way through parliament with the aim of preventing platforms from intentionally flouting child-safety rules. The current version of the (already much amended) Online Safety Bill, which is set to return to parliament today for

Late last week it emerged Google intends to ignore a call by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) — the international body that works to guide the development of web standards — to rethink the Topics API: A key ad-targeting component of Google’s so-called “Privacy Sandbox” proposal to evolve the adtech stack Chrome supports for

Cumul.io, the company behind a low-code business intelligence (BI) analytics platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, has raised €10 million ($10.8 million) in a Series A round of funding. Founded out of Belgium in 2015, Cumul.io works in a similar space to well-established BI incumbents such as Tableau and Looker, but sets itself apart with a

This weekend, Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo told Le Parisien that Parisians will get to vote whether they want to ban free-floating electric scooters or not. As I explained last week, Dott, Lime and Tier, the three scooter companies currently operating in the city, have operating licenses that are set to expire on March 23rd,

A meeting between TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, and senior European Union lawmakers that took place today saw the video sharing platform’s chief executive quizzed on a range of topics — including its preparations to comply with incoming pan-EU rules focused on content governance and safety (aka the Digital Services Act; or DSA), and its

What is going to happen to the 15,000 colorful electric scooters that currently spill across the streets of Paris? On March 23rd, their fate could drastically change as the French capital weighs up whether or not to renew licenses for the three scooter companies currently operating in the city. And this isn’t just going to

With our mysterious, unsustainable and psychological attachment to pets, combined with a boom in pet ownership since those lonely pandemic times, veterinary practices have come under increasing pressure. Pet ownership has increased (56 to 70% U.S. household penetration in the last 35 years). But, there are not enough vets. To meet demand, a vet currently

TikTok is the latest tech giant to be schooled by France’s data protection watchdog for breaking rules on cookie consent. The €5 million penalty announced today by the CNIL relates to a cookie-consent flow TikTok had used on its website (tiktok.com) until early last year — in which the regulator found it was not as

Elon Musk should take note of a recent major privacy fine for Meta before forging ahead with any plan to force behavioral ads on Twitter users in the European Union. To wit: In remarks today, following the publication of two final decisions against Meta by EU privacy regulators applying the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

There’s long existed a divide in the world of computer hacking between those who are taking a malicious approach to crack a system, and those who are using the same techniques to understand the system’s vulnerabilities, help fix them and at the same time fight against the malicious actors. Today, Hack The Box, one of

Privacy watchers keen to dig into the regulatory reasoning underpinning two major decisions against Meta earlier this month — which struck down Facebook and Instagram’s claim of contractual necessity as a valid legal basis to run behavioral advertising on users in the European Union — can now sift through the detail after the complainant, privacy