Europe

Bad news for Google in Germany — where the antitrust watchdog has issued a preliminary statement of objections over its data processing terms and said it’s currently planning to require the tech giant to provide users with more choice over what it does with their information. The Bundeskartellamt, or Federal Cartel Office (FCO), has been investigating

There are some mega-trends playing out across developed-world workforces that startups are picking up on. There’s the digitisation of healthcare, the ‘platforming’ of employee services, and the macro effects of older employees, combined with the cost of living crisis for new parents. Founded in London in 2018, Peppy offer services around menopause, fertility, pregnancy and

Activity in the self-driving car industry, frenetic for years, has somewhat stalled in more recent times, but a handful of the most promising companies are continuing to see their businesses grow and attract investment in the process. In one of the more recent developments, Oxbotica, a startup out of England that develops software to power

Facebook-owner Meta and its lead data protection regulator in the European Union, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), are facing an interesting legal challenge over a major data-scraping breach that led to a €265 million penalty for Facebook last year under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The legal action, reported earlier by the Irish

Running a data center means that you have to find innovative ways to manage heat from the servers. And French startup Qarnot is standardizing its process to reuse fatal heat and turn it into an asset. While the startup has been around for a while, Qarnot now wants to reach the next level. It has

European telcos are moving ahead with a plan to create a joint venture to offer opt-in “personalized” ad targeting of regional mobile network users following trials last year in Germany. Although it remains to be seen whether European Union regulators will sign off on their plan. In a filing submitted to the European Commission’s competition

Superscript, an insurance broker and tech platform targeting SMEs and “high-growth” tech firms, has raised £45 million ($54 million) in a Series B round of funding Founded out of London in 2015, Superscript constitutes two core insurance businesses: an online-only “self-serve” platform that’s available to U.K. customers including SMEs, sole traders, and landlords, and an

We’ve seen a lot of companies trying to turn the humble pen into something a little more digital, but few have been as elegantly successful as Nuwa. The company showed off its smart pen at CES in Las Vegas this week. The smart pen uses three integrated cameras, along with motion and pressure-sensing electronics to take

If you have a particular hatred for the microwave or prefer your food to be heated gently when you’re ready for lunch, Steambox is ready for your steamy lunch encounters. The company sold more than 500 of its device via Kickstarter at the end of 2019, and is finally ready to start shipping its device.

A rare privacy penalty for Apple: France’s data protection watchdog, the CNIL, has announced it imposed a sanction of €8 million (~$8.5M) on the iPhone maker for not obtaining local mobile users’ consent prior to placing (and/or reading) ad identifiers on their devices in breach of local data protection law. The sanction decision was issued on

Meta is kicking off the New Year with more privacy fines and corrective orders hitting its business in Europe. The latest swathe of enforcement relates to a number of EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) complaints over the legal basis it claims to run behavioral ads. The Facebook owner’s lead data protection watchdog in the

This past year was tumultuous for venture investors, to say the least. The ecosystem watched as startup funding dried up, held its breath as a $32 billion venture-backed company evaporated almost overnight and witnessed one of the largest startup acquisitions of all time. Did you hear anyone yell “bingo?” Probably not. It’s unlikely that many

While German startup Trade Republic is better known as a mobile app that helps you buy and sell stock, the company is adding interest on uninvested cash. Users who hold cash in their Trade Republic account will receive 2% in annual interest. This feature reminds me of Robinhood’s brokerage cash sweep program. In the U.S.,

Meet Vianova, a French startup that is building a data platform for shared mobility companies as well as local governments. The company acts as both a data repository and a data visualization dashboard. It has raised a $6.4 million (€6 million) Series A funding round led by Baloise VC with XAnge as well as existing

The European Commission (EC) has announced that it has reached an agreement with Amazon over a duo of antitrust probes, one that will enshrine commitments made by Amazon in European Union (EU) antitrust legislation. The initial probe kicked off back in 2018, when regulators launched enquiries into how Amazon was leveraging non-public data from third-party

The European Commission (EC) has confirmed that it’s proceeding with an antitrust investigation into Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc. (Meta), over the way it ties together its core social network and Marketplace classified ads service. The Commission’s Statement of Objections also points to “unfair trading conditions” related to how it uses data gleaned from rival

European Union lawmakers have wasted no time warning Twitter-owner Elon Musk over “arbitrary suspension of journalists” following reports late yesterday that a number of reporters who had recently written about Musk had had their Twitter accounts suspended without warning. Věra Jourová, an EU vice-president for values and transparency, took to Twitter this morning to tweet the

Today, banks and fintech startups tend not to provide products dedicated to families, specifically, and this has appeared as something of a gap in the market. Meanwhile the general lack of financial education and financial literacy means families are missing out on securing financial prosperity for their families. GoHenry (which raised $121.2M), which bills itself as “smart banking

The trillion-dollar construction industry is often tarred with the inefficiency brush, accused of failing to move with the times and ignoring digitization in favor of legacy tools. But there is plenty of evidence that things are changing, with countless startups raising large sums of cash to help the construction industry modernize. Venture capital (VC) funding in

Microsoft will begin a phased rollout of an expanded data localization offering in the European Union on January 1, it said today. The EU Data Boundary for the Microsoft Cloud, as it’s branding the provision for local storage and processing of cloud services’ customer data, is intended to respond to a regional rise in demand

Fintech startup Checkout.com was in the news this morning because the Financial Times reported that the payment company had slashed its internal valuation to $11 billion. And it’s a huge drop compared to the $40 billion valuation that the company reached a little less than a year ago. But that doesn’t necessarily mean what you

Uber’s delivery business in Spain has settled with local labor unions which were challenging its dismissal of more than 4,000 riders in August last year ahead of a labor law reform coming into force. The company acknowledged that the couriers were collectively dismissed in violation of local labor laws — agreeing to pay severance equivalent

Twitter’s lead privacy regulator in the European Union is being kept very busy indeed by Elon Musk’s erratic piloting of the bird site. Following a report by Platformer, which suggests Musk is planning to force users to accept personalized advertising unless they pay for a subscription service that will include an opt-out for ads, the

Bondaval, the London-based B2B insurtech that gives credit teams assurance that customers will fulfill their financial obligations, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Talis Capital. The round included participation from returning investors Octopus Ventures, Insurtech Gateway Ltd, Truesight and Expa, and new investors FJ Labs and Broadhaven Ventures. Talis Capital general

Back in June, I predicted that we would see an uptick in startups acquiring other startups this year. At the time, the venture market was souring and starting to show a divide between startups with years of cash on hand — companies that were also, often, overvalued — and those that were low on capital and would

The European Commission has announced a draft decision on US adequacy, paving the way for a replacement EU-US data transfer deal to be adopted next year. The draft adequacy decision for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF), as it’s called, can be downloaded here. The Commission’s draft is a key step in years of tortuous

For businesses, protecting trademarks is often a lengthy and expensive process, especially if they have multiple brands. Digip digitizes much of the process, helping its customers file trademarks by themselves instead of going to law firms. The Stockholm-based legaltech startup announced today it has added $1.3 million to its seed round, bringing the total to

Microsoft is to acquire a 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), the company that owns the London Stock Exchange as well as a several other businesses including financial market data company Refinitiv which LSEG acquired from a Blackstone/Thomson Reuters consortium last year for $27 billion. Microsoft’s stake, which it bought from the

Primer, a U.K. startup founded by alums of Braintree and PayPal that provides a drag-and-drop framework for merchants to build online payment stacks, last year raised $50 million at a $425 million valuation from investors like ICONIQ, Accel, Balderton Capital and Seedcamp — a round the came amid a bullish period for e-commerce, with record-levels

Elon Musk’s desire to stir conspiratorial shit up by giving select outsiders aligned with his conservative agenda access to Twitter systems and data could land the world’s richest man in some serious doodoo with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. In recent days, this access granted by Musk to a few external reporters has