Europe
The latest startup and technology news coming out of Europe.
EU member states remain divided on controversial CSAM-scanning plan — but for how long?
Opponents also contend the EU plan will fail at its claimed aim of protecting children, suggesting law enforcement will instead be swamped by millions of false positives.
Amazon is bringing its generative AI listing smarts to more sellers, revealing today that those in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. can now access tools designed to improve…
Malicious hacking is getting increasingly sophisticated, and that’s leading to a very clear trend in security technology. To keep people and organizations safe, security also has to continue improving. Security…
Hero, a new fintech startup based in Paris, is announcing an €11.3 million all-equity funding round led by Valar Ventures ($12.2 million at today’s exchange rate). For the past couple…
Like it or hate it, artificial intelligence — especially generative AI — is the technology story of 2024. OpenAI, with its rollouts of viral services like ChatGPT and billions in…
Featured Article
C12, a French quantum computing startup founded by twin brothers, raises $19.4M
C12 is announcing that it recently raised an €18 million funding round ($19.4 million at today’s exchange rate). Originally founded in 2020 as a spinoff from the Physics Laboratory of the École Normale Supérieure, the company has been working on a unique process to create quantum computers based on carbon…
Four years after acquiring Shine, a French fintech startup that offers bank accounts to freelancers and very small companies, Société Générale has announced plans to sell Shine to Ageras. In…
Stop playing games with online security, Signal president warns EU lawmakers
A controversial European Union legislative proposal to scan the private messages of citizens in a bid to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is a risk to the future of…
Tinybird raises another $30 million to transform data into real-time APIs
Tinybird is not so tiny anymore. The enterprise data startup TechCrunch first covered three years ago has been growing at a rapid pace and recently raised a $30 million Series…
There has been a lot of bad news about social media startups lately. Multiple companies, including Twitter alternative Post News, and IRL have shut down. And ShareChat’s valuation has dropped…
Meta pauses plans to train AI using European users’ data, bowing to regulatory pressure
Meta has confirmed that it will pause plans to start training its AI systems using data from its users in the European Union and U.K. The move follows pushback from…
AccountsIQ, a Dublin-founded accounting technology company, has raised $65 million to build “the finance function of the future” for midsized companies.
Gorilla, a Belgian startup that helps energy providers crunch big data, raises $25M
Gorilla, a Belgian company that serves the energy sector with real-time data and analytics for pricing and forecasting, has raised €23 million ($25 million) in a Series B round led…
Black Semiconductor nabs $273M in Germany to supercharge how chips work together
Black Semiconductor, which is developing a chip-connecting technology based on graphene, has raised $273M in a combination of private and public funding.
Diversity Spotlight is a feature on Crunchbase that lets companies add tags to their profiles to label themselves.
Mistral AI has closed its much-rumored Series B funding round, raising €600 million (around $640 million) in a mix of equity and debt.
Featured Article
Raspberry Pi is now a public company
Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, valuing it at £542 million, or $690 million at today’s exchange rate.
Kelvin wants to help save the planet by applying AI to home energy audits
French startup Kelvin, which uses computer vision and machine learning to make it easier to audit homes for energy efficiency, has raised $5.1M.
With €50 million to invest, Italian Founders Fund looks for entrepreneurs with global ambitions
While funding for Italian startups has been growing, the country still ranks eighth in Europe by VC investment, according to Dealroom. Newly created Italian Founders Fund (IFF) hopes to help…
Deal Dive: Human Native AI is building the marketplace for AI training licensing deals
AI systems and large language models (LLMs) need to be trained on massive amounts of data to be accurate but they shouldn’t train on data that they don’t have the…
Featured Article
In 2024, many Y Combinator startups only want tiny seed rounds — but there’s a catch
When Bowery Capital general partner Loren Straub started talking to a startup from the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch a few months ago, she thought it was strange that the company didn’t have a lead investor for the round it was raising. Even stranger, the founders didn’t seem to be…
The British retailers association also takes aim at Amazon’s “Buy Box,” claiming that Amazon manipulated which retailers were selected for the coveted placement.
Sirion, now valued around $1B, acquires Eigen as consolidation comes to enterprise AI tooling
There’s a lot of buzz about generative AI and what impact it might have on businesses. But look beyond the hype and high-profile deals like the one between OpenAI and…
Dealt turns retailers into service providers and proves that pivots sometimes work
Dealt is now building a service platform for retailers instead of end customers.
SoftBank-backed grocery startup Oda lays off 150, resets focus on Norway and Sweden
It’s not just instant-delivery startups that are struggling. Oda, the Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup, has confirmed layoffs of 150 jobs as it drastically scales back its expansion ambitions to…
The next few weeks could be pivotal for Worldcoin, the controversial eyeball-scanning crypto venture co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whose operations remain almost entirely shuttered in the European Union following…
Microsoft hit with EU privacy complaints over schools’ use of 365 Education suite
Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union. Privacy rights nonprofit noyb has just lodged two complaints with Austria’s data…
Samara is accelerating the energy transition in Spain one solar panel at a time
Since the shock of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, solar energy has been having a moment in Europe. Electricity prices have been going up while the investment required to get…
Swiss startup Neural Concept raises $27M to cut EV design time to 18 months
Neural Concept lets designers model how components will perform before they can be manufactured.
UK neobank Monzo reports first full (pre-tax) profit, prepares for EU expansion with Dublin hub
Monzo has announced its 2024 financial results, revealing its first full-year pre-tax profit. The company also confirmed that it’s in the early stages of expanding into the broader European market…
