The Competition and Markets Authority — the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog — is wasting no time in lodging its first official investigation of 2025 under its new rules that came into effect this month. It’s looking into the market dominance of Google in Search, including the new work it’s doing in AI search as well as […]

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Healthcare is proving to be one of the more lucrative industries for building AI solutions to speed up clinical, research, and administrative operations. Now, we have one of the latest examples of how that is playing out in terms of venture funding. Qventus, a startup that builds AI-based tools to automate work across a range […]

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In 2023, the U.K. made a big song and dance about the need to consider the harms of AI, giving itself a leading role in the wider conversation around AI safety. Now, it’s whistling a very different tune: today, the government announced a sweeping plan and a big bet on AI investments to develop what […]

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A startup hoping to provide a credible alternative to Amazon has picked up funding to double down on the gap in the market. PrettyDamnQuick (PDQ) provides tech to retailers to let them customize and test different shipping and checkout flows, and now it has picked up a deal of its own: a $25 million Series […]

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Gaming startups, specifically those building casual mobile games, are very hot in Turkey right now, and today another one is announcing a sizable round.

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Wirecard, a German fintech that raised hundreds of millions of dollars only to collapse in 2020 in a sea of scandal and insolvency, still makes headlines today as lawsuits continue against different entities and people once connected to the business. But not all that came out of it was rotten. A Dublin-based startup called Nomupay […]

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Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, today announced a major overhaul of its content moderation policies, taking off some guardrails that it had put in place over several years, in response to criticism that it had helped spread political and health misinformation. In a blog post called “More speech, fewer mistakes”, Meta’s new […]

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After looking for a buyer for more than two years, Just Eat Takeaway.com has finally closed the menu on Grubhub. On Tuesday, the Dutch food delivery giant said it completed the sale of the U.S. business to Wonder, the food startup founded and led by e-commerce veteran Marc Lore. The deal has an enterprise value […]

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Yet another major investment is going down in the travel sector, underscoring its ongoing rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic. Prosus, the tech conglomerate controlled by Naspers, is paying $1.7 billion to acquire Despegar, one of the biggest online travel agencies in Latin America, to scale up its operations in the region. Despegar’s board of directors […]

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Logistics is the name of the game during the holiday season: Companies that can seal the deal and get people and things to the places they need to be, on time, rake it in this time of year.  But behind that demand lies a huge amount of inefficiency and fragmentation. Are logistics businesses ready for […]

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A young startup that emerged from stealth less than two months ago with big-name backers and bigger ambitions is returning to the spotlight.  Decart is building what its CEO and co-founder Dean Leitersdorf (pictured above, right) describes as “a fully vertically integrated AI research lab,” alongside enterprise and consumer products based on the lab’s work. […]

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The tourism and travel industries are finally back on track, expected to make a “full recovery” to pre-pandemic levels of activity, the UN said earlier this month. As an indicator of that, Hostaway, one of the bigger software startups in the space, is announcing a giant round of funding to double down on growth.  The […]

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A startup out of Turkey that has built a hit casual mobile game where you have to find cats in Where’s Wally-style drawings of increasing complexity has now found something else: $18 million in funding. Agave Games, the creator of Find the Cat, will be using the Series A to build out its team and […]

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These startups have fascinating new technologies, business models, founder stories or are pushing an industry forward in exciting ways.

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A deep learning scientist whose last startup was acquired by Snap to build its My AI chatbot has raised seed funding for his latest venture: a platform for building and operating real-time, video-based conversational AI agents.  eSelf, as the startup is known, is today coming out of stealth with $4.5 million in its coffers to […]

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Existing investor Vor Capital is leading the round, which also saw other previous backers CNI and Incore participating.

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Languages are typically taught by first exposing you to reading and writing, but native speakers always start learning languages by hearing and talking. Speak has built a platform to teach languages by focusing on how native speakers learn: Using AI, the startup generates audio conversations and listens to users’ responses to improve their grasp of […]

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Interest in Donald Trump surged higher than interest in Kamala Harris. People ate up content on Dubai chocolate bars. And the Yankees really did win. These and more insights are all from Google’s annual list of top trending searches, which it released today.  Google’s place in popular culture today is undisputed. It’s the biggest internet […]

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Some believe Klarna’s planned IPO in 2025 could set the stage for other fintech startups to go public. But with the tech IPO market still sluggish, one of the candidates hotly tipped to follow suit has instead just announced a fundraise, and its CEO says going public is “not a priority.” Zopa, the U.K. neobank […]

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As Meta faces off with antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe, a £2.1 billion+ Facebook U.K. class action-style competition lawsuit, which takes Meta’s market dominance as a given, is moving ahead after the social media giant lost a bid to have the litigation thrown out. The suit is seeking damages worth a minimum of […]

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