The autonomous navigation market — where ships, guided by AI, steer themselves, resulting in fuel and time savings — is projected to sail past $11 billion by 2028. As a result, companies in this space are pushing on an open door. The latest is Orca AI, which closed a Series B funding round of $72.5 million […]

In 2013, Tatyana Marynich and Anastasiya Khamiankova opened the doors to Imaguru, a startup hub in Minsk, Belarus that would go on to launch some of Eastern Europe’s most prominent tech success stories. A decade later, they’ve been sentenced ‘in absentia’ to a combined 23 years in prison by Belarusian authorities. Their property has been […]

Veterans of the European startup scene, who’ve launched multiple consumer apps in the past, are partly coming out of stealth Tuesday with a new app. On the face of it, Grouphug will simply generate memes from the archive of a group WhatsApp chat. However, that masks a wider play.  Grouphug is led by Felix Petersen, […]

Supporting early-stage entrepreneurs seems to be suddenly in vogue in Europe. Back in March, podcaster and venture investor Harry Stebbings launched “Project Europe” to great fanfare, aiming to back founders aged 25 and under with a small $10 million fund — riffing on the ‘Peter Thiel Fellowship’ model of yore. Now, a new fund hopes […]

Most mortgage lenders would rather people didn’t pay off their mortgages early. After all, that’s how they make their money. Indeed, overpayment is positively discouraged and sometimes even penalized. What if there was a solution that solved the technology behind it, alongside the financing arrangements? That’s the idea behind the Sprive fintech app. This is […]

The U.K. fintech sector is on a bit of a roll. Allica Bank — a London-based fintech — recently announced it had doubled its profits in 2024, bringing in £29.9 million, while neobank Revolut announced a £1 billion profit in 2024. Companies of this nature continue to spring out of London, a city that has become a […]

Swedish fintech startup Froda has secured a $22.7 million (€20 million) Series B round led by Incore Invest, also based in Sweden. The move bucks the trend of a slight slowdown in investments into fintech, plus a further confirmation of the long-term trend toward the “embedded finance” model.  Largely operating in northern European countries, from […]

Back in 2020, Xayn was a privacy-based, on-device AI startup designed specifically for smartphones. But that early experience eventually saw the company pivot into developing sovereign AI for the legal sphere. Now Xayn has rebranded as Noxtua and raised a $92.2 million (roughly €81.2 million) Series B round. The round was led by strategic investor […]

X has not been faring well in the U.K., which used to be a major source of revenue for the social network prior to Elon Musk’s takeover. Still named Twitter UK Ltd, revenues and profits for X’s U.K. entity collapsed by over 60% in 2023, according to accounts filed this week with the U.K.’s Companies […]

Former Y Combinator startup Telli is helping companies alleviate the bottleneck that occurs when a high-volume of customers try to, for example, book appointments. Its AI voice agents kick in and handle basic operations while handing off more-complex processes to human operators. The Berlin-based startup has now raised $3.6 million in a pre-seed funding round led […]

It would appear the environment and society remain relevant, whatever you might hear in some other quarters. At least, that’s one conclusion to be drawn from the news that European specialist VC Revent has closed a  €100 million ($109 million) Fund II to invest in “planetary and societal health” startups.  Launched out of Berlin in […]

The number of “operator VCs” — former founders turned VCs — in Europe in recent years. This is common in the U.S., where the majority of VCs are former founders. The reverse is true in Europe, where most come from banking or finance. Recent examples in Europe include Wise founder Taavet Hinrikus, Glovo founder Oscar […]

Billing itself as “Stripe for emerging markets,” Turkish fintech Sipay has raised a $78 million Series B funding round, claiming a valuation of $875 million in the process. This round is significant, as Sipay plans to expand into markets outside of Turkey, offering additional services like remittances that Stripe currently does not offer in those […]

With President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs coming out today — a day he is calling “Liberation Day” — a web3 startup thinks it could track tariffs automatically on goods coming into and out of the USA using its blockchain platform. The claim may well be bold — and typical of many such bold claims […]

When there are damages to energy infrastructure, such as electricity pylons or gas pipelines, expensive helicopters are frequently used to inspect them. Drones have begun to replace some of those inspections, but the flight-time for these can be limited. Now a new company has produced a drone with a very long range to fill this […]

As generative AI moves increasingly into the physical world through robotics, vehicles, and drones, the need to map cloud-based AIs to real-world environments can lead to a huge mismatch. Rerun, a Stockholm-based dev tools startup, which builds a data stack for this emergent kind of “physical AI,” has secured $17 million in seed funding to […]

Venture capital investment in European startups passed $52 billion last year, reflecting the market’s long-term growth trajectory and gradual stabilization after the out-sized peaks of 2021-2022 (driven largely by the COVID-19 pandemic), and the comparative slump of 2023, according to a new report. Although 2024 has seen political and regulatory turmoil, Europe’s talent pool of […]

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Booking an ad campaign with social media influencers is currently not exactly easy. For starters, influencers’ approaches to marketing can be unconventional, and there’s no standard way to engage with them. On the other side, marketing agencies that employ hosts of people to book and track brand campaigns are limited by how many influencers they […]

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So-called “vibe coding” with LLM-driven tools like Cursor Composer — a term coined by renowned computer scientist Andrej Karpathy — describes a hands-off approach to writing code using GenAI models, and it has really taken off recently. According to Y Combinator, one-quarter of the startups in its latest batch relies on AI to generate 95% […]

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Amidst geopolitical tensions and volatile markets, the question of Europe’s ability to weather the storms ahead, especially as President Trump seems intent on having his pound of tariffs from the continent, is looming large. But an extensive new report claims deeptech is poised to become a key pillar of Europe’s security, defense, and future autonomy, […]

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