Provizio, a combination hardware and software startup with technology to improve car safety, has closed a seed investment round of $6.2million. Investors include Bobby Hambrick (the founder of Autonomous Stuff); the founders of Movidius; the European Innovation Council (EIC); ACT Venture Capital. The startup has a “five-dimensional” sensory platform that — it says — perceives,

European lawmakers are pressing major e-commerce and media platforms to share more data with each other as a tool to fight rogue traders who are targeting consumers with coronavirus scams. After the pandemic spread to the West, internet platforms were flooded with local ads for PPE of unknown and/or dubious quality and other dubious coronavirus

In recent times startups have appeared offering credit at an e-commerce basket checkout so that a customer can buy a product without needing to pay right away. Klarna or Clearpay are the two most notable in this field. But what if you flipped the model around so that consumers could buy the item at a

Last year, the French government and the government-backed initiative La French Tech unveiled an index of French startups so that it would be easier to identify them. The 40 top-performing startups get the label Next40, and the top 120 startups are grouped into the French Tech 120 — it’s a play on words with the

Spain’s All Iron Ventures (AIV), an investor in b2c marketplaces and ecommerce plays, has closed its first fund with commitments totalling €66.5 million (~$79M) — which it touts as one of the largest first fund raises in the country.  Capital committed to the fund by its parent Group’s founding partners and other investors brings its

Starling founder Anne Boden recently told TechCrunch that the U.K. challenger bank is on track to be profitable by Christmas, but this doesn’t mean it isn’t out raising additional capital already. According to well-placed sources, Starling has hired Rothschild with the aim of raising a new £200 million round. The draw is its expected profitability,

The UK’s data watchdog is facing a legal challenge after it took the decision to quietly close a complaint against the adtech industry’s high velocity background trading of personal data. The legal challenge was reported earlier by Politico. The original complaint — challenging the adtech industry’s compliance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) —

As we’ve seen, some startups are pivoting to re-model themselves for the radically different world of the COVID-19 pandemic. But others literally turned out to have a business model which, although they could never have realized it at the time, might have been (almost) tailor-made for this era. A fascinating example of this is SaaS

Citysocializer, previously a platform for promoting real-world socializing in cities, has relaunched, becoming something akin to a “Get Your Guide for virtual events”. Just as other startups have pivoted to ‘lean in” to current circumstances, this startup has turned its attention to how people can monetize their skills and passions from home during the COVID-19

French cloud hosting company Scaleway originally started with very cheap cloud instances. Over the years, the company has expanded its offering and added more premium services, such as managed Kubernetes, object storage, block storage, managed databases, load balancers and GPU instances. But Scaleway is now launching another cheap cloud instance that costs €0.0025 per hour

Offline-messaging app Bridgefy — which innovatively uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi — became known as the go-to app by thousands of protesters around the world to keep communications going even when oppressive regimes blocked or shut down the internet. Recently, activists in Nigeria and Thailand have urged supporters to download the app, as last year, when

New research looking into how UK VC has been invested over the past decade according to race, gender and educational background makes for grim reading — with all-ethnic teams and female entrepreneurs receiving just a fraction of available funding vs all-white teams and male founders. The finding of baked in bias holds true across all

When it comes to using algorithms and other formulae to determine what kinds of services you might offer to specific customers and at what price, the insurance industry is one of the oldest in the book. But that legacy position masks the fact that some of its determinations might leave a lot to be desired,

Penguin Business describes Starling Bank founder Anne Boden’s “Banking On It” as the “first-hand account of one woman’s quest to rebuild Britain’s broken banking system.” Written with the help of a ghost writer, Boden relates how she came up with the idea to found a challenger bank and the many obstacles she faced along the

Major Internet platforms will be required to open up their algorithms to regulatory oversight under proposals European lawmakers are set to introduce next month. In a speech today Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager suggested algorithmic accountability will be a key plank of the forthcoming legislative digital package — with draft rules incoming that will require platforms

VC firm e.ventures is expanding its footprint in Europe with a new office in Paris, as well as a new Paris-based partner. Jonathan Userovici, who previously worked for Idinvest Partners, is joining e.ventures as partner and head of the Paris office. Originally founded in the U.S. 20 years ago, e.ventures has been expanding to new

U.K.-based Fertifa has bagged a £1 million (~$1.3 million) seed to plug into a fertility-focused workplace benefits platform. Passion Capital is investing in the round, along with some unnamed strategic angel investors. The August 2019-founded startup sells bespoke reproductive health and fertility packages to U.K. employers to offer as workplace benefits to their staff —

The UK’s ICO has reduced the size of a data breach penalty for hotel business Marriott — dropping it to £14.4 million (~$23.8M) in a final penalty notice down from the £99M ($123M) figure that the watchdog initially said it would levy in July 2019. The fine relates to a data breach suffered by the

Nutrium, a digital health startup which links dietitians and their patients via an app, has raised a €4.25 million seed round led by Indico Capital Partners, alongside the Social Innovation Fund in Portugal (SIF) and previous investors. It now offers professional nutrition software to 80,000 nutrition professionals and 800,000 patients in more than 40 countries.

The VC trends of later and larger continue to change the landscape of private capital The global recovery in venture capital activity did not miss Europe, new data indicates. According to a PitchBook report, European venture capital activity rose in Q3 2020, putting the continent on pace to set a new yearly record for aggregate

European lawmakers are taking aim at big tech’s ability to push its own services in search results at the expense of rivals, with Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager confirming today that a legislative proposal due in a few weeks will aim to ban what she called “unfair self-preferencing”. The concern is that so-called gatekeeper platforms have

On the heels of Germany announcing another lockdown to try to contain the rapid rise in Covid-19 cases in the country, one of the hottest startups in its capital city is announcing the closing of a large convertible note to help it keep moving forward. GetYourGuide, which in brighter times runs a thriving and viral

AppFollow, an app management startup, has raised a $5 million Series A round led by Barcelona’s Nauta Capital, alongside existing investors Vendep Capital and RTP Global participating. The Helsinki-headquartered company says benefitted during the pandemic and even in April 2020 as the desire for automation and apps exploded. It says it now has 70,000 clients

Italy’s competition authority has opened an antitrust investigation into Google’s display ad business — adding another allegation of abuse of a dominant position to the tech giant’s regulatory woes. In a press release announcing the action the AGCM said it “questions the discriminatory use of the huge amount of data collected through its various applications,

Amazon is the biggest online retailer in Europe, and today it took the next step in making that effort more localized. The company has launched a dedicated portal for Sweden at Amazon.se — giving Swedish shoppers, third-party merchants and itself a local URL — and a local logistics system, and a local marketing push —

Nordic digital therapeutics company, Sidekick Health, has closed a $20 million Series A led by pan-European VC Wellington Partners and healthcare focused VC Asabys Partners. Existing investors, Novator and Frumtak Ventures, also participated in the oversubscribed round. The 2014-founded startup has built a gamified digital care platform that targets chronic and lifestyle disease management via

Google search engine rivals have dialled up pressure on the European Commission over the tech giant’s ‘pay-to-play’ choice screen for Android users in Europe — arguing the Google-devised auction has failed to remedy antitrust issues identified by the European Commission more than two years ago. The joint letter to the Commission, which has been signed

Diversity and inclusion are slowly, slowly moving away from being an afterthought (or worse, a no-thought) in the tech world. And to underscore the new attention the area is getting — in every aspect of the concept — today a startup that’s building tools to help designers and developers make their end products more accessible

Milan-headquartered scale-up Boom, which offers a two-sided tech platform to let companies book and manage commercial photo shoots, has raised $7 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Italy’s United Ventures, with the participation from Wellness Holding. It will be used to support the photo tech company’s next stage of growth as

Uber is facing another legal challenge in Europe related to algorithmic decision making. The App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU) filed a case, yesterday, with a court in the Netherlands seeking to challenge the ride hailing company’s practice of ‘robo-firing’ — aka the use of automated systems to identify fraudulent activity and terminate drivers based