Europe

Elvie, a femtech hardware startup whose first product is a sleek smart pelvic floor exerciser, has inked a strategic partnership with the UK’s National Health Service that will make the device available nationwide through the country’s free-at-the-point-of-use healthcare service so at no direct cost to the patient. It’s a major win for the startup that

SenSat, a U.K. startup aiming to use visual and spatial data to “simulate reality” and help computers better understand the physical world, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding — cash it will use to further develop the technology, and invest in its San Francisco office. The round was backed by Force Over Mass, Round

Lyvly, a London-based startup that offers what might best be described as a members-based shared living and rental service, has raised $4.6 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Mosaic Ventures, while Greg Marsh, who co-founded Onefinestay, has joined the burgeoning company as chairman and investor. The latest take on how to improve

Hinge Health, the San Francisco-based startup that offers a tech-enabled platform to treat musculoskeletal (MSK) disorders — things like knee pain, shoulder pain, or back pain — has raised $26 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Insight Venture Partners, with participation from the company’s Series A backer Atomico. In fact, I understand

Taxfix, the Berlin-based startup that has developed a mobile assistant to help you file your tax return, has closed $13 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, with participation from existing investors Creandum and Redalpine. Launched in 2017, Taxfix is built on the premise that filing taxes remains

MessageBird, the Amsterdam-based cloud communications platform backed by Accel in the U.S. and Europe’s Atomico, is unveiling a new product today that aims to make it easier for enterprises to communicate with customers across various channels of their choosing. Dubbed “Programmable Conversations” (yes, really!), the product takes the form of a single API that unifies

Handiscover, a startup that lets you find and book accessible travel accommodation, has raised $700,000 in new funding. The round is backed by Howzat Partners, which has previously invested in a number of successful travel companies, such as publicly-listed Trivago and more recently Lodgify. Tranquility Capital, a Swedish family fund with a background in accessibility,

Our body is continuously storing and consuming energy to keep us alive — but understanding which fuels are being used and why is the Holy Grail of things like weight loss and body hacking. Today’s weight-loss market is saturated with generic products because — guess what — trying to tailor-make a solution for an individual

Flux, the London fintech that has built a software platform to offer merchants digital receipts, loyalty, card-linked offers and analytics, continues to sign new partnerships in a bid to solve its ‘chicken and egg’ problem. That is, it needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks. The

We all know what Android for smartphones is. A free, (almost) open source operating system for smartphones. But right now there is no equivalent of the “Android for robots.” Instead there are many, many proprietary systems. A new startup plans to address this problem in order for the robotics market to really take off, and

The flood underinsurance problem is arguably the largest unsolved problem in insurance. Over the last ten years, an average of $41bn per year of flood damage has gone uncovered by insurance, leaving people, businesses and governments to pay the bill. It’s estimated that there are $50bn of losses caused by floods around the world. Currently,

If you were at Disrupt London four years ago you may remember more than a little awkwardness during an investor panel when two VCs that had invested in European payday loans firm Wonga declined to comment on what had gone wrong at their portfolio company in the wake of a £220M write down. Yesterday Sky

Lemonade, the New York-based insurance platform, looks set to drop the lawsuit it filed against German company ONE Insurance, its parent company Wefox, and Wefox founder Julian Teicke. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court Southern District of NY, alleged that Wefox reverse engineered Lemonade to create ONE, infringed Lemonade’s intellectual property, violated the

Teamleader, the SaaS platform that helps SMEs operate in a more digitally savvy way, has closed $22 million in Series C funding. The round was led by London-based Keen Venture Partners, with participation from PMV and existing investors Fortino Capital and Sage Capital. Claiming to serve nearly 10,000 customers in 6 countries — comprised mostly

A national six-day taxi driver strike in Spain has ended after the government agreed to pass regulation that will allow the country’s autonomous communities to cap the number of private hire vehicle permits within their cities. The VTC licenses are used by Uber and local ride-hailing rival Cabify to offer professional driver services in the

Shedul, an online booking platform for salons and spas, has raised $5 million in funding. The round is led by Berlin’s Target Global, with participation from New York based FJ Labs. A number of individuals also invested personally, including Tom Stafford (Managing Partner at DST Global), Niklas Östberg (founder and CEO of Delivery Hero), and

European consumer electronics retailer Dixons Carphone’s apologetic admission yesterday that a 2017 data breach was in fact considerably worse than it first reported suggests disclosures of major breaches could get a bit more messy — at least under the early reign of the region’s tough new data protection framework, GDPR — as organizations scramble to

Poland-based CallPage offers something other customer interaction apps don’t: the ability to call your website visitors as soon as they click on your page. In a world where the difference between a sale and a click past your site onto Facebook, this is a pretty cool little feature. CallPage began in 2015 when the founders,

Facebook has been given the go ahead to appeal to Ireland’s Supreme Court against an earlier High Court decision to refer key questions relating to the validity of EU-US data flows to Europe’s top court, the Irish Times reports. The eventual outcome of what is already years of legal to-ing and fro-ing — in a

“Happy to spend 10 minutes on our vision and the journey we’re on, but then, really, 15 minutes on what we’ve got today, what it is we’ve achieved, what it is our AI does,” says Tractable co-founder and CEO Alexandre Dalyac when I video called him a couple of weeks ago. “You can probably speed

A meaty first report by the UK parliamentary committee that’s been running an inquiry into online disinformation since fall 2017, including scrutinizing how people’s personal information was harvested from social media services like Facebook and used for voter profiling and the targeting of campaign ads — and whose chair, Damian Collins — is a member

3D body scanning systems have hit the big time after years of stops and starts. Hot on the heels of Original Stitch’s Bodygram, another 3D scanner, 3DLOOK, has entered into the fray with a $1 million investment to measure bodies around the world. The founders, Vadim Rogovskiy, Ivan Makeev, and Alex Arapovd, created 3DLOOK when

Grover, the Berlin-based startup that offers “pay-as-you-go” subscriptions to the latest consumer tech as an alternative to owning products outright, has raised €37 million in funding. The Series A round is led by Circularity Capital LLP — a VC that specialises in the so-called “circular economy” — with participation from fintech investor Coparion, Samsung NEXT,

The UK parliament has provided another telling glimpse behind the curtain of Facebook’s unregulated ad platform by publishing data on scores of pro-Brexit adverts which it distributed to UK voters during the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. The ads were run on behalf of several vote leave campaigns who paid a third company to

TechCrunch is coming back to Berlin to talk with the best and brightest people in tech from Europe and the rest of the world. In addition to fireside chats and panels, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the coveted cup. Grab your ticket to Disrupt Berlin before August 1st as

Snap40, a Scottish startup that has developed an AI-enabled wearable device to help health professionals monitor patients either on the hospital ward or at home, has raised $8 million in seed funding. The round is led by ADV, with participation from MMC Ventures, and brings total funding to $10 million. Originally launched as a clinical

A two-day taxi driver strike in Barcelona this week, called to protest against the number of ride-hailing vehicles on the streets and failure to enforce national regulations that are supposed to cap private hire vehicle numbers, turned violent yesterday with protestors attacking cars and local media reporting attacks on drivers too. The violence has led

It’s still quite hard to buy physical goods using bitcoins or ethers. Coinbase plans to (partially) solve that issue with a new partnership with WeGift. Coinbase customers in Europe and Australia can now convert their tokens on their Coinbase account into digital gift cards for popular stores. For instance, you’ll be able to buy gift

A group of computer vision researchers from ETH Zurich want to do their bit to enhance AI development on smartphones. To wit: They’ve created a benchmark system for assessing the performance of several major neural network architectures used for common AI tasks. They’re hoping it will be useful to other AI researchers but also to

Market research firm GlobalWebIndex, which provides consumer insight data for marketing purposes for customers including Google, Spotify, WPP, IPG and Omnicom Group, has closed a $40 million Series A round. The funding is its first VC raise, almost a decade after the business was founded. The investment comes from New York-based growth fund Stripes Group,