Europe

Berlin-based Zizoo — a startup which self describes as booking.com for boats — has nabbed a €6.5 million (~$7.4M) Series A to help more millennials find holiday yachts to mess about taking selfies in. Zizoo says its Series A — which was led by Revo Capital, with participation from new investors including Coparion, Check24 Ventures and PUSH

Google has announced its plan for combating election interference in the European Union, ahead of elections next May when up to 350 million voters across the region will vote to elect 705 Members of the European Parliament. In a blog post laying out a narrow approach to democracy-denting disinformation, Google says it will introduce a

Movinga, the European house removals and relocation platform, has closed €15 million in further funding. The round was led by London-based growth investor ETF Partners, with participation from existing backers Santo Venture Capital, Earlybird, and Rocket Internet. The company says the new capital will support “further process automation”, the launch of new services, and international

Facebook has said it will appeal against a £500,000 penalty issued by the UK’s data watchdog in October following a lengthy investigation into the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal. The ICO announced in July that it intended to fine Facebook the maximum possible amount under the UK’s old data protection regime, saying it was “clear”

A ruling in late October against a little known French adtech firm that popped up on the national data watchdog’s website earlier this month, is causing ripples of excitement to run through privacy watchers in Europe who believe it signals the beginning of the end for creepy online ads. The excitement is palpable. Impressively so,

One of the biggest problems for the mainstream adoption of crypto is the need for memorizing seed phrases, the inability to get your cryptocurrency back if something goes wrong, the list goes on. Until major issue like this are solved, crypto is going to remain a pretty elite game. Argent is a project which recently

Imagine any surface, such as a wooden table, car door or glass wall, could be turned into a user interface without the need for physical buttons or a touch screen. That’s the ambition of HyperSurfaces, the London startup originally behind the Mogees line of music devices and software, which today is unveiling what it claims

Facebook’s latest PR crisis has cast a lurid spotlight on a GOP-led publicity firm called Definers Public Affairs, after a New York Times investigation revealed last week the firm had sought to discredit Facebook critics by, in one instance, linking them to the liberal financier George Soros — a long-time target of anti-semitic conspiracy theories. The

Putting a new spin on the term ‘digital nomad’, UK addressing platform what3words has partnered with Airbnb to list stays with Mongolian nomads. The startup’s simplified addressing system is being applied to help adventurous travellers ‘home share’ with Dukha reindeer herders at their mountain camp where there aren’t any street names to anchor a trip.  The partnership is

UK car tech startup lightfoot, which sells a telematics system that gives real-time feedback to drivers combined with a rewards platform to further incentivize smoother driving, has picked up £3.2 million (~$4M) from London-based early-stage venture fund BGF. Former Dyson CEO, Martin McCourt, also contributed to the investment, and will join lightfoot’s board as a non-executive

European multi-modal travel planning platform, GoEuro, is adding another transport option to its ‘compare and book’ proposition by introducing ferries to the existing mix of trains, planes and buses. The platform is powered by partnerships with more than 800 regional transport operators at this stage. The initial focus for ferries will be on the Mediterranean,

VOI Technology, an e-scooter startup headquartered in Sweden but with pan-European ambitions, has raised $50 million in Series A funding, confirming our earlier scoop. As I previously reported, London-based venture capital firm Balderton Capital has led the round, alongside LocalGlobe, Raine Ventures, and previous VOI backer Vostok New Ventures. A number of angel investors also

European online contact lens supplier Vision Direct has revealed a data breach which compromised full credit card details for a number of its customers, as well as personal information. Compromised data includes full name, billing address, email address, password, telephone number and payment card information, including card number, expiry date and CVV. It’s not yet

The UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights has raised concerns about the UK’s rush to apply digital technologies and data tools to socially re-engineer the delivery of public services at scale, warning in a statement today that the impact of a digital welfare state on vulnerable people will be “immense”. He has

Facebook is facing calls to conduct an external investigation into its own lobbying and PR activities by an aide to billionaire George Soros. BuzzFeed reports that Michael Vachon, an advisor to the chairman at Soros Fund Management, made the call in a letter to friends and colleagues. The call follows an explosive investigation, published yesterday

LocalGlobe, the seed-stage venture capital firm founded by father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein, and one of the most active firms in the U.K., is gearing up to launch a new separate fund aimed at Series B. According to sources — and since confirmed by LocalGlobe — the VC firm is raising a

Mozilla is adding a new security feature to its Firefox Quantum web browser that will alert users when they visit a website that has recently reported a data breach. When a Firefox user lands on a website with a breach in its recent past they’ll see a pop up notification informing them of the barebones

Urban Massage, the London-headquartered startup that lets you book a vetted massage therapist “on-demand”, is expanding into new wellness services in addition to changing its name. Now simply called Urban, the company, which operates in several U.K. cities along with Paris, is adding the ability to book an expert nail technician, GOsC-regulated osteopath, or skin

French hardware startup Netatmo got acquired by the biggest manufacturer of switches and sockets in the world, Legrand. Terms of the deal are undisclosed. Legrand and Netatmo already collaborated together on some products. Back in 2017, the company announced that it would work with industrial groups to connect everything in your home, starting with Legrand

Pirate Studios, the music technology company that operates fully automated and self-service 24 hour music studios, has secured $20 million. The investment was led by Talis Capital, the London-based VC family office. Talis was already an existing backer of Pirate Studios, with Talis’ Matus Maar also named as a co-founder of the startup. Other investors

The shock news yesterday that Google is taking over a health app rolled out to UK hospitals over the past few years by its AI division, DeepMind, has caught the eye of the country’s data protection watchdog — which said today that it’s monitoring developments. An ICO spokesperson told us: “An ICO investigation and an

DeepMind’s health app being gobbled by parent Google is both unsurprising and deeply shocking. First thoughts should not be allowed to gloss over what is really a gut punch. It’s unsurprising because the AI galaxy brains at DeepMind always looked like unlikely candidates for the quotidian, margins-focused business of selling and scaling software as a service.

Tandem, the U.K. challenger bank, is gearing up to launch a new “Auto Savings” feature — a clever way to lower the barriers for Tandem app users who want to save for a rainy day — and to power the feature the company is partnering with Stripe. The latter in itself isn’t necessarily huge news

DeepMind’s recent foray into providing software as a service to U.K. hospitals has reached the end of its run. The Google -owned AI division has just announced it will be stepping back from providing a clinical alerts and task management healthcare app to focus on research — handing off the team doing the day to day

Personal finance management app maker Fintonic has teamed up with ecommerce behemoth Amazon to offer users in Spain interest free purchases on the local Amazon .es marketplace. The 0% finance offer is being timed to coincide with the annual Black Friday shopping fest that kicks off later this month. Qualifying Fintonic users can apply for Amazon Gift

Anorak Technologies, the U.K. startup building a life insurance advice platform, has raised £5 million in Series A funding. Notably, the round is led by previous backer Kamet Ventures, the tech incubator funded by insurance giant AXA. It brings the total raised by Anorak to £9 million. In a call, co-founder and CEO David Vanek

French startup BlaBlaCar is announcing plans to acquire Ouibus, the bus division of France’s national railway company SNCF. For the first time, BlaBlaCar is moving beyond carpooling and plans to offer both long-distance carpooling rides and bus rides. BlaBlaCar already ran a test with Ouibus for the past six months on popular corridors. It looks

Framer, the Amsterdam-based startup behind interactive design platform Framer X, has raised $24 million in Series B investment. The round is led by European VC firm Atomico, with participation from Accel, and AngelList. The startup says it will use the new capital to continue building out its platform for designers and product teams. It brings

Ryan Smith of Qualtrics speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015 Enterprise software giant SAP announced today that it has agreed to acquire Qualtrics for $8 billion in cash, just before the survey and research software company was set to go public. The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2019.

Meet Bubble a bootstrapped startup that has been building a powerful service that lets you create a web application even if you don’t know how to code. Many small and big companies rely on Bubble for their website. I have to say I was quite skeptical when I first heard about Bubble. Many startups have