Europe

Nested, the London-based “data-driven” estate agency that provides a cash advance to help you buy a new home before you’ve sold your old one, has raised a further £120 million in funding. The new round is a mixture of equity and debt: £20 million and £100 million, respectively. Leading the equity round is Northzone, and

A report by England’s children’s commissioner has raised concerns about how kids’ data is being collected and shared across the board, in both the private and public sectors. In the report, entitled Who knows what about me?, Anne Longfield urges society to “stop and think” about what big data means for children’s lives. Big data practices

Netflix has persuaded everyone’s favorite naturalist, David Attenborough, to voice its forthcoming original nature documentary series, Our Planet, which is slated to put conservation squarely in the frame, not just offer glorious animal eye-candy. It’s a timely moment to focus on conservation with climate change posing existential threats to global biodiversity — unless humans act to

Xiaomi’s expansion into Europe continues at speed after the Chinese smartphone maker announced plans to open its first retail store in London. The company is best known for developing quality Android phones at affordable prices and already it has launched devices in Spain, Italy and France. Now, that foray has touched the UK where Xiaomi

RealtimeBoard, a visual collaboration tool particularly suited to distributed teams, has picked up $25 million in Series A funding. Accel led the round, with participation from existing investor AltaIR Capital. The 150 person-strong company — which itself is distributed across offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Perm — says it will use the

Infarm, the Berlin-based startup that has developed vertical farming tech for grocery stores, restaurants and local distribution centres to bring fresh and artisan produce much closer to the consumer, is expanding to Paris. Once again, the company is partnering with Metro in a move that will see Infarm’s “in-store farming” platform installed in the retailer’s

Obtaining a banking license and then launching an actual new retail bank requires capital. A lot of capital. Enter Zopa, the U.K. peer-to-peer lending company that wants to become a bank, which today is announcing that it has closed £60 million in further funding. Only £16 million is actually new new money, having already disclosed

The UK’s privacy watchdog has asked Facebook’s lead EU regulator to look into ongoing data protection concerns about its ad platform — including how its platform is being used to target and spread fake adverts to try to manipulate voters. Facebook’s international HQ is in Ireland so the regulator in play here is the Irish

One Minute TechCrunch! Since it’s impossible, as a journalist, to crawl around all the stands at Web Summit in Lisbon, I thought it would be easier to stand in one place and meet people there! Thus, you will get the chance to meet me (Mike Butcher) and pitch me your company for 1 MINUTE at

Facebook has yet again declined an invitation for its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to answer international politicians’ questions about how disinformation spreads on his platform and undermines democratic processes. But policymakers aren’t giving up — and have upped the ante by issuing a fresh invitation signed by representatives from another three national parliaments. So

The holiday season is here again, touting all sorts of kids’ toys that pledge to pack ‘STEM smarts’ in the box, not just the usual battery-based fun. Educational playthings are nothing new, of course. But, in recent years, long time toymakers and a flurry of new market entrants have piggybacked on the popularity of smartphones

TranswerWise, the European fintech unicorn that enables low-cost international money transfer, has always had ambitions of being a platform in the truest sense. In addition to its direct to consumer app, the company offers an API for integration with other fintechs and banks, although it is fair to say that third-party integrations of this kind

Aiden.ai, a London based AI analytics startup, has raised a $1.6M seed round to develop its “AI-powered marketing analyst” which, they claim, is like having an extra person on the marketing team for mobile apps. The round has been led by Partech. Other investors include Sophia Bendz, who previously led marketing at Spotify and Nicolas

Language learning company Reverso is launching a new product on the web and mobile. Reverso Synonyms is a thesaurus service that lets you learn new words and improve your vocabulary. You may have found this feature in the main Reverso translation app already. If you translate a word or a group of words, there’s a

The UK government has announced an investigation into personalized pricing practices in online retail following growing concerns that vulnerable consumers are at risk of price discrimination through the use of ecommerce technologies that vary prices for products such as cars, holidays and household goods via the use of personal data points. The Competition Markets Authority (CMA) will

An app that the UK’s governing party launched last year — for Conservative Party activists to gamify, ‘socialize’ and co-ordinate their campaigning activity — has been quietly pulled from app stores. Its vanishing was flagged to us earlier today, by Twitter user Sarah Parks, who noticed that, when loaded, the Campaigner app now displays a message informing users

Well, you have to admire a staggered PR plan. Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that just announced £85 million in Series E funding and its entrance into the fintech unicorn club, is rolling out a new feature today. The banking upstart is adding interest-earning savings accounts as an upgrade to its existing “Pots” functionality that

ICEYE CEO Rafal Modrzewski is obsessed with SAR satellites. He’s so obsessed that his company plans to launch dozens of satellites into space. According to him, ICEYE satellites should be much better than existing SAR satellites — call it the Tesla or satellites if you want. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Modrzewski is

French startup Lendix is changing its name to October. The company is using this opportunity to redesign its branding assets and refresh the design of the website for new users. The product remains the same — a lending platform connecting individual and institutional investors with small and medium companies. October had to change its name for

Two separate parliamentary committees, in the UK and Canada, have issued an unprecedented international joint summons for Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before them. The committees are investigating the impact of online disinformation on democratic processes and want Zuckerberg to answer questions related to the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook user data misuse scandal, which both have been

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that now boasts more than a million customers, has raised £85 million in Series E funding. The round is led by U.S. venture capital firm General Catalyst, and Accel. Existing backers Passion Capital, Goodwater, Thrive Capital, Orange Digital Ventures, and Stripe also participated. The latest funding was at a pre-money

Concord is raising a new $25 million funding round led by Tenaya Capital, with existing investors CRV and Alven also participating. The company is building a platform that makes it easier to manage your contracts all the way from writing them to signing them. Even if you used a service like DocuSign to sign a

Volkswagen Group wants to reinvent itself in the age of connected and electric vehicles. And it starts with Volkswagen’s Moia, a brand new mobility brand with services and vehicles built for the cities of tomorrow. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Moia CEO Ole Harms is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. Volkswagen has

Uber is back in court in the UK today and tomorrow to try once again to overturn a  two year old employment tribunal ruling that judged a group of Uber drivers to be workers — meaning they’re entitled to workers benefits such as holiday pay, paid rest breaks and the national minimum wage. Uber lost its first

Earlier this year omni:us, an AI-driven service which is able to process digital documents (some of which contain handwriting) by classifying them and extracting the valuable data, revealed it was working with over half of the top 10 insurance providers in the German-speaking DACH region. It’s now closured a Series A round of funding bringing

One of the longest-standing crypto exchanges has new owners after Europe-based Bitstamp was sold to South Korea’s Nexon, marking the gaming firm’s second such acquisition. The acquirer is NXMH, a Belgium-based PE and investment firm owned by NXC — the parent of Nexon — and it will take a majority 80 percent stake in the business for

Mytaxi, the Daimler-owned Uber competitor, announced today it would launch an electric scooter pilot in Southern Europe later this year, with a full international roll-out planned for 2019. Daimler initially took a 15 percent stake in Hamburg-based mytaxi in 2012, adding the company to its portfolio of ridesharing businesses that also includes Chauffeur Privé, Careem, Flinc, car2go and

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s visage loomed large over the European parliament this week, both literally and figuratively, as global privacy regulators gathered in Brussels to interrogate the human impacts of technologies that derive their power and persuasiveness from our data. The eponymous social network has been at the center of a privacy storm this year. And

From humble beginnings as a simple Facebook group I posted in September 2015, Techfugees has come a long way. It was conceived as a vehicle to enthuse technologists about the plight of refugees by waking them up to the idea that their innovation, startup mentality and design-led thinking could potentially bring new, scalable new solutions

We couldn’t put together a conference in Berlin without inviting Valentin Stalf from N26, the co-founder and CEO of one of Europe’s most promising startups. A few years ago, few people would have bet on a startup creating a bank from scratch. N26 now has over 1.5 million clients and a ton of funding. N26