Europe

The dev team that’s now engineering the Fleksy keyboard app has raised more than $800,000 via an equity crowdfunding route. As we reported a year ago, the development of Fleksy’s keyboard has been taken over by the Barcelona-based startup behind an earlier keyboard app called ThingThing. The team says their new funding raise — described

The European Parliament has called for a full audit of Facebook following a string of data breach scandals —  including the Cambridge Analytica affair. MEPs are urging the company to allow European Union bodies to carry out a full audit to assess data protection and security of users’ personal data, following the scandal in which

Italy’s Autorità garante della concorrenza e del mercato, roughly equivalent to this America’s FTC, has fined Apple and Samsung a total of $15 million for the companies’ practice of forcing updates on consumers that may slow or break their devices. The amount may be a drop in the bucket, but it’s a signal that governments

In a speech discussing ethics and the Internet, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has tasked the technology industry and its coder army with paying continuous attention to the world their software is consuming as they go about connecting humanity through technology. Coding must mean consciously grappling with ethical choices in

TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin is right around the corner, and I’m excited to announce that we invited Threads founder Sophie Hill to talk about her innovative vision of luxury shopping. Threads is like nothing out there. It isn’t an e-commerce website with warehouses and and suppliers. It isn’t a marketplace website for second-hand luxury goods. It

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has joined the chorus of voices warning that data itself is being weaponized again people and societies — arguing that the trade in digital data has exploded into a “data industrial complex”. Cook did not namecheck the adtech elephants in the room: Google, Facebook and other background data brokers that profit

We already knew that the electronic scooter space in Europe was heating up, with Berlin’s Tier announcing today it has raised €25 million in a round led by Northzone, and rumours circulating that Delivery Hero founder Lukasz Gadowski has ventured into the space — all within the context of U.S. companies Bird and Lime recently

Futrli, a cloud-based business decision-making platform aimed at small businesses, has raised a £4m Series A from e.ventures, Notion Capital and firstminute Capital. Bootstrapped to date, Futrli claims to have over 40,000 businesses and 1,100 accountants in 130 countries using it. The four-year-old business led by CEO and founder Hannah Dawson says it uses AI/ML

Tier, one of a number of electric scooter rental startups based in Berlin, has raised a chunky €25 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is VC fund Northzone, with participation from existing investors Speedinvest, and Point Nine. The investment marks the biggest financial backing for a European company in the space, and, according

Cowboy, the Belgium startup that’s designed and sells a smarter electronic bicycle, has raised €10 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Tiger Global Management, with participation from previous backers Index Ventures, and Hardware Club. The new capital will be used to scale operations, and expand beyond Belgum into Germany, U.K., Netherlands, and

A major new campaign of disinformation around Brexit, designed to stir up U.K. ‘Leave’ voters, and distributed via Facebook, may have reached over 10 million people in the U.K., according to new research. The source of the campaign is so far unknown, and will be embarrassing to Facebook, which only this week claimed it was

Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Git-based code sharing and collaboration service, GitHub, has been given an unconditional greenlight from European Union regulators. The software giant announced its intention to bag GitHub back in June, saying it would shell out $7.5 billion in stock to do so. At the time it also pledged: “GitHub will retain its

Startup funding hasn’t changed much in the past decade. Funderbeam is an interesting company trying to turn everything upside down using a marketplace approach, a modern syndication system and a blockchain-based platform. I’m excited to announce that Funderbeam founder and CEO Kaidi Ruusalepp will come to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. The first boom of venture capital

A lot of uncertainty hangs over the U.K. as it continues its slow march out of the European Union, but today one of the world’s biggest companies announced plans to expand its presence in the country. Amazon today said it would add another 1,000 workers in the U.K., including establishing its first corporate and R&D

Emma, the U.K. money management app (or self-described “financial advocate”), is launching a cryptocurrency feature by integrating with a plethora of exchanges so that you can easily track your cryptocurrency balances. The idea is that a modern PFM type app should support cryptocurrency if it wants to provide insights into a user’s whole financial life,

French startup Alan wants to be a bit better than your good old health insurance. That’s why the company is trying something new and now covers part of your Petit Bambou subscription. Petit Bambou is a popular meditation app. It’s a sort of Headspace, but with French content. You download an app, put your earphones,

Facebook has announced it rolled out a system of checks on political ads run on its platform in the UK which requires advertisers to verify their identity and location to try to make it harder for foreign actors to meddle in domestic elections and referenda. This follows similar rollouts of political ad transparency tools in

JobUFO, the Berlin-based startup that has built a video focussed app to help facilitate better job applications, has raised €2 million in seed funding. Leading the round is IBB and Hevella Capital, with the investment to be used for growth. Claiming to re-invent the way companies handle the application process, JobUFO has developed an online/mobile

Syncron, a Stockholm-headquartered company that offers a SaaS to help equipment and other product manufacturers move to a service model, has raised $67 million, its first ever funding round despite being over 15 years old. Leading the round is growth equity firm Summit Partners, while a source close to Syncron pegs the post-money valuation at

Only six months ago Barcelona-based TravelPerk bagged a $21M Series B, off the back of strong momentum for a software as a service platform designed to take a Slack-like chunk out of the administrative tedium of arranging and expensing work trips. Today the founders’ smiles are firmly back in place: TravelPerk has announced a $44M Series

Stride.VC, the new VC fund from Fred Destin, formerly a partner at Accel, and Harry Stebbings, producer of the “The Twenty Minute VC” podcast and ex-Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Atomico, is being officially unveiled today, confirming most of the details of my earlier report. The fund has closed at just over its £50 million target and will

Readdle might not be a familiar name, but chances are you’ve been using some of their mobile apps. The Ukrainian company is a bootstrapped success story with 100 million downloads, 135 employees and a profitable business. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Readdle Vice President Denys Zhadanov is coming to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to

New Relic, a provider of analytics and monitoring around a company’s internal and external facing apps and services to help optimise their performance, is making an acquisition today as it continues to expand a newer area of its business, containers and microservices. The company has announced that it has purchased CoScale, a provider of monitoring

With its regulatory woes behind it — and the acqui-hire of fintech startup Pariti — Tandem‘s product roadmap appears to be picking up pace. The challenger bank founded by Ricky Knox has launched its second credit card today, this time targeting people in the U.K. who have yet to build up a credit history at

After holding a series of hearings in the wake of the Facebook –Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal this summer, and attending a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg himself in May, the European Union parliament’s civil liberties committee has called for an update to competition rules to reflect what it dubs “the digital reality”, urging EU institutions

On the heels of Apple this morning inking a $600 million deal to acquire IP, talent and licenses from Dialog Semiconductor in Europe, it has also confirmed another acquisition of a smaller startup in the region. Apple has purchased Spektral, a computer vision company based out of Denmark that worked segmentation technology, a more efficient

French startup Skello just raised a $6.9 million funding round (€6 million) from Aglaé Ventures, XAnge, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle and existing investors Thomas Landais, Guillaume le Dieu de Ville and Gilles Blanchard. The startup is helping bar, restaurant and hotel managers keep track of all the shifts and staffing issues. Skello uses a software-as-a-service approach to

School’s back in session and a startup that’s building games to help students learn has moved to the top of the class. Kahoot — the educational gaming startup out of Norway that has been a quick hit with schools in the US and elsewhere — today announced that it has raised 126.5 million Norwegian krone

An analysis of the impact of Europe’s new data protection framework, GDPR, on the adtech industry suggests the regulation has reduced the numbers of ad trackers that websites are hooking into EU visitors. But it also implies that Google may have slightly increased its marketshare in the region — indicating the adtech giant could be winning

Emmanuel Macron came to France’s ginormous startup campus Station F to talk to the French tech community. The event is organized by La French Tech, the government initiative to promote and foster the startup community in France. Station F director Roxanne Varza first took the stage to introduce the event. She announced that there will