Europe

European early-stage investor Seedcamp has announced the $180M close of its “Fund VI”. It’s a long way from a London university lecture hall 15 years ago in September, when Founding Partner and co-CEO Reshma Sohoni stood up and introduced the first Seedcamp cohort (Incidentally, this was the same day TechCrunch launched in Europe, and my first day

Wefox, the German insurtech startup, has closed a new funding round from existing investors. The funding amount isn’t going to impress anyone as the company managed to secure $55 million. This could be considered as an extension of the $400 million Series D round as Wefox managed to maintain the same valuation of $4.5 billion.

In 1846, London surgeon John Hutchinson invented the spirometer, a thing you blow hard into, to measure the volume of air inspired and expired by the lungs. It’s a pretty basic idea. Incredibly, since then, the technology has barely evolved. Today, the modern spirometer doesn’t even measure the amount of CO2 expelled by the lungs,

Welsh in-space manufacturing startup Space Forge has developed a satellite reentry system to enable rapid recovery and reuse of its in-space manufacturing spacecraft. The new system, which includes a heat shield and a water vehicle designed to soften the spacecraft’s landing, will be incorporated into the company’s in-space manufacturing satellite platform called ForgeStar. As opposed

Building and maintaining relationships is hard, and COVID-19 definitely didn’t help. Multiple studies have shown that adults have gotten even more lonely since the start of the pandemic. Founders are trying to find tech solutions. There are many startups looking to combat loneliness — some formed years before the pandemic — including senior-focused ElliQ and

Reminder: Today is the deadline for the Meta’s lead privacy regulator in Europe to adopt a final decision on a nearly decade-long complaint against Facebook’s transfers of personal data from the EU to the US that could see the company ordered to stop the flow of data. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) confirmed to

Builder.ai tapped into a new wave of businesses wanting their own native apps with a turnkey approach, accelerated by the rapid digitization of life during the pandemic. That led to led to a $100 million Series C funding round last year led by Insight Partners, taking the company’s total funding to $195 million. It’s now

In a series of votes in the European Parliament this morning MEPs have backed a raft of amendments to the bloc’s draft AI legislation — including agreeing a set of requirements for so called foundational models which underpin generative AI technologies like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The text of the amendment agreed by MEPs in two committees

The U.K.’s floundering National Health Service (NHS) is not in the best of shapes by just about any estimation, the victim of chronic underfunding and understaffing that has led to excruciatingly long waiting times and health care professionals striking en masse. But in the midst of chaos, opportunity often lingers. A growing number of startups

Most U.S.-based tech investors are likely familiar with smaller-ticket investor marketplaces AngelList and Carta. In Europe, Germany’s Bunch and the UK’s Vauban (acquired by by US-based Carta last year) have attempted to do similar job. But the back-story to this is that although launching many years ago, AngelList struggled with Europe’s regulatory environment. UK Angel

Clearview AI, the US startup that’s attracted notoriety in recent years for a massive privacy violation after it scraped selfies off the Internet and used people’s data to build a facial recognition tool it pitched to law enforcement and others, has been hit with another fine in France over non-cooperation with the data protection regulator.

The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has officially greenlighted the proposed $7.3 billion merger between Viasat and Inmarsat. London-based Inmarsat and its U.S. rival Viasat offer various satellite services including in-flight Wi-Fi to commercial airlines. Today’s news comes some two months after the CMA revealed that it was likely to give the merger the

For founders and investors, there’s no platform like TechCrunch Disrupt. Just as the industry is always evolving and innovating — especially in recent months — we’re doing the same to keep Disrupt on the cutting edge for first-time founders, seasoned investors, visionaries and everybody in between. It’s time to disrupt TechCrunch Disrupt This year, we’re

Last year we covered how late-stage tech backer Liquidity Group had raised $775M for its fintech platform from Apollo (private equity) and MUFG (a Japanese bank). Liquidity is part tech platform and part lender, using its technology to make decisions on deploying debt facilities and other financial solutions from $5M to 100M relatively quickly compared