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The European Investment Bank (EIB) is considering new measures to help close the funding gap for European startups and prevent them from relocating across the Atlantic. During a meeting with EU finance ministers yesterday in Luxembourg, the EIB proposed its “Action Plan” that aims to boost Europe’s capital markets, investments, and competitiveness. A key pillar of the plan is to increase support for the...

Stop for a moment and pay attention to the things around you. The clothes you’re wearing, the device you’re using, what you’re sitting on, the building you’re in. What are they made of?  The simple answer is “stuff from nature” — woods, metals, rocks, oils, and plants refined into things like furniture, batteries, bricks, plastics, and clothes.  In 2017, humanity’s total material footprint —...

“Welcome on board. I have been tasked with taking you to Mäntsälä — in the middle of nowhere,” the minivan driver greets us in the characteristic clear and unhurried intonations of a Finnish native speaker. Mäntsälä is, indeed, in the middle of nowhere. But this kind of location is often where you find collections of some of the most powerful machines of today, humming...

Stockholm-based Lovable has raised $7.5mn in pre-seed funding for its newly-launched AI coding assistant that promises to make everyone a dev. Dubbed GPT Engineer, the AI coding tool generates production-ready code in real-time, without requiring developer experience. According to the startup, users need only chat with the assistant to build websites and web apps. “We want to expand the world’s coding capabilities beyond the current...

It doesn’t simply take a village to raise a startup. It takes a whole ecosystem, driven by the collaboration between governments, corporates, ecosystem builders — and of course, visionary founders. Startup ecosystems have naturally emerged as the foundation of technological innovation and as key drivers for business growth and regional development. But there isn’t a single recipe for success. What’s the best way to...

The recently released EU Competitiveness Report from the European Commission delivered a stark message to the bloc’s tech sector. As Mario Draghi, lead author of the report, warned, Europe faces ‘’an existential challenge’’. “The problem is not that Europe lacks ideas or ambition,” the former Italian premier said. “But innovation is blocked at the next stage: we are failing to translate innovation into commercialisation.”...

To the average eye, extended reality is starting to look bleak. The metaverse has bombed, the Apple Vision Pro has flopped, and Sony has all but abandoned the PSVR. Sadly for Mark Zuckerberg, consumers rarely want to strap computers to their faces. But there is one place where business is booming: the military. XR has diffused across the armed forces since 2021, when Microsoft...

Europe’s spacetech elite are making their final preparations for a groundbreaking meeting with an asteroid. A spacecraft called Hera — named after the Greek goddess of marriage — will make the rendezvous. The probe is slated for launch on October 7. If all goes well, Hera will then complete a detailed inspection of Dimorphos — a binary asteroid that’s also caught the eye of...

Finland’s vast green forests are famously restorative. So restorative that they can even treat diseases. That’s according to Uute Scientific, a biotech firm based in Helsinki. The company has created a unique remedy: a microbial extract that replicates Finnish nature. Today, the startup revealed new evidence of the organism’s powers. The extract targets a growing health problem. Immune systems, Uute says, are being weakened by...

Amsterdam-based Lapsi Health is looking to firmly position itself in the rapidly-evolving market of smart medical devices. The startup announced yesterday the US launch of its first clinical support tool, a digital stethoscope, after receiving clearance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — the US regulator for medical devices. Dubbed Keikku, the digital stethoscope is a portable wireless device that uses sensing technology...

IBM’s first quantum data centre in Europe may have been planned during his predecessor’s tenure, but it was Olaf Scholz with entourage who descended on the small German town of Ehningen on Tuesday. The reason was to welcome the first IBM Heron processor to be installed outside of the US.  When the Chancellor of Germany shows up to spend nearly half a day at...

London-based scaleup Huma announced today the expansion of its digital healthcare solutions with the acquisition of eConsult. This is one of the UK’s largest digital triage and consultation platforms across primary and emergency care. Founded in 2011, Huma works with healthcare providers and big pharma to improve clinical outcomes with digital solutions. Since its founding, the company has been strategically expanding its portfolio of...

2025 marks Amsterdam’s 750th birthday. It also marks the 19th TNW Conference, which will take place on June 19 and 20 at — and you’re all invited. The show returns to NDSM next year, right at the heart of the city. As usual, we’re bringing together the entire ecosystem, from startups and investors to C-level executives, industry leaders, and policy makers. With a mission...

Six-fingered gloves have been sent to global leaders as a chilling reminder of AI dangers. The gloves symbolise a disturbing digital problem: image generators giving people extra fingers. The petrifying pictures have now been brought to life by Finnish startup Saidot. “AI is developing so fast that nobody can fully anticipate its impacts and the emerging risks,” warned Veera Siivonen, the company’s CCO and...

Microsoft has partnered with medical note taking software startup Autoscriber to further scale the latter’s software across the EMEA region. The company’s speech-based AI tool frees up large chunks of doctors’ time and allows them to stay focused on their patients during consults. Based out of the Netherlands and South Africa, Autoscriber offers an ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) product that automatically generates summaries from...

Gone are the days of elite footballers buying pubs. Today’s star players prefer to put their money into tech. Kylian Mbappe is one of the new generation’s leaders. The French captain has his own investment company, Coalition Capital, which just bought a stake in German electronics giant Loewe Technology. The luxury brand has an ambitious business plan. Over the next few years, the company...

Dubai is a city on the rise. The first nine months of 2023 saw its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increase by 3.3%, while in the same period, its information and communications sector shot up by 4.4%. Alongside its prolonged economic success, the city has also become a haven for startups and the tech sector in general. A big part of this has been the...

What do the Rothschilds, big wave surfing, and cows have in common? A Portuguese man by the name of Francisco Roque de Pinho, of course. Francisco used to be a banker at Rothschild, the most famous of European banking dynasties. For the past eight years he’s been quietly operating an investment firm funding sustainable cattle grazing in South America. In his spare time, he’s...

Swedish prosecutors are set to serve Northvolt with a suspicion of gross manslaughter notice following the death of a worker at the EV battery-maker’s struggling gigafactory in the country’s icy North, the Financial Times reports.  Environmental prosecutor Christer B Jarlås told the paper that officials will deliver the formal notice in the coming weeks, which indicates Northvolt is under investigation for possible legal responsibility...

Arm wants to upgrade the brains inside our mobile devices. The chip designer — whose architectures power 99% of smartphones — envisions AI bringing a new wave of breakthroughs to our handsets. The company outlined this plan after the release of Llama 3.2 — Meta’s first open-source models that processes both images and text.Arm said the models run “seamlessly” on its compute platform. The smaller, text-based LLMs —...

UK startup Pact has raised £9mn in funding and opened a new factory to scale up the “world’s first” sustainable and scalable biomaterial made from collagen — the primary building block of your skin. The material — dubbed Oval — looks, feels, and ages much like leather, but without the environmental impacts. Oval doesn’t just look like leather, it also responds to scratches, water,...

Amsterdam-based scaleup Mews has bagged $100mn in credit financing as it looks to swallow up competitors and become a market leader in SaaS software for the hospitality industry. Vista Credit Partners, the credit-investing arm of tech-focused private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, dished out the funding.  Mews, based at TNW City, has built a cloud-based system that helps hotels and other hospitality businesses manage...

Following a five-fold growth since 2018, VC investment in Europe’s defence tech is set to hit a record year in 2024, as it’s on course to reach $1bn. According to a new Dealroom report, Europe is now at the heart of an investment surge, as governments turn to the defence tech sector to strengthen national security in response to escalating geopolitical instability. “As we...

Nebius today announced the launch of a new data centre in Paris — among the first in Europe to offer NVIDIA’s H200 Tensor Core GPUs. The company, which is the rebranded European arm of “Russia’s Google,” Yandex, is investing more than $1bn to build AI infrastructure across the continent by mid-2025.  “We work in a new industry which requires both deep technology and significant...