Feed Items
French accounting startup Pennylane has just become Europe’s latest unicorn after securing €40mn — its sixth major fundraise since the company was founded just three years ago. “We weren’t even looking for fundraising, but we welcome any opportunity to grow even faster,” Pennylane’s CEO and co-founder, Arthur Waller, boldly stated. The fresh funds have doubled the company’s valuation to €1bn,...
Like many of us, Alisha Fredriksson is terrified about climate change. But unlike many of us, she’s rolling up her sleeves and doing something about it. Two years ago the young entrepreneur co-founded Seabound — a London-based startup on a mission to decarbonise the shipping industry. Unlike other modes of transport like cars or buses, big shipping companies have few technologies at their...
A supermarket deep in rural Germany had a problem. Far from the ample workforce of the nearest city, the shop was staffed largely by local teenagers still at school. The kids were motivated but inexperienced, says Avik Mukhija, co-founder of retail tech startup Freshflow. He declines to reveal the shop’s exact location. When ordering fresh produce each day, the adolescent employees tended to over...
Finnish startup Kuva Space has unveiled plans to provide the US government with hyperspectral data. A powerful technology with diverse applications, hyperspectral imagery analyses a wider light spectrum than traditional sensors. As a result, it can unravel new insights about scanned objects. Here on Earth, the techniques have discovered artworks hidden under Picasso paintings and enhanced colours...
Amid an increasingly intense global race, EU lawmakers have agreed on a new set of rules to boost domestic production of green technologies. On Tuesday, the European Parliament and Council struck a deal on the much-anticipated Net Zero Industrial Act (NZIA). The key regulation seeks to ensure that homegrown net-zerotech can cover at least 40% of the bloc’s demand by 2030. “The NZIA is an...
Welcome to the new episode of the TNW Podcast — the show where we discuss the latest developments in the European technology ecosystem and feature interviews with some of the most interesting people in the industry. In today’s episode, Andrii and Linnea talk about the AI Act, the leak of Mistral’s surprisingly powerful large language model, European supercomputer chips, and more. Here are the...
Deepfake “face swap” attacks skyrocketed by 704% from the first to the second half of 2023, according to new research. Analysts at iProov, a British biometric firm, attributed the surge to the growing accessibility of sophisticated generative AI tools. With their ability to manipulate key traits of an image or video, face swaps made with GenAI are difficult to detect. They’re also user-friendly...