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Dawn Aerospace has flown its rocket-powered aircraft past the speed of sound, the latest milestone on its path to its first commercial flights. During the test, which took place on New Zealand’s South Island, the startup’s Mk-II Aurora aircraft reached Mach 1.1 and an altitude of 25 kilometres. Dawn said this marks the first time a civil aircraft has flown supersonic since Concorde. The feat...
Two years ago, the minds behind Testing for All — a Covid-era at-home testing service — launched a new startup. But instead of those dreaded antigen tests that make you feel like you’re trying to tickle your brain with a cotton swab, the company delivers something much more comforting: a trained nurse or doctor. The London-based venture is called Heim Health. It works with the private sector and...
London-based startup Gendo has secured €5.1mn amid booming demand for its generative AI software built for architects. British architectural designer George Proud and software engineer Will Jones founded Gendo in 2022. The platform transforms simple inputs like sketches, 2D drawings, or text descriptions into hypereal building designs. It works a bit like Midjourney or DALL-E, except it’s built...
Zurich-based venture capital firm Founderful has raised $140mn in its second fund — $20mn more than its target and a strong sign of investor confidence in Switzerland’s flourishing tech ecosystem. First announced back in February, the fund has already invested in 15 early-stage startups. These include Chiral Nano, which develops nanomaterials for silicon chips, and 8inks, which is rejigging the...
American wearables firm Realwear has acquired Swiss augmented reality (AR) startup Almer Technologies. Almer’s AR headset — the Arc-2 — overlays digital information onto the wearer’s field of view, allowing them to access real-time data, instructions, or assistance from an engineer seated anywhere in the world. The glasses are targeted specifically at industrial companies looking to help their...
German tech darling DeepL has (finally) launched a voice-to-text service. It’s called DeepL Voice, and it turns audio from live or video conversations into translated text. DeepL users can now listen to people speaking a language they don’t understand and automatically translate it to one they do — in real-time. The new feature currently supports English, German, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, Dutch...
Amsterdam-based startup Sympower has secured €21mn as it looks to scale its grid-balancing technology. Sympower partners with businesses that use a large amount of electricity. It gains access to some of their energy assets and can turn them on and off when the grid requires balancing — a process called demand response. Sympower’s software platform uses AI to analyse data and optimise when and...
In 1991, Sony brought the first rechargeable lithium-ion battery to market. The unique chemistry proved a game-changer in energy storage. Today everything from EVs to smartphones depends on it, with demand skyrocketing. But lithium is rare, most of it comes from unstable markets outside Europe, and its extraction can cause extensive pollution. We need more lithium to enable the green transition...
New data from LinkedIn on the most in-demand jobs on the platform in the third quarter of this year reveals that software engineering is in second place. Just pipped to the post by sales roles, it is clear that software engineering and development pros are in high demand. Additionally, full stack engineers and application developers feature in the top ten in-demand roles at places eight and ten...
In the ambitious pursuit to tackle the harms from false content on social media and news websites, data scientists are getting creative. While still in their training wheels, the large language models (LLMs) used to create chatbots like ChatGPT are being recruited to spot fake news. With better detection, AI fake news checking systems may be able to warn of, and ultimately counteract, serious...