Friday is here and so is TNW’s weekly round-up of tech news from our glorious home country. This week saw advances in medtech, quantum breakthroughs, and calls to further boost the Dutch chip industry. Our highlights have you covered, but…
Estonian mobility startup Bolt has secured a €220mn credit facility as it plans to go public next year. This type of financing is a more flexible loan option, which allows a business to withdraw and repay funds as needed, on an ongoing…
Flemish venture capital firm Imec.xpand has raised €300mn to invest in deeptech startups. The VC is a spinoff from Leuven-based Imec, one of the world’s largest microelectronics research institutions. The new fund targets AI,…
Today’s NHS faces severe time constraints, with the risk of short consultations and concerns about the risk of misdiagnosis or delayed care. These challenges are compounded by limited resources and overstretched staff that results in…
When the EU approved the European Green Deal in 2020, the bloc unveiled a plan to lead the clean energy transition. Yet it has since faced growing competition from both China — which has quickly and quietly buried Europe’s solar panel…
Lithuanian climate investment firm HeavyFinance has added over 700,000 football pitches-worth of farmland in Ukraine to its soil carbon credit programme. Modern agriculture has taken its toll on soils. Centuries of plowing, cutting, and…
In June, Kubernetes celebrates its tenth birthday. The system is now so widely used by hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide to scale their applications to meet demand it’s hard even to remember a time before it existed. But there…
Another Dutch tech firm has been caught in the simmering tensions between the West and China. Amid growing calls to curb Chinese access to chipmaking equipment from ASML, a Dutch minister has raised a separate alarm about the sale of…
Utrecht-based Vitestro has raised €20mn to bring its robotic blood drawing device to market. Founded in 2017, Vitestro aims to improve the blood draw experience for patients and address personnel shortages in healthcare — where the demand…
Blockchain is often criticised as a solution in search of a problem. But one group of people has already found immense value in the tech: money launderers. Their crimes cause painful headaches for financial institutions, crypto businesses,…
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,…
Vinted, the popular online marketplace for second-hand fashion, has announced its first-ever annual profit. The milestone follows a strong 2023, reaching €596.3mn in revenue — a 61% increase compared to the previous year (€370.2mn). With…
MindAffect, a Netherlands-based healthtech startup, has raised €1.1mn to bring its hearing diagnostics technology to market. A spinout from Radboud University, MindAffect has developed a patented brain computer interface (BCI) technology,…
The European Space Agency (ESA) has secured a ride for its solar wind satellite. The Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer — or Smile for short — will blast into space aboard a Vega-C rocket. The launch is scheduled for late…
Paris-based Klineo has raised €2mn for its AI platform that facilitates access to cancer clinical trials. Klineo’s platform connects doctors and patients directly with relevant clinical trials. It provides trial search, contact with…
The Financial Times (full disclosure — the owners of The Next Web) have inked a deal with OpenAI. The American firm will use the British publisher’s content to train its generative AI models. The deal is the latest in a string of new…
Under the UK’s new cybersecurity law, consumer smart devices can no longer allow the use of weak, easy-to-guess passwords, such as “admin” or “12345.” This is part of a set of minimum-security standards the UK is requiring to protect…
Polestar has successfully charged its upcoming EV model in just 10 minutes. The Swedish car maker achieved the feat using a “silicon-dominant” battery built by Israeli startup StoreDot. Polestar installed the battery in a fully drivable…
Our understanding of the challenges women face in the startup ecosystem is limited. Past research has focused on overt negative sexist attitudes that question women’s competence and suitability for entrepreneurship. This view overlooks the…
Hallo, Netherlands! Welcome to TNW’s first weekly round-up of tech news from our glorious home country. As we count down to TNW conference in Amsterdam on June 20 and 21, we’re ramping up our coverage of the Dutch IT sector. We’d also love…
In 2022, over 20,000 Lithuanians returned to their country of birth from abroad. A high quality of life coupled with a booming entrepreneurial ecosystem and a collaborative mentality has contributed to what investors are calling a “reverse…
DeepL, which has been rivalling machine translation giants such as Google Translate and Microsoft Translator, has launched an AI writing assistant tailored for businesses. Dubbed DeepL Write Pro, the product acts as a creative assistant…
British cybersecurity flag bearer Darktrace is set to leave London’s stock market after agreeing a £4.3bn sale to US private equity firm Thoma Bravo. Shareholders will have to approve the takeover before it’s rubber-stamped. The chair of…
Time and again, leading scientists, technologists, and philosophers have made spectacularly terrible guesses about the direction of innovation. Even Einstein was not immune, claiming, “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear…
Cyber attackers battered Poland after the country’s change of government late last year. DDoS attacks at the end of 2023 were nearly quadruple the country’s average, according to cybersecurity firm NetScout’s observations. The surge began…
Demand for industrial robots is rising in Europe, especially driven by the benefits of automation. However, there are ongoing challenges in ensuring seamless collaboration with humans while maintaining safety. To address this issue, a…
A British startup today unveiled new AI humans that blur the line between the virtual and the real. Synthesia calls the digital beings “Expressive Avatars.” They promise the most realistic emotional expressions on the market. Generated by…
Dutch car-sharing platform SnappCar, which claims to be the largest of its kind in the Netherlands, has been fully acquired by AutoBinck Group — a shareholder in the scaleup since its founding in 2011. The ownership change also sees the…
A startup promising “universal AI compute” has joined France’s thriving artificial intelligence sector. Paris-based FlexAI emerged from stealth today with a €28.5mn war chest and an ambitious plan to “unlock the future of machine…
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,…