Tag: ecosystems

Europe’s drought is shutting down nuclear reactors

Nuclear reactors need water. They sit beside rivers and coastlines for a reason. The water carries heat away from the core. When it runs low or runs warm, the reactor has to power down. That is happening across Europe right now. On Thursday, Romania’s state-owned Nuclearelectrica began disconnecting the country’s sole operating reactor, CNBC reported. […]

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Yann LeCun’s second attempt at a VC fund lands with $100M and Gemini’s co-lead as a partner

TL;DR LeCun and Oriol Vinyals join 224 Ventures, a new AI fund with $100M+ in assets. Targets early stage AI with $1M-$5M checks. University of Illinois is anchor investor. LPs are mostly AI insiders. Yann LeCun has found a VC fund that will actually launch. The Meta former chief AI scientist is joining 224 Ventures, […]

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Robinhood is launching a publicly traded fund that invests in Y Combinator startups. Anyone can buy shares.

TL;DR Robinhood Ventures Fund II is going public at $25/share, focused on Y Combinator startups. Fund I (March IPO, $315M raised) holds Databricks, Stripe, Canva. Goldman, Citi, JPMorgan underwriting. 2% management + 20% incentive fee. Robinhood is launching a second publicly traded closed-end fund that will invest in private companies from the Y Combinator ecosystem. […]

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NVIDIA didn’t invest in Xanadu, but it made its CEO a billionaire anyway

Christian Weedbrook, the founder and CEO of Toronto-based Xanadu Quantum Technologies, became a billionaire this week without NVIDIA investing a single dollar in his company. His 46.4 million multiple-voting shares were worth approximately $1.5 billion as of midday Friday, after Xanadu’s stock surged nearly fivefold in six trading sessions. The catalyst was not anything Xanadu […]

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AppDirect buys PartnerStack to complete its ‘everything store’ for B2B software distribution

AppDirect has acquired Toronto-based PartnerStack, the partner relationship management platform with 138,000+ B2B partners and ~50% market share in the PRM category. Terms were not disclosed. The deal is AppDirect’s sixth acquisition in 12 months, following Tackle.io (cloud go-to-market, $20B+ in hyperscaler transactions), vCom Solutions ($100M+, network/mobility), and DNE Resources (energy). AppDirect ($438M raised, $1.5B […]

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Rethinking Hospitality Operations Through AI Integration While Preserving the Human Experience at Scale

Hospitality has long been defined by human interaction, but the systems that support those interactions have undergone continuous change. Arran Campolucci-Bordi, owner of Casa Italia, established 50 years ago in Liverpool, UK, frames this evolution through lived experience, tracing a path from handwritten reservation books to digital booking systems and now toward AI-driven operations. In […]

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Anthropic signs biggest compute deal yet with Google and Broadcom as revenue run rate hits $30bn

In short: Anthropic has agreed to access approximately 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation Google TPU compute capacity via Broadcom from 2027, its largest infrastructure commitment to date — while simultaneously disclosing that its revenue run rate has surpassed $30bn, more than tripling from roughly $9bn at the end of 2025. Anthropic has announced it is securing multiple […]

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Argentine wildfire AI startup raises $2.7M after building a detection system that beats NASA’s alerts by 35 minutes

Satellites on Fire, founded in 2020 as a school project by three Argentine teenagers, has closed a seed round led by Dalus Capital. Its software-only platform integrates satellite data from multiple agencies and detects fires faster than NASA’s FIRMS system by avoiding the gaps between satellite passes. Argentine climate-tech startup Satellites on Fire has closed […]

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A 27-year-old just raised $450 million to bet that AI’s future runs on nuclear power

Isaiah Taylor was sixteen when he decided the nuclear industry had a size problem. Not that reactors were too dangerous or too expensive, though they are both, but that they were simply too big. The multi-gigawatt monuments to Cold War-era engineering that still dot the American landscape were designed for a grid that moved power […]

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OpenUp raises €20M to scale employee mental health platform

The Amsterdam startup, which gives employees direct anonymous access to psychologists, lifestyle experts, and financial counsellors through their employer, now serves more than 2,000 organisations across five European markets. Smartfin led the round; Rubio Impact Ventures, which led the 2022 Series A, returned. The traditional path to professional psychological help in Europe involves a GP […]

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Halter raises $220M at $2 billion valuation as virtual fencing for cattle goes global

A cow wearing a GPS collar doesn’t sound like a $2 billion idea. But for the ranchers who have strung virtual fences across 60,000 miles of American pastureland in under two years, it apparently is. Halter, the New Zealand-born agtech company, announced on Monday that it has raised $220 million in Series E funding at […]

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DORA is reshaping how Europe’s financial sector thinks about compliance, and most firms still aren’t ready

Fourteen months after the Digital Operational Resilience Act became enforceable, Europe’s financial institutions are running out of room to improvise. The regulation, which took effect on January 17, 2025, was supposed to mark the beginning of a new era in digital risk management across the EU. Instead, it has exposed just how far most firms […]

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Mantle8 secures €2.06M EU grant to scale natural hydrogen tech

A €2.06 million EU grant gives the Grenoble deep-tech startup non-dilutive runway to industrialise a four-component technology platform, and moves it one step closer to its first commercial drilling campaign. Fourteen months after closing a €3.4 million seed round backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Kiko Ventures, Mantle8 has secured a second source […]

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Cleo launches new ‘AI money coach’ to help fix your spending habits

UK-based fintech Cleo, known for its AI-powered budgeting app, has launched its most advanced product to date. Dubbed Cleo 3.0, the new version introduces features such as voice interaction, long-term memory, and improved reasoning capabilities. Barney Hussey-Yeo, Cleo’s founder and chief executive, said Cleo 3.0 is less chatbot and more “conversational AI money coach.” Users […]

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Why navigating ongoing uncertainty requires living in the now, near, and next

As we move into the second half of 2025, the global tech ecosystem is navigating a heady mix of unpredictability and promise. Funding into newer tech firms remains complex, with Startup Genome reporting that while the Beijing, Los Angeles and Tokyo startup landscapes are seeing YoY growth, Paris is flat and the rest of the […]

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Funding focus: Germany snaps up 90% of Europe’s record defence tech funding

Funding focus is a new series analysing cash flow into the European tech ecosystem. Last week, we looked at the largest investment rounds in fusion energy this year, and now we’re honing in on Europe’s booming defence tech arena.  Europe’s defence tech startups secured $971mn in funding in the first half of this year, as VCs […]

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