Mike Butcher, Author at TechCrunch

Faber launches third VC fund with $34M first close, aims for $64M

Mike Butcher — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 13:36:31 +0000

The startup ecosystem in the Iberian Peninsula — the region encompassing Spain and Portugal — has been on a roll the last couple of years. The value of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023, according to Dealroom data, with venture investment of €2.2 billion across some 850 rounds. Meanwhile, Portugal has produced a slew of […]

Founders and VCs back a Pan-European C corp, but an ‘EU Inc’ has a rocky road ahead

Mike Butcher, Anna Heim — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 19:13:24 +0000

It’s become a common refrain in political discourse: Europe needs to take radical action to remain competitive. On the long list of potential reforms, one that’s gaining particular traction is a new, EU-wide corporate status for innovative companies. Known (somewhat obscurely) as the “28th regime,” the innovation is being billed as Europe’s answer to a […]

Airdog’s founders are back with a precision-strike drone meant for modern warfare

Mike Butcher — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 09:52:15 +0000

The war in Ukraine has shown that warfare changes by the day. It’s also clear that the tech used to make war today is costly: While larger countries can afford legions of tanks, helicopters, and precision-strike systems, smaller nations find themselves scrambling for cheaper ways to defend themselves. Origin, a new defense tech startup out of […]

General Catalyst raises $8B in fresh funds to back startups globally

Paul Sawers, Mike Butcher — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 12:44:00 +0000

U.S. venture capital giant General Catalyst has announced a fresh $8 billion in funds as it looks to ramp up its investments in multi-sector early-stage startups globally, with a specific focus on the U.S., Europe, and India. The capital constitutes around $4.5 billion for its “core VC funds,” which spans seed and growth equity funding, […]

Sensei reels in $16M to expand its contactless store platform in Europe

Mike Butcher — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 06:00:00 +0000

While Amazon Go helped popularize the concept of completely contactless stores, the arena is growing with others like 7-Eleven and Walmart entering the category, as well as several startups such as Standard Cognition, Zippin, AiFi, Grabango, and Trigo. In Europe, Portuguese startup Sensei has been capitalizing on this momentum to grow its contactless store platform, and […]

Long careers in luxury fashion led to a $17M raise for this supply chain platform

Mike Butcher — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 09:35:22 +0000

The retail sector needs inventory planning to maintain margins and meet demand. This is getting harder because there are now many distribution channels, more complex supply chains, and shorter sales cycles. Mid-market retailers and premium brands have less firepower than the retail giants and tend to rely on legacy software. Founded in 2020, Autone aims […]

Aktiia trained AI on 11 billion data points of blood pressure, and now a clinically certified app is coming

Mike Butcher — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 14:56:39 +0000

As well as being a major cause of premature death worldwide, hypertension, also known as high blood pressure, is a major risk factor for stroke, coronary artery disease, and heart failure, and is a contributing factor to dementia. It also affects an estimated 1.3 billion people; up to 95% of cases are due to lifestyle […]

Unhappy with their exit, these ex-Planetly employees are using AI to refine carbon accounting

Mike Butcher — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 11:29:31 +0000

Startup employees often go on to found interesting ventures, basing their new work on the experience gained from their time building a company from scratch. But not all of those experiences are positive, and sometimes, a less-than-satisfactory exit can do more to fuel a founder’s fervor than anything else. In the case of Forward Earth’s […]

Gropyus plans to use robots to help rebuild Ukraine better and faster

Mike Butcher — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 14:46:40 +0000

Construction tech startup Groypus has raised $100 million to scale up its factory that uses robots to make buildings 30% faster than traditional methods.

Quoroom acquires Investory to scale up its capital-raising platform for startups

Mike Butcher — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 13:08:51 +0000

These days, private investors have a range of options for investing in startups without having to deal with them in real life. This ecosystem more or less started with AngelList, but there are now a plethora of options — such as Carta, Allocations, Vauban, and Odin — that startups can use to raise funding and […]

Scammed and exploited, she built an AI-driven app for immigrants like her

Mike Butcher — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 11:36:28 +0000

Immigrants face an enormous number of challenges and difficulties. In particular, without a local base of family or friends to depend on, new immigrants often find themselves in the dark about reliable information on essential services like housing, healthcare and banking. After being scammed and exploited, one immigrant founder decided to try to help other […]

Hedosophia leads $7M seed round into retail supply chain AI startup Ameba

Mike Butcher — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 10:12:19 +0000

Ameba takes the unstructured data in a retailer’s supply chain systems, sprinkles in some generative AI, and makes the whole thing more efficient.

Direct ocean capture may be the next frontier for carbon removal

Mike Butcher — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 17:24:22 +0000

Amsterdam-based Brineworks, a company specializing in seawater electrolysis technology, says its innovative method is expected to cost under $100 per ton of CO2 at scale.

As war rages in Ukraine, investment in European defense and dual-use tech skyrockets

Mike Butcher — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 11:07:18 +0000

A new Dealroom report shows that VC investment in defense-related tech is outpacing any other type of investment across NATO member states and allies.

Convergence AI played with agents ‘for years’ until raising $12M to give them long-term memory

Mike Butcher — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 17:04:00 +0000

The strategy is to create consumer agents, but then use those to inform how they train agents in the enterprise.

A startup from ex-Revolut employees uses AI to automate accounting — but hopes to keep accountants in jobs

Mike Butcher — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:02:00 +0000

As enterprise platforms gradually eat into the workflows of accountants, many are choosing to leave the industry, especially as AI automates away a lot of the core, manual work required. More than 300,000 U.S. accountants and auditors left their jobs between 2019 and 2021, and the number of accountants in the U.S. has declined 15.9% […]

All Iron Ventures rebrands as Acurio Ventures with a new €150M ‘follow-on’ fund

Mike Butcher — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 13:33:04 +0000

The new fund has already made around 20 investments, and it will operate with a generalist thesis, investing across the whole of Europe.

She sat down during the COVID lockdown and started coding — now she’s taking on Bolt

Mike Butcher — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 14:13:30 +0000

Sitting in Athens during the first COVID-19 lockdown, entrepreneur Rania Lamprou watched online e-commerce exploding because of social distancing. But merchants still struggled with low conversion rates because their checkout processes were complicated, and they had to integrate multiple providers for payments, shipping, and loyalty programs. “I knew there had to be a better way […]

This founder grew up in wine country — now he’s built a platform for wine makers

Mike Butcher — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 12:14:24 +0000

Growing up in the Hunter Valley, a region of Australia renowned for its fine wine production, Mitchel Fowler never realized he might one day think of an idea that could revolutionize the wine industry. Now, after a long career in finance, he has returned to that heritage to launch a platform to solve the wine […]

Londoners will soon see drones ferrying blood between hospitals

Mike Butcher — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 15:04:18 +0000

A joint pilot by Apian, Alphabet’s drone company Wing, and the U.K.’s NHS will see drones used to fly urgent blood samples between two hospitals in London.