~the-next-web | Bookmarks (227)

London-based startup Lighthouse just raised a hefty $370mn from American investment giant KKR at a valuation of over $1bn, making it Europe’s latest unicorn tech company. The funding will supercharge the company’s ambitions to shake up the $15bn travel tech market. What’s on the to-do list? Refining its AI tools, expanding globally, and snapping up competitors through mergers and acquisitions (it has already made...

Candela is flying high — and across the Atlantic.  The Swedish startup has secured $14mn, marking the close of its Series C round at a cosy $40mn. This puts its total funding at just shy of $90mn.  Candela has also sold its first P-12 ferry in the US, amid burgeoning demand for what is the world’s fastest and longest-range electric passenger vessel.  FlyTahoe, the...

Amsterdam-based startup Skytree is set to deploy its carbon-sucking machines on a newly announced carbon capture and storage project in Texas, US.  Dubbed “Project Concho,” the $100mn Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant aims to initially vacuum up 30,000 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere annually, eventually scaling to 500,000 tonnes. This carbon will be permanently stored underground, on site.  The facility is set to...

British scaleup Tokamak Energy has secured $125mn as it looks to harness fusion — the same clean, virtually limitless energy source that powers the Sun and stars.  Tokamak spun out from the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority in 2009. As its name suggests, the company is building a tokamak reactor, the most common kind of fusion design, first pioneered in the 1960s. Tokamaks use giant...

For the past few months, Meta has been sending recipes to a Dutch scaleup called VSParticle (VSP). These are not food recipes — they’re AI-generated instructions for how to make new nanoporous materials that could potentially supercharge the green transition.  VSP has so far taken 525 of these recipes and synthesised them into nanomaterials called electrocatalysts. Meta’s algorithms predicted these electrocatalysts would be ideal for...

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...

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...

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 by architects for architects. The tool...

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 lithium-ion battery. Founderful —...

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 staff maintain and repair equipment and...

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, French, Turkish, Polish, Portuguese,...

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 and yet, currently, its...

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...

Ruby’s creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz), released the first public version of the programming language in December 1995, making Ruby just shy of its 30th birthday. It spread across Japanese-language Usenet newsgroups, a popular way of exchanging conversation and media before the World Wide Web, and then reached broader communities throughout the late 1990s. This was thanks to Ruby’s friendly community and, in no small...

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is often held as a model for driving technology advances. For decades, it has contributed to military and economic dominance by bridging the gap between military and civilian applications. European policymakers frequently reference DARPA in discussions, as outlined in the 2024 Draghi Report, but an EU equivalent has yet to materialise. To create such an agency,...

About one in every 10 European startups that have raised VC investment are also backed by an EU grant of equity financing, according to a research project conducted by Dealroom and Dealflow.eu. While the full report is expected to be published later this year, the authors presented a few preliminary numbers in Warsaw last week. In financial terms, the 10% share translates into EU-backed...

If you’ve ever seen yourself through a thermal imaging camera, you’ll know that your body produces lots of heat. This is in fact a waste product of our metabolism. Every square foot of the human body gives off heat equivalent to about 19 matches per hour. Unfortunately, much of this heat simply escapes into the atmosphere. Wouldn’t it be great if we could harness...

The European Space Agency has given the go-ahead for initial work on a mission to visit an asteroid called (99942) Apophis. If approved at a key meeting next year, the robotic spacecraft, known as the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses), will rendezvous with the asteroid in February 2029. Apophis is 340 metres wide, about the same as the height of the Empire...

While many people in the creative industries are worrying that AI is about to steal their jobs, Oscar-winning film director James Cameron is embracing the technology. Cameron is famous for making the Avatar and Terminator movies, as well as Titanic. Now he has joined the board of Stability.AI, a leading player in the world of Generative AI. In Cameron’s Terminator films, Skynet 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 special episode, we’re happy to present an interview with Diana van Stijn, co-founder and chief medical officer at Lapsi Health, a Dutch startup that builds...

Whether you’re looking to change the direction of your career or expand your skillset as a programmer, the languages you chose to learn will significantly impact your time commitment and prospects. Some languages use familiar syntax, welcome minimum code commands for heavy-duty work, and are open-source with a helpful developer community that guides users in making the most of it. Others are complicated due...

Just as calculators took over the tedious number-crunching in maths a few decades ago, artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming coding. Take Kyo, an eight-year-old boy in Singapore who developed a simple platform game in just two hours, attracting over 500,000 players. Using nothing but simple instructions in English, Kyo brought his vision to life leveraging the coding app Cursor and also Claude, a general...

The walking, talking, dancing Optimus robots at the recent Tesla demonstration generated huge excitement. But this turned to disappointment as it became apparent that much of what was happening was actually being controlled remotely by humans. As much as this might still be a fascinating glimpse of the future, it’s not the first time that robots have turned out to be a little too...

As is their tradition at this time of year, Apple announced a new line of iPhones last week. The promised centrepiece that would make us want to buy these new devices was AI – or Apple Intelligence, as they branded it. Yet the reaction from the collective world of consumer technology has been muted. The lack of enthusiasm from consumers was so evident it...