Tech.eu

Up this week:The AI wars are heating up: During London Tech Week Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set the goal of establishing the UK as the global home of artificial intelligence. This week OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, announced that it would open its first international office in London, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis went on record stating that his engineers are building an AI system dubbed Gemini that will be more capable than that of OpenAI. All the while Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion is looking, well, a bit unstable.A new report from Frontline Growth took a look at how US companies succeed and fail when it comes to European expansion. Representing up to 40% of global revenue for public software businesses, The authors note that "the strength of today's European tech ecosystem makes ignoring the region a costly mistake." Frontline goes on to cite the problem of success amnesia, where companies focus on sales at the expense of local marketing, community development, and brand-building efforts. Their data shows that 50% of companies don't have a single marketing resource in Europe a year after landing.Following a retreat from France, Turkish speedy grocery service Getir is now pulling out of Spain. Spain's biggest trade union CCOO didn't mince words stating, "We condemn the disastrous business management of Getir, which has not known how to grow or have a market strategy in Spain. Now its staff will suffer the biggest harm." In light of these developments, it would appear as though Getir's rumoured offer to acquire Flink might well be off the table.VTT Spinout Steady Energy is working on a 50MW nuclear reactor to be used to heat homes in Europe. Operating at significantly lower temperatures and pressure than a traditional reactor, the company's CEO Tommi Nyman says, "The pressure required by the LDR-50 reactor is comparable to the pressure that of a household espresso machine. It operates at a lower pressure than a district heating network. This ensures that in case of a malfunction which leads to a leak, the leak is contained within the heating plant, without endangering people or the environment."Working on the algorithms that drive quantum computing, specifically, applying these algorithms to drug discovery and development, Finnish startup Algorithmiq 's CEO and co-founder Sabrina Maniscalco says that, "a useful quantum advantage is coming sooner than many think."A new report issued by ESG_VC and BVCA analysed ESG data provided by 450 startups backed by leading venture capital firms including Lakestar, Balderton, Molten Ventures, Highland Europe, Beringea, and MMC Ventures. We spoke to ESG_VC co-founder Henry Philipson about how the initiative is aiming to assist startups navigate the world of ESG, as well as gather his response to commentary that startups shouldn't be focusing on ESG in early days.

Shhhh. Can you hear it? Listen in. Very carefully. Yes, yes, that's the unmistakable sound of an ecosystem that's staring down a summer full of iced tea and days by the lake. Or, is that just me?Either way, due to popular demand stemming from her appearance at our Summit just last month, we're welcoming Earlybird Venture Capital's Marieke Gehres to the show today where she brings a unique opinion to this week's news.We're talkin':- Finally, Bolt + Starship have ‘shipped’! - Bolt's new scooters are on the lookout for bad riders- Are new immigrant policies a threat to the Finnish start-up ecosystem?- Crappy photos no more thanks to generative AI- How do you get the US Marine Corps as a client? The power of partnerships - €100 million tech campus planned for Vilnius – Tech Zity to create ‘largest tech campus in Europe’- EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager is in the running for the top job at the European Investment Bank- Open AI - stolen EMEA account details for sale- EasyTranslate is using generative AI to drill down to client-specific language models- Wimbledon and IBM for AI tennis- The BBC documentary about London-based events startup Pollen and its collapse: Crashed: $800 million festival fail- Sequoia's new tool to help find talent: Atlas.All this, and a whole lot more on this week's episode of the Drive at Five!

Founded two decades ago, Argentinia-born Globant has become a technology partner for some of the world's leading organisations. Increasingly, it's looking at Europe to expand its business and grow its now 28,000-strong workforce.Globant may not be a household name in the global tech field, but arguably it should be.Founded in Buenos Aires by four friends back in 2003, the software development giant went public in 2014 and currently has a market cap just south of $8 billion, bringing in hundreds of millions in revenue on a quarterly basis from clients all over the world.Its relationship with Europe goes back a long way. The company opened an office in London around a year after its founding, and one of its first key clients was the UK-based Lastminute.com.Since then, the company has built up its business in this part of the world and opened quite a number of talent hubs, from the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy to smaller countries such as Romania, Poland, and Denmark.It also captured attention globally at the tail end of last year by scoring a multi-year agreement with football's world governing body FIFA to "supercharge the growth of the FIFA+ streaming platform and support football’s flagship events".We caught up with Fernando Matzkin, Chief Business Officer and GM of Europe for the company, to learn more about its future plans for European expansion.Matzkin, who's been with Globant for more than 14 years, previously headed up the company's business in North America, and is now tasked with growing its business in Europe, where it already has more than 11,000 staff.Globant aims to do that through client recruitment and partnerships, as well as opening new and further boosting existing talent hubs, but also through targeted acquisitions and startup investments, Matzkin says.The company has a CVC fund called - simply - 'Globant Ventures' but also operates the 'Be Kind Tech Fund', which invests in startups that tackle the misuse of technology in society.Currently, Europe represents only 15% of Globant's revenue, but the desire to grow that footprint to a bigger percentage is clear.Recently, it made acquisitions in France (Pentalog), Denmark (Vertic), and Italy (Sysdata) and announced back in September 2021 it would invest £65 million over a number of years to bolster its business in the UK.Stay tuned for much more Globant activity in Europe in the near future.

In case you weren't paying attention, a whole boatload of activity happened across the European tech scene this week. So much so that we had trouble whittling down what to discuss and what to let slide. In discussion:- The Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2023 (GSER 2023)- German autonomous trucking company FERNRIDE announces it has raised $31 million in Series A funding. - Venture capital firm Molten Ventures has written down its holding in Revolut by 40%, adding to the fintech company’s recent trouble as it struggles to gain a UK banking licence.- Stock trading app Freetrade is cutting its pre-money valuation by around 65% ahead of a planned Crowdcube fundraise later this month.- UK payments unicorn GoCardless is to cut 17% of staff in a bid to shave 15% off its cost base and quote unquote rediscover its scrappy startup energy.- Digital bank Zopa, also based in the UK, is rejigging its leadership team.- Amsterdam-based cloud banking provider Mambu has announced the immediate departure of its CEO and co-founder Eugene Danilkis for “personal reasons”.- France is openly courting to become the home of Tesla's next Gigafactory in Europe.- Earlier this week, Musk met with the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni as leaders in Europe attempt to woo the Tesla boss into building a new car manufacturing facility in their countries.- Less than a month old startup Mistral AI raised a seed round of €105 million at a €240 million valuation.- Wargraphs sells to M.O.B.A Network for €50 million.- Wayflyer renews debt line of $300 million from JP Morgan.- EU Regulation Update- Amsterdam - Framer AI- Mercedes adding ChatGPT to their cars- a16z crypto comes to London. - Pirate Summit scuttles the ship with its last burn.All this and a whole lot more on this week's Drive at Five!

Acquired by Germany-based Ratiodata in November 2020, Romania-born tech solutions giant Accesa is a perfect example of how 'IT outsourcing' has evolved in the last 20 years. Accesa CEO Andrea Marliere explains.Accesa is a leading technology services company headquartered in Cluj-Napoca (Romania), with offices in Zurich, Oradea and Munich. Over the past 16 years, the company has managed to establish itself as an employer of choice for IT professionals.Today, the company offers a wide array of technology competences and partnerships, providing services like software development, cloud solutions, automation, artificial intelligence, e-commerce and intelligence workplace solutions, and much more.In November 2020, Accesa joined forces with Ratiodata, one of the largest system houses and service providers for banking technology and document digitalisation in Germany. This has allowed the company to grow to around 1,200 IT professionals on the team, servicing more than 70 clients globally.In the past, companies would simply outsource their IT needs to third-party vendors who would provide temporary staff to work on specific projects.Today, however, nearshoring has become a more sophisticated and strategic approach than pure outsourcing. Rather than simply providing staff on a temporary basis, nearshoring involves integrating the outsourcing partner into the company's value chain. This means that the outsourcing partner becomes a strategic partner to the company, working closely with them to achieve specific business objectives.I caught up with Accesa CEO Andrea Marliere to learn from about this shift to nearshoring, and the new trend which is 'friendshoring'.She explained more about how and why she joined the company, how the company ended up joining Ratiodata, and how Accesa aims to deliver value to its partners now and in the future (with case studies to boot!).

The fintech industry- and the business world- is grappling with generative AI, which experts say has the potential to revolutionise financial services. Spearheaded by the rival of ChatGPT, fintechs are being wooed by generative AI’s potential to transform their way of working, from back to front office.In this podcast, we chat with Alexandra Mousavizadeh, an economist who benchmarks banks’ adoption of AI and Christian Trummer, the co-founder and CTO of crypto company Bitpanda, about the potential of AI.Mousavizadeh says generative AI will be as transformative as email and “change the way we work”.“The release of ChatGPT has put AI at the top of mind of every CEO in every sector,” she says.But she caveats this by saying generative AI is not a “plug and play” and highlights the challenge of running Large Language Models (LLMs), the algorithmic basis for AI-powered Chatbots like ChatGPT, on financial data.Trummer, meanwhile, predicts that in the future amid the rise of generative AI, “everyone will need to be a prompt engineer”.Bitpanda has recently made a whopping $10m investment in AI and Trummer discusses how the money will be spent and what impact the technology will have on his business and fintech more broadly.

We caught up with Mathias Wikström, CEO of Sweden's Doconomy, to learn more about its platform to measure climate and social impact in the financial services industry.The Stockholm-based scale-up, which recently acquired fellow Swedish financial wellbeing fintech Dreams Technology for an undisclosed sum, last raised funding back in September 2021.We asked Wikström what's been up with the business since, if fresh financing will (need) to be raised, and learned more about how the company helps banks, brands, and consumers better understand and reduce their environmental impact.You can watch the video on YouTube here.

On this Drive at Five editione speziale the omnipresent community builder/angel investor/and now Solo GP, Sarah Drinkwater sits in to discuss her newly announced fund, Common Magic.Tune in, turn it up, and start taking notes, because this week we're talking:- What is a Solo GP fund?- Angel speed, less structure, more access.- Nightclub term sheets.- Traditions to keep, traditions to change.- Sarah has raised one-third of a targeted £10 million.- Investing in 30 to 35 startups in Europe and the US at the pre-seed and seed stage.- "Hey kid, here's a hundred bucks, don't spend it all in one place."- "Products with community at their core." What does that mean?- Sarah's first job? You do not want to miss the answer.- Flexing the Google- 2014 - 2018 London. Good times.- SuperVenture: 40 people at a meeting, 38 in ironed white or blue shirts.- Temperature check: what is the funding landscape like at the minute?- What are LPs looking for right now?- Who do you see as people, "who are underestimated and underrepresented in their field"?- Grit!- An eye infection, pitching for 50 hours a week, and nobody says yes.- Pitfalls founders should be aware of when setting out on community building.- Nick breathes community. But only if they smell good.- A thesis, an ah-ha moment, and a "but isn't this obvious?"- Great club nights.- "I'm always nervous about trends because trends imply impermanence."- Building community is hard. Community builders are busy.

With the team finally recovered from anything and everything that was the Tech.eu Summit, we're back guns a-blazin'.This week we're talkin':- Sex tech - it's not what people think it is.- Quinky is a company that's developing an app providing sex education through gamification for Gen-Z’s- "We are after all the IP branch of the oldest industry in the world – Sex’ and ‘Social permission and the confidence to ask for what they want in the bedroom because that transcends to the boardroom" - Dominique Karetsos, CEO of the Healthy Pleasure Group.- Elaine Burke in the Business Post Connected goes into detail about different areas of sex tech.- British digital bank Monzo has hit profitability for the first time.- Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later company, also recently unveiled that it has halved its net loss in the first quarter.- Revolut is definitely not profitable yet, but it has announced reaching over 30 million retail customers making 400 million transactions a month.- Taxfix has laid off 20% of its staff — 120 employees — as part of wider restructuring of the business aimed at cutting costs.- Vitamin has folded.- John Reynolds knows fintech.- Creative equity is the new investment.- Today global travel experiences platform and marketplace GetYourGuide, announced the closing of $194 million in equity and credit financing.- NVIDIA was and then they weren't, but either way, the keynote was hot shiz.- AI made the cover of TIME Magazine.- More letters about AI. Probably lost in the post.- OpenAI is handing out cold hard cash.- Italy bans, unbans, and now establishes a state-backed fund to support AI startups.- Japan says copyright, schmopyright when it comes to training AI.- Your honour, ChatGPT has no further questions.- Spanish startup Jeff never closed a €90 million round, hasn’t paid employees for nine months, and is now filing for bankruptcy. All this and a whole lot more in this week's Drive at Five! If you've enjoyed this show, be sure to like, subscribe, tell your friends, tell your enemies, hell, tell your dog too.

Niknam set up bunq in 2012, inspired to reinvent banking in the wake of the financial crisis. Today, bunq is one of the most well-known challenger banks across Europe, with millions of users across the Netherlands, Germany, France, and other European contrives.Next up, it is launching in the US market, a tough nut to crack where other European fintechs have struggled.In this podcast, Niknam, a serial entrepreneur who set up his first company when he was just 16, offers his insight into some of the latest fintech news stories.This includes revealing his dealings with fintech regulators in light of strained relations between rival neobank Revolut and UK regulators.“Maybe Revolut’s relationship with the regulators is good and this is just a way for Nik [Storonsky] to get free publicity,” Niknam says.He also offers a damning view of the current commercial potential of crypto and blockchain applications.Talking about bunq, Niknam reveals the challenger bank is on course to make a full-year profit for the first time, as challenger banks across Europe face increased pressure to swing into the black.He also shines a light on bunq’s plans to launch in the US, and how it might be bolstered by a new funding round.On the European challenger bank market, he tells us why he thinks bunq’s subscription model will win out against free-of-charge rivals.“Any business that wants to survive needs to be profitable,” he says, in a dig at rivals who have amassed millions of customers but remain unprofitable.Finally, Niknam addresses criticism about his management style, saying those employees who criticise him didn’t meet the grade.On disgruntled ex-bunq employees “venting” online, he says, “We always find it a bit sad that people don’t discuss it internally” but “it’s a free country”.