Recap: Europe’s top funding rounds this week (16 -22 March)
Recap: Europe’s top funding rounds this week (16 -22 March)

A quieter week by headline standards, but one that reveals a great deal about where European venture capital is quietly concentrating: AI agents for physical industries, agritech automation, and the growing operator-to-VC pipeline. What the week of 16-…

The dummy server and the chip war
The dummy server and the chip war

The indictment of Super Micro’s co-founder exposes not just a $2.5 billion scheme, it exposes a system that was never built to stop one. Somewhere in a rented warehouse in Southeast Asia, a man was using a hair dryer on a server box. Not to dry it. To …

Starling launches an AI banking assistant that actually does things
Starling launches an AI banking assistant that actually does things

The UK challenger bank is rolling out Starling Assistant to personal account holders today, billing it as the UK’s first agentic AI financial assistant. It can set up savings goals, organise bill payments, and even quiz you on your own spending, all fr…

BBLeap raises €5M to bring plant-level precision spraying to arable farms globally
BBLeap raises €5M to bring plant-level precision spraying to arable farms globally

The Rijen-based startup, which retrofits existing sprayers with nozzle-by-nozzle PWM control, will use the capital to commercialise its LeapEye camera system and scale LeapBox internationally from Europe to Canada. The idea behind BBLeap is disarmingly…

Apollo.io acquires Pocus as it pushes to build an AI-native operating system for sales teams
Apollo.io acquires Pocus as it pushes to build an AI-native operating system for sales teams

The San Francisco B2B sales platform, which recently approached $200M in ARR and appointed a new CEO, absorbs the revenue intelligence startup’s signal-layer technology to deepen its enterprise push. Apollo.io has acquired Pocus, a revenue intelligence…

Austrian startup TACEO launches a network that runs sensitive computation without seeing the underlying data
Austrian startup TACEO launches a network that runs sensitive computation without seeing the underlying data

The TACEO Network, already live inside World ID’s biometric verification system for more than 18 million users, lets organisations share digital infrastructure without sharing sensitive data. When Sam Altman’s World needs to verify that a new user’s ir…

Ringtime raises €1.8M to send AI agents after blue-collar candidates
Ringtime raises €1.8M to send AI agents after blue-collar candidates

Recruiters spend hours a day calling, leaving voicemails, and asking the same questions. Ringtime automates the whole thing, and has already found a second home in real estate. There is a well-worn frustration in blue-collar recruitment. A warehouse op…

Reson8 raises €5M pre-seed funding to scale Europe’s first customisable speech AI
Reson8 raises €5M pre-seed funding to scale Europe’s first customisable speech AI

Amsterdam-based Reson8 has raised €5M in pre-seed funding to challenge US-centric speech platforms by building a high-precision, industry-specific speech recognition platform tailored for European languages. Reson8, a hyper-customised speech AI startup…

GlobalComix raises $13M, acquires INKR, and appoints new CEO to build the infrastructure for global comics distribution
GlobalComix raises $13M, acquires INKR, and appoints new CEO to build the infrastructure for global comics distribution

The New York digital comics platform is combining its 300,000-title library with INKR’s AI localisation engine, and bringing in new leadership to execute the expansion. The problem with getting manga into the hands of readers outside Japan is not deman…

Meta’s Manus AI agent arrives on your desktop to take on OpenClaw
Meta’s Manus AI agent arrives on your desktop to take on OpenClaw

Manus’s new desktop app can read, edit, and act on files and applications directly on a user’s machine. The launch puts Meta’s AI agent ambitions in direct competition with the open-source tool that has dominated the conversation this week. OpenClaw ar…