E-commerce roll-up companies are big in the United States, and Wonder Brands wants to be that for Latin America.

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Well that was quick. U.K.-based hyper fast grocery delivery startup Weezy — which only raised a pre-seed for its 15-minute delivery services of supermarket fare last year (after founding the biz in 2019) — has been bagged by Turkish 10-minute delivery app Getir. It’s the latest slice of consolidation to hit Europe’s hyper competitive on-demand […]

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Gamification and social hooks have become cornerstones across every category of consumer apps these days, and today one that’s using these to build out a new e-commerce platform in Europe is announcing a seed round to give its growth a boost. Blidz — a social shopping app that offers big discounts (many items in categories […]

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UK-based Ravio reckons real-time data is the best way to arm businesses to win the global talent war. Its new-to-market compensation benchmarking tool lets users see how the compensation (wages and benefits) they offer their own staff compares to the market by pooling data across its employer customers (data is anonymized at the platform level) […]

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A host of major European tech founders and investors are today backing the launch of OneUkraine, a new charity providing sustainable humanitarian relief for the Ukrainian people. OneUkraine will be supporting Ukrainians at home and abroad, delivering humanitarian aid, and aiming to rebuild the tech and broader infrastructure of Ukraine by SMEs and startups on […]

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Raising venture capital is rarely an easy lift for startups, but 2022 is turning out to be a more challenging year than we’ve seen for some time. As venture capital continues its slowdown after an aggressive 2020 and record-breaking 2021, it’s clear that early-stage founders looking for their first dollars will require a new approach. […]

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How does one build, scale and navigate the headwinds of a recession, especially as consumer behavior changes dramatically?

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Chicago-based Groupon today laid off more than 500 of its employees — 15% of its 3,416-person headcount — according to posts from former employees on social media. The reduction impacted workers in teams including merchant development, sales, recruiting, engineering, product and marketing. Groupon confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch after the publication of the story. “Our […]

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Groupon has laid off another 500 employees in a bid to cut costs, the company said in an SEC filing last week. The e-commerce company had cut 500 jobs — nearly 15% of its workforce then — in August 2022. The company said this new set of layoffs will be spread across the first two […]

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A dozen years ago, Groupon shot to fame popularizing the online group buying format, confidently rejecting a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and instead going public with a $17.8 billion market cap. The company today says it has 14 million active users, but almost consistently for the last decade, its financial position has been […]

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Adyen lost $13 billion in market cap last month when investors scrambled to sell shares after the payments company missed quarterly revenue targets. But it’s not the only one facing the music in fintech. Shares in SumUp, a privately-held European payment technology business that focuses on point-of-sale transactions, are currently being sold in inside sales […]

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The technical documentation for chips in the semiconductor industry is often thousands of pages long. Keeping those documents updated with every revision is a massive lift, as is generating the manuals and tutorials for engineers who then implement those chips in their own products. And to make matters even more complicated, very few products only […]

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Atlassian first showed off Rovo six months ago. Rovo is what the company calls its “AI teammate” that combines smarter search and chat-based AI tools with agents that can help users automate some of their workflows in tools like Jira and Confluence. At its Team ’24 Europe event in Barcelona, the company has now announced […]

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Atlassian recently announced its plans to combine its Jira Software tools for developers and Jira Work Management tool for business teams into a single product. Jira was originally for developers and the teams that directly support them, but over time, it also became popular with business teams. That’s a trend Atlassian quickly capitalized on with […]

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Arne Schepker, the CEO of the popular Berlin-based language learning platform Babbel, is stepping down, and the company’s co-founder and former CEO Markus Witte is stepping back in to lead the company “into a new phase while searching for Arne’s successor with patience,” the company said. This new phase, unsurprisingly, will involve AI. Witte will not […]

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Since it was founded in 2015, Cato Networks has evangelized the concept of a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform that combines many of the features of software-defined networking, modern network security tools, and endpoint protection into a single service backed by a global private network. The promise here is that instead of managing dozens […]

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Early is a Tel Aviv-based startup that uses generative AI to generate unit tests, helping programmers catch potential bugs early in the development cycle. The company, which launched in August, today announced that it has raised a $5 million seed funding round led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from Dynamic Loop Capital. In its current […]

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Creating engaging videos isn’t only about the visuals. So much of the appeal of good video content is about the audio, but finding (or maybe even creating) the right audio effects can be a time-consuming process. At its annual MAX conference, Adobe is showing off Project Super Sonic, an experimental prototype demo that shows how […]

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Alert management for developers and ops teams may seem like a solved problem. Notifying an on-call engineer isn’t exactly difficult anymore, after all. But the real question has become when to alert the right person and how to help them when a service goes down, for example. Many are turning to AI to solve some […]

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Notion, as my colleagues at TechCrunch scooped earlier Thursday, is announcing an email client at its first “Make with Notion” user conference. For now, Notion Mail is in preview, and at least for the time being, it’s more of a Gmail client than a traditional email service. The idea here, Notion says, is to build […]

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Stacklok, the open source software supply chain company founded by Kubernetes co-creator Craig McLuckie and Sigstore creator Luke Hinds, is donating Minder, one of its key projects, to the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). Minder helps development teams set up a system of proactive checks and policies to minimize supply chain risks by enforcing best […]

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AI code assistant company Tabnine is launching a code review agent today that aims to help developers stick to their organization’s best practices and standards. It allows organizations to codify these rules either by providing the agent with documentation or by pointing it at a set of “golden code repos.” The agent will passively review […]

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At its Universe conference, GitHub today announced a number of major new products, including the Spark project for writing applications entirely with AI, as well as multi-model support for its Copilot service. But Copilot itself is also getting quite a few updates. With this release, Microsoft-owned GitHub is bringing Copilot to Apple’s Xcode environment for […]

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GitHub today announced that it will now allow developers to switch between a number of large language models when they use Copilot Chat, its code-centric ChatGPT-like service. Until now, Copilot Chat was powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4. Going forward, developers can choose between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, o1-preview, and […]

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When GitHub Copilot launched and started autocompleting lines of code — and, later, entire code snippets — the question many people were asking was: How long until we can just describe an app in natural language and Copilot will build it for us? We’ve seen quite a few experiments in this arena in recent months, […]

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Starting today, developers using Google’s Gemini API and its Google AI Studio to build AI-based services and bots will be able to ground their prompts’ results with data from Google Search. This should enable more accurate responses based on fresher data. As has been the case before, developers will be able to try out grounding […]

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About a year and a half ago, quantum control startup Quantum Machines and Nvidia announced a deep partnership that would bring together Nvidia’s DGX Quantum computing platform and Quantum Machine’s advanced quantum control hardware. We didn’t hear much about the results of this partnership for a while, but it’s now starting to bear fruit and […]

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Symbiotic Security, which is announcing a $3 million seed round today, watches over developers as they code and points out potential security issues in real time. Other companies do this, but Symbiotic also emphasizes the next step: teaching developers to avoid these bugs in the first place. Ideally, this means developers will fix security bugs […]

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Exactly 20 years ago, Mozilla started shipping version 1.0 of its Firefox browser. At the time, you could download it or buy a CD-ROM with a guidebook from Mozilla (or maybe get it on one of those free CDs that would come with many magazines at the time). Born out of the ashes of Netscape, […]

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Luxembourg-based SUSE has long offered various services around its various Linux- and cloud-centric infrastructure and security tools. Yet what the company didn’t really offer before was a more traditional SaaS product. That’s changing now with the early access launch of SUSE Cloud Observability, a fully managed observability platform designed for Rancher-managed multi-cloud Kubernetes clusters. Rancher, […]

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Dapr, the Microsoft-incubated open source runtime for helping developers build secure and resilient distributed applications, has graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) pool of incubating projects to become a top-level project at the same level of projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Istio, and Vitess. To graduate to this level, a project has to be […]

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When it comes to privacy nightmares, Pinterest is unlikely to be the first social app that springs to mind. But the visual discovery engine’s use of tracking ads is the target of the latest complaint from European privacy rights nonprofit noyb, which accuses it of breaching the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by failing […]

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A €1.06 billion EU antitrust penalty on chipmaker Intel for abuse of dominance dating back to 2009 (when it was equivalent to $1.45 billion) has been consigned to the history books after the bloc’s top court rejected the Commission’s appeal against a 2022 lower court ruling that annulled the sanction. “The Court of Justice dismisses […]

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Bad news for LinkedIn in Europe, where the Microsoft-owned social network has been reprimanded and fined €310 million for privacy violations related to its tracking ads business. The administrative penalties, which are worth around $335 million at current exchange rates, have been issued by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) under the European Union’s General Data […]

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A new data bill from the U.K. Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) aims to revive several measures that failed to pass under the prior government, while rowing back on some controversial post-Brexit reforms proposed by conservative ministers. The government reckons the “Data (Use and Access) Bill” (DUA) stands to boost the U.K. economy […]

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Gut health isn’t the most glamorous of topics, but as many as 1 in 10 people regularly suffer from gastric symptoms like nausea, bloating, or cramping after eating. Figuring out exactly what’s causing stomach misery is not easy without invasive tests. But New Zealand-based startup Alimetry has developed a wearable device that can speed up […]

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Fixing the climate crisis is a vast, world-sized puzzle. But one particularly large piece of this ginormous conundrum is construction and real estate — which collectively amount for around 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Enter Munich-based data startup Emidat, which has built a software platform for automating the generation of validated Environmental Product Declaration […]

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Best-selling author Margaret Atwood isn’t worried about the indefatigable rise of generative AI — telling Reuters that she’s too old to be concerned about its impact on the arts. Her remarks follow a petition calling for an end to the unlicensed use of creative works to train AI models that’s now amassed more than 31,000 […]

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The European Union will spend €1.4 billion (about $1.5 billion) next year to bolster deep tech research and support scale-ups in strategic areas like AI, low-carbon technologies, agritech and biotech, the European Commission said on Tuesday. The budget for the 2025 Work Program of the European Innovation Council (EIC), part of the bloc’s flagship Horizon Europe […]

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The European Union has expanded its scrutiny of online marketplaces by opening a formal proceeding on Chinese low-cost e-commerce platform, Temu, under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Commission announced Thursday. Enforcers of the online governance framework will now dial up their oversight of Temu. The bloc’s suspicions are focused on concerns about the sale […]

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The European Union has tossed a wrench in the works of chipmaker Nvidia’s proposed acquisition of Tel Aviv-based AI workload management startup Run:ai. The deal, which was announced back in April — with a price tag of $700 million per our sources — will be reviewed by the bloc after a request by competition regulators in […]

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Two veteran European companies in the world of on-demand printing are merging, and you may have not even realized they were separate companies to begin with. Printful and Printify, both startups with Latvian roots providing custom printing services, are coming together as a single company. They are framing the move as a natural fit to […]

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Meta has added another privacy sanction to its extensive collection: South Korea’s data protection agency fined the social media giant around $15.7 million for processing sensitive user data and passing it to advertisers without a proper legal basis, Reuters reports. Seoul’s Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) found Facebook’s parent collected information from about 980,000 users, […]

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The European Union’s flagship market contestability regulation has been in force on a handful of tech giants for months. Since March, the bloc has had open investigations on several gatekeepers. But it’s Apple that will face the first Digital Markets Act (DMA) fine, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the case. Apple’s App Store rules […]

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On Wednesday, the European Union opened an investigation of U.S. manufacturer Corning over possible anti-competitive practices. Corning may not be a name that’s super familiar to the average tech consumer, but you are almost certainly within touching distance of its products, as it’s a leading supplier of speciality toughened glass for mobile devices, including Apple’s […]

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Solar energy is booming, which is good news for Glint Solar. The Norwegian software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup has built a platform that’s helping energy giants and large solar developers such as E.ON, Recurrent Energy, and Statkraft cut the time it takes to plan and pre-design solar installations to accelerate the transition to renewables. Glint’s software pulls in […]

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Tozero, a Munich-based startup that recovers valuable raw materials from recycled lithium-ion batteries, is gearing up to scale. The startup just closed an oversubscribed €11 million seed round (around $11.7M) to step up production by building its first industrial deployment (A.K.A first-of-a-kind or FOAK) plant. Currently, Tozero’s pilot plant processes nine tonnes of lithium-ion battery […]

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Qwant, France’s privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine that uses ad revenue to fund tree planting and other climate-focused initiatives, are joining forces on a joint venture to develop their own European search index. The pair hopes this move will help drive innovation in their respective search engines — including and […]

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Apple’s pile of regulatory woes in the European Union has ticked up again: The iPhone maker is being accused of unlawfully discriminating against consumers by applying restrictions on how several of its media services can be accessed around the bloc. Consumer protection authorities in three EU Member States have been investigating the geoblocking measures (access […]

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Meta, under legal pressure in the European Union over a binary “pay us or consent to ad tracking” choice it currently offers regional users of its social networks Facebook and Instagram, is changing how its regional ad business works again. Little wonder when compliance failure in this context risks fines of up to 10% of […]

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