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Founded just months ago by two repeat Y Combinator founders and a retail veteran, Lemrock is betting that AI agents are becoming the new storefront, and that brands are nowhere near ready for it. When you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity which running shoes to buy, someone has to make sure the right brand

NVIDIA makes ‘significant investment’ in Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab

3 hours ago

The deal pairs one of the world’s most powerful chip companies with the AI startup founded by OpenAI’s former CTO, and the compute commitment alone runs to tens of billions of dollars. When Mira Murati left OpenAI in September 2024, she declined to say much about what came next. What has become clea

EchoPrime – Cedars-Sinai’s AI system can read echocardiograms and write the report

EchoPrime, published in Nature in February 2026, outperforms both task-specific AI tools and previous foundation models across 23 cardiac benchmarks, and its code, weights, and a demo are publicly available. An echocardiogram is one of the most common diagnostic tools in cardiology: an ultrasound of

French insurtech Alan hits €5B valuation

A decade after becoming the first new independent health insurer in France in 30 years, Alan has closed a €100M round backed by Index Ventures, Shopify’s Tobi Lütke, and World Cup winner Antoine Griezmann, and it’s not slowing down. Alan, the Paris-based health insurance startup, has raised €100 mil

Swiss VC Emerald Technology Ventures hits €100M milestone for its Global Water Fund II

Temasek and the Grundfos Foundation have joined the fund as it passes its latest target, part of a broader push to channel institutional capital into water technology innovation. Water scarcity is not a future problem. It is a present one, already constraining agriculture, industry, and urban planni

Amazon’s Health AI is now open to all US customers

Three years after its $3.9 billion bet on One Medical, Amazon is deploying its healthcare AI assistant across its main website and shopping app, in a direct challenge to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health and Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare. Amazon has opened its Health AI assistant to all US customers, remo

Finperks raises $4M to become the API layer for prepaid payments in Europe

5 hours ago

The Berlin startup, founded by the team behind viafintech, is building a single integration that lets banks, fintechs, and HR platforms offer gift cards, cashback, and tax-free employee benefits, without touching the underlying infrastructure themselves. The founders of viafintech, the prepaid payme

Samaipata launches €110M fund to back early-stage AI-native startups across Europe

5 hours ago

The pan-European VC firm has held its first close at €70M for Fund III, backed by Germany’s KfW, Spain’s SETT, and a network of family offices, with a mandate to find European companies building on the AI wave. Samaipata, the pan-European venture capital firm founded in Madrid in 2016, has launched

British startup Outpost raises €15M to make international selling as simple as domestic commerce

6 hours ago

Founded in 2024, Outpost acts as the legally liable entity for cross-border payments, tax, and compliance, so merchants don’t have to. Ribbit led the Series A. Selling across borders has always been technically possible and operationally punishing. The payments fail more often. The tax obligations m

AgentMail raises $6M to give AI agents their own email inboxes

6 hours ago

The San Francisco startup, backed by General Catalyst and Y Combinator, is betting that email, not some new identity protocol, is how AI agents will establish themselves on the internet. AI agents can already book your meetings, negotiate contracts, and handle support queues. What they have not had,

6 biggest tech nightmares to avoid next time you travel abroad

Drop me on a Balinese coastline with a decent paperback and my smartphone, and I’ll luxuriate for two weeks straight. But fly me out to the same spot with a Nokia 3310 and a physical map, like the one my dad used to carry, and I’ll probably have a nervous breakdown. Most of us can agree that we’re h

Meet the finalists of the TNW València startup pitch battle

Some of Europe’s hottest startups arrived at TNW València last week to develop ideas, expand networks, create new leads, and — and most importantly of all — fight. Not in the physical sense, of course, but in a fiercely-contested TNW València pitch battle. After surviving a series of fiery knockout

TNW València has arrived! Here are some highlights from Day 1

TNW València is finally here! Founders, investors, business leaders, and tech enthusiasts descended on València’s marina this morning to discover the next in tech, now. Before long, the venue — nestled between the historic inner city and the crystal clear waters of the Mediterranean — was bustling w

Stockholm is a world-class tech hub: 6 startups and scaleups to watch

Once predominantly known for IKEA, Ericsson, and Volvo, in the past decade, Sweden has emerged as one the most valued tech ecosystems in Europe, with Stockholm ranking as the fifth top performer in 2021. The success of Swedish startups such as Tink and Spotify has turned the capital city into a worl

Opinion: The AI pope coat is the shape of hyperreality to come

By now, you’ll have seen it. Pope Francis walks across the frame, his focus on the mid-distance. He’s brightly lit as though it’s early morning. A silver cross hangs from his neck, dangling over his snow-white, Balenciaga-inspired puffer jacket. It’s the baller bishop, the steezy father, his holy dr

Why third-party app stores are good for Apple’s users — and the company

With the passage of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) in 2022, online platforms, including Apple, with EU revenues of 75 billion euros or more and at least 45 million active monthly end users must open up their devices to third party app stores. The DMA aims to end unfair practices by l

Award-winning economist has tapped AI to close the gender equity gap

The gender equity gap in the tech sector is well-documented. Research has found that women occupy only 22% of all tech roles across European companies, while the proportion of funding raised by female-only teams has dropped from 3% to 1% since 2018. The issue is prevalent at every level of the indus

3 things you can do to stand out in a job interview

Congratulations! You’ve just landed an interview for a position you really want… although now comes the hard part. Generally considered to be the most daunting stage of the entire job hunt, the interview experience can be overwhelming, nerve-wracking and wholly unpleasant, quite frankly, especially

Swedish startup takes commuting by boat to new heights — literally

Is it a boat or is it a plane? Put your glasses on! This is clearly an electrically-powered hydrofoil passenger ferry. The brainchild of Swedish startup Candela, the P-12 Shuttle is set to become the fastest and longest-range electric passenger vessel in the world when it launches this summer. Fou

How an outsider’s freedom can make a successful startup founder

Building a startup in a sector you’ve never worked in might seem a risky move, but it can actually provide a competitive advantage. That’s certainly proven true for Vivino. Founded in 2010 in Copenhagen, the scaleup has raised $221 million in funding, and become the world’s most downloaded wine app

The world’s first self-driving bus fleet will soon hit Scotland’s streets

Next time you board a bus in Scotland and it’s driving itself, don’t freak out — this is all part of a government plan to bring self-driving tech into the mainstream. Five fully autonomous buses will be taking to the streets near Edinburgh next month, announced Stagecoach, the UK’s largest bus and c

Digital twins could save your life. Here’s how

Digital twins — virtual replicas of real-world things — are already commonplace in manufacturing, industry, and aerospace. There are highly complex digital models of cities, ports, and power stations — but what about people? The idea of digital doppelgängers has long been confined to the realm of s

TNW València 2023 was a blast — here are our favourite moments

For 16 memorable years, TNW Conference has been at the center of Amsterdam’s tech ecosystem, but on March 30 and 31, TNW València brought — for the very first time — the heart of tech to Spain’s east coast. But we didn’t choose Valencia simply for its bright blue sea, delicious paellas, or sunny wea

Mammoth meatball beef exposes foodtech’s patent problem

A bitter feud has erupted over who first resurrected the woolly mammoth — as a meatball. The de-extinct delicacy was unveiled last week at Nemo Science Museum in the Netherlands. Naturally, no mammoths were harmed in the making of this product — and nor were any other animals. In lieu of dead flesh,

Everything you need to know about building a career in the gaming industry