Mike Butcher, Author at TechCrunch

AI business agent startup Bardeen pulls in strategic investment from Dropbox and HubSpot

Mike Butcher — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 11:05:47 +0000

Bardeen has raised $3M to build its platform that uses a natural language interface to automate repetitive knowledge work.

Hey, there ARE growth funds in Europe — Kennet raises $287M for its largest fund to date

Mike Butcher — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 15:53:41 +0000

Europe is routinely castigated by tech industry observers for having too few “growth capital” funds, and, compared to the U.S., that’s true. That said, it is nowhere near nonexistent on this front. To wit: Growth equity investor Kennet of London just announced it has raised €266 million for its largest fund to date, Kennet VI, […]

Packing travel insurance products into an app helped Faye to a $31M Series B

Mike Butcher — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 10:00:00 +0000

We’ve been covering U.S.-based insurtech startup Faye way back since 2022 with its seed round, and the Series A round in 2023, and it seems they continue to be on a roll, today announcing a $31 million in Series B funding. What is keeping this online insurance company on the rise? Well, it would appear […]

ZeroTier raises $13.5M to help avert CrowdStrike-like network problems

Mike Butcher — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 11:26:31 +0000

With the CrowdStrike update continuing to cause havoc across the planet, a startup has raised $13.5 million to at least improve some level of security for the kinds of devices that have been affected. California-based ZeroTier raised the Series A in a funding round led by Battery Ventures. While legacy companies like Cisco or Palo […]

bunch raises $15.5M for its platform that simplifies investment management for VCs

Mike Butcher — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 07:01:00 +0000

Public market investors have a large variety of infrastructure and software that helps them keep track of, analyze and manage their investments, but that’s not the case for investors in private companies, such as venture capitalists. Indeed, a lot of private market investors have to manage and upload information about their investments into a plethora […]

Spanish startup Exoticca raises a €60M Series D for its tour packages platform

Mike Butcher — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 05:00:00 +0000

Exoticca’s platform connects flights, hotels, meals, transfers, transportation and more, plus the local companies at the destinations.

A startup set out to fight climate change — it did it by helping plumbers

Mike Butcher — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 12:31:17 +0000

HERO Software has closed a €40 million Series B financing round, and plans to expand across Europe.

Exein raised $15M Series B to stop robotic arms going haywire

Mike Butcher — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 15:45:57 +0000

The capital will be used to expand in Europe, the U.S. and Asia.

Defense AI startup Helsing raises $487M Series C, plans Baltic expansion to combat Russian threat

Mike Butcher — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 15:15:33 +0000

Helsing has created a new entity in Estonia and plans to spend €70 million on Baltic defense projects over the next three years.

Alexa co-creator gives first glimpse of Unlikely AI’s tech strategy

Mike Butcher — Tue, 09 Jul 2024 16:30:09 +0000

After announcing a whopping $20 million seed last year, Unlikely AI founder William Tunstall-Pedoe has kept the budding U.K. foundation model maker’s approach under lock and key. Until now: TechCrunch can exclusively reveal Unlikely is taking a “neuro-symbolic” approach to its AI. In an additional development, it’s announcing two senior hires — including the former […]

Quantum Rise grabs $15M seed for its AI-driven ‘Consulting 2.0’ startup

Mike Butcher — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 12:08:39 +0000

Quantum Rise, a Chicago-based startup that does AI-driven automation for companies like dunnhumby (a retail analytics platform for the grocery industry), has raised a $15 million seed round from Erie Street Growth Partners. Its approach is somewhat akin to UiPath’s, a company famous for bringing robotic process automation to the enterprise, but with a broader […]

Spain’s exposure to climate change helps Madrid-based VC Seaya close €300M climate tech fund

Mike Butcher — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 15:50:36 +0000

According to a recent Dealroom report on the Spanish tech ecosystem, the combined enterprise value of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023. In the latest confirmation of this upward trend, Madrid-based VC fund Seaya has closed Seaya Andromeda, an “Article 9” €300 million climate tech fund based out of Madrid. Article 9 refers to the EU’s Sustainable […]

Forestay, Europe’s newest $220M growth-stage VC fund, will focus on AI

Mike Butcher — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 14:29:27 +0000

Forestay, an emerging VC based out of Geneva, Switzerland, has been busy. This week it closed its second fund, Forestay Capital II, at a hard cap of $220 million. The VC wasn’t well known in Europe until it started to lead rounds in enterprise startups a couple of years ago, notably scanning software startup Scandit […]

Vaire Computing raises $4.5M for ‘reversible computing’ moonshot which could drastically reduce energy needs

Mike Butcher — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 11:58:32 +0000

Vaire Computing, based in London and Seattle, is betting that chips that can do reversible computing are going to be the way forward for the world.

As Spain gets its latest VC fund, Southern Europe appears to be on a roll

Mike Butcher — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 13:02:18 +0000

While startup valuations have plummeted since the bull run of 2021-2022, a factor that’s hit the European startup ecosystem particularly hard, there’s one region of Europe where the correction has slightly worked in its favor: the South. Evidence for this was apparent during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, as time and time […]

EasyTranslate thinks augmenting LLMs with humans will give it an edge over pure AI translation services

Mike Butcher — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

EasyTranslate is headed in a new direction with a new, generative AI-driven platform that it calls HumanAI.

Climate X’s founders mortgaged their house to stay afloat — now they’ve raised an $18M Series A

Mike Butcher — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 07:05:45 +0000

U.K. startup Climate X has raised $18M to help financial services providers assess the impact of climate change on their physical assets.

CuspAI raises $30M to create a GenAI-driven search engine for new materials

Mike Butcher — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 07:01:00 +0000

The company says its platform functions like a search engine for materials, enabling the fast evaluation of a “vast number of novel structures.”

Autonomy’s Mike Lynch acquitted after US fraud trial brought by HP

Mike Butcher — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 01:59:41 +0000

Former Autonomy chief executive Mike Lynch issued a statement Thursday following his acquittal of criminal charges, ending a 13-year legal battle with Hewlett Packard that became one of Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud cases. He was accused of falsely inflating revenues at the U.K. startup ahead of Autonomy’s $11 billion sale to HP in 2011. Commenting […]

Qargo raises $14M to digitize and decarbonize the trucking industry

Mike Butcher — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 13:16:49 +0000

While the transport industry does use legacy software, many of these platforms are from an earlier era. Qargo hopes its newer technologies can help it leapfrog the competition.