Enline is the winner of the EIT Venture Award for their vegetation and landslide predictive forecast programme. The company develops tech such as  dynamic line rating and digital twins to help utilities get more out of their existing infrastructure.

Altris AB is the winner of the EIT Innovation Team Award for their sodium-ion batteries. The batteries enable high performance batteries to accelerate the energy transition, without increasing the cost to the environment or to customers. https://www.altris.se/

We talked with Mohamed Elamir and  Dr. Andreas Bittner. Mohammad is the winner of the EIT Changemaker Award and co-founder of Woamy, which develops biodegradable plastic-free biofoam for protective packaging to replace harmful plastic foams. https://www.woamy.com/ Dr. Andreas Bittner is the winner of the Public Award winner from HiQ-CARB, a team that produces sustainable and resource-efficient nanomaterials for high-performance batteries. These materials enable faster-charging electric...

Around 25 per cent of fintechs pitching a top VC for funding are AI-first startups, according to a top VC. Asked what per cent of fintechs pitching Breega, a European VC which backs UK savings and investment app Moneybox and UK card-consolidator Curve, are AI-first startups, Breega partner Benjamin Deplus said: “I guess in fintech, it. Is still pretty low.“I mean you have AI involved but it’s mostly for workflow automation. It's not the heart of the product.“I think that is the opportunity...

“It’s never too late and it’s never too early” to launch a startup, according to the co-founder and co-CEO of Enfuce, the payment startup and one of Finland’s biggest fintech. Monika Liikamaa, co-CEO & co-founder of Enfuce, was speaking along with Michaela Berglund, CEO and founder of Feminvest, an events and education platform for women which has also launched an €8.8 million fund to invest in Nordic startups which are majority owned by women. The pair discussed the dearth of female...

The CEO of a European neobroker startup recently acquired by Dutch financial services giant ABN AMRO says it’s his job to keep BUX protected from “too much influence from the larger organisation”. In the Tech.eu podcast, Yorick Naeff, BUX CEO, gives us the background to ABN AMRO’s purchase of BUX, announced in December last year. The Dutch giant was an early stage investor in BUX- most famous for offering commission-free trading to European investors- and the pair are also tech partners. “We...

“There is no entrepreneurial gene, I don’t think,” says James Wise, partner at VC firm Balderton Capital and author of Start-Up-Century. He adds: “I don’t think it is in your DNA. But certainly, your upbringing and the role models you have around you do make a big difference.”Wise gives us the full skinny on his new book, Start-Up Nation, which offers a fresh look at the rise in entrepreneurship and startups and how they are changing the world of work as well as what the changing economy...

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is “horrible” and will “continue to create concerns” across the world, including the investment community, according to Jaidev Janardana, CEO of UK fintech lender Zopa. The CEO pointed out that the Middle East was where the world gets a lot of its oil from. Janardana said: “What happens in the Middle East? It’s hard to predict.  I am assuming there will be concerns about the conflict spreading and thus putting pressure on oil prices again, driving a new...

Last month, Singapore-based Nium announced that it had chosen London as its European HQ while US fintech Plaid has dual European headquarters in London and Amsterdam. The two executives discuss the virtues of their international fintechs having European headquarters and why they chose the cities they are located in. Sandhofer says:  “London is proving to be one of the best ecosystems for fintechs overall.”Lambert says:  “The two top priorities for us are, one, being very, very close to our...

Lucas Timberlake, general partner at Fintech Ventures Fund, the US VC that has a focus on fintech and insurtech, and Ricardo Schäfer,early-stage investor and partner at Revolut backer Target Global, discuss the differences between European VC and US VC funds while also offering insights into the European fintech market. Timberlake, though, says the most prominent difference is between US West Coast VCs and US East Coast VCs, which are more aligned to European VCs. Timberlake says, generally...

Scandinavia is home to some of the most celebrated tech companies in recent years: Skype, Spotify, and Klarna. Cities like Stockholm and Copenhagen are also home to a new generation of startups creating waves across Europe. In this podcast, we talk to Henrik Rosvall, chief operating officer of Stockholm-based climate fintech Doconomy and Emil Stigsgaard Fuglsang, co-founder and chief operating officer at Matter, the Copenhagen-based sustainability insights fintech. We discuss the fintech...

This week the seldom talked about world of Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) came into the spotlight after Nigel Farage claimed the banks did not want him as a customer due to him being a PEP. The row between Farage and NatWest bank has already accounted for the heads of the CEOs of NatWest and Coutts, the prestigious private bank for the wealthy it owns, and looks set to rumble on. In this podcast, we chat with a PEP expert Alia Mahmud, who is the Regulatory Affairs Practice Lead at...

Founded in London back in 2012, Onfido has become one of the global leaders in the digital identity verification and authentication services. We caught up with Mike Tuchen, who joined the company almost three years ago after stints as CEO of companies like Rapid7 and Talend, and was brought on board to lead the scale-up and supercharge global growth. Started with merely $30,000 in seed funding a decade ago, Onfido has raised more than $200 million in funding to date, and currently employs...

Bulgarian cargo drone manufacturer Dronamics today extended its pre-Series A funding round to raise €2 million euro from private investors exclusively via SeedBlink, the Romania-based crowdfunding platform. A few months back, the company raised $40 million right before completing the first successful flight of its flagship aircraft, the Black Swan. As the deep tech firm gears up to close a Series A round, Dronamics wants to build on the momentum by commercialising its drone. We caught up with...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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" -...

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...