Speaking on the Tech.eu podcast, George Toumbev, chief commercial officer, NatWest Boxed,  talks about NatWest’s BaaS offering and some of the challenges and opportunities in the market.

A podcast interview with David Cohen, the co-founder and CEO of Techstars, the startup accelerator, which has backed thousands of startups. In the episode, Cohen addresses recent criticism about its corporate culture and discusses startup trends in Europe and beyond in 2024.

Zoe Peden, partner, Ananda Impact Ventures, an impact VC fund and Eleanor Kaye, managing director, Newton Venture Progam, an education scheme for overlooked and under-represented VCs, discussed the VC diversity issue in this week's Tech.eu podcast.

Doctor Peter Garraghan, co-founder and CEO, Mindgard and  Kevin Berghoff,  co-founder of Quantum Diamonds, discuss the virtues and challenges of university spinouts.

An interview with Agate Freimane, general partner, Norrsken VC and Pablo Pederjon, partner at Madrid-based impact VC fund Seaya about impact investing.

An interview with two experts on the CrowdStrike fallout and how businesses can limit impact of outage or cyber attack.

A podcast interview with the president of Robinhood UK. In the podcast, we discuss how the UK app is performing, the growth of the UK team, and future plans.

Interview with Maria Rotilu, founder and general partner, Openseed, a fund which is raising $10m to invest in startups at the earliest stages in Europe and Africa. Rotilu discusses-The the birth of Openseed, The benefits of being a solo general partner, What type of investments Openseed is interested in, Why startups should partner up with Openseed, and The investment landscape in Europe and Africa.

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...