Mike Butcher
TechCrunch
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Recent articles by Mike:
France’s IRIS Capital reaches €110M first close for its new €150M venture fund
IRIS Capital reaches the €110m first close for its new €150m venture fund (IRIS Venture IV), plans to hold a second close in 3Q 2023. → Read More
Harbor Lab secures €6.1M to make shipping dock more easily and cheaply
When a ship goes into a commercial port, there are lots of port call-related costs. These are called things like ‘disbursements’ and ‘port call expenses’. They can include, port dues, towage and pilotage fees, which, added together can represent are large swathe of operating costs, after fuel, for a ship operator. Most of the time, […] → Read More
How Chargifi pivoted to Kadence, a platform to enable hybrid co-working, then pulled in $10M
Kadence raises $10M Seed funding round led by Kickstart Fund with participation from Manta Ray, Hambro Perks and Vectr7 as well as Shadow Ventures and Forward VC. → Read More
As demand for real estate VR booms, Founders Fund leads $16M round into Giraffe360 platform
Giraffe360 raises $16 million in new funds led by Founders Fund. Existing investors LAUNCHub Ventures, Hoxton Ventures, HCVC (Hardware Club) and Change Ventures also participated. To date, the company has raised $22m in equity and $9m in venture debt. It was founded in 2016 in Riga, Latvia by two brothers, Mikus Opelts and Madars Opelts, and is headquartered in London, U.K. → Read More
GoStudent uses its warchest to acquire large network of traditional tutoring centres in Europe
GoStudent — the Austria-based late-stage tutor marketplace that has raised $686.3 million (and attained a €3 billion valuation) to date — has acquired Germany-based Studienkreis, a traditional tutoring company, founded in 1974, which is focused on the German-speaking “DACH” region. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Studienkreis had previously been owned, since 2017, by […] → Read More
Natives Rising wins backing to help Native Americans into tech and startups
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Black, Latina, and Native American women represent approximately 16 percent of the total US population, but make up only 4 percent of students obtaining bachelor’s degrees in computing. On this trend, women of color receiving computing degrees will not double until 2052 — by which time they […] → Read More
BackingMinds raises new €50 million fund to fund normally overlooked entrepreneurs
Denmark-based venture fund BackingMinds, founded in 2016, likes to think it takes a different approach to venture in Europe. Its new €50 million fund will aim to take a road less travelled by most VCs, looking “for the blind spots” traditional venture capital can often miss because of typical VC herd behaviour (such as investing […] → Read More
A new wave of Solo GP VCs is coming to Europe and Hypernova hopes to power it
Hypernova, a $25m fund which soft-launched in June has been founded by experienced investor Tugce Ergul. She plans to not only invest in other funds but also directly into startups. Ergul was formerly with Angel Labs, an “investor accelerator”, which spread across 44 countries. → Read More
Anne Hathaway backs Pact, an all-women led VC for mission-driven startups, from West to East
Pact is a new Seed VC fund launched with a £30 million ($36 million) pot of cash to back early-stage startups across Europe. Pact will aim at ‘mission driven’ startups in what it calls the “ABC” categories: Access (economic inclusion), Betterment (personal and professional well-being), and Climate. Pact’s investment tickets will range from around £1m to 1.5m. → Read More
Slush and VC pitch judges revoke decision to hand $1M to Russian founders after industry outcry
Immigram — a talent immigration platform founded by two Russian passport holders which last week won the startup pitch stage at the large Slush conference in Helsinki — is now out of the competition, after a swirl of controversy enveloped the decision in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. → Read More
Zennström calls the end of high-valuations era, says founders and VCs must remove stigma of down rounds
European founders must get used to taking tough decisions to ensure the survival of their startups. → Read More
Index Ventures thinks new startups will emerge in the downturn and is putting $300M behind that bet
Index ventures launches new “Origin Fund” which will be a $300 million Seed fund, $100m larger than Origin I last year. → Read More
Tiger Global-backed Algorithmiq to collaborate with IBM over drug discovery using Quantum
Algorithmiq, a Helsinki-based quantum computing startup, has pulled in a deal with IBM to super-charge its exploration of quantum algorithms applied to the life sciences. The collaboration will attempt to dramatically cut the time and cost of drug discovery and development. The widely accepted maxim is that it takes around a decade and $1 billion […] → Read More
Startup founders go to war with UK government over its moves to appoint bank into key ecosystem role
Coadec calls on the government to commit to retaining Tech Nation in its role, a role which it has filled in various guises since September 2011. → Read More
Lisbon’s Indico VC launches €25M Opportunity Fund for its scale-ups, taking it to a €141M total
Indico Capital Partners, the Lisbon, Portugal based VC, has launched a €25 million ‘Opportunity Fund’, with the help of previous LPs, to invest up to an additional €5 million in the most promising four or five companies from its first fund. Indico says this would double the maximum investment per startup from €5-10 million. → Read More
Real-time data startup Quix raises a $12.9M Series A round led by MMC Ventures
The complexity of streaming data technologies – not just streaming video but any kind of streaming data – has created a headache around dealing with that high speed data processing. Accordingly, companies like Spark, Flink have spring up to address this ksqlDB. Many are either either java-based solutions or SQL-based analytics solutions. However, UK startup […] → Read More
Pet insurance startups chase the market as pet ownership booms among Gen Z and Millennials
Pet insurance start-up Napo offers pet insurance but also pet health prevention information, pet ownership education, and additional services. It’s now raised a £15m Series A funding round, led by DN Capital, and with the participation of the petcare-focussed Companion Fund as well as Helvetia Venture Fund, M Tech Capital, Picus Capital, dmg ventures, Sarona Partners, T0 Ventures and FJ Labs. → Read More
‘Self-therapy’ startups are blooming in the ‘moderate mental health’ space
‘Moderate mental health’ startup Bloom, a digital mental health 'self-therapy' startup, raises a $8M seed round, led by Berlin-based VC Target Global. → Read More
Satellite startup Constellr wins backing to build out its water-monitoring platform
To tackle this, the Germany-based Constellr satellite startup has now raised $10M in seed funding, co-led by Lakestar and VSquared, with participation from early and new supporters FTTF, IQT, Amathaon Capital, Natural Ventures, EIT Food, OHB Venture Capital, Next Humanity, and Seraphim. → Read More
Evolito, with an axial-flux motor lighter than Tesla’s, starts ramping up its team
Evolito, which develops ultra-high-performance, low-weight and best for future EV aircraft electric motors appoints YASA CEO Dr. Chris Harris as CEO. → Read More