~the-next-web | Bookmarks (154)

DeepSeek proves that Silicon Valley can’t monopolise AI innovation, according to a European AI entrepreneur. Muj Choudhury, the CEO and co-founder of British voice processing startup RocketPhone, welcomed DeepSeek’s rapid rise. He hopes the Chinese company signals a shift in the balance of AI power. “AI development has long been dominated by Silicon Valley’s powerful VC firms, which wield immense influence by pouring vast...

Spanish tech star TravelPerk has raised a whopping $200mn and sealed the acquisition of expenses platform Yokoy. The investment values TravelPerk at $2.7bn — almost double last year’s $1.4bn valuation. The business travel giant said the funds would fuel further product development and expansion into the US. European VC firm Atomico led the Series E investment. Alongside the cash injection, TravelPerk announced the purchase...

Remember when spotting a drone in the sky was a novelty? Now it’s like playing whack-a-mole with flying machines. Delivery drones, military drones, AI drones, hobby drones — our skies are busier than the queue at airport security. Without air traffic control, we’re one step away from midair collisions and drones arguing over parking spots.  Enter AirDodge, a Norwegian startup that’s stepping in to...

Stunning AI advances from Chinese startup DeepSeek have sent tech stocks tumbling across the US and Europe. DeepSeek released a free chatbot and new open-source AI models last week. Within days, the chatbot had overtaken ChatGPT to reach the top spot on the Apple App Store’s free app rankings. The new R1 models sent further shockwaves through the AI world. R1 promised performance to...

The practice of medicine has undergone an incredible, albeit incomplete, transformation over the past 50 years, moving steadily from a field informed primarily by expert opinion and the anecdotal experience of individual clinicians toward a formal scientific discipline. The advent of evidence-based medicine meant clinicians identified the most effective treatment options for their patients based on quality evaluations of the latest research. Now, precision...

Right now, there’s at least one nuclear-power, nuclear-armed submarine stealthily patrolling the waters off the UK. The sub is powered by a nuclear reactor, so it can cruise undetected for over 20 years without refuelling. Oh, and it’s also armed with eight nuclear warheads — each six times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  Since 1969, the Royal Navy has kept...

Donald Trump’s big AI announcement has turned heads on both sides of the Atlantic. Trump revealed this week that OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle have formed a joint venture — called Stargate — that will invest $500bn in AI infrastructure. The companies said $100bn of the funding was available immediately. The rest would be deployed over the next four years. Trump billed Stargate as “the...

Ah, quantum computing… that moonshot technology full of potential, full of promise — and jam-packed with enough jargon to make the average person cry.  Qubits, entanglement, superposition, trapped-ions, Schrödinger’s cat. These terms sound strange because the world of quantum mechanics — where things can exist in multiple states at once — is strange.  And that’s why I want you to bear with me while...

A new season of the “Champions League of Tech” has begun with the return of TECH5 — Europe’s hottest scaleup contest. Over the next five months, TECH5 will showcase the continent’s future stars. The competition comes to a climax on June 19-20, when the 2025 winners are announced on the main stage of TNW Conference. Applications for the tournament opened this week. Promising scaleups...

An Icelandic scaleup has sparked hopes of a breakthrough in dementia treatment after raising €26.5mn for groundbreaking research. Arctic Therapeutics (ATx) attracted the investment after pioneering a new approach to drug development. Founded in 2015, the company first analyses genomic data with bioinformatics — a blend of computer science and biology. After identifying disease-associated genes and proteins, ATx targets the root causes of a...

Dutch scaleup Mosa Meat, the maker of the “world’s kindest burger,” has submitted its first request to sell cultivated meat in the EU.  Cultivated or “lab-grown” meat is made by harvesting animal cells and growing them in a high-tech bioreactor filled with a nutrient-packed broth. The result? Real meat minus the slaughterhouses and climate-heating emissions.  Singapore, the US, and most recently Israel are the...

Google DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic Labs expects testing on its first AI-designed drugs to begin this year, as tech startups race to turn algorithmic magic into actual treatments. “We’ll hopefully have some AI-designed drugs in clinical trials by the end of the year,” the firm’s Nobel Prize-winning CEO Demis Hassabis told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. “That’s the plan.”  ...

Stuttgart, Germany-based Sereact has secured €25mn to advance its embodied AI software that enables robots to carry out tasks they were never trained to do.  “With our technology, robots act situationally rather than following rigidly programmed sequences. They adapt to dynamic tasks in real-time, enabling an unprecedented level of autonomy,” said Ralf Gulde, CEO and co-founder of Sereact (short for “sense, reason, act”). Early...

A startup called Scenexus has unveiled plans to build digital twins of cities around the world. A spin-off from Dutch research organisation TNO, Scenexus launched this week with a new platform for urban planning. The software blends multiple datasets to clone entire cities and regions. Planners and engineers then use the replicas to precisely analyse the impacts of their ideas. According to Scenexus, the...

Four billion years ago, Earth was a fiery, tumultuous world of molten rock, volcanic eruptions, and toxic skies, with searing heat and the constant threat of asteroid impacts. Thankfully, our planet has cooled off a bit since then. Nevertheless, the Earth still radiates vast amounts of geothermal energy. It’s a clean, limitless, always-on power source lying beneath our feet — we just have to...

Yet another deal has been signed between a publisher and a GenAI leader. Paris startup Mistral and news outlet Agence France-Presse (AFP) announced today that they are combining their services to improve AI responses. The deal provides Mistral’s chatbot — imaginatively named Le Chat — with access to all of AFP’s text stories.  According to Mistral, the integration will bring “enhanced factuality” to the...

Australian-German startup Quantum Brilliance has raised $20mn in Series A funding as it looks to deploy small, portable quantum accelerators that promise to supercharge the computational power of everything from data centres and robots to satellites. A quantum accelerator is a specialised hardware unit that speeds up specific quantum algorithms, or tasks. They act as co-processors to classical computers, such as CPUs or GPUs,...

TNW Conference will be born again this summer. Over 18 years of unforgettable events, countless future tech stars have used our stage as a springboard to success. We’ve driven vast investments, showcased endless innovations, and made friends along the way. We’ve also learnt from our mistakes. But don’t worry, fellow kids — we’re not getting old yet. We’re still mixing serious business with festival...

Synthesia has claimed the crown of Britain’s biggest GenAI company after raising $180mn at a $2.1bn valuation. The London-based business generates lifelike avatars for video content. Enterprises use the software to produce training content and corporate communications. The tech has made Synthesia a leader in the burgeoning synthetic media industry. According to the startup, over 60,000 businesses are customers — including more than 60% of...

Shift, a social enterprise founded by Dutch tech entrepreneur Don Ritzen, has announced its ambitious plans to construct a massive landmark designed to inspire action on climate change.  Shift aims to attract 1 million annual visitors to the “New World Wonder,” which it estimates will cost up to $250mn. The startup plans to build the monument in the Netherlands, and if that’s successful, construct...

Coming from South Africa but living in Europe, I can tell you that sending money to family and friends back home is a bit of a nightmare. Typically you must use a traditional bank, which can take a week or more, or payment apps like PayPal or Wise, which charge high fees.  The antiquated nature of remittance payments is something that immigrants are all...

More than half of knowledge workers now use generative AI weekly, according to a recent piece of research from Asana’s Work Innovation Lab, in partnership with Anthropic. The study also found that takeup ramped up by 44% over nine months in 2024. And those who use AI daily benefit most. Eighty-nine percent reported a productivity boost, whereas casual monthly users only saw a 39%...

Eindhoven-based startup Photon IP has raised €4.75mn in seed funding as it looks to scale up its unique method for creating energy-efficient photonic chips.   AI systems, data centres, fibre-optic networks, and even some sensors rely on photonic chips to send and receive information using light. These chips are a big deal because they’re faster and use less energy than typical semiconductors, which transfer data through...

In 2018, after decades of research and tens of millions in funding, Russian astronauts attached a wildlife-tracking receiver to the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS). The device received data from tagged animals across the planet and beamed it to a ground station in Moscow. From there, it went to an open-source database called Movebank.  The space tracker was the final piece of...