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🎙️ The Drive at Five with Dan Taylor and Robin Wauters - Episode 13 Nov 04, 2022

Show notes

Well alright, alright, alright. Robin's back in the studio this week, and after nine years, he actually has a semi-professional setup. This week:

🇩🇪 The first German developer of quantum computers, eleQtron has raised over €50 million in new funds, including venture capital from Earlybird and Siegerlandfonds.

🇸🇪 Polestar obtained $1.6 billion in financing support from its two major shareholders

🇩🇪 Volkswagen sells its electric car-sharing service, WeShare to Miles Mobility. Here's why.

🇵🇹 Web Summit? That's 71,000 people too many.

🇸🇪 Sweden’s STILRIDE is anything but still, rides ahead with €3.7 million

🇩🇪 Billed as the first European ClimateTech Entrepreneur in Residence programme, Atlantic Labs and FoodLabs launch Founders for Climate initiative

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 / 🇩🇪 Not quite dead yet, but Made.com has indicated that they're headed towards administration, and German nappy service provider Windeln.de has filed an application for insolvency proceedings

🇩🇪 Now closing in on close to $1 billion raised, Volocopter lands another $182 million in second signing of Series E round

🇪🇺 According to the Tech.eu database, European tech companies raised €5.7 billion in total in October, recording a €1 billion decline compared to the total amount raised in September (€6.7 billion).

All this and a whole lot more on this week's episode of the Tech.eu Drive at Five!

🎙️ Big Deal: Barcelona's Seqera Labs CEO and co-founder Evan Floden Nov 01, 2022

Show notes

As part of Tech.eu's Big Deal feature, this week, we're putting “data orchestration and workflow software for life sciences” Seqera Labs under the microscope and aim to dissect just where the company came from, what part it played in the fight against Covid-19, and what an Addition led €22 million investment round means for the company.

Moreover, instead of just the written word, we managed to sit down with Seqera Labs' CEO and co-founder Evan Flowden and hit the record button.

Read the article in-depth over at Tech.eu.

🎙️ The Drive at Five with Dan Taylor and Robin Wauters with Fiona Alston - Episode 12 Oct 28, 2022

Show notes

Well alright, alright, alright. Today is Robin's birthday and he's headed back to Brussels after co-hosting a start-studded event here in London. In the meantime "temporary" Tech.eu writer Fiona Alston sits in and shares her thoughts and opinions on the news items that caught her attention this week.

🇪🇺 First up, Bill Gates throws his support behind new European cleantech scale-up coalition

🇫🇷 Launch of a bioengineered houseplant called Neo P1 purifies your home

🇵🇹 No sheet: eToro acquires portfolio management provider Bullsheet

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Pixera is on a mission to make professional e-learning a more entertaining experience

🇪🇸 Former Tiger Global partner Lee Fixel’s Addition lead Seqera Labs’ €22 million investment round

🇮🇪 Johnson Hana raises €10.5 million to up-end the legal market

🇫🇷 One more thing: insuretech Neat

🖋️ One more one more thing: Dan was interviewed by Black Unicorn PR

All this and a whole lot more on this week's episode of the Tech.eu Drive at Five!

🎙️ The Drive at Five with Dan Taylor and Robin Wauters with Molten Ventures' James Clark - Episode 11 Oct 21, 2022

Show notes

Well alright, alright, alright. This week Robin's quite literally underwater, taking a well-deserved few days off and, in his own words, "sipping cocktails poolside", so we've managed to rope in Molten Ventures' Marketing Director James Clark to get a VC fund marketers opinion on four stories that caught our eye this week.

🐄 First up, Hoxton Farms raised $22 million in its efforts to pack in the fat and up the taste of meat alternatives. Dan concludes that ultimately everything tastes like chicken, and James adds that it now also tastes like pork belly too.

✈️ While Quantum Systems raised $17.5 million, in part via Peter Thiel directly himself, J&D dissect not only what the company does, but where the heck the name came from and if a massive pivot and Schrödinger weren't involved.

🚀 As it turns out, James is a massive space nerd, and Dan can recall the nominal average value of standard gravity at Earth's surface (9.8 m/s2). The duo somehow manage to weave this into a discussion about Orbex's landing £40.4 million in a Series C funding round as it gears up for the first vertical launch from Scottish soil.

🏖️ And one more thing - after being hard hit by the pandemic, travel tech funding seems to be on the mend as Munich's Holidu housed north of €100 million in a Series E round led by 83North.

All this and a whole lot more on this week's episode of the Tech.eu Drive at Five!

🎙️ The advantages of Vanta with Chief Revenue Officer Stevie Case Oct 18, 2022

Show notes

Security and privacy frameworks are not your everyday topic of conversation, but the minute either of these fails, it's the talk of the office.

On the back of a just-days-ago-announced $40 million Series B extension to an already impressive $110 million round, we sit down with Vanta Chief Revenue Officer Stevie Case to discuss just what advantages the company offers organisations, and what this rock solid compliance certification can mean when it comes to speed of execution, growth, and ultimately the bottom line.

Stevie also highlights, in 90 words or less the top three most requested compliance certifications, SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and how Vanta works closely with auditors to ensure that every client that walks through their doors leaves fully compliant.

The company has recently opened offices in Dublin and Sydney, with Stevie confirming that the company is currently scouting locations to open operations in South America. When asked about any future M&A activities, Ms. Case remains ... politely silent.

All this and more with Vanta Chief Revenue Officer Stevie Case.

🎙️ The Drive at Five with Dan Taylor and Robin Wauters - Episode 10 Oct 14, 2022

Show notes

In this 🇹🇷 Türkiye 🇹🇷 special edition both Dan and Robin are dusting off their boots from a trip out to Istanbul and the Webrazzi Summit, but never the less ....

We discuss the rumoured Getir/Gorillas merger.

Which of course evokes memories of one of the biggest shopping expeditions of all time: Ford vs. Ferrari.

Robin weighs in on the fast-delivery space and who's next on the M&A consolidation action.

Philly!

We discuss CNBC's Ryan Browne reporting on N26's, "net revenue increased 67% in 2021 to 120.3 million euros as the bank benefited from growth in subscriptions, stronger customer engagement and higher interest rates. However, the company continued to lose money that year, with its net loss climbing 14% to 172.4 million euros."

BaFin and Wirecard, with a tangent to kebab and The Gamestop Saga.

ABC = Always Be Cobbling.

Bonus: be the first to tweet us first with the addendum to the ABC's and you'll win a free t-shirt from Tech.eu.

And last by not least, Dan recaps the Big Deal this week and the rationale behind Grover's numbers. While he wanted something dark and dirty to be going on, in fact, the $2.1 billion in debt funding does, in fact, check out.

Teşekkürler!

🎙️ The Drive at Five with Robin Wauters and Dan Taylor - Episode 9 Oct 07, 2022

Show notes

Woof, what a week it was. Pony up to your favourite beverage of choice, and let's recap what caught our eyes here at Tech.eu

❗ Tech.eu is expanding! We're looking for some new crackerjack news tellers to join our editorial team. If you've got the chops, or know someone that does, hit us up at work@tech.eu.

🎮 London-based Improbable did NOT, in fact, close a $100 million round this week, as confirmed by Tech.eu, but rather, they're in the process of closing the round. Robin reports on how very strange this news is.

❗ The Tech.eu Summit is 24 May 2023. In Brussels.

🛒 Spotify snaps up Kinzen / Reddit acqui-hired (Robin hates that term with a passion) Sweden's Oterlu.

🤖 Dublin-based Tines extended its Series B round by $55 million, and we find out just how Lee Fixel quit Tiger Global. Hint: Reuters.

🪑 An Austrian pr0n company proposes to buy Home24 for $250 million. In Robin's words, "F*ck you Home24". (XXXLutz is actually a furniture retailer that was founded in 1945).

🦷 Maki.vc sunk €5.3 million into Düsseldorf-based at-home orthodontics device maker K Line. Of interest as the IoT investment space has cooled dramatically.

📉 Tech.eu Insider members have exclusive access to our quarterly report where we outline the shape of the European landscape.

🥄 Dan recaps the Big Deal article that went out earlier this week, diving a bit deeper into Bending Spoons' recent $340 million funding round. We got revenue numbers direct from the horses mouth, uncovered that H14 is the family office of the Berlusconi family (Bunga bunga!), and how and why the company's name is tied to The Matrix.

📱 One more thing: The European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of enforcing USB-C as a common charging port across a wide range of consumer electronic devices. Hallelujah. F*ck you dongles.

🍻 That's it, now get out there and have a fantastic weekend.

❓ Leave it, I don't care.

On pivoting: becoming the painkiller and not a vitamin with Karoli Hindrix of Jobbatical Oct 06, 2022

Show notes

Having recently closed an €11.6 million Series A funding round, Jobbatical founder Karoli Hindriks joins the show today to discuss the hows and whys of pivoting the platform from a recruitment service to a talent relocation one; and how she hasn't looked back since.

"As a startup, you want to be a painkiller, not a vitamin." - Karoli Hindriks.

We also discuss the ins and outs of digital nomadic life, why and how governments need to recognise that worker patterns and expectations have changed dramatically in the past 50 years, and what country is the toughest to deal with in terms of relocations. Hint, it's the United States of America.

In the signature Tech.eu Lightning Round, we get to know Karoli as a person and find out that she is (for the purposes of this podcast) related to one of the greatest guitar legends of all time.

Closing out the show, Dan digs into Karoli's CV (yes, she once worked for Fox, but at the same time, also held a position as a cabaret dancer), and she leaves the youths with some sage advice.

All this and more on Episode 303 of the Tech.eu podcast!

The Drive at Five with Robin and Dan with Nick Stevens- Episode 8 Sep 30, 2022

Show notes

In what turned out to be the Week d'Italia Robin jetted off to TechChill Milano and brought home a head cold, so good friend of the show Nick Stevens stepped in on a wing and a prayer.

🇮🇹 (2:25) This week we cover Ryan Reynolds' involvement in a $340 million investment in Bending Spoons, their video editing tool Splice, photo editor Remini, how and why mobile tech has plateaued, why everyone shouldn't be a creative genius, DALL E2, and why Brad Pitt's Bullet Train is the greatest worst greatest film of all time.

🇩🇪 (7:27) We glossed over Grover (to an extent) as Dan's planning on taking a deeper look at the tech rental platform in the Big Deal segment next week, but spoiler alert, of the $2.3 billion that the Berlin-based company has raised, $2.1 billion of it is in debt funding.

🇮🇹 (10:40) Slimming the show down ever more, we blazed through Satispay, their €320 million Series D round, and after Scalapay (I'm detecting a theme here 🤔) the startup takes the second ever unicorn title home for Italy.

🇩🇪 (11:00) Nick chimes in with a subject near and dear to his heart and how Berlin's one • fıve is out to save the world. To spice things up, we do it in pub quiz trivial style with me not having the article open and seeing just how much of my own reporting I can remember.

🇬🇧/🇺🇸 (13:55) And last, but certainly not least, Nick and I cover why mayonnaise is the ultimate condiment, what I've got my eye on for the after work beverage of choice (hint: Guinness), and why Nick is taking drugs (hint: the clue is in the intro).

All this and more on Episode 8 of Tech.eu's Drive at Five!

The Drive at Five with Robin and Dan - Episode 7 Sep 23, 2022

Show notes

Despite skipping the legendary opening party at OMCLUB as part of DMEXCO in Cologne, and smelling quite lovely, I might add, Robin's back in the studio to discuss what went down across the European technosphere this week.

🇵🇹 Robin weighs in on Dan's "tech-light, but a good read" piece highlighting the shaky legal system in Portugal and what it means to the investment and startup scenes.

🎙️ > 🎤 After a blip in the audio recording, we're pleased to announce that we're going through Robin's audio setup with a fine-toothed comb, and let's see if we can get him sounding just as good as Dan. Or at the very least, remove all the technical barriers.

⚛️ Dan finally received the opportunity to pen a headline he's been waiting his entire life for it involves "pet food and supplements" and a quantum leap in innovation.

👑 Robin recaps the funding numbers of the week, noting that of the top 10 investments none of them were from the UK. A rarity indeed. What's going on? Hint: Salve Regina.

📱 Berlin/San Francisco-based telecom-as-a-service platform Gigs raised $20 million from a number of notable investors including Gradient, Google’s early-stage fund, YC Continuity, etc., but neither Robin nor Dan can figure out just who their customers are and/or what industries/segments they're targeting. Stay tuned...

🐝 Robin waxes poetic about the buzz surrounding the Instabox and Budbee merger.

💸 And there's one more thing - Robin takes note that investors tend to like the $300 million number. This week Swisscom Ventures, DTCP, and Extantia all clocked in at 300 million.

😂 Last but certainly not least, after 5 episodes hosted together, Robin finally loses it and we almost have to stop the show due to uncontrollable laughter.

All this and more on Episode 7 of Tech.eu's Drive at Five.

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