Air defence startup Egide raises €8M seed to take on Europe’s sky protection gap
Air defence startup Egide raises €8M seed to take on Europe’s sky protection gap

A new entrant into the crowded but urgent European air defence startup space has closed its first significant round, as capital chases the continent’s most pressing military capability shortfall. The phrase ‘air defence gap’ has become one of the defin…

360 Capital raises €85M for deeptech fund backed by European defence prime
360 Capital raises €85M for deeptech fund backed by European defence prime

The Paris-Milan VC’s new vehicle is the latest sign that European investors are hardwiring defence into their deeptech strategy. There is a version of this story that could have been told three years ago and would have raised eyebrows in polite Europea…

Recap: Europe’s top funding rounds this week (16 -22 March)
Recap: Europe’s top funding rounds this week (16 -22 March)

A quieter week by headline standards, but one that reveals a great deal about where European venture capital is quietly concentrating: AI agents for physical industries, agritech automation, and the growing operator-to-VC pipeline. What the week of 16-…

The dummy server and the chip war
The dummy server and the chip war

The indictment of Super Micro’s co-founder exposes not just a $2.5 billion scheme, it exposes a system that was never built to stop one. Somewhere in a rented warehouse in Southeast Asia, a man was using a hair dryer on a server box. Not to dry it. To …

WordPress.com lets AI agents write, publish, and manage your site
WordPress.com lets AI agents write, publish, and manage your site

Automattic has added write capabilities to WordPress.com’s MCP integration, giving AI agents like Claude and ChatGPT the ability to create posts, build pages, manage comments, and restructure content, all through natural conversation, with human approv…

Starling launches an AI banking assistant that actually does things
Starling launches an AI banking assistant that actually does things

The UK challenger bank is rolling out Starling Assistant to personal account holders today, billing it as the UK’s first agentic AI financial assistant. It can set up savings goals, organise bill payments, and even quiz you on your own spending, all fr…

Bluesky raises $100M Series B as new CEO takes charge
Bluesky raises $100M Series B as new CEO takes charge

Ten days after founder Jay Graber stepped aside as CEO, the decentralised social platform has disclosed a $100 million Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto, a round that closed last April but was never announced. The timing tells its own story. There is…

DoorDash launches Tasks
DoorDash launches Tasks

Here is one way the AI data economy works in practice in 2026: a DoorDash courier straps on a body camera, washes at least five dishes, holds each one up to the lens for a few seconds, and earns a few dollars. That footage, mundane, specific, reproduci…

Microsoft’s MAI-Image-2 enters the top three AI image generators in the world
Microsoft’s MAI-Image-2 enters the top three AI image generators in the world

The second version of Microsoft’s in-house image model lands at #3 on Arena.ai’s leaderboard, behind only Google and OpenAI, and begins rolling out across Copilot and Bing Image Creator today. A year ago, Microsoft was generating images for Bing and Co…

Austrian startup TACEO launches a network that runs sensitive computation without seeing the underlying data
Austrian startup TACEO launches a network that runs sensitive computation without seeing the underlying data

The TACEO Network, already live inside World ID’s biometric verification system for more than 18 million users, lets organisations share digital infrastructure without sharing sensitive data. When Sam Altman’s World needs to verify that a new user’s ir…