Pinterest reported its first billion-dollar quarter last week. Revenue hit $1.008 billion in the first three months of 2026, up 18 per cent year on year, with monthly active users reaching 631 million for the tenth consecutive quarter of double-digit user growth. The stock jumped on guidance that projects second-quarter revenue of $1.133 billion to […]

  Denmark generates more than 80 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources. Its wind farms, both onshore and offshore, have made the country a global model for clean energy transition. Its grid operator, Energinet, has spent decades building the infrastructure to support a decarbonised power system. In March, Energinet paused all new grid […]

Every major government now has an AI strategy. Most involve pilot programmes, task forces, and multi-year roadmaps that promise transformation without specifying a deadline. Dubai has taken a different approach. On Sunday, Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum launched an initiative to transition the emirate’s entire private sector toward agentic AI […]

Apple has spent more than a decade trying to get every gym, cinema, airline, and transit system on Earth to build native passes for its Wallet app. Most have not. The gym down your street still gives you a QR code in a standalone app. The cinema chain still emails you a PDF. The local […]

  Katie Haun has raised $1 billion for two new venture funds at Haun Ventures, split evenly between early and later-stage vehicles to be deployed over the next two to three years. The capital will go into crypto and blockchain companies, which have been the firm’s focus since Haun left Andreessen Horowitz in 2022 to […]

The pitch deck version of digital health goes something like this: AI replaces the clinician, costs drop, access expands, outcomes improve, everyone wins. The pitch has been effective. Venture capital has poured billions into companies built around the premise that removing humans from the care loop is both possible and desirable. The premise has a […]

Eight AI partnerships signed in six months. Williams runs Claude. McLaren runs Gemini. Red Bull runs Oracle. The 2026 regulation overhaul has turned the paddock into one of the largest live commercial AI deployments in sport. The teams in the Formula One paddock have always quietly run on data. They have just become noisier about […]

There are more than 8,000 active satellites in orbit. By 2030, there will be more than 25,000. A single geomagnetic storm, the kind the sun produces several hundred times during a solar maximum, could cost the satellite industry $40 billion. In February 2022, a moderate storm knocked 40 freshly launched Starlink satellites out of orbit, […]

The Geneva-based chipmaker has shipped over 5 billion RF antenna chips to Starlink and now expects its low-Earth-orbit business alone to deliver more than $3bn in cumulative revenue between 2026 and 2028. Orbital data centres are an option for later. When STMicroelectronics first qualified its chips for the European Space Agency in 1977, the satellite […]

  Elon Musk texted Greg Brockman two days before trial to ask about settling. Brockman suggested Musk drop all claims against the individuals. Musk replied: “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be.” The exchange, disclosed in a court […]

Ryan Cohen announced on Saturday that GameStop has submitted an unsolicited, non-binding proposal to acquire eBay for $125 per share, a cash-and-stock offer valuing the e-commerce company at approximately $55.5 billion. GameStop’s market capitalisation at the time of the offer was $11.9 billion. eBay’s was $46.2 billion. The company proposing to buy is roughly a […]

As institutional crypto adoption accelerates, security standards are becoming a defining factor in provider selection. CryptoProcessing by Coinspaid, a regulated crypto payment gateway serving enterprise and institutional merchants globally, has achieved Level 3 certification under the Cryptocurrency Security Standard (CCSS) for its Institutional-Grade Key Management and Wallet Infrastructure, the highest designation granted by the CryptoCurrency […]

Eighteen months after a €9m pre-seed, the Freiburg-based pioneer of TabPFN is being acquired by SAP and will receive more than €1bn over four years. The terms are not disclosed; the strategic intent is unmistakable. When Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir founded Prior Labs in early 2024, the AI world was paying attention […]

Barocal, a Cambridge University spin-out commercialising efficient, refrigerant-gas-free cooling and heating technology, has raised a €8.5 million ($10 million) Seed round to accelerate development and scale its engineering team ahead of commercial deployment.

Investors in the round included World Fund, Breakthrough Energy Discovery, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures and IP Group. The team will use the new funding to scale operations and recruit senior technical and commercial talent to accelerate system development.

Prof. Xavier Moya, Founder of Barocal, says: “Heating and cooling have always been the elephant in the room when it comes to emissions, and ours is a set of materials that could change history. We are building something truly revolutionary. The world can only hit a 1.5 degree target if we cut emissions by around half – solving heating and cooling emissions would achieve that goal. I am thrilled to be partnering with investors who will support us to commercialise and scale our technology before the planet runs out of time.”

Barocal’s Seed round sits within a 2026 dataset showing continued early-stage and project-linked capital for thermal systems, building efficiency and energy-intensive infrastructure.

The closest same-country comparables are Exergy3 in Edinburgh, which raised €11.4 million for thermal energy storage for clean industrial heat, and Ionech in Oxfordshire, which secured €2.3 million for ambient-air-to-electricity pilots.

Adjacent activity includes SolidWatts’ industrial process-heating technology, Lucend’s data-centre optimisation platform, ecoworks’ residential energy-renovation project, and WtEnergy’s industrial waste-to-energy systems.

Taken together, these examples indicate investor interest in technologies that address heating, cooling, thermal efficiency and energy use across buildings, industry and data centres, with over €51 million in funding.

Mark Windeknecht, Principal at World Fund, adds: “Barocal has achieved what scientists have struggled to do for decades – a materials breakthrough delivering solid-state materials that finally enable new cooling and heating platform technology that competes with vapour-based incumbents. We are extremely proud to be supporting this world-leading scientific team as they commercialise.”

Founded in 2019, Barocal is developing next-generation solid-state cooling and heating systems – replacing conventional refrigerant gases with innovative organic barocaloric materials that heat and cool under pressure, eliminating high-global-warming refrigerants and improving energy efficiency.

While many caloric materials are limited by costs, degradation, or fatigue, Prof. Moya discovered a way to demonstrate unprecedented performance in barocaloric materials – hence the company’s name.

Barocaloric materials use pressure-driven phase transitions to generate large temperature changes. Based on this discovery, his team developed and patented a heating and cooling platform technology. It is designed to be more efficient and less expensive than traditional vapour-compression systems that rely on climate-damaging gas refrigerants to power today’s air conditioning units.

The company will initially target fast-growing applications, including data centre cooling and commercial refrigeration, tapping into a ~€384 billion ($450 billion) global HVAC market that is expected to surge to ~€492 billion ($577 billion) by 2033.

At scale, Barocal says their technology will significantly reduce heating and cooling sector emissions through efficiency gains and avoiding gas refrigerants. The sector is responsible for around 15% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions – a far higher proportion than the aviation sector. Cooling alone accounted for more than 4 Gt of CO₂e in 2022, and demand is expected to triple by 2050.

Ashley Grosh, Head of Breakthrough Energy Discovery, says: “Buildings account for roughly 7% of global emissions, and decarbonising heating and cooling is essential to address that impact. We first supported Barocal through the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program, where Professor Moya’s rigorous, years-long research into caloric materials stood out for its technical depth and commercial potential.

“This most recent investment reflects our continued confidence in the team as they scale a solid-state alternative to vapour compression that is cleaner, more efficient and fundamentally rethinks how we deliver comfort.”

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The European Commission has formally recommended that member states keep Huawei and ZTE out of their connectivity infrastructure. The same restrictions are now moving toward becoming legally binding. China has already threatened to retaliate. When the European Commission first asked its member states to keep Huawei and ZTE out of their 5G networks, in the […]

An Anthropic AI model that can find zero-days in every major operating system has become a geopolitical and prudential question. The Eurogroup met in Brussels on Monday with no answer in hand. Brussels on a Monday morning in early May is not, by tradition, the place where the world’s most powerful AI model gets discussed. […]

A new Bloomberg-Feroot investigation finds that nine of the 10 largest US health companies are still loading advertising trackers on the very pages where patients log in and register. The story keeps repeating because nothing has stopped it. There is, by now, a familiar shape to investigations of online tracking. A reporter or researcher loads […]

Trentino-based Smartness tech travel startup has just raised €47 million Series B, in a round including primary and secondary equity and debt, being the largest round completed for an Italian vertical SaaS company. Smartness is a tech company that offers business-to-business (B2B) Software as a Service (SaaS), offering several products to hospitality businesses, to facilitate […]

Quantum Machines (QM), a provider of hybrid quantum-classical control solutions, today announced the acquisition of Dutch company QHarbor and the opening of a new office in Delft, the Netherlands. 

The move establishes a local base in one of Europe’s leading quantum ecosystems and supports the continued expansion of QM’s software platform. Quantum Machines develops the hardware and software systems that power QM’s Orchestration Platform, a comprehensive solution for real-time control of quantum processors.

The platform is designed to lead the industry’s shift toward hybrid quantum-classical computing across all major qubit modalities, including superconducting, neutral atom, trapped ion, and spin-based platforms. The addition of the QHarbor team reflects Quantum Machines’ focus on building a strong presence in Delft by attracting top local talent and by working closely with the broader quantum community. 

“As an American company, this step reflects our deep investment in Europe’s quantum future and our commitment to being an integral part of this thriving ecosystem,” said Itamar Sivan, CEO and co-founder of QM.

“By establishing a home in Delft, we are investing our resources and expertise in one of Europe’s most significant quantum hubs.” 

The QHarbor team will form the foundation of QM’s Delft office, contributing to the company’s work on software-defined experimentation, data management, and system-level integration for quantum computing.

Joining Quantum Machines allows us to take our work further and integrate it into a broader platform used across the quantum ecosystem,” said Alberto Tosato, one of QHarbor’s co-founders, now joining QM. 

“We look forward to contributing to the development of technologies that support the scaling of quantum systems.”

The Delft office, located in Hubbz Delft, will support research and development activities and serve as a base for collaboration with local partners, including institutions within the House of Quantum and the wider Dutch quantum ecosystem.

This expansion builds on Quantum Machines’ growing presence in Europe, with existing operations in Denmark, Germany and France.

Together with Delft, these locations place QM within several of Europe’s key quantum hubs and enable closer collaboration across the region.

Lead image: Freepik.

OpenAI has finalised the most structurally novel enterprise AI deal of 2026: a $10bn vehicle anchored by TPG, with 19 investors and a 17.5% guaranteed annual return over five years. The strategy is to make PE portfolios a captive distribution channel. We wrote about the venture’s outline last month; Monday’s confirmation closes the funding question. […]

Blackstone Digital Infrastructure Trust will list on the NYSE under BXDC, targeting newly built data centres leased to hyperscalers. It is the most direct way Wall Street has yet packaged the AI build-out for public investors. For most of the past 18 months, the financial story behind the AI build-out has been a story about […]

A quick look at 2026 activity points to a broadening European drone innovation sector spanning unmanned aircraft, mission software, autonomy, counter-UAS systems, aerial intelligence and inspection platforms.

• Platforms: Quantum Systems secured a €150 million financing package to support growth and industrial scaling of unmanned systems in Europe; ABZ Innovation raised €7 million to scale production, speed product development and expand heavy-duty agricultural and industrial drones; and Japanese backing for Bulgaria-linked cargo drone company Dronamics.
• Software and interoperability: AirHub, which secured €4.4 million in Series A funding to build mission-critical drone operations software for security, defence, public safety and critical infrastructure; Intelic itself has also previously appeared in EU-Startups coverage under its former name, Avalor AI, when it raised a €2 million seed round in 2024 to enhance military unmanned systems.
• Autonomy and intelligence: Occam Industries raised €3 million in pre-Seed funding to support frontline drone autonomy in Ukraine, Cambridge-based Mutable Tactics closed a €1.8 million pre-Seed round to develop AI software for coordinated unmanned systems operating with unreliable communications; and Kelluu raised a €15 million Series A to expand persistent aerial intelligence, fleet capacity, AI capabilities and hiring.
• Counter-drone systems: Shotling raised €700k to advance kinetic short-range counter-UAS systems against FPV drones and loitering munitions; and counter-drone company Sensofusion acquiring Atol Aviation to add aircraft and unmanned aircraft manufacturing expertise and production capacity.

Across these 2026 round, around €181 million has been reported for drone and adjacent unmanned systems innovation. Taken together, this places Intelic BASE within a wider European market where funding is moving not only into drone platforms, but also into software, interoperability, autonomy, inspection, aerial intelligence and counter-drone capabilities.

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