Monzo is closing its US banking operations after struggling to gain traction in the market, and will instead focus on its core UK and European business.

The UK digital bank, famed for its bright coral cards, will stop onboarding new customers and lay off about 50 employees in the US, according to a report in Bloomberg. US customers can continue to use their accounts until June.

The move marks a key strategy decision by new CEO Diana Layfield, who replaced TS Anil as CEO last month.  

Monzo said: "With a fast-growing customer base of 15 million in the UK and the growth opportunity our European banking licence creates, we're making a deliberate, strategic decision to focus on scaling in our home market and Europe ⁠to step away from the US.”  

Monzo first made a play for the US market in 2020 but withdrew its application for a US banking licence in 2021. But it has continued to hold a presence in the US. The challenger bank, which has over 15m customers, has offices in New York and San Francisco, with its US business headed up by US CEO Conor Walsh, a former Cash App executive.  

In December last year, Monzo, which already has a UK banking licence, won a European banking licence.

The challenger bank has been vocal about its EU expansion plans.  

Last month, Monzo rival Revolut said it was making a fresh attempt to secure a US banking licence as it scaled up its ambitions in the US market.

Six months after emerging from stealth and completing its pre-seed funding round, Credibur reports that its platform now supports clients with a total of €2 billion in debt facility volume. The figure represents structured debt portfolios connected to its system, which provides continuous monitoring, independent verification, reporting, and backup servicing.

Originally launched with $2.2 million in pre-seed funding led by Redstone, the Berlin-based company introduced a modular, API- and AI-driven infrastructure designed to manage the full lifecycle of credit facilities between non-bank lenders and institutional capital providers.

European structured credit markets, including securitisation and private debt, have grown significantly in recent years and now exceed €1.27 trillion, with securitisation volumes increasing markedly between 2023 and 2025, according to the Association for Financial Markets in Europe. This growth has supported the development of new lending strategies, fund structures, and faster capital deployment.

At the same time, the increasing scale and complexity of these structures can make oversight more challenging. In many cases, visibility into key aspects such as eligibility, cash flow reconciliation, and covenant compliance remains limited, with issues often identified only through periodic reporting, resulting in less consistent oversight.

Positioned as an infrastructure layer between alternative lenders and institutional investors, Credibur provides an operational monitoring and control system for structured debt portfolios, replacing manual workflows with automated data processes.

Its platform connects to originators, servicers, and payment systems to reconcile portfolio data with cash flows on an ongoing basis, while automatically assessing eligibility criteria, covenants, and concentration limits, supporting more scalable and data-driven governance across complex debt structures.

According to founder and CEO Nicolas Kipp, the growth of non-bank lending has outpaced the development of the operational infrastructure supporting it.

The tools haven’t kept up the pace. Lenders across the facility lifecycle still manage complex facilities with outdated software and manual data entry. Reaching over two billion euros in debt facilities on our platform in six months suggests that demand for such a solution already existed,

Kipp said.

The company works with a growing group of lenders, originators, and fund managers across Europe, the UK, and the US, supporting a range of non-bank lending and structured credit strategies.

Audicin, a Finland-based neurotechnology company developing real-time nervous system regulation tools, has raised $1.9 million in funding. The round includes private investment, follow-on backing from Petteri Lahtela and Virpi Tuomivaara, as well as support from Business Finland through its Deep Tech Accelerator programme. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to approximately $3 million.

The company develops solutions based on brainwave entrainment, auditory engineering, and music neuroscience to support focus, stress recovery, productivity, and sleep. Its technology delivers real-time background listening sessions that adapt to physiological signals, enabling continuous nervous system regulation throughout the day.

A core component of the offering is Audicin for Apps, an SDK designed to integrate real-time regulation protocols directly into digital health, performance, and consumer platforms. The SDK operates passively - triggered by biometric data, time of day, or in-app events—and integrates with wearable devices such as Oura, Apple Watch, Garmin, and Whoop, without requiring additional hardware.

In parallel, the company is advancing a standalone, offline Sleep Headband designed for use in environments where mobile devices are restricted, including healthcare and defence settings. The device delivers pre-configured recovery programmes based on low-frequency brainwave protocols associated with deep sleep.

According to co-founder and CEO Laura Avonius, the company is focused on embedding nervous system support into everyday environments, enabling real-time regulation without requiring dedicated user attention, and expanding into contexts where maintaining recovery and performance is more challenging.

Audicin is seeing early commercial traction across sectors, including defence, performance, and wellness, with a growing pipeline of enterprise opportunities and increasing user engagement following recent product updates.

The funding will support the commercialisation of Audicin’s core products, including its mobile application, Sleep Headband, and Audicin for Apps, as well as further product development and expansion into new use cases and markets.

Metafuels, a Switzerland-based aviation technology company developing sustainable fuel solutions, has been awarded €1.92 million in grant funding to support the development of its synthetic sustainable aviation fuel (e-SAF) project in the Port of Rotterdam. The funding was granted to its subsidiary, Metafuels Nederland B.V., by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency under the TSE Industry Studies - Hydrogen & Green Chemistry programme (GroenvermogenNL).

The grant will support key development activities for the Turbe project, including front-end engineering and design, permitting, and commercial preparation ahead of a final investment decision. The facility is planned to be located at the Evos terminal in the Port of Rotterdam and represents the first commercial deployment of Metafuels’ proprietary methanol-to-jet technology, aerobrew.

The project is designed as a blueprint for future large-scale facilities and is targeting production from 2030, in line with emerging regulatory frameworks such as ReFuelEU Aviation. Its location in Rotterdam provides access to established infrastructure, logistics networks, and industrial expertise, supporting the scale-up of synthetic fuel production in Europe.

Metafuels’ approach focuses on converting renewable methanol into drop-in jet fuel compatible with existing aircraft and infrastructure. Compared to conventional sustainable aviation fuel pathways, the methanol-to-jet process offers a more scalable alternative and, when powered by renewable inputs, can significantly reduce lifecycle emissions.

The grant will support critical project development activities through to final investment decision (FID), including front-end engineering and design (FEED), permitting and consents, and commercial development.

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When Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in late February, choking off the corridor through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas flows, the immediate consequences were predictable: crude prices spiked, energy markets convulsed, and geopolitical analysts reached for their most alarming adjectives. What fewer people anticipated was how quickly the crisis […]

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German consumers throw away 4.4 million tonnes of food every year, worth roughly €6 billion. Austrian startup Afreshed just bet that the solution is consolidation, not competition, acquiring Munich-based rival Etepetete and raising a mid-seven-figure sum to take its organic rescue-box model across the border. The deal, announced on Monday, unites the two largest “ugly […]

Finnish IoT cybersecurity company Test of Things has raised €1.2 million in Pre-Seed funding.

When a company builds a connected device — whether it's a smart lock, a hospital monitor, or a piece of factory equipment — it has to make sure that device is secure before selling it. 

However, cybersecurity testing and compliance documentation are largely manual work performed by highly skilled experts, and thus very expensive. And it doesn’t scale when today’s market is flooded with connected products.

"Cybersecurity of products is in everyone's interest," says Marko Kaasila, CEO and co-founder of Test of Things.

"But the current way of assuring it — manual, not systematic, and expensive — is unsustainable."

Every insecure device that makes it to market is a potential door left unlocked for cyber criminals to exploit— hack your personal data, the operational systems of the factory, or the controls within an office building, even threatening essential critical infrastructure such as the electricity grid.

Test of Things is building a platform that automates cybersecurity compliance testing end-to-end. Instead of a team of cybersecurity experts spending weeks manually combing through a device's security, their AI-powered software handles the heavy lifting — running tests continuously, flagging issues early, and generating the compliance documentation that regulators increasingly require.

For device manufacturers, this means getting secure products to market faster. For the rest of us, it means the things we invite into our homes and workplaces are a little less likely to be someone else's backdoor.

According to Rauli Kaksonen, CTO and co-founder:

"This investment will let us focus on building the product further and start helping manufacturers to achieve their customers’ and authorities’ trust with secure products."

The €1.2 million round was led by

, with backing from industry veterans: Aapo Oksman, Zach Shelby, Neil Costigan, along with ScanABC and Business Finland innovation.

According to Sami Ahvenniemi, Partner at Vendep Capital, the market for IoT and OT security and compliance testing is entering a high-growth phase driven by two converging megatrends: 

“Firstly, the increasing integration of industrial control systems, IIoT and OT networks into enterprise IT and cloud ecosystems; and secondly, the rising regulatory and operational risk environment around critical infrastructure, manufacturing, energy and utilities.

When two successful entrepreneurs with 100 per cent relevant experience put their heads together to build a testing platform, we wanted to jump in right from the start!”

The fresh capital will go toward growing the engineering team and accelerating platform development—so that the next generation of connected devices can be shipped with a little more peace of mind.

Afreshed, an Austrian organic fruit-and-vegetable rescue-box company, has acquired the German competitor etepetete. Fresh fruit and vegetables account for 35 per cent. of all avoidable food waste in private households. 

Fruit and vegetables that do not meet the required standard sometimes do not make it onto the shelves and are, in some cases, destroyed directly by the farmer.  The afreshed delivery service operates nationwide in Austria and has reached break-even. Thousands of deliveries are made to customers in Germany and Austria every day. 

The founders have continuously improved the model, heavily digitised their product and invested in their own logistics infrastructure, which forms the core of the business. afreshed maintains its own delivery fleet in Austria, comprising just under 20 vehicles. afreshed uses specially developed software to plan routes to minimise CO₂ emissions. This ensures that the ‘last mile’ – the journey from the distribution centre to the customer’s front door – is organised efficiently.

“The founding philosophy of both companies is essentially the same: saving food and passing it directly on to consumers, all via an optimised supply chain. In recent years, we have each demonstrated the potential of this vision independently. With the acquisition of etepetete, we are now taking the next logical step in our expansion and joining forces to further strengthen this shared mission,” shared Lukas Forsthuber, co-founder of afreshed.

He asserts that with etepetete, afreshed has acquired an established competitor that has customers in every German state, particularly in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, and Berlin. 

With this transaction, afreshed marks the start of its expansion into the German market; to this end, the organic delivery service has closed a funding round in the mid-seven-figure range.

According to Bernhard Bocksrucker, co-founder of afreshed, etepetete will be continued as a brand:

“The acquisition not only gives us immediate market presence, but also local expertise and an existing customer base on which we can build. This acquisition is intended to be the first of further such moves.

Our goal is to become the leading provider of rescued food in German-speaking regions. By bringing both brands together, we will further raise awareness of our food rescue boxes.” 

Raiffeisen-Holding Niederösterreich-Wien, which invests across the food and consumer goods sectors, among others, is taking a 25.1 per cent stake in afreshed. With Raiffeisen-Holding NÖ-Wien on board, afreshed gains a strong strategic partner that supports its long-term growth strategy: expanding its market leadership in German-speaking countries.

The acquisition price has not been disclosed.