Anna Heim

It’s not just instant-delivery startups that are struggling. Oda, the Norway-based online supermarket delivery startup, has confirmed layoffs of 150 jobs as it drastically scales back its expansion ambitions to focus on just two markets, its homebase and Sweden, the homebase of Mathem, an online grocery that Oda merged with last year. Oda, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and was once valued as high as $900 million in a round led by

With fewer than 400,000 inhabitants, Iceland receives more than its fair share of tourists — and of venture capital. Both are good reasons to pay attention to what’s going on and coming out of this unique island nation. “We need more pillars to our economy,” Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir, Iceland’s Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, recently told TechCrunch at Iceland Innovation Week in Reykjavík. Some diversification is already underway, and the country’s export revenues

If 11 figures is your attention threshold, you may be interested in learning that the combined enterprise value (EV) of Spanish startups surpassed €100 billion in 2023, according to Dealroom’s latest report on the Spanish tech ecosystem. As we’ll see, venture investment into Spanish startups also held up quite well, with €2.2BN raised across some 850 funding rounds. Spain’s venture capital tally was lower last year than in 2021 and 2022; that’s no surprise as

There are many ways countries can go about supporting their tech industries. In France it involves picking a yearly cohort of 120 high-potential startups — the French Tech 120 — including 40 private companies deemed as most promising, dubbed the Next40. The French secretary of state for Digital Affairs, as of this year, Marina Ferrari, revealed this year’s laureates during VivaTech week in Paris. According to its promoters, this fifth class was the most selective

Buy now, pay later services have become so ubiquitous that BNPL may as well just be another way to say “debt.” But in Mexico, where BNPL platform Aplazo operates, a large underbanked population makes BNPL more like an alternative to cash. The four-year-old Mexican fintech startup facilitates fractionated payments to offline and online merchants even when the buyer doesn’t have a credit card. To the end users, Aplazo offers a virtual card that lets them

Brazilian startup Salvy, a mobile carrier for businesses, was the only company based in Latin America in Y Combinator’s latest batch, the accelerator confirmed to TechCrunch. That’s a significant drop compared to cohorts that went through the accelerator during COVID when it was remote, but also more recent classes: There were 33 Latin American companies in Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 batch, 16 in summer 2022 and 10 in winter 2023. One caveat to the stark

Not a day goes by without some confirmation that ​​deep tech is on the rise in Europe — and public and private capital investors are here for it. Latest case in point, OTB Ventures, which closed a $185 million fund to invest in deep tech in Europe that it will mostly deploy at the Series A stage. However, up to 10% could be allocated to seed funding, and more than 50% to follow-on investments. OTB’s