Natasha Lomas

Canadian biotech startup Afynia Laboratories, a spin-out from McMaster University in Ontario, has picked up $5 million in seed funding to commercialize a blood test for endometriosis — a medical condition that can afflict people with a uterus, causing problems like chronic pelvic pain and fertility issues. Endometriosis affects nearly 200 million people worldwide. Getting a diagnosis remains challenging, with some women reporting that it can take years — even up to a decade —

Cultivated chicken doggie snacks have gone on sale at a U.K. pet food retailer, Pets at Home. The retailer also happens to be a major investor in Meatly, the startup producing the meat ingredient contained in dog food brand The Pack’s Chick Bites, as the slaughter-free, low-carbon treats are billed. (Other ingredients in the snacks are plant-based.) Meatly is claiming a world-first for retailing cultivated meat for pet food, as The Guardian reports. The company

Swiss startup LogicStar is bent on joining the AI agent game. The summer 2024-founded startup has bagged $3 million in pre-seed funding to bring tools to the developer market that can do autonomous maintenance of software applications, rather than the more typical AI agent use case of code co-development. LogicStar CEO and co-founder Boris Paskalev (pictured top right, in the feature image, with his fellow co-founders) suggests the startup’s AI agents could end up partnering

The European Union has announced the winners of a “Large AI Grand Challenge” it kicked off earlier this year in a bid to accelerate the pace of homegrown innovation by large-scale AI model makers. Four startups will share €1 million in prize money and, perhaps more importantly, 8 million GPU hours to train their models on a couple of the bloc’s high-performance computing (HPC) supercomputers over the next 12 months. The Commission reckons this will