Photoncycle raises €15M Series A to address Europe’s seasonal energy storage gap

Norwegian energy storage startup Photoncycle has raised €15 million in Series A funding to commercialise its seasonal energy storage technology across Europe. The round was led by NordicNinja and Vo [...]

GHARAGE Ventures launches €40M Fund I to back travel and airport technology startups

Berlin- and Singapore-based venture platform GHARAGE Ventures has launched Fund I, a €40 million early-stage fund focused on technologies shaping the future of travel infrastructure and airport reta [...]

OpenAI launches GPT-5.3 Instant to improve ChatGPT’s most-used model

OpenAI has released GPT-5.3 Instant, the latest iteration of the fast, general-purpose model that powers everyday interactions in ChatGPT. Rather than introducing a new frontier model, the update focu [...]

The Designer rebuilding AI interfaces for humans

Valentyn Pavliuchenko, head of Hosanna Studio, suggests replacing inhumane AI prompting with intuitive, high-performance interfaces that bridge the gap between technical power and human desirability W [...]

Mutable Tactics raises €1.8 million in a pre-seed fund to develop drone automation with AI

Mutable Tactics, a UK-based defense-tech startup, just raised €1.8 million in a pre-seed fund round to develop an AI software that enables drone team collaboration for autonomous operation and decis [...]

PSA: YouTube will be streaming Coachella for free next week

Coachella officially kicks off next Friday, April 10. But for anyone who doesn’t want to fly out to the desert or fork over upwards of $650 for a ticket, YouTube is going to livestream the concert f [...]

Perplexity turns your Mac mini into a 24/7 AI agent

At its first developer conference, held in a former North Beach church, Perplexity unveiled Personal Computer, expanded its cloud agent to enterprise, opened up finance data tools, and staked its iden [...]

FIRSTPICK closes €25M second fund to back Baltic founders before anyone else does

When FIRSTPICK backed Emilė Radytė in 2021, her company Samphire Neuroscience was still building its first product and the risk, by the fund’s own assessment, was high. There was no revenue, no cl [...]

From a dragonfly’s wing to a WorldTour saddle

Thomas Rettenwander was writing his doctoral thesis at Austria’s Montanuniversität Leoben when he first studied dragonfly wings in detail. Not for their beauty, but for their engineering. Dragonfly [...]