Startups

May 24 Europe Startups

Europe Is Producing More Startup 'Mafias' Than Ever

Of Europe and Israel’s 353 venture-backed unicorns, 221 have spun out 1,171 new tech-enabled startup companies with employees at these firms leaving to start up their own ventures.
The biggest examples of companies whose former talent went on to establish new startups include Spotify, which spawned 32 new companies.
The development mimics the trend of startup “mafias” in US, where companies like PayPal indirectly helped produce huge businesses like Tesla and Palantir.

DoorDash has been charging iPhone users more than Android users for identical deliveries, according to a lawsuit seeking class action status.
On the company's website, it said the fee "helps DoorDash preserve [customers'] access to the available merchants farthest from [them]."
However, the lawsuit said the fee is tacked onto iPhone users' bills more often than Android users' "likely because studies reveal iPhone users earn more."

Neeva, which for a while looked like one of the startups with a real chance to challenge the supremacy of Google Search, announced on Saturday that it is shutting down its search engine.
The company says it’s pivoting to AI — and may be acquired by Snowflake — but mostly seems to believe it failed.
“Building search engines is hard,” Neeva co-founders Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan wrote in a blog post announcing the shutdown.

Chinese electric vehicle maker Nio has invested in a startup firm that is developing fusion technologies, according to a source with direct knowledge and a company filing, placing more bets in other areas of the energy sector.
The newly established company, Neo Fusion, will research and develop technologies that aim to bring controlled fusion for commercial uses globally in two decades, the source said.

Sabi, a Lagos-based B2B e-commerce startup providing digital commerce infrastructure to Africa’s informal economy, has raised $38 million in Series B funding at a valuation of $300 million, according to two people familiar with the matter, signaling revived investor interest in a B2B e-commerce market going through some reckoning.
Sabi declined to comment on the matter.