News
Start it X, the programme dedicated to driving innovation within large companies, announces the launch of a new matchmaking service. Start it X will help corporates innovate by connecting them to established scale-ups from all over the world. In doing so, the accelerator gives Belgian companies faster access to innovations developed in other countries while positioning the Benelux as a highly attractive region for trade.
European challenger bank bunq today joins forces with global charities to aid its mission to make the world a better place. Following a public beta programme, which saw bunq ask its users to share their insights and to test its new app before rolling out to the masses, bunq is now unveiling ‘Common Goals’.
Lipreading-friendly face masks, digital medical services and contact-free ATM buttons among winning business entries to The AdamStart COVID-19 Innovation Challenge, as British entrepreneur Adam Bradford has revealled the five winners of the AdamStart global entrepreneurial challenge to tackle COVID-19.
The number of people on UK payrolls dropped by 612,000 between March and May, according to early data from the Office for National Statistics and HM Revenue and Customs that is starting to show the depth of the hit to the economy from the pandemic. The UK unemployment rate for the three months to April 2020 was estimated at 3.9%, 0.1 percentage points higher than a year earlier but largely unchanged on the previous quarter.
Personalised health management platform, Span, has announced the launch of its new subscription-based business offering to help employees prevent and reduce symptoms of lifestyle-induced conditions – Diabetes, Hypertension, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, Obesity and IBS. The platform offers personalised, continuous nutrition and mental wellbeing plans and on-demand consultations with clinicians.
The Tech to Connect Challenge was launched in the summer of 2019, in order to develop early-stage ideas for technology that enable more or better interactions between people. The challenge looked for the most innovative ideas, helping them turn these ideas into prototypes that have the potential for real change.
Quickly responding to the impact COVID-19 and lockdowns are having on tech startups, Capital Enterprise has collaborated with OneTech and Mindful Team, with support from J.P. Morgan, to launch the Startup Resilience programme. Over six months, startup founders will be provided everything from webinars and community slack channels, to mastermind sessions and accountability groups, to be helped through this period of uncertainty.
Ontruck, Europe’s leading digital road freight platform, has secured an investment round of €17 million euros led by OGCI Climate Investments (OGCI CI). Existing Ontruck investors, Cathay Innovation, Atomico, Idinvest Partners and Total Carbon Neutrality Ventures, participated in the round, with Endeavor Catalyst joining as a new investor.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the technological landscape of the future. US-based technology company, is developing a consented and privacy preserving public dataset of human interactions for AI research. This video content will help researchers to advance the possibilities of machine learning within their applications. The contributors to the project are remote workers in the gig economy, also known as the ‘human cloud’. They are being crowdsourced by freelance hiring platform, Twine, through their extensive community of 350,000 freelancers.
The team at Quotezone.co.uk, an insurance comparison site, surveyed 600 UK businesses about how they are dealing with the lockdown. The research revealed that two fifths of UK businesses (39%) have had to pivot their offerings since the beginning of lockdown, with 76% of these providing a brand-new service.









