Jonathan Keane

Down rounds, corrections, and adjustments. These are just a few of the gloomy terms you have likely heard a lot of in European tech in 2023.
It has been a year of bleak headlines in tech — and European startups, scaleups, and giants didn’t escape the trend. Job cuts have been a common theme and valuations have been slashed.
We saw Hopin, the digital events startup that was once a darling of VCs at the height of lockdowns, fall from a valuation over $7 billion to a sale worth just $15 million....

TikTok is building a payments team in Dublin to serve the social media company and its parent ByteDance.

The Chinese social media giant is hiring for several roles in Dublin for the European arm of ByteDance’s Global Payments division.

The division serves TikTok and other properties under its umbrella for payments to partners and vendors.

Aughinish Alumina, the Russian-owned Limerick smelter firm, has sounded the alarm over the state of aluminium production in Europe.

In a letter to the European Commission earlier this year, the company, which extracts alumina from bauxite at its site in Limerick, stated that the “European aluminium industry is in crisis”.

Keywords Studios, the video game services mainstay, is facing a line-up of disputes with unions after it laid off employees at one of its Canadian offices. The Dublin-headquartered company recently laid off 13 employees after BioWare, a division of Electronic Arts behind the Dragon Age series, ended its contract with the company. Keywords’ games testers in Edmonton had voted last year to join a Canadian workers union in a bid to negotiate deals on pay, benefits, and remote working. By voting ...

Oura, the Finnish health wearable startup, is suing one of its biggest rivals, claiming it copied its ring device and accessed proprietary information.
The Oulu-based company, which makes the Oura Ring health tracking device and has raised more than €140 million, has filed legal action against Indian company Ultrahuman.
In a lawsuit filed in a court in Texas in early September, Oura accuses Ultrahuman of violating its patents and accessing proprietary information through ex-Oura employees and...

Ride-hailing company inDrive is exploring financial services products in the developing markets where it is active.
Mark Loughran, the company’s president and deputy CEO, who joined the company last summer, said that the move would enable greater financial stability for drivers on the platform.
InDrive was founded in Russia and is now headquartered in the U.S. Much of its business is in developing markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America but last year ventured into the U.S. market with a lau...

When Oisin Hanrahan stepped down as CEO of Angi, the Nasdaq-listed home services firm, in late 2022, he took some time off to decompress. In 2018, Angi had acquired Hanrahan’s start-up Handy, a platform founded in 2011 where people could hire the likes of plumbers and carpenters. Just three years after the acquisition, Hanrahan was running the whole show. But after more than a decade in the home services business, from start-up to corporate, Hanrahan let go of the reins. The Dublin-born entre...

When Monzo published its latest annual revenue figures in February, it provided a flicker of light after months of headlines about fintech down rounds and job cuts.
The accounts showed that the UK digital bank was now profitable with a net operating income of £214.5 million (€249mn). The news will cheer up Monzo after seeing its valuation cut during the pandemic but for some of its peers in Europe the challenges of the macroeconomic environment still loom large.
A rumoured acquisition by Monz...

The voice and video messaging service, once a phenomenon in the 2000s, has had a rocky two decades, from ownership changes in its formative years to a dwindling market share in recent times as Zoom has unseated Skype as the go-to place to make calls over the internet.
Skype’s founders, who previously built Kazaa, rolled out the voice caller on August 29, 2003.
“We have a big ambition with Skype: it is to make it the global telephone company,” co-founder Niklas Zennström told the New York Time...

LetsGetChecked, the Irish tech unicorn, is facing a class-action lawsuit that questions the efficacy of its home-testing kit for Lyme disease.

While Europe’s e-scooter industry makes sense of Paris’s decision to ban the shared vehicles, no such talk is taking place in Berlin.
That’s according to Natascha Spörle, who heads up public policy at ride-hailing and micromobility player Bolt, overseeing Germany and the pivotal Berlin market.
The backlash against e-scooters has been "very curiously viewed" by German cities, Spörle said.
"Paris was in the last couple of years the example for German cities. They all looked to Paris, before the...

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has registered an Irish entity as it considers its place in the European market.

When the National Standards Authority of Ireland got the nod from the European Commission last month to carry out certifications of in-vitro medical devices under a new regulatory framework, it joined a relatively small network of inspectors around Europe that are cleared to do so. That relatively small number is at the heart of a lingering issue for Europe’s medical device sector and patients’ access to vital devices for care. The EU’s Medical Device Regulation (MDR) and the In-Vitro Diagnos...

Privately owned e-scooters have become a regular fixture on the roads of Irish towns and cities, but the vehicles still exist in a legal grey area.

That grey area has meant that Ireland is one of the few European markets where e-scooter sharing companies have not launched.

In some form or other, legislation to clarify the legal status of e-scooters – and in turn open the door for these companies – ...