Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher

Editor At Large

Mike Butcher (M.B.E.) is Editor-at-large of TechCrunch. He has written for UK national newspapers and magazines and been named one of the most influential people in European technology by Wired UK. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, Web Summit, and DLD. He has interviewed Tony Blair, Dmitry Medvedev, Kevin Spacey, Lily Cole, Pavel Durov, Jimmy Wales, and many other tech leaders and celebrities. Mike is a regular broadcaster, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, CNBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and Bloomberg. He has also advised UK Prime Ministers and the Mayor of London on tech startup policy, as well as being a judge on The Apprentice UK. GQ magazine named him one of the 100 Most Connected Men in the UK. He is the co-founder ThePathfounder.com newsletter; TheEuropas.com (the Annual European Tech Startup Conference & Awards for 12 years); and the non-profits Techfugees.com, TechVets.co, and Coadec.com. He was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2016 for services to the UK technology industry and journalism.

The Latest from Mike Butcher

Buy now, pay later on a Porsche? Zaver now has $30M to make it a reality

We last checked in on Zaver, a Swedish B2C buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when it raised a $5 million funding round in 2021. The company has now closed a $10 million extension to its Ser

New study of unicorn founders finds most are ‘underdogs,’ and female founders are rising

A new study that zeros-in on the founders of so-called “unicorns” — companies worth over a billion dollars — has found most have “underdog” founders who are often drawn from th

Boeing CEO to leave company by year-end after a wave of safety incidents

Boeing’s chief executive Dave Calhoun will leave the plane-maker by the end of 2024, according to the company. The company has been rocked by controversy after a cabin panel blowout on one of it

1991 Ventures in London joins the growing list of VCs aimed at Ukrainian startups

U.K.-based limited partners Venrex and Samos Investments are this week backing the launch of a new VC primarily aimed at investing in startups led by Ukrainians inside and outside the war-torn count

World Fund closes first €300M climate tech fund, seeking to follow on and back hardware

After three years of efforts, World Fund has finally closed a €300 million first fund, €50 million short of its target in 2021, but still a considerable number given a background of war and econom

Healthcare platform Anima brings Salesforce-like capabilities to clinics, raises $12M

Globally, healthcare IT systems are groaning under the weight of legacy platforms. Thankfully, there’s a new wave of startups entering the arena: U.K. startup Anima is a “care enablement&#

Cure51 raises a €15M seed round aiming to crack the code on cancer survival

Rather than grimly assembling data about cancer deaths to predict outcomes in treatment, the founders of Cure51 had another idea.

Inclusivity-focused VC Ada Ventures pulls in $80M for second fund

U.K.-based Ada Ventures is an unusual VC. Instead of just talking about SaaS or AI, it hunts down founders addressing inclusivity and diversity. Instead of confusing LPs with this methodology, it’s

‘Banking-as-a-Service’ startup Griffin raises $24M as it attains full banking license

Founded by former Silicon Valley engineers, UK-based Griffin Bank, has now raised $24 million (£19 million) in a fresh, extended Series A, funding round.

LLMs are poised to make lumbering business intelligence tools easier and faster to use

UK startup Fluent has closed a $7.5M seed round to apply LLMs to business databases, making them far easier to interrogate.

This Swedish startup wants to reduce the cost, and controversy, around stem cell production

With the news that “mini organs” have been grown for the first time using human stem cells, this futuristic area of bio-medicine is clearly accelerating by leaps and bounds. However, harvesting st

New report confirms Europe’s tech investment doldrums, but there are signs of life

Europe is suffering from a big hangover after the tech investment party of the 2020-2021 period. That said, compared to pre-pandemic levels, VC investment in European startups is up, historically spea

MWC: Swayy app lets you share your future location with close friends, or groups you curate

Given that this week Instagram revealed that it was developing a “Friend Map” feature, it was interesting and timely to run into a startup during Mobile World Congress that plans to go beyond even

The five finalists to emerge from the Four Years From Now 2024 pitch competition

Update: Qilimanjaro was chosen as the winner and awarded €20,000. Long ago Mobile World Congress, which we’ve been covering all week, absorbed a side event for startups, the idiosyncratically nam

Spain’s Embat, which has raised $16M, plans to compete with Trovata in real-time accounting

For obvious reasons, financial teams can spend a great deal of time on corporate treasury management, accounting and bank reconciliation, so anything that speeds up that process usually garners a lot

Displace plans new models, new AI features for its ‘wireless’ TVs

At CES 2023, a startup hardware company called Displace launched its 55-inch ‘Display Flex’, a “wireless” $3,000 4K OLED TV  which sticks to walls without a traditional mounting. The launch c

Doublepoint launches its WowMouse gesture-touch control app for Pixel Watch 2

Admittedly, Apple iWatch users have had it since October last year, but as of today at Mobile World Congress, the Doublepoint startup has launched the updated version of its popular WowMouse gesture-t

Two years since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine’s startups soldier on

This weekend marks exactly two years since Russia’s illegal, unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine. Despite overwhelming odds and continued hiccups in the supplies of Western aid to fight off Ru

$13M and 3 years later, Superlist hopes to become a decacorn. But will it?

The former founder of a to-do lists app which sold for as much as $200 million, comes back, nine years later, with yet another app to do the same thing. Really? It’s a story that would be hard to ma

AI-powered Estonian QA startup Klaus acquired by Zendesk

Klaus — an Estonian-born startup which emerged in 2019 to aid customer services agents — has been acquired by global customer services platform Zendesk for an undisclosed amount. Last year
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