Europe

China’s EV upstart Nio switches on power swap station in Sweden • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 18, 2022Posted in China, electric vehicles, Europe, EV, nio, Sweden, TransportationNo Comments

Electric vehicle startup Nio is accelerating its expansion in Europe. The premium EV maker just launched its first power-swapping station in Varberg, Sweden, the company said in a LinkedIn post. When it comes to charging, Nio differentiates itself from its rivals by offering swappable batteries, which are upgradable and charge a monthly subscription fee, on top of the traditional plug-and-charge model. In its home market China, Nio’s battery-swapping systems are popping up around trendy malls and office highrises, and it’s taken the novel concept to a noticeable scale. As of November 6, the company had installed 1,200 of these swapping stations across China. The idea is to enable EV charging as fast as refueling a petrol car. The company said on its November earnings call that it planned to install 20 power swapping stations across Europe by the end of 2022 and increase the tally to 100 by next year. Nio began expanding in Europe last year, starting out in Norway, which has been aggressive in pushing EV adaption. Xpeng, Nio’s Chinese rival, also picked Norway as the first stop in its European expansion. Nio is setting itself up for an uphill battle in a crowded auto market in Europe, but it seems determined in growing its presence on the continent. Headed by the charismatic, English-speaking serial entrepreneur William Li, Nio hosted a splashy launch event in Berlin, which marked its official market entry in Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden. The company began by offering lease-only for its models in all European countries except Norway but shortly added the option for customers to purchase the vehicles after initial market feedback. It’s also ramping up its operational footprint in Europe, with an R&D center in Berlin to work on “localized development and deployment of digital cockpits and to continuously improve the intelligent digital experience of local users,” said Li on the earnings call. The carmaker now operates “Nio Houses“, which are essentially product showrooms and customer clubs, in ten major European cities. Possibly in a move to diversify supply chains from China, Nio recently began manufacturing products including its power swapping facilities out of Hungary and shipped its first Hungary-made swapping station to Germany in September.

LF Europe’s Project Sylva wants to create an open source telco cloud stack • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in cloud, Enterprise, Europe, linux foundation, open source, telco, telecommunicationsNo Comments

The Linux Foundation Europe (LF Europe) — the recently launched European offshoot of the open source Linux Foundation — today announced the launch of Project Sylva, which aims to create an open source telco cloud framework for European telcos and vendors. This is the first project hosted by LF Europe and is a good example of what the organization is trying to achieve. The project aims to create a production-grade open source telco cloud stack and a common framework and reference implementation to “reduce fragmentation of the cloud infrastructure layer for telecommunication and edge services.” Currently, five carriers (Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Orange, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom) and two vendors (Ericsson and Nokia) are working on the project. “There’s a whole bunch of Linux Foundation networking projects already that have taken telecommunications into the open source era,” Arpit Joshipura, the general manager for Networking, Edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation, told me. “All those projects are under what is called the [LF] Networking foundation. […] So whatever that work is that is done by the telcos, Sylva is going to leverage and build on top of it with these European vendors to solve EU specific requirements. Those are security, energy, federated computing, edge and data trust.” At the core of Sylva is a framework for a compute platform that can be agnostic to whether a workload is running on the telco access network, edge or in the core. The project aims to build a reference implementation, leveraging all of the work already being done by LF Networking, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (the home of Kubernetes and other cloud-native infrastructure projects), LF Energy and others. All of this, of course, is done with a focus on the EU’s goals around security, data privacy and energy management, but even though the project has this EU focus, the overall ambition is broader and goes well beyond the European Union. Many of these regulations, after all, will make it to other markets as well. “Linux Foundation, Europe allows us to focus more on specific regional requirements, but without those siloes and fragmentation that foster that techno-nationalism, if you want to call it that, by really being able to foster local collaboration and then, pushing that stuff upstream gives us this amazing conduit to go across borders,” explained Gabriele Columbro, the general manager of the Linux Foundation Europe. The vendors joining the project all argue that they are doing so in order to reduce fragmentation as the industry moves to a cloud-centric model and to enable interoperability between different platforms. “The Telco Cloud ecosystem today is fragmented and slowing down our operational model transformation. Despite a transition to cloud native technologies, a real interoperability between workloads and platforms remains a challenge,” said Laurent Leboucher, group CTO and SVP, Orange Innovation Networks. “Indeed, operators have to deal with a lot of vertical solutions that are different for each vendor, leading to operational complexity, lack of scalability and high costs. Sylva, by providing a homogenous telco cloud framework for the entire industry, should help all the ecosystem to use a common technology, which will be interoperable, flexible and easy to operate.”

Sweden’s EQT Ventures closes a its third fund at €1.1B to double down on European and early-stage startups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in early stage, eqt ventures, Europe, VentureNo Comments

Startups might be in a funding midwinter, but the ray of sun shining on some VCs speaks of a different trend. EQT Ventures, the venture fund arm of Sweden’s investment giant EQT making early-stage bets on startups primarily in Europe, has closed its latest fund and filled its coffers with 1 billion euros (and $1.1 billion in total commitments). This brings the total raised by EQT to €2.3 billion since the EQT Ventures launched in 2016. To date, the firm has backed some 100 companies, with 18 exits and nine “unicorns” (Wolt, Small Giant Games, Einride, Handshake, Netlify and Instabox/Instabee are in that group). This third fund fund was raised and closed relatively quickly, between February and June of this year (with final paperwork coming in since then), and there have been some 13 investments made out of it so far, Juni, Nothing, Knoetic and Candela among them. The larger EQT has emerged as one of the key deal makers in recent months where larger privately-held companies have been looking for funding and/or exit opportunities. These have included the recent purchase of New Jersey-based Billtrust for $1.7 billion and leading an investment round for Knoetic. But it has also put money where its mouth is, so to speak. Earlier this year sister subsidiary EQT Growth announced a $2.4 billion fund largely aimed at scaling startups out of Europe. Growth has backed the likes of Vinted, Epidemic Sound and Mambu. The plan will be to use this latest EQT Venture fund for similar geographical ends: the firm wants to use it to make investments of between $1 million and $50 million, with about two-thirds of all investments falling in Europe, and the rest across the U.K. and the U.S., said Lars Jörnow, a partner at the firm. In terms of categories, EQT Ventures will remain generalist but ideally is on the lookout for startups that address “where society has problems,” Jörnow said. That includes greentech investments, transportation and the future of work, he said (specifically areas like tools and platforms for freelancers). The firm’s close of the fund speaks to what appears to be a bifurcation in the world of tech investing. While funds and firms that focus on much larger and later stage companies might be seeing big losses in their portfolios, there remains confidence among those that back the funds, the limited partners, that investors focusing on earlier (and smaller) stages still have a lot of opportunity ahead. “The higher the valuation before the contraction, the bigger the fall,” he warned. It helps too to have a history of good bets. Jörnow noted that the company’s target had actually been €900 million. His takeaway of the relatively quick close and exceeding that figure: “Investors think it’s a great idea to back VCs that are investing in early stage with a much longer holding period,” he said. On average, EQT expects exits to be made in 2031, “when the world will look different than today,” he added. “If you back the best founders, they will grow startups regardless of the current macro climate.”

The lack of VC funding to women is a Western societal shortfall • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in EC DEI, EC venture capital, Europe, Startups, Venture, venture funding, womenNo Comments

The issue of women startup founders not receiving equitable venture funding is a shortfall of the West: It’s here, everywhere in the U.S., and over there, all throughout Europe. It’s hard to say that some of these metrics represent investors simply pulling back when data shows the bias has historical precedence. Even in 2008, all-women U.S. founding teams raised 1.2% of all venture capital, according to PitchBook data. In 2012, they raised 1.8%, then 1.7% in 2016. If anything, 2021 was the anomaly, which saw 2.3% of venture dollars allocated to all-female U.S. teams. Today, that number is tracking at 1.9% so far, which is nearly on par with what, typically, always has been. That the solution is so simple — cutting more checks to women — highlights the discriminatory ideological strongholds that our society continues to impose on us. In Europe, the story is quite similar, although 2020 was the standout year that saw women raise 2.4% of all venture capital on the continent. Last year paints a more realistic picture: All-women teams raised only 1.1% of all venture funds in Europe, a number on par with what they raised in 2017, 2018, and 2019, which saw these teams pick up 1.5%, 1.8%, and 1.5% of all venture capital, respectively, as previously reported by ZebethMedia. The inequality gap is failing to move in a meaningful direction. It’s no coincidence that our societies, with frameworks and ideological mores hand-crafted with sexism and misogynoir, have made little progress toward equitable change. There are two concurrent narratives here: In one, the data reflects how investors, the men in charge, truly feel about economic gender equality. At the same time, the numbers are a byproduct of our Western society, one that is still beholden to excluding and devaluing women, one that relishes their treatment as second-class citizens, rendering their dreams irrelevant.