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Welcome to a new edition of Sunday CET, let’s get right at it.

Best,
Dragos

Market talk

🇮🇹 The Italian parliament passed a new law for reforming the local startup ecosystem this week.

• baby steps towards a direction opposite of, say Norway or the UK, right?

• worth noting: Italian pension funds are now required to allocate a % in venture capital (any EU-authorized VC, but money have to be invested in Italy) in order to maintain a Capital Gain tax exemption.

🇸🇪 Northvolt filed for bankruptcy, with only $30 million left in its accounts - one week’s cash.

• it went the American Chapter 11 restructuring route, with 235 million additional funding to make the best of it. The Swedes have raised 14 billion from professional investors, with VW among the major shareholders.

• speaking of VW, they should buy the company as it is strategic to them, but the Germans are in deep problems as well, while the whole European ecosystem is in shambles. Ugly.

🇬🇧 Revolut will expand its network of debit card vending machines into the UK. Just smart marketing turned into a sales channel.

• they will also roll out a digital mortgage product as well as an AI bot to assist with better money habits.

🛴 Italy will require people riding electric scooters to wear helmets and carry insurance. Madrid banned them in the city starting with this month, btw.

🇪🇸 Spanish socialist Teresa Ribera is the European Union's new Commissioner for Competition.

🇬🇧 UK households will get paid to not use power at peak times.

🇮🇹 Italian energy company Enel is working on a deal for setting up a mini-nuclear supply chain in the country.

🇩🇪 Meanwhile in Germany, the energy keeps being a situation because, well, winter is here and Putin got them addicted to cheap stuff.

🇸🇪 Minecraft, which is owned by Microsoft, did a £85 million deal with the Brits from Merlin to open two Minecraft-themed attractions, including rides, retail outlets, and hotel rooms in the UK and the US in 2026 and 2027.

🇬🇧 As Britain gets older and wealthier, parents are becoming a growing source of finance for UK adults looking to buy housing.

• around 650,000 adults received a transfer of £10,000 or more in the two-year period, with such gifts now accounting for about 20% of the total.

• the total value of financial gifts reached £29 billion in 2018-2020, more than double the level a decade earlier.

🇬🇧 Some Twitter folks were up in arms this week as FT covered voices saying that Matt Clifford of EF did a poor job advising the government on AI.

• well, people can say whatever they want, it’s a democracy and of course they will talk and have opinions.

• but Britain needs more Matts, if nothing else - work performance or conflict of interests aside, there will always be something, no agent of change will be welcome or positively perceived by an old and corrupt political establishment

• real question here is when your country is deep-deep down in a hole, how do you expect to change it - from within or from outsiders? Asking as the change from within doesn’t seem to work great for the UK.

• Matt’s a young dude who is a nobody in the politics world - a management consultant who’s built a startup accelerator - and his ambitions of becoming a high profile politician in the UK are to be encouraged, if anybody has any hope for a change in a country that’s edging collapse.

♾️ xAI has raised $5 billion in a funding round that valued it at $50 billion, more than doubling its valuation from earlier this year. Meanwhile, Amazon has upped its bet on Anthropic, investing another $4 billion. Fwiw, OpenAI raised $6 billion in October.

⚠️ Visa and Mastercard execs are under scrutiny by American senators on duopoly, and high swipe fees - in 2023 alone, Visa and Mastercard charged merchants more than $100 billion in credit card fees, mostly in the form of interchange fees

🐵 Nicantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, is creating an AI model that can navigate the real world, using the geospatial data it has collected from millions of Pokémon hunters.

🎮 Twitch still makes up 82% of all streaming hours in the third-quarter of the year, despite some competition from platforms like Kick and YouTube Gaming.

🛺 Pony AI, the Chinese robotaxi operator, pushed its US IPO back to next week, amid reports that Uber plans to be a buyer.

⛈️ DOJ will push Google to sell Chrome to break search monopoly.

₿ Microstrategy purchased Bitcoin in 2020 as a hedge against inflation and now has over $26 billion in Bitcoin, a position larger than IBM and Nike cash holdings - tracker here.

🗣️ Amazon’s quietly building its health business.

Also notable 

⛓️‍💥 The founder of an AI startup focused on education was arrested and charged with defrauding her investors, lying about the company’s profits and falsely claiming that some of the largest school districts in the country were her customers.

• prosecutors complain that, in her Series A Investor Deck, there was a page about customers that includes the logos of several school districts that were not actually AllHere customers, though with no explicit claim that they were.

• she raised almost $10 million from VCs and now faces more than 40 years in prison.

🏃 Strava introduced changes that will kill most of the apps using them as it restricts API access.

• specifically - third-party apps are no longer able to display Strava activity data and are also prohibited from using any data obtained via Strava’s API in artificial intelligence models

• strategically, it will lose significant business and a nice economy built on top of that, but that simply means that Strava does not want to be in the selling B2B data business anymore.

• it also means data has become strategic to the company, and I would be surprised if this is just a defensive move - Strava has built a nice data collection mechanism, but that is just a pillar, the features and the output are equally important, aligned to the business model.

• so I’d expect that the money they lose by cutting off the API to be offset by significant gains from AI-enabled output. Super interesting to follow.

🖖 Oura’s moving towards helping users monitor their blood sugar.

• the Finns just raised money part of a larger deal with the glucose device maker Dexcom involving the two companies’ devices and apps to be used together.

• btw, expect more consumer health data startups popping out next year, already seeing a few and I think it will become an investment theme.

💲 Speaking of strategy but not un-expected this time, Meta started selling AI, competing with the likes of OpenAi, Google and Mistral in Europe. They poached Clara Shih from Salesforce to do that for them.

🇨🇳 China’s biggest technology groups are building AI teams in Silicon Valley, seeking to hire top US talent despite Washington’s efforts to curb the country’s development of the cutting-edge technology.

💭 As Comcast is divesting the MSNBC network, you will never believe who wants to buy it. Elon.

💪 YC is on a sales tour in Europe these days and gathered 1200 people in London - somebody even live tweeteed it.

🥸 Klarna soap opera over at Bloomberg.

🥸 FT profiled Thrive Capital of Josh Kushner’s fame, who also happens to be Trump’s son in law.

🤙 The Japanese from Tokyo Metro will manage London's Elizabeth line for the next seven years. London’s pride.

✈️ Using BA’s consumer facing tech has gotten so bad that folks started chipping in to build new tech for it. BA’s gotten no interest in making it better though.

🇬🇧 MPs want to summon Elon Musk to testify about X’s role in UK summer riots - y’all know what Elon would say.

💲 Apparently stealing p0rn videos from social media and doctoring them with AI makes for a great business model.

🇺🇸 DOGE wants to end remote work.

🇺🇸 Americans are increasingly looking to secure secondary passports post this month’s American elections.

• secondary passport applications require extensive paperwork and can cost a minimum of $200,000 per application, with the more expensive locations costing $1 million for a couple.

💥 How VCs expect you to react to their website.

😎 A 10-year-old boy sought help for his math homework and called 911 - cops actually came to help.

🙈 Dull Men’s Club - a club for dull men to gather and only discuss the unsexy details of their lives.

🇩🇪 The Germans are champions at forklift racing.

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

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