This was supposed to be the year that climate tech died. President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have done their best to dismantle the Biden administration’s hallmark industrial and climate policies. Even the European Union has begun to ease off its most aggressive goals. And yet, as the year closes, the receipts provide a different view of climate and clean energy investing in the U.S. and Europe. Instead of tanking, venture bets in the sector remained essentially flat relative to 2024, according to CTVC, far from the slide some had expected. That resiliency is due in part to continued…

Universities and research labs have long been Europe’s deep tech treasure trove. Now, academic spinouts have consolidated into a solid startup funnel worth $398 billion — and VC money is following. According to Dealroom’s European Spinout Report 2025, 76 of these deep tech and life sciences companies have either reached $1 billion valuations, $100 million in revenue, or both. These include unicorns like Iceye, IQM, Isar Aerospace, Synthesia, and Tekever, which are now inspiring more funds to back university spinouts. Just this month, two new funds emerged that will bring more funding to talent emerging out of European tech universities,…

In some ways, 2025 was when AI dictation apps really took off. Dictation apps have been around for years, but in the past they’ve proved slow and inaccurate — unless you speak with particular accents and enunciate clearly. But advances in large language models (LLMs) and speech-to-text models have helped improve the systems that can decipher speech better while retaining the context to format the text. And developers have built in features to automatically format text, remove filler words, and ignore fumbles to output text that would need fewer edits. But with the soaring popularity of everything AI, there’s dozens…

Every year, TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield pitch contest draws thousands of applicants. We whittle those applications down to the top 200 contenders, and of them, the top 20 compete on the big stage to become the winner, taking home the Startup Battlefield Cup and a cash prize of $100,000. But the remaining 180 startups all blew us away as well in their respective categories and compete in their own pitch competition. Here is the full list of the consumer/edtech Startup Battlefield 200 selectees, along with a note on why they landed in the competition.  Ahoi  What it does: Helps people find places that are…