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From left to right, Accel general partners Harry Nelis, Sonali de Rycker, Andrei Brasoveanu, Luca Bocchio, and Philippe Botteri.

Accel

Venture capital firm Accel said Tuesday it’s raised $650 million for its eighth fund targeted at investing in European and Israeli early-stage startups, in a sign the venture capital market may be showing signs of a recovery.

The firm, which made prolific early bets on the likes of social media app Facebook and music streaming service Spotify, said in a press release it raised the fund to “support ambitious founders building global category-defining companies” in Europe and Israel.

Harry Nelis, general partner at Accel, said the European tech ecosystem in particular has evolved drastically in the nearly 25 years since it opened up its London office as a separate fund in 2001.

“The environment has dramatically changed since then,” Nelis told CNBC. “People would ask us, can Europe generate $1 billion outcomes?”

“Now, there are more than 360 venture-backed unicorns across Europe and Israel, and the whole ecosystem has evolved from one that raised about $1 billion in capital to now $66 billion in 2023.”

Talent ‘flywheel’

Nelis said Europe is producing a more promising talent pool now thanks to a “flywheel” of experienced employees from other companies that have hit unicorn status becoming founders of new companies themselves.

A report released by the firm last year citing Dealroom data showed that employees of 248 venture-funded unicorns in the region have fueled 1,451 new tech startups across Europe and Israel.

Nelis noted that there are emerging geographies in Europe that investors aren’t paying as much attention to, but that are showing huge potential in technology innovation.

He called out Lithuania and Romania as examples of countries where major technology successes are emerging. In Lithuania, for example, secondhand marketplace Vinted is now a $4.5 billion “unicorn” company, while in Romania, UiPath has attracted a $10.9 billion valuation in the public markets.

Accel expects to invest in between 25 and 30 companies from its latest early-stage fund.

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Magnus Grimeland, CEO of seed investor Antler, told CNBC earlier this year that early-stage venture activity and private company valuations have been inching up since the start of this year — and he expects Europe to follow the trend.

“It’s on its way back,” Grimeland said in an interview at Antler’s London office in March. “We see a lot more activity in the portfolio. In New York, we made eight investments in January, and seven of them already have follow-on investments. The U.S. tends to always act quicker.”

Europe’s AI opportunity

Even as startup funding has waned, though, excitement about artificial intelligence has led to a rush of capital flowing into startups focusing on AI.

For example, the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere have raised billions of dollars.

Nelis suggested that Accel doesn’t want to get distracted and focus solely on a hyped area like AI with its latest fund.

Instead, he said, the firm will focus on using its “prepared mind” philosophy — which encourages deep focus and a disciplined and informed approach to investing — to approach its next startup bets.

“We’re lucky that with DeepMind here in London and with Fair [Facebook AI Research] in Paris, there’s at least two big centers that have great AI expertise,” Nelis told CNBC.

“Together with smaller centers across Europe, we think that Europe is extremely well-positioned to create some important AI companies, the same way we created important enterprise businesses.”

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Nelis said that the way Accel thinks about AI can be broken up into three layers: the “foundation model” layer, referring to algorithms underpinning advanced AI systems, the “tooling layer,” which helps applications that sit on top of these algorithms run, and the “application layer.”

He added that he thinks Europe will excel when it comes to AI application companies, as opposed to foundation models where U.S. technology giants have a big advantage.

“My expectation is Europe is going to generate some really interesting AI application companies,” Nelis told CNBC. “The foundation layer is a layer where at least for now the U.S. incumbents currently have a real advantage — they have the advantage of compute power, large datasets, and lots of capital.”

The firm has previously invested in Synthesia, a $1 billion generative AI startup backed by U.S. chipmaker Nvidia that helps companies make presentations with AI-generated avatars.

Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia, told CNBC his company partnered with Accel last year as the firm’s team knows “how to strike the right balance between visionary and useful technology.”

“Over the last year, there have been a lot of cool demos and perhaps too much frothiness in the AI industry,” Riparbelli told CNBC via email. “It was really important to us to partner with a fund that is as focussed as we are on delivering real, tangible business value.”

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Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

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Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty.  But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

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Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

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Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.

On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.

“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”

Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.

A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.

The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”

If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.

Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.

The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”

While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.

Tesla is promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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