Patrick Collison, CEO and co-founder of Stripe, speaking at 2022’s Italian Tech Week in Turin, Italy.
Giuliano Berti | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Founders of some of Europe’s largest technology unicorns on Monday backed an open letter calling for a “tech renaissance” fueled by the creation of a single pan-European entity to promote startups and innovation in the bloc.
The letter was also signed by VC firms Index Ventures, Sequoia and Seedcamp.
“The multitude of countries and cultures in Europe is its unfair advantage. But because of that, our startup scene is fragmented,” read the open letter, which was published Monday on a newly created website for the EU Inc initiative.
“Legal and regulatory compliance is a burden, and cross-border collaboration is rare,” said the letter, which added that, unlike U.S. venture capitalists, the capital from European investors tends to remain within national borders. This results in “stifled momentum, unrealized potential, and an artificial limit on our startups’ chances of success.”
Rather than writing new legislation at an EU-wide level to simplify regulations for tech startups, the founders are calling on policymakers to allow for the creation of a new single entity, called EU Inc, under the bloc’s 28th regime.
So-called 28th regimes are proposed legal frameworks within the EU that offer an alternative to member states’ own national rules instead of replacing them.
For example, the European Company Statute offers an alternative 28th option — in addition to the existing national laws of the EU’s 27 member states — for setting up of public limited-liability companies in the EU.
The new structure of EU Inc would “standardize investment processes, simplify cross-border operations, and create a unified employee stock options framework” to help European startups scale rapidly and attract more capital, according to a Monday press release.
Other signatories to the open letter include Ilkka Paananen, CEO of Supercell, the Finnish mobile game publisher owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent, and Miki Kuusi, CEO of Wolt, the European food delivery app owned by American online takeout platform DoorDash.
The launch of EU Inc as an initiative comes as numerous officials have been calling for major European reforms to help the bloc compete more effectively with the U.S. and China as an economic superpower.
Last month, former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi issued a long-awaited report calling for 800 billion euros of additional investment per year to make the EU more competitive on the world stage.
Citing technology innovation as a key area where improvement was needed, Draghi said that the region is still “stuck in a static industrial structure with few new companies rising up to disrupt existing industries or develop new growth engines.”
Meanwhile, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen has made supporting innovation, competitiveness and smarter regulation a key part of her focus since winning a second term as president.
“In the startup world, momentum is everything. Anything that slows you down doesn’t just slow you down – it kills you by stopping you from reaching escape velocity,” said Andreas Klinger, co-initiator of the EU Inc proposals and an investor at Prototype Capital.
“Despite the world-class talent, global ambition and unique strengths of the European startup ecosystem, it’s still absurdly hard to build here. EU Inc is about removing those artificial constraints and allowing our startups to truly accelerate.”
Europe has long lagged behind the U.S. and China when it comes to generating global tech giants. The U.S. is the biggest market for tech, home to Amazon, Google, Meta and Apple. China, meanwhile, has its own tech giants, including Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu.
“Building a tech giant from Europe today requires navigating a maze of different regulations and market conditions,” said Martin Mignot, partner at Index Ventures. “EU Inc is our opportunity to streamline and simplify the landscape dramatically.”
European tech startups raised $45 billion worth of venture capital funding last year, according to Atomico’s 2023 State of European Tech report. That pales in comparison to the U.S., where startups raised $120 billion. Chinese startups, meanwhile, raised $48 billion in 2023, according to Atomico’s data.
While the volume of new startups created in Europe outpaces the U.S., European tech firms are 40% less likely to secure venture funding after five years than their U.S. counterparts, Atomico said in its report, which was published in November 2023.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told employees on Thursday that the company’s U.S. operations will be housed in a new joint venture.
The entity is named TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, according to a memo sent by Chew and obtained by CNBC. As part of the joint venture, Chew said the company has signed agreements with the three managing investors: Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. He said that the deal’s “closing date” is Jan. 22.
Under a national security law, which the Supreme Court upheld in January, China-based ByteDance was required to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations or face an effective ban in the country. In September, President Donald Trump signed an executive order approving a proposed deal that would keep TikTok operational in the U.S. by meeting the requirements of a law originally signed by former President Joe Biden.
Chew noted that the new TikTok joint venture would be “majority owned by American investors, governed by a new seven-member majority-American board of directors, and subject to terms that protect Americans’ data and U.S. national security.”
The U.S. joint venture will be 50% held by a consortium of new investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX with 15% each. Just over 30% will be held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance, and 19.9% will be retained by ByteDance, the memo said.
The TikTok chief said the entity will be responsible for protecting U.S. data, ensuring the security of its prized algorithm, content moderation and “software assurance.” He added that the joint venture will “have the exclusive right and authority to provide assurances that content, software, and data for American users is secure.”
In addition to being an investor, Oracle will serve as the “trusted security partner” in charge of auditing and validating that it complies with “agreed upon National Security Terms,” the memo said. Sensitive U.S. data will be stored in Oracle’s U.S.-based cloud computing data centers, Chew wrote.
The new TikTok entity will also be tasked with retraining the video app’s core content recommendation algorithm “on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” the memo said.
Chew noted that TikTok global U.S. entities “will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing.”
Under Trump’s executive order in September, the attorney general was blocked from enforcing the national security law for a 120-day period in order to “permit the contemplated divestiture to be completed,” allowing the deal to finalize by Jan 23.
The VC arms of Google and Nvidia have invested in Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable’s $330 million Series B at a $6.6 billion valuation, the company announced on Thursday.
The news confirms an earlier story from CNBC, which reported on Tuesday that Lovable had raised at that valuation, trebling its valuation from its previous round in July, and that the investors included U.S. VC firms Accel and Khosla Ventures.
CapitalG, one of Google’s VC divisions, and Menlo Ventures led the round. Alongside Accel and Khosla, Nvidia venture arm NVentures, actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s VC firm Kinship Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Databricks Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, T.Capital, Hubspot Ventures, DST Global, EQT Global, Creandum and Evantic also participated.
The fresh funds take Lovable’s total raised in 2025 to over $500 million.
“Lovable has done something rare: built a product that enterprises and founders both love,” said Laela Sturdy, managing partner at CapitalG in a statement accompanying the announcement.
“The demand we’re seeing from Fortune 500 companies signals a fundamental shift in how software gets built.”
Lovable’s platform uses AI models from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic to help users build apps and websites using text prompts, without technical knowledge of coding.
The startup reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in November, just under a year after achieving $1 million in ARR for the first time. It was founded in 2023 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin.
Vibe coding startups have seen big interest from VCs in recent times, as investors bet on their promise of drastically reducing the time it takes to create software and apps.
In the U.S., Anysphere, which created coding tool Cursor, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November. In September, Replit hit a $3 billion price tag after picking up $250 million and Vercel closed a $300 million round at a $9.3 billion valuation.
During an earnings call with analysts, Micron, which makes memory storage used for computers and artificial intelligence servers, said data center needs have fueled greater demand for its products.
Micron said it expects the total addressable market for high-bandwidth memory to hit $100 billion by 2028, growing at a 40% compounded annual growth rate. Management also upped its capital expenditures guidance to $20 billion from $18 billion.
“We are more than sold out,” said business chief Sumit Sadana. “We have a significant amount of unmet demand in our models and this is just consistent with an environment where the demand is substantially higher than supply for the foreseeable future.
Micron topped Wall Street estimates for the fiscal first quarter and issued blowout guidance.
Read more CNBC tech news
The company reported adjusted earnings of $4.78 per share on $13.64 billion in revenue, surpassing LSEG estimates for earnings of $3.95 per share and $12.84 billion in sales.
Revenues in the current quarter are expected to hit about $18.70 billion, blowing past the $14.20 billion expected by LSEG. Adjusted earnings are forecast to reach $8.42, versus expectations of $4.78 per share.
JPMorgan upped its price target on the stock following the results, citing the favorable pricing setup, while Bank of America upgraded shares to a buy rating.
Morgan Stanley called the results the best revenue and net income upside in the “history of the U.S. semis industry” outside of Nvidia.
“If AI keeps growing as we expect, we believe that the next 12 months are going to have broader coat tails to the AI trade than just the processor names and memory would be the biggest beneficiary,” analysts wrote.