Tech
This founder grew up in wine country — nows he’s built a platform for wine makers
Growing up in the Hunter Valley, a region of Australia renowned for its fine wine production, Mitchel Fowler never realized he might one day come up with an idea that may revolutionize the wine industry. But after a long career in finance, he’s returned to that heritage to launch a platform that could solve the procurement cycle and inventory management problems that have debilitated the wine and drinks industry for decades.
Ferovinum is both a SaaS platform and a lending platform for wine producers. Their problem is that conventional B2B lending or banking products debilitate the growth of the drinks industry, as the inventory can’t be easily lent against.
Instead, Ferovinum turns the wine and spirits produced into a ‘just in time asset’ so that drinks producers can focus their equity capital on growth (rather than tying it up on stock), and scale up funding for their production in a way that would be much more risky if conducted through more conventional financial products.
Users of Ferovinum place their inventories on the platform during production and distribution periods, and then sell them off the platform to resellers, who may also be on it.
As Fowler told TechCrunch over a call: “As the platform carries the stock for the clients end-to-end — throughout the entire value chain — this also allows the client’s supply chain to benefit from our supply chain technology, automation, and market access for import and export flows, and thus getting closer to, for instance, exports to the US.”
He says the platform “is a new way for businesses in the drinks sector to unlock growth versus the traditional path of raising equity to fund growth, where you hope to get acquired by a large corporate along the way.”
Fowler says the platform can thus “democratize” financing for wind production even for smaller producers.
It’s now raised a $23.2 million (£17.5m) for global expansion and already claims to have provided £114 million in working capital for the UK wine and spirits industry as a result of customers using its platform.
Ferovinum is also tackling a market where there is little competition in terms of direct competitors. Most of the time wine and drinks producers are cobbling together various software to run their businesses, and the financing aspect remains separate.
Fowler told TechCrunch: “There are SaaS tools, like Unleashed, for example, which is wine inventory management software. But the beauty of what we’re building is it’s end to end, and it’s sector-specific, so from managing it in the warehouse all the way to delivering and fulfilling to those retailers.”
That’s what attracted Notion Capital, a European SaaS and Cloud investment firm, whose General Partner Jos White will now join the Ferovinum board. The round also had participation from Shapers VC, Semapa Next, and Ferovinum’s existing shareholder group.
White said in a statement: “Ferovinum’s platform leverages technology to give small and mid-sized players in the drinks industry access to funding, and an integrated set of supply chain services. In this way they enable their customers to compete more effectively with the large corporates and, ultimately, to unlock growth. We couldn’t be more excited to invest in this industry disruptor.”
Customers now include two of Edinburgh’s independent distilleries; Holyrood Distillery & Port of Leith Distillery; English sparkling wine producers Ridgeview Wine Estate and Hundred Hills Winery.
Tech
Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO
British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.
The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.
According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.
As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.
Revolut declined to comment.
Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.
Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.
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Tech
Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs
Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.
Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.
Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.
“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.
Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.
The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.
Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.
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While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”
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Tech
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.
Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.
Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.
Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.
Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.
In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.
Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.
The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”
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