Tech
Meet the new European unicorns of 2026
January was such a long month that it has already brought us five fresh European unicorns: from Belgium to Ukraine, several tech startups raised funding at valuations above the $1 billion threshold.
But before we take a closer look at who joined the club, two caveats.
First: This count includes startups that may be incorporated elsewhere but have their roots or a large part of their team in Europe. Until a pan-European corporate structure exists (often called “EU Inc”), this split will remain common — and we’ve decided to overlook it. Take Lovable, which is incorporated in Delaware but cannot be dissociated from Stockholm’s startup scene.
Second: valuation doesn’t equal commercial success, and it is too early to tell whether all of these companies will achieve the kind of traction that Lovable has, with the company recently crossing $300 million in annual recurring revenue. But in the current climate, the fact that VCs were willing to invest in them at unicorn valuations is a strong signal of where the appetite is.
With these caveats out of the way, let’s dive in.
Aikido
Belgium-based cybersecurity startup Aikido Security reached unicorn status with its $60 million Series B funding round. Valuing the company at $1 billion, the round was led by DST Global, with participation from PSG Equity, Singular, Notion Capital, and others.
According to a press release, the funding will help Aikido enhance its platform, which was built to unify security across the entire software lifecycle and is already used by more than 100,000 teams globally. The company also reported “five-times revenue growth and nearly three-times customer growth” over the last year.
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In a blog post, the startup celebrated this milestone and its significance. According to its team, “in an industry dominated by Palo Alto and Tel Aviv heavyweights, Aikido shows that Europe can build a world-class software security company and win globally.”
Cast AI
Cloud optimization company Cast AI is headquartered in Florida, but has Lithuanian roots and a major office in Vilnius — which explains why many now consider it to have become Lithuania’s fifth unicorn.
Cast AI’s valuation now exceeds $1 billion following a strategic investment from Pacific Alliance Ventures (PAV), the U.S.-based corporate venture arm of Korean conglomerate Shinsegae Group. In April 2025, Cast AI raised a $108 million Series C that had reportedly already brought the company close to unicorn territory.
Alongside its latest funding round, the company also introduced OMNI Compute for AI, which aims to help users deploy more AI workloads on fewer GPUs and remove regional capacity constraints.
Harmattan AI
French defense tech company Harmattan AI was only founded in 2024, but is already worth $1.4 billion, according to its latest funding round. The $200 million Series B was led by Dassault Aviation, maker of the Rafale fighter jets, and also ties into a broader partnership.
Before securing this key partner, Harmattan AI had already signed agreements with the French and British ministries of defense and with Ukrainian drone maker Skyeton, amid growing appetite for autonomous defense aircraft.
Osapiens
German ESG software firm Osapiens raised a $100 million Series C led by Decarbonization Partners, a joint venture between BlackRock and Temasek, which valued the company at over $1.1 billion.
Founded in Mannheim in 2018, Osapiens now has more than 2,400 customers worldwide, including large multinational companies that rely on its platforms and tools for sustainability reporting and data compliance, but also to mitigate supply chain risks.
Preply
The 14-year-old language learning marketplace Preply is now a unicorn valued at $1.2 billion — a milestone that also embodies Ukrainian resilience. The edtech company was founded in the United States, but its founders are Ukrainian and supporters of their home country, where Preply has a team of 150 employees.
According to its CEO, Kirill Bigai, who believes in AI-enhanced learning, proceeds from the $150 million Series D round will help the startup hire more AI talent across its four offices — now located in Barcelona, London, New York, and Kyiv.
Tech
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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