• Legal battles overshadow Web Summit
• Inside Hedosophia's hush-hush scout network
• What really happens in an insect farm?
• Startups need to lose their money taboo

\Investigation 

Legal battles and ‘kompromat’ claims haunt Web Summit as conference opens

\A message from our sponsor Nordigen

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Open banking is reshaping the banking industry. Join the trend with Nordigen, which allows fintechs access to regulated European open banking data from over 2,000 banks.

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\For Members Venture Capital

Secretive fintech VC Hedosophia launches European scout network

\Membership

Need to get up to speed on a market, fast? 

\Sustainabiity

Inside an insect farm 

\Opinion

We celebrate unicorns, so why is money still taboo at startups?

News that Matters

🚴 The latest in on-demand grocery. It's still go go go in Europe’s hottest market, with Getir recently expanding to Portugal as Yandex moved into London, Pop Market launching in Greece and Gorillas raising even more moolah. Find all the recent news here.

🍦 N!cks raises $100m. Kinnevik was among the investors in the Series C funding round for the Swedish healthy snacks and ice cream startup N!cks, which operates in 16 international markets and plans to double its store count in 2022. It sells its products in 6,000+ stores in the US alone.

👀 Gig economy equality. Spanish on-demand delivery startup Glovo announced "The Couriers Pledge", a commitment to increase social rights and benefits available to couriers, regardless of employment or work status with the company.

🐅 A behemoth fund. Tiger Global’s fifteenth fund has closed — at a whopping $8.8bn — with a focus on internet technology companies. It’s been powering through European investments this year.

💸 Cheaper decentralised apps. Moralis, a Stockholm-based blockchain development platform helping developers build and scale decentralised apps, has raised $13.4m in a seed round led by EQT Ventures. Over 30,000 developers have used the tool since it launched last year.

Sifted Suggests

🇪🇸 Spain: a hybrid working hotspot? From corporates opening tech hubs to its pool of global tech talent, this piece makes the case for Spain as a global tech hotspot in 2022. 

🤖 Does your startup really need AI? Not really, thinks Patrik Liu Tran, cofounder and CEO of Validio, an automated real-time data reliability platform. He tells Sifted how startups can determine whether artificial intelligence or machine learning really make sense.

Sifted Members