Here Are 6 European Startups Pushing Cutting-Edge Technology Platforms

Europe's technology startup landscape has produced a growing number of $1 billion unicorns in recent years, with brands like Deliveroo, Klarna, UiPath and Revolut standing out as major pace-setters.

Those high-profile names are just the most visible part of Europe's maturing tech landscape, which is rapidly making a name for itself as the birthplace of cutting-edge innovations in a wide range of sectors. Though the economy has gone down the pan somewhat in 2023 and funding has suddenly become a lot harder to find, there remains a whole host of nascent startups that are looking to make their – in areas ranging from investing to finance, quantum computing to big data analytics and more besides.

cheqd

They include the U.K.-based digital identity startup cheqd, which has the wonderful vision of making it possible for individuals and businesses alike to satisfy legally required identity checks while retaining their privacy.

cheqd, which raised $2.6 million in funding in 2021, operates in the Web3 space that intends to carve out a new, decentralised internet. It enables people to create a verifiable digital identity that they can store on a mobile device and use to verify they are who they say they are, without revealing any information about themselves. It's a novel idea that involves the encrypted ID being "signed" by a trusted authority, so it can be securely shared with organisations to meet KYC requirements, without the company itself being asked to perform checks of its own.

The system will require users to undergo KYC with a trusted provider just once, and after that, they'll be able to share that identity credential anytime they're asked to prove their identity. It's a transformative idea that could one day eliminate the repetitive process of constantly undergoing KYC for each new service they sign up for.

AngelBlock

Instead of trying to secure money for itself, AngelBlock is all about raising money for others, in particular Web3 startups that need to secure funding quickly.

UK-based Angelblock's decentralised fundraising platform provides startups with an easy path to funding, based on the idea of releasing timelines regarding cryptocurrency token sales and other milestones. So if a project raises $1 million, it will have to meet specified milestones to unlock that capital in increments, and that will only happen when investors vote in favour. Other features include on-chain vesting, which prevents investors from selling off their tokens early and causing problems for the project.

It's an innovative idea that strives to protect the interests of investors and founders alike and is certainly welcome in a cryptocurrency industry that's seen more than its fair share of scams. At the same time, the novel idea of using capital release timelines provides an incentive for startups to deliver, with financial rewards on offer as they make progress along their roadmaps. It'll be interesting to see what kind of interest there is in SOLA-X, which was recently announced as the first project seeking to raise money through AngelBlock's platform.

Quantexa

Another hot London-based startup is the decision intelligence platform provider Quantexa, which is pioneering an artificial intelligence-powered approach to analysing corporate data for signals that could indicate money laundering, fraud and other illegal activities.

Quantexa's contextual decision intelligence can be used by companies to assess risk and compliance as well as spot fraudulent financial activity. The platform presents its findings through easily digestible graphs that help users to better understand how different legal entities are linked to one another. Its platform is designed to serve customers in the financial services industry, as well as healthcare, insurance and government. More recently, it has expanded its decision intelligence algorithms to cover additional use cases. For example, it can help to build customer profiles for KYC compliance.

Quantexa claims to be growing exceptionally fast, with major clients including HSBC, BNY Mellion, Standard Chartered and Danske Bank. It has also raised a hefty amount of money, most recently securing $129 million in late-stage funding from GIC and other investors.

Libertify

Looking to make financial markets safer for investors is Libertify, based in Paris. The company refers to itself as the "crypto seatbelt" because it uses artificial intelligence to help cryptocurrency investors navigate the intense volatility of one of the most dynamic markets of all.

Libertify is an automated investing app that helps users to deal with sudden price movements, based on their willingness to tolerate risk. The idea is that Libertify can protect investors against sudden price changes by making rational decisions, and it claims it can reduce portfolio volatility by up to 30 per cent, helping to prevent common mistakes made by users under pressure.

It sounds promising, and it should get even better with Libertify's recent integration with the crypto analytics platform IntoTheBlock. The new partnership means Libertify users will gain access to more relevant updates about each digital asset in their portfolio. This information is displayed on an "insights card" that's available for every asset the app tracks. Among the insights include news updates, Telegram sentiment analytics, Twitter sentiment analytics and more.

Wakweli

If there's one nation you can always trust to be neutral, it's the Swiss. So it means Geneva-based Wakweli is the ideal platform to try and bring more authenticity to the non-fungible token space, with a revolutionary protocol that incentivises users to counteract fraud.

Wakweli has created a clever consensus mechanism that it calls "proof-of-democracy", which encourages third parties to certify that an NFT is real, and then rewards anyone who spots one that has been incorrectly certified. It's an intriguing idea that helped Wakweli to raise $1.1 million earlier this year.

The Wakweli protocol has already gotten the attention of Polygon, which is a popular scaling solution for the Ethereum network. In March, Wakweli said it's joining forces with Polygon to help it counteract NFT fraud within its growing ecosystem of digital assets. As part of the alliance, Wakweli will work to ensure that every Polygon-based NFT is compatible with its certification scheme, and then encourage creators to authenticate those assets.

Riverlane

British quantum computing startup Riverlane made headlines recently with its £15 million Series B round of funding in April. The company is developing an error-correction platform to solve the problem of instability in quantum computing.

Quantum computers promise to be exponentially more powerful than today's classical computers, but until now, the creators of these machines have struggled to scale them to a degree where they can actually be useful. That's because the quantum bits – or qubits – that power them are inherently unstable, being too sensitive to environmental interference and high temperatures.

Riverlane hopes to be able to solve these issues with its quantum computing operating system, Deltaflow.OS, which uses hardware decoders to detect quantum errors and a control system that implements error correction cycles when they occur. It's a complex technology, but Riverlane has found fans of its platform in the shape of quantum computing startups Rigetti Computing and Seec.