Mike Butcher

Freeda raises €3.4m to catch design errors before they hit the construction site

The Paris startup is using AI to scan complex construction plans for costly mistakes. The round was led by Frst VC.

By Amelia Isaacs
@AmeliaKIsaacs

pathfounders.com/p/freeda-rai...

This VC fund raised $75m and runs on AI agents — no analysts needed The husband-and-wife team behind Davidovs Venture Collective is rethinking venture capital and giving a network of limited partners from top tech companies the chance to invest like megafunds do.

This VC fund raised $75m and runs on AI agents — no analysts needed pathfounders.com/p/dvc-davido... by @ameliakisaacs.bsky.social

Super delighted and excited to see the (soft) launch of @mikebutcher.bsky.social pwrd @pathfounders.bsky.social !
Everybody follow, great things are definitely on the way!

Welcome to Pathfounders It's high time we had a new tech media brand.

Today, I am soft-launching @pathfounders.bsky.social, a new tech media brand to offer informed reporting, analysis, and opinion on the top tech startups and VC firms across Europe, Silicon Valley, and globally.
Read more here:
pathfounders.com/p/welcome-to...

Plenty of investors wanting to jump on the AI bandwagon, that’s who! 🤣

Geez, there are SO MANY Michael Jackson Sora / AI deepfake videos now. I should think his estate must be planning a several billion-dollar law suit.

The wind is in their sails…

Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting man Exclusive: Instagram pictures of girls as young as 13 were posted to promote Threads site ‘as bait’, campaigner says

While ya’ll get excited about Meta’s new Glasses: “One mother said her Instagram account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads where they were visible.”

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Today’s defection to Reform is Danny Kruger, that former Tory MP who is a bastion of anti-establishmentarianism!

“Education: University of Oxford (2000), University of Oxford, The University of Edinburgh, Eton College”

Inside Anthropic’s ‘Red Team’—ensuring Claude is safe, and that Anthropic is heard in the corridors of power | Fortune Unique among AI labs, Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team reports to its policy chief and has a mandate to publicize the dangers it finds.

Anthropic are doing something very smart: Employing their own team to test how their technology might be misused.

This is in a huge contrast to many large tech companies that simply hope they can get away with never being regulated - and so don't bother with ...

fortune.com/2025/09/04/a...

Today’s Big Story: Mistral is on fire
• There’s been lots of speculation about Mistral’s upcoming fund-raise. Today it's been confirmed that it’s raised a €1.7B Series C round ($1.99 billion) led by ASML. Most of the major tech news outlets have the story, except for TechCrunch. (I wonder why?!).

There’s been lots of speculation about Mistral’s upcoming fund-raise, much of it wrong. Today it's been confirmed that it’s raised a €1.7B Series C round ($1.99 billion) led by ASML, which transla... There’s been lots of speculation about Mistral’s upcoming fund-raise, much of it wrong. Today it's been confirmed that it’s raised a €1.7B Series C round ($1.99 billion) led by ASML, which translates ...

[Breaking] There’s been lots of speculation about Mistral’s upcoming fund-raise, much of it wrong. Today it's been confirmed that it’s raised a €1.7B Series C round ($1.99 billion) led by ASML. Reuters reported that ASML 1.3 billion euros of that amount.
www.linkedin.com/posts/mikebu...

I guess not.

They are the same as they were before. For years. Please keep up.

Podcast | A billionaire’s hidden empire built on coal and post cards You probably have never heard of him, but he’s one of Europe’s most influential billionaires: Daniel Křetínský, a Czech businessman who built his fortune on coal – all the while receiving hundreds of ...

You probably have never heard of him, but he’s one of Europe’s most influential billionaires: Daniel Křetínský, a Czech businessman who built his fortune on coal – all the while receiving hundreds of millions of euros for green subsidies. In this episode, our journalists unpick his vast empire.

It’s not going to be the total end of human moderation. The AI will simply flag to human moderators the content it can’t make a decision about. But yes, overall this is a good development.

Former EU boss keeps office in von der Leyen’s building – and allows his guests to lobby in secret Years after stepping down as head of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker still meets with lobbyists and foreign diplomats in the Berlaymont, the EU executive’s seat in Brussels. He holds regu...

The former president of the European Commission still holds office at his old headquarters, where he regularly receives prominent guests. According to the Kazakh government, he also offered help as go-between. Jean-Claude Juncker himself denies this, claiming that he is “immune” to influence.

US-based Rumble, backed by Tether, proposes $1.17B acquisition of German AI cloud company Northern Data - Silicon Canals Rumble announces its intention for a share swap with this company backed by Tether, which could potentially reshape AI cloud ambitions.

Completely missed in this story is that Northern Data is one of Europe’s very few sovereign cloud data centre players. That it could be sold to a US company should ring alarm bells amongst those interested in European resilience.

siliconcanals.com/rumble-propo...

Good time to do a UK/European version of the Internet Archive before it all gets deleted by the Whitehouse.

Any European startups need this data? It’s about to go up in smoke.

The revenge of the working classes? 🤣🤷‍♂️

I have a feeling you didn’t read the post.

Rows — The spreadsheet with superpowers Slick design. Built-in integrations. Revolutionary sharing. Rows reinvented spreadsheets so teams do more, crazy fast.

Check out rows.com - has has $30m of investment.

• What’s the news? | Mike Butcher ✍️ • What’s the news?  Startups are working out how to attach LLMs to Excel. This is significant because analysts have to do repetitive, mechanical work in financial modelling, which LLMs could do almost...

Startups are working out how to attach LLMs to Excel. This is significant because analysts have to do repetitive, mechanical work in financial modelling, which LLMs could do almost instantaneously. www.linkedin.com/posts/mikebu...

Why would you not just do a quote post so you have your “take” on your own timeline with the context of the thing you are responding to?

Wealth of five richest men doubles since 2020 as five billion people made poorer in "decade of division," says Oxfam www.oxfam.org/en/press-rel...

Hot AI startup Lovable claims to have just crossed $100M ARR in 8 months, faster than many other startups of its size, such as OpenAI, Cursor and Wiz. | Mike Butcher ✍️ Hot AI startup Lovable claims to have just crossed $100M ARR in 8 months, faster than many other startups of its size, such as OpenAI, Cursor and Wiz. It’s also releasing an update which is claims wil...

[Breaking]
Hot AI startup Lovable claims to have just crossed $100M ARR in 8 months. It also released an update which it claims will reduce error rates by 91%, in the shape of a new improved Lovable Agent.
substack.com/@mikebutcher...

Trump: Moscow’s Man in the White House? What’s the truth about Trump and Putin’s relationship?

The UK’s @Channel4 @C4Dispatches has finally done a proper documentary on Trump.
www.channel4.com/programmes/t...

Exclusive: OpenAI to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome OpenAI is close to releasing an AI-powered web browser that will challenge Alphabet's market-dominating Google Chrome, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Breaking: The Browser Wars Begun, They Have. OpenAI’s Web browser will include a chat interface, and include agents. It is now ON with Google (because Chrome). Capturing data on users' is (Hey, Meta!) once again the name of the game.
www.reuters.com/business/med...

Tell me your company has no Brits without telling me