ETN steps up bid to become Europe’s TBPN with $1.6m raise: ‘We’re taking this incredibly seriously’
Sifted
European Tech News just raised $1.6m to become Europe's version of TBPN, the buzzy US startup show. It's going from two live episodes a week to five, betting Europe's AI scene needs faster, louder coverage.
Based on reporting by Sifted — read the original for the full story.
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Eight months ago, Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers were hustling for cash to get a scrappy live show off the ground. Now ETN has $1.6m in seed funding, backers including Axel Springer and Powerhouse Capital, plus angels from OpenAI and DeepMind, and more than 5m views across YouTube and X. The round, Chambers admits, ran hot enough that they had to turn people away.
Most of the money is going into a new studio near King's Cross, and into people. ETN has hired former Bloomberg chief of staff Alexandra Best, poached the ex-head of video production from Tottenham Hotspur, and brought on four alumni of TBPN itself, the American show ETN openly wants to mirror. Two internship postings pulled in over 300 applications in 48 hours, which tells you something about how much cachet this thing has built in under a year.
Chambers insists the team won't balloon in size, leaning instead on AI tools to keep things lean while output scales up. The jump from two shows a week to five is a direct response to volume: at the old pace, ETN was fielding 60 to 70 story pitches weekly and couldn't keep up. That's less a vanity metric and more a signal of how crowded Europe's AI and startup scene has gotten — London alone has pulled in €13.4bn in startup funding this year, and mega-rounds north of $500m are no longer rare.
The guest list backs up the ambition. Founders from Synthesia, Granola and Legora have already sat down on the show, alongside Formula One champion Nico Rosberg and UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan. Former prime minister Rishi Sunak, now advising Microsoft and Anthropic, is booked in next. Chambers frames ETN not as a rival to traditional media but as an extra layer sitting on top of it — a stage where people closer to the story than the hosts can explain why it matters, rather than ETN pretending to be the expert itself.
What Chambers is really betting on is timing. He talks about a shift in European tech's confidence over the last couple of years, and wants ETN to be the microphone for that shift rather than just a chronicler of it. Whether five live shows a week is sustainable, or just a fast way to burn through goodwill and seed cash, is the more interesting question nobody's asking yet.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I like that a European outlet is finally copying TBPN's format instead of just complaining that Europe lacks its own version — but raising money from OpenAI and DeepMind angels to cover the AI ecosystem is the kind of access-journalism setup that should make everyone squint a little. Five live shows a week powered by a 'lean, AI-heavy' team sounds less like the future of newsrooms and more like a founder-media hype machine dressed up as journalism. Europe doesn't need faster cheerleading, it needs sharper scrutiny, and those are rarely the same product.
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