Less than a year ago, Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers were quietly scraping together cash to launch what they hoped would become Europe's answer to US tech media phenomenon TBPN.
On Monday, the London-based founders of ETN announced they had raised a $1.6m seed round — backed by investors including Axel Springer and Powerhouse Capital alongside angels from OpenAI and DeepMind — having surpassed 5m views across YouTube and X.
After a brief stint off-air, ETN has relaunched, upping the number of live shows from two to five per week. For Chambers, the scale of investor demand came as a surprise.
"By the end of the round, we were actually turning people away," he tells Sifted. "We hadn't planned to raise as much as we did, but it became incredibly oversubscribed. We wanted to let more people in because so many of them were fans and viewers of the show."
Much of the funding has gone into building what Chambers describes as a "state-of-the-art" studio near King's Cross. Recent hires include former Bloomberg chief of staff Alexandra Best, the former head of video production at Tottenham Hotspur and four former TBPN employees. Two internship roles attracted more than 300 applications in just two days.
Chambers tells Sifted he doesn’t envision the team growing much larger.
"We're a lean team, and everything we do is heavily AI-powered," he says. "When you compare us with the budgets of traditional media shows, we think we're building the next generation of what a newsroom can look like."
The expansion comes as Europe's startup ecosystem continues to accelerate. London startups alone have raised €13.4bn so far this year, according to Sifted data, while a string of AI companies have secured mega-rounds exceeding $500m.
"When we were going live twice a week, we were getting 60 to 70 story pitches every week," Chambers says. "We couldn't keep up with the number of great stories coming out of Europe's ecosystem."
Keeping pace
The daily format, Chambers says, is necessary to keep pace with a fast-growing ecosystem.
"We're taking this incredibly seriously because Europe needs more discussion around AI, and it needs that discussion to happen faster. We need something that moves at the pace of the ecosystem."
Over the past eight months, ETN has already hosted founders from some of the continent’s buzziest companies, including Synthesia, Granola and Legora.
Other big names have taken guest slots, including UK AI minister Kanishka Narayan and Formula One world champion Nico Rosberg. Former UK prime minister Rishi Sunak — now an adviser at US tech giants Microsoft and Anthropic — is due to appear on Tuesday.
Chambers is keen to stress ETN isn't trying to compete with traditional journalism. "Our relationship with traditional media has to be symbiotic," he says. "We're not trying to replace it — we're another layer on top of the ecosystem that traditional media has already built."
He portrays ETN as a platform where founders, investors and policymakers can discuss the biggest issues shaping European tech.
"Our job is to provide a stage for people who know far more about these topics than we do. If there's an important story, we'll discuss it on the show, but we'll bring in the experts to explain why it matters. We want to push the conversation forward."
Ultimately, Chambers hopes to deliver Europe's a platform that matches the growing ambition of the ecosystem itself.
"Everyone in Europe can feel the vibe has shifted over the past couple of years," he says. "If we can inspire the next generation of founders by telling those stories, then we've done our job."
