Portugal’s Iberian candidacy for a European Commission AI gigafactory project will concentrate all operations in Sines rather than establishing a secondary hub in Pego. The €8 billion investment from public and private funds will create an AI infrastructure facility with 150 MW computing capacity, expected to be fully operational by 2028. Spain’s location is Tarragona in Catalonia.
Hotiday, a Milan-based startup founded in 2022 by a trio of students, sublets hotel rooms and rents them to travelers. It topped the third annual Sifted 100 ranking of the 100 fastest-growing companies in Southern Europe, achieving a remarkable 1330.95% two-year revenue CAGR between 2023 and 2025. The company uses an innovative business model based on subletting rather than purchasing buildings or franchising.
Dunia Innovations unveiled plans for Berlin GigaLab, a €280 million facility to industrialize AI-driven materials discovery. The 6,000 m² facility will integrate autonomous experimentation, AI-guided design, and industrial-grade characterization. Backed by an industrial consortium including Siemens, ABB Robotics, NVIDIA, AWS, and ILS, the facility is expected to create over 200 jobs and begin operations in 2028.
Dior is reassessing its pricing strategy to win back customers who have been deterred by luxury price increases over recent years. CEO Delphine Arnault confirmed the brand is working on leather goods and maintaining price caution, having frozen Lady Dior prices since 2023. Creative director Jonathan Anderson is driving brand renewal with lower-priced product offerings.
Grampet Group presented the LEON train, the first domestically-built diesel train in Romania in 80 years, during a ceremonial journey from Bucharest to Brașov carrying international astronauts. The three-car LEON features 145-155 seats, dual 390 kW MTU engines, speeds up to 120 km/h, and modern amenities. Grampet plans to expand passenger operations with the LEON model and 80 ICE4 units purchased from Denmark. The event highlighted Romania’s aerospace and technological potential with visits to the Air Force Academy where an auditorium was named after Prunariu.
Redis launched Redis Iris, a context and memory platform designed to replace RAG infrastructure for enterprise agentic AI. The platform addresses the structural problem that AI agents generate orders of magnitude more data requests than human users, requiring a different retrieval architecture. Iris includes data integration via CDC pipelines, semantic context retrieval with auto-generated MCP tools, agent memory capabilities, and Redis Flex storage engine running 99% of data on SSDs at sub-millisecond latencies.
Kuchnia Vikinga, Poland’s largest producer of fresh ready-made meals, launched a new marketing campaign targeting cooking enthusiasts – a demographic previously ignored by the industry. The campaign is based on research conducted on over 1,000 Poles revealing a paradox: people who are most passionate about cooking often have the least time to do it.
Rubik Hub, a startup accelerator based in Iași, Romania, is hosting a 9-year anniversary networking event on May 26, 2024. The event features pitch sessions from alumni startups, investor presentations, and panel discussions on investments and local-global ecosystems. The hub has supported over 600 European startups that have collectively raised over 75 million EUR, and was recently recognized as Europe’s top accelerator by Financial Times for the second consecutive year and won the Global Startup Awards for best coworking space globally.
Odd Dreams Digital, a Malmö-based indie game studio founded in 2022, achieved remarkable success with the launch of its debut game ‘Everything is Crab’, an animal evolution roguelite action game. The game sold over 200,000 copies in three days and received strong critical acclaim on Steam. The studio, led by CEO Denis Asensio with team members from AAA studios including Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Wars Outlaws, participated in the Haven game support program before launch.
Bison Bank, a Portuguese bank specializing in investment banking, custodial services, corporate advisory and cryptocurrency services, launched the first Portuguese stablecoin with two versions indexed to the euro and US dollar. The stablecoin was designed to enable fast, secure and transparent international payments and transfers in compliance with the EU’s MiCA regulation.