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Canal Letter

Contributor

Canal Letter is Silicon Canals' weekly briefing on the global innovation ecosystems we cover, with particular attention to European startup activity. Articles under this column are produced by our editorial team under the direction of the Chief Publisher.

Technology

Nearly a million wallets have lost $3.8 billion on Trump’s memecoin while the president cleared $636 million — and the SEC has formally declared the whole arrangement outside its jurisdiction

Nearly one million retail investors have lost a combined $3.8 billion buying President Donald Trump's $TRUMP memecoin, while the president personally cleared $636 million from the same instrument, according to a blockchain analysis by cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen.

Jul 6, 2026

Technology

Quantum Systems signed a $1.2 billion round at a valuation of about $8 billion — and one of the investors co-leading it is Airbus, exactly the kind of defense prime the startup’s founder says his company could disrupt

The Munich drone maker calls itself a "neo prime" that says it can upend the defense establishment. The establishment just helped write the check — and says its own role is changing.

Jul 3, 2026

Technology

Booking.com still runs on the internal A/B testing framework its engineers wrote in Amsterdam in the mid-2000s, with no major rewrite since, and at any given moment it is running more than 1,000 live experiments on the same booking page you’re looking at

Booking.com runs more than 1,000 concurrent experiments on its production booking flow through an in-house framework its Amsterdam engineers built in the late 2000s — a foundational piece of software that has been extended continuously but never rewritten. The case reveals how the most powerful systems in modern e-commerce are often the oldest.

Jun 30, 2026

Technology

A 35-year-old founder’s perfect biomarkers missed a fist-sized tumour, and what Claude caught on his final PET scan — just as his oncologist began discussing radiotherapy near his heart — is the real story about AI in medicine

A 35-year-old founder with near-perfect biomarkers, four years of optimised bloodwork, and a Whoop band that tracked his sleep against an Oura ring discovered a tumour the size of a fist behind his sternum — not through any of his tracking, but by accident.

Jun 30, 2026

Technology

ASML in Veldhoven ships each EUV lithography machine in roughly 250 crates aboard multiple Boeing 747s, the mirrors inside are polished so finely that scaled to the size of Germany the largest bump would be under a millimetre tall, and every advanced chip in every iPhone on Earth passes through one of these machines before it reaches a pocket

ASML insists it can account for every one of the 314 EUV lithography machines it has ever shipped — and that none of them, nor any component designed for one, has reached China. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says otherwise. The fight reveals just how concentrated the world's chip supply chain has become.

Jun 29, 2026

Business

Stripe’s payment infrastructure was built in a Palo Alto apartment by two Irish brothers from Limerick who, before they turned 25, had convinced Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to back them, and the company’s annual payment volume now exceeds the entire GDP of Ireland by more than three times

Stripe processed $1.4 trillion in payment volume in 2024 — roughly 2.6 times Ireland's GDP — and the founders built the first version in a Palo Alto apartment before either turned 25.

Jun 26, 2026

Business

A Detroit pension fund just sued Uber’s board for running a ‘serial compliance offender’ culture — and the math behind the lawsuit is what every gig-economy director should be reading tonight

A Detroit pension fund has filed a derivative lawsuit against Uber's board and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, accusing the ride-hailing company of operating as a serial compliance offender that knowingly cut corners on safety.

Jun 23, 2026

Technology

Mach Industries raised $300M at a $1.8B valuation — and its new in-house rocket-motor arm targets a U.S. supply bottleneck

A three-year-old unmanned-systems maker just raised $300 million. Two weeks earlier it bought a propulsion company, a move aimed at one of the defense industry's most stubborn shortages.

Jun 23, 2026

News

One of the five brothers who kept Ubisoft independent for 40 years just died in a plane crash, and the real question is whether the family voting bloc can survive its first generational test

Claude Guillemot, a co-founder of French video game publisher Ubisoft, reportedly died in a plane crash.

Jun 23, 2026

Technology

A Nobel laureate just walked out of Google DeepMind for Anthropic, and the part nobody is discussing is what Alphabet had reassigned him to do before he left

Nobel laureate John Jumper is leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic after nearly nine years at the Alphabet-owned lab.

Jun 22, 2026

Technology

BlackRock and Wellington just backed a 1977 Japanese taxi operator’s robotaxi pivot — and the demographic math behind the deal explains why Waymo needs Go more than Go needs Waymo

Japan's largest ride-hailing app, Go, raised ¥88.6 billion ($553 million) in its Tokyo Stock Exchange debut on Tuesday, making it the country's biggest IPO of…

Jun 22, 2026

Technology

OpenAI just hired a Transformer co-author and a former Trump AI official in the same quarter — and the pairing is really an IPO prospectus written in personnel form

OpenAI is stacking its bench ahead of a public listing, recruiting one of the most consequential researchers in modern AI alongside a former White House policy official — a pairing that says less about talent acquisition than about the institutional posture the company is building for its IPO roadshow.

Jun 19, 2026