The European Tech Network ETN has raised a $1.6 million (approximately £1.3 million) seed round and is moving to a five-day-a-week live show schedule, positioning itself as the continent’s answer to the kind of founder-friendly tech chat that made TBPN a household name in Silicon Valley circles. Whether Europe was actually crying out for this, or whether the founders just watched a lot of TBPN and liked the idea, is a question the ratings will eventually answer.
European Tech Network ETN goes five days a week from Kings Cross
The round was led by Powerhouse Capital, a media-focused investor with a track record that includes sports-news site The Athletic (later sold to The New York Times) and podcast studio Wondery, according to reporting on the deal. Axel Springer SE, the German media group that owns Business Insider and Politico, also participated, alongside one of the co-founders of LadBible and angel investors from OpenAI and DeepMind.
Powerhouse Capital’s Salim Mitha framed the bet squarely around the creator-economy thesis: ‘What stands out about ETN is how it is tapping into the growing creator economy and servicing an unmet need to provide live news, in-depth reporting and storytelling for the European tech community.’
With the cash, ETN is moving into a studio in King’s Cross, growing its current eight-person team, and launching a newsletter. Starting now, the show runs Monday to Friday: live from noon to 3pm covering trending stories, followed by two hours of guest interviews.
Since launching last October, ETN has racked up more than 5 million livestream views, a number that apparently prompted around 70 guest pitch requests per week. Hosts Kieran Knight and Tom Chambers were cramming 12 interviews into two hours, twice a week. Something had to give.
‘We needed an outlet that could move at the pace of that,’ Chambers told TechCrunch, referring both to the show’s own momentum and to Europe’s tech ecosystem more broadly.
The TBPN comparison: flattering, but the context has shifted
Knight and Chambers are happy to invoke TBPN as a template. The comparison is reasonable on the surface: a live, founder-friendly format where guests announce funding, products, or hires without a hostile line of questioning. ETN has already hosted the founder of Synthesia, the CFO of Legora, the founder of Granola, UK AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, and visiting American investors including one from Andreessen Horowitz.
The original, though, just got absorbed into the machine it covered. OpenAI acquired TBPN earlier this year. The snippet describes the sale price as a ‘nine-figure sum’; the Financial Times, cited by Digital Applied’s summary of the deal, reported it as ‘low hundreds of millions.’ Axios, citing the Wall Street Journal, reported TBPN had been on track for $5 million in ad revenue in 2025 and had hired a new executive to target $15 million in 2026. TBPN will now report to OpenAI’s chief political operative Chris Lehane. It is hard to claim editorial independence from a company you are covering when that company signs your pay cheques, which is precisely the gap ETN is now walking into.
Kirkland & Ellis advised OpenAI on the acquisition, a detail that underlines how seriously the big players are taking this new category of tech media.
London’s moment, and ETN’s pitch to own the narrative
The backdrop does support Chambers’s urgency. London reclaimed the top European tech spot from Paris in 2026, ranking fourth globally behind the Bay Area, New York, and Boston, according to Reuters citing Dealroom data. The city is home to 138 unicorns and tech companies raised $17.7 billion there last year. So far this year alone, London startups have raised $14.7 billion per Dealroom, with six companies clearing the $500 million mark: Wayve, Superintelligence, ElevenLabs, Recursive, Ineffable Intelligence, and Isomorphic Labs.
ETN’s sponsors include Polymarket, blockchain company Base, ElevenLabs, and fintech firm Airwallex. The show monetises through advertising, the same model that carried TBPN to profitability before OpenAI came calling.
Beyond London, Knight and Chambers are travelling to European conferences: they have broadcast from the Panathenaea Conference in Athens and from inside the Louvre for the RAISE AI Summit. Upcoming guests include Sequoia partner George Robson and former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, now a senior adviser to Anthropic and Microsoft.
‘These are things that have never happened in Europe before,’ Chambers said of the speed at which capital is moving through the ecosystem. The show’s bet is that the audience for that story is big enough to sustain a daily programme, a newsletter, and a growing studio headcount. If the guest queue is anything to go by, the supply side has already bought in. The demand side is the remaining question.
