Europe has gotten its own TBPN-style live show, and everyone is looking forward to landing a guest spot

Europe’s answer to TBPN is here and ready to stream five days a week, starting June 27.

Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers first launched the London-based European Technology Network (ETN) last October, analyzing technology trends and news during a live broadcast two days a week. Currently, the show is streaming live on X and YouTube and has received over 5 million views.

On Monday, the network announced a $1.6 million seed round from major players in the media ecosystem, including Powerhouse Capital, Axel Springer SE (which owns Business Insider and Politico), popular media publication LadBible, and angel investors OpenAI and DeepMind. With this new capital, the network announces its largest expansion to date.

It’s now moving into a large studio in King’s Cross (where all of London’s leading AI startups are based), expanding the team (currently just eight), launching a newsletter, and starting today is moving to a five-days-a-week live show schedule, which will soon see Knight and Chambers interviewing the likes of George Robson (partner at Sequoia) and Rishi Sunak (former UK Prime Minister and senior advisor to Anthropic and Microsoft).

Speaking to TechCrunch, Knight and Chambers said ETN has already become a hot stop on the European startup press tour – they spoke to the founder of Synthesia, the CFO of Legora, the founder of Granola, and Kanishka Narayan, the UK’s first AI minister. They even have American investors stop by the show when they’re in town, including one from Andreessen Horowitz.

“ETN was born out of a huge gap in the industry,” Chambers told TechCrunch. “It’s all about speed.” He said the current media ecosystem in the UK cannot keep up with how fast the technology landscape is moving. For example, so far this year, London startups have raised $14.7 billion according to Dealroom. Six companies have raised more than $500 million: Wayve, Superintelligence, ElevenLabs, Recursive, Ineffable Intelligence, and Isomorphic Labs, the last three of which were founded by DeepMind alumni.

“These are things that have never happened in Europe before,” Chambers continued, referring to the speed at which capital flows through the ecosystem. As the show’s popularity grew, Chambers said they were receiving about 70 pitches a week from guests looking to attend the show. They were trying to do 12 interviews in two hours, twice a week, but eventually it became too much. “We needed an outlet that could move at the same pace,” he said of interest in the show and how quickly Europe’s tech ecosystem is moving. “That’s why we’re going from two days a week to five days a week.”

The five-day format will look very similar to the two-day format. There will be a live show from 12pm UK time until 3pm, explaining trending stories, and then for two hours, there will be guests on the show talking about whatever they want. Chambers said they also want to start hosting discussions, roundtables and a Shark Tank-style pitch session on the show.

“We want to make it as beneficial to the ecosystem as possible,” Chambers said. “There needs to be more discourse around AI in Europe. There needs to be more discourse around venture capital and money flowing into the ecosystem. There needs to be more discourse about the amazing things happening in the tech ecosystem, and our role is to be the stage where people can shout about all the amazing things they are doing.”

The show makes its money from advertising dollars, like most media publications, and big-name sponsors already include prediction market Polymarket, blockchain company Base, and AI audio company ElevenLabs.

When asked about the impact TBPN has had on them, Knight and Chambers said they already look to John Coogan and Geordie Hayes, the founders of TBPN (which was recently sold to OpenAI for what some say is a nine-figure sum), as pioneers in this new tech media ecosystem. The show became a place for tech guests to appear, chat with friendly faces, and announce new product releases, appointments, or funding news. “My thinking was, if we can have ITV and the BBC, why can’t we have a regional version of this?” Chambers continued.

However, Europe is a big place, with over 40 different countries and over 200 languages ​​spoken (24 of which are recognized by the European Union). Chambers said that although ETN will report from London, he and Knight are making an effort to bring in guests from across the continent. Aside from bringing guests to the studio, they also travel to attend top tech conferences across Europe. For example, they broadcast from the Panathenaea conference in Athens and from inside the Louvre Museum in Paris for the RAISE AI Summit.

“You have all these different cultures, these different minds coming together and producing different products,” Chambers said. “You can taste what he’s making [Europe] “Great power.”

With all this, they said that they would never refuse an American founder if they wanted to participate in the show. “It is a European technology network, but we believe there is a huge network [global] “Opportunities,” Chambers said. Knight added to this, noting how often talks pit the European tech ecosystem against the US ecosystem

“We are universally optimistic,” Knight said. “We drive global prosperity from Europe. Wherever you want to go and build your company, wherever is the best place to go and build that company, go do it, and we will shout at you to go do it.”

Nor do he and Chambers necessarily consider themselves journalists; Rather, they consider themselves technology insiders curious about what’s happening and why. They also do not see themselves as an alternative to traditional media and instead intend to work alongside those publications. “We rely on traditional media,” Chambers said, adding that’s how they find a lot of the news they talk about on ETN.

Overall, the duo hopes to help document the stories coming from the new wave of European success, from London’s ElevenLabs to Stockholm’s Lovable, to help the next generation understand that technology is one way to move a nation forward.

Discussing the impact of European success stories, Chambers said: “They excite the next generation to the point where it’s no longer cool to finish university and go into banking or consulting. People want to leave university and go straight into building a startup, and I think that’s amazing.”