ETN raises $1.6M to build Europe's TBPN, announces new studio and five-day-a-week schedule
Key Points
- ETN closes $1.6M seed round at $9M valuation and launches five-day-a-week live show from new studio, betting the European tech ecosystem lacks media infrastructure rivals US coverage.
- Co-founders Knight and Chambers received 360 intern applications including relocation-willing candidates from Tesla and SpaceX, signaling strong demand for European tech media.
- ETN's ad model already works; founders took venture funding only after concluding the European opportunity justified building toward a broader network business including summits and recruitment.
Summary
Read full transcript →ETN raises $1.6M at $9M post-money valuation
Luke Knight and Ronan Chambers, the co-founders of ETN — the European Technology Network — closed a $1.6M seed round at a $9M post-money valuation, announced on the day of this appearance. The raise comes alongside two other milestones: a new studio and a move to a five-day-a-week live show schedule.
ETN is a daily live technology and venture capital news show covering the European startup ecosystem, modeled after TBPN. Knight and Chambers are roughly ten months into building it.
“We raised $1,600,000. $9,000,000 post money valuation. Announced today. Super happy. And new studio. When we figured out how big the opportunity is in Europe specifically, we realized that raising the money had legs — we were like, okay, this thing can be really big.”
The business model and the bigger bet
The live show is the entry point, not the end state. Knight says ETN is building toward a network business — think summits, recruitment, potentially a fund — arguing the European ecosystem lacks the kind of media infrastructure that exists in the US, and that the show gives ETN the distribution to build it.
The ad model is already working well enough that the team hadn't initially planned to raise. The decision to take outside money came after they concluded the European opportunity was large enough to justify it.
Demand signal
Knight put out a job posting for two interns and received roughly 360 applications, including candidates based in San Francisco who had interned at Tesla and SpaceX and were willing to relocate to Europe. ETN couldn't accommodate them, but the pull is notable for a ten-month-old media startup.
Chambers also emailed around 600 people on the day of the announcement and says the volume of out-of-office auto-replies was "pretty shocking" — a reminder that July is a structurally difficult month to launch anything in Europe.
What comes next
Knight and Chambers are eyeing vertical spin-offs within Europe — fashion and other categories came up as examples — though nothing is confirmed beyond the core show. The live format, PTZ cameras, ticker sponsorships, and studio buildout all borrow from the TBPN playbook, which the founders credit openly. Their pitch is that European tech is undercovered and that the same model can go bigger on this side of the Atlantic than anyone has yet tried.
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