About Trending Topics

Trending Topics

Trending Topics is a Vienna-based digital news portal for technology and innovation, co-founded by Bastian Kellhofer and Jakob Steinschaden. From Vienna it covers startups, artificial intelligence, fintech, crypto and sustainability, with daily news and podcasts, for a German-speaking audience interested in how new technology companies and digital policy are reshaping Austria and Europe. In June 2025 it was acquired by the Vienna artificial intelligence company newsrooms.ai, which had been incubated inside Trending Topics and spun off in 2024. The founding year of Trending Topics could not be independently confirmed in the sources behind this profile and is therefore not stated — an explicit gap that this profile preserves rather than filling with a plausible date.

That acquisition makes Trending Topics an unusual directory case: a tech medium bought by a company born inside itself. Newsrooms.ai, which builds artificial intelligence software for automated content production for media companies and corporate communications teams, began within the media house of Trending Topics, was spun off in 2024 with its own developer team and investor backing, and then, in June 2025, acquired its former parent. The founders of Trending Topics, Kellhofer and Steinschaden, remained on board after the deal, holding equity in newsrooms.ai and taking central roles in product development, strategy and business development.

Founders: Bastian Kellhofer and Jakob Steinschaden

Trending Topics was co-founded by Bastian Kellhofer and Jakob Steinschaden, the two names attached to the portal in every company and acquisition report. Both are media and technology entrepreneurs in Vienna, and both crossed over into the acquiring company: after the June 2025 acquisition, tech.eu reported that the founders would remain on board, hold equity in newsrooms.ai, and play central roles in product development, strategy and business development. Kellhofer, who is also a co-founder of newsrooms.ai, framed the deal in terms of disruption: after search engines and social media, he said, artificial intelligence is the next major disruption of the media world of the twenty-first century, and the combined company wanted to be at the forefront of it.

The founders' dual role — journalists and media founders on one side, artificial intelligence product builders on the other — explains the portal's trajectory. Trending Topics covered the Austrian and European startup scene from inside that scene, and its newsroom became a test bed for the question its own coverage kept asking: what happens to media when software can produce content? Newsrooms.ai was the product answer developed inside the house. The 2025 acquisition formalised that answer by making the product company the owner of the medium that had incubated it.

Editorial focus: startups, AI, fintech, crypto and sustainability

Trending Topics covers startups, artificial intelligence, fintech, crypto and sustainability with daily news and podcasts, according to the directory seed drawn from EU-Startups and company releases. That beat list maps the technology economy of the 2020s: young companies and their funding, the artificial intelligence wave, financial technology and crypto assets, and the sustainability technologies attracting European capital and regulation. Its daily news rhythm distinguishes it from slower analysis formats, while its podcasts give founders, investors and experts a conversational format alongside the news file.

Tech.eu's acquisition report called Trending Topics the leading Austrian tech media platform, and other reporting described it as a player in Europe's tech industry for over a decade. That over-a-decade formulation, from coverage of the 2025 deal, is the strongest available indication of the portal's age, and it is reported here in exactly that attributed form. It does not license a precise founding year, which — as the seed itself states — could not be independently confirmed. A responsible profile can say the portal is a long-running, decade-scale presence in Austrian tech media without inventing a birthday.

Vienna base and German-language tech coverage

Trending Topics is based in Vienna and publishes at trendingtopics.eu, a European domain that suits a portal whose subjects — EU artificial intelligence regulation, cross-border venture capital, crypto rules — are European as much as Austrian. Vienna is a rational base for that coverage: it hosts Austria's largest startup concentration, the headquarters of major banks and insurers building fintech products, and a growing artificial intelligence company scene, including newsrooms.ai itself.

Within this directory's Austria batch, Trending Topics sits beside Brutkasten as one of two Vienna digital-native titles specialising in the startup and innovation economy. The distinction drawn in their own positioning is one of emphasis: Brutkasten built a broad ecosystem business with events, services, print and German acquisitions around startup news, while Trending Topics centred on technology news and podcasts across startups, artificial intelligence, fintech, crypto and sustainability, and then on the artificial intelligence tooling that grew out of its own newsroom. Both are Austrian tech media; they arrived, by 2025, at very different corporate stories.

Newsrooms.ai: incubated inside, spun off in 2024

Newsrooms.ai was originally incubated within the media house of Trending Topics and spun off in 2024 with its own developer team and investor Hermann Futter, chief executive of the Compass Group and an investor in other Austrian technology companies. Under chief executive Erek Stoisser, the company developed market-ready artificial intelligence software for automated content production, based on modern large language models, tailored for media companies and corporate communications. Its core technology, led by chief technology officer Matteo Rosoli, includes what the company calls Generative Engine Optimisation — an approach to optimising online content for artificial intelligence search engines and chatbots such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity.

The company's stated emphasis, in Stoisser's words, is that efficiency can be bought but great language is priceless, with a mission to help Europe develop its own artificial intelligence infrastructure that values linguistic diversity, technological sovereignty and data security, processing data within Europe. In October 2025 reporting, newsrooms.ai raised 750,000 euros in pre-seed funding, with Hermann Futter and Hansi Hansmann's Hans(wo)men Group among its investors, and announced plans to expand into other European markets. The founding team by then included Stoisser, Rosoli, head of AI Alexander Maitz, and — following the Trending Topics acquisition — Kellhofer and Steinschaden.

The June 2025 acquisition

In June 2025 newsrooms.ai acquired Trending Topics. The acquisition was reported by tech.eu on 6 June 2025 and by EU-Startups, and its financial terms were not disclosed in the reporting available for this profile. The logic stated by the participants was integration: combining a tech media platform's editorial expertise and audience with an artificial intelligence content company's software, at a moment when, in the founders' own framing, artificial intelligence is disrupting media as search and social media did before it.

Under the new ownership, Trending Topics continues as a media platform while its founders work inside newsrooms.ai on product, strategy and business development. That arrangement makes the portal both a publication and, potentially, a showcase and laboratory for its owner's technology — a dual role readers should know about, and one the participants themselves publicised rather than concealed. The acquisition reporting is the main source for the portal's recent history, which is why this profile attributes the leading-platform description and the over-a-decade history to that reporting rather than stating them as independently audited facts.

Podcasts and daily news formats

Trending Topics publishes daily news and podcasts, per the seed record. The podcast format is a standard pillar of Austrian tech media — founders and investors are habitual podcast listeners, and interview shows build the personal networks a small scene runs on — and Trending Topics' use of it alongside daily written news gives the portal two rhythms: fast coverage of rounds, launches and policy moves, and slower conversations that explain the people and ideas behind them. No verified episode count, audience figure or podcast chart position was established in research for this profile, and none is claimed.

The daily news file itself is the portal's public archive and its claim to the tech-media title. Covering startups, artificial intelligence, fintech, crypto and sustainability daily from Vienna means competing for the same announcements as Brutkasten, general business media and international tech press, while adding Austrian context international titles omit: domestic regulation, Austrian investors, Viennese company building. That local layer, in German, for a European-facing domain, is the portal's durable editorial proposition, whoever owns it.

The unconfirmed founding year: an explicit gap

The directory seed for Trending Topics states plainly that its founding year could not be independently confirmed and is therefore not stated, and this profile honours that instruction. Research for this profile did not produce a reliable founding date either: acquisition coverage says the platform has accompanied the industry for over a decade, which points to a start in the mid-2010s or earlier, but an attributed approximation is not a founding year. Many directories would silently copy a year from a company database; this one records the gap instead, because the standards for these profiles forbid invented dates.

Flagging the gap has a further use. It shows readers how much of Trending Topics' public record is recent and deal-driven: rich on the 2024 spin-off and the June 2025 acquisition, with named executives, investors and quotations, and thin on early history. Where a profile of Brutkasten can cite a 2014 founding, a 2017 buyout, a 2023 takeover and a 2024 anniversary with nearly 16,000 articles, a profile of Trending Topics must be honest that its early chronology is documented only in the broad over-a-decade form. The contrast is itself information about the two companies' public record-keeping.

Artificial intelligence and the future of the title

Trending Topics now sits inside a company whose product is artificial intelligence for content production, whose chief executive speaks of a sustainable transformation of content production and journalism, and whose investors include figures who argue that in future a single person could take over the content creation of an entire publishing house. Those statements, from newsrooms.ai's funding reporting, define the environment in which the portal's journalism will be made: its owner sells the tools that are changing its trade, and its founders help build them.

That could be read as conflict or as alignment, and this profile records the structure without choosing a reading. What is documented is that the portal continues under its brand, that its founders remain involved with equity and central roles, and that the acquiring company presents linguistic quality, European data processing and editorial style as differentiators rather than pure automation. The coming years will show how a tech news portal owned by an AI content company balances those claims — a development media researchers are likely to follow precisely because Trending Topics incubated the experiment itself.

Why Trending Topics matters

Trending Topics matters for two documented reasons. First, editorially: it is a leading Austrian tech media platform, in tech.eu's acquisition-day description, covering startups, artificial intelligence, fintech, crypto and sustainability daily from Vienna, with podcasts, for the German-speaking technology public. Second, structurally: its incubation and 2024 spin-off of newsrooms.ai, followed by its June 2025 acquisition by that same company, is one of the clearest European examples of the media and artificial intelligence industries merging inside a single small company.

The verified summary for the directory is therefore precise about what is known and what is not. Trending Topics is a Vienna-based digital news portal for technology and innovation, co-founded by Bastian Kellhofer and Jakob Steinschaden, publishing daily news and podcasts at trendingtopics.eu, acquired in June 2025 by newsrooms.ai, the Vienna AI company incubated inside it and spun off in 2024. Its founding year is not stated, because it could not be independently confirmed. That combination of a well-documented present and an honestly flagged gap in its early history is the correct record.