News
A chatbot called DoNotPay has saved motorists millions in parking fines—without charging a cent. It’s next target: divorce law. To read more, click here.
In APAC, Amazon lags behind Alibaba- owned Taobab, which receives 42% of all visitation over a month as compared with Amazon's 34%. Alibaba dominates in China specificially but Amazon has managed to sneak in with 1 in 5 internet users now visiting its site. To read more, click here.
Echo, the UK’s leading medication management app, today announced that it has raised a £7 million Series A round of funding. This investment follows a £1.8m seed round from LocalGlobe, Global Founders Capital and Rocket Internet in 2016. To read more, click here.
Public VC Draper Esprit, which has invested in UK tech firms such as LoveFilm and Graphcore, has acquired Seedcamp Funds I and II for £17.9m.
As a result of the deal, Draper Esprit now owns Seedcamp’s stake in UK FinTech unicorn TransferWise.
It is believed the transaction will results in 4x returns to Seedcamp’s investors. To read more about this, click here.
Cheshire-based online health and beauty company The Hut Group has received a £515m revolving credit facility as it bids to grow into a “truly global company”.
Nested, the U.K. estate agent that provides a cash advance to help you buy a new house before you’ve sold your old one, has raised £36 million in further funding. The round was led by Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital, and brings the less than two year old startup’s total funding to just shy of £50 million. Buying and selling houses is a pretty capital intensive business, after all. To read more click here.
Athlone Ventures, the venture capital arm of Athlone Group, has launched a $300m tech startup investment fund. Set up by Jojar Dhinsa alongside Brendan Morrissey, Athlone Ventures has been devised to support the tech and digital sectors and will seek to fund up to 15 startups a year. The fund will invest at Seed and Series A stages. To read more on this click here.
China’s juggernaut of an online-to-offline (O2O) platform Meituan-Dianping just announced a new funding round that puts an additional $4 billion in its pockets. The new investment gives the company a valuation of $30 billion, making it the fourth most valuable startup in the world. to read more, click here.
The Norwegian Consumer Council has uncovered a litany of critical vulnerabilities and privacy shortcomings in several smartwatches specifically targeted at children. Among other things, malicious agents can easily hijack control of the watches and turn them into covert spying devices, capable of listening in and keeping tabs on the children. To read more about the security risks of children's smartwatches, click here.
Smartphone ownership is virtually universal and the average internet user is spending 3 hours a day online on these devices. This is especially true for the youngest consumers (16-24s). As well as spending the longest time online more generally, half of this online time is now taking place on a mobile. to read more on this, click here.