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Lifestyle fashion brand Crew clothing is targeting rapid physical store expansion with plans to open up to 12 new locations this year alone in Britain and Ireland.
CEO David Butler said three of the shops will open as soon as mid-April with two of them being in the south-east of England and one in Ireland.
The company has been testing store expansion ideas and will open between eight and 12 shops this year with a focus on market towns and coastal areas. That's an interesting approach that perhaps reflects the changing priorities of consumers post-pandemic with more local shopping and consumers clearly keen to get away from it all on the UK coast.
But it possibly also reflects the high costs associated with prime city centre stores, particularly business rates that are still a bugbear for many retail chains.
Butler also stressed that the company isn't focusing on city expansion, but it's not ignoring cities altogether as it will look at third-party link ups for its city centre business.
The company currently has around 100 stores in the British Isles.
Amplience, a “commerce experience” platform for online retailers, has closed a $100m (£76.5m) Series D funding round.
Investment came from Fairview Equity Partners, Sixth Street and previous backer Octopus Ventures.
London-based Amplience will use the capital injection for product development and to increase its US and global expansion.
“We are doubling-down on product investment, and in scaling our global go-to market, customer success and expert services teams,” said James Brooke, founder and CEO at Amplience.
Amplience provides the underlying technology for B2B and B2C commerce businesses to create bespoke omnichannel experiences, without requiring coding knowledge.
It was founded in 2008 by Brooke and Rory Dennis. Amplience counts the likes of Argos, Currys, Ulta Beauty and Very Group among its customers.
“At Amplience, our vision has always been to empower commerce, marketing and technology teams to create digital experiences without limits. We give them the freedom to do more through better tools, more powerful APIs and performant content delivery at commerce scale,” added Brooke.
The latest investment brings Amplience’s total funding to $180m (£137.7m). It previously raised $37m during a Series C round in April 2018.
Fairview Equity Partners invest in European growth-oriented enterprise technology businesses, with a focus on SaaS and fintechs.
Meanwhile Fairview, founded in 2019, invests between €15 and €50m into companies, with previous investments including Spotify, believe Distribution services and WorldRemit.
“Amplience’s mission to reimagine the commerce experience technology stack and user experience using a MACH approach aligns completely with our determination to invest in companies that are disrupting incumbent vendors and re-making the market,” commented Guy Sochovsky, partner and co-founder of Farview Equity Partners.
H&M Group reported its Q1 sales on Tuesday and — as is usual for the Swedish fashion giant’s quarterly preliminary sales data — it was distinctly low on detail.
But we do know that the company saw net sales in local currencies increasing by 18% in the period from December up to the end of February, on a year on year basis.
Converted to Sweden’s currency, net sales increased by 23% to SEK49.166 billion (4.6bn/£3.9bn/$5.1bn). However, that’s a provisional figure and could change by the time the full three-month report is published at the end of this month.
The quarterly sales performance was in line with analysts’ expectations.
The company added no commentary to the figures but it’s clear that it’s continuing its recovery, although the comparison with last year is relatively easy given the widespread lockdowns that were in place during the period. That said, Q1 this time still had its challenges given the onset of the Omicron variant at the beginning of the period and the massive supply chain issues that fashion retailers had to face.
Only two months ago, the group reported buoyant Q4 and full-year results for the 12 months to the end of November. It said it was back to pre-pandemic levels and fully focused on growth with ambitious plans to double its sales by the end of the decade.
But it’s likely to be facing ongoing challenges in the current quarter as Covid cases surge in China and the company’s business in parts of Eastern Europe being devastated by the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine.
Delio, a London, UK-based fintech company with a mission to enable financial institutions of all sizes to create investor access to alternative assets such as private equity, private debt, and real estate, raised $8.3M in Growth funding.
The round was led by Octopus Ventures. Additional investment from early-backers Maven Capital Partners brings the total equity funding raised by Delio to $15.5m.
The company intends to use the funds to further enhance international operations.
Led by CEO Gareth Lewis, Delio digitises the private markets strategies of banks, wealth managers and other financial firms, enabling them to offer unlisted investment opportunities to their clients. It currently serves more than 90 financial institutions worldwide, including the likes of Barclays, UBS and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank.
Identity verification (IDV) provider Veriff, has raised a $100 million Series C round co-led by Tiger Global and Alkeon. They were joined by existing investors IVP and Accel, bringing Veriff’s total funding to date to $200 million. The new funding means the company is now valued at $1.5 billion. The new financing will be used for growing the workforce, R&D, sales and marketing.
The Estonia-based startup’s “special sauce” is using AI-powered video to verify identifies. To date, the biggest startups in the space include OnFido and Jumio, but so far these rely on still photographs rather than video.
Veriff claims its video approach makes online IDV “more accurate” than physical face-to-face authentication and prevents fraud more often.
It also claims that last year it grew verification volumes by more than 8x, and by 20x in the U.S., with its financial services operation growing by 10x, while customer growth had grown by 150%.
Kaarel Kotkas, CEO and founder of Veriff, said: “Organizations and consumers needed to verify identities online more than ever before in 2021 — from onboarding remote employees, to creating a safe space for gaming in the metaverse, and conducting business fully online — which makes the establishment of digital trust and transparency incredibly critical.”
John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global said: “A reliable IDV solution for today’s digital businesses and consumers has been exacerbated over the past two years as all operations moved online to conduct business. Veriff has created an industry-leading product to ensure trust and safety online. Based on our research and customer calls, Veriff’s product performance leaves others far behind and should be used more widely by companies out there.”
Speaking to Kotkas, I asked what else is going on that helps increase the accuracy of Veriff’s platform. He told me: “We factor in user behavior. Instead of basing an IDV decision on three pictures alone, we are analyzing over 1,000 other data points. So this gives us an automation advantage and very accurate decisions on ID.”
He also said he thinks the future of IDV is being driven by the fact that it’s not just essential for financial services companies, but that it’s also now requisite for just about every service online. Because of the pandemic, there are now remote examinations at universities which require IDV, for instance.
“There are 5 billion people online today and when they all start to verify their identity, there is going to be 50 billion verifications happening on an annual basis. We are moving towards a world where we need to make trust reliable and scalable online,” he said.
Oxford-based QuantrolOx has raised £1.4m in a seed funding round to develop its artificial intelligence (AI) software that tunes and stabilises quantum computers.
The Oxford University spinout is aiming to improve the slow load up time of quantum computers using machine learning.
While quantum computers are much quicker at solving certain problems than a traditional computer, they take much longer to set up, resulting in shorter use times.
Quantum computers use qubits, or quantum bits, instead of binary bits to store units of information. When booting a quantum computer, these qubits currently require human expertise to set up before the machine can be used. As quantum computers use more and more qubits, this problem will become increasingly important as the computers will require more time and people to set them up.
Founded in 2021 by Andrew Briggs, Vishal Chatrath, Professor Natalia Ares and Dominic Lennon, QuantrolOx is creating hardware-agnostic software that can automate the tuning of qubits.
Its seed funding, announced last week, was led by Nielsen Ventures and Hoxton Ventures. Voima Ventures and Remus Capital provided further capital, along with angel investors Dr Hermann Hauser, and Laurent Caraffa.
Charles Seely, partner, Hoxton Ventures said: “Successful tuning, optimising and stabilising of many thousands of qubits, regardless of their variability, requires intelligent automation. Current solutions that depend on human expertise are not good enough and will not scale.”
QuantrolOx wants its software to run on any quantum computer but is currently focusing on solid-state qubits.
“I am excited to be backing a world-class team and a technology that has the potential of establishing itself as a category leader in the new and rapidly growing quantum ecosystem,” said Niels Nielsen of Nielsen Ventures.
London-based cybersecurity firm Red Sift has closed $54m (£40m) in a Series B funding round to fuel its global expansion, which includes a new headquarters in Austin, Texas.
European growth investor Highland Europe led the funding round, while other investors included Sands Capital, Oxford Capital and MMC Ventures.
Rahul Powar and Randal Pinto founded Red Sift in 2015. The company provides an integrated cloud email security and brand protection platform. It automates BIMI and DMARC processes to stop email compromise and secures domains from impersonation to stop attacks.
The company says it has doubled annual recurring revenue in the past 12 months and now has more than 700 brands among its customers, including Domino’s Pizza, Wise and ITV.
Red Sift will also use the additional capital for growth in Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East. It will also increase its headcount.
Sam Brooks, partner at Highland Europe, and Michael Graninger, partner at SANDS Capital, will join Red Sift’s board of directors.
“With phishing attacks now ubiquitous, there is a necessity in the enterprise for Red Sift’s cloud security platform which prevents domain impersonation and provides inbox protection,” said Brooks.
Graninger added: “Phishing, ransomware and cyber-disruptions have become significant threats that affect every human in today’s world. Red Sift continues to be a genuine partner to its customers in countering the bad guys by offering a platform to protect organisations from multiple, varied and interconnected threat vectors.”
Red Sift has offices in the UK, North America, Spain and Australia. Last September it raised $8.8m in its Series A round bringing its total funding at the time to $69.8m.
The investment follows a record year for UK cybersecurity investment, with £1bn invested into UK companies in 2021.
OCR Labs, a London, UK-based provider of a verification technology platform, raised $30M in Series B funding.
The round was led by Equable Capital.
The company intends to use the funds to expand its team in North America and EMEA.
Originally founded in 2016 by Matthew Adams and Daniel Aiello and led by John Myers, CEO, OCR Labs is a technology leader in the digital identity verification space. The solution supports Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations and improves customer identity verification while reducing fraud.
The company supports clients across industries including financial services, government, telco, crypto and a variety of platform-based businesses, including SaaS providers. Customers include the Australian Government, Vodafone, ZIP and BMW.
Since announcing its Series A last year, OCR Labs has continued to scale into the UK and European markets. As part of its Series B, it is bolstering its international growth with a new office in North America, a direct sales force, and hiring a global Chief Revenue Officer. The company is headquartered in London, UK with offices in Australia and Turkey.
UK fintech company Wise has placed restrictions on money transfers to Russia following the country’s invasion of Ukraine on Thursday morning.
Wise, formerly known as TransferWise, told UKTN that it is also capping transfers on its platform to Ukraine so that it can continue providing its service there.
“As long as we are able to do so, we will continue providing our service to people needing to send money to Ukraine,” a Wise spokesperson told UKTN. “Recent developments in the region mean it’s more difficult to operate our service.”
The spokesperson added that it is aiming to remove the Ukraine cap “as soon as we’re able to” and that it’s “monitoring the situation closely” to “comply with any sanctions”.
On Thursday morning Ukraine said that “[Vladimir] Putin has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine”. The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said that Russia has launched strikes against Ukraine’s military infrastructure and sent tanks across the border.
The UK, US, EU, Japan, Australia, and others have ramped up sanctions against Russia, including financial sanctions against its banks and individuals.
Wise was founded by Estonian businessmen Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus in 2011 and is used for international money transfers.
The UK-listed company said that it is keeping its measures “under constant review”.
A spokesperson for London-headquartered digital bank Revolut told UKTN that it’s “monitoring the situation in Ukraine carefully” and that it’s “prepared to take any necessary steps to ensure we continue to operate in compliance with applicable sanctions laws and legislation”.
When asked what specific measures it was taking to stay in line with regulation, the Revolut spokesperson said: “We cannot comment on engagements with regulators.”
SoftBank has led a $230m (£172m) secondary placing investment into London-based recipe box startup Gousto.
The investment, which comes via SoftBank’s Vision Fund II, follows a previous $100m (£73.8m) backing by the Japanese conglomerate in January, which valued the company at £1.25bn.
Gousto has not raised additional money with SoftBank’s placing. Instead, SoftBank and investors Fidelity International, Grosvenor Food & AgTech and Railpen have “partially replaced” some of Gousto’s early-stage backers as “larger institutional investors.”
A Gousto spokesperson told UKTN that the new investors are “better suited to support the next stage of Gousto’s growth – the deal represents a maturing of Gousto’s shareholder base and is a milestone transaction”.
“This successful placing follows the primary capital raise announced in January and is further testament to the relevance and appetite for Gousto’s leading recipe box solution, as we meet an accelerating consumer need to eat healthily and sustainably, at value,” said Timo Boldt, co-founder and CEO of Gousto.
Boldt and James Carter founded Gousto in 2012 to provide a meal subscription service, which comes with premeasured ingredients and simple recipes.
Gousto uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate parts of its fulfilment centres in Lincolnshire and Warrington. It also uses AI algorithms to recommend new recipes to its customers.
Max Ohrstrand, investor for SoftBank Investment Advisers, said: “We have been closely watching the growth and performance of Gousto for the last few years and have been greatly impressed with what Timo and his team have achieved. We believe they have succeeded in disrupting the traditional grocery channel when it comes to how we consume the evening meal and are excited to be joining the Gousto journey.”
Gousto is also aiming to reduce food waste, with a recent study by environmental services company Foodsteps revealing that Gousto meals produced 23% fewer carbon emissions than the equivalent meals from supermarket stores.