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London-headquartered fashion rental marketplace HURR has raised $5.4m (£4.08m) in seed funding. The round was led by Octopus Ventures alongside participation from D4 Ventures and Ascension.
HURR, which is delivering $2.5m in annualised revenues, said it will use the fresh funds to expand its operations and develop its proprietary technology. The startup is aiming to disrupt the global women’s fashion industry, said to be worth $1.4tr.
It also wants to capitalise on the increasing consumer demand to embrace circular and sustainable fashion choices by providing rental second-hand designer clothes.
HURR was founded by Victoria Prew in 2019. Since then, it has built a hybrid business model that comprises peer-to-peer fashion rentals, direct partnerships with more than 85 exclusive fashion partners, and the recent launch of its white-label service, which powers rental for leading retailers including Selfridges Rental. HURR also wants to expand its white-label portfolio.
The fashion rental marketplace has an office in Selfridges London. Also, it announced a partnership with the global resale platform Depop, which was acquired by Etsy.
“We are also delighted to welcome Octopus Ventures, D4, and Ascension on our journey,” said Victoria Prew, CEO and founder of HURR. “Their combined expertise in circular and building exceptional customer-focused businesses will be tremendous assets as we work towards our vision of re-inventing ownership.”
Octopus Ventures, Europe’s largest VC firm and most active early-stage investor, has previously backed circular economy startups such as Depop, OLIO, and Whirli.
Matt Chandler, consumer investor at Octopus Ventures, said: “HURR is perfectly placed to capitalise on the shift towards new models of ownership and spearhead the transition to a more climate-friendly fashion industry. By operating the critical logistics functions needed for rental, it is able to provide a full-stack rental solution to existing brands, which in turn feeds the HURR platform with amazing breadth and depth of supply. We see a huge opportunity for scale and are excited to leverage our experience working with Depop as we partner with Victoria and her team.”
London-based curated professional development platform Learnerbly has secured $10m in a Series A led by venture capital firm Beringea.
The edtech, whose platform is used by companies including Hellofresh, WeTransfer and GoCardless, said it will use the funds for product development, scaling its distributed workforce of more than 60 employees and to drive US expansion.
The startup’s technology is used by companies to offer learning and development tools to employees – a perk that has become more important as the hiring market has become more competitive for recruiters. It offers employees access to learning materials for jobs ranging from marketing, finance and sales. Its platform contains books, podcasts, courses and coaches from more than 250 providers.
Founded in 2017 by Rajeeb Dey MBE, who is also CEO of Enternships, Learnably says its platform is used by thousands of employees in over 100 organisations across more than 50 countries.
Other participants in the funding include new investors Digital Horizon Ventures, BY Venture Partners, GO Ventures and prolific marketplace venture fund FJ Labs, alongside existing investors Frontline Ventures, Triple Point, London Co-Investment Fund and UFI Ventures.
Learnerbly also secured the backing of influential angel investors including Zach Coelius of Coelius Capital; Leonard Picardo, the second employee at Deliveroo; Neil Ryland, the CRO of Peakon, Renaud Visage, the co-founder and CTO of Eventbrite; and Stephan Thoma, former global head of learning at Google.
According to Statista, the global workplace learning industry is worth over $350bn. Learnerbly says learning has traditionally been delivered top-down but since the pandemic, this has changed as employers look to retain employees during the “great resignation”.
Recent research by Beamery found that 83% of employees think companies should help with career progression, yet 44% don’t currently have access to talent acceleration programmes from their employers.
According to Rajeeb Dey MBE, founder and CEO of Learnerbly, an increasingly competitive hiring market means employers worldwide are concerned about how they recruit and retain top talent.
“Yet, many HR teams struggle to keep up with the breadth of content and pace of change required for L&D in the digital economy,” explained Dey. “Our platform provides employees with the tools to discover exceptional content from more than 250 providers and tailor their own learning plans. This means employers can easily offer access to best-in-class learning without ever needing to create their own content, manage relationships with multiple content providers, or take what we would deem a ‘one-size-fits-none’ approach to L&D.”
Maria Wagner, investment director at Beringea, said: “With the hybrid work environment, employers are under pressure to offer new ways of learning for their employees and ensure they are engaged and retained. Learnerbly offers a curated solution that serves both the needs of the employees and of HR departments in this new environment.”
World Makers (formerly Automaton Games), a Cambridge, UK-based video gaming studio, raised $3m in seed funding.
Makers Fund made the investment.
The company intends to use the funds to continue developing Deceit, as well as pursue additional new projects.
Led by James Thompson, CEO, World Makers is an independent games studio focused on building multiplayer games such as Deceit, a breakout multiplayer horror game, which has hit several major milestones to date including:
- 13 million downloads
- 17,000 peak concurrent users
- 87,000+ Discord members
- Over 53 million games played
Thompson found Automaton Games in 2015 with co-founder Jord Fox (technical director), Shivam Mistry (platform director), Oliver Hodge (design director), and Joel Mills (analytics director).
DeepStream, a London UK-based provider of a cloud-powered procurement platform using AI, raised £5.2M in Series A funding.
The round was led by Beringea with participation from Seed X Liechtenstein, London-based Conviction VC and Portfolio Ventures.
The company intend sto use the funds to double its workforce and further develop its AI applications.
Founded in London in 2016 and led by Jack Macfarlane, CEO, DeepStream provides a cloud-based procurement platform using AI to allow businesses to handle all their ‘Request For Anything’ (RFP/ RFI/ RFQs etc.) processes in one place, and improve the efficiency, accuracy and sustainability of their supply chains.
Its AI-driven supplier recommendations engine presents buyers with compatible suppliers based on criteria such as cost, efficiency or, crucially, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), helping companies to improve the sustainability of their supply chain.
The company currently employs a team of 15 technology experts and works with over 3,500 companies, across cleantech, renewable energy, logistics, gigafactories, green steel, electric vehicles, and construction industries, including Maersk, Britishvolt and Xos Trucks.
London-based money management fintech Plum has raised $24m (£18m) in a Series A round, bringing its total funding to date to $43m (£32.4m) and helping triple its valuation since July 2020.
The Series A funding will enable Plum to accelerate its expansion across Europe in countries including the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium Italy, Finland, Austria, and Germany in 2022.
The company is also planning to expand its product offerings by launching new features, including a US stock investing product from early December. Users will also get access to EU and UK stocks and crypto assets in 2022.
The announcement comes a few weeks after raising $14m from various investors, including dmg ventures, Ventura Capital, Global Brain, Venture Friends, and 500 Startups.
Following the $14m raise, Plum secured an additional $8m via crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. A total of 9,712 investors took part in the crowdfunding raise, which according to the company makes it the fourth most popular Crowdcube fundraise of all time in Europe.
Victor Trokoudes, CEO & co-founder of PlumTrokoudes, said: “Crowdfunding was a key part of our early success, and we are pleased so many people want to continue to support our development and mission to provide tools to make more people financially secure.”
The funding follows Plum receiving regulatory approval to offer investment in the EU.
Founded by Victor Trokoudes (ex-Wise) and Alex Michael (ex-TicTail) in 2016, Plum is a money management platform that connects to users’ bank accounts and analyses their incomings and outgoings.
The platform then analyses transactions and identifies regular income, rent, bills, and daily spending.
Using this and other factors, the app calculates daily what amount it can safely put aside without affecting users’ daily life. Plum also offers different saving rules, such as Roundups, Weekly saver, and Paydays saver.
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Rapid grocery delivery company Getir is acquiring UK rival Weezy in a sign that the nascent market flush with investor cash is consolidating.
The definitive agreement will see Turkey-headquartered Getir absorb Weezy’s 700 staff and four UK fulfilment centres. The two firms did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Both Weezy and Getir offer grocery deliveries within 15 minutes ordered via a smartphone app.
Getir launched in 2015 and expanded into London in January 2021. It has since started operating in 15 towns and cities including Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham.
Getir said its acquisition of Weezy “further solidifies Getir’s long-term commitment to the UK market”.
In its most recent funding round Getir tripled its valuation to $7.6bn and has also expanded to the US.
“Teaming up with Weezy, which has quickly established itself across the UK, is an exciting opportunity and one that complements our people-first belief and business approach,” said Turancan Salur, Getir UK general manager. “We look forward to welcoming Weezy’s customers, employees and partners to the enlarged group.”
Weezy has raised a total of £19.2m in funding, with £15m of that coming in January this year. In March it expanded to Bristol, adding to its operations in London, Brighton and Manchester.
However, there were signs that Weezy was struggling financially. It reported revenue of £161,400 against losses of £676,000 in 2020 – despite the boom in home deliveries during the Covid-19 pandemic.
And last week Weezy closed five of its dark stores in an attempt to stem losses, despite its co-founders telling UKTN in March that it planned to open more than 40 UK sites by the end of 2021.
Kristof Van Beveren, CEO and co-founder of Weezy, said: “We are incredibly excited to continue our journey in disrupting the skyrocketing ultrafast grocery market. Getir has an unparalleled track record of achievements and experience with an equally ambitious team.”
The rapid grocery delivery market has attracted large amounts of investor cash that has effectively subsidised discounted or free delivery for consumers.
Analysts have warned that the number of companies offering rapid delivery is unsustainable given the majority run at a loss.
Last month Berlin-based rival Gorillas raised nearly $1bn in a sign that investors still have an appetite for the rapid grocery delivery market.
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Cybercriminals have stolen customer card details from over 4,000 UK online retailers by exploiting a vulnerability in popular ecommerce software Magento, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned.
The NCSC – a division of GCHQ – is urging ecommerce businesses to update Magento, an open source ecommerce platform that was acquired by Adobe in 2018 for $1.68bn.
Failing to update Magento and other ecommerce software could lead to an attack resulting in “financial and reputational damage”, the NCSC said.
Card skimming sees criminals intercept and make copies of debit or credit cards while they are being used at an ATM or at checkout online.
In total, the NCSC said it notified 4,151 ecommerce companies that they were running a vulnerable version of the software up until the end of September.
The card skimming warning comes in the build up to the annual Black Friday shopping event, which is regularly targeted by cybercriminals.
“We want small and medium-sized online retailers to know how to prevent their sites being exploited by opportunistic cyber criminals over the peak shopping period,” said Sarah Lyons, NCSC deputy director for economy and society. “Falling victim to cyber crime could leave you and your customers out of pocket and cause reputational damage.”
In October 2020 British Airways was fined £20m by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for failing to protect 400,000 customers from a card skimming breach two years earlier. That fine was heavily reduced from the £183m initially proposed by the data regulator.
Infamous hacking group Magecart had successfully injected code to the airline’s website to steal personal and financial data.
Cybersecurity experts welcomed the NCSC’s card-skimming alert but said retailers should take extra precautions to protect both their business and consumers.
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Shield-IoT, an IoT cyber security, and analytics software solution provider announced that it has raised $7.4M (approx £5.5M) funding in the Series A round.
The funding round was led by NextLeap Ventures and Bloc Ventures, with the participation from Atlas Ventures, Akamai Technologies, Springtide
Ventures, DIVEdigital, and Janvest Capital Partners. The company will use the funding to streamline and secure mass-scale IoT networks.
Shield-IoT streamlines the implementation of mass-scale IoT and 5G networks with the world’s first Coreset-AI security platform. “Shield-IoT’s innovative approach to anomaly detection provides accurate analytics at mass-scale,” says Ramanath Mallikarjuna, Chief Strategist at Akamai Technologies.
Founded in 2017 by Ohad Levin, and Udi Solomon, Shield-IoT delivers cybersecurity solutions that protect edge devices from security threats and operational risks.
“Coresets compress the data from n to log(n), or from 1 million to 20 data points, enabling context-free highly accurate anomaly detection in minutes instead of hours or days,” says Professor Dan Feldman, Chief Scientist at Shield-IoT.
With Shield-IoT, service providers and IoT brands can monitor and secure their mass-scale B2B IoT and IIoT networks, reduce operational costs, and generate new revenue streams with value-added services.
The company does it by offering a simple-to-deploy and easy-to-operate cloud-based software solution to protect any IoT device or application with no changes to end-customer networks.
Currently, the company’s solution is in use across multiple verticals, including telcos, utilities, transportation, manufacturing, smart cities, and government.
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According to the NHS Mental Health Organisation, 75 percent of children and young people who experience a mental health problem aren’t getting the help they need. Zinc, a London-based investor, kicks off a brand new venture building program to tackle the mental health crisis in children and young people.
Zinc VC will be investing in 70 founders and the ventures they will build during the programme. This will create better, more accessible and more effective solutions to ensure that every child and young person can grow to become a healthy adult, living a thriving and fulfilling life.
The company has carefully selected a highly diverse cohort of global founders who are fully committed to the same mission. They will build a set of brand new scalable businesses.
The group of founders in the new fund include senior professors, ex-Premier League footballer, high-flyers from giant tech companies like Facebook and Amazon, doctors, serial entrepreneurs who want to have a social impact, creatives from the performing arts, teachers, psychologists, and many others. The program will officially launch on November 24, 2021 in London by Nadhim Zahawi.
The founders will be backed by over 100 industry leaders in their domains including Mustafa Suleymen the co-founder of Google Deepmind, and Professor Peter Fonagy Chief Executive, Anna Freud National Centre for Children & Families UK Secretary of State for Education, Nadhim Zahawi said: “Supporting the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people has never been more important. I am delighted to see 70 entrepreneurs stepping up to address this challenge at Zinc. As an entrepreneur myself, I know how exciting and challenging it is to create and scale a new business. I am looking forward to seeing the fruits of their hard work.”
“Zinc provides a unique platform for ambitious and driven entrepreneurs who want to build a new business that will solve one of the most pressing issues we’re facing today, which has exacerbated during the current pandemic. We’re hugely excited to be backing such an extraordinary cohort of diverse, passionate, skilled and experienced founders.” said Ella Goldner Co-Founder at Zinc VC.
Kevin George, former Premier League Footballer said: “I’m excited about the opportunity to harness my experience and passion for sports and psychology to change kids lives”
Alison Metcalfe, a professor and a former university Pro-Vice-Chancellor “Having spent over 20 years in Academia I am looking forward to working in a dynamic, experimental environment to turn my experience and knowledge into new innovative products”.
A healthtech startup B-Secur from Belfast represents the next generation of internal biometrics. In a recent development, the company has announced that it has completed a total raise of £8.8 million in 2021. The latest round was led by US-based First Capital Ventures and The Bank of Ireland Kernel Capital Growth Fund NI, thereby increasing its investment level to £2.2 million with other existing investors also participating in the round.
The funding will be used to cement the company’s traction in the wearable space whilst accelerating entry into the medical device market. The company, which has offices within Belfast’s Innovation Centre, Catalyst, employs over 45 scientists and engineers and will look to hire additional staff in Belfast and the US.
“The world-class team at B-Secur has demonstrated that their patented and FDA cleared technology delivers insights and value to wellness and medical devices alike. Kernel Capital are pleased to continue our strong support of the company as it accelerates its growth.” said Siggi Saevarsson, Partner, Kernel Capital.
“We are delighted with the investment by First Capital Ventures and by the continued support from Kernel Capital and our other investors and we look forward to a transformational 2022 when our technology will be embedded across both consumer and medical devices.” said Alan Foreman, CEO, B-Secur.
B-Secur has developed the world’s first software technique that uses an individual’s unique heartbeat pattern, known as electrocardiogram (ECG) in everyday technologies to securely identify, and provide health and wellness insights at the same time. Medical grade ECG recording traditionally happens in the hospital environment using expensive equipment, but B-Secur are embedding this into latest smartwatches, cars and even clothing and are already selling to some of the world’s largest technology companies.
Last year, B-Secur was granted FDA clearance for its technology and has since signed its first contract with a US-based medical device manufacturer.