News
Suma Brands, a Minneapolis-based platform for acquiring and scaling Amazon FBA businesses, closed a $150m Series A funding.
The round was led by Pace Capital and Material alongside a credit facility led by i80 Group. These financings bring the total amount raised by the company, which launched last year and has been operating in stealth mode, to over $150M.
The company intends to use the funds to continue accelerating their pace of acquisitions of Amazon FBA businesses and expand their diverse portfolio of e-commerce brands, and hiring e-commerce, Brand Management, and Supply Chain talent to expand its operating platform.
Co-founded by Matt Salzberg, Founder and former CEO of Blue Apron, Andy Salamon, co-founding investor in Hims and Hers, Danielle David Parks, and Jon Dussel, former CFO of Dolls Kill) and led by Co-founder and CEO Andrew Savage, Suma Brands is an commerce platform focused on acquiring and developing marketplace brands by applying enterprise-level operating resources to scale them.
Headquartered in Minneapolis, the company is building a national presence with remote work optionality and planned offices in New York City and Los Angeles.
THG, the online beauty and wellness group, has acquired trailblazing prestige beauty etailer Cult Beauty in a £275m deal.
Manchester-based THG, which owns Lookfantastic, Dermstore, Glossybox and a raft of other beauty and wellness brands, said Cult Beauty’s portfolio of emerging and independent third-party brands was “a compelling addition for THG Beauty”.
Founded by entrepreneur Jessica DeLuca in 2008, who was then joined in the business by co-founder and co-CEO Alexia Inge, Cult Beauty blazed a trail for selling beauty online and found a loyal following for its edit of independent, or cult, brands and its on-site story-telling.
Brands on the site include Charlotte Tilbury, Drunk Elephant and Huda Beauty, which are currently not available elsewhere in the THG portfolio. With less than 50% of its sales coming from international markets, THG sees a promising opportunity for global expansion for Cult Beauty, but it will focus on markets outside of the US, which it will continue to serve via Lookfantastic and Dermstore, a multi-brand online beauty retailer it acquired from US retail giant Target at the end of last year.
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Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley is set to step down from leading his retail empire, Frasers Group, and hand the reins to his prospective son-in-law, according to reports.
The tycoon is expected to reveal plans to step back from his role as chief executive of Frasers Group to become deputy chairman on Thursday, The Telegraph has reported.
It said he will be replaced in the top job by 31-year-old Michael Murray, who is engaged to Ashley’s daughter Anna.
Murray is currently “head of elevation” at the retail group, which also owns House of Fraser, Jack Wills, USC and Flannels among others, and has been tasked with modernising the business and creating a more upmarket image.
However, the report also said sources told the newspaper that the famously mercurial retail chief could still change his plans.
Ashley has been one of the high street’s most high profile and colourful characters since founding Sports Direct in 1982.
He has rapidly grown his retail operation in recent years, snapping up a number of distressed British brands including Evans Cycles, Jack Wills and Game.
The group is now worth around £3bn and operates almost 1,000 shops.
Ashley was previously executive deputy chairman of the retail group – which changed its name from Sports Direct International to Frasers Group last year – until 2016, when long-serving chief executive Dave Forsey resigned.
Frasers Group will reveal its latest full-year trading figures on Thursday and is expected to highlight a recovery in sales following the reopening of high street stores in April.
The efforts to curb the rate at which pollution is being pumped into the environment was stepped up with the Paris Agreement. However, businesses create a lot of the pollution that either needs to be lowered or removed from the atmosphere to meet one of the critical goals of the agreement, to keep the earth’s warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Enter Supercritical, a startup offering businesses the option to reach carbon net zero output via its offerings. The London-based company has secured £2 million in pre-seed funding, which was led by LocalGlobe and will be utilising it to further ramp up its mission to make climate action accessible for all businesses.
Post funding, the startup will also hire more people to grow its team.
Supercritical’s offerings might seem akin to the conventional offsets that many services currently provide. However, in an exclusive conversation with UKTN, the company’s CEO and Co-founder, Michelle You, notes that it is much more. When one buys conventional offsets, it means that someone else is getting paid not to emit the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere. So, the carbon emitted by a company still remains in the atmosphere.
On the contrary, Supercritical offers high-impact carbon removal offsets via its software platform. The software is said to measure a company’s carbon footprint, create an actionable plan for reducing emissions, and recommends a portfolio of high-quality carbon removal offsets to buy.
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Cyber attacks and crimes are an ever-increasing threat in the tech world. When organisations fail to detect and block a cyber-attack, they can remain unaware that the attack happened for a considerable time. It has been estimated that it takes 206 days on average for a company to learn of a previously unprevented breach.
Seedata.io, a London-based cybersecurity SaaS startup, tackles this long-standing problem in the industry, and now the startup has announced that it has picked up £640K in a pre-seed funding round.
The investment round involved notable angels and VCs, including Charles Delingpole (Founder at ComplyAdvantage, MarketInvoice), Will Neale (Founder of Fonix, Grabyo), Tom James (co-founder at Intec Telecom Systems, IOCORE), Dr Chai Patel (Founder and former Chairman at HC-One, Court Cavendish), Dr Nicolaus Henke (Senior Partner at McKinsey, Chairman at QuantumBlack), Nicolas Hess (co-founder at Roboyo), Rahul Bhushan (co-founder at RizeETF), Konrad Habsburg (EMEA Head at Unqork), CyLon (cybersecurity VC) and Triple Point (VC).
The fresh funds will help seedata.io expand its development team and accelerate both the product roadmap and go-to-market strategy.
Matt Holland (seedata.io co-founder & CTO) said: “The problem is, successful attacks typically aren’t detected by the techniques companies currently use, and without knowing you’ve been breached, you can’t do anything about it. Many attacks only get discovered when somebody external tells the victim organisation about it (a customer, law enforcement or a regulator, for example).”
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Rapyd, a London, UK-based Fintech as a Service company, raised $300m in Series E funding.
The round was led by Target Global with participation from new investors including funds managed by Fidelity Management and Research Company, Altimeter Capital, Whale Rock Capital, BlackRock Funds, and Dragoneer, along and existing investors General Catalyst, Latitude, Durable Capital Partners, Tal Capital, Avid Ventures, and Spark Capital.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate growth through a combination of organic growth, acquisitions, and strategic investments. The financing comes shortly after Rapyd’s acquisition of Valitor, a European payments and card issuing company, for $100m, and the launch of Rapyd Ventures, the company’s venture arm.
Led by Arik Shtilman, co-founder and CEO, Rapyd provides tools to power local payments anywhere in the world, enabling companies across the globe to access markets quicker. By utilizing its payments network and Fintech-as-a-Service platform, businesses and consumers can engage in local and cross-border transactions in any market. The platform brings together 900-plus payment methods in over 100 countries.
The pandemic has led e-commerce to alter customer shopping behaviours and transformed the global retail landscape from brick and mortar to omnichannel.
The UK is considered to have one of the world’s most developed internet grocery industries. Companies are springing up all over the UK, promising to deliver whatever you want in as little as 10 minutes.
The latest one to hit the headlines is Zapp, a London-based startup backed by Atomico that delivers everyday items to customers’ doorsteps within 20 minutes, 24/7.
Recently, the online delivery company that’s battling it out in London has now launched its services in Manchester, as the company continues to expand outside of London. Already Getir, Gorillas and Weezy are operating in Central Manchester.
Founded by Joe Falter and Navid Hadzaad in 2020, Zapp operates dozens of ‘Zappstores’, with each store stocking 1,000s of products ready to be picked, packed, and delivered.
Unlike other startups, the online grocery service caters to the ‘need it now’ occasions, such as entertaining last-minute, an impromptu BBQ, and others.
“Zapp is for when life can’t wait,” says Steve O’Hear, Zapp’s Vice President of Strategy. “Our sweet spot is spontaneity and urgent-need”.
It’s worth mentioning that Joe Falter is a part of the founding team at Jumia where he led the on-demand services business through to the group’s IPO.
On the other hand, Navid Hadzaad was a product leader at Amazon’s Seattle HQ, after founding GoButler and scaling several ventures at Rocket Internet.
The leadership team also spans former employees of Deliveroo, Just Eat, Domino’s, and Tesco.
A few days back, the company hired Bank of America Corp, managing director Ngoc Chu as CFO, to help the company navigate an increasingly crowded and competitive industry.
Chu worked as an investment banker for 15 years, most recently at Bank of America in London advising on media and internet deals including Auto Trader Group Plc’s public stock offering. She previously worked at HSBC Holdings Plc.
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Wolverine Worldwide, the Michigan-based company that operates a portfolio of footwear and lifestyle brands including Sperry, Hush Puppies, Saucony, Wolverine and Keds, has acquired Sweaty Betty from private equity group L Catterton for around $410m (£295m).
Sweaty Betty will continue to be led by CEO Julia Straus, who will report to Brendan Hoffman, president of Wolverine Worldwide.
Hoffman said: “Sweaty Betty aligns perfectly with our strategic growth plan for Wolverine Worldwide, as we focus on growing digital channels, expanding our international footprint, and building our brand portfolio beyond footwear.”
Straus said Wolverine’s “portfolio of purpose-driven heritage brands, knowledge and expertise in building performance brands, robust international distribution, and supply chain expertise provides a strong platform to expand Sweaty Betty and further our mission to ‘empower more women through fitness all over the world'. ”
The completed on Monday, and was funded by cash and a revolving line of credit.
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Just last week, UKTN covered the £50m funding round of UK’s online florist Bloom & Wild and now another online subscription-based florist from London is in news for their latest investments.
Freddie’s Flowers, the quite-famous flower subscription service that delivers bouquets anywhere in the UK, offering customers floral arrangements for £25 a pop has now got an investment of $60m from The Craftory.
Based in London and San Francisco, The Craftory is a $375M global investment house focused on cause-driven CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) brands that positively impact the categories they serve, society, and the planet.
“At Freddie’s Flowers, sustainability is a core focus of what we do” explains William Gee, Head of Sustainability at Freddie’s Flowers. “As a business, we strive to actively demonstrate climate leadership and account for our environmental impact. This has been shown both through our commitment to carbon neutrality, third-party verified by the Carbon Trust, and through our greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets via the Science-Based Targets initiative.
As per the company press release, having seen a huge spike in sales during lockdown, Freddie’s Flowers has quickly grown to become the largest flower box subscription business in the UK. Launched in 2014, Freddie’s Flowers delivers beautiful selections of flowers each week to homes across the whole of mainland UK and Germany. The startups already has around 130,000 customers in the UK and nearly 25,000 in Germany.
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In today’s world where privacy is demanded by customers and mandated by regulators, encryption has become the norm now. But it also poses a big threat as it has become a major target for cybercriminals. In 2020, Cisco estimated that as much as 70% of all malware campaigns would use some type of encryption to conceal malware delivery, enabling malicious communications to sneak past network defences and extract data through encrypted channels.
Unlike traditional solutions that require communications to be decrypted to accurately identify abnormal activity, London-based encrypted analysis platform Venari Security uses a combination of machine learning, artificial intelligence and behavioural analytics to accurately detect threats on the network in near real-time, without the need for decryption.
This significantly reduces the response time of security teams and enables them to proactive respond to threats rather than react to events, while delivering internal and regulatory compliance for organisations. The defender of encrypted networks has now raised a Series A funding of £4.2 million with a post money valuation of £14.2 million.
With some of the best known and most influential figures in the cybersecurity industry onboard including Paddy McGuinness, the UK’s former Deputy National Security Adviser for Intelligence, Security and Resilience; Lane Bess, former President and Chief Executive Officer of Palo Alto Networks; and Cris Conde, former Chief Executive Officer of SunGard, the company is primed for success by fundamentally transforming organisations’ ability to accurately and quickly spot threats concealed in encrypted traffic.
The business will be led by CEO Tom Millar, former Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ITC Secure; Chief Revenue Officer Hiten Mistry, former banking lead architect and senior figure at several cyber security start-ups, and Chief Technology Officer Simon Mullis, former Technical Director EMEA at Tanium.
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