News
Carepatron is a New Zealand-based healthcare management system that works with medical practices that range in size from five to 100 practitioners. The platform is now used in about 50 countries and recently launched in Spanish.
Carepatron’s platform has tools for providers to manage their entire practice, including appointments, telehealth consultations, patient records, payments and communicating with other providers in a secure environment. It also has a patient app that lets users see their health records and talk with their providers who use Carepatron.
To support its expansion, Carepatron has raised $4 million in seed funding from Blackbird and TQ Ventures.
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Major Wall Street firms said a dismal year of dealmaking appears to have hit a trough, and now some companies are looking to merge, offering hope that investment banking revenues could pick up after a disappointing third quarter.
Dealogic data showed that globally, investment banking revenue tumbled 16% in the third quarter from a year earlier. But lately, bankers have been sounding more positive on the transaction pipeline after Exxon Mobil and Chevron both announced acquisitions for more than $50 billion.
Those takeovers, alongside a nascent revival in initial public offerings (IPOs), should bolster investment banking revenues next year.
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Espresa, a personal benefits platform designed for global enterprises, announced the completion of its Series A funding round totaling $23 million led by Clear Ventures. All existing investors participated, including Crosslink Capital, New Era Capital Partners, Moneta Venture Capital, Ridge Ventures and Westwave Capital. The new investment enables scaling and expanding sales and marketing, platform development, and further building the global support infrastructure.
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Kasa Living is a leading technology powered hospitality brand. Kasa has built a truly differentiated proprietary hospitality operating system that materially improves profits for owners and enhances the experience for today's modern travellers across a diverse range of investor-owned accommodations, including multifamily apartments, single-family homes and boutique hotels. Kasa consistently improves property profitability by >50% and uplevels property review scores meaningfully across a wide range of channels.
Kasa has recently raised $70 million Series C fundraising. Citi Ventures and FirstMark Capital led the all equity round with participation from new investors New York Life Ventures and Fireside Investments. All major existing investors including RET Ventures, Zigg Capital, and Ribbit Capital participated in the twice upsized and oversubscribed round.
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Tabby, previously headquartered in Dubai but now based in Riyadh, has raised $200 million in its Series D funding round, achieving a valuation of $1.5 billion. This positions the shopping and financial services app as the first fintech startup unicorn in the Gulf, underlining its substantial growth and market importance in how customers shop and pay.
This is coming less than a year after Tabby’s $58 million Series C round led by Sequoia Capital India and STV, both of whom participated in this recent unicorn round. Existing investors like Mubadala Investment Capital, PayPal Ventures and Arbor Ventures joined. At the same time, new backers include the lead investor Wellington Management, one of the world’s top independent investment management firms, and growth equity investor Bluepool Capital.
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Once a venture capital-backed star with an astronomical valuation, the flexible-office-space provider is now preparing for chapter 11 protection.
WeWork plans to file for bankruptcy as early as next week, a source familiar with the matter said on Tuesday, as the SoftBank Group-backed company struggles with a massive debt pile and hefty losses.
Shares of the flexible workspace provider fell 32% in extended trading after the Wall Street Journal first reported the news. They have fallen roughly 96% this year.
New York-based WeWork is considering filing a Chapter 11 petition in New Jersey, the WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Following a successful private beta programme that involved some 2,000 participants, Berlin-based Aware, a healthech startup focusing on ridding the planet of chronic diseases via blood and health tests, is today officially launching to the general public in both Berlin and Hamburg. According to the startup, a testing facility in Frankfurt am Main is slated to open in the near future.
Founded by former EyeEm co-founder Florian Meissner and Ferdinand Schmidt-Thomé, Aware raised a healthy $15 million in a seed funding round Tech.eu reported on in June of 2022.
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Payments provider Paytrix has landed $18.3m (£14.8m) in Series A capital led by Unusual Ventures, Motive Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.
The London-headquartered fintech’s payment API is used by businesses to send, receive and store payments.
Aran Brown, CEO and co-founder of Paytrix, said the company is aiming to slot into the middle gap between “inefficient local solutions” and “tier-one global providers”, which are only available to the largest companies.
“People have been telling us that this is the worst time to raise funding in 20 years,” said Brown. “Given that backdrop, we’re delighted to have attracted such high-calibre investors.”
Fin Capital, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Hambro Perks, ClockTower Ventures, The Fintech Fund, D4 Ventures and unnamed angels joined the lead investors in the round.
It comes off the back of a Paytrix £5m pre-seed round led by Hambro Perks last year.
Matt Harris, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said: “Paytrix is addressing a critical need for businesses operating in an international marketplace.
“The complexity and cost of cross-border payments have long been a major pain point for companies looking to scale, and Paytrix’s solution neatly tackles these challenges.”
Paytrix is also based in Ireland where its customer support, heads of finance, IT and operations reside.
The fintech company will use the proceeds of the Series A capital to fund overseas growth, with its Irish base becoming the centre for global operations.
AI has huge potential to make businesses more sustainable. It is already being deployed by companies including Google to cool data centres, in hospitality to track and reduce food waste, and by governments such as Indonesia and Peru to show near real-time vessel movements in the ocean to combat illegal fishing.
In 2023, governments and businesses are continuing to strive towards improved sustainability. Environmental, social governance (ESG), is high on boardroom agendas. Businesses want to work with suppliers and partners who have similar values and are equally committed to sustainability. And, less altruistically, ESG is increasingly a focus for scoring when tenders are awarded, or investment is levied.
From a legislative stance, businesses will soon have to comply with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which obligates financial market participants to disclose their non-financial and diversity information.
Businesses are therefore actively looking for green solutions that can also improve their marketability and, ultimately, their bottom line. AI is being touted as something that can manage environmental impacts and climate change, whilst also improving business efficiency – a win-win.
Is AI as green as it seems?
When environmental claims are unproven, over-inflated or just incorrect, this is ‘greenwashing’. When implementing AI solutions, there is often little detail given at the micro-level on how AI will save the planet any more effectively or efficiently than traditional computer-human operations.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has been cracking down on greenwashing in advertising, recently issuing reprimands to HSBC, Alpro and Innocent, amongst others.
When implementing AI and measuring the energy-savings it can produce, this needs to be offset against the electricity consumption of AI systems themselves, as this is potentially substantial. It has been calculated that AI’s global carbon footprint might foreseeably be equal to that of the aviation industry.
Until all AI is powered by renewable electricity, including using sustainable data sources, AI’s energy consumption must be taken into account when making claims about the energy-saving capabilities of AI. It is only a matter of time before AI greenwashing undergoes the same scrutiny by private and public auditors and is more heavily legislated against and regulated.
Competition bill looms
We are imminently waiting for the UK Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill, under which it is expected that companies could face fines of up to 10% of their global turnover for breaches of consumer law.
The bill is expected to grant regulators with new powers to use against companies that make misleading environmental claims. This bill, combined with the new EU AI Act, and divergent ‘sector by sector’ approach to regulation in the UK, is going to increase the regulatory considerations for businesses deploying AI technologies.
This is only going to increase, as we see other technologies where AI is crucial, such as the metaverse, develop.
Could AI deliver better ESG standards?
From efficiency gains in agriculture and energy supply to sustainable supply chains and environmental monitoring, the claims made about the green potential of AI are vast.
But there is little published information about how AI use in these fields will be deployed; how AI software will differ from non-AI software; and whether that difference will actually be beneficial in reducing the rate of climate change or meeting biodiversity and ESG goals. Developers and users risk being challenged on such green claims in 2023.
AI is already being used as a tool to combat greenwashing. It is being deployed to analyse a company’s publicly available information on the web to detect early signs of greenwashing or identify related risks.
The hope is this increased scrutiny will force higher ESG standards. There is an irony to being caught out by an AI system for making false statements about the energy efficiency and ESG benefits of the AI system your business has deployed.
Practical guidance
So where does this leave businesses in the brave new world of AI, greenwashing and sustainability? Here are some practical steps to keep in mind.
– Marketing statements and representations made by an organisation regarding its ESG commitments and how AI is improving its sustainability must also take into account the AI systems themselves and the energy the AI consumes, not just their application. This means involving legal teams in deploying these technologies and the statements made concerning their sustainability.
– Where AI is being used to enhance ESG standards, proper consideration needs to be given to how the delivery of these tools can be monitored and assessed. As with the deployment of all AI technologies, there should be someone in the business who has an understanding of the ‘output’ and can verify its accuracy and identify potential issues and areas to improve on.
– Customers should review and be prepared to challenge AI and ESG claims made by suppliers to ensure they are accurate. Where overambitious statements have been made, legal advice should be obtained.
London-based asset manager and active fintech investor Fasanara Capital has secured $200m (£169.4m) from a Canadian pension fund.
Fasanara, which has previously invested in UK-based fintechs like Playter, Twig, and Storfund, holds around $3.5bn (£2.96bn) in assets.
The new funds will be deployed through its alternative credit strategy to provide loan investments to fintech firms.
“This capital will help bolster our portfolio companies, by providing them with the certainty that they can access a range of financial products, should they need them,” Fasanara Capital CEO, Francesco Filia, said.
“At a time when the wider capital market is experiencing such uncertainty, Fasanara’s portfolio companies know that they belong to an ecosystem which is strongly supported by some of the largest institutional investors in Europe and North America.”
Filia described the investment as “another major milestone for Fasanara”.
The asset manager did not disclose the name of the fund that provided the financial backing. It is understood to be one of Canada’s largest pension funds.
In May, Fasanara Capital launched a $350m (£296.5m) investment fund to target early-stage fintech and cryptoasset startups in Europe.
While the bulk of the firm’s assets is based in Europe, including the Italian buy now pay later unicorn Scalapay, the firm has ambitions to expand its position in the US.