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Shawn Tan, Skymind’s CEO, sees the company as offering a very different approach to the traditional investment approach. The company is involved in AI itself, with its own open-source enterprise software. Despite only being launched in 2020 Tan proudly tells UKTN, “over half of all Fortune 500 companies are using Skymind open-source software to launch AI innovations.”
The company uses its knowledge and experience in AI to offer more than just venture capital. “We provide deep operational support and market access to our portfolio companies,” Tan explains. The approach is perhaps more akin to a coaching or partnership relationship than a traditional VC equity stake. Skymind offers hands-on support to its companies, helping to nurture and develop talent, and working with them to bring products to market. “Most of the world’s AI innovation stays in the research lab,” says Tan, “We want AI out in the real world, solving real-world problems.”
The people-first approach has already had benefits, with Skymind already able to point to successes from their model. One such application was used at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic to assist in treatment. Covid-19 has puzzled many clinicians and researchers — especially towards the beginning of the pandemic — because it could sometimes be unpredictable, affecting people differently and being particularly severe in some patients.
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Setting up and growing an e-commerce brand is not the lean process. Staffordshire-based e-commerce technology startup The Moot Group (TMG) wants to make this fragmented process simple. From having to work with dozens of providers – website to logistics to tracking – they provide a unified platform that consolidates the entire process and calls themselves ‘E-commerce as a Service.’
Now the SaaS startup has secured £5 million in seed funding, led by Fuel Ventures. Their founder, Nick Moutter, tells UKTN that the investment tees us up for the next stage of growth.
“We will continue to build on our own highly successful interior brands and support our third-party customers with bespoke E-commerce technology. We also have our sights on growing the business overseas too, so watch this space.”
Fuel Ventures, which is an early-stage UK venture capital investing in fast-growing digital tech businesses, also unveiled £45M in funds for early-stage tech startups in the country. As per the company press release, the fund will be distributed in the next 12 months to over 60 early-stage digital startups. At the same time, Fuel Ventures also announced its commitment to extend support to pre-seed companies through this new fund.
At the same time, Nick is fast becoming one of the UK’s most successful E-commerce and adtech entrepreneurs, having achieved success with his first business Admedo, the unified programmatic marketing platform. Following the investment, TMG welcomes to its advisory board Richard Chapple, former GymShark exec and Founder of The Growth Foundation, and Mark Pearson, of Fuel Ventures.
In the company press release, Mark Pearson, Founder & Managing Partner at Fuel Ventures said: “We’re delighted to support Nick and the rest of the team at TMG. The growth of the group has been staggering, they are one of the UK’s most exciting and fastest-growing companies.”
TMG was founded in 2019 as a single homeware brand called Olivia’s. Headquartered in Stafford, Olivia’s is an online furniture retailer that sells home furnishing products, lighting accessories, and more.
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Tide, a London, UK-based business financial platform, raised just over $100m in Series C funding, bringing the total raised to date to $200m and valuation to over $650 million post-money.
The round – which remains subject to FCA approval – was led by funds advised by Apax Digital, the growth equity team of Apax Partners, with participation from existing investors Anthemis, Augmentum, Jigsaw, Local Globe / Latitude, SBI, and SpeedInvest.
The company intends to use the funds to continue to develop their business financial platform, grow their market share, as well as expand globally.
Led by Oliver Prill, CEO, Tide provides a business financial platform that offers business accounts and related banking services, and a comprehensive set of software solutions, such as full integration with accounting systems. Tide has over 350,000 members and over 400,000 business accounts.
The company, in partnership with ClearBank, has also been awarded a total of nearly $120m in grants from the RBS Alternative Remedies Package.
IBM today announced that it has acquired BoxBoat Technologies, a Bethesda, Maryland-based DevOps consultancy and enterprise Kubernetes service provider. The move, which comes the same week former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst stepped down as president at IBM, will extend IBM’s container and data portfolio to advance the company’s hybrid cloud practice, IBM SVP John Granger said in a statement.
“Our clients require a cloud architecture that allows them to operate across a traditional IT environment, private cloud, and public clouds. That’s at the heart of our hybrid cloud approach,” Granger said. “No cloud modernization project can succeed without a containerization strategy, and BoxBoat is at the forefront of container services innovation.”
Founded in 2016, BoxBoat helps clients establish containers and Kubernetes — an orchestration system for app deployment — as enablers for hybrid cloud solutions. The startup delivers services including strategies for Kubernetes and enterprise container adoption, as well as app containerization, DevSecOps, training, enablement, and guides on DevOps tooling and workflows.
BoxBoat’s customers span the Fortune 100 and government agencies, and the company counts among its partners Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It also has the distinction of being the first certified professional services partner with GitLab, according to BoxBoat CEO Tim Hohman.
Hohman says that BoxBoat will join IBM Global Business Services’ (GBS) Hybrid Cloud Services division. The transaction is expected to close this fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions.
“We founded BoxBoat on the idea that containers and DevOps would become an industry standard with the potential to transform enterprise IT with lightning fast application deployment workflows,” Hohman said in a press release. “Joining IBM will allow us to realize a shared vision of helping clients innovate by successfully deploying container-based applications on-premises and to the cloud.”
Containers and Kubernetes are two of the leading drivers of enterprise digital transformation. By 2025, it’s anticipated that more than 85% of global organizations will be running containerized apps in production, a significant increase from fewer than 35% in 2019. At the same time, Kubernetes is becoming the preferred way to build digital services. StackRox found that 91% of organizations are leveraging Kubernetes to orchestrate containers, while 75% of organizations are actively using Kubernetes in production.
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Authentic Brands Group Inc., the owner of brands including Marilyn Monroe, Forever 21 and Brooks Brothers, has filed to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange.
A prospectus filed Tuesday gives a listing size of $100 million, but that’s a placeholder amount likely to change. Bloomberg News has reported that the New York-based company could be worth about $10 billion in an initial public offering.
Founded by Jamie Salter in 2010, Authentic Brands has grown to a portfolio of more than 30 apparel, celebrity and sports brands through an acquisition spree. Recent purchases include Eddie Bauer. The company’s net income amounted to $295 million during the quarter that ended in March, topping its full-year total of $225 million in 2020.
BlackRock Inc., Leonard Green & Partners LP, General Atlantic LLC, Simon Property Group Inc. and Lion Capital LLP are listed among its largest shareholders, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
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One of the UK’s leading fintechs, Wise, formerly TransferWise, has gone public on the London Stock Exchange today. The first trades commenced shortly after 11:22 am BST under the ticker ‘WISE’. Valued at £7.95 billion on its market debut, this has been the largest-ever tech listing in London by market capitalisation.
The company currently caters to over 10 million individual and business customers, processing over £5 billion in cross-border transactions every month.
To coincide with its direct listing today, the company has also released independent research which revealed £150 billion is unknowingly spent in hidden fees on foreign currency transfers each year.
The research was unveiled by company founders Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus from the company’s Tallinn office, as part of a private listing ceremony streamed to the company’s 2,400 Wisers (employees), located in 17 offices around the world.
The company’s decision to pursue a direct listing follows the approach taken by Spotify, Slack and Coinbase. The direct listing is the first of a technology company on the London Stock Exchange.
In contrast to a traditional Initial Public Offering, a direct listing is a fairer, cheaper and more transparent way for the company to broaden its ownership, in support of its mission to move money around the world faster, cheaper, more conveniently and transparently.
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According to the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, one kilogram of clothing saved, reused or recycled saves five kilograms of CO2 from entering the environment, thereby significantly reducing unnecessary water use, chemical waste, and greenhouse gas emissions.
This is where the Norwegian social platform Tise comes to play. It enables environmentally conscious consumers to contribute their best by rewarding them for buying and selling second-hand items. Now, the company has raised $11 million (nearly £8 million) in funding to expand into new territories.
The investment round was led by VNV Global, a Swedish investment firm that has previously backed Avito, the most popular classifieds site in Russia, scooter-sharing company VOI, and BlaBlaCar, the leading long-distance carpooling service. Also, Therese Angel from VNV will join the Tise board. The investment follows the $7 million (nearly £5 million) funding that the company raised six months back. With this round, the total investment raised by the company is $25 million to date and is currently valued at $60 million. Already, rival brands that bring sustainabiility in fashion such as Depop and Vinted among others are present in the UK.
Tise will use the funds to strengthen its position as the market leader in the Nordics and expand into larger European territories including Germany, France, and the UK. Already, Tise is revolutionising the way consumers engage with the second-hand market in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.
Eirik Rime, CEO and Co-founder of Tise, commented: “We are incredibly excited to introduce our platform to consumers outside of the Nordics. The fast fashion sector is one of the most polluting industries in the world, but recycling clothing, buying and selling items second-hand, and repurposing garments gives items a new lifecycle which helps to end the environmental damage. At Tise, we want to promote, encourage, and incentivise sustainable practices and our recent funding will enable us to reach new markets and consumers who share the same passion for the environment as we do. We’re looking forward to seeing how our new users, ‘Tisers’, interact with our platform, which is another great step towards tackling the wasteful issues within the fashion industry.”
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The pandemic made the current work from home and study from home a new norm. Students around the world attend classes online, right from their homes, and the current graduating class will most likely need to apply for a college online. With the aim of helping students make better decisions about their higher education, the global edtech startup Unibuddy has raised a notable £14.5 million in its series B funding round.
The latest funding for Unibuddy was Highland Europe with additional participation from Stride.VC. Including the latest funding round, the startup has secured a total of £23.2 million since its inception in 2017. In a conversation with UKTN, the company’s co-founder and CEO Diego Fanara reveals more on how the latest funds will be utilised.
“This funding will help Unibuddy tackle a variety of strategic priorities. We’re excited about tripling the size of our engineering team. Over the next 18 months, we will launch a new suite of virtual event and community group products with advanced CRM integrations that democratize the student funnel data across institutions’ technology infrastructure,” Fanara reveals.
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Facial recognition has been one of the more conflicted applications of artificial intelligence in the wider world: using computer vision to detect faces and subsequent identities of people has raised numerous questions about privacy, data protection, and the ethics underpinning the purposes of the work, and even the systems themselves. But on the other hand, it’s being adopted widely in a wide variety of use cases. Now one of the more controversial, but also successful, startups in the field has closed a big round of funding.
AnyVision — an Israeli startup that has built AI-based techniques to identify people by their faces, but also related tech such as temperature checks to detect higher temperatures in a crowd — has raised $235 million in funding, the company has confirmed.
This Series C, one of the bigger rounds for an AI startup, is being co-led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 and Eldridge Industries, with previous investors also participating. (They are not named but the list includes Robert Bosch GmbH, Qualcomm Ventures and Lightspeed.) The company is not disclosing its valuation but we are asking. However, it has to be a sizable hike for the company, which had previously raised around $116 million, according to PitchBook, and has racked up a big list of customers since its last round in 2020.
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The future is a place where infinite worlds are at your fingertips and you can interact both naturally and in 3D without any controllers. Understanding this, Bristol-based Ultraleap, the world-leading hand tracking, and unparalleled mid-air haptic technologies let you engage naturally with the digital world without touching surfaces.
Ultraleap makes hand-tracking haptic (touch) technology. It works with Qualcomm, Varjo, and others to create high-end enterprise applications for Extended Reality (XR). Its spatial interaction technology solutions offer a haptic module that enables the integration of virtual touch and an optical hand tracking module, which has the capability to capture the movements of a user’s hands with unparalleled accuracy and near-zero latency.
Also, it offers a TouchFree application, which enables to add touchless gesture control to interactive screens. The software application runs on an interactive kiosk or advertising totem and has the capability to detects a user’s hand in mid-air and converts it to an on-screen cursor.
Ultraleap’s technology witnessed a huge demand during the pandemic, where interfaces that work sans human touch help prevent spreading the novel coronavirus. Recently, Ultraleap established a partnership with Simply NUC to use its TouchFree system with computers. It wants to bring the TouchFree application to market to meet the increasing demand for touchless interaction.
This technology will likely play a role in AR headsets and smartglasses, where hand gestures are a prevalent form of user input. Already, Ultraleap has integrated its Gemini software into the Varjo XR-3 headset and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 reference design.
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