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Following last week’s news that it was considering an IPO, maternity wear specialist Seraphine has formally confirmed its intention to float.
The final offer price of the London-based brand will be determined following a book building process with admission to the London Stock Exchange expected to take place during July.
Seraphine CEO David Williams said now was “the right time for the business to IPO”. “The ITF announcement marks the next stage in our journey towards being a publicly listed company. Listing will give us the opportunity to further the Group’s reach and continue to grow our presence and product offer in the highly resilient and under-competed maternity and nursing wear market. The opportunities for the business are considerable, with plenty of the global market still to go for.”
The offer will comprise new shares to be issued by the company (expected to raise gross proceeds of approximately £61 million) and sale shares expected to be sold by existing shareholders, including the executive directors. The company is targeting a free float of at least 50% of the Company’s issued share capital.
Seraphine was founded by entrepreneur Cécile Reinaud in 2002 offering premium, fashionable but accessibly priced maternity and nursing wear. The brand went on to acquire a high profile celebrity following, including, most notably, the Duchess of Cambridge.
Reinaud took a step back from the business when Williams, who arrived at the business from ASOS in 2017, stepped into the role of CEO in 2019.
At the end of last year the business was acquired in a £50m deal by Mayfair Private Equity Partners, who bought out Reinaud previous backers Bridgepoint Private Equity.
The digital-first business, which also has a number of strategically placed retail stores and some digital and wholesale partners, achieved sales of £34m in the year to 4 April. It also has a strong global footprint with around two-thirds of its FY21 revenue generated outside of the UK.
In addition to the intention to float, the business has also announced that Elvie Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer Sarah Highfield has been appointed as a non-executive director. Elvie specialises in natural and sustainable baby products and equipment. Prior to joining Elvie, she was CFO at Costa Coffee.
‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) is a decentralised political and social movement protesting against incidents of police brutality and all racially motivated violence against black people. This movement was highlighted with the murder of George Floyd in 2020. However, it seems not to be long-lived as 53 per cent of London’s black tech workers feel that the incident hasn’t inspired enough tech companies to take meaningful action around diversity and inclusion.
This has been concluded by a new research by Tech London Advocates, the independent network of 10,000 tech leaders, experts and investors alongside UKBlackTech and the TLA Black Women in Tech Working Group.
Whilst career progression opportunities, salary and training remain the three most important factors for black tech professionals when deciding on a new job, 61 per cent and 57 per cent of the respondents identified diverse representation at senior level and equal opportunities as two deciding factors for choosing an employer. Most importantly, black tech workers think diversity of executive boards requires urgent focus.
As per the respondents, Google, Microsoft and Facebook are the three companies that demonstrated best practice in terms of creating a diverse workforce and culture. Also, Accenture is the highest ranking British business to follow the best workplace culture and diversity.
On the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, UKTN has listed 10 black women who are inspiring other aspirational women to break the stereotypes that exist in the UK tech world.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the legal sector and given rise to a significant opportunity to capitalise on increased budgetary pressure and interest in cost-saving software tools. A recent report by Thomson Reuters identified that 84% of Law Partners surveyed expected their technology investment to increase and had a greater openness to experiment with different forms of service delivery and operational processes.
London-based Legatics is an intuitive legal transaction management software that simplifies and automates traditional legal processes. The legaltech company just bagged £3 million growth capital investment from Mobeus to develop its platform and further build up on its strong customer acquisition. Also, Joe Krancki will join the board after the completion of this round.
Legatics will use this investment to double the size of its team over the next 18 months and further develop its technology to deliver new features and use cases for a wider range of practice areas within new and existing customers.
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Demand for cutting-edge education technology has soared during the pandemic while education has gone online. Among the companies that have mushroomed in this scenario is London-based AI edtech startup CENTURY Tech, which builds AI technologies to improve education and transform learning in schools worldwide. The company just secured $6.5 million (nearly £4.7 million) in funding.
Two-thirds of the investment in the oversubscribed round came from new investors, including MIT Solve’s philanthropic venture fund Solve Innovation Future. CENTURY Tech will use the investment to scale its AI-powered learning technologies to more schools across the world, following an acceleration in the adoption of technology in education. The company will also ramp up its efforts to expand its backend AI technologies to publishers and other content owners globally.
Priya Lakhani OBE, Founder CEO of CENTURY Tech, said: “The pandemic accelerated the pace of innovation in education – fast-forwarding the use of technology in learning by years in just the space of a few months. Advanced technologies like AI are here to stay – in the classroom, for homework, to aid with marking and planning, and generally to make the processes of teaching and learning far more effective. We are looking forward to being able to help more schools than ever before to realise the power of AI to transform education for the better.”
Susan Nesbitt, Head of the Global Innovators Community at the World Economic Forum, said: “We’re excited to welcome CENTURY Tech to our 2021 cohort of Technology Pioneers. CENTURY Tech and its fellow pioneers are developing technologies that can help society solve some of its most pressing issues. We look forward to their contribution to the World Economic Forum in its commitment to improving the state of the world.”
Casey van der Stricht, Principal of Solve Innovation Future, MIT Solve’s philanthropic venture fund, said: “CENTURY Tech is working to ensure that anyone, anywhere, at any level realises their ultimate learning potential. Priya and her team are rightfully focused on scalability of the AI learning platform model, especially given the increased demand for virtual learning technology—and at Solve, we are equally excited about how this tool can customise learning to support all students.”
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Founded in August 2015, Fresh Car Valeting was started as a project at Heriot-Watt University. Sam Brennan, the founder, saw a huge gap in the premium car valeting and cleaning service market. As a result, he wanted to revolutionise the industry that hasn’t had any innovation in the past few years. According to Brennan, the company is on a mission to change the way people manage their car, and customer satisfaction is central to that.
In the latest development, Edinburg-based company launched a new app as it embarks on a £1 million investment round. With the app, the UK company aims to transform the way people manage their car care.
Sam Brennan says, “The market of 31M users across the UK is worth more than £1.2B so making it as simple as possible to deal with us is vital. Launching a new app does exactly that. Fresh is expanding rapidly because we provide fantastic customer service across all our franchises and people are sick and tired of sub-standard care.”
Furthermore, the company is planning to add more features to the app over the next twelve months. It includes added car services like tire and oil changes, scratch removal and more.
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, over the past year, remote workforces have accelerated digital transformation for companies of all sizes.
Founded in 2014 by Jonathan Anguelov, and Olivier Pailhès, Aircall, a French startup helps businesses meet objectives by integrating its cloud-based solution into leading software such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Slack, and Intercom and allows businesses to streamline workflows, providing more efficiency for their teams with better visibility, data and insights into their customers’ needs. Today, the company announced that it has picked up $120 million (nearly £86 million) in Series D funding.
The investment round was led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management along with most of Aircall’s current investors including DTCP, eFounders, Draper Esprit, Adams Street Partners, NextWorld Capital, and Gaia Capital Partners. This round takes the valuation of the company to over $1 billion.
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With the global EV infrastructure market all set to exceed 55 million chargers in buildings by 2030, charging infrastructure needs to adapt to handle new hardware and increased power demand. With the optimise the EV charging process, US-based IoTecha uses Internet of Things (IoT) technology to connect electric vehicle (EV) charge points with the electricity grid, homes, and buildings.
Now, the company has hit the tech headlines as it bagged $7 million (nearly £5 million) funding, which takes the total Series B investment raised by the company to $13.2 million (nearly £9.5 million).
The investment round was led by London-based bp ventures, which invests in private, high-growth, game-changing technology companies, accelerating innovation across the entire energy spectrum. This investment in IoTecha is aligned with bp’s aim to provide over 70,000 public EV charging points worldwide by 2030.
IoTecha will use this investment to scale its operations through bp’s electrification network. Together, bp and IoTecha will work to accelerate mainstream adoption of EVs and support the transition to more sustainable mobility. The collaboration will be strengthened by the appointment of Shaun Healey, bp ventures Principal to IoTecha’s Board of Directors.
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Kiteline (formerly known as Liminal Health) is a London-based startup that provides personalised content and virtual health coaching to employees affected by chronic conditions.
The UK healthtech company has secured £370K funding led by SFC Capital. Others including global VC Antler and a group of carefully selected angel investors also participated.
The funding will be used to accelerate its smart coach matching service and content offering, which will include on-demand wellbeing learning modules and condition-specific resources.
Founded by Candice Hampson and Christine Beardsell in 2020, the company was created in direct response to their own personal and professional experiences.
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GoStudent is a Vienna-based edtech scaleup offering a digital learning platform for online education and the future of tutoring. In a recent development, the company picked up €205 million (nearly £175 million) in an oversubscribed Series C funding round led by investor DST Global along with participation from new investors SoftBank Vision Fund 2 Tencent, and Dragoneer and existing investors Coatue, Left Lane Capital and London-based DN Capital.
The investment will primarily be used to drive its global expansion further. With a presence in 18 countries, GoStudent will continue to strengthen its position as the market leader for K12 online tutoring in Europe. Over the past months, the company expanded its team to over 500 employees and opened 12 offices, including new locations in Athens, Istanbul and Amsterdam. Besides Europe, GoStudent will also be expanding overseas and plans to launch in Mexico and Canada this summer. The scaleup will also invest in branding, product development and consider strategic acquisitions.
Felix Ohswald, Co-Founder and CEO, GoStudent, said: “At the heart of GoStudent is our mission to build the No. 1 Global Digital School. The new investment and the resulting opportunities for continued international growth bring us one step closer to fulfilling our mission.”
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Bristol-based Ecologi is a subscription service that helps individuals and businesses lower their impact on the climate. Now, the company has picked up £4 million investment led by General Catalyst to become the ‘Spotify of Sustainability’.
Notably, General Catalyst has backed companies of significant scale such as Airbnb, Stripe, Monzo and Deliveroo. Also, the company bagged a smaller investment from Entrée Capital.
Ecologi will use the investment to scale up the teams to enhance the platform, grow the climate projects procurement and reporting team, and expand the marketing and partnership teams. It eyes to have a team of 40-60 people over the next 12 months.
The investment will also allow the company to buy larger quantities of certified carbon offsets and tree purchases upfront, thereby letting them plan better, get access to some projects that would not be possible otherwise and sometimes access better prices.
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