News
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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Electric Gamebox, a UK-based gaming platform company, raised $25M in Series A2 funding.
The round was led by Philian, with participation from Brookfield Asset Management, Index Ventures, and ActivumSG.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate expansion in the US and UK including 100 new locations over the next two years and 1,000+ locations by 2026.
Co-founded by CEO Will Dean and CFO David Spindler, Electric Gamebox delivers hyper-immersive games in interactive digital smart rooms, or ‘Gamebox’ gaming pods. The Gameboxes – which can host two to six players at a time – feature a range of technologies including projection mapping, touch screens, 3D motion tracking and surround sound without the need for headsets. Originating in Central London in October 2019, the company now has locations in Essex and Manchester in the UK, and Dallas.
Brookfield will leverage its real estate portfolio to bring Electric Gamebox to its retail locations. Over the next year, Electric Gamebox will be opening locations at Oakbrook Center, Chicago; The Woodlands Mall, Houston; Fashion Place, Salt Lake City; Victoria Gardens, LA/San Bernardino; and Ballston Quarter, Arlington. Electric Gamebox concessions are also coming to San Antonio, in partnership with Santikos Movie Theaters.
Electric Gamebox currently has six games, designed by its in-house game studio with plans to release additional games in 2021. New games will be released monthly.
American tech giant Honeywell is upping its bet on redefining the future of quantum computing by combining its own three-year-old group with British startup Cambridge Quantum Computing. Now, the company is pledging to invest up to $300 million (nearly £212 million) in the new venture. This investment round will reportedly be closed later this year.
The combined company will be pitted against the likes of major quantum computing players including IBM, Google, and Microsoft. Honeywell predicts the quantum computing market to be worth $1 trillion. Notably, IBM is already an investor in Cambridge Quantum Computing, a global player in this space.
Furthermore, Honeywell’s ion-based quantum computing hardware has already reached a quantum volume of 512. This is the highest ever volume measured on a commercial quantum computer to date.
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Circulor, a London, UK-based provider of supply chain traceability and dynamic CO2 tracking solutions, raised $14m in Series A funding.
The Westly Group led the round with participation from Salesforce Ventures, BHP Ventures, Future Positive Capital, 24Haymarket and Sky Ocean Ventures. Existing investors in the company include Boeing HorizonX, Volvo Cars Technology Fund, Jaguar Land Rover’s CVC arm, InMotion Ventures, SYSTEMIQ, Plug and Play and TotalEnergies Ventures. Steve Westly, Founder and Managing Partner of The Westly Group, will join the Circulor board.
The company intends to use the funds to drive ongoing innovation and extend its presence in North America and Asia.
Led by Douglas Johnson-Poensgen, CEO, Circulor enables businesses to fully analyse, track and manage their supply chains to support responsible sourcing and improve sustainability. It does this by providing an enterprise software platform, which creates a reliable chain of custody of materials and attaches sustainability and other ESG data to that flow of materials. The technology assigns a digital identity to commodities and tracks the supply chain data and embedded carbon at each stage of production, recycling and end-of-life.
The company serves Volvo Cars, Polestar, BHP, and LG Energy Solutions.
The round was led by Brighteye Ventures and Mustard Seed Maze and joined by business angels including Cédric Sellin, Josef Bovet (SumUp, ex Tiller), and Bruno Sola (Business).
The funding will be deployed towards accelerating the company’s growth in France and Europe, notably with the launch of its first London location scheduled for January 2022.
The company is also planning to increase students per location from 60 to 200 and double down its workforce to 10.
Founded in 2019 by Marie Taquet, IconoClass offers a four-month course in the area of business development. The course is based on intensive practical learning with partner companies including, Doctolib, Deliveroo, Spendesk, and SumUp.
Furthermore, the company assures students a permanent job contract with one of its many partner companies at the end of the course.
“By creating IconoClass, I wanted to offer an excellent education to as many people as possible, regardless of educational background and financial means. We’re proud of our pioneering role in intensively training valued and well-paid professions such as business development. This funding will allow us to speed up our strike force at a time when student precariousness is becoming an economic and social emergency that must be resolved efficiently,” said Marie Taquet, Founder and CEO of IconoClass.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically increased the need for remote healthcare solutions as healthcare service providers have been forced to adopt new, modern solutions at an accelerated pace.
Meet Medixine, a telehealth provider that has built an all-in-one digital platform for virtual care to support healthcare professionals focusing better on the patients.
Recently, the Espoo-based company raised €2.9 million (approx £2.4 million) in funding led by a crowdfunding campaign organized by Springvest.
The Finnish company will use the funding to expand its operations in the UK and Central Europe. Further, it plans to develop new products within the Medixine Suite.
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Of late, people are increasingly investing both time and money into more thoughtfully curating their home environments. The COVID-19 pandemic-imposed lockdowns have further accelerated this trend. At the same time, the rise of social media has turned private spaces public, thereby making people consider utilities as fashion purchases. Eventually, consumers are gravitating towards brands that offer stylish, sustainable, and comfortable home products.
Piglet is a British direct-to-consumer homeware brand behind a range of high-quality and low-maintenance linen products and other soft home goods. Recently, the company raised $8.5 million (nearly £6 million) in a round led by Active Partners, a London-based consumer-focused investment firm.
The fresh funds are Piglet’s first outside capital. They will be used to internationally scale the business, expand the brand’s product offering, and build the team of Piglet in the UK, Europe and North America. In addition, the Piglet team aims to nearly double its size by 2022, with the company hiring in the UK, US, Germany, and France.
Besides this, Stuart Grant, co-founder and chairman of leading British apparel brand Mint Velvet with extensive experience and expertise in the apparel, lifestyle and homeware sectors, will join Piglet as Chairperson.
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Razorsecure, a cybersecurity software provider for the rail industry, has secured more than £2 million from the existing investors including, Enterprise M3 Growth Fund; Mainport Innovation Fund II, Wentworth Limited; and Breed Reply.
To date, the company has raised £6 million in funding. The funding will be used to accelerate the company’s growth and scale its products.
Founded by Alex Cowan in 2015, RazorSecure provides a suite of products and services to protect rail companies from cyber-attack.
The company’s technology is powered by machine learning and designed to protect rolling stock, signalling, and infrastructure systems. RazorSecure’s solution detects how a system operates and identifies deviations as a possible threat.
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Half of UK businesses expect to reduce the size of their office space, with a third looking to cut it down by 30%, according to a new report.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) surveyed 258 C-Suite executives and over senior employees of the UK's largest companies and their proposed cuts roughly equated to nine million square feet of space.The finding indicates an appetite for 'hybrid work' models in the UK, where employees mix remote and in-office shifts, with around 71% of the respondents planning to increase investment in technology to enable more agile work models over the next two years.
As such, only 10% of those surveyed agreed that the level of employees working in the office will match that of pre-pandemic levels, despite taking into account the speed of the vaccine roll out. The consensus from the survey among the senior executives is that staff will continue working remotely for two or three days a week.
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TempoCap, a pan-European technology investor, has announced that its portfolio company Depop is to be acquired by Etsy. Inc for $1.6 billion (approx £1.14 billion).
According to the VC, the transaction marks a watershed moment for the European scaleup ecosystem, as the largest venture-backed acquisition of a private technology company in the UK since 2019.
Founded in 2011 by Simon Beckerman, Depop is a community-powered marketplace app, where users buy and sell unique fashion. At present, the platform is home to 21 million+ stylists, designers, artists, collectors, vintage sellers, and more.
Around 90% of Depop’s active users are under the age of 26, claims the company. As a part of the acquisition, TempoCap expects an 11x cash-on-cash return in 3.5 years at closing.
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