News
The COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown, and work-life balance have taken an enormous toll on the well-being of employees globally.
The current crisis has brought the issue of employee mental health firmly into the foreground for employers.
According to the report, 78.5% of employers are reporting an increase in requests for mental health support and 90% are concerned that their employees are experiencing burnout, says another.
Based out of London, Unmind, a B2B mental health platform, fills that need sparked by the pandemic by providing clinically-backed tools and training.
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smol, the UK’s fastest-growing homecare brand, is celebrating its third anniversary. Now, the company bagged $34 million (nearly £24 million) Series B funding led by Eight Roads Ventures alongside Google Ventures, Latitude, and existing investors Balderton Capital and Jam Jar.
The new funds will allow the company to continue investing in new product development and expand into other European markets. smol notes that the pandemic has further increased the demand for its products, driven by their convenient home delivery and sustainable approach.
“The last year has further increased consumers’ awareness of the ecological impact our everyday actions have, and the role younger brands can have in making a positive difference,” said co-founder Nick Green, pointing to a recent Brandbean study that showed over 80% of consumers switching brands or products last year in order to be more eco-friendly, and trusting smaller brands to offer better eco-friendly products.
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An NHS Digital-run vaccine-booking website exposed just how many vaccines individual people had received – and did so with no authentication, according to the Guardian.
The booking page, aimed at English NHS patients wanting to book first and second coronavirus jabs, would tell anyone at all whether a named person had had zero, one or two vaccination doses, the newspaper reported on Thursday.
All you need, it says, are the date of birth and postcode of the person whose vaccination status you wanted to check up on. These details are not difficult to find online with some obvious search terms.
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Fly Now Pay Later, a UK alternative payments provider, raised a further £10m ($14m) in Series A funding, bringing its total to £45m ($62m).
The round was co-led by asset management firms Revenio Capital and Taurus Wealth Advisors.
The company intends to use the funds to launch US and grow UK and German operations.
Founded by CEO Jasper Dykes, Fly Now Pay Later is a fintech company providing an alternative payments solution exclusively for the travel sector. This enables customers to spread the cost of a trip over up to 12 monthly installments by partnering with travel merchants or directly to consumers through its Anywhere app.
Hundreds of travel companies use it to offer finance (from as little as 0% APR) to holidaymakers, who can make repayments in affordable scheduled installments. Its merchant partnerships range from SME travel operators to leading operators like Malaysian Airlines, Lastminute.com and TravelUp.
London-based insurtech Sprout.ai that assures to settle insurance claims process in just 24 hours has now announced to have bagged £8 million in Series A funding.
The investment round was led by Octopus Ventures, one of the largest and most active early-stage investors in Europe. Even existing investors, including Amadeus Capital Partners, Techstars and Playfair Capital, also participated in the round.
Sprout.ai will use the investment to support hiring and plans to recruit top talent into its product, operations, delivery, and technical teams. Also, it intends to grow its enterprise sales and partner networks. Apparently, the insurtech company intends to make sure that customers can receive the solution quickly by accelerating pipeline deployment and customer onboarding. Sprout.ai also announced that it would use the investment in R&D with an increased focus on OCR and NLP. This way, it aims to grab the position of segment leader in claims automation.
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Cumulus Neuroscience, formerly known as BrainWaveBank, a Belfast, UK – based provider of “real-world” clinical trial data and AI-powered insights, raised £6m in funding.
The round was led by the Dementia Discovery Fund (DDF) joined by LifeArc, a medical research charity, and the UK Future Fund.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate the development of CNS therapies.
Led by CEO Ronan Cunningham, Cumulus is a provider of “real-world” clinical trial data and AI-powered insights via an integrated biomarker platform co-developed with some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies.
The company’s integrated solution is a platform capable of:
- capturing frequent, longitudinal measurements of brain activity synchronously with a comprehensive range of functional and symptomatic domains outside of the clinic, and
- providing insights, powered by AI techniques, to support clinical trial decision making and execution
This integrated platform, built on both proprietary expertise and partnerships with proven leaders in their field, remotely captures large amounts of real-world lab-quality data. Across the time-course of a clinical trial, mobile device-based assessments and simultaneous brain activity recordings track the full spectrum of drug mechanisms, neurophysiological functions, and patient symptoms, all in a user’s home.
Cumulus Neuroscience has developed a first-in-class home usable EEG headset that can objectively probe neuronal integrity, network connectivity and the strategies the brain uses to compensate for neuronal damage. Uniquely, these EEG signals are synchronised with mobile device-based functional assessments of 4 neurofunctional domains: cognition, mood, language, and sleep. The platform provides secure cloud-based data storage and a machine learning architecture to safely analyse composite behavioural, physiological, and functional data.
TV ad spending in the US reached its highest point ever in 2018, a year that featured the Winter Olympics and a midterm congressional election—except no one realized it was a peak at the time. Linear TV had been stagnating for several years, though in early March 2020, the combo of the Summer Olympics and a big presidential campaign season looked set to generate a record $72.00 billion in US TV ad spending that year.
The political ad spending did come, but nothing else about last year went as expected for TV, and spending on that media type declined by 12.5% year over year, rather than increasing by our pre-pandemic estimate of 2.0%. While TV ad spending will rise again this year, by 6.7%, we don’t expect it to reach 2018 levels ever again.
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Apple has posted record revenues for its fiscal 2021 second quarter, with sales of its Mac desktop computers hitting an all-time high of $9.1 billion.
Overall revenues hit $89.6 billion for the quarter ending in March 2021, a rise of 54% year-on-year, the majority of which came from sales of the iPhone, at $47 billion.
International sales accounted for 67% of the quarter’s revenue, with fiscal second-quarter sales to China nearly doubling.
Demand for Macs has surged during the past year of mass remote work, although Apple CEO Tim Cook has also suggested that consumers have responded strongly to the new M1 chip, its in-house processor for Mac computers.
"Both of those things happening at once really supercharged the Mac sales. The last three quarters on Mac have been the strongest three quarters ever in the history of the Mac," Cook said, speaking to Reuters.
Despite this, the company warned that the ongoing global chip shortage could affect the supply of iPads and Macs, with CFO Luca Maestri estimating revenues could fall as much as $4 billion as a result.
It emerged earlier this month that Apple was facing significant delays to its iPad and MacBook shipments. Apple had reportedly postponed part of its component orders for its iPad and MacBook devices from the first half of 2021 to the second half.
Cisco’s CEO Chuck Robbins predicted this week that the global semiconductor shortage will last for at least another six months and that supply was unlikely to be fully resolved until 2022. He added the shortage had been caused by unprecedented demand for semiconductors which “go in virtually everything”.
Apple isn’t the only company to have started equipping its devices with its own custom processors in order to rely less on other companies. Amazon is reportedly getting ready to make its own networking chips for its internal IT infrastructure and AWS, it was reported last month.
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Manna is an Irish food delivery startup that builds and operates unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that perform high-speed, last-mile deliveries of food, groceries and pharmacy foods or supplies of up to 3 kg. Now, the UK company just raised $25 million (nearly £18 million) Series A funding.
Draper Esprit, a London-based leading venture capital firm that invests in and develops high-growth digital tech businesses, led the investment round in Manna. The other investors in the drone delivery startup include Team Europe, DST Global and existing investors Dynamo Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, and Elkstone.
Manna sees a huge appetite for a greener, quieter, safer, and faster delivery service. As a result, the company will use the investment to expand operations and offer its services to more customers. Already, it is working with partners to deliver grocery products, takeaways, and pharmaceutical supplies.
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Kry, a Swedish healthcare platform which connects patients with doctors, has raised $300m, which it says will accelerate European expansion plans.
The funding round was led by CPP Investments and Fidelity Management and Research LLC.
Kry uses video consultation technology to allow clinicians to triage patients. The company says it now wants to expand into secure patient messaging, personalised treatment plans and greater mental health triage tools.
“We have played a leading role in the digitisation of healthcare across Europe and will continue to play a leading role in the creation of a global digital healthcare ecosystem,” said CEO and cofounder Johannes Schildt.
But how does Kry, which operates as Livi in the UK and France, compare to the other big European healthtech startups also on a mission to become the healthcare super app?
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