News
London-based FourthRev is a new edtech startup, which bridges the gap between universities and businesses to address the gap in digital skills. The company just announced £2.3M in a round led by Reach Capital along with existing investors Emerge Education and Dunce Capital and angel investors including US education executive Craig Pines and Charlie Songhurst, former Head of Corporate Strategy at Microsoft.
Reach Capital is a US-based education specialist VC whose portfolio includes educational trailblazers Handshake, Class Dojo and Outschool. This investment round comes after the pre-seed fundraising round of £450K in February 2020 by the company founders Jack Hylands and Omar de Silva.
Plans for rapid expansion
Headquartered in London, FourthRev intends to use the investment for rapid expansion. Currently, the company is in discussion with nearly 20 organisations and plans to double the number of higher education partners they work with in the coming months. Furthermore, the company is in discussion with 20 more organisations as it plans to double the number of higher education partners in the next 12-18 months.
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Monzo, the UK-based challenger bank that allows customers to access a range of products and services, is expected to raise a £50 million extension in Series G round from existing shareholders and a new San Francisco-based VC firm Octahedron Capital.
The new funding will take the amount raised by the digital bank during the pandemic to £175 million. It’s worth mentioning that the investment round will be carried out with the same financial terms as the rest of the rounds.
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Digital triage platform eConsult Health has closed a £7m funding round led by Gresham House Ventures and institutional investor Calculus Capital alongside existing shareholders. A spin-out of GP-led Hurley Group, eConsult Health is one of the most widely used triage services in the NHS and is currently used by over 3,200 NHS GP practices.
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Vamstar, a London-based B2B healthcare marketplace powered by AI, has secured $1.7 million (approx £1.2 million) seed funding led by btov with participation from Antler and Begin Capital.
The funding will be used to build the supplier and buyer related use-cases to accelerate growth. Also, the company is planning to expand team globally from the UK, Germany, India, and the United States by the end of 2021 with new roles — sales and marketing, product development, and data analysis.
Reinventing healthcare procurement
Founded by Praful Mehta, Richard Freeman, and Vishesh Duggar in 2020, Vamstar is reinventing healthcare procurement by using data science to connect billions of data points across the supply chain.
The platform is used for businesses and organisations connecting suppliers, such as pharmaceutical, medical device, and digital technology companies, with public and private buyers, such as hospitals, health insurances, or Group Purchasing Organisations (GPOs).
Combating supply chain stability
The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the notion of supply chain stability in the global economy. In the healthcare industry, this has led to equipment shortages in hospitals and issues with medical transportation. To combat this, Vamstar has created the world’s first AI-powered B2B healthcare marketplace.
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Founded by Oscar Health veteran Harry Ritter, M.D., in 2018, Alma aims to improve access to high-quality, affordable mental health care.
Typically, mental health providers do not accept insurance, and an average session can cost between $150 and $500, he told Crunchbase News.
Alma’s platform enables providers to accept insurance. It also provides a member directory, client-matching service, scheduling and billing functions, as well as education, training and a community for support, he said. In addition, Alma works with the insurance companies on behalf of the providers, which reduces session costs down to an average of $18.
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Divvy Homes — a startup that is out to help more people realize that dream by buying a house and renting it back to them while they build equity — has just closed on $110 million in Series C funding. Tiger Global Management led the round, which also saw participation from a slew of other investors, including GGV Capital, Moore Specialty Credit, JAWS Ventures and existing backers such as a16z. The latest financing brings Divvy’s total debt and equity raised since its 2017 inception to over $500 million, with about one-third of that raised in equity and two-thirds in debt.
The startup last raised $43 million in Series B funding from the likes of Affirm CEO Max Levchin and homebuilder Lennar (via its venture arm), among others. In fact, Divvy — which was co-founded by Adena Hefets, Nick Clark and Alex Klarfeld — was incubated in Levchin’s startup studio HVF.
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Buy-now-pay-later products are rapidly increasing in popularity, with the volume of transactions tripling in 2020 as the pandemic drove online shopping, and there is now a significant risk that these agreements could cause harm to consumers.
By announcing plans to legislate to bring interest-free buy-now-pay-later into regulation, the government is acting swiftly to ensure people can continue to benefit from these products with the right protections.
The announcement comes as a review of the unsecured credit market, led by Christopher Woolard, recommends bringing interest-free buy-now-pay-later into FCA supervision.
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Thousands of jobs remain at risk after online fashion retailer Asos struck a £295m deal to buy four brands from failed retail group Arcadia.
Asos is buying the Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge and HIIT brands, but not the shops.
Sir Philip Green's Arcadia group fell into administration in November last year, casting doubt over the future of its brands and 13,000 jobs.
Asos is paying £265m for the brands and a further £30m for the stock.
About 300 people currently employed by the brands in design, buying and retail partnerships will transfer to Asos, but a question mark hangs over thousands more jobs.
About 70 stores with 2,500 employees are expected to close.
Within the past few weeks 50 stores have already closed, with the loss of about 2,000 jobs.
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InPost SA soared in Amsterdam trading after its shareholders raised 2.8 billion euros ($3.4 billion) in Europe’s biggest initial public offering since 2018 amid an online shopping boom that’s driving up demand for the Polish company’s automated parcel lockers.
Stockholders including Advent International, Templeton Strategic Emerging Markets Fund and PZU Fundusz sold 175 million existing shares at 16 euros each, the top end of an initial range, the company said. The IPO of the 35% stake values InPost, which didn’t raise any money in the offering, at 8 billion euros. InPost jumped 26% to 20.22 euros at 10:08 a.m. in Amsterdam.
InPost is joining other beneficiaries of stay-home orders in going public. Online retailers THG Plc and Allegro.eu SA listed in the U.K. and Poland, respectively, last year, while virtual greeting-card company Moonpig Group Plc is taking orders for its London IPO.
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HR and finance software provider Workday has acquired Denmark-based SaaS company and ’employee success platform’ provider Peakon for roughly $700 million in cash.
Workday said that with Peakon, it will “provide organizations with a continuous listening platform, including real-time visibility into employee experience, sentiment, and productivity”, in an effort to help drive employee engagement and improve organisational performance in a world that has been profoundly changed by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Bringing Peakon into the Workday family will be very compelling to our customers – especially following an extraordinary past year that has magnified the importance of having a constant pulse on employee sentiment in order to keep people engaged and productive,” said Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and co-CEO of Workday.
Originally launched back in 2016, Peakon was backed by the likes of Atomico, EQT Ventures, IDInvest Partners, Balderton Capital, and Sunstone/Heartcore, raising about $68 million along the way.
The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Workday’s fiscal year 2022, ending April 30, 2021, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.