News
Behind closed doors, Google is engaged in a bitter standoff with the online travel industry. The issue is global but German travel companies have been particularly outspoken. Activity booking platform GetYourGuide, hotel finder Trivago, and Airbnb rival HomeToGo have been feuding with the search giant about their unpaid advertising bills since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
Unlike Facebook and Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Google has not been overly accommodating when it came to delaying or reducing unpaid bills. Facebook offered some online travel companies an immediate 60-day delay. Bing immediately offered payment delays of at least 90 days, with ongoing review, should the recovery not start.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, has yet to decide whether to investigate the case and it has not offered further comment.
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Capita has scored a hefty contract with Transport for London that includes sending the body's on-prem IT systems for the Congestion Charge, and the Low and Ultra Low Emission Zones (ULEZ), into the cloud.
TfL hired Capita to manage tech for the Congestion Charge when it was first established in 2003. It then replaced the integrator in 2009 with IBM only to return the contracted work back to Capita in 2014.
The latest five-year £355m renewal from October 2021 comprises an extension to further work on the Congestion charge's digitisation, and other fresh elements such as the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone to include the inner London area bounded by the North and South Circular Roads.
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Popular London fintech Revolut recorded post-tax losses of £107.4m last year, despite strong growth in customer numbers and revenues. The five-year-old company more than tripled its losses from 2018, which stood at £32.8m, according to the company’s annual report for 2019, published today.
This comes alongside a similar widening of losses at digital banking competitors Monzo and Starling. Monzo’s pre-tax losses grew to £115.4m for 2019 while Starling recorded a loss of £53.6m.
Revolut chief executive Nikolay Storonsky said in a statement he was “pleased” with the company’s progress last year. Indeed, the fintech also posted strong revenues of £162.7m in 2019; a 180% increase from 2018, when it reported revenues of £58.2m. That falls just shy of predictions it would triple yearly revenues in 2019, targeting £180m in sales.
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BigCommerce, an ecommerce startup based in Austin, priced its shares at $24 apiece on Tuesday, raising more than $216 million. BigCommerce’s stock opened at $68 on Wednesday, with the price going as high as $91.80 around 12:35 p.m. ET. The company’s shares trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker BIGC.
If a startup’s stock surging like crazy on its first day of trading sounds familiar, it’s because it’s been happening a lot lately. BigCommerce is one of a long string of companies to see their stock open well over its IPO price when it hits the public markets. It’s definitely a change of pace from earlier this year, considering the long IPO lull for tech companies following COVID-19 being declared a pandemic.
BigCommerce raised at least $219 million in funding as a private company from investors including GGV Capital, General Catalyst and SoftBank. It reported $33 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2020 and $4 million in losses during the same period. BigCommerce isn’t profitable, but most startups going public aren’t these days.
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When BigCommerce, the Texas-based Shopify competitor, first announced an IPO price range, the numbers looked a little light. With a range of just $18 to $20 per share, it appeared that the firm was targeting a valuation of around $1.18 billion to $1.31 billion.
Given that BigCommerce had revenue of “between $35.5 million and $35.8 million” in Q2 2020, up a little over 30% from the year-ago period (and better margins than Shopify) its implied revenue multiple that its IPO price range indicated felt low. At the time, TechCrunch wrote that “BigCommerce feels cheap at its current multiple,” and that if you added “recent market exuberance for cloud shares that we’ve see in other IPOs … it feels even more underpriced.”
BigCommerce boosted its IPO range by 16.7% at its lower end and 15% at the upper end. At its new prices BigCommerce is worth between $1.38 billion and $1.51 billion.
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The UK Government has commenced a review into the nation's fintech industry, viewed as a key lynchpin in the country's economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. The independent Fintech Strategic Review, led by Ron Kalifa OBE, former CEO of Worldpay, will "establish priority areas for industry, policy makers, and regulators to explore in order to support the ongoing success of the UK fintech sector".
The UK fintech industry is estimated to be worth around £7 billion to the economy and employs around 60,000 people nationwide.
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Healthtech is a hefty sector, spanning digital health, femtech, pharma, AI-assisted diagnostics, drug discovery and plenty more. It makes money too, and a lot of it. In 2019, global healthtech investment totalled a staggering $7.4bn, with some of Europe’s healthtech companies landing big funding rounds.
Last year’s biggest European healthtech deal came from London-based unicorn Babylon Health which raised $550m, while this year Stockholm-based digital health startup Kry raised $155m and Paris-based health insurance provider Alan raised $54m.
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BigCommerce, which provides e-commerce services to merchants, has filed to go public. The Austin, Texas, based e-commerce company raised over $200 million while private. The company’s IPO filing lists a $100 million placeholder figure for its IPO raise.
The company is going from strength to strength based on performance in 2019 compared to 2018, and Q1 2020 in contrast to Q1 2019:
- In 2019, BigCommerce’s revenue grew to $112.1 million, a gain of around 22% from its 2018 result of $91.9 million.
- In Q1 2020, BigCommerce’s revenue grew to $33.2 million, up around 30% from its Q1 2019 result of $25.6 million.
If the company’s revenue growth acceleration continues in the most recent period — bearing in mind that e-commerce as a segment has proven attractive to many businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic — BigCommerce’s will have timed the IPO very well.
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Thrasio, the largest acquirer of Amazon businesses and one of the top 25 sellers on Amazon, today announced that it has raised $260 million in a Series C financing led by Advent International, one of the largest and most experienced global private equity investors.
The latest round was raised at a $1 billion pre-money valuation, making Thrasio the fastest US company ever to reach profitable unicorn status. Thrasio acquires category-leading Amazon third-party private label businesses, and then seamlessly onboards, optimizes, and operates those brands.
The company drives blistering rates of organic growth through best-in-class marketing, product development, operations, and supply chain management.
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London-based VC Nauta Capital has announced its fifth fund with a first close at €120 million.
Nauta Tech Invest V is expected to exceed the firm’s previous fund, which landed at €155 million in 2016, and which would bring assets under management over half a billion euros. Operating from its three hubs in London, Barcelona and Munich, the firm plans to invest in companies mainly based in the UK, Spain and Germany, though is open to other continental European countries as well. The main rule is that the B2B software startup is capital-efficient.
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