News
In May, Checkout.com became the UK’s latest unicorn startup, and the first to reach such a valuation through a Series A funding round. They’d kept very quiet up until this point, having bootstrapped their way to a turnover of £35m in 2017 after just five years of operations.
Also raising in May, WorldRemit also became a unicorn through their Series D funding round, reaching a valuation of over $900m. A close competitor to leading international transfer startup Transferwise and the industry incumbent Western Union, WorldRemit allows users to transfer money to international accounts. This service is mainly used by expat workers looking to return earnings to family and friends abroad.
Monzo needs little introduction, but is without a doubt one of the UK’s two leading consumer challenger banks, alongside Revolut. This large funding round will help the company roll out its app in the US, as it seeks to enter new markets and outcompete its myriad of rivals. This round was led by America’s most successful startup accelerator Y Combinator, via their “Continuity” growth fund.
One of the biggest raises ever by a British Insurtech startup, Zego’s funding will be used to enhance their online platform, which provides insurance products to workers in the rapidly growing gig economy. The company’s main partners include Deliveroo, Uber, Uber Eats, and Stuart, illustrating where their market lies: freelancers providing mobility services to new tech companies operating in the food delivery, courier, and ride hailing sectors. The round was led by Target Global, a Berlin-headquartered VC fund that opened a London office in April.
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A survey of over 2,500 consumers in the UK has found that online pure players experience 50% lower online sales than retailers with a physical presence.
The research, released by CACI, the consumer and location intelligence specialist, showed that online sales are an average of 106% higher within a physical store’s catchment. And this rises to 127% for fashion and 124% for the sportswear sector, demonstrating what CACI has called the ‘halo effect’ of physical retailing.
CACI explained that the so called ‘halo effect’ underpins the role stores play in influencing purchasing decisions. Over 50% of online spend is still influenced by a bricks-and-mortar store either due to click and collect or because consumers are using stores as showrooms to try on clothes before making a purchase online.
The findings come as more and more retailers choose to reduce their store portfolio to protect their business amid tough trading conditions on the UK high street. National chains including New Look, Mothercare, M&S and Boots are shutting locations and focusing on growing their online presence to adapt to the rise of online shopping. But the report reveals that completely disappearing from the high street might not be the best solution.
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Fintech startup Curve has just announced a $55 million funding round from a group of investors as part of a successful Series B funding round. This brings the startup’s valuation to $250m.
Curve’s growth has been pretty impressive over the years. In 2016, it raised $2m in a seed funding round to get its product out to the market. In 2017, the fintech raised $10m in a Series A round to boost its growth, build new features and recruit more staff.
The Series B will mark the beginning of a new era in banking – an Over-The-Top Banking Platform that provides a better banking experience, and places Curve in the top five UK consumer fintechs next to Transferwise, Monzo, Revolut and Starling.
The round is being led by Gauss Ventures, a fintech investor whose te
am has a track record of funding some of the brightest UK fintechs, as well as backing high impact technologies that reshape industries, and comes less than two years after Curve secured its Series A investment.
Curve is available in 31 European countries and plans to use the fresh funding to expand its product offering in the UK, Europe and overseas. It will officially launch into six European markets later this year: France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain, and aims to launch its operations in the US by mid next year.
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Unibuddy, a London-based edtech startup, secured $5m in Series A funding.
The round was led by Fred Destin of Stride VC.
The company intends to use the funds to:
- grow the team, which currently spans 4 continents,
- focus on US expansion, and
- create new products.
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London-based business banking fintech firm Soldo has today closed a $61m (£48.7m) series B funding round, led by Battery Ventures.
Battery joined the round as a new investor alongside Dawn Capital, and existing investors Accel and Connect Ventures. The venture capital firms have previously backed the likes of iZettle, Facebook and Slack.
Soldo, which provides businesses with a dedicated spending account to streamline expense management, has now raised a total of $82m. The funding will be used to scale into new European markets, and double its workforce in the next year.
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Universum Global has launched the findings for the UK portion of its annual Global Talent Survey which found that Google is the UK’s most desirable company to work for by graduates for the seventh consecutive year.
Universum studied 39,500 students from 97 British Universities to understand the career aspirations, goals and workplace requirements for graduates.
Whilst Google continued to prove popular with those studying business and STEM, their applicant pool continues to widen with humanities and law students both ranking the organisation in their top two and four companies to work for respectively.
The UK’s Top Business and STEM Employers 2019 include Google, J.P Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Apple.
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The government has announced a partnership between NHS and Amazon, which will allow people to access healthcare information via their Alexa devices.
From this week, the voice-assisted technology is automatically searching the official NHS website when UK users ask for health-related advice, as opposed to searching through various popular answers.
The government in England said this partnership could reduce demand on the NHS. Privacy campaigners have raised data protection concerns but Amazon say all information will be kept confidential.
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15Five, which builds software and services to help organisations and their employees evaluate their performance, as well as set and meet goals, has closed a Series B round of $30.7 million, money that it plans to use to continue building out the functionality of its core product — self-evaluations that take “15 minutes to write, 5 minutes to read” — as well as expand into new services that will sit alongside that.
This Series B is being led by Next47, the strategic investment arm of manufacturing giant Siemens. Others in the round included Matrix Partners, PointNine Capital, Jason Calacanis’s LAUNCH Fund, Newground Ventures, Bling Capital, Chaifetz Group, and Origin Ventures (which had led 15Five’s Series A). It brings the total raised to $42.6 million.
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Blaize, a London-based SaaS customer experience platform for the subscription economy, raised £2.5M in seed funding.
The round was led by Nauta Capital. In conjunction with the funding, Carles Ferrer, Nauta Capital’s London-based General Partner, will be joining Blaize’s board.
The company intends to use the funds to further enhance its platform, strengthen its leadership and operational teams, and accelerate international expansion plans.
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A new report published by Oracle shows that on average, less than 40% of companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are confident they can master their data – that is to manage, secure and gain insight from data, and use it responsibly.
Key findings:
- On average 42% of respondents do not have a data management strategy in place
- Only 4 in 10 are highly confident in their ability to manage, secure data and use their data responsibly
- Only 35% are highly confident they can manage data to generate meaningful insights
- Key departments are still not accepting both accountability and responsibility for data management
- Data security protocols are often not understood, or abided by
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