News
The venture capital arm of Salesforce has closed its second fund for European tech startups at $125m (£98.7m), with a renewed focus on enterprise cloud.
Salesforce Ventures said it was the most active corporate VC in Europe last year, making investments across the spectrum in digital payments, artificial intelligence and blockchain.
It follows the software giant's first fund, launched in Europe in 2015 at $100m. Previous British investments from Salesforce's first fund include Gocardless, Privitar and Onfido.
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Online shopping platform Zalando is looking to reduce waste and carbon dioxide emissions. Makeup products will now be shipped in paper bags instead of plastic, and the company is testing reusable packaging for returns, it announced on Wednesday.
Ecommerce must become more environmentally friendly, said board member David Schneider at the firm’s AGM in Berlin. This will be key to the company’s success.
However, in the last financial year Zalando saw average order values decline, triggering more shipments regardless of packaging.
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Money Dashboard, the personal finance app, raised more than £2 million within 24 hours yesterday after launching Scotland’s biggest fintech crowdfunding exercise privately to its user base.
The Edinburgh-based company, now valued at £21m, smashed its initial target of £1.5m within 45 minutes and over the course of the day saw 1,037 users invest in the business. The cash call on the Crowdcube platform is now open to the public.
Money Dashboard’s management app helps more than 200,000 people handle their finances. The app connects to over 60 financial institutions. It generates revenue from insightful market research based on anonymised banking data. This gives data clients critical insight into how businesses, such as Deliveroo or Uber, are performing.
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OpenFin, a New York and London-based operating system (OS) of finance, raised $17m in Series C funding.
The round, which brought OpenFin’s total amount of venture funding to $40m, was led by Wells Fargo with participation from Barclays and existing investors including Bain Capital Ventures, J.P. Morgan and Pivot Investment Partners.
The company intends to use the funds for further product innovation, including its new Cloud Services offering, which enables banks, asset managers, wealth managers and hedge funds to provide their own private app stores for employees and customers out of the box.
Led by Mazy Dar, CEO and Co-Founder, OpenFin provides a desktop operating system which enables financial services firms to build new applications with modern web technology while enabling secure integration with legacy applications.
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Angela Ahrednts's, the high-profile luxury retail executive, appointment comes at a time when the start-up is pushing for more luxury home listings.
The highly successful executive joins the home-sharing start-up after a five-year stint overhauling Apple Inc.’s retail operations and more than eight years as chief executive of British high-end fashion house Burberry Group Plc. Airbnb, which is preparing for a public stock offering next year, has been broadening its mission to become an end-to-end travel company, and has been moving to add more luxury listings to its six million homes on offer.
Ahrendts has been consistently named a Top 100 Global Executive in rankings by Forbes and Fortune. During her tenure at Burberry, Ahrendts transformed the company into a global luxury brand, tripling the business.
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Deliveroo, the on-demand food delivery app, has announced that Amazon is leading a new £450m Series G preferred shared funding round. Other investors in the round are T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Management and Research Company, and Greenoaks.
The new investment will contribute to growing Deliveroo’s engineering team in its London office, expanding Deliveroo’s delivery reach to target new customers, expand ‘Editions’, and develop new products for customers to offer a more personalised experience.
This takes the total Deliveroo has raised to date to $1.53bn.
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Mobeus has invested £5m of growth capital in Arkk, a UK-based Software as a Service provider that digitises regulatory reporting, which is increasingly required by authorities worldwide.
Founded in 2009, Arkk recently launched for:sight, a new software platform that simplifies burdensome processes, reduces the potential for non-compliance, and frees up the finance function to focus on value-adding tasks. Arkk has over 800 clients in 20 countries, including a quarter of the FTSE 350 and 10 of the top 20 UK accounting firms.
Mobeus’s capital will support Arkk’s plans to invest in sales, marketing and new product development to accelerate its strong position in the UK tax and regulatory reporting market.
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Pleo, the Danish fintech that offers a “business spending platform” that lets companies easily issue employees with cards and manage expenditure, has raised $56m in Series B funding.
The round was led by Stripes, the New York-based growth fund, with participation from existing investors, Kinnevik, Creandum and Founders.The new funding values the company just under $500m and brings the total amount raised to $79m.
The Pleo MasterCard is a prepaid card that can be charged up and handed out to employees, either physically or virtually. This is then coupled with Pleo’s backend system and apps. Features of the software includes the ability to categorise spending automatically and capture receipts associated with each transaction.
Pleo will use the new funding to expand its staff from 120 to 400 employees by the end of 2020. It also plans to accelerate product development, which will include adding credit, invoices, mobile payments, a vendor marketplace, VAT reclaims and more.
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DocPlanner, a healthcare platform founded in Poland, has raised a funding round of €80m led by One Peak Partners and Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, with participation from existing investors Piton Capital and ENERN Investments. This round brings the total amount raised by the company to €130m.
The company's products include an appointment booking platform for patients with reviews and search, as well as a SaaS tool for doctors that digitises their workflow and could help reduce the number of patients missing appointments. The company says that it currently serves 30 million patients and processes 1.5 million bookings every month.
Founded in Poland in 2012, DocPlanner currently employs more than 1,000 people across its offices in Warsaw, Barcelona, Istanbul, Rome, Mexico City and Curitiba. It operates in 15 countries, with a total of more than 2 million healthcare professionals with a total of 2.4 million patient reviews listed on its local websites.
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Blackbullion, the edtech company transforming students’ lives through financial literacy, has secured a second-round investment of £400K.
This second tranche of funding was led by Lord Stanley Fink, who will also join the startup’s board as Chairman. Additional investments came from MPA Education, Emerge Education and Jisc, the membership organisation providing digital solutions for UK education and research.
It brings the total raised by Blackbullion to £1 million and will be directed towards new product development and expanding its existing suite of solutions for universities.
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