News
The Plum Guide, a London-based travel tech startup, has raised £5.7m in Series A funding in a round led by Octopus Ventures.
Investors in the round also included BGF Ventures and the founders of Secret Escapes, Zoopla and LoveFilm.
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Scientists have successfully built artificial intelligence that can diagnose patients with heart disease and lung cancer much earlier than human doctors.
The ability to accurately pick up these problems at a less advanced stage could not only save people from the fatal diseases, but cut huge costs to the health service.
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London-based CityStasher is building what it calls an ‘Airbnb for luggage’, a network of brick and mortar businesses across Europe that will store your luggage for a few hours after you have checked out or are waiting to check into your travel accommodation.
To help with this mission, CityStasher has raised $1.1 million in seed funding in a round led by Venture Friends, with participation from Howzat Partners, Charlotte Street Capital, and various angel investors. One of those is Big Yellow Storage CEO James Gibson, who was also an earlier backer of the startup.
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The distance between prosthetic and real is shrinking. Thanks to advances in batteries, brain-controlled robotics, and AI, today’s mechanical limbs can do everything from twist and point to grab and lift.
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Mobile commerce’s inevitable rise to dominance is no secret. Heading into the holidays a Trustlook survey suggested more people would be doing their holiday shopping via mobile, and that they felt more secure than ever about doing so.
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Ahead of going public, Spotify just announced it’s killing it on the subscriber front. As of today, Spotify has 70 million subscribers compared to Apple Music’s 30 million. Last July, Spotify had more than 60 million paid listeners and over 140 million active users.
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On Thursday, automakers Hyundai and Volkswagen both announced a new partnership with Aurora, the autonomous driving startup with a killer pedigree and good momentum early on – but they also both revealed that each is planning to deploy self-driving cars by 2021 on roads in a commercial capacity.
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Earlier today, we reported that Didi was in the process of acquiring 99, a ridesharing company in Brazil, and now the two companies have confirmed the deal as part of Didi’s plans to expand its service into Latin America.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed — we are asking — but earlier today we noted that Didi was effectively putting in $900 million — $600 million to buy out investors, plus an additional $300 million of further investment into the business and its expansion plans — effectively giving the company a valuation of $1 billion (after you add in Didi’s original $100 million investment in 99 in January of last year).
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London was the top city in Europe for technology investment last year, with more funding going into companies in the British capital than into firms based in Paris, Berlin and the next seven cities combined, data showed on Friday.
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UK peer-to-peer lending platform Funding Circle is eyeing an IPO.
According to Sky News, the firm is reportedly looking to hire advisers to oversee a £1bn-plus flotation in London, which could happen as soon as late autumn.
The firm, which launched in 2010, made headlines last year after it announced a $100m investment round led by Accel.
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