News
Swedish card reading startup iZettle has raised €40 million (£35.2 million) to fund growth, just months after its last funding round and amid increased market competition in Europe.
iZettle announced on Wednesday that it had raised the sum from VC firm Dawn and The Fourth Swedish National Pension Fund, which manages SEK 348 billion (£30.9 billion) of assets. Existing investors also took part in the funding round.
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OTA Insight, a UK company developing software for the hotel industry, has raised $20 million led by Eight Roads Ventures alongside F-Prime Capital Partners.
The startup’s cloud-based platform helps hotels manage their revenue streams and profits by monitoring competitor rates, demand forecasts, and reviews in real time. The platform currently has 16,000 properties registered, including hotel groups like Hilton, Best Western, and Accor.
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Google and Facebook, the ‘digital duopoly’, account for 84% of global digital media and are growing while the rest are shrinking. That’s bad for society, but a mandatory break-up looks further away than ever.
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China’s massive Singles’ Day ecommerce festival has grown to surpass pretty much every other online shopping event in the world. The event, which began as a sort of anti-Valentine’s Day for lonely college students to celebrate singledom, was usurped by ecommerce giant Alibaba in 2009 and has grown into an increasingly worldwide event since.
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WorldRemit, a London-based startup with some 2 million users that offers a quick way for people to send money to each other with a focus on developing markets.
The company has picked up $40 million — a Series C round that sources tell us brings the company’s valuation to around $668 million.
The funding was led by a new, strategic investor: LeapFrog Investments, the firm founded in 2007 and backed by billions from the likes of Prudential, JP Morgan and the Omidyar Network specifically to make investments into financial and healthcare businesses improving services in emerging markets, specifically in regions like Africa and Asia.
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Viola FinTech, an Israeli tech investment group, has raised $100m to back financial technology startups across the world.
The fund drew investment from banks and insurance companies including Scotiabank – credited with being Israel’s second largest bank – The Travelers Companies and Bank Hapoalim.
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Scaling great startups into profitable, productive global powerhouses is the ambition of many nations. A report launched by Mind the Bridge and Cisco today names the UK as the tech scaleup capital of Europe.
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The Irish government has reached an agreement with Apple to start collecting the €13bn ($15bn) owed by the tech giant.
“We have now reached agreement with Apple in relation to the principles and operation of the escrow fund,” finance minister Paschal Donohoe said in Brussels in quotes confirmed by Ireland’s finance ministry.
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Distilling a generally-accepted definition of what qualifies as artificial intelligence (AI) has become a revived topic of debate in recent times. Some have rebranded AI as “cognitive computing” or “machine intelligence”, while others incorrectly interchange AI with “machine learning”. This is in part because AI is not one technology. It is in fact a broad field constituted of many disciplines, ranging from robotics to machine learning.
To read what the 6 areas of AI and Machine Learning to watch out for, click here.
Graduway, a London, U.K.-based provider of alumni software, raised $12.7m in growth funding.
Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE), made the investment joining existing investors Gigi Levy, Massa Innovations and SaaS Capital.
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