News
Edinburgh-based TravelNest, an advertising optimisation platform for holiday rental owners, has raised £3m in Seed funding.
Early-stage venture firms Pentech, Mangrove Capital Partners and Frontline Ventures participated in the round.
Mark Logal, former COO of Skyscanner, also invested and will be joining the firm’s board.
To read more, click here.
The findings come in a major new report from venture capital firm Atomico which signals a feared Brexit effect on the industry has not materialised.
Investors have ploughed $5.4bn into the UK's tech companies in 2017, figures from Dealroom show, more than double the amount of its nearest rival Germany.
And the country remains the number one destination for tech talent, attracting 20 per cent of all international migrants in European tech, LinkedIn data demonstrates, and is home to more professional developers than any other country.
To read more, click here,
What if you could play with landmarks instead of just touring them? Nexto is turning audio guides into games to make sightseeing more interactive. Launching today as part of TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin‘s Battlefield competition, Nexto is partnering with tourist destinations to help them attract more visitors and earn more money to fund culture.
To read more, click here.
For every thriving billion-dollar unicorn, there are endless numbers of start-ups that have passed onto the other side — laying off their engineers with their matching, branded t-shirts; closing down their game rooms filled with ping-pong tables; and leaving heartfelt goodbye notes for customers on their soon-to-be defunct websites.
To see who the 10 startups that died in 2017, click here.
User-generated Amazon reviews are one of the most important ways that consumers find products and decide what to buy. So much so that Amazon has consistently shown itself to be Google’s competitor in e-commerce search. Almost all Amazon product reviews are written but, as business research firm L2 wrote, Amazon is now pivoting to video.
To read more about Amazon's new video strategy, click here.
Investors need to dig deeper into robotics portfolios to better understand the companies they are exposed to, according to Robo Global's EMEA CEO, Richard Lightbound.
Lightbound said robotics is not a mature theme and there is still room for this sector to grow beyond its relatively limited and concentrated universe.
To read more, click here.
How to keep the offspring occupied when smartphone games, YouTube, and Netflix are all so alluring is a challenge in itself. (Especially when you’ve had a knackering week and you’re at your wit’s end).
This is why Virginie Charles-Dear and co-founder Sara Barokas started toucanBox.
It’s a subscription craft kit that drops through the letterbox once a month, making sure the kids have all the arty supplies they need, however busy you might be.
To read more, click here.
commerce has long been an industry in which VCs have had success. Indeed, several of Europe's biggest VC investments and exits have come in this sector. Just this year, Rocket Internet-backed food delivery marketplace Delivery Hero priced its IPO at the top of its range at €25.50, netting the company €465 million and giving it a valuation of roughly €4.4 billion. Elsewhere, Deliveroo, one of the most valuable startups in Europe, completed a huge $482 million Series F round in early November.
To read more, click here.
European startups are on pace to collect a record $19 billion from investors this year, despite concerns the U.K.'s departure from the European Union will weigh on the region's technology industry, according to an annual report by the London-based venture capital firm Atomico.
To read more, click here.
Replenishment. It’s a problem. Every ecommerce company needs to do it, but very few have worked out a way that works well for them.
To see how companies tackle replenishment, click here.