News
Nested, the U.K. estate agent that provides a cash advance to help you buy a new house before you’ve sold your old one, has raised £36 million in further funding. The round was led by Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital, and brings the less than two year old startup’s total funding to just shy of £50 million. Buying and selling houses is a pretty capital intensive business, after all. To read more click here.
Athlone Ventures, the venture capital arm of Athlone Group, has launched a $300m tech startup investment fund. Set up by Jojar Dhinsa alongside Brendan Morrissey, Athlone Ventures has been devised to support the tech and digital sectors and will seek to fund up to 15 startups a year. The fund will invest at Seed and Series A stages. To read more on this click here.
China’s juggernaut of an online-to-offline (O2O) platform Meituan-Dianping just announced a new funding round that puts an additional $4 billion in its pockets. The new investment gives the company a valuation of $30 billion, making it the fourth most valuable startup in the world. to read more, click here.
The Norwegian Consumer Council has uncovered a litany of critical vulnerabilities and privacy shortcomings in several smartwatches specifically targeted at children. Among other things, malicious agents can easily hijack control of the watches and turn them into covert spying devices, capable of listening in and keeping tabs on the children. To read more about the security risks of children's smartwatches, click here.
Smartphone ownership is virtually universal and the average internet user is spending 3 hours a day online on these devices. This is especially true for the youngest consumers (16-24s). As well as spending the longest time online more generally, half of this online time is now taking place on a mobile. to read more on this, click here.
DeepMind's latest iteration of AlphaGo — the artificial intelligence that beat world champion Go player Lee Sedol in 2016 — can learn to play the ancient game without feedback from humans or data on their past plays. Instead, the new AlphaGo Zero started with just knowledge of the rules and learned from the success of a million random moves it made against itself. To read more about AlphaGo click here.
ECI have announced its investment in Make It Cheaper, the UK's leading SME switching provider for essential bills, including energy, telecoms, and insurance. Make It Cheaper has appeared three times Sunday Times Fast Track 100 and the Company is rated as the number one SME energy intermediary by industry analysts. To read more on this deal, click here.
GMG Ventures, as the fund will be known, will seek to support early-stage businesses working on developing the next generation of media technology.
The fund will consider investments in a wide range of areas including artificial intelligence and machine learning tools for journalism; advertising technology, including new formats and fraud detection; technology used to enrich reader and customer experiences; payment technologies; and new forms of content distribution using VR, AR, audio and voice platforms.
To read more on GMG ventures, click here.
EdTech startup BridgeU has closed a £4m Series A led by Octopus Ventures. The London and Hong Kong-based company also drew support from existing backer Fresco Capital and new investor Downing Ventures. Founded in the UK in 2014, BridgeU has created a university preparation and careers guidance software, which leverages big data. To read more click here.