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As per a report, there are over 31.5 million cars registered in the UK, in 2018. The insurance industry also paid out over £13.4 billion in claims back in 2017, which goes to show how crucial vehicle insurance is. Helping companies save money, the London-based insurtech Humn offers real-time data-driven fleet insurance. The startup has now secured £10.1M funding in its series A funding round.
This latest funding round for Humn was led by notable names such as BXR Group and Shell Ventures. Additionally, Hambro Perks Leaders Fund and Woodside Holdings also participated in the round. In a conversation with UKTN, the company’s CEO Mark Musson reveals that the fresh funds will be utilised to boost their teams by hiring people across commercial functions, sales, marketing and customer success.
“We are investing in our underwriting and compliance teams as well. As always, we are adding the brightest minds we can find in our engineering and data science departments,” Musson notes. Furthermore, he tells us that the company will be building out its European operations and adding core country teams in the Netherlands and Germany, initially with a phased entry in Spain and France.
Amory Poulden, Venture Principal at Shell Ventures, investor and Board Director Humn comments, “In a sector dominated by opaque and siloed offerings, Humn is rapidly establishing itself as the transparent, fair and flexible option for the modern fleet. Since our initial investment, we have been continually impressed with the whole team’s clarity of vision and speed of execution. We are excited to deepen our commitment to helping Humn become the market leader for commercial fleet insurance.”
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London-based fintech 9fin is a provider of data, news and predictive analytics for debt capital markets. The fintech just announced that it has grabbed £8 million funding in a Series A round to fuel its US expansion.
The investment round was led by Redalpine along with existing investor Fly Ventures. Also, angel investors Paul Forster, Co-Founder of Indeed, and Alan Morgan, Co-Founder of MMC Ventures participated in the round along with Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital and a number of high-net-worth individuals. With this, the total investment raised by 9fin accounts for over £10 million.
9fin will use the proceeds of this round to expand into the US market and is opening an office in New York following strong client demand. Initial hiring in New York will focus on content, analytics and business operations. 9fin is also hiring across its sales, marketing, product and engineering teams. It expects to double its current team of 30 before the end of 2021.
Steven Hunter, Co-Founder and CEO of 9fin, commented, ”We’re delighted to have the backing of new and existing investors in this round. The Redalpine team has a very strong track record of FinTech investments. We’re excited to welcome Aleksandra to our board, lending her capital markets and operational expertise to our team. In the last year we’ve used our analytics to predict multi-billion dollar deals, saved analysts hours of manual data extraction and allowed funds to spot lucrative trading opportunities.”
Aleksandra Laska, Partner at Redalpine, added “We are delighted to back Steven and Huss, they’re an incredibly driven team who have the ambition, network, and know-how to turn 9fin into a massive business. They have deep industry expertise in debt capital markets and have experienced the pain of poor-quality information first hand. Faster, better-quality data has huge value within this space. Whether that’s predictive analytics to spot new business opportunities or freeing up an analyst team’s time through automating the manual collection of data.”
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9fin, a London, UK-based provider of data, news and predictive analytics for debt capital markets, raised £8M in Series A funding.
The round was led by Redalpine, alongside previous investors Fly Ventures and angel investors Paul Forster, Co-Founder of Indeed, Alan Morgan, Co-Founder of MMC Ventures, Ilavska Vuillermoz Capital and a number of high net worth individuals.
The company, which has to date secured over £10M in funding, including the support from Seedcamp and AI Seed Fund, intends to use the funds to accelerate its expansion into the US, with the opening of a New York office following increased demand from existing customers in Europe.
Co-founded by Steven Hunter and Hussam El-Sheikh, 9fin provides intelligence for the debt capital markets community. Its tech platform uses machine learning and computer vision to extract and standardise debt capital markets data in real time to allow customers to save time, spot trading opportunities and increase their share of the $65bn of debt capital markets fees earned by advisors each year.
Product offerings include: News alerts, Financials, Covenants, Comparables, Deal predictions, ESG, and Search.
9fin serves nine of the top 10 investment banks, funds managing over €52bn of high yield assets under management and award-winning advisory and law firm franchises.
Initial hiring in New York will focus on content, analytics and business operations. 9fin is also hiring across its sales, marketing, product and engineering teams. It expects to double its current team of 30 people before the end of the year.
Femtech refers to technologies specifically focused on women’s health, covering a broad range of areas from hormonal disorders and period pain to birth control, pelvic health, and sexual wellness. Femtech seeks to address women’s health issues through new product development.
Regardless of how it is perceived, femtechs are getting popular in VC portfolios, which is good progress. Recently, FemTech Lab was opened in London to encourage more innovative companies to establish their presence in this industry. Having said that, here are 10 UK-based femtech startups that were founded by female entrepreneurs.
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The world’s first live mental health platform based in London, MindLabs, has raised $3.5 million (nearly £2.5 million) in a seed funding round. The investment came from PROfounders Capital, Slack Fund, the executive chairman and ex-CEO of Sky Jeremy Darroch, and existing investors Seedcamp and Passion Capital.
This seed investment is the second financing round raised by MindLabs and it comes ahead of World Mental Health Day 2021, which is celebrated on October 10 led by PROfounders Capital, the first investors in GetYourGuide and MADE.com. This round comes 11 months after the pre-seed funding round led by Passion Capital along with Seedcamp, and Cazoo founder Alex Chesterman.
MindLabs intends to use the funds to double its investment in product and is actively hiring roles across Engineering, Product, Marketing and Content teams in London and Berlin.
Sean Seton-Rogers, Partner at PROfounders Capital, said: “We back great teams solving massive consumer pain points. Mental health problems are unfortunately growing fast for this generation, but there’s also increased awareness of the problem. We believe that MindLabs can make a meaningful impact on helping train the mind.”
Jason Spinell, Head of Slack Fund, said: “At the Slack Fund, we’re wholly committed to investing in founders who are driving the future of work and building solutions that make work life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive for people everywhere. MindLabs directly addresses this by
providing a means for people increasingly affected by changes to working patterns and hybrid or remote working to look after their mental wellness with leading experts and quantitative analysis to track wellness over time.”
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Besides COVID-19, type 2 diabetes is the most pressing healthcare problem faced by many right now. In the UK, it is estimated that one in 10 people over the age of 40 is diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Of these, 60 percent are said to suffer from a complication of the disease along with major risks, including amputation, heart attack, and stroke.
Recent evidence shows that 45-60 percent of those suffering from type 2 diabetes can completely reverse the condition via a combination of diet and behavioural changes. This reversal has the potential to not only change millions of lives across the world but also to save healthcare systems billions of pounds. These interventions have been delivered on a small scale for research and in NHS pilots.
London-based digital health startup Habitual is working hard to deliver a scaled digital intervention to millions of patients in need of it. The company provides digital prediabetes and type 2 diabetes remission programmes that help patients to reverse disease and live medication-free.
Today, Habitual announced it has closed $2.3 million (nearly £1.7 million) in a seed funding round led by Berlin-based early-stage investor Atlantic Food Labs along with existing investors Seedcamp and MMC. Also, Oxford Seed Fund, an initiative of the Entrepreneurship Centre at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford took part in the round.
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As per reports, the overnight stay market on a global scale is estimated to be worth $1.2 trillion as the travel industry’s recovery is accelerating post the pandemic. Despite this growth, looking for the perfect stay can feel like a lottery with over 15 million homes online to choose from. Adding to this, the customer reviews are often misleading or untruthful.
London-based Plum Guide, an online platform for high-end vacation homes and homestay experiences, offers highly curated travel experiences.
In a recent development, Plum Guide has secured $9 million (nearly £6.6 million) in a funding round led by Beringea, the transatlantic venture capital firm. Also, existing investors Talis Capital, Hearst Ventures and Latitude took part in the investment round. Plum Guide will use the investment to accelerate its rapid climb towards boasting the definitive list of the world’s best vacation homes, As of now, the company has properties in over 500 destinations across 29 countries.
Plum Guide also offers its community of hosts, guests and fans a chance to participate in this round via a crowdfunding campaign with Crowdcube. It invites those who have a passion for travel and who expect perfection from their homestays to join world-class institutional investors excited by Plum Guide’s distinctive vision; to create a world-class trust mark for travel.
This latest funding round signals the anticipated travel boom in 2022 and beyond, amongst global travellers who prefer hotels in favour of alternative and more personal accommodation.
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SenseOn, a London, UK-based cyber security company, raised $20m in Series A funding.
The round was led by Eight Roads Ventures and was supported by existing investors MMC Ventures, Crane Venture Partners and Winton Ventures Limited.
The company intends to use the funds to further R&D, as well as scaling its go-to-market team. To support this next phase of growth, SenseOn added veteran software go-to-market leader Jeremy Duggan – who has previously taken three SaaS companies – AppDynamics, Bladelogic and Ascential – to unicorn status – to its board.
Founded in 2017 by David Atkinson, SenseOn brings together cyber security experts, former government cyber operatives and applied machine learning specialists. It combines broad detection and response capabilities across traditionally siloed security domains with AI-based automation and an open security data cloud. Its unified platform proactively detects and shuts down threats including ransomware, hacking / data theft and malicious insiders, solving critical security challenges in a rapidly evolving IT landscape. It’s also suited to hybrid and remote work settings as it can be rapidly deployed across any endpoint or network inside and outside the traditional perimeter.
Headquartered in London, Heydoc is a cloud-based clinical system covering medical and administrative tasks of healthcare providers. Now, the integrated clinical operating system and electronic health record (EHR) has raised $8.3 million (nearly £6.1 million) in a Series A funding round.
The investment round was led by Smedvig Capital with existing investors Hambro Perks, Triple Point Ventures and InHealth Ventures. This round brings the total amount raised to date by Heydoc to $12 million.
The proceeds will be used for further expansion in the UK healthcare market, where Heydoc is rapidly growing, and to expand its product offering to its existing and new clients. The raise will also allow Heydoc to expand internationally beyond their current nascent international footprint. The bulk of the raise will be used to grow the team which currently stands at 30 employees.
Christoph Lippuner, Co-Founder & CEO at Heydoc, commented: “We’re very excited to have Smedvig Capital as a partner in this new chapter of our adventure. This new raise will help us accelerate our growth in the UK, focus on our product and expand its capabilities, as well as go after international markets. Innovating and contributing to a transforming healthcare industry, profoundly impacted by regulatory changes, new patient expectations and a global pandemic, is both fascinating and rewarding. There is so much to be done in this industry and Heydoc is barely scratching the surface.”
Jon Lerner, Managing Director at Smedvig Capital, added: “We are delighted to invest in Heydoc and partner with Christoph and Mikael. Heydoc has grown rapidly and proven that its platform can dramatically improve the way clinicians work and the quality of patient interaction. The company has a strong mission-based culture and a huge opportunity in front of them to be part of the future of healthcare. We’re looking forward to supporting them in achieving this goal.”
Heydoc works with the mission to improve healthcare by empowering clinical teams with an all-encompassing operating system. Their innovative, user-friendly software solves core workflow issues for clinicians, transforming both the user and patient experience and providing a vastly improved offering compared to existing legacy solutions.
Tech apprenticeship startup co-founded by the oldest son of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Multiverse is nearing the billion-dollar ‘unicorn’ status after having closed a $130-million funding round to allow it to meet the growing demand for professional apprenticeships in both the UK and the US.
The Series C round was led by D1 Capital Partners and BOND and brings total funding for the tech startup to $194 million. The apprenticeship provider has experienced exponential growth since closing the UK’s largest ever edtech funding round this past January, a $44 million Series B led by General Catalyst, which was used to expand into the US. This latest funding round valued the company at around $875 million, more than four times the startup’s estimated valuation in January this year.
Founded in 2016 in London and previously known as WhiteHat, the education technology company matches talent who have not graduated from college with apprenticeship opportunities at companies. It trains apprentices at more than 300 companies including Facebook, Morgan Stanley and the NHS.
The startup also opened a US headquarters in New York City earlier in January. Within six months of launch in the US, it has begun training professional apprentices with organisations including Google, ClassPass and Adyen.
The additional funding will be used to drive growth in both the UK and the US, including by launching additional programmes and qualifications. This year Multiverse launched an innovative programme to enable apprentices to earn a Bachelor’s Degree in Data Analytics and Data Science alongside their roles.