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Clearly a lot is happening in the global online grocery market right now and the UK is no behind. Online grocery shopping has skyrocketed up 230% compared to pre-pandemic levels. A host of European and UK startups have launched with the promise of delivering grocery online within 10-15 minutes and they all are battling each other fiercely in this race of fastest first.
The current generation of online grocery startups is flawlessly trying to address issues like fighting for slots, damaged goods, disappointing substitutions, and poor time management by building their own fulfillment centres. In industry terms, it is dubbed as Dark Stores or Cloud Stores — basically, they are only for delivering internet orders. Once the order is placed via an app, items will be picked, packed, and delivered to customers.
As per industry experts, this full-stack or vertical approach and the visibility it provides are supposed to produce enough supply chain and logistics efficiency to make the unit economics work.
While £9.8 billion has been invested into the super-fast delivery market globally and with the UK having a plethora of speedy online grocery delivery apps ready to bring fresh and branded groceries to consumer’s doorsteps competing with the likes of Ocado, Waitrose, Tesco and Whole Foods, we at UKTN take a look at how they compete with each other in terms of price, delivery time and products they offer and more.
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Corporate payments have traditionally happened via bank transfers or corporate credit cards. Both these methods bring a unique set of administrative hassles and security risks. And, of course, once the transactions are complete, there is a haze of receipts, expense reports, reimbursements, budgets, and analysis – none of which is connected. Attempting to solve this issue is London-headquartered Soldo, the digital solution to this incredibly costly challenge.
The leading European pay and spend automation platform has announced today it has closed $180 million in an oversubscribed Series C funding round, a European record for the spend management category.
Offering businesses real-time visibility
The fundraise was led by Temasek, a leading global investor headquartered in Singapore. The round includes new investors Sunley House Capital, Advent International’s crossover fund, Citi Ventures and continued backing from Accel, Battery Ventures, Dawn Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank for debt financing. Goldman Sachs acted as the exclusive placement agent to Soldo for the deal.
This investment follows an impressive 4x growth in spend volume across the company’s platform since series B, despite the backdrop of the challenging macro-economic environment.
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Mental health and effects of anxiety can have a far-reaching impact on productivity. Hence, in an uncertain world like ours, an ever-increasing number of employers are implementing changes that foster mental wellness for their employees. Add to it the trauma and uneasiness caused by the pandemic, more organisations are attempting to focus on the emotional health of employees recovering from Covid, blurred work-life boundaries in the ‘work from home’ context to keep employees connected, engaged and motivated in the extended remote work environment. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics has noted the pandemic is creating ‘a rising toll on mental health, with many people not necessarily accessing medical help.’
As these companies struggle with unprecedented strain on their employees’ mental health, they still lack a dedicated solution. While some of them offer insurance and wellbeing solutions to address employees’ physical health, a proper mental healthcare solution that covers the broad spectrum of both employee and manager needs hasn’t been available until now.
Entering this space is UK-based Oliva, which has launched the first comprehensive online mental healthcare solution for businesses in the UK and Europe. The mental wellness startup has also announced a £2.2 million new pre-seed investment led by Atomico cofounder Mattias Ljungman’s new Moonfire Ventures, with participation of numerous tech founders and executives in Europe.
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Blackstone is acquiring a majority stake in Bangalore and San Francisco-headquartered edtech startup Simplilearn for $250 million.
Simplilearn operates an eponymous online bootcamp to help people learn data science, AI, machine learning, cloud computing and other skills that are in demand in the market.
The startup has partnerships with several universities and colleges including IIT Kanpur, Caltech, and Purdue University and students enrolling and completing these courses get a certificate from these institutes.
The 11-year-old startup, which runs 1,000 live classes each month, says it has helped over 2 million professionals and 2,000 companies including Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon across 150 countries.
The startup, which was last valued at $80 million in its 2016 Series C funding round, counts Brand Capital, Kalaari Capital, Helion Venture Partners, and Mayfield among its early backers. It had raised about $34.4 million prior to today’s deal, according to insight platform Tracxn.
Kalaari Capital, Helion Venture Partners and Mayfield Fund have taken exit as part of the new transaction but the leadership team of Simplilearn haven’t sold their stakes, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“The pandemic has only accelerated the need for digital skills and the industry has demonstrated absolute readiness for upskilling online. Hence, this is the most opportune time to take the next big leap in our journey to build the world’s largest digital skilling company,” said Krishna Kumar, founder and chief executive of Simplilearn, in a statement.
“We believe Blackstone can add significant value to our company because of their scale, commitment to building businesses, and global network, which will enable us to develop partnerships with businesses and universities as Simplilearn continues to expand around the world.”
The acquisition comes months after Blackstone-backed Aakash Education Services, which runs coaching centres across the country, was acquired by Byju’s — India’s most valuable startup — for nearly $1 billion. Blackstone has since also made an investment in Byju’s.
“This is Blackstone’s first private equity investment in Asia in a consumer technology company. […] We are excited to partner with Krishna Kumar and Simplilearn’s top-notch management team to accelerate growth and build the world’s pre-eminent digital learning company, and we expect this to be the first of many such investments in Asia,” said Amit Dixit, head of Asia for Blackstone, in a statement.
Tencent has announced plans to buy British video game company Sumo Group for $1.27 billion. The Chinese tech giant already has an 8.75-percent stake in the developer, as Gamesindustry.biz reports, and the offer represents a 43-percent premium on Sumo’s current valuation.
Based in Sheffield, England, Sumo’s well-regarded core studio Sumo Digital has carried out contract work for many of the biggest names in gaming. It developed Sony’s PlayStation 5 launch title Sackboy: A Big Adventure and was the primary studio behind Microsoft’s Crackdown 3 for Xbox consoles and PC. In 2017 Sumo released Snake Pass for multiple platforms, its first foray into original IP.
“The three founders of Sumo, who work in the business, Paul Porter, Darren Mills and I are passionate about what we do and are fully committed to continuing in our roles,” says Sumo CEO Carl Cavers in a statement. “The opportunity to work with Tencent is one we just couldn’t miss. It would bring another dimension to Sumo, presenting opportunities for us to truly stamp our mark on this amazing industry, in ways which have previously been out-of-reach.”
Cavers says Tencent has “demonstrated its commitment to backing” Sumo’s client work, as well as its own original IP, so things are unlikely to change too quickly. The buyout does, however, give Tencent yet another foothold in the international gaming industry, following prominent investments in companies like Epic, Riot, Activision, and Ubisoft.
“Tencent intends to bring its expertise and resources to accelerate the growth of Sumo both in the UK and abroad, supporting Sumo in the market for top-notch creative talent, and the UK as a hub for game innovation,” says Tencent’s chief strategy officer James Mitchell. “We believe the proposed transaction benefits all stakeholders, delivers compelling value for Sumo shareholders, while enhancing the Sumo business for the future.”
This would be the second billion-dollar deal involving a British game developer this year — EA completed its acquisition of racing game specialists Codemasters for a similar price in February.
Shawn Tan, Skymind’s CEO, sees the company as offering a very different approach to the traditional investment approach. The company is involved in AI itself, with its own open-source enterprise software. Despite only being launched in 2020 Tan proudly tells UKTN, “over half of all Fortune 500 companies are using Skymind open-source software to launch AI innovations.”
The company uses its knowledge and experience in AI to offer more than just venture capital. “We provide deep operational support and market access to our portfolio companies,” Tan explains. The approach is perhaps more akin to a coaching or partnership relationship than a traditional VC equity stake. Skymind offers hands-on support to its companies, helping to nurture and develop talent, and working with them to bring products to market. “Most of the world’s AI innovation stays in the research lab,” says Tan, “We want AI out in the real world, solving real-world problems.”
The people-first approach has already had benefits, with Skymind already able to point to successes from their model. One such application was used at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic to assist in treatment. Covid-19 has puzzled many clinicians and researchers — especially towards the beginning of the pandemic — because it could sometimes be unpredictable, affecting people differently and being particularly severe in some patients.
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Setting up and growing an e-commerce brand is not the lean process. Staffordshire-based e-commerce technology startup The Moot Group (TMG) wants to make this fragmented process simple. From having to work with dozens of providers – website to logistics to tracking – they provide a unified platform that consolidates the entire process and calls themselves ‘E-commerce as a Service.’
Now the SaaS startup has secured £5 million in seed funding, led by Fuel Ventures. Their founder, Nick Moutter, tells UKTN that the investment tees us up for the next stage of growth.
“We will continue to build on our own highly successful interior brands and support our third-party customers with bespoke E-commerce technology. We also have our sights on growing the business overseas too, so watch this space.”
Fuel Ventures, which is an early-stage UK venture capital investing in fast-growing digital tech businesses, also unveiled £45M in funds for early-stage tech startups in the country. As per the company press release, the fund will be distributed in the next 12 months to over 60 early-stage digital startups. At the same time, Fuel Ventures also announced its commitment to extend support to pre-seed companies through this new fund.
At the same time, Nick is fast becoming one of the UK’s most successful E-commerce and adtech entrepreneurs, having achieved success with his first business Admedo, the unified programmatic marketing platform. Following the investment, TMG welcomes to its advisory board Richard Chapple, former GymShark exec and Founder of The Growth Foundation, and Mark Pearson, of Fuel Ventures.
In the company press release, Mark Pearson, Founder & Managing Partner at Fuel Ventures said: “We’re delighted to support Nick and the rest of the team at TMG. The growth of the group has been staggering, they are one of the UK’s most exciting and fastest-growing companies.”
TMG was founded in 2019 as a single homeware brand called Olivia’s. Headquartered in Stafford, Olivia’s is an online furniture retailer that sells home furnishing products, lighting accessories, and more.
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Tide, a London, UK-based business financial platform, raised just over $100m in Series C funding, bringing the total raised to date to $200m and valuation to over $650 million post-money.
The round – which remains subject to FCA approval – was led by funds advised by Apax Digital, the growth equity team of Apax Partners, with participation from existing investors Anthemis, Augmentum, Jigsaw, Local Globe / Latitude, SBI, and SpeedInvest.
The company intends to use the funds to continue to develop their business financial platform, grow their market share, as well as expand globally.
Led by Oliver Prill, CEO, Tide provides a business financial platform that offers business accounts and related banking services, and a comprehensive set of software solutions, such as full integration with accounting systems. Tide has over 350,000 members and over 400,000 business accounts.
The company, in partnership with ClearBank, has also been awarded a total of nearly $120m in grants from the RBS Alternative Remedies Package.
Authentic Brands Group Inc., the owner of brands including Marilyn Monroe, Forever 21 and Brooks Brothers, has filed to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange.
A prospectus filed Tuesday gives a listing size of $100 million, but that’s a placeholder amount likely to change. Bloomberg News has reported that the New York-based company could be worth about $10 billion in an initial public offering.
Founded by Jamie Salter in 2010, Authentic Brands has grown to a portfolio of more than 30 apparel, celebrity and sports brands through an acquisition spree. Recent purchases include Eddie Bauer. The company’s net income amounted to $295 million during the quarter that ended in March, topping its full-year total of $225 million in 2020.
BlackRock Inc., Leonard Green & Partners LP, General Atlantic LLC, Simon Property Group Inc. and Lion Capital LLP are listed among its largest shareholders, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
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IBM today announced that it has acquired BoxBoat Technologies, a Bethesda, Maryland-based DevOps consultancy and enterprise Kubernetes service provider. The move, which comes the same week former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst stepped down as president at IBM, will extend IBM’s container and data portfolio to advance the company’s hybrid cloud practice, IBM SVP John Granger said in a statement.
“Our clients require a cloud architecture that allows them to operate across a traditional IT environment, private cloud, and public clouds. That’s at the heart of our hybrid cloud approach,” Granger said. “No cloud modernization project can succeed without a containerization strategy, and BoxBoat is at the forefront of container services innovation.”
Founded in 2016, BoxBoat helps clients establish containers and Kubernetes — an orchestration system for app deployment — as enablers for hybrid cloud solutions. The startup delivers services including strategies for Kubernetes and enterprise container adoption, as well as app containerization, DevSecOps, training, enablement, and guides on DevOps tooling and workflows.
BoxBoat’s customers span the Fortune 100 and government agencies, and the company counts among its partners Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It also has the distinction of being the first certified professional services partner with GitLab, according to BoxBoat CEO Tim Hohman.
Hohman says that BoxBoat will join IBM Global Business Services’ (GBS) Hybrid Cloud Services division. The transaction is expected to close this fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions.
“We founded BoxBoat on the idea that containers and DevOps would become an industry standard with the potential to transform enterprise IT with lightning fast application deployment workflows,” Hohman said in a press release. “Joining IBM will allow us to realize a shared vision of helping clients innovate by successfully deploying container-based applications on-premises and to the cloud.”
Containers and Kubernetes are two of the leading drivers of enterprise digital transformation. By 2025, it’s anticipated that more than 85% of global organizations will be running containerized apps in production, a significant increase from fewer than 35% in 2019. At the same time, Kubernetes is becoming the preferred way to build digital services. StackRox found that 91% of organizations are leveraging Kubernetes to orchestrate containers, while 75% of organizations are actively using Kubernetes in production.
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