News
One of the UK’s leading fintechs, Wise, formerly TransferWise, has gone public on the London Stock Exchange today. The first trades commenced shortly after 11:22 am BST under the ticker ‘WISE’. Valued at £7.95 billion on its market debut, this has been the largest-ever tech listing in London by market capitalisation.
The company currently caters to over 10 million individual and business customers, processing over £5 billion in cross-border transactions every month.
To coincide with its direct listing today, the company has also released independent research which revealed £150 billion is unknowingly spent in hidden fees on foreign currency transfers each year.
The research was unveiled by company founders Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus from the company’s Tallinn office, as part of a private listing ceremony streamed to the company’s 2,400 Wisers (employees), located in 17 offices around the world.
The company’s decision to pursue a direct listing follows the approach taken by Spotify, Slack and Coinbase. The direct listing is the first of a technology company on the London Stock Exchange.
In contrast to a traditional Initial Public Offering, a direct listing is a fairer, cheaper and more transparent way for the company to broaden its ownership, in support of its mission to move money around the world faster, cheaper, more conveniently and transparently.
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According to the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, one kilogram of clothing saved, reused or recycled saves five kilograms of CO2 from entering the environment, thereby significantly reducing unnecessary water use, chemical waste, and greenhouse gas emissions.
This is where the Norwegian social platform Tise comes to play. It enables environmentally conscious consumers to contribute their best by rewarding them for buying and selling second-hand items. Now, the company has raised $11 million (nearly £8 million) in funding to expand into new territories.
The investment round was led by VNV Global, a Swedish investment firm that has previously backed Avito, the most popular classifieds site in Russia, scooter-sharing company VOI, and BlaBlaCar, the leading long-distance carpooling service. Also, Therese Angel from VNV will join the Tise board. The investment follows the $7 million (nearly £5 million) funding that the company raised six months back. With this round, the total investment raised by the company is $25 million to date and is currently valued at $60 million. Already, rival brands that bring sustainabiility in fashion such as Depop and Vinted among others are present in the UK.
Tise will use the funds to strengthen its position as the market leader in the Nordics and expand into larger European territories including Germany, France, and the UK. Already, Tise is revolutionising the way consumers engage with the second-hand market in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland.
Eirik Rime, CEO and Co-founder of Tise, commented: “We are incredibly excited to introduce our platform to consumers outside of the Nordics. The fast fashion sector is one of the most polluting industries in the world, but recycling clothing, buying and selling items second-hand, and repurposing garments gives items a new lifecycle which helps to end the environmental damage. At Tise, we want to promote, encourage, and incentivise sustainable practices and our recent funding will enable us to reach new markets and consumers who share the same passion for the environment as we do. We’re looking forward to seeing how our new users, ‘Tisers’, interact with our platform, which is another great step towards tackling the wasteful issues within the fashion industry.”
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The pandemic made the current work from home and study from home a new norm. Students around the world attend classes online, right from their homes, and the current graduating class will most likely need to apply for a college online. With the aim of helping students make better decisions about their higher education, the global edtech startup Unibuddy has raised a notable £14.5 million in its series B funding round.
The latest funding for Unibuddy was Highland Europe with additional participation from Stride.VC. Including the latest funding round, the startup has secured a total of £23.2 million since its inception in 2017. In a conversation with UKTN, the company’s co-founder and CEO Diego Fanara reveals more on how the latest funds will be utilised.
“This funding will help Unibuddy tackle a variety of strategic priorities. We’re excited about tripling the size of our engineering team. Over the next 18 months, we will launch a new suite of virtual event and community group products with advanced CRM integrations that democratize the student funnel data across institutions’ technology infrastructure,” Fanara reveals.
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Facial recognition has been one of the more conflicted applications of artificial intelligence in the wider world: using computer vision to detect faces and subsequent identities of people has raised numerous questions about privacy, data protection, and the ethics underpinning the purposes of the work, and even the systems themselves. But on the other hand, it’s being adopted widely in a wide variety of use cases. Now one of the more controversial, but also successful, startups in the field has closed a big round of funding.
AnyVision — an Israeli startup that has built AI-based techniques to identify people by their faces, but also related tech such as temperature checks to detect higher temperatures in a crowd — has raised $235 million in funding, the company has confirmed.
This Series C, one of the bigger rounds for an AI startup, is being co-led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 and Eldridge Industries, with previous investors also participating. (They are not named but the list includes Robert Bosch GmbH, Qualcomm Ventures and Lightspeed.) The company is not disclosing its valuation but we are asking. However, it has to be a sizable hike for the company, which had previously raised around $116 million, according to PitchBook, and has racked up a big list of customers since its last round in 2020.
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The future is a place where infinite worlds are at your fingertips and you can interact both naturally and in 3D without any controllers. Understanding this, Bristol-based Ultraleap, the world-leading hand tracking, and unparalleled mid-air haptic technologies let you engage naturally with the digital world without touching surfaces.
Ultraleap makes hand-tracking haptic (touch) technology. It works with Qualcomm, Varjo, and others to create high-end enterprise applications for Extended Reality (XR). Its spatial interaction technology solutions offer a haptic module that enables the integration of virtual touch and an optical hand tracking module, which has the capability to capture the movements of a user’s hands with unparalleled accuracy and near-zero latency.
Also, it offers a TouchFree application, which enables to add touchless gesture control to interactive screens. The software application runs on an interactive kiosk or advertising totem and has the capability to detects a user’s hand in mid-air and converts it to an on-screen cursor.
Ultraleap’s technology witnessed a huge demand during the pandemic, where interfaces that work sans human touch help prevent spreading the novel coronavirus. Recently, Ultraleap established a partnership with Simply NUC to use its TouchFree system with computers. It wants to bring the TouchFree application to market to meet the increasing demand for touchless interaction.
This technology will likely play a role in AR headsets and smartglasses, where hand gestures are a prevalent form of user input. Already, Ultraleap has integrated its Gemini software into the Varjo XR-3 headset and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 reference design.
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In the latest development, Rapyd, a London-based Fintech as a Service company, has agreed to acquire Valitor, an Icelandic payments solutions company, from Arion Banki (Arion Bank) for $100 million (approx £73 million).
Valitor provides both in-store and online payments acceptance solutions and card issuing to SMB merchants in Iceland, the UK and Ireland, and across Europe.
The UK company plans to streamline integration of omnichannel payments, expand into new markets, flatten FX fees, unlocking revenue and growth potential that would otherwise be inaccessible to them.
By leveraging Rapyd’s Collect, Disburse, Wallet, and Issuing capabilities, Valitor businesses and merchants can expand into a broad set of new use cases and services, quickly enter new markets.
Furthermore, Rapyd is actively pursuing acquisition opportunities, targeting strong payments companies following their $300 million (approx £218 million) financing round in January.
Founded in 2016 by Arik Shtilman, Arkady Karpman, and Omer Priel, Rapyd embeds fintech services into any application and simplifies the complexity of offering local payment methods.
Furthermore, the company is unifying fragmented payment systems worldwide by bringing together 900-plus payment methods in over 100 countries.
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Currently, real-time data is only a fraction of the data consumed today. Reports suggest that it will account for 30% of global data by 2025. However, building homegrown real-time synchronisation capabilities is complex and costly and Ably eyes to simplify this.
London-based Ably is a platform that synchronised digital experiences in real-time. Now, the company just announced that it grabbed $70 million (nearly £50.6 million) in a Series B funding round co-led by Insight Partners and Dawn Capital LLP. The funding round involved participation from existing investors including Triple Point, Digital Horizon, Forward Partners, and MMC.
The funds will be used to accelerate Ably’s growth and continued platform innovation to provide organisations with a comprehensive solution to offload the growing complexity of real-time data synchronisation at scale for distributed applications, devices, and hybrid cloud environments. Currently, Ably employs 65 people and plans to add a further 125 hires to strengthen its core UK team and grow a strong US presence over the next 15 months.
“When we launched Ably five years ago, we had a clear vision that real-time interactions would underpin rather than just augment our everyday digital experiences. Today, our most important daily and digital experiences happen in real-time. It’s business is critical now, and organizations realize they must keep up and transform to remain relevant,” said Matthew O’Riordan, CEO and Co-founder of Ably.
“Insight has an established track record of investing in industry disruptors and Ably is a natural fit for our portfolio,” said Teddie Wardi, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “Ably has demonstrated it is a visionary when it comes to solving the challenges of synchronizing digital experiences in realtime. The company is already the market leader and is primed for further growth in what we believe is an uncapped market.”
Norman Fiore, General Partner and Co-founder at Dawn Capital, commented, “We all live our lives in realtime. And now, we expect our digital lives to reflect this – whether tracking parcels, gaming with friends, querying inventory or updating business-critical infrastructure. As the infrastructure and platform powering these experiences, Ably is helping companies operate in realtime. I’m both hugely impressed by what Ably has achieved to date and excited to be supporting the team to innovate and scale further.”
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Thymia, a London-based mental health startup that empowers clinicians to assess depression faster and more accurately, has secured £780K in the seed round.
The investment round was co-led by Kodori AG and Calm/Storm. Others including, Form Ventures, Entrepreneur First, and several angel investors, participated.
The funding will go towards scaling up its platform to assess for and monitor depression.
Thymia uses video games based on Neuropsychology alongside analyses of video and speech to make mental health assessments smart, starting with depression.
The online platform allows clinicians to make faster and more accurate clinical decisions by making mental illness as objectively measurable as visible physical conditions.
Neuroscientist Dr. Emilia Molimpakis and theoretical physicist Dr. Stefano Goria co-founded Thymia after a close friend of Emilia’s developed depression. The traditional depression assessment methods failed to convey the severity of her distress leading to a suicide attempt.
This led Emilia to leverage her understanding of Linguistics, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Experimental Psychology to build a platform that could supplement and in time replace the highly subjective questionnaire-based approach clinicians use with patients experiencing mental health difficulties.
Emilia and Stefano have created video game-style activities and challenges for patients to interact with, such as verbally describing animated scenes or interacting with moving objects.
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Almost all sectors and services are undergoing digitisation and we’ve witnessed this trend accelerate since the COVID-19 pandemic. Insurance industry, too, pivoted quickly and now most of its services are offered online. London-based startup Bequest aims to further shake things up in this segment by offering simplified wills and life insurance for the millennial market. It has secured a £1.7 million seed funding and is also launching its new insurance offering that was being beta tested.
The latest funding round for Bequest was led by Kuvi Capital. Clocktower Ventures and Form Ventures participated as well, and all three investors will join the startups’ board as its platform scales up. Bequest will utilise these fresh funds to further develop its product offerings and generate traction for its services. It is also partnering up with Panda’s Foundation, but exact details of this are still under wraps.
James Buckley-Thorp, CEO and founder of Bequest, says, “Currently, 38 million families are unprotected and uninsured each year. We, at Bequest, want to make sure everyone is covered by making it relatable, accessible and something that does not cost an arm and a leg.”
Thorp adds that the life insurance industry is ‘out-of-date and overly complex’ and like most services, people require quick access to life insurance online with more knowledge and support. “We have seen that in the hugely positive response to date to our product. With this seed funding we can now supercharge our growth and become the all of life platform for the millennial generation,” Thorp says.
In a conversation with UKTN, Thorp reveals more about Bequest and what it aims to accomplish. The company was founded back in 2019 by James Buckey Thorp, after he realised how archaic the insurance industry was when he lost a friend in late 2017. Thorp says, “I realised how life insurance was slipping through the cracks for those with digital assets, and with the needs and desires of the millennial generation as a whole. This is when Bequest was born.”
The startup focusses its offering for the millennials and claims to be challenging the status quo. Typically, fulfilling insurance cover can take up to 6 weeks or even more, however Bequest says it can do the same in as little as 15 minutes. “People get instant cover, up to £500,000. Instant access, knowing that their family is supported no matter what happens,” Thorp adds.
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As a result of the pandemic, people are returning to their home countries due to the many restrictions. This has opened the door to a new era of global employment in which employers recognise the need to offer remote-first jobs. However, thousands of organisations are currently breaching local employment laws without even realising it.
Dublin-based Boundless, a remote employment platform, helps companies compliantly employ talent globally while giving their employees access to benefits and opportunities in the country they work in. Now, this company has raised €2.5 million (nearly £2.1 million) in seed funding.
The investment round was co-led by London-headquartered Ada Ventures and FYRFLY to represent the significant shift to remote working, which is worth multi-trillion euros now.
Dee Coakley, Co-Founder and CEO of Boundless, commented: “From failing to register workers in the proper jurisdiction through to incorrectly hiring people as contractors to perform permanent roles, these worries are being felt across the entire leadership team – from the CFO and Head of Legal to the COO and Head of HR/People Ops. Employment laws, tax codes and statutory benefits all differ from country to country. Cultural norms around working also vary significantly. Overlooking or misunderstanding these norms only makes it more challenging to recruit and retain talent.”#
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