News
Squarespace, a NYC-based website building and ecommerce platform, raised approximately $300m in funding at an enterprise valuation of $10 billion.
The round includes new investors Dragoneer, Tiger Global, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Spruce House with participation from existing investors Accel and General Atlantic.
The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its business reach.
Led by Founder & CEO Anthony Casalena, Squarespace is a website building and ecommerce platform that enables users to build a brand and transact with their customers. Its suite of products enables anyone at any stage of their journey to manage their projects and businesses through websites, domains, ecommerce, marketing tools, scheduling, and with Unfold, tools for managing a social media presence. The company currently has customers in 180+ countries and a team of more than 1,200 across New York City, Dublin, Ireland, Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles, California based offices.
PayFit is a French HRtech startup that aims to facilitate complex and time-consuming payroll and HR tasks. The leader in HR and payroll management for SMEs has hit the headlines as it bagged €90 million (nearly £77 million) funding.
This investment comes soon after the 40% growth that follows PayFit achieved back in 2020. The investment round was led by Eurazeo Growth, Large Venture and BPIFrance along with existing investors including Accel, Frst and French billionaire Xavier Niel. PayFit is gearing for a further 80% company growth in 2021.
The latest funds will let PayFit continue developing its comprehensive HR solution, consolidating its existing offer and support to hypergrowth. This is possible as the company intends that to increase its headcount by 50% to 800 and 1,000 by the end of 2022.
As of now, PayFit serves over 5,000 SMEs with 100,000 employees using the solution. These include Revolut, Starling Bank, Treatwell, and others across locations including France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the UK. Already, there are 550 employees in its offices located in Paris, Berlin, Barcelona and London. So, it will hire fresh talent to work at these offices.
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Online investment platform eToro is set to go public via a merger with blank cheque company FinTech Acquisition Corp that will value the business at about $10.4 billion.
The latest high profile fintech Spac deal will see eToro list on Nasdaq and includes commitments for a $650 million common share private placement from a host of blue chop investors.
Founded in 2007 as a "social investment network" with the aim of opening up capital markets to the masses, eToro lets users trade a host of assets, from fractional equities to crypto. Users can trade directly themselves, invest in a smart portfolio, or replicate the strategy of successful investors on the platform.
Like other trading platforms such as Robinhood, the company has seen business boom during the pandemic, adding over five million registered users in 2020 and generating gross revenues of $605 million, up 147% on the previous year.
Yoni Assia, CEO, eToro, says: “We created a new category of wealth management - social investing - and we are dominating the market as evidenced by our rapid expansion.”
SumUp, a London-based startup that helps businesses power revenues through card payments — by way of physical readers, online payments, invoices and other services — is itself powering up in a big way.
Today it announced financing totalling €750 million (around $895 million at today’s rates), money that it will be using to continue expanding its business — specifically, for acquisitions; to launch in new markets in Europe, Latin America and Asia; and to build out the suite of services that it provides to businesses. The company is already active in 33 countries (most recently Chile, Colombia and Romania) and has some 3 million businesses as customers.
The funding is coming from Goldman Sachs, Temasek, Bain Capital Credit, Crestline and funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management. SumUp confirmed that the financing is coming in the form of debt, not equity, so there is no formal valuation of the company to disclose. To date, it’s one of the biggest financings, debt or otherwise, for any startup (that is, any privately-backed tech company) in the region.
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In a recent development, London-based B2B-focused sales and marketing lead generation platform provider, Cognism has raised $12.5 million (nearly £9 million) funding.
The investment round was led by existing investor, AXA Venture Partners along with participation from a new investor, Swisscom Ventures. The other existing investors that took part in the round are Investiere and VentureFounders.
Since founded in 2015, Cognism has grown to become one of the leading B2B data providers in Europe. The introduction of the GDPR in May 2018 provided Cognism with the opportunity to build a leading compliant product.
With this investment, the UK scaleup plans to expand across Europe. Also, it intends to consolidate its position as a leading provider of compliant and intelligent B2B contact data.
James Isilay, CEO of Cognism, said, “This funding round marks the continued recognition of the strength of our team as we are now one of the biggest go-to-market data providers in Europe.
Stefan Kuentz, Partner at Swisscom Ventures, said, “Sales intelligence is crucial for making sellers more productive, even more so when people are working from home. Cognism is well-positioned to become the leading company in Europe and we are excited to be part of that journey.”
Founded by James Isilay, Cognism provides transformative solutions to help revenue teams drive predictable lead generation and improve conversions across all engagements.
Powered by patented AI technology, it provides organisations with compliant B2B data and a suite of sales acceleration tools to help activate it. Cognism enables its global customers to find and deliver new revenue faster.
The company witnessed 60% year-on-year growth in the financial year 2020. The ARR also increased to $11 million from $7 million, and it saw a record-breaking growth. In January 2021, the monthly ARR of the company surpassed $1 million.
Back in May 2020, Cognism acquired Mailtastic, an email signature marketing platform. Its workforce now comprises 200 employees based in seven countries – the U.K., USA, Canada, South Africa, Croatia, Macedonia and Germany.
Cognism’s continued success and revenue growth is testament to the demand from B2B companies for compliant prospecting data. The company’s ongoing commitment to adhering to global regulations is recognised, as it is providing compliant prospecting data to over 1,000 companies worldwide.
The EU is expected to allocate an estimated €2 billion to fund digital projects over the next seven years, it has emerged.
This is part of a new deal reached by the European Parliament (EP) and Council negotiators on new funds for transport, digital, and energy projects under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) for 2021-2027.
The CEF is an EU funding instrument focused on promoting growth, jobs, and competitiveness through targeted infrastructure investment across member states.
Under the newly-announced provisional deal, which is still under legal review, the CEF will receive an overall budget of about €30 billion to fund projects aiming to modernise various cross-border projects. This will include an estimated €10 billion to help EU countries complete missing transport links as well as €1.4 billion for fast-tracking the completion of major missing cross border railway projects which are to be selected by the Commission on a competitiveness basis.
A CEF spokesperson told IT Pro that the digital section of CEF will be allocated around €2 billion of the overall fund.
This will include the development of “projects of common interest on safe and secure very high capacity digital networks and 5G systems, as well as the digitalisation of transport and energy networks”, and the rollout of 5G coverage across important transport axes by 2030.
Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden revealed the move as he set out his Ten Tech Priorities to power a golden age of tech in the UK this week.
The new AI strategy will focus on:
- Growth of the economy through widespread use of AI technologies
- Ethical, safe and trustworthy development of responsible AI
- Resilience in the face of change through an emphasis on skills, talent and R&D
Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden said: Unleashing the power of AI is a top priority in our plan to be the most pro-tech government ever. The UK is already a world leader in this revolutionary technology and the new AI Strategy will help us seize its full potential - from creating new jobs and improving productivity to tackling climate change and delivering better public services.
The Government will build on the UK’s strong foundations put in place through the AI Sector Deal to develop and deliver an AI Strategy that is both globally ambitious and socially inclusive.
It will consider recommendations from the AI Council, an independent expert committee that advises the government, which published its AI Roadmap in January, alongside input from industry, academia and civil society.
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: The UK is already harnessing the enormous potential of AI to improve all our lives - from faster and more effective disease diagnosis, to controlling the heating in our homes. Through this strategy we will nurture our AI pioneers to accelerate bringing new technologies to market, unlock high-skilled jobs, drive up productivity and cement the UK’s status as a global science superpower.
The National AI Strategy will align with the government’s plans to support jobs and economic growth through significant investment in infrastructure, skills and innovation. This comes as the UK sees a boost in R&D investment through the government’s Research and Development Roadmap to reach 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2027.
To read the full article click here.
NFTs – or non-fungible tokens, a newfangled way to trade virtual assets – truly exploded into the mainstream on Thursday when Christie’s auctioned off its first-ever NFT digital artwork for $69,346,250. Not a typo.
That's perhaps a lot to unpack. An NFT is a unique string of numbers and characters that act as a digital certificate proving ownership of a particular item. The token is published on a blockchain to record this ownership, and the token can be later transferred to another person. The chain of ownership is indelibly reflected in the token's blockchain. The value lies in how much you can sell the token for to the next person.
You can make an NFT for pretty much anything – and ideally something someone wants to pay for. Digital artwork, music, the written word, whatever can be represented as a token. In the case of the $69m artwork: it's a giant JPEG. It's a big picture. Like all NFT assets, it exists outside the blockchain. Someone bought, presumably, the full thing for tens of millions of dollars, and got a token in a blockchain to prove it.
In general, the creator of such NFT works can retain the copyright if they wish. The asset might even already be public, or sold separately like, say, on iTunes. Again, NFTs are a hyped up, cryptographic way of proving you own an official copy of something. Using an append-only log of receipts that consumes a non-trivial amount of energy.
The craze has been bubbling along as celebrities, musicians, and tech moguls made NFTs out of stuff like individual public tweets and albums. It hit another level, though, with the sale of a JPEG file titled "Everydays: The First 5000 Days," deemed to be worth, we say again, $69m (£49.3m) in the cryptocurrency Ether when it was auctioned off this week.
To read the full article click here.
Congressional lawmakers passed the long-awaited government stimulus bill Wednesday, which included cash injections for federal technology efforts.
The House of Representatives passed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion package designed to help US households hit by the pandemic. It included $7.1 billion in emergency connectivity funding for remote learning and $1 billion for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF), a funding hub for federal IT projects.
The broadband money came in the form of the Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF), which would allocate money for schools and libraries to buy Wi-Fi hotspots, modems, routers, and connected devices for students to use for remote learning during the pandemic. The Fund resulted from pressure from education advocates who petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in January for emergency E-rate funding.
The ECF is a separate measure to the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program passed as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act in December.
Influencer-driven fashion etailer In The Style has applied for admission to AIM after raising £49m in an “oversubscribed” placing which has set its market capitalisation at £105m.
The funds were raised after it placed 5.5m new ordinary shares, of 0.25 pence each and 24.5m existing ordinary shares at a price of 200 pence each, to institutional and other investors.
On admission, In The Style will have just under 52.5m ordinary shares in issue and a free float of approximately 44.2%.
The placing of the new shares is expected to raise £11m for the company and the placing of the sale shares £49m for the selling shareholders.
In The Style chief executive officer Adam Frisby said: “We are thrilled by the very positive reception to our IPO from a wide range of high-quality institutional investors.
“This is a great testament to In The Style’s differentiated brand, innovative influencer collaboration model, and exciting opportunities for future growth.
“I’m incredibly proud of the ITS brand and would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone connected with In The Style – including our team, customers, partners and influencers – for their continued support of the business, which has contributed to both its success so far and today’s exciting milestone.
“We are delighted to welcome our new shareholders and are looking forward to the next exciting chapter of In The Style’s journey as a public company.”