News
Deliveroo, the on-demand food delivery app, has announced that Amazon is leading a new £450m Series G preferred shared funding round. Other investors in the round are T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Management and Research Company, and Greenoaks.
The new investment will contribute to growing Deliveroo’s engineering team in its London office, expanding Deliveroo’s delivery reach to target new customers, expand ‘Editions’, and develop new products for customers to offer a more personalised experience.
This takes the total Deliveroo has raised to date to $1.53bn.
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Mobeus has invested £5m of growth capital in Arkk, a UK-based Software as a Service provider that digitises regulatory reporting, which is increasingly required by authorities worldwide.
Founded in 2009, Arkk recently launched for:sight, a new software platform that simplifies burdensome processes, reduces the potential for non-compliance, and frees up the finance function to focus on value-adding tasks. Arkk has over 800 clients in 20 countries, including a quarter of the FTSE 350 and 10 of the top 20 UK accounting firms.
Mobeus’s capital will support Arkk’s plans to invest in sales, marketing and new product development to accelerate its strong position in the UK tax and regulatory reporting market.
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Pleo, the Danish fintech that offers a “business spending platform” that lets companies easily issue employees with cards and manage expenditure, has raised $56m in Series B funding.
The round was led by Stripes, the New York-based growth fund, with participation from existing investors, Kinnevik, Creandum and Founders.The new funding values the company just under $500m and brings the total amount raised to $79m.
The Pleo MasterCard is a prepaid card that can be charged up and handed out to employees, either physically or virtually. This is then coupled with Pleo’s backend system and apps. Features of the software includes the ability to categorise spending automatically and capture receipts associated with each transaction.
Pleo will use the new funding to expand its staff from 120 to 400 employees by the end of 2020. It also plans to accelerate product development, which will include adding credit, invoices, mobile payments, a vendor marketplace, VAT reclaims and more.
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DocPlanner, a healthcare platform founded in Poland, has raised a funding round of €80m led by One Peak Partners and Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, with participation from existing investors Piton Capital and ENERN Investments. This round brings the total amount raised by the company to €130m.
The company's products include an appointment booking platform for patients with reviews and search, as well as a SaaS tool for doctors that digitises their workflow and could help reduce the number of patients missing appointments. The company says that it currently serves 30 million patients and processes 1.5 million bookings every month.
Founded in Poland in 2012, DocPlanner currently employs more than 1,000 people across its offices in Warsaw, Barcelona, Istanbul, Rome, Mexico City and Curitiba. It operates in 15 countries, with a total of more than 2 million healthcare professionals with a total of 2.4 million patient reviews listed on its local websites.
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Blackbullion, the edtech company transforming students’ lives through financial literacy, has secured a second-round investment of £400K.
This second tranche of funding was led by Lord Stanley Fink, who will also join the startup’s board as Chairman. Additional investments came from MPA Education, Emerge Education and Jisc, the membership organisation providing digital solutions for UK education and research.
It brings the total raised by Blackbullion to £1 million and will be directed towards new product development and expanding its existing suite of solutions for universities.
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Closed Loop Medicine, a Cambridge, and London-based healthtech startup, has raised £2.1M in Pre-Series A funding.
Investment came from Longwall Venture Partners, IQ Capital and Martlet, the investment arm of the Marshall of Cambridge group, as well as Cambridge Angel investors, including well-known serial entrepreneur Sherry Coutu CBE.
Founded in 2017 by Dr Hakim Yadi OBE, CEO, Dr Paul Goldsmith, Dr David Cox and Dr Felicity Sartain, Closed Loop Medicine is a therapeutics company that combines proven drug treatments with digital therapeutics. Digital therapeutics deliver evidence-based therapeutic interventions to patients that are driven by high quality software programs to prevent, manage, or treat a medical disorder or disease. The company’s approach uses data and insights about how a patient is responding to treatment to tailor drug and non-drug therapy.
The funding will enable the company to invest in technical product development, start clinical development and clinical trials as well as invest further in drug development. The funding has also been used to recruit the current management team, as well as support building out the CLM tech team.
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Stitch Fix, an online service combining algorithms and personal stylists to provide curated wardrobes, has made its UK debut.
The company is attempting to grab a share of the lucrative UK fashion ecommerce market and will compete with local businesses such as Thread, Intelistyle and the personal shopping services of powerhouses like Net-A-Porter and Amazon.
In the US, Stitch Fix has grown quickly since the first shipment in 2011. The company has over 3 million users and went public last year, and announced a 26% increase in revenue to $1.2b in the year ended 28 July 2018.
The platform has hired UK stylists and buyers to ensure it has the right brands and products for the launch. The UK version will source from brands including Sweaty Betty, Joules, Rag & Bone, Oasis, Warehouse, Whistles and French Connection - all popular brands amongst UK consumers.
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The Hut Group, a fashion and beauty e-commerce business, has dived deeper into the hospitality sector by acquiring the Eclectic Hotel Group, which comprises two prestigious luxury boutique hotels in Manchester.
The Hut Group said the deal demonstrates its innovative approach to engaging with consumers in both the online and offline environment. The two four-star hotels, King Street Townhouse and Great John Street Hotel, will form part of the firm’s marketing infrastructure, and help deliver enhanced consumer experiences, influencer and brand-led events as well as content creation.
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Alphabet's Google, the largest U.S. digital advertising platform, is facing increased competition from sites where people purchase products and places thought to be safe from potentially offensive content, advertising buyers say.
Alphabet’s shares fell 7.5% on Tuesday, a day after the company reported its slowest quarterly revenue growth in three years. About 85% of the company’s revenue comes from Google’s ad business.
Google’s massive size, which still had revenue of $36.3 billion in the first quarter, means that growth must slow as global digital ad budgets and international economies have also slowed.
Amazon’s ad business, which is combined in an “advertising and other sales” segment, brought in $2.7 billion in the first quarter, less than one-tenth of Google’s ad sales.
Google’s streaming video platform YouTube has also struggled to stop the spread of disturbing or adult content on the site, prompting some major advertisers including AT&T Inc to remove its ads for fear they could appear next to offensive content.
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Revolut surveyed its 18-38 year old customers in the UK and Ireland to reveal their attitudes towards money.
The research has revealed that over two thirds of millennials are regularly saving, with half now enjoy handling their finances. However, two thirds of young consumers are still worried about their financial future.
Over the last few years, various studies have appeared to confirm a troubling pattern – millennials don’t save, they don’t care about their financial futures and they don’t know how much money they need to live on. But the research shows this simply isn’t true.
While older generations have accused millennials of valuing avocado toast and chai lattes above mortgages and pensions, the new data has revealed that the vast majority are regularly saving money. Despite this, almost two thirds (63%) are still worried about their financial future.
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