News
Care Sourcer, a care comparison and matching site, has closed an £8.5m funding round – the largest ever Series A funding round to be received by a digital tech company in Scotland.
Care Sourcer works by allowing anyone, from private individuals to GPs and social workers, to request care for older people on the website and then receive offers from local care providers within 48 hours. The purpose being to reduce NHS costs and waiting times, the Delayed Transfer of Care currently stands at over 150,000 days equating to a delay cost of £8m a day, as well as reduce stress and hassle for people going through the process of trying to find a carer.
The funds will be used to expand the area the company operates within, which is currently London, Edinburgh and Gloucester, as well as develop its technology and grow its workforce.
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Founders Factory, a company that focuses on launching and scaling fast-growth startups across a range of sectors, and Marks & Spencer (M&S) are partnering up to create Founders Factory Retail, an initiative that will invest in startups and help them grow
As part of the collaboration M&S will become Founders Factory’s exclusive UK retail partner and will financially support a number of startups sourced through Founders Factory’s global network. This will form part of M&S's new digital strategy.
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Farfetch, the online fashion platform, has acquired CuriosityChina, a Chinese tech firm, to boost its presence in China and in particular within the luxury apparel market.
The two companies will combine their social and marketing expertise with technological capabilities to offer brands different services. For example helping them launch an app or design their own brand website, operate a WeChat account and integrate everything with Farfetch.
These acquisition will also help Farfetch to compete with Yoox Net-a-Porter, which designs and manages online flagship stores for brands including Valentino.
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Auro, a fitness app with a built-in AI-driven personal trainer, has closed its second seed funding round, bringing its total raise to £450K.
The company was launched in 2017 by ex Goldman Sachs banker Anta Pattabiraman, and is now backed by European tech entrepreneurs including the founders of Zoopla, LoveFilm and Passion Capital.
The workouts are created using content from world class instructors aided by motivating playlists and using AI that learns and adapts based on users' activity levels.
This funding will be used to grow the team and develop the product and its AI capabilities.
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Seatfrog, an app which lets people bid for empty first-class rail or airline seats, has raised £4.5m in a Series A funding round led by European VC firm, Octopus Ventures.
The basic concept is that users can bid on available premium seats, which if successful means they can easily upgrade their seat after buying their original ticket up until the time of departure.
The funds will be used to increase the senior team in its London and Sydney offices, to grow the company and to develop its product.
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Snapchat, the image-sharing app which has just under 200m users, is working to transform smartphone cameras into a shopping tool on Amazon’s e-commerce site via a visual product search feature. The Android version of Snapchat’s has an unreleased “visual search” feature that would let users identify an object, song or barcode by sending data to Amazon, Shazam (the music identification service) or other tech partners.
This new feature will expand Snapchat's user experience, to allow them to interact with the world around them, instead of focusing on posting time-limited selfies and pictures. It will also increase Snapchat's potential revenue streams.
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Michael Kors, the luxury fashion brand, is the first advertiser to test out Facebook's AR ads in the news feed. The fact the new AR ads lie within Facebook's news feed shows the way the social media platform is expanding its advertising capabilities to try and bring more brands and marketers on board.
Users click the ads' "tap to try it on" button to superimpose a pair of Michael Kors sunglasses on their face to see how they look. If they like what they see they can make a purchase directly in the app.
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Brands are shifting their focus to social media in an attempt to build awareness, drive transactions and provide customer service according to a report by Gartner, which states that around 66% of the 424 brands analysed have adopted social commerce in the past year.
During this period social networks have been improving their offering of commerce features. About 17% have used Facebook's shoppable brand pages, while 41% of brands have used Instagram's shoppable content.
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Alibaba is piloting its first "FashionAI" concept store at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The pop-up store was open for only 3 days and only stocked clothing from US fashion brand Guess.
The store had smart mirrors that amongst other things could show product information, make personalised mix-and-match suggestions, show where the items were located in the shop and allowed customers to add items to a virtual shopping cart.
Guess wants to roll out this technology to all their stores, focusing primarily on China and Hong Kong. They are hoping to use the FashionAI technology to not only improve the in-store customer experience, but also to inform major business decisions such as product selection, inventory management and assessing product displays.
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Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant, is currently in talks to provide its cloud services to BT, in an apparent bid to take on Amazon's dominance of the European market.
Alibaba Cloud is now the fourth largest provider of cloud computing services in the world, following behind Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Alibaba holds a cloud services deal with Vodafone in Germany, where its first European data centre is located. If the partnership with BT were to look similar, business customers would be able to purchase Alibaba Cloud hosting and services from BT without the need for separate billing.
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