News
Vesta, a new online marketplace for property rentals, has managed to raise £2.1m in Seed funding at first close.
The company, which only launched this month, provides an online marketplace for buying, selling and fractionally investing in residential investment property.
The funding will allow Vesta to improve its core product offering and to roll-out across the UK.
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Moneysupermarket's share price dropped by 24 per cent this morning after their 2018 announcement that the company's earning growth would be flat.
This was compounded by the fact that the company had a four per cent increase in revenue in 2017 and is expecting a one-off "transitional costs" of between £6m and £9m during 2018 as well as investing £5m in its product engineering team.
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3Radical, the team behind Voco which is an engagement platform for brands and consumers, has managed to raise £3m from UK tech investors including fund manager David Newton and Christopher McCann.
The company is going to put the funding towards further growth and expansion in existing and new markets as well as increasing their management team. 3Radical originally launched in South East Asia in 2014. In 2015 they expanded their reach to include the UK and Australia. Looking forwards the team would like to break into the US market.
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StatusToday, a London-based AI startup , has raised $3.91m in a round led by LocalGlobe with participation from Notion Capital and Firstminute Capital.
The startup is building an AI solution that monitors how employees are working to identify risks and breaches and highlight where improvements can be made.
StatusToday will use the funding to grow its staff and attract more businesses to use the software, 200 companies currently use the service.
To read more, click here.
The Investment Association has developed a 'fintech accelerator' named VeloCity to boost technological innovation within asset management.
VeloCity, which will launch in the second quarter of 2018, will welcome between four to eight fintech firms, twice a year, and assist them with turning their technology into business-ready solutions with the aim of increasing innovation.
To read more, click here.
Homie, a PropTech startup that has built a home search platform for renters, has attracted an additional $4m in Seed funding. The round was led by Connect Ventures and drew participation from Seedcamp, Venture Friends and The Family.
Their goal is to reduce the time people spend searching for a new place to rent in London by providing a platform that makes London’s rental market faster, more transparent and easier to navigate.
The funding will allow Homie to further develop its tech platform as well as its team.
To read more, click here.
There is potentially bad news for traditional thing-producers as we see a massive value-shift from thing-value to data and service value. What’s interesting about data is it can be abstracted, manipulated, analysed and enhanced in a way that things can’t. And the results of all that activity can ultimately tell the first thing or a bigger group of things what to do to produce a desired outcome.
It is good news for all the innovative big data, AI, VR and sensor companies out there that are identifying innovative new ways to interpret data streams and collapse historical business models. Industries are going to be atomised and rebuilt as digital-first outcome-centric services.
To read more, click here.
The think tank Reform has created a report that urges the NHS to consider using AI to boost its digital transformation efforts.
Amongst the 16 recommendations that Reform makes to the NHS are ideas such as increasing the quality of the data they collect so it can be better used by AI and that IT companies in charge of AI for the NHS should be responsible if systems fail.
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Re:infer, a London-based artificial intelligence startup delivering cognitive automation, has raised £2.5m in a round led by Touchstone Innovations. The spinout from UCL’s AI lab also drew support from Crane Ventures alongside existing backers Seedcamp and Dr Jason Kingdon, an AI pioneer.
Re:infer’s deep learning tech automates the interpretation of communications data and bridges the gap between humans and information technology systems.
The company will use the money to further develop its cognitive automation product suite and hire across sales and marketing.
To read more, click here.
A report produced by Innovate Finance, in collaboration with PitchBook, found that the UK had its best year on record for VC investment into FinTech in 2017 and was a global leader in terms of capital invested and deal volume, second only to the US.
In 2017 in the UK there was $1.8bn of capital invested over 224 deals, a 153% increase Year-over-Year. The report believes this was due to a variety of factors including the fact that the FinTech industry is maturing and that it has a stronger talent base as well as the increased availability of capital.
To read more, click here.