News
Every year, the Queen's New Year's Honours list awards people in the UK who have made important contributions to society, including everything from charity, to journalism, and technology.
This year, the New Year's Honours list includes 16 people from the world of tech. The list features everyone from an artificial intelligence pioneer, a cybersecurity expert, and a pioneering investor.
To read more, click here.
Clubhouse was launched in early 2016, is designed to remove the drudgery that developers feel when they use software project management software, all the while increasing every engineer’s visibility into their company’s top level goals and development milestones.
The company just got a boost to bring that hopeful vision to development teams across the world, securing a $10 million series A investment from Battery Ventures investor Neeraj Agrawal, who will also be joining the company’s board.
If you would like to read more, click here.
Today, CB Insights unveiled the second annual AI 100 — a list of 100 of the most promising private companies applying artificial intelligence algorithms across 25+ industries, from healthcare to cybersecurity — at the A-Ha! conference in San Francisco.
The companies were selected from a pool of 2,000+ startups based on several criteria, including investor profile, tech innovation, team strength, patent activity, mosaic score, funding history, valuation, and business model.
To read more, click here.
Swedish card reading startup iZettle has raised €40 million (£35.2 million) to fund growth, just months after its last funding round and amid increased market competition in Europe.
iZettle announced on Wednesday that it had raised the sum from VC firm Dawn and The Fourth Swedish National Pension Fund, which manages SEK 348 billion (£30.9 billion) of assets. Existing investors also took part in the funding round.
To read more, click here.
OTA Insight, a UK company developing software for the hotel industry, has raised $20 million led by Eight Roads Ventures alongside F-Prime Capital Partners.
The startup’s cloud-based platform helps hotels manage their revenue streams and profits by monitoring competitor rates, demand forecasts, and reviews in real time. The platform currently has 16,000 properties registered, including hotel groups like Hilton, Best Western, and Accor.
To read more, click here.
Artificial intelligence start-up Senseye has raised £3.5 million in a Series A funding round led by MMC Ventures.
The Southampton-based firm enables industrial companies to predict the failure of machines months in advance, using machine learning algorithms fed with data from the Industrial Internet of Things.
The round was also supported by existing investors Breed Reply, IQ Capital and Momenta Partners.
To read more, click here.
Manchester-based software firm Intechnica Limited has raised £5m.
The company, which offers scalable software solutions to help customers manage surges in website traffic and helps remove unwanted traffic from bots, crawlers and spiders, received £3.5m from Mercia Technologies.
The round includes a £1.3m convertible loan facility provided by Mercia, which now owns a 24.3% stake in the business.
To read more, click here.
Google and Facebook, the ‘digital duopoly’, account for 84% of global digital media and are growing while the rest are shrinking. That’s bad for society, but a mandatory break-up looks further away than ever.
To read more, click here.
China’s massive Singles’ Day ecommerce festival has grown to surpass pretty much every other online shopping event in the world. The event, which began as a sort of anti-Valentine’s Day for lonely college students to celebrate singledom, was usurped by ecommerce giant Alibaba in 2009 and has grown into an increasingly worldwide event since.
To read more, click here.
Viola FinTech, an Israeli tech investment group, has raised $100m to back financial technology startups across the world.
The fund drew investment from banks and insurance companies including Scotiabank – credited with being Israel’s second largest bank – The Travelers Companies and Bank Hapoalim.
To read more, click here.