Europe
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Carlyle acquires 1E.com, an endpoint and hybrid working specialist, in $270M deal
Remote work was the order of the day for the past 16 months, but as we (fingers crossed) move out of the pandemic, it’s looking like a lot of people may move into a new era of hybrid work: less focus being present in offices to feel like you are getting things done, less time commuting and more time to be productive. To help better address that opportunity, a company called 1E, which builds solutions for companies to enable hybrid working along with managing the wider space of endpoint management, has been acquired by Carlyle on the heels of a strong year of business.
The private equity firm has picked up the London-based company in a deal that values the company at $270 million.
The acquisition is coming in the form of a majority stake with CEO and co-founder Sumir Karayi maintaining a significant minority stake, along with employees of the company. The firm is completely bootstrapped — no outside investors, no VCs on the cap table prior to this deal — and profitable, with growth of 28% in the last year.
The birth and now exit of 1E is an interesting counterpoint to that of most of the enterprise startups that you will read about on the pages of TechCrunch, or maybe in tech press overall.
The company was started in 1997 when Karayi and co-founders Phil Wilcock and Mark Blackburn were at Microsoft working as in-house consultants helping enterprises adopt and adapt to Microsoft software. Karayi decided he wanted to start something of his own, rather than, in his words, “working for Microsoft forever.”
Given his background, his business started first as a consultancy, but he said that it didn’t take long to pivot, since “We realized that the problems we were looking to solve we needed to build technology to do that, so we started to write our own software.”
The company got its start as a Microsoft shop, building endpoint technology management, along with tools to help companies manage their computer terminals and networks better. That included products like NightWatchman, a power management tool for PCs and servers that helped save energy consumption for businesses; Nomad, a bandwidth management tool that helps reduce server usage; and Shopping, a platform for companies to build app store-like experiences for internal employees or customer-facing tools.
Over time — years before the COVID-19 pandemic — that also evolved into software to enable hybrid working environments, which were already emerging as a thing and already posing challenges to businesses and users.
“The challenge was that remote working was a second-class experience,” he said, with technical support, software usage, network connectivity, device issues and just about everything harder to sort out when problems arose for workers not working in the office. So 1E — a play on the last two characters of the error message you get on a failing PC, “STOP 0x0000001E” — built software to address that, too.
Overall the company amassed some 40 patents on its technology, which now is used across more than 11 million devices among 500 large enterprise customers, including AT&T, Nestlé and a number of big banks that can’t be named.
It’s been the remote working software that has seen the company through an especially strong year — no surprise there, given the environment many of us have been working in — where businesses have been buying its tools as part of their “digital transformation” efforts, and it was this that got Karayi thinking that the company — which had largely built the business it had today on an employee base of people who just like building new things, and word-of-mouth between end users — could finally do with an outside investment and cash injection to take the business to the next level.
“We’re going through a seismic change right now and we think it’s a big opportunity for 1E,” he noted, adding that while many of us might feel like remote work is everywhere, he believes this is just the beginning of how to enable better remote working. “I think the office boat has sailed,” he said.
1E went with Carlyle among a number of other bidders as it seemed like the right fit: strong support and understanding of the business, combined with a well-recognized name. The plan more generally is to follow the PE playbook if all goes well: four years of growth, with “all later options open.”
“We were attracted to 1E’s fully integrated digital experience technology, which is differentiated by its advanced remediation and automation capabilities, and are delighted to partner with Sumir as we support the company as it enters its next phase of growth,” said Fernando Chueca, a managing director in the Carlyle Europe Technology Partners (CETP) advisory team. “With strong industry tailwinds, we believe 1E has significant growth opportunities and we look forward to supporting another founder-backed business to scale through investments in product innovation, commercial operations, and international expansion.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Mendel raises $18M to tease out data structure from medicine’s disparate document trove
The medical industry is sitting on a huge trove of data, but in many cases it can be a challenge to realize the value of it because that data is unstructured and in disparate places.
Today, a startup called Mendel, which has built an AI platform both to ingest and bring order to that body of information, is announcing $18 million in funding to continue its growth and to build out what it describes as a “clinical data marketplace” for people not just to organize, but also to share and exchange that data for research purposes. It’s also going to be using the funding to hire more talent — technical and support — for its two offices, in San Jose, California and Cairo, Egypt.
The Series A round is being led by DCM, with OliveTree, Zola Global, and MTVLP, and previous backers Launch Capital, SOSV, Bootstrap Labs and chairman of UCSF Health Hub Mark Goldstein also participating.
The funding comes on the heels of what Mendel says is a surge of interest among research and pharmaceutical companies in sourcing better data to gain a better understanding of longer-term patient care and progress, in particular across wider groups of users, not just at a time when it has been more challenging to observe people and run trials, but in light of the understanding that using AI to leverage much bigger data sets can produce better insights.
This can be important, for example, in proactively identifying symptoms of particular ailments or the pathology of a disease, but also recurring and more typical responses to specific treatment courses.
We previously wrote about Mendel back in 2017 when the company had received a seed round of $2 million to better match cancer patients with the various clinical trials that are regularly being run: the idea was that certain trials address specific types of cancers and types of patients, and those who are willing to try newer approaches will be better or worse suited to each of these.
It turned out, however, that Mendel discovered a problem in the data that it would have needed to enable its matching algorithms to work, said Dr. Karim Galil, Mendel’s CEO and founder.
“As we were trying to build the trial business, we discovered a more basic problem that hadn’t been solved,” he said in an interview. “It was the reading and understanding medical records of a patient. If you can’t do that you can’t do trial matching.”
So the startup decided to become an R&D shop for at least three years to solve that problem before doing anything with trials, he continued.
Although there are today many AI companies that are parsing unstructured information in order to extract better insights, Mendel is what you might think of as part of the guard of tech companies that are building out specific AI knowledge bases for distinct verticals or areas of expertise. (Another example from another vertical is Eigen, working in the legal and finance industries, while Google’s DeepMind is another major AI player looking at ways of better harnessing data in the sphere of medicine.)
The issue of “reading” natural language is more nuanced than you might think in the world of medicine. Galil compared it to the phrase “I’m going to leave you” in English, which could just as easily mean someone is departing, say, a room, as someone is walking out of a relationship. The “true” answer — and as we humans know even truth can be elusive — can only start to be found in the context.
The same goes for doctors and their observation notes, Galil said. “There is a lot hidden between the lines, and problems can be specific to a person,” or to a situation.
That has proven to be a lucrative area to tackle.
Mendel uses a mix of computer vision and natural language processing built by teams with extensive experience in both clinical environments and in building AI algorithms and currently provides tools to automate clinical data abstraction, OCR, special tools to redact and remove personal identifiable information automatically to share records, search engines to search clinical data and — yes — an engine to enable better matching of people to clinical trials. Customers include pharmaceutical and life science companies, real-world data and real-world evidence (RWD and RWE) providers and research groups.
And to underscore just how much there is still left to do in the world of medicine, along with this funding round, Mendel is announcing a partnership with eFax, an online faxing solution used by a huge number of healthcare providers.
Faxing is totally antiquated in some parts of the world now — I’m not even sure that people the age of my children (tweens) even know what a “fax” is — but they remain one of the most-used ways to transfer documents and information between people in the worlds of healthcare and medicine, with 90% of the industry using them today. The partnership with Mendel will mean that those eFaxes will now be “read” and digitized and ingested into wider platforms to tap that data in a more useful way.
“There is huge potential for the global healthcare industry to leverage AI,” said Mendel board member and partner at DCM, Kyle Lui, in a statement. “Mendel has created a unique and seamless solution for healthcare organizations to automatically make sense of their clinical data using AI. We look forward to continuing to work with the team on this next stage of growth.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Frst and Fabric Ventures announce fellowship program for crypto entrepreneurs
VC funds Frst and Fabric Ventures are teaming up to create Le Crypto Fellowship. With this program, the two firms want to find the next 10 crypto entrepreneurs in France. And they think they might foster the most promising crypto startups if they don’t have any preconceived idea and team yet.
As Pierre Entremont from Frst writes in a Medium post, there are a lot of opportunities if you want to build the next crypto success, but few entrepreneurs are actively looking at this space.
“Nearly all crypto developers and entrepreneurs are already rich and therefore don’t step up their ambition,” he writes.
Blockchain development and DeFi projects are nearly always open source. Learning resources are available for free around the web. So it’s not that hard to get started and build a prototype, but you have to get started. Frst and Fabric Ventures think they can create the right framework to incentivize the next generation of entrepreneurs.
If you get accepted into the program, the two VC firms will hand you €100,000 in exchange for 7% of your company. Basically, this should cover one year of salary for one person in France with a salary of €50,000, €21,000 in employer contributions and €29,000 in expenses. You can be based in another country as long as it’s in the same time zone and you incorporate your company in France.
This way, you get to play around and think about an ambitious idea without feeling any financial pressure. You’ll join a Discord channel with other fellows and you’ll attend weekly Zoom meetings during the first few months. After that, Fabric Ventures and Frst partners will schedule regular office hours with you to check in on your progress.
If you end up creating a proper company and taking your idea to the next level, the fellowship may later ask to invest an additional €700,000 for a 20% stake in the company.
Candidates can apply until June 15. Le Crypto Fellowship isn’t looking for people who already have an idea or are only available part-time. But if you want to join as a team of two or three, you can. Instead of €100,000, you’ll get €200,000 or €300,000. Working as a team will probably help you remain motivated over the long haul.
This isn’t the first startup mentoring program. The Thiel Fellowship is arguably the most well-known. But Le Crypto Fellowship doesn’t limit itself to college dropouts and has a different focus. It’s going to be interesting to see if it pans out and if the VC firms will have a second, a third and a fourth batch down the road.
Powered by WPeMatico
Little Black Door launches app on iOS/Android allowing women to share wardrobes, online and off
Our relationship with fashion has changed, and not just because of the pandemic. Months in lockdown means people are probably more aware of their fashion purchases and how they consume, given its been such a long time without socializing. But the oft-talked about “Clueless” wardrobe, which would allow women to both see into their collections, as well as share and potentially borrow from friends, has yet to go mainstream. Now a U.K. startup aims to change this.
The Little Black Door app, previously in closed beta, has just launched on the Apple iOS store here and on Android.
The app allows women to share the content of their wardrobes in an Instagram-like manner by creating collections (“Lookbooks”), as well as curate their private wardrobe for their own use, with a focus on premium and luxury fashion. Women, says LBD, can “see, style and share”, as well as resell and borrow clothes offline.
The Lookbook feature allows women to share wardrobes collections with friends or followers in a controlled way, a feature that lets users borrow from each other.
Co-founder Lexi Willetts tells me: “We’d simply gotten to a point where we didn’t know what fashion we owned, given that almost every other area of life allows this. Most fashion can be easily dash-boarded on our phones — we couldn’t understand why our wardrobe wasn’t! Equally the effort required to list an item on resale was also super hard.”
Willetts and co-founder Marina Pengilly came up with the app when they realized they could make as much as £30,000 a year reselling their luxury clothes and accessories online. LBD is going after four key trends: the rise of resale (Depop etc); rentals like Rent the Runway; AI in e-commerce; and re-receipts.
Users upload their wardrobe by taking a photo of an item. The app will then recognize the item using computer vision. Lookbooks showcases fashion collections; new and old also have an “I have this” button, allowing users to add items to their own wardrobes, or add as they buy automatically via links to retailers.
Another key feature allows users to see into their own wardrobes to see what they have, and, crucially, see how much they’ve spent, and own, in value.
Users can also create a Lookbook, not unlike on Pinterest, which can be shared with friends or a wider fashion community in a public or private group-controlled way. Lookbooks can be shared with a user’s network to allow them to see your style, or borrow the outfit in real life. As well as this, LBD itself also curates a feed of fashion/lifestyle news and surveys.
Willetts says partnerships with retailers and supplier deals for sales and fashion repairs are also in the offing.
LBD competes with the Save Your Wardrobe’ app.
But it is pushing the fact that it places a greater emphasis on sharing the wardrobe as well, also allowing people to borrow items With this focus on premium and luxury fashion this makes it a truly social wardrobe, says LBD.
The business model is likely to be a Premium version that unlocks extra features, affiliate revenues, advertising, and resale commissions.
Disclosure: Mike Butcher was an early, informal, adviser.
Powered by WPeMatico
Lightyear is a new stock trading app from early Wise employees
Meet Lightyear, a new London-based startup coming out of stealth today. The company is building a stock trading app with a focus on creating a truly commission-free app. In addition to waving account fees and trading fees, Lightyear doesn’t charge foreign exchange fees either — up to a certain point.
The two founders met when they were working at Wise — then known as TransferWise. That’s why it makes sense that Lightyear wants to stand out from the crowd with lower foreign exchange fees.
Martin Sokk, co-founder and CEO of Lightyear, worked at Wise between 2012 and 2017. He held various roles, such as head of product, head of people and head of operations. Mihkel Aamer, Lightyear’s other co-founder and CTO, was an engineering lead at Wise between 2013 and 2019.
“Having spent my career in financial services, I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly. I believe retail investing in Europe is still very much ‘the ugly’ — we’re talking about sneaky fees, less access and complicated products remaining as the status quo,” Aamer said in a statement. “We’re building something that will change that by opening up investing to everyone, whichever global market they want to invest in and however much they want to invest.”
As a user, you can expect a mobile app that lets you buy and sell shares and ETFs. There will be 1,500 stocks and ETFs from multiple markets at launch. Customers won’t pay any account fees, trading fees and foreign exchange fees. But there will be a limit on foreign exchange fees. After £3,000 per month, users will pay 0.35% in FX fees.
The app isn’t quite ready just yet, as Lightyear is opening up a waitlist today. The product should roll out at some point during the third quarter of this year.
Image Credits: Lightyear
Lightyear has raised a $1.5 million pre-seed funding round co-led by the new unnamed fund formed by Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus and Teleport co-founder Sten Tamkivi. This is their first investment through this new venture. Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn is also co-leading the fund through Metaplanet. There are also several business angels participating in today’s funding round, including Checkout.com CTO Ott Kaukver, former president of Robinhood U.K. Wander Rutgers and Veriff founder Kaarel Kotkas.
It’s a nice list of investors, but the company will face tough competition from other startups — you’ll likely end up paying more fees if you use one of these competitors, but they’re already well established. For instance, Berlin-based stock trading app Trade Republic has recently raised $900 million. In the U.K., Freetrade has also managed to attract 600,000 users.
And yet, more importantly, Lightyear also competes with legacy brokers. Unlike in the U.S., the vast majority of retail investors still rely on traditional banks and web platforms for stock trading. There will be room for more than one company in this space. So let’s see how Lightyear executes in the coming months.
Powered by WPeMatico
EU and Bill Gates make joint push for $1BN to accelerate clean tech
The European Commission has announced a partnership with Bill Gates’ sustainable energy funding vehicle with the goal of unlocking new investments for clean tech and sustainable energy projects totaling up to $1 billion (€820 million) over five years (2022-2026).
EU-based projects the partnership will initially focus on four sectors that are being prioritized for their potential to deliver substantial reductions in regional emissions — namely:
- Green hydrogen.
- Sustainable aviation fuels.
- Direct air capture.
- Long-duration energy storage.
The goal is to scale technologies that are currently too expensive to compete with fossil-fuel-based incumbent technologies.
The pair said they will continue to work on setting up the program over the coming months, with an eye on having something further to announce at the COP-26 conference in November.
It’s not the first time the commission and Gates’ Breakthrough Energy organization have worked together on funding sustainable investment. But the scale of this latest partnership dwarfs the €100 million fund the EU established back in 2019 with its venture investment funding arm.
Now the commission has partnered with Breakthrough Energy Catalyst — a financing program within Gates’ organization that aims to accelerate the development and adoption of technologies needed to underpin a low-carbon economy — to mobilize up to 10x more than the earlier fund to build large-scale, commercial demonstration projects for clean technologies.
The overarching goal is of course to lower the costs and accelerate deployment of clean tech in order to deliver significant reductions in CO2 emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.
The bloc is a major emitter of CO2 but has committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, under the European Green Deal.
Gates’ philosophy with his 2015-founded Breakthrough Energy vehicle, meanwhile, is that renewables alone won’t be enough to avert catastrophic climate change — and investments in a range of high risk but potentially high reward technologies is also needed.
But given the lengthy time scales needed for a return on these types of investments, public-private partnerships look like a key piece of the financing puzzle.
Commenting on the partnership announcement in a statement, EU president Ursula von der Leyen, said: “With our European Green Deal, Europe wants to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. … Europe has also the great opportunity to become the continent of climate innovation. For this, the European Commission will mobilise massive investments in new and transforming industries over the next decade. This is why I’m glad to join forces with Breakthrough Energy. Our partnership will support EU businesses and innovators to reap the benefits of emission-reducing technologies and create the jobs of tomorrow.”
In another supporting statement, Gates, founder of Breakthrough Energy, added: “Decarbonising the global economy is the greatest opportunity for innovation the world has ever seen. Europe will play a critical role, having demonstrated an early and consistent commitment to climate and longstanding leadership in science, engineering, and technology. Through this partnership, Europe will lay solid ground for a net-zero future in which clean technologies are reliable, available, and affordable for all.”
On the EU side, funding for the partnership is expected to come from the bloc’s flagship R&D fund, Horizon Europe, and also via the low-carbon-focused Innovation Fund within the framework of the InvestEU program.
Breakthrough Energy Catalyst will mobilise equivalent private capital and philanthropic funds to finance selected projects.
The partnership will also be open to national investments by EU Member States through InvestEU or at project level, the commission noted. It added that a call for expressions of interest for potential InvestEU implementing partners is currently open until June 30, 2021.
Renewable energy and clean(er) transport were also key focus areas for the massive €750 billion “Next Generation EU” coronavirus recovery fund put together by the commission last year — which said it would borrow money on the financial markets through the issuance of bonds for post-pandemic recovery — with that money pegged to be channelled through EU programs between 2021 and 2024.
The bloc’s lawmakers have also suggested that digitization and AI technologies — which are other areas it’s pegged for major investment — will play a key supporting role in Europe’s green transition.
Powered by WPeMatico
June makes product analytics more accessible
Meet June, a new startup that wants to make it easier to create analytics dashboards and generate reports even if you’re not a product analytics expert. June is built on top of your Segment data. Like many no-code startups, it uses templates and a graphical interface so that non-technical profiles can start using it.
“What we do today is instant analytics and that’s why we’re building it on top of Segment,” co-founder and CEO Enzo Avigo told me. “It lets you access data much more quickly.”
Segment acts as the data collection and data repository for your analytics. After that, you can start playing with your data in June. Eventually, June plans to diversify its data sources.
“Our long-term vision is to become the Airtable of analytics,” Avigo said.
If you’re familiar with Airtable, June may look familiar. The company has built a template library to help you get started. For instance, June helps you track user retention, active users, your acquisition funnel, engagement, feature usage, etc.
Image Credits: June
Once you pick a template, you can start building a report by matching data sources with templates. June automatically generates charts, sorts your user base into cohorts and shows you important metrics. You can create goals so that you receive alerts in Slack whenever something good or bad is happening.
Advanced users can also use June so that everyone in the team is using the same tool. They can create custom SQL queries and build a template based on those queries.
The company raised a seed round of $1.85 million led by Point Nine. Y Combinator, Speedinvest, Kima Ventures, eFounders and Base Case also participated, as well as several business angels.
Prior to June, the startup’s two co-founders worked for Intercom. They noticed that the analytics tool was too hard to use for many people. They didn’t rely on analytics to make educated decisions.
There are hundreds of companies using June every week and that number is growing by 10% per week. Right now, the product is free but the company plans to charge based on usage.
Image Credits: June
Powered by WPeMatico
6 investors and founders forecast hockey-stick growth for Edinburgh’s startup scene
Scotland is slowly but surely drawing attention in the UK’s startup space. In 2020, Scottish startups collectively raised £345 million, according to Tech Nation, and with nearly 2,500 startups, it has the highest number of budding tech companies outside London. Venture capital fundraises are also consistently on the rise every year.
Scotland’s capital Edinburgh boasts a beautiful, hilly landscape, a robust education system and good access to grant funding, public and private investment. It’s also one of the top financial centers in the U.K., making it a great place to begin a business.
So to find out what the startup scene in Edinburgh looks like, we spoke to six founders, executives and investors. The city’s tech ecosystem appears to have a robust space for machine learning, artificial intelligence, biomedicine, fintech, travel tech, oil, renewables, e-commerce, gaming, health tech, deep tech, space tech and insurtech.
Use discount code SCOTLANDSURVEY to save 25% off an annual or two-year Extra Crunch membership.
This offer is only available to readers in the UK Europe and expires on June 30, 2021.
However, the city’s tech scene is apparently lackluster when it comes to legal tech, blockchain and consumer-facing technology.
Breakout companies that were founded in Edinburgh include Skyscanner and FanDuel. Notable among the current crop are Desana, Continuum Industries, Parsley Box, Current Health, Boundary, Zumo, Appointedd, Criton, Mallzee, TravelNest, TVSquared, Care Sourcer, Stampede, For-Sight, Vistalworks, Reath, InfraCost, Speech Graphics and Cyan Forensics.
The Edinburgh business-angel community appears to be quite strong, but it seems local founders find it difficult to get London-based investors to take an interest. Scottish investors are said to be “pretty conservative and risk-adverse” with some notable exceptions.
We surveyed:
- Wendy Lamin, managing director, Holoxica
- Andrew Noble, partner, Par Equity
- Danae Shell, co-founder and CEO, Valla
- Allan Nelson, co-founder and CEO, For-Sight
- Lysimachos Zografos, founder, Parkure
- Bertie Wilson, co-founder in stealth mode
Wendy Lamin, managing director, Holoxica
Which sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
It’s strong in space, biomedicine, fintech/insurtech, AI.
What are the tech investors like in Edinburgh? What’s their focus?
The Scottish business-angel community is said to be the largest in Europe. It’s difficult to get London-based investors take an interest in Scotland — investors can tend to look at where companies are based. It is hard for “underrepresented founders” to get investments in Scotland and beyond.
With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Edinburgh or will they move out? Will others move in?
Stay. Not always easy to get people to come and live in Scotland. Edinburgh, there are lots of prejudices, despite it being one of the best cities to live in in the whole of the U.K.
Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
Good to see more focus on impact investing. Par Equity is one of Edinburgh’s biggest investors, whereas Archangels is one of the biggest angel investors. Poonam Malik is great for diversity and female entrepreneurs, and she is on the board of Scottish Enterprise, and is a social entrepreneur and investor. Garry Bernstein is also an investor — he leads the Scottish chapter of Tech London Advocates and Global Tech Advocates, and as such is the founder of Tech Scot Advocates.
Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
Thriving. The government is doing its best for the tech sector. Education in tech is currently an issue, though. Hope Brexit won’t be too much of an issue.
Andrew Noble, partner, Par Equity
Which sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
Strong in fintech, health tech, data science, deep tech. Excited by quantum computing, advanced materials, AI in Edinburgh. Weak in blockchain and consumer.
Which are the most interesting startups in Edinburgh?
Current Health, InfraCost, Speech Graphics and Cyan Forensics.
What are the tech investors like in Edinburgh? What’s their focus?
Good at seed stage up to £1 million, okay for pre-series A (£1 million to £3 million) and non-existent for Series A (£3 million-£10 million). Quality of investors is improving. Par Equity is leading the way.
With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Edinburgh, or will they move out? Will others move in?
Experiencing influx of new talent due to COVID-19. Edinburgh is a highly desirable city to live in. Recent new residents include Aaron Ross (Predictable Revenue) and Jules Pursuad (early employee at Airbnb and now VP at Omio).
Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
Par Equity (investor), Paul Atkinson, Alistair Forbes, Mark Logan, Lesley Eccles, Chris McCann, CodeBase.
Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
One to two new unicorns. Promising number of high-growth tech companies. A much more sophisticated investor scene in the Series A space.
Danae Shell, co-founder and CEO, Valla
Which sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
Edinburgh is strong in fintech because of our proximity to so many financial services companies and banks. Also, there are some exciting games tech companies because of our history of games companies. We’re pretty weak in law tech, Valla’s area.
Which are the most interesting startups in Edinburgh?
Vistalworks for consumer tech; Sustainably for fintech; Reath for sustainable tech.
What are the tech investors like in Edinburgh? What’s their focus?
As a rule, Scottish investors are pretty conservative and risk-averse. The only real exception is Techstart Ventures, in my experience.
With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Edinburgh, or will they move out? Will others move in?
I think more people will come to Edinburgh from London because the quality of life and cost of living are both so much better here.
Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
Calum Forsyth and Mark Hogarth at Techstart Ventures; Janine Matheson at CodeBase; Jackie Waring from the Investing Women angel syndicate; Jim Newbury is a very well-respected developer and coach, and my co-founder Kate Ho is also well known. Also Danny Helson who runs the EIE event with the Bayes Centre.
Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
We’ve had a few exits in the past few years (Skyscanner, FreeAgent), which means that talent is spreading out across the ecosystem here and we’re getting some fantastic new startups kicking off. In five years, that first crop should be coming into the Series A stage so we could see a lot of super exciting businesses!
Allan Nelson, co-founder and CEO, For-Sight
Which sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
Strong in fintech, travel tech, health, oil, renewables, e-commerce, gaming (both video game and gambling tech). Excited by all bar oil (great driver of revenue, but not the future).
Which are the most interesting startups in Edinburgh?
Boundary, Parsley Box, Appointedd, Criton, Mallzee, TravelNest, TVSquared, Care Sourcer, Stampede, For-Sight.
What are the tech investors like in Edinburgh? What’s their focus?
Big fintech scene here. Travel tech is growing too, with Skyscanner’s influence strong.
With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Edinburgh, or will they move out? Will others move in?
Most will stay, as it’s a very attractive city to live and work in. It’s a globally recognized and unique city. Very international flavor as evidenced by the makeup of our team.
Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
Ex-Skyscanner people including Gareth Williams, Mark Logan, etc. Ian Ritchie, Alistair Forbes, the FanDuel’s founders and the CodeBase founders.
Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
A lot bigger, as tech is a key growth target of the Scottish government and is underpinned/influenced/inspired by Skyscanner and FanDuel.
Lysimachos Zografos, founder, Parkure
Which sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
Strong in machine learning/AI/digital. Weak in deep tech discovery, especially in biotech/therapeutics. Excited by the rise in adoption of AI in drug discovery — all these ideas that were sci-fi 20 years ago are now adopted in £B deals.
Which are the most interesting startups in Edinburgh?
Pheno Therapeutics.
What are the tech investors like in Edinburgh? What’s their focus?
Conservative angels and a few tech seed VCs.
With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Edinburgh, or will they move out? Will others move in?
Move in.
Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
Investors: Archangels, Techstart Ventures and Epidarex.
Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
Growing.
Bertie Wilson, co-founder, “Stealth mode”
Which sectors is your tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
I don’t think there are any sectors that stand out — it’s fairly evenly split. A good strength of the city is the talent that comes from the universities. There are some really good engineers that come from Edinburgh, Heriot Watt and Edinburgh Napier. The main weakness is that the ecosystem doesn’t favor the most ambitious founders. Most investors in the region are angels and aren’t interested in finding outliers that could grow 1000x and are more interested in backing companies that are less risky but might 5x their money. If you want to find investors that will back risky (but very ambitious) plans, it’s easier to find that elsewhere.
Which are the most interesting startups in Edinburgh?
Desana, Continuum Industries, Parsley Box, Current Health, Boundary, Zumo.
What are the tech investors like in Edinburgh? What’s their focus?
I would say it’s getting better, but there are still a lot of issues with the ecosystem. It is being helped in Scotland by the likes of Techstart investing at the earliest stages with high conviction and term sheets that are more similar to London VCs. Outside of this, though, it’s easy for founders to end up with a messy cap table due to the number of angels and lack of VCs looking for VC-type returns — the messiness of these cap tables can then make it hard to raise venture funding down the line. This is fine for a lot of companies that aren’t aiming for a venture-scale return (which admittedly is a lot), but it can hurt those that are.
With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Edinburgh, or will they move out? Will others move in?
I imagine and hope others will move in. It is a great place to live with a very high quality of life, and this should be a natural attraction for people who want a good standard of living but want to remain in a city.
Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
SEP (investor), Techstart Ventures (investor), Gareth Williams (founder/investor), MBM Commercial (lawyers), Pentech, Bill Dobbie (investor), Jamie Coleman.
Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
Optimistically, I hope that there will be a good number of companies that are at the Series B/Series C stage, which will invite a lot more interest from investors outside of Edinburgh (London, Berlin, Paris, New York, San Francisco, etc.) to start investing more actively in the city at the earliest stages as well as these stages.
Powered by WPeMatico
Café helps hybrid organizations schedule in-office time
Meet Café, a new French startup founded by two brothers that wants to help companies switch to a hybrid remote-and-office workplace model. Café isn’t a traditional desk-booking tool. Instead, the company helps you see when people in your team are coming to the office so that you can plan when you should go to the office as well.
Instead of focusing on workspace, Café focuses on people first. “We decided that we wouldn’t let you book a desk directly,” co-founder and CTO Arthur Lorotte de Banes told me.
When you open the app, you get a simplified calendar view. For each day, you can see your team members divided by groups — people coming to the office, people working from home, etc.
In just a few taps, you can tell your other co-workers what you plan to do. This way, it becomes much easier to schedule meetings, have in-person conversation and more generally hang out with your co-workers. It also makes it easier to find a common day with a specific co-worker if you’re working on the same project.
“We interviewed 150 companies and we realized companies faced the same issue after interviewing the first five companies. They all use spreadsheets,” co-founder and CEO Tom Nguyen told me.
Image Credits: Café
Using a tool like Café also gives you insights about your office. For instance, you can see the average number of persons in your office depending on the day of the week or the day of the month. Admins can configure a weekly reminder to make sure that everybody fills out information.
In addition to its mobile app and web app, Café integrates with your existing tools. For instance, you can connect your Café account with Slack so that your status on Slack reflects your status in Café. Teammates can hover over your name to know that you’re in the office or you’re at home.
The company is also working on integrations with human resource information systems, such as PayFit, so that your vacation is automatically synchronized with Café.
Image Credits: Café
As companies start hashing out a plan to return to the office, Café arrives on the market at the right time. Companies can create custom statuses to fit their specific needs. For instance, a Café customer has created a status so that they know who has the office keys to make sure that the office remains open.
The company raised a $1 million seed round from 122West, Kima Ventures, Jonathan Widawski, Guillaume Lestrade, Jacques-Edouard Sabatier and various business angels who work or have worked for WeWork, Dropbox, Github, Snapchat, Intercom, Stripe, Alan and PayFit.
Like Typeform, Doodle or Slido, Café has chosen a freemium strategy. Teams can sign up for free and start using the product with their immediate co-workers. You don’t need to enter card information to sign up.
If you want to roll it out across the organization with more users, you have to start paying — existing clients include Livestorm, Jellysmack and Yubo. The startup believes employees will become product advocates for the entire organization. And it seems like the right strategy for a product that is supposed to make employees happier at work.
Powered by WPeMatico
On-demand grocery startup Food Rocket launches in the Bay Area, goes up against delivery giants
On-demand grocery startups like Gorillas are invading Europe right now, but although on-demand-everything is kinda old-hat in the Bay Area, a new startup thinks it might just be able to do something new.
Food Rocket says it has raised a $2 million investment round from AltaIR Capital, Baring Vostok fund and the Angelsdeck group of business angels, including Philipp Bashyan, of Russia’s Yonder, who has joined as an investor and advisor.
Yes, admittedly, this tiny startup is competing with DoorDash, GoPuff, InstaCart and Amazon Fresh. Maybe let’s not get into that…
Using the company’s mobile app, users can order fresh groceries, ready-to-eat meals and household goods that will be delivered within 10-15 minutes, says the startup, which will be servicing SoMa, South Park, Mission Bay, Japantown, Hayes Valley and other areas. The company hopes to open 150 “dark stores” on the West Coast as part of its infrastructure.
Vitaly Aleksandrov, CEO, and co-founder of Food Rocket, said: “The level of competition in this market in the U.S. is still manageable, which is why we have the opportunity to become leaders in the sphere of fast delivery of basic products and household goods. We aim to replace brick-and-mortar supermarkets and to change consumers’ current habits in regards to grocery shopping.”
What can we say? Good luck?
Powered by WPeMatico