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Brolly, an ‘AI-driven’ insurance app, raises £1M seed round led by Valar Ventures and Pi Labs
Brolly, a U.K. ‘insurtech’ startup that offers an app to help you manage and purchase various insurance products, has raised £1 million in seed funding. Valar Ventures, the U.S.-based venture fund backed by Peter Thiel, led the round, with Pi Labs co-leading. Entrepreneur First (EF) also participated via the company builder’s £40 million “Next Stage Fund”. Read More
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On-demand delivery startup Jinn pulls out of ‘other markets outside London’
Jinn, the U.K. same-hour ‘shop on your behalf’ delivery app, has pulled out of all markets outside London, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, the startup shut down operations in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds as of yesterday, whilst I understand the Spanish team may have been let go, too. Read More
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Cleo, a chatbot that wants to replace your banking apps, raises £2M led by LocalGlobe
Cleo, the London-based fintech startup that offers an AI-powered chatbot to help you manage your finances, has closed £2 million in further funding, adding to an impressive list of backers that already includes Skype founder Niklas Zennström. The new round is led by LocalGlobe, the seed VC firm founded by father and son duo Robin and Saul Klein, with participation from a number of… Read More
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Social media analytics company Synthesio acquires Social Karma
Synthesio is announcing its second acquisition of the year — it’s buying Social Karma, a company that uses social data to help marketers understand consumers. Back in January, Synthesio announced that it had acquired presentation software-maker Bunkr. Co-founder and CEO Loic Moisand told me that this is all part of a two-year strategy to buy up companies and technologies that can… Read More
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Uber is going to provide accident insurance in France for free
Uber drivers and delivery persons in France are automatically going to get covered by accident insurance over the coming months. Uber has partnered with French insurance company Axa on this insurance product. It’ll go live this fall and it’s going to be free for independent workers. Hold your horses for a minute though. Before you think Uber is a nice company and wants to help… Read More
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Fleksy keyboard to get major reboot under ThingThing’s dev team
Third party keyboards might seem like an app fad blast from the recent past. But the smartphone keyboard space could be set for a shake up as long time player Fleksy gets a new team working full time on the app… Read More
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Facebook, Twitter, Google warned over EU consumer rights
U.S. social media giants have been warned by Europe’s consumer rights commissioner that she’s running out of patience with their failure to comply with the region’s consumer protection standards. Read More
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Hungarian hacker arrested for pressing F12
The Budapest Transport Authority (BKK, in Hungarian) recently launched an online payment system with the help of a T-Systems Hungary, Deutsche Telekom’s consulting arm. The system, which took three months to build, was supposed to be installed in time for the FINA world championships in Budapest. The software, not unexpectedly for such a project, was full of bugs including the discovery… Read More
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Iguazio nabs $33M to bring big data edge analytics to IoT, finance and other enterprises
Big data analytics — where vast troves of information are structured and used to help businesses gain more insights into their operations and customers, to develop new products, and to run more efficiently — are a cornerstone of how many tech-centric enterprises run their businesses today. Now the focus is on building solutions that the rest of the enterprise world can use, even if… Read More
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Startup hub builder Factory plans gargantuan new campus in Lisbon
This year Lisbon is roaring along with noted startups like Uniplaces, Aptoide, Farfetch, Seedrs and Unbabel putting the Portuguese capital on the map. Vast annual startup conference Web Summit arrived last year with 53,000 people, and entrepreneurs and investors have been increasingly eyeing-up the city as a viable alternative to equally cheap Berlin, especially since the government… Read More
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SF-based Grabr grabs $2.7M to scale its traveler-driven shopping community
Grabr, an SF-based platform with a convenient way for people to buy international goods, has secured a $2.7 million funding round led by SignalFire. FF Angel, NFX, Global Founders Capital and multiple angel investors, including Diana Moldavsky and Charles Songhurst, also participated. Grabr plans to use the cash to scale up its operations and attract more travelers to its platform. Read More
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Hinge Health closes $8M Series A led by Atomico to ‘digitize delivery of healthcare’
Hinge Health, a startup originally founded out of London but that has since moved its headquarters to San Francisco, is on mission to “digitize the delivery of healthcare”. Beginning with musculoskeletal (MSK) disorders, the company is combining wearable sensors, an app, health coaching and peer support to remotely deliver physical therapy and behavioural health for chronic conditions. Read More
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Fairphone ends support for first repairable-by-design smartphone
Fairphone, the European mobile phone maker and social enterprise that has made it its mission is to build and sell fairer smartphone hardware, has announced it is ending support for its first handset, the Fairphone 1. Read More
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Accountants, get worried — Rimilia raises $25m growth funding
Currently large enterprises require large accounting teams to do what’s known as cash matching and credit collection. This is very manual stuff. Some of the ERP vendors (most notably SAP) have their own modules to do this, but in this world the big players are firms like Hanse Orga which is focused on Germany and the SAP ecosystem, and US players HighRadius and Billtrust. However, much… Read More
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The dream of Polish tech entrepreneurship is almost over
Poland has worked diligently over the past decade to become an entrepreneurial powerhouse. Once home to businesses focused primarily on app design and outsourcing, social, societal, and economic pressures forced the country’s brightest to start building for themselves. And they did. I’ve covered Polish startups for almost a decade, first on TechCrunch and then on a new blog I… Read More
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Drone registration coming to the UK
The UK government has announced a plan to require drone owners to register their devices. It says the incoming rules are aimed at ensuring safer use of the technology. Read More
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Graphcore’s AI chips now backed by Atomico, DeepMind’s Hassabis
Is AI chipmaker Graphcore out to eat Nvidia’s lunch? Co-founder and CEO Nigel Toon laughs at that interview opener — perhaps because he sold his previous company to the chipmaker back in 2011. Read More
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