£6m loan for London startup notonthehighstreet.com from Silicon Valley Bank May 26, 2015 The London-based tech startup notonthehighstreet.com has won a £6m loan from the Silicon Valley Bank. The website, which was founded by Holly Tucker and Sophie Cornish, brings together lifestyle products from over 5,000 small businesses and makes them easy to buy. It will use the money from the new loan to expand the business further. [...]
Playground broker Alex Fenton pulls in £5m for new startup GapCap May 17, 2015 They say you can spot talent early, and so it was with Alex Fenton. The now-26-year-old’s first foray into business was in the playground, where he acted as a broker for collectible stickers. Fast-forward a couple of decades and Fenton, who used to work in private equity, has secured £5m in funding for his startup. [...]
FinTech payment startups least likely to get acquired by banks April 23, 2015 Financial technology startups shaking up the payments industry are least likely to be acquired by established banks, despite the increasing efforts by financial institutions to become more innovative. The most likely end-game for a successful startup developing innovative new ways for making payments in the rocketing FinTech sector is being acquired by a major technology firm such [...]
Bye-bye Tech City? Spiralling office rents in Shoreditch’s Silicon Roundabout will push tech startups out of London April 17, 2015 Technology firms are being forced to consider relocating outside of London by the spiralling costs of renting office space in the capital and the home of tech in Shoreditch. A quarter of London’s tech firms have considered a move away from the capital entirely, while more than two in five lack confidence in the city’s [...]
Toroidion 1MW: This Finnish startup has created an electric supercar more powerful than the Bugatti Veyron April 17, 2015 Electric cars have come a long way since the G-Whizz. A Finnish startup has unveiled a supercar designed to compete at Le Mans – and at 1,341 horsepower (that's 1,000 kW), it's more powerful than the Bugatti Veyron (1,200hp), and not far off the 1,400hp Koenigsegg One:1. The Toroidion 1MW was unveiled yesterday at the [...]
This map shows the best London boroughs for startups April 16, 2015 Two year business survival rates in London via data from the ONS (Source: PlaceILive) Perhaps you're thinking of setting up a craft beer shop in east London, or a tech start-up on Silicon Roundabout. If so budding entrepreneurs wishing to give themselves the best start should set their sights on these boroughs. Islington and Lambeth both [...]
“Uber for marijuana” startup raises $75m from Snoop Dogg and other investors April 15, 2015 A marijuana delivery start-up has raised $10m (£6.8m) in a funding round which included investments from Snoop Dogg's Casa Verde Capital and Silicon Valley firm DCM Ventures among others. Eaze, which has been dubbed the "Uber for weed", does not directly supply marijuana, but instead connects California medical marijuana card-carriers with local dispensaries, claiming it can [...]
Funding Circle’s new funding round will value the London FinTech startup at $1bn April 2, 2015 Funding Circle is on the verge of closing a new round of funding which would value the London FinTech startup at more than $1bn (£674m) and see it join just a handful of UK tech companies with billion-dollar valuations. The peer-to-peer lender could close funding of more than £50m within weeks, including backing from Blackrock and [...]
Investment in London’s tech startups hit record levels of $682m in 2015 April 2, 2015 Investment in London’s technology sector has hit a record high, once again proving the city’s attractiveness to investors as firms in the capital gained more than half-a-billion dollars in backing in 2015. In the first quarter of the year, in which established tech startups such as World Remit, Transferwise and Shazam received multi-million pound funding [...]
Social media firm Sprinklr just became the latest $1bn startup March 31, 2015 New York-based marketing group Sprinklr just became the lastest billion-dollar tech startup. The social media platform today revealed it had raised $46m (£30.1m) in its latest round of funding from “our family of investors”, valuing it at more than $1bn. Sprinklr, which employs 700 people, offers a host of tools for businesses to manage [...]