F50 is pleased to announce F50 Connect 2017, a three-month program for U.S. founders and CEOs intent on cross-border expansion. You will learn from leading global investors and strategic partners to develop an engagement […]
Funding and Exit
- Landbot gets $2.2M for its on-message ‘anti-AI’ chatbot July 19, 2018Who needs AI to have a good conversation? Spanish startup Landbot has bagged a $2.2 million seed round for a ‘dumb’ chatbot that doesn’t use AI at all but offers something closer to an old school ‘choose your adventure’ interaction by using a conversational choice interface to engage potential customers when they land on a website. […]Natasha Lomas
- Sweden’s Engaging Care raises $800,000 for its digital healthcare SaaS July 19, 2018Engaging Care, a Swedish heathtech startup co-founded by Charlotta Tönsgård, who was previously CEO of online doctor app Min Doktor before being asked to step down, has raised $800,000 in “pre-seed” funding to continue building out its digital healthcare SaaS. Backing the burgeoning company are a host of well-established angel investors in the region. They [ […]Steve O'Hear
- India’s BookMyShow pulls in $100M to grow its online ticketing business July 19, 2018BookMyShow, an online ticketing service for cinemas, theatres and sports in India, has pulled in $100 million in new capital for growth. The Series D round was led by private investment firm TPG Growth and it included participation from undisclosed existing investors. BookMyShow, which is headquartered in Mumbai, has now raised a total of $225 million […]Jon Russell
- Alibaba boosts its offline reach with $2B+ investment in outdoor digital marketing firm July 19, 2018Alibaba is investing big bucks into offline distribution. The Chinese e-commerce giant has forked out $2.23 billion in exchange for a sizeable piece of Focus Media, a Shanghai-based company that operates outdoor digital advertising screens across China, Singapore and Hong Kong, according to a U.S. filing. The deal itself is broken up into a few pieces. Aliba […]Jon Russell
- With eyes on Europe, Open Banking API provider TrueLayer raises $7.5M July 19, 2018TrueLayer, the London startup that’s built a developer platform to make it easy for fintech and other adjacent companies, such as retailers, to access bank APIs — and ride the Open Banking and PSD2 gravy train — has picked up further $7.5 million in funding. Leading the round is venture capital fund Northzone. It follows […]Steve O'Hear
- InkHunter heads to YC to build a try-and-buy tattoo marketplace July 18, 2018InkHunter, an augmented reality tattoo try-on app that was born out of a 48-hour hackathon back in the altogether gentler days of 2014, has bagged a place in Y Combinator’s summer 2018 batch, scoring itself the seed accelerator’s standard $120,000 deal in exchange for 7 percent equity. We first covered InkHunter in April 2016 when it […]Natasha Lomas
- Okta nabs ScaleFT to build out ‘Zero Trust’ security framework July 18, 2018Okta, the cloud identity management company, announced today it has purchased a startup called ScaleFT to bring the Zero Trust concept to the Okta platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. While Zero Trust isn’t exactly new to a cloud identity management company like Okta, acquiring ScaleFT gives them a solid cloud-based Zero Trust […]Ron Miller
- Light raises $121M led by SoftBank as it prepares to bring its camera tech to smartphones July 18, 2018Camera technology company Light is the latest to do the money dance with SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund after it raised a $121 million Series D round. The funding round was led by Vision Fund, the near-$100 billion fund anchored by SoftBank, with participation from consumer camera giant Leica Camera AG. Today’s announcement takes Light to around $186 […] […]Jon Russell
- The Ken raises $1.5M to grow its subscription journalism business in India July 18, 2018The Ken, a subscription news startup from India, is moving through the gears after it raised $1.5 million in fresh funding to build out its media business. We first profiled the company in March 2017 and now, nearly 18 months later, the startup has raised its Series A round led by Omidyar Networks, which has […]Jon Russell
- Swim.ai raises $10M to bring real-time analytics to the edge July 18, 2018Once upon a time, it looked like cloud-based serviced would become the central hub for analyzing all IoT data. But it didn’t quite turn out that way because most IoT solutions simply generate too much data to do this effectively and the round-trip to the data center doesn’t work for applications that have to react […]Frederic Lardinois
