All posts tagged: Series

As pet owners turn to mobile insurance apps, Lassie raises $25M Series B led by Balderton

Published by skeptic

We last wrote about Lassie, a pet health app and insurance provider, when it closed an €11 million Series A round in 2022. It’s growth had been spurred by the boom in pet ownership during the pandemic (nearly half of all European households now own a pet, and and owners spend €23.5 billion on them annually) and when pet owners turned to mobile apps to maintain their pet’s health. This turned out to be a big driver of pet insurance companies such as ManyPets (UK) and Dalma (France). Lassie has now raised €23 million in a Series B funding led by Balderton Capital. Previous investors including Felix Capital, Inventure, Passion Capital and Philian (H&M Chair Karl-John Persson) also participated in the round. That means Lassie has now raised a total of €36.5 million. The funding will be used to develop Lassie’s team and products such as its in-app sale of health products for pets, and expand beyond its core bases of Germany and Sweden. The app features online courses, and other information on preventative health …

European investors grab the popcorn for the new ‘series’ of OpenAI, but are fearful of the fallout

Published by skeptic

With the OpenAI saga playing out across the pond, the European tech community has been waiting for the latest updates as if a new series of Succession was about to drop. Indeed, events have at times resembled some Greek tragedy about the Gods fighting it out, atop Mount Olympus, while us mere mortals watch on. With only a handful of large scale AI startups such as Germany’s Aleph Alpha and France’s Mistral to get any drama from (London’s Deepmind was absorbed into the Google Borg long ago), we’ve been grabbing the popcorn and watching this unexpected episode of Silicon Valley. I probed a few keen tech observers, many of them Venture Capitalists, but almost none would go on the record, perhaps for fear of drawing the attention of some Valley AI God in full battle-mode. A UK-based Investor posited that the drama will have positive effects on Europe’s nascent AI sector. “This is great news for startups like Mistral, who can probably poach some good employees and catchup with Open AI. For the AI companies …

‘The echoes with Trump are obvious’: BBC series on Caesar casts light on similarities with modern populists | BBC

Published by Sam

It is “the most thrilling, the most extraordinary political story” in history, whose central character “stamps himself on the fabric of time and whose fame endures throughout the ages”, according to historian Tom Holland. For Rory Stewart, podcaster, former soldier and former politician, that character is “a disgrace in every single way. He’s immoral, he’s irreligious and he’s a political tyrant”. The man in question is Julius Caesar, the subject of a new BBC three-part docudrama in which Holland and Stewart dissect the popular Roman general-turned-despot, offering different perspectives. Holland admires Caesar as a “titanic figure”; Stewart bats for his principled arch-enemy, Cato. Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator starts on 27 November and includes dramatised scenes depicting Caesar’s rise and fall, his ambitions, plots, alliances and conquests as he dismantles five centuries of the Roman republic in just 16 years. It shows how some of those closest to Caesar tried to stop the march towards tyranny, culminating in daggers being plunged into his body on the Ides of March in 44BCE as he …

The Lazarus Project series two review – the spectacular action scenes are worthy of Bond | Television

Published by Sam

A lot can happen in 17 months. Keeping track of who is in the cabinet is difficult enough, let alone remembering the finer details of a TV series you watched in June 2022. When that show is the complex time-loop thriller The Lazarus Project, that’s even harder. So, to recap: season one established that the Lazarus Project is an organisation capable of going back in time to a set point – the first day of July – to undo cataclysmic events. Our protagonist, George (Paapa Essiedu) joined the Project thanks to his innate ability to remember multiple timelines, only to find himself in an ethical quandary when his girlfriend Sarah was killed in a road accident. Not content to focus on the task at hand, namely preventing apocalyptic events, he instead engineered the detonation of a nuclear warhead to force the Project to reset the timeline so that he could prevent her death. Unfortunately for George, saving Sarah didn’t mean rescuing his romantic life: as Lazarus project leader Wes (Caroline Quentin) says witheringly, “After all …

Use LinkedIn to raise a Series A

Published by skeptic

Katie Konyn is a principal at Publicize. Originally from the UK, she resides in Colombia and has long been passionate about the positive impact that startups, particularly in the medical space, can make. Daniela Restrepo Contributor Daniela Restrepo is a tech and business journalist and VP at Publicize, a public relations firm empowering tech companies. With investment activity reaching a three-year low in Q2 of 2023, it’s clear that we’re deep in the midst of a funding winter. However, founders with their Series A on the horizon are facing especially tough odds. Seed startups in the U.S. were least affected by the funding downturn as investors opted for smaller deals against more costly late-stage rounds. While this was good news in the short-term for new startups, there are now more seed-stage companies than ever in the pipeline and the average funding time between seed and Series A has stretched to 25 months. Having a stellar pitch deck will encourage investors to bet on your idea, but how can you convince anyone without first securing a …

Sample Series A extension pitch deck: Phospholutions’ $10.15M deck

Published by skeptic

I haven’t seen a lot of agriculture tech startups submit their pitch decks for this series, so I was delighted to get one from Phospholutions, which just closed a $10 million round, bringing its total funds raised to $32 million. The team initially said they used the deck to raise a Series B round, which confused me, but upon reading the press information more carefully, it seems they made a mistake. I would usually let people get away with this kind of stuff, but this deck is riddled with issues that could have been avoided by simply paying more attention to detail. We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that.  Slides in this deck Parts of Phospholutions’ deck are pretty heavily redacted, which makes it hard to get the full picture, but there’s still plenty to get into. Cover slide Problem slide Market context slide Commercial opportunity slide Solution slide Benefits slide Product slide Sustainability benefits slide Competition slide …

TV tonight: the brilliant Prof Hannah Fry is back with her fascinating series | Television

Published by Sam

The Secret Genius of Modern Life 8pm, BBC Two How did the hunt for a 19th-century serial killer, car crashes in the 1900s and first world war spy tactics bring us the modern passport? The author and broadcaster Prof Hannah Fry investigates the birth and development of the essential travel document in the return of this inquisitive series. She examines the latest biometric technology before gaining access to a top‑secret site where passports are made. She also discovers why airport e-gates are so annoying to get through. Hollie Richardson Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius 9pm, BBC Two Marking 400 years since the publication of William Shakespeare’s First Folio, this docudrama asks what we really know about the bard. Brian Cox, Helen Mirren and Judi Dench are just some of the fans who tell his story, which begins with the hopeful young writer’s arrival in Elizabethan London a decade after the opening of the Rose theatre. HR Payback 9pm, ITV1 It’s a Succession-like finale, as intimidating Scottish patriarch Cal Morris (Peter Mullan) leads his clan on …

Lidl owner and Bosch Ventures co-lead $500M Series B into German AI start-up Aleph Alpha

Published by skeptic

German AI start-up Aleph Alpha has raised a Series B funding round of $500 million from a consortium of seven new investors, as well as existing investors from previous rounds. Founded in 2019, Aleph Alpha’s funding may be dwarfed by that of Microsoft-backed OpenAI ($11.3B), but the startup makes great play of the fact that its clients have ‘full sovereignty’ over the implementation of AI into their businesses. So although it’s tempting to compare Aleph Alpha with other foundational models like Open AI, it’s much closer to startups like France’s Mistral ($112 million in funding), which works with large corporates to deploy LLMs internally. The consortium is led by the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (Ipai). The round was co-led by Schwarz Group (the owners of the Lidl supermarket chain) and Bosch Ventures. Other new investors include Berlin-based Christ&Company Consulting, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SAP, as well as Burda Principal Investments. Existing institutional investors also participated. Ipai — an AI hub based in the south-west German city of Heilbronn and was jointly set up by a …

Luxury clothing distributors get into virtual try-on tech; bag $15M Series A on a $100M valuation

Published by skeptic

Sandy Sholl and Adam Freede are no strangers to the world of fashion. They’ve been at the helm of MadaLuxe Group, a luxury distribution platform for fashion and accessories, since 1990. Now they’re adding AI-powered virtual try-on and styling technology to the list. Today, the pair launched Zelig, offering personalized technology that will eventually enable consumers to upload a photo to visualize how clothes, shoes and accessories look on their body type as they shop online. At launch, consumers can choose between more than 40 models of diverse body types, skin tones and hair colors. The technology uses a combination of artificial intelligence, machine learning and computer vision to do this. Zelig users can create different outfit combinations and then save them to their profile and even share them before purchasing complete looks. The concept of virtual try-on is not new. Large enterprises, like Walmart, Google and Amazon, have invested in some kind of try-on technology. There are also a number of venture-backed startups in this sector, including Dia & Co., AIMIRR and Revery.ai, showing …

Kuva Space raises €16.6M Series A to scale hyperspectral imagery ambitions

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Kuva Space, a hyperspectral imagery startup founded in Finland, has closed a €16.6 million ($17.6 million) Series A funding round as it looks to deploy up to 100 satellites by the end of the decade. The startup, formerly called Reaktor Space Lab, was founded in 2016 and spent its first four years focused on building nanosatellites for firms including the European Space Agency. It has successfully launched three satellites to-date, including a cubesat that contained a small hyperspectral camera demonstration. It was only around 2020 that the company decided to pursue a hyperspectral constellation, with Kuva closing a €4.2 million ($4.85 million) seed round in October 2021 to get started. “Building nanosatellites for other people, it’s not the nicest business in the world,” Kuva Space CEO Jarkko Antila said in a recent interview. “We’ve been always looking at these different opportunities to go into digital services business, through maybe telecom or also hyperspectral.” Hyperspectral imagery can read the “spectral signature” of materials on Earth, which means it can be used to identify crops, minerals, and …