Tag: Europe

COVID-hit UK startups cry out for help, as UK gov trails Europe in its response

The UK government is reportedly looking at a range of options to support the startup industry, possibly involving a co-investment model involving state-owned funds (via the British Business Bank) and private VC funds. Investors have been warning that typically loss-making, early-stage startups are at risk of collapse amid the coronavirus…

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Lydia lets you donate to hospitals and charities

Fintech startup Lydia is the dominating mobile payment app in France with most of its 3.3 million users in its home country. That’s why the startup has been working hard over the past ten days to ship a feature that was originally planned for this summer — donations to charities and…

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Open banking fintech Yapily raises $13M Series A

Yapily, one of a number of fintech startups that offer an opening banking API to let enterprises, such as financial service providers and merchants, connect to banks, has raised $13 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Lakestar, which is also a backer of fintech unicorn Revolut. Existing…

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Germany’s Xpension pension platform raises €25M in A Series C growth round

The German pension and insurance industry was a laggard in the word of online a few years ago, but in recent times it’s quickly caught up. There’s further evidence of this trend with the news that Xpension (trading as xbAV), an online platform for pensions and life insurance, has raised…

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Valispace raises $2.4M lead by JOIN Capital to become the ‘Github for hardware’

Hardware engineering is mostly document-based. A typical satellite might be described in several hundred thousand PDF documents, spreadsheets, simulation files and more; all potentially inconsistent between each other. This can lead to costly mistakes. NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because one engineering team used metric units while another…

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In the wake of COVID-19, UK puts up £20M in grants to develop resilient tech for critical industries

Most of the world — despite the canaries in the coal mine — was unprepared to cope with the coronavirus outbreak that’s now besieging us. Now, work is starting to get underway both to help manage what is going on now and better prepare us in the future. In the latest…

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