Tag: London
JustEat Takeaway $7.6B merger approved, pair pick up $756M in new funding
On the heels of Amazon getting approval from the competition authority to proceed with an investment leading a $575 million round for food delivery startup Deliveroo in the UK, two of Deliveroo’s biggest rivals got their own £6.2 billion merger approved, and they have subsequently picked up an extra $756 million…
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Gousto, a UK meal-kit service, raises another $41M as business booms under lockdown
Food delivery — be it ready-made restaurant meals, groceries, or anything in between — has seen a huge surge of activity in the last few weeks as people have sheltered in place to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus. Today, one of the startups that’s built a business…
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Airbnb ups its debt by $1BN amid the coronavirus travel crunch
Airbnb has secured commitments of $1 billion for a syndicated term loan from institutional investors, it said. The emergency cash injection comes as the coronavirus travel freeze continues to hammer vacation rentals, with holidaymakers locked down at home and global travel banned or heavily discouraged for public health reasons. Neither…
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Potential new treatment for COVID-19 uncovered by BenevolentAI enters trials
BenevolentAI, a startup which has raised $292 million to apply AI to create drugs faster, today says it has uncovered an already approved drug as a potential treatment for COVID-19, after it applied its AI platform and team to the problem. The revelation, which has now appeared in peer-reviewed scientific…
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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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Self-reporting app for Covid-19 symptoms for UK research sees 650k downloads in 24 hours
One of the big challenges (among many) with the coronavirus pandemic is that overwhelmed health services do not always know how best to deploy the limited resources that they have to meet the demand of people falling ill with Covid-19. For example, we know that more ventilators and beds will…
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