The pandemic has accelerated e-commerce by an estimated 5 years according to a recent report by IBM. This global seismic shift has been possible since reliable payment solutions are available, ready to be deployed regardless of country, currency, or language. PPRO is the local payments infrastructure platform that powers some of the industry’s leading solutions including Citi, Mastercard Payment Gateway Services, PayPal, and Worldpay. As companies rush to serve a global, digital market, PPRO’s technology ensures that merchants are able to accept payments globally with customer’s preferred payment methods on payment platforms that they already use. London TechWatch caught up with CEO Simon Black to learn more about the company’s impression traction, expansion plans, and latest round of funding from investors that include Sprints Capital, Eurazeo Growth, Wellington Management.
Funded in London
My Bespoke Room Raises £700K to Make Interior Design Accessible
As folks spent more time at home as a result of the pandemic and with fewer places to spend discretionary income, homeowners in the UK have spent £55b on home renovations since March. My Bespoke Room offers a technology-powered, personalized interior design service for a flat fee to anyone looking to hire a professional to spruce up their homes. It takes less than 15 minutes to complete your design brief and then you are connected with a designer based on your preferences and tastes. The service starts at a very affordable £195 per room. London TechWatch caught up with Cofounder Diana Greenlaugh to learn more about the inspiration for the business, how the lockdown has bolstered interest in interior design, and the company’s recent funding round.
The December 2020 London Venture Capital Funding Report
Funding down 28.7% MOM as much of the nation under lockdown in December. Find out where it went… Aggregate statistics for all London funding deals by stage of funding (Early, Series A, Series B, and Late) including mention of notable rounds for December 2020.
eXate Raises £2.3M for its All-In-One Enterprise Data Management Platform
Data volumes are growing exponentially and expected to hit 175 zettabytes by 2025. For businesses managing this unprecedented growth, ensuring compliance with regulatory initiatives like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act has become a challenge. eXate is the data management solution that enables enterprises to have a single application to manage data visibility and privacy across the data landscape. Companies can now readily capture the value of the data that they possess and share the data internally without getting bogged down by privacy concerns, resulting in significant value creation, cost savings, and efficiency. London TechWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder Peter Lancos to learn more about pain point that eXate addresses, the burgeoning data privacy space, and the company’s recent funding round from investors that include Outward VC, ING Ventures, and Triple Point Ventures.
myGwork Raises £750K for its Professional Community for the LBTQ+ Community and Their Advocates
Although impressive strides have been made to make the workforce more inclusive recently, still 56% of workers think that companies should be doing more to recruit and hire from the LGBTQ+ community and almost 20% believe employers have negative attitudes towards LGBTQ+ hiring. myGwork is a professional community and network focused exclusively on the needs of this community and its supporters. The free network, which currently has over 300,000 members, offers resources for employers and prospective employees to connect, features events and news, and offers a mentorship program; the company charges corporate members on a tiered schedule.
London TechWatch caught up with brothers and Cofounders Adrien Gaubert and Pierre Gaubert to learn more about the inspiration for the business, the company’s traction, expansion plans, and first institutional round of funding from 24Haymarket.
Cledara Pulls in Another $3.4M to Centralize SaaS Spend and Management
Software may be eating the world but software spend may be eating your runway.
The average employee uses eight SaaS applications; companies with 50 or less employees have a total of 40 applications while larger companies with 1000+ employees have over 200 different subscriptions on average. Cledara is the SaaS purchasing and management platform that centralizes a company’s cloud software subscriptions, providing transparency into spend and usage. The pandemic has created a frenzied acceleration for digital transformation and the associated software needed and this trend has fueled massive growth for Cledara; the company has grown 20x in 2020 alone.
London TechWatch caught up with Cofounder and CEO Cristina Vila to learn more about the company’s platform, expansion plans, and latest round of funding from Nauta Capital and Anthemis.
These 9 London Startups Raised the Most Capital in November 2020
Alphagreen Raises £1.1M to be the One-Stop Marketplace for CBD in Europe
The demand for CBD products across the globe has been steadily increasing and in Europe, consumers are projected to spend approximately €13.6B on CBD products by 2025. The e-commerce CBD marketplace, Alphagreen, makes it easy for consumers to discover and purchase high-quality CBD products while providing emerging CBD brands the tools to scale and launch products in new markets. London TechWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder Alexej Pikovsky to learn more about how Alphagreen’s plans to become more than just a CBD marketplace by becoming the go-to intelligence platform for CBD products, the company’s impressive traction, and recent funding round from investors that include Enexis AB, West Creek, and Igor and Oleg Tikhturov.
Guardara Pulls in £120K to Make Fuzzing Accessible for Software Development Teams
Fuzzing, or fuzz testing, is a quality assurance technique used to identify coding errors and hackable software bugs in enterprise software, networks, or systems. Guardara has built a general-purpose fuzzer, FuzzLabs, to help enterprise security teams easily find code defects and vulnerabilities earlier on in the development process. London TechWatch caught up with Mitali Rakhit to learn more about Guardara, the inspiration for the business, fundraising virtually, and the company’s recent funding from Techstars.
Railsbank Raises $37M for its Banking-as-a-Service Platform That Sets to Define the Future Innovation in Finance
The concept of banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) is on the rise and research conducted by IBM shows that 79% of bank executives believe that BaaS will provide a competitive edge, increase profitability, and help expansion into new markets. Railsbank is the leading BaaS platform that offers a complete financial services backend – platform, connectivity, operations, scheme memberships (e.g. Visa), regulation, and compliance. Railsbanks’ APIs provide the building blocks for businesses to innovate to address any financial use case, including the launching of a full banking system. London TechWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder Nigel Verdon to learn more about Railsbank, its global expansion plans, and recent capital raise, which brings the total funding raised to $51.4M.