Seed Weekly keeps you informed of the latest seed and pre-seed funding rounds taking place across the UK, Europe and Emerging Markets. Published at least 2x a month.
Things feel as though they may have cooled off a little throughout this thoroughly wet March in London, but some brilliant European companies continue to announce funding rounds.
My picks of the week:
Finary -
The Paris based company participated in YC W21, and funnily enough wasn’t the only company named Finary in that batch. Maybe we’re running out of names and words.
This Finary enables users to aggregate all their investments and shareholding into one slick dashboard, with the aim to beome the go to “digital wealth manager for Europe”. Sadly it’s still in French and doesn’t yet support UK bank accounts, but I can really see a need for this product with the fragmentation of investments and holding these days.
Student Finance -
Based out of Madrid, Student Finance offers the infrastructure for students to access Income Share Agreement (ISA’s) to attend Universities, Colleges and Schools. They take limited/no upfront costs, and eventually are repaid through a portion of the students future earnings.
The model differs heavily from the Lambda setup as they are not required to create courses or content, and instead focus only on the Financial innovation.
I like this a lot as it democratises access to education/outcomes and is a step to improve the mess that is student finance globally.
Description: HiveMQ helps companies connect devices to the Internet providing MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) solutions that allow for the deployment of IoT applications in a scalable and reliable manner.
Investors: Earlybird Venture Capital, Charlie Songhurst, Senovo and others.
Description: The semantha platform (by ThingsTHINKING) provides flexible web services for out-of-the-box semantic processing of text documents and data extractions. The AI understands natural language regardless of the choice of words, able to read large amounts of text and find relevant content.
Description: CoinBurp’s mission is to tackle the common misconception that only the young or technically-minded can enter the cryptocurrency market by creating a uniquely user-friendly trading platform for everyone.
Investors: Outlier Ventures, Alphabit Fund and others.
Description: Finary is a platform that allows everybody to track and manage their wealth online, from ISA’s and Crypto to Angel Investments and Bank Accounts. TechCrunch has more here.
Investors: Y-Combinator, Speedinvest, Kima Ventures and others.
Description: Flux is a scalable open data protocol providing on-chain data for any asset, commodity, or event. They claim that they are “the easiest protocol for developers launching open financial primitives”.
Investors: IOSG Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Hack VC and others.
Description: &Open is a customer loyalty platform for modern brands. Their gifting platform sends digital and physical gifts at scale from brands to people around the world. TechCrunch has more here.
Investors: First Round Capital, LocalGlobe, Unpopular Ventures and others.
Description: Swarmia integrates with development tools such as GitHub, Jira, Linear and various CI tools to “create a holistic view to the engineering teams’ inner workings.” Mike Butcher and TechCrunch has more here.
Description: StudentFinance is a Fintech and Edtech company aiming to solve the skills gap. They assess the skills society needs and make education affordable and accessible through Income Share Agreements. TechCrunch has more here.
Investors: Seedcamp, Firestartr, Giant Ventures, Mustard Seed MAZE and others.
Description: Kitch provides a technology platform that focuses on providing control and simplicity to their digital operations, while allowing them to maximize their sales and reducing associated costs.
Investors: Seedcamp, Market One Capital, Atlantic Food Labs and Mustard Seed MAZE.
