🙄Another BNPL Startup, and the 🔥est early-stage deals across UK, France & Germany
2021 feels busier than ever, and there were plenty of exciting rounds to share this week.
This week we saw an Italian rival to Klarna and Affirm enter the Buy now pay later (BNPL) space, raising a $48m seed round from various European Family Offices.
This sector seems to have attracted a lot of attention over the last few months, but it does seem incumbents such as PayPal will have a large role to play, and are also beginning to prioritise this financing model; “On the call, Schulman (CEO) also described PayPal’s new “buy now pay later” feature as surpassing the company’s expectations.”
Back in the UK we saw Chris Smalling (Professional Footballer) try his hand at Angel Investing, a Gen-Z focused impact-investing app led by Ada Ventures and a company trying to optimise digital publisher revenues through AI.
Enjoy :)
🇮🇹 Italy
Raised: $48m (Seed)
Description: Scalapay is a payment method that allows the users to purchase and pay it in three instalments of the same amount without interest. They take their cut of the revenue from the merchant side, arguing to increase conversion for digital customers. The BNPL wars rage on.
Investors: Ithaca Family Office and others.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Raised: $3.4m (Seed)
Description: tickr is an app that lets users invest in companies making a positive impact, and offset their carbon footprint. TechCrunch has more here.
Investors: Ada Ventures.
Raised: $2.5m (Seed)
Description: Ben is an all-in-one platform for any company to personalise benefits and rewards. They marry a (SaaS) platform with per-employee Mastercards and financial infrastructure.
Investors: Seedcamp, Cherry Ventures, Taavet Hinrikus, Carlos Gonzalez- Cadenas and others.
Raised: $2.45m (Seed)
Description: BBC Maestro is a brand new e-learning service, where courses are taught by the most experienced creators in the world. They have courses from David Walliams, Marco-Pierre White to begin with.
Investors: Downing Ventures and Greatpoint Ventures.
Raised: $2.33m (Seed)
Description: Heights claims to provide the daily nutrients, knowledge, and network you need to elevate your cognitive potential and brain health.
Investors: Forward Partners, Chris Smalling (of Fulham FC), Tom Singh (Founder of New Look) and others.
Raised: $2.2m (Seed)
Description: Mindstone is an online compound learning tool that allows people to annotate the web.
Investors: Moonfire Ventures, The Fund and others.
Raised: $1.6m (Seed)
Description: BondAval is a digital platform for B2B credit security to replace bank guarantees and traditional collateral-based instruments.
Investors: Charlie Songhurst, Insuretech Gateway, TrueSight Ventures, Chris Adelsbach and others.
Raised: $500k (Seed)
Description: PubX empowers Publishers to make more money from their programmatic advertising via an AI-powered dynamic floor pricing tool.
Investors: RLC Ventures, Force Over Mass Capital and others.
🇫🇷 France
Raised: $12m (Seed)
Description: Homa Games is a primarily hypercasual mobile games developer and publisher with more than 30 apps in its portfolio. EU Startups has more here.
Investors: IdInvest, e.ventures and others.
Raised: $3.6m (Seed)
Description: Tchek is a startup that uses Artificial Intelligence for car inspection.
Investors: Demeter and Region Sud Investissement.
🇩🇪 Germany
Raised: $6.4m (Seed)
Description: Aleph Alpha aims to revolutionize the accessibility and usability of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in Europe.
Investors: Cavalry Ventures, LEA Partners and 468 Capital.
Raised: $4.8m (Seed)
Description: Banxware is a software provider for embedded financial services enabling any company to offer financial services to their customers.
Investors: High-Tech Grunderfonds, Force Over Mass Capital and others.
Raised: $4m (Seed)
Description: Next Matter enables teams to digitize their complex, manual business processes within hours, and realize substantial performance improvements within days. No code, consultants, or IT project management required.
Investors: Crane Venture Partners and BlueYard Capital.