The Variety of Europe: E-Commerce Infrastructure and Massive Online Battle Arenas
Lots of exciting rounds this week as usual and surprise focus on Poland - always great to see
Selected deals from across France, Germany, UK and Poland this week. Of course there are some NFTs involved and being Europe another challenger bank - this time focused on the Circular Economy.
Picks of the Week
The first company I thought looked most interesting this week was Saleor Commerce, backed by Cherry Ventures. The company is based in Poland and building an “API first” headless e-commerce platform, purpose built to help developers build better storefront solutions.
Competition is fierce with Shopify Plus offering similar solutions. The Saleor team ensured API calls are made through GraphQL instead of the more commonplace REST, to ensure developer delight in its accuracy and speed.
The second was Omeda Studios, or more specifically their game Predecessor. This game is heavily inspired on the success of the MOBA Paragon, which was released by Epic in 2016 and later killed in 2018 as they focused efforts elsewhere. They have just secured a decently sized Seed round and also recieved an Epic Megagrant. If things go well, this could Epic’s horse in the MOBA race (a category worth billions if you look at Dota, League of Legends)
The company also claim to have a waitlist of over 100,000 players already…
Will be keeping an eye on both these companies going forward.
🇫🇷 France
Raised: $9.5m (Seed)
Description: Arianee is a record for NFT’s tied to luxury real-worlds goods. Arianee assigns NFTs, or what it calls ‘digital passports’, to digital copies of luxury goods such as watches and clothes that can be used to certify that the item is authentic and not a counterfeit or knockoff. That allows the owners to guarantee the value and the origin should they decide to resell them or pass them along. More from sifted here.
Investors: BPI France, Isai and others.
Raised: $3.5m (Seed)
Description: Silvr offers revenue-based financing for e-businesses who can’t access bank loans and are looking to raising equity capital.
Investors: Idinvest, Serena, Isai and others.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Raised: $5.5m (Seed)
Description: DIEM, is a circular economy-oriented fintech company, with the mission to empower consumers to earn instant cash back on items they wish to resell. Techcrunch has more here.
Investors: Fasanara Capital, Chris Adelsbach and others.
Raised: $4.95m (Seed)
Description: Cytoseek are a spinout from the University of Bristol, using novel cell membrane augmentation technologies to add new functionalities to cell therapies including tissue specific targeting and enhanced cell survivability.
Investors: Parkwalk Advisors, UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund, Luminous Ventures and others.
Raised: $2.2m (Seed)
Description: Omeda are a UK games studio developing Predecessor, a Third Person MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game for PC and console.
Investors: Inventure, Ride Ventures, GFR Fund and others.
Raised: $2.2m (Seed)
Description: Kairos is a live sport performance enhancement platform, consolidating all scheduling and communications for staff and players.
Investors: Techstart Ventures.
Raised: $1.4m (Seed)
Description: Legislate is aiming to transform the way people enter contracts and negotiate terms in a transparent, efficient and fair way.
Investors: Parkwalk Advisors and others.
🇩🇪 Germany
Raised: $3.3m (Seed)
Description: 35up is a cross-selling platform integration that suggests customers suitable complementary items from their partners that they will drop-ship directly to them. No effort for the stores themselves, just a split of extra revenue.
Investors: DvH Ventures and comparison.
Raised: $3m (Seed)
Description: PlanA is a Berlin-based startup developing an end-to-end platform that enables companies to measure, monitor and reduce their environmental footprint and improve their ESG performance. Techcrunch has more here.
Investors: Softbank, DvH Ventures and comparison.
Raised: $2.95m (Seed)
Description: Elucidate offers users the ability to score, manage and price financial crime through the Elucidate FinCrime Index.
Investors: Frontline Ventures, APEX Ventures and others.
Raised: $1.6m (Pre-Seed)
Description: Deepset builds semantic search for enterprises fueled by the latest NLP and open-source technologies.
Investors: Acequia Capital (Acecap), Charlie Songhurst, Jeremy Yap, Tiny VC and others.
🇵🇱 Poland
Raised: $3m (Seed)
Description: Airly provides actionable insights about air quality with its AI-driven algorithms that predict air pollution for the next 24 hours with a verifiability of up to 95%. EU Startups has more here.
Investors: Firstminute Capital, Uber founder Garrett Camp via Expa, Bolt CEO Markus Villig, founding Editor-in-Chief of WIRED David Rowan, Pipedrive founder Ragnar Sass and Ferry Heilemann, co-founder of Leaders for Climate Action
Raised: $2.5m (Seed)
Description: Saleor Commerce is an API-first e-commerce platform that takes a “headless” approach. The idea is that the platform does the back-end heavy lifting so that developers can focus on the front end where most of the value is created for users. Techcrunch has more here.
Investors: Cherry Ventures and various angels.