Cuvva, the app-based insurance provider that began life offering pay-as-you-go driving cover but has since expanded to also sell travel insurance, has raised £15 million in Series A funding. Backing comes from RTP Global, Breega, and Digital Horizon, joining existing investors LocalGlobe, Techstars Ventures, Tekton and Seedcamp. A number of angels also joined the round,
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Facebook is expanding Crisis Response, its disaster-reporting and communications feature that’s been used in 300 crises in over 80 countries. The company today is announcing several new features, including WhatsApp integration, support for first-hand information sharing, and an expansion of its “Data for Good” tools for things like better disaster and displacement maps. Crisis Response
The U.S. government may be in the process of formally withdrawing from the term of the Paris Agreement, an International accord on targets to fight climate change, but major U.S. employers say they’ll stay the course in a new statement jointly signed by a group of 148 chief executives and U.S. labor organization leaders. The
Today, Amazon announced a new approach that it says will put machine learning technology in reach of more developers and line of business users. Amazon has been making a flurry of announcements ahead of its re:Invent customer conference next week in Las Vegas. While the company offers plenty of tools for data scientists to build
As the Holiday Season approaches, new jobs for players in the tech ecosystem beckon. And this is no less true for investors. Two notable moves have recently happened that are worthy of note in the European scene. The first is that GR Capital, a pan-European VC, is opening an office in London and has lured
Translating the physical world to the digital has been a challenge, especially when it comes to things like color: Color isn’t actually all that static a thing, and the myriad displays and cameras we use can represent them in very different ways. But new gadgets from startup Nix can help cut through the confusion –
Meet Pixpay, a French startup that wants to replace cash when you’re handing out pocket money to your kids. Anybody who is older than 10 years old can create a Pixpay account, get a debit card and manage pocket money. Challenger banks are nothing new, but they’re still mostly targeted towards adults. If you want
Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about Airbnb’s issues. Before that, I noted Uber’s new “money” team. Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and
French startup Foodvisor has raised a $4.5 million funding round after generating 2 million app downloads. Agrinnovation is leading the round and various business angels are also participating. I covered Foodvisor last month, so I’m not going to describe the app once again. In a few words, the startup uses deep learning to enable image
Europe’s lead data regulator has issued its first ever sanction of an EU institution — taking enforcement action against the European parliament over its use of US-based digital campaign company, NationBuilder, to process citizens’ voter data ahead of the spring elections. NationBuilder is a veteran of the digital campaign space — indeed, we first covered
Lyft is making 200 new long-range EVs available to rideshare drivers as part of its Express Drive program, the company revealed today. Express Drive is a program that Lyft offers to provide rental cars to drivers on its platform as an alternative to options like long-term leasing. Express Drive members get unlimited miles, as well
Prevailing wisdom states that as an enterprise SaaS company evolves, there’s a tendency to sacrifice profitability for growth — understandably so, especially in the early days of the company. At some point, however, a company needs to become profitable. Box has struggled to reach that goal since going public in 2015, but yesterday, it delivered
Zebra Fuel, the London-based startup that delivered fuel directly to your vehicle — backed by Robin and Saul Klein’s LocalGlobe, Brent Hoberman’s Firstminute Capital and Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman — has told customers it is “no longer” delivering fuel in London. However, it is unclear at this stage if the company has ceased operations entirely.
Peak Design has evolved from a crowdfunded upstart into a trusted accessory brand for photographers everywhere, and this week it introduced updates to its ‘Everyday’ line of backpacks and bags. These new and improved designs offer stuff that impresses anyone who was previously a fan of Peak’s work, and should also win the company brand
The Samsung Galaxy Fold is a very unique smartphone, in more ways than one. The most obvious differentiator is that it folds out to expose a large, continuous 7.3″ display, hiding the seam thanks to a flexible OLED screen. It’s also at the very top end of the smartphone market price-wise, which could explain why
Fintech startup Revolut is adding a key feature for users who want to replace their traditional bank account altogether. You can now pay with GBP direct debits. Revolut already added EUR direct debits last year. While most people use cards to pay for goods and services in the U.K., some businesses require you to pay
Jason Sherman, founder and CEO of TapRm (pronounced “taproom”), says it’s time for beer-lovers to do more of their shopping online. It’s an industry that Sherman knows well, having worked as an attorney at Anheuser Busch and at the alcohol giant’s ZX Ventures incubator. He said it was through the job that he began wondering
A joint investigation by watchdogs in Canada and British Columbia has found that Cambridge Analytica-linked data firm, Aggregate IQ, broke privacy laws in Facebook ad-targeting work it undertook for the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum. A quick reminder: Vote Leave was the official leave campaign in the referendum on the
After a year of testing out environmental technologies for a private company, co-founder Patricia Ayma developed a process for bioplastic production using bacteria. The system turns organic matter, such as food waste, into a product that can be used as a biodegradable alternative to single-use plastics. “I realized that it was a simple technology for
Xerox fired the latest volley in the Xerox –HP merger letter wars today. Xerox CEO John Visentin wrote to the HP Board that his company planned to take its $33.5 billion offer directly to HP shareholders. He began his letter with hostile tone befitting a hostile takeover attempt, stating that their refusal to negotiate defied
Leavy.co, the Paris-born startup that offers a travel app for millennials to help them travel more without getting into further debt, has quietly raised $14 million in funding. The investment — which is pegged as a seed round and actually closed in January! — is led by Dutch investor Prime Ventures, with participation from angel
Establishing an enduring presence on the Moon will mean making a lot of landings — and NASA researchers want to make those landings as reliable and cheap as possible. This robotic “pallet lander” concept would be a dead simple (as lunar landers go) way to put up to 300 kilograms of rover and payload onto
$35 million-funded Omni is packing up and shutting down after struggling to make the economics of equipment rentals and physical on-demand storage work out. It’s another victim of a venture capital-subsidized business offering a convenient service at an unsustainable price. The startup fought for a second wind after selling off its physical storage operations to
Keegan Walden Contributor Keegan Walden, Ph.D, is the Co-founder & COO of Torch, a leadership development software platform. He is also a psychologist with a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. My co-founder and I go to couples therapy. Our partnership is not romantic — we’re both married to other people
Detectify, the Sweden born cybersecurity startup that offers a website vulnerability scanner powered by the crowd, has raised €21 million in further funding. Leading the round is London-based VC firm Balderton Capital, with participation from existing investors Paua Ventures, Inventure and Insight Partners. Detectify says the new funding will be used to continue to hire
Hulu is currently down. We’re not sure why, and neither does Hulu. A stream of tweets complaining about the outage surfaced Sunday morning on the U.S. east coast, but it seems like a global outage. In response, Hulu’s Twitter support didn’t seem to know either, instead telling frustrated users that it’s looking into it. Fantastic.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk definitely didn’t have the most issue-free presentation during last night’s Cybertruck unveil, but he did pull off a pretty impressive ‘one more thing moment’ – revealing a surprise all-electric all-terrain vehicle (ATV) that Tesla created to pair with its futuristic pickup. The Tesla electric ATV didn’t get a lot of time
More than 12,000 attendees gathered this week in San Diego to discuss all things containers, Kubernetes and cloud-native at KubeCon. Kubernetes, the container orchestration tool, turned five this year, and the technology appears to be reaching a maturity phase where it accelerates beyond early adopters to reach a more mainstream group of larger business users.
Prince Andrew, The Duke of York, is to completely step down from his role as head of the Pitch@Palace initiative he set up at Buckingham Palace to showcase entrepreneurs, and the operation will be relaunched as ‘Pitch’ without any royal involvement, according to a well-placed source close. Despite indications on Thursday that the Duke had
Netgear has released the first updated Canvas digital art from from Meural since acquiring the company last September, and the next-generation connected frame comes with some decent quality-of-life improvements as well as a new, additional size. It’s not a dramatic change from the original Meural Canvas, but it means that a product that was already