London Brief #31: New Fund from Brent Hoberman, £1.6m for Better Futures from Sadiq Khan and let’s meet at Here East
EVR Holdings, owners of the VR startup Melody, raised £5m on AIM, a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange. Read more in this issue.
People
Theresa May has managed to lose the election and keep her PM job at the same time, although the Queen’s Speech is delayed. The Institute of Directors survey of 700 business leaders shows that 65 per cent of the interviewed leaders believe uncertainty over the make-up of the Government is ‘a significant concern’ for the UK economy. As for the tech industry, the Government will continue its efforts to control the Internet and ban encryption.
Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, says he would like to see London become the “world’s leading smart city”, as he launched London Technology Week in the capital. On the occasion, Mr. Khan announced a new incubator “Better Futures” which is to invest £1.6m in clean technologies. The Mayor has also officially opened Plexal, the largest (68,000 sq ft) tech campus in Europe located at Here East.
Brent Hoberman, the co-founder of lastminute.com, Founders Factory and, well you know him already, raised $60m for the Firstminute Capital seed fund to invest in technology start-ups. The fund’s co-founder is Spencer Crawley who has acted as an angel investor on behalf of Mr.Hoberman since 2016.
In the news
London Tech Week is the news. Meet us there at The London Lean Startup Summit.
Business as usual
- Oxford Genetics, a biotech startup, raised £500,000 from Mercia Technologies.
- Smart Pension, an auto-enrollment platform for pension plans, closed a £15m Series B, led by the Stensrud family (Skagen Funds) Tom Valentine and William Reeve, the co-founders of Secret Escapes, participated in the round.
- Trint, a transcription service, raised $3.1m in a pre-Series A round led by Horizon Lab
Number of the day
£1.6m — probably not enough to pay for the better future, but a nice touch nevertheless
Idea
London Brief is a weekly selection of essential information about startups, technology and the business scene in London. Got news? Give us a shout at londonbrief@netguru.co.
Radek Zaleski
On behalf of the London Brief Team
