London Brief #33: Monzo burns money on pre-paid cards
Intercom opens an office in London, and we are still living in the Europe’s Tech Hub… Read more in this issue.
People
Tom Blomfield, CEO of Monzo, an app-only bank has just published a financial report for the year ending on Feb 2017. The company has lost almost £8m on its pre-paid card service. The company grows fast, but will it ever become profitable?
Darragh Curran has announced that Intercom, the company backed by Zuckerberg’s secretive Iconiq Capital, is opening an R&D centre in London, to initially focus on Intercom’s Educate product.
In the news
Google has trouble with the EU and UK regulators. The EU has fined Google for breaching antitrust regulations by pushing its own services to the top of the search results. UK’s ICO is not happy with the NHS sharing data with Google’s DeepMind.
London, in spite of the burden of Brexit and terrorism, is still leading European tech investments. According to figures published by London & Partners, the Mayor of London’s promotional agency, venture capital firms pumped more than £1.1bn into the city’s technology sector over the past six months.
Business as usual
- Your.MD, an AI-powered self-diagnosis platform, has raised $10m in funding in a round led by Orkla Ventures.
- Diffblue, a spin-out company from the University of Oxford that uses AI to build software, has raised $22m in Series A funding round led by Goldman Sachs Principal Strategy Investments.
- Tide, a digital bank, has raised $14m (£11m) in a Series A round led by Anthemis.
- Muso, content protection software, has raised £2.5m in Series A funding from Harwell Capital.
- Previse, an AI platform that speeds up payments from large corporates to SMEs, has closed a £2m Seed round led by Hambro Perks alongside Founders Factory.
- Hometree, a startup that helps consumers purchase a new boiler, has raised £1.9m in Seed funding from LocalGlobe and other investors.
- Catapult, a staffing platform, has raised £1.8m from investors including Global Founders Capital.
- Bibblio, an AI-backed content recommendation service, has closed a $1.5m Seed round led by 01 Ventures.
- Moixa, a home energy storage provider, has raised £1.5m in equity funding from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) and First Image! Ventures.
- ClauseMatch, a smart document management platform, has raised £1.25m in Seed funding from investors including Speedinvest.
- Zeelo, AI service that predicts demand for coach travel, has closed a $450,000 pre-Seed from investors including Jaguar Land Rover’s InMotion Ventures.
Number of the day
£2.14bn is how much Google has been fined for breaking the EU’s anti-trust regulations.
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
