Weekly digest, July 9th, 2021
Interesting news
📢 Square is going to make a hardware wallet for bitcoin in order to make the currency's custody "more mainstream”. More here
📢 The Defense Department said that it would not go forward with $10B cloud-computing Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (known as JEDI) contract that it had awarded to Microsoft and which had become bitterly contested by rival Amazon. More here
📢 Robinhood is on a collision course with regulators over a controversial practice called payment for order flow that generates most of its revenue, as the online brokerage gears up for a highly anticipated IPO. In its IPO Robinhood disclosed that 81% of its first-quarter revenue came from sending its customers’ stock, options, and cryptocurrency orders to high-speed trading firms. More here
Notable deals
Venture capital:
🚀 AnyVision, a 6-year-old, Israel-based startup that develops facial recognition technology, raised $235M in Series C funding co-led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 and Eldridge Industries. More here
🚀 Pleo, a 6-year-old, Denmark-based maker of expense management software and "smart" company cards that enable employees to spend more flexibly while within the finance director's control, has raised $150M in Series C funding. Bain Capital Ventures and Thrive Capital co-led the round. More here
🚀 Mmhmm, a year-old, US-based startup that adds its own flourishes to existing video communications services like that of Zoom and says it will soon function as a standalone product, has raised $100M from investors led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, with participation from Sequoia Capital and others. More here
🚀 Lula, a 5-year-old, US-based insurance infrastructure startup, has raised $18M in Series A funding co-led by Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, with participation from SoftBank, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, Bain Capital co-chairman, and Boston Celtics owner Steve Pagliuca, and Tiny Capital’s Andrew Wilkinson. More here
Exits:
🔥 Dataminr, the New York-based company specializing in real-time information alerts, says it has acquired WatchKeeper, a data geo-visualization platform in London, for an undisclosed amount. More here
🔥 Google is set to buy Japanese mobile payments startup Pring for around $182M. The company is in negotiations to buy the Tokyo-based cashless payment and settlement outfit owned by Mizuho Bank and other investors so that it can offer fintech services, such as payments and transfers, in Japan next year, following launches in the U.S. and India. More here
🔥 Zomato, the 12-year-old, India-based food delivery company backed by China’s Ant Group and Uber, said it has boosted its plan to raise $1.3B in its initial public offering, which opens on July 14 and closes on July 16. More here
Promising technology
Google is launching its Visual Inspection AI - an innovative service that non-AI engineers can use to help manufacturers and related workers and businesses to inspect and reduce product defects and decrease quality control costs. Powered by Google Cloud Platform’s computer vision technology, Visual Inspection AI goes beyond the traditional methods of supporting manufacturing quality control through its general-purpose AI product, AutoML.
Visual Inspection AI aims to automate quality assurance workflows, thus allowing companies to identify and correct defects before shipping products. Through this, the new AI tool automates visual inspection using a set of AI and computer vision to improve production by increasing yields, reducing re-work, and cutting back on return-and-repair costs. More here
Insightful data
Fintech companies based in London raised more funding from venture capital investors in the first six months of 2021 than in any other year, demonstrating the British capital's resilience as a hub for digital financial services post-Brexit. Investors poured $5.3B into London fintech startups in the first half of the year, compared to $2.1B in the same period in 2020. More here
Have a nice week!😎