At Itnig, we know it’s hard to keep up with all the news and updates flying around. This month, we (Itnig) expanded our coworking space as you may have seen in the news. If you want to join our ecosystem of entrepreneurs and techies, just let us know!
On top of that, Syra and Itnig worked on what we call Coffice, an office space that offers coffee for everyone. We opened doors on August 5th (Pujades 100, Barcelona) so make sure to pass by to try our coffee!
Startup Inside Stories Podcast
#95 : Ignacio Fonts, from Inveready
This week we’ve interviewed Ignacio Fonts, Managing Partner at Inveready, one of the first early-stage investment firms in Spain. This VC fund is especially interesting as they have pioneered in many fields successfully.
Inveready’s most notorious investment is MÁSMÓVIL, the telecom company that has become a superstar buying bigger companies like Yoigo. Ignacio opens up and explains some of the toughest situations of the company and how a VC firm can support in such hard times.
No doubt this is one of the most educational podcast so far!
#96 : Andreas von Estorff, from ModelManagement.com
Andreas von Estorff is a German serial entrepreneur based in Barcelona that has built his career around the model management business. In this week’s podcast, he explains how he built some of his companies like Casting.net, a marketplace for models, actors and other artists.
His current project is ModelManagement.com, a website that has built a community that connects clients that need to find a model and people that want to perform as models, being or not professionals. He shows numbers and events tell us how much a model can earn per shooting!
#97-#98 : Christian Rodríguez, from ByHours
Christian Rodríguez is an entrepreneur with plenty of things to tell. In this week’s podcast, he tells us about some of his successes at Hawkers, Northweek and ByHours.
In 2011, Christian decided to setup ByHours, a company that allows users to book hotel rooms for 3, 6 or 12 hours. Since then, the business has grown and has become another success story from the Barcelona startup ecosystem.
Christian explains his businesses in detail and the conversation went longer than usual so when talking about the history of Hawkers, we decided to make a dedicated podcast so you can watch it fully at any time. Enjoy de Part 1 and the Part 2.
#99 : Marc Vicente, from ABA English
In this week’s podcast, we are chatting with Marc Vicente who is currently CEO at ABA English, a startup focused on teaching English. He has also been at other C-level positions in companies like Akamon and Rakuten Spain.
Marc discusses some of his insights in the marketplace business and explains some of the differences he finds between Amazon, Rakuten or other companies like Alibaba or Cdiscount.
#100: Yassir Raïs, from Syra Coffee
We got to the podcast 100 already, and to celebrate it we have invited Yassir Raïs, founder and CEO at Syra Coffee. At Itnig we believe in the potential of his project and we are investing from the Itnig Fund to support its growth.
His claim is to democratise coffee, good coffee. He believes that specialty coffee should not be expensive but it should remain of outstanding quality. His success in his fist shop in Gracia (Barcelona) has encouraged him to dream big and scale the business to become the leader in the sector.
We compared the business to Luckin Coffee (over 1.700 shops) and Starbucks. Check it out here!
July Startup News & Updates
Neobank startups seem to be the golden pot of entrepreneurship as we got yet another astonishing figure from Monzo, which doubled valuation to $2.5 billion. But fintech doesn’t have just one leg and Freetrade, the European Robinhood, raised last month £1M via Crowdcube at £18M valuation. They did it in 1 minute and crushed the site… and this week they have raised £3M at £42M valuation! That’s nuts!
This technology is quite the present rather than the future and some investors don’t want to miss it out as proven by the Japanese startup Tier IV that just raised a humongous Series A of $100M!
App developing companies must be happy as app revenue is up by 15% in the first half of 2019 compared to last year’s. The Apple Store continues to be the king with $25.5B spent in 6 months in contrast with the $14.2B in the Google counterpart.
Oh, and if you are new to our newsletter you might have missed the 5 mega-deals that made Q2 2019 a record-breaking quarter for European startups. More to be expected soon as e-ventures raised $400M with $175 million going to its Europe-focused investment arm.
Are you an Angel Investor? You may not be using your money right. Some people believe angel investments are meant for those willing to support ideas rather than purely making money.
EU-Startups just published a list of 10 mobility startups to look out for in 2019 and the sector keeps booming. For instance, last week, we got to know that Uber’s rival Bolt has closed a $67M round, but… wait! They are not the only Bolt startup that raised $67M last week!
We got to know that card-payment solution SumUp secured a $300M loan to finance its growth while the German neobank N26 has raised an additional $170M funding at $3.5B valuation. Also, the card aggregator Curve raised €49M and they partnered up with us for this week’s podcast!
The Apollo 11 turns 50, a project that might bring some insights for your own moonshots. Additionally, as entrepreneurs ourselves, we know sales is tough and being a team leader in the sales department is even tougher so Bernat wrote an opinion piece on what a leader should have.
Oh, and a couple more news to start off the week. Sifted explained how to do PR in a startup – tip, don’t hire an agency before Series A. And if you have a B2B model, you may be interested in learning how to build your Lead Generation Strategy.
New Funding for Startups
- British fintech Monzo doubles valuation to $2.5 billion
- Carbon Raises $260M to scale its light-driven 3D printing tech
- Data center chip startup Fungible closes $200M Series C
- Commonwealth Fusion Systems closes $115M Series A to accelerate the path to commercial fusion energy
- Palma-based biotech company Sanifit closed €55M round led by Caixa Capital Risc
- Belgium-based Showpad raises $70M for cloud-based sales tools
- Urban tech startup Venn raises $40 in Series A round
- Dutch digital top-up startup Creative Group secures €22M
- Madrid-based Bipi closes €6.5M in Series A lead by Maniv Mobility
- Munich-based 42CAP closes new €50 million fund for seed-investments in European B2B technology startups
- India’s newest unicorn Ola Electric revs up with $250M
- Solar cell producer Oxford PV closes €74 million Series D round
- Euro e-scooter startup Dott raises €30 million from EQT Ventures, Naspers Ventures and others
- Paris-based logistics startup Cubyn raises €12 million
- Deepki raises €8M to enter the Spanish market
- Podimo raises €6M to become Europe’s ‘Netflix for podcasts’
- Ironhack raises raises $4M led by JME Venture Capital
- InnoUp Farma opens up a 1M€ round to develop a vaccine against food intolerances
- Brazil’s Creditas secures $231M from SoftBank
- AeroFarms raises $100M as investors rush to indoor farms
- Wind Mobility raises an additional $50M and unveils new e-scooter hardware designed for rentals
- Fever just raised another $35M led by Rakuten
- French AI tech company Sinequa raises $23 million from Jolt Capital and Troismer
- Catering app City Pantry acquired by Just Eat for £16M
- Finnish hardware startup IQM raises more than €11M in seed funding to take quantum computing to the next level
- Berlin proptech startup Wunderflats has secured €8M in funding
- Barcelona-based startup LexGo App raises €330K from Akola and IESE investors
- European fintech scale-up SumUp secures €330M loan to finance growth
- Fintech startup N26 raises another $170M at $3.5B valuation
- Icertis raises $115M to automate contract management
- TravelPerk raises an additional $60M in Series C bringing the total value of the round to $104M
- London-based fintech Curve raises €49M for its banking app that consolidates multiple accounts
- Legaltech startup ContractPodAi lands €49M
- The software solutions for insurers company, BriteCore received $47.5Mfunding
- Subscription recipe firm Gousto raises £40M
- Raisin picks up $28M backing from Goldman Sachs for its savings and investment marketplace
- Marseille-based Traxens closes €20M Series C
- Prontopiso raises €14M en Venture Debt led by Inveready
- Paris-based HostnFly raises €9M to manage 10,000 Airbnb rentals in France
- The Spanish startup Finizens raised $3.3M
- Dentaltix raised €500K from Cabiedes & Partners and Bewater Funds
- Mobile-First Trading Platform Robinhood Raises $323M In Series E Financing
- Gusto Raises $200M Series D At $3.8B Valuation To Power HR Within Small Businesses
- Retail Tech Shop Trax Raises $100M, Becomes Singapore’s Latest Unicorn
- Fintech Startup MoneyLion Raises $100M Series C, ‘Nears Unicorn Status’
- Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital Leads $100M Round In Insurance Startup Hippo, Crowning It A Unicorn
- Tile Raises $45M To Help The Modern World Find Its Darn Phone
- Fintech company Zeta raises close to $65 million from Sodexo at $300 million valuation to scale to Europe and US
- Swedish fashion startup NA-KD closes its Series B round at €65 million, with the extra €20 million for localisation
- HEAP raises $55 Million in Series C
- Kraków-based edtech platform Brainly scores €27 million from Naspers
- The healthtech startup Leuko raises $1.8M
- Catalan startup Picker raises €650K
- Allergeneat raises €200K in a seed round
- Bonus: The Collider just opened a call for talent
Random Tech News
- Twitter will hide rule-breaking politicians’ tweets.
- NASA is prepping a 2026 mission to Titan to find the origins of life.
- Microsoft is about to shut off its ebook DRM servers: “The books will stop working”
- Hans Zimmer is composing the sound for BMW’s electric vehicles.
- Google Maps is the new search destination, but it’s not always reliable.
- Bitcoin has quadrupled in value in six months.
- Debugging your startup.
- Bonus: the science behind the best chocolate chip cookies.
- How did Adam Neumann turn WeWork into a $47 billion company?
- A Unicorn Lost in the Valley, Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel.
- Scaling from 2,000 to 25,000 engineers on GitHub at Microsoft
- DNA data storage is closer than you think.
- Drone swarm spray painting a jumbo-size graffiti mural.
- Top VPNs secretly owned by Chinese firms.
- A beginner’s guide to AI: Supervised and unsupervised learning.
- How big biased datasets make social inequalities worse.
- Amazon, Microsoft wage war over the Pentagon’s ‘war cloud’.
- Drones will supply car components in Seat factory.
- Facebook heralds its ‘superhuman’ poker-playing AI.
- Mac Zoom Client allows malicious website to enable your camera.
- Flaws in hospital anesthesia and respiratory devices allow remote tampering.
- Apple Updates Air, Pro Laptops, Kills off the MacBook.
- Instagram now asks bullies: ‘Are you sure?’
- AI trained on old scientific papers makes discoveries humans missed.
- London is tracking passengers on the Underground.
- Elon Musk’s Neuralink is building tech to control computers with your mind.
- Amazon offers $10 to Prime Day shoppers who hand over their data.
- Ex-Microsoft dev used test account to swipe $10m in tech giant’s own store credits.
- Taking one flight emits as much CO2 as many people do in a year.
- We shouldn’t colonize Mars without knowing if aliens were there before us.
- Computer password inventor Fernando Corbató has died aged 93.
- This is one way Toyota plans to shuttle people around during the 2020 Olympics.
- Bug bounty programs are real if you find real vulnerabilities.
- Some of the keys to hire the best programmers.
- Netflix launches a 3$/month mobile only subscription in India.
- Norwegian will allow passengers to buy tickets using bitcoin.
- CERN is migrating from Microsoft to open source technologies.
- Hot weather is affecting Europe’s nuclear power.
- Using computer vision and AI to track buffet crowds on ships.
- These are the hours of day famous programmers get work done.
- You can now run SQL on ADN, with the right software and bio-chemical modules.
- The AI behind Nintendo 64’s Golden Eye.
Those are July 2019 startup news!
At Itnig, we write a weekly newsletter where we keep our community updated on everything related to startups, tech news, fundings, and we share our weekly podcast!
Subscribe and keep up with the startup universe, or feel free to come back for more startup news of the month here!
in fact, the attractiveness of the start app is primarily assessed by the team, and by sales, and then already in the market in which orn is growing and developing, and by my company, which has only recently entered the European market, http://englishpapa.com/ but has already earned a reputation as a reliable provider of educational services