News
Foodsteps, a food technology startup that allows businesses to easily calculate, reduce, and label the environmental impact of their food, has formally launched in the UK today. The company is the first UK-based tech firm to provide carbon tracking and impact labelling to restaurants and caterers as well as food businesses.
Vira Health, a digital health company focused on improving long term health for women, has raised £1.5m in seed funding from LocalGlobe, MMC Ventures, and angel investors including Megumi Ikeda, Managing Director, Hearst Ventures, Andrea Zitna of Elvie, former Spotify executive Sofia Bendz, founder of GoCardless Matt Robinson, and Simon Lambert, former CTO, MOO.com, and Treatwell.
It’s no secret that the pandemic has significantly challenged the events industry. Even with lockdown restrictions lifted, a hesitancy to return to large indoor events is predicted to continue for some time. In order to meet these changing customer needs and help to revive corporate events safely, Eventurous Ltd, a full-service events agency near Atherstone in the West Midlands, has launched an exciting new tipi hire service – creating an unusual and inspiring venue solution for business use.
TOCA Football, the world’s only technology-enabled soccer experiences and entertainment company, today announced the completion of its Series E funding round, totaling $40m. Leading the round are current investors WestRiver Group (WRG), RNS TOCA Partners LLC, and D2 Futbol Investors, LLC., who are joined by a group of new investors including Jared Smith, co-founder and former COO of Experience Management (XM) company Qualtrics. This round brings TOCA’s total capital raised to $105m.
As we say goodbye to lockdown restrictions, new research from Sky Connect, Sky’s new B2B telecoms business, celebrates the strength and adaptability of British small businesses with a third revealing that the secret to their resilience over the past year is sheer hard work and motivation. The majority of the UK’s SMEs (80%) – which make up over 99% of the business population – believe they have shown resilience at its best throughout the pandemic.
As we successfully hosted the 2021 Hustle Awards last night at the Finsbury Business Centre (in-person finally!) and had a virtual livestream too, we saw five incredible startups take the prize across the five different categories, plus an array of talent that was also shortlisted and five amazing runner-ups. But not only that we saw our community again, and what an amazing feeling that was to be able to speak to some of you face-to-face!
The UK’s first-ever ‘Laptop Library’ has launched to help support and educate the nation’s most underprivileged children. The initiative, launched by grassroots charity CC Foundation in partnership with leading IT service provider Totality Services, will give hundreds of children access to use and borrow laptops.
Greyparrot, the London based tech company disrupting the recycling industry by providing waste analytics to monitor, sort, and audit waste at scale, was selected among hundreds of candidates as one of the World Economic Forum’s “Technology Pioneers”. Previous to founding Greyparrot in 2019, co-founders Mikela Druckman, Ambarish Mitra and Nikola Sivacki had built some of the most cutting edge deep-learning computer vision systems in the world. Now they are committed to applying this technology to the recycling sector, extracting the value of materials that would otherwise end up in landfills, oceans or incinerated.
Innovate UK is releasing new data which reveals the proportion of women setting up businesses has not only remained stagnant at just over a quarter of the total number of new businesses for the last decade, but seen a slight dip since 2010/11 when it was at 28.7%, compared to 27.3% today. Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation Awards looks to help balance the playing field in business by providing more support to female entrepreneurs from across the UK.
Digital insurer Getsafe recently reached two significant milestones: With 10,000 customers in the United Kingdom and close to 200,000 customers in its native market, Germany, Getsafe is now the largest neo-insurer in Europe. The company currently offers contents insurance with five extensions in the UK and a larger product portfolio in Germany.









