Year: 2021

This morning Treasury Prime, a banking-as-a-service startup that delivers its product via APIs, announced that it has closed a $20 million Series B. The capital comes around a year since the startup announced its Series A, and around 1.5 years since it raised its preceding round.

For Treasury Prime, the new capital was an internal affair, with prior investors stepping up to lead its new round of funding. Deciens Capital and QED Investors co-led the round, with Susa Ventures and SaaStr Fund also putting cash into the transaction.

As is increasingly common among insider-led fundraises in recent years, the startup in question was not in dire need of new funding before the new investment came together. In fact, Treasury Prime CEO Chris Dean told TechCrunch that his firm is “super capital efficient” in an interview, adding that it had not tucked into its Series A capital until January of this year.

So, why raise more funds now? To invest aggressively in its business. That plan is cliche for a startup raising new funding, but in the case of Treasury Prime the move isn’t in anticipation of future demand. Dean told TechCrunch that his startups had run into a bottleneck in which it could only take on so much new customer volume. That’s no good for a startup in a competitive sector, so picking up its spend in early 2021 and raising new capital in mid-2021 makes sense as it could help it hire, and absorb more demand, more quickly.

And for Treasury Prime’s preceding backers, the chance to put more capital into a startup that was dealing with more demand than capacity likely wasn’t too hard a choice.  Dean added that to make sure the round’s price was market-reasonable, he pitched around 10 venture capital firms, got three term sheets, and then went with his preceding investor group; if any VC reading this is irked by the move, this is the founder equivalent of private-market investors asking founders to come back to them after they find a lead.

But with the banking-as-a-service market growing, thanks to entrants like Stripe showing up in recent quarters, how does Treasury Prime expect to stay towards the front of its fintech niche? Per Dean, by bringing together banks that want fintech deal volume, and fintechs who need both technology and eventual banking partners. By courting both sides of its market, Treasury Prime hopes to be well-situated for long-term growth.

And its CEO is bullish on the scale of his market.

If you imagine the banking-as-a-service market as merely neobanks, he explained, it’s not that big. But his startup expects the number of companies that want to offer their customers the sort banking capabilities that Treasury Prime and some competitors can offer will be broad. How broad? The best way I can summarize the company’s argument is that, a bit like how vertical SaaS has proven that building software for particular industries can be big business, Treasury Prime expects that banking tools will also be built for similar business categories. Vertical banking, perhaps, integrated into other services.

And it wants to be there, offering the back-end tech, and access to banks that the companies building those services will need.

Fintech is a big and expensive market, and Treasury Prime isn’t busy raising nine-figure rounds — yet, at least. According to PitchBook data, Treasury Prime was valued at just over $40 million at the time of its Series A; the company’s new valuation was presumably higher, though how much is not yet clear.

Let’s see how far it can get with $20 million more as it sheds some of its frugal DNA and looks to burn a little faster.

As private companies like Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX prepare to ferry private customers to the stars, a whole new market is opening up to train affluent would-be travelers for their future missions. Case in point: space training company Orbite, whose goal is to combine aeronautics and five-star hospitality in its inaugural astronaut training program.

“We’re going to have hundreds, if not thousands of people this decade of the 2020s, who will go to space, but you just don’t get off the couch and strap into a rocket […] you actually have to get mentally prepared, physically prepared, and also spiritually prepared for this out of out of this world journey,” co-founder Jason Andrews told TechCrunch. “And that’s really our role.”

Orbite (the French word for ‘orbit,’ pronounced or-beet) was founded by space and hospitality industry veterans Andrews and Nicolas Gaume. Andrews is an aerospace entrepreneur that founded Spaceflight and BlackSky, while Gaume, a software and game development entrepreneur, sits on the board of his family’s resort and hotel business Groupe Gaume. Last year, Gaume’s business Space Cargo Unlimited shipped a dozen bottles of wine to the International Space Station. They were later retrieved. (When asked how the wine tasted, Gaume told TechCrunch, “It’s a unique product.”)

The program will be led by Brienna Rommes, who previously worked as the director of space training and research at the National Aerospace Training and Research Center. Rommes has trained over 600 people to prepare for spaceflight, including Sir Richard Branson, Orbite said.

Led by Rommes, the program aim to prepare travelers that are determined to reach space, but Andrews also said Orbite can help customers “try before they buy” – give people a taste of spaceflight for those who are unsure whether they’d actually want to board a launch vehicle. This seems to be their main value proposition, by providing a general overview to space travel across different companies, because they’ll also be competing to a degree with the native (and mandatory) training programs of individual private launch companies that are purpose-built to prepare customers for their flight.

Costs remain prohibitively high for the average spacefarer: it’s been reported that a ticket on Axiom’s inaugural commercial launch to the International Space Station costs upwards of $55 million. Orbite’s premium training program comes in at $29,500 per person for the three-day, four-night stay.

In acknowledgement on the premium price tag, the four training program sessions scheduled through the remainder of 2021 will be held at luxury resorts: the Four Seasons Resort in Orlando, Florida, and Hôtel La Co(o)rniche in Pyla-sur-Mer, France. The latter hotel is owned by Groupe Gaume.

Would-be space travelers will be able to experience up to 5 Gs by taking a ride on a high-performance aircraft as well as simulated zero-gravity. To prepare customers mentally and even spiritually, the training program itinerary includes meditation training, a workshop on stress and anxiety management, and individual coaching with staff “to explore personal goals for space, thoughts and asses possible flight options,” the company said. The itinerary also includes virtual reality mission experiences and a ‘Michelin star’ space food tasting.

“We really want to make sure we bridge the gap with more of a sensorial, psychological, even spiritual preparation for the trip,” Gaume said.

The company’s long-term vision is building and operating many training facilities around the world. The first facility will open in 2023 or 2024, though Andrews and Gaume are not yet sharing where it will be located. They did say that the dedicated training facility will offer a range of packages, with some as short as single-day experiences. They will also offer accommodation and hospitality, potentially for the long term – weeks or even months, depending on if we reach a stage in human space travel where we’re sending private citizens to the Moon or even Mars.

Job-hunting for those close to leaving or just out of college is a different ballgame these days than it used to be. Gone (at least for now) are the open job fairs and so-called milk rounds where prospective employers go en masse to tap student bodies for potential new entrant hires. In their place, virtual fairs run by startups like Handshake. Today, the company, which has built a platform for professional networking and graduate recruitment aimed at the wider and diverse breadth of college students, is announcing a hefty round of funding — a sign of how it has capitalized on the new landscape and found a healthy place for itself within it.

The startup has closed in on $80 million, a Series E that it has confirmed values Handshake at over $1.5 billion. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Spark Capital co-led this round, with first-time backers Coatue Management and Valiant Peregrine Fund also investing, alongside Handshake’s previous investors. (That list of previous backers is a pretty illustrious list: EQT, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Omidyar Network, Reach Capital, True, Kleiner Perkins, and GGV are among them.)

“Covid-19 has had a massive effect on our business,” CEO and co-founder Garrett Lord told me in an interview. Key to that has been a new video product that Handshake built, which powers its virtual career fairs and interviews between prospective recruits and organizations. “It’s all centered around video recruiting with more than 90% of our university partners using our video solution. That’s really important for them because they [recruiters and those working in career services at the schools] are all under a lot of pressure to show results. They moved to our virtual products because they could facilitate those connections.”

The valuation is a big hike compared to its previous round (also $80 million, as recently as last October), and comes as the company is recording a lot of momentum in the market.

It has been doubling revenue every year for the last three, and is now on track for $100 million in annual recurring revenue. The platform now has 18 million students and young alumni hailing from 1,200 educational institutions including four-year colleges — with the recent additions of the wider extent of higher learning, in the form of community colleges and boot camps, now also bolstering those ranks. It said that a full 49% of U.S. college graduates from 2018-2020 received job offers via Handshake.

Meanwhile, the third part of Handshake’s marketplace alongside students and their colleges — the organizations doing the recruiting — is also really digging in. It now has 550,000 companies on its rolls using Handshake to connect with individuals. That includes no less than 100% of the Fortune 500. And it notes that with companies getting more serious about diversity and inclusion, the companies’ engagement on Handshake is only growing. The startup said that 98 million virtual student-employer connections were enabled on its platform last year.

When I previously covered Handshake (see stories here and here), what really stood out to me about the company was how it was building and gaining traction addressing a very significant and often-ignored parts of the workforce, groups traditionally underrepresented in hiring in graduate roles.

Hires for these roles traditionally skew towards white males, and for the most competitive jobs, towards a select coterie of institutions. The mission of Handshake — founded by Garrett Lord (CEO), Scott Ringwelski (CTO) and Ben Christensen (a board member), three friends who hailed from a technical university in Michigan — was to break those models and barriers by creating a network that catered to a much wider range of historically Black colleges, and simply a wider range of institutions to improve the ratios.

In doing so, Handshake has carved out a place for itself as a kind of complement, or even competitor, to LinkedIn in this area. (It’s a complement if you think LinkedIn has squared away its ambitions for building professional networking and social-network-based recruitment for the rest of the wider working world; competitor if you think that LinkedIn has a viable chance of working out how to do this specifically for younger users earlier on in their careers, and those from historically underrepresented groups — both of which it’s never done outstandingly well.)

What’s interesting is that while there have been a lot of worries over how the graduate job market and students would fare in a Covid-19 landscape, Handshake has found a way ahead to match our current times. Specifically, it’s doubled down on virtual recruiting fairs and other ways of facilitating connections and conversations between its users and the organizations that want to hire them.

This funding, Lord tells me, will be used to continue developing the company’s technology and tools that it provides to its users. Interestingly, the company does not believe that its development is best-served by trying to mimic a LinkedIn experience, however: no plans for online education or professional development, or sharing content and news related to your professional life, but more work on improving recommendations and perhaps extending out the number of years where a user might find Handshake useful.

“We know where users went to school, and what they were looking for in a job,” Lord said. “What makes us different is that everyone is searching at the same time and that means a ton of information we can work with.”

Investors are happy with the focus and how Handshake plans to develop it.

“Since leading Handshake’s Series B in 2016, we’ve been thrilled to watch the company become the clear number one way for students to find internships and jobs, and there is still so much opportunity ahead,” said Will Reed, general partner at Spark Capital, in a statement. “Doubling down on our investment five years later underscores our belief that Handshake will not only help students build the skills and relationships they need to get their first job, but also expand into the $100 billion+ market of helping professionals advance their careers with second, third, and fourth jobs over time.”

Mental health has been put into the spotlight in a big way in recent times. For many of us, our lives and lifestyles have changed massively in the last year, and alongside that, we’re collectively facing pandemic-fueled mortality on a global scale in a way that hasn’t existed for generations, a perfect storm of sorts that has inevitably had an impact on our state of mind and our moods.

Today a startup that has built a platform to help people think about and respond to this situation is announcing a big round of growth funding, specifically to help address all of this and how it plays out in one of the more stress-inducing aspects of our life — our workplaces.

Unmind — a London startup that has built a mental health app for the workplace — has raised $47 million, a Series B that it will be using to continue investing in its research and development and also to expand its business reach. The funding is being led by EQT Ventures –- a very active investor at the moment in UK growth rounds — with participation also from Sapphire Ventures and previous backers Project A, Felix Capital, and True.

The core of Unmind’s service is an app built around a set of questions to help employees explore their own states of mental health, which could include depression, anxiety, insomnia, and a host of other manifestations. It provides advice and content to begin addressing the results of that — exercises, advice, podcasts, links for further reading, and links to seeing further help from professionals (not more machine interfaces, but humans). It also provides a service to the employers, sharing anonymized data from the app with them so that they, too, can consider how better to respond to their employees’ needs.

The app has seen some notable traction especially in the last year, a time when the conversation about mental health has become much more commonplace and critical, given the environment we’ve been living in.

Unmind does not disclose user numbers, nor how they have grown, but it tells me that uptake and adoption of its app ranges from 15% to over 60% of an organization’s workforce (this varies by size, and the emphasis that the organization itself puts on using the app, among other things). It said that of those employees who are using Unmind, 88% have said they experience an improvement in mental wellbeing, work, or relationships, while 92% report higher confidence, awareness, and understanding of mental health.

The company also said that revenues grew by more than 3x in the last 12 months. Meanwhile, its customers include major retailers like John Lewis and M&S, high street bank TSB, Uber, Samsung, Virgin Media, British Airways and Asos — a list of companies that have strong degrees of customer service around them, have been greatly impacted by the lockdowns, and you can imagine must have a lot of people working in them pretty stressed out as a result of being on the front lines of interfacing with a stressed-out wider population of consumers.

The company was co-founded by Dr Nick Taylor, who previously had been a clinical psychologist and worked for years in mental health care (and before that was a classically-trained singer), who said he came up with the idea after feeling like he was seeing too many people only for the first time at a stage when their issues were already very advanced.

“I kept encountering the same frustration time and again: I wish I’d met this person six months ago,” Taylor said in an interview.

As with all kinds of preventative healthcare, it’s always better to identify and work on issues before they grow big and more urgent, and so he set out to think about how one might approach the concept of a preventative check-up and check-in for mental health.

The workplace is not a bad place to base that effort. Not only is it often a source of stress for people, but it’s a regular place for them to be every day so creating a way of assessing mental health through that implicitly creates a kind of routine to the effort. It also potentially means a closer connection to the employer to work on issues more collectively when and if they emerge, in a way that the employer might not do (or ever discover) through other means.

The connection between work and mental health is a longstanding one but has perhaps been proven out more than ever before in the last year.

“I didn’t know what would happen with mental health during Covid,” Taylor recalled. “I actually wondered if it would be demoted,” given all of the other conflicting priorities. “But the prevalence of mental illness has escalated. It’s out of control. And in the workplace, it’s a leading cause of absenteeism and turnover.” And given how full-on everything has become, including likely more hours spent working since now it all has merged with our home lives, we all know (and may well be among) many people who are feeling incredibly burned out right now.

Taylor said that in fact quite the opposite has happened to his early skepticism: mental health has become front of mind, “and the shackles of stigma are falling away.”

This is part of what has really caught the eye of investors: technology that is not just effective, but very relevant to right now. “It is now universally recognized that our Mental Health is as important if not more important than our physical health – but has long been neglected. That is now changing rapidly,” said Alastair Mitchell, a partner at EQT Ventures. “As a result there has been a massive rise in the popularity of consumer mental health apps which is now being matched by surging demand from employers and employees for the same in the workplace. Unmind is the leading mental health app for the enterprise and we are so excited to work with Dr Nick and the team to support their scaling globally.” EQT is also a strategic investor, not just a financial one: it’s rolling out Unmind across its own workplace and its many portfolio companies.

Unmind, it should be noted, is not the only company that has identified this “opportunity,” if you could call it that. They include other startups like SF-based Ginger — which has also built a platform that partners with employers, but also healthcare providers and other stakeholders, to help people identify and manage their state of mind. Ginger has been well-capitalised over the years. Others in the same space include Welbot in New York, Spill also out of London and a host of others providing different aspects of mental wellness like Calm and Headspace, the meditation apps.

I’m inclined to think that, given the size of the problem and that mental health should not be a bunfight but something that takes a village to address, the key will be in how each company approaches its remit, and how people respond to it, and whether what people do ultimately use results in better bridges for employees to getting the help and peace they need, whether it’s from the app or a professional.

“We have a responsibility to connect with our mental health in the same way that we do when it comes to healthcare,” Taylor said, likening the effort to how it takes a number of skill sets sometimes to work on the complexities of a health issue. “Great healthcare integrates across a number of systems.”

When eventually they become a working reality, Quantum computers won’t be of much value if they simply sit there on their own. Just like the internet, the value is in the network. But right now there’s scant technology to link these powerful devices together.

That’s where QphoX comes in. Thus Dutch startup has raised €2 million to connect Quantum computers with a ‘Quantum modem’.

The funding round was led by Quantonation, Speedinvest, and High-Tech Gründerfonds, with participation from TU Delft.

QphoX aims to develop the Quantum Modem it created at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) into a commercial product. This networks separate processors together, allowing quantum computers to scale beyond 10’s or 100’s of qubits. Look out for the Singularity folks…

Simon Gröblacher, CEO and co-founder of QphoX told me: “It is the exact same thing as a classical modem except for quantum computers, so it kind of converts electrical and microwave signals to optical signals coherently, so you don’t do any of the quantum information in the process. It then converts it back so you can really have two quantum computers talk to one another.

I noted that there’s more than one type of quantum computer. He countered “We are in principle agnostic to what kind of quantum computer it is. All we do at the moment is we focus on the microwave part, so we can work with superconducting qubits, topological qubits etc. We can convert microwaves to optical signals and they can talk to each other. Currently, the only competitors I know are all the in the academic world. So this is we’re the first company to actually starts building a real product.”

Rick Hao, Principal with Speedinvest’s Deep Tech team, added: “ We want to invest in seed-stage deep technology startups that shape the future and QphoX is well-positioned to make a major impact. Over the next couple of years, there will be rapid progress in quantum computers. Quantum Modem, the product developed by QphoX, enables the development of quantum computers that demonstrate quantum advantage by combining separate quantum processors.”

Vacation rental startup Holidu has tucked $45 million in Series D funding into its suitcase — bringing its total raised since being founded back in 2014 to more than $120M.

The latest funding round is led by 83North with participation from existing investors Prime Ventures, EQT ventures, Coparion, Senovo, Kees Koolen, Lios Ventures and Chris Hitchen. Also participating, with both equity and debt, is Claret Capital (formerly Harbert European Growth Capital).

The financing will be ploughed into product development; doubling the size of the tech team; and on building out partnerships to keep expanding supply, Holidu said.

While the global pandemic clearly hasn’t been kind to much of the travel industry, the Munich-headquartered startup has been able to benefit from coronavirus-induced shifts in traveller behavior.

People who may have booked city breaks or hotels pre-COVID-19 are turning to private holiday accommodation in greater numbers than before — so they can feel safer about going on holiday and perhaps enjoy more space and fresh air than they’ve had at home during coronavirus lockdowns.

Having flexible cancelation options is also now clearly front of mind for travellers — and Holidu credits moving quickly to build in flexible cancellation and payment solutions with helping fuel its growth during the pandemic.

Holidu’s meta search engine compares listings on sites like Airbnb, Booking.com, HomeAway and Vrbo and provides holidaymakers with tools to zoom in on relevant rentals — offering granular filters for property amenities; property type; and distances to the beach/lake etc.

It can also be used to search only for listings with a free cancelation policy.

“We see that many travellers have chosen vacation rentals in rural destinations over hotels or cities,” confirms CEO and co-founder Johannes Siebers. “In spite of this shift in preference, the overall European vacation rental market declined in 2020 due to the strong travel restrictions in many months. Holidu managed to grow against this trend by responding very quickly to the increased demand for domestic lodging and for flexible cancellation options.”

The startup saw year-over-year growth of circa 50% in 2020 — and greater than 2x growth in its contribution margin, per Siebers.

“[That] enabled us to become profitable with our search business,” he adds. “Revenues for 2021 are still difficult to forecast due to the uncertain pandemic and political outlook but we expect a significantly higher growth rate compared to 2020.”

Holidu is active in 21 countries with its search engine — which now combines more than 15M vacation rental offers from over a thousand travel sites and property managers. In July 2020 alone, it said that more than 27M travellers used the product.

Its search engine business has a mixed business model, with Holidu taking a commission per click with a minority of its partners and earning a commission for each booking generated with the majority.

In another strand of its business, under the Bookiply brand, it works directly with property owners to help them maximize bookings via a software-and-service solution — offering to take the digital management strain in exchange for a cut of (successful) bookings.

Back in 2019 it was managing 5,000 properties via Bookiply. Now Siebers says it’s “on track” to grow to more than 10,000 properties by the end of this year.

Bookiply has become the largest supplier of vacation rentals in what it described as “important leisure destinations” such as the Balearic Islands, Canary Islands and Sardinia (which are all very popular holiday destinations with German travellers).

Part of the Series D funding will go on opening more Bookiply offices across Europe so it can grow its service offering for regional vacation rental owners.

The division aims to reach property owners whose properties are not yet online, as well as optimizing digital listings that aren’t doing as well as they might, so having physical service locations is a strategy to help with onboarding owners who may be newbies to digital listing.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Laurel Bowden, partner at 83North said: “Vacation rentals are a very competitive market and Holidu’s growth throughout the pandemic has been highly impressive. We are attracted by their strong operating efficiency and proven ability to grow market by market.”

Last year Holidu was among scores of startups in the travel, accommodation and jobs sectors that signed a letter to the European Commission urging antitrust action against Google.

The coalition accused the tech giant of unfairly leveraging its dominant position in search in order to elbow into other markets via tactics like self-preferencing, warning EU lawmakers that homegrown businesses were at risk without swift enforcement to rein in abusive behaviors.

Although in Holidu’s case it’s managed to grow despite the pandemic — and despite Google.

Asked how much of an ongoing concern Google’s behavior is for the growth of its business, Siebers told TechCrunch: “Given its size and market position, we believe Google carries a special responsibility in the search market. Furthermore, we believe in merit based competition to drive innovation and provide users with the best products. We have joined the letter to the EC as in our view, Google does not fully live up to its responsibilities in all areas of its product.

“The way Google displays specialized search products in many travel verticals does, in our view, not comply with the principle of fair, merit based competition. It gives Google’s own product eyeballs which no other player could attract in the same way.”

“We have not yet seen noticeable changes in Google’s search box integration but we are confident that Google will eventually provide a level playing field. Even if this would take some time and is important, we are not overly worried as we have a very diversified business. Among others, with Bookiply we have a strongly growing offering towards homeowners which is independent of Google’s activities in the market,” he added.

Since the coalition wrote the letter the Commission has unveiled a legislative proposal to apply ex ante regulations to so called ‘gatekeeper’ platforms — a designation that looks highly likely to apply to Google, although the Digital Markets Act (DMA) is still a long way off becoming pan-EU law.

Siebers said Holidu supports this plan for a set of ‘dos and don’ts’ that the most powerful platforms must abide by.

“We are supportive of the commission’s proposal and believe not only the act itself but also enforcement will drive innovation and better products for customers,” he added. “Enabling free and fair competition is a core deliverable for a regulator in a market place and we have high expectations towards the EU in this regard. If we achieve this, I am certain we will  see an  increase in innovation, investments and activities in areas which are currently impacted by gatekeeper’s activities.”

E-commerce continues to be a huge focus for investors watching consumer behavior and spending patterns in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the latest development, UK startup Lyst, a portal for high fashion brands and stores to sell directly to users, has picked up $85 million, in what the startup is describing as a ‘pre-IPO’ round.

The news comes as the company says that it has now grown to 150 million users browsing and buying from a catalog of 8 million products from 17,000 brands and retailers.

List said that gross merchandise value in 2020 was over $500 million, with new user numbers growing 1100% growth in new users. GMV has definitely been accelerating. Lyst has been around since 2010 and said today that lifetime GMV is more than $2 billion.

“Lyst is rapidly becoming a fashion category leader, which hundreds of millions of fashion lovers rely on to decide what to buy. While our app and website already enjoy very large audiences in the USA & Europe, fashion e-commerce remains under-penetrated in general, with huge growth potential globally. We’re excited to use this raise from top-tier investors to continue personalising the fashion shopping experience to each of our millions of customers, while helping our partner brands thrive,” said Chris Morton, Lyst’s CEO and founder, in a statement.

We have contacted the company to ask about the timing and location for a public listing and while it has not commented, we understand that London or New York would be the most obvious locations for a listing, which is not likely to be for another year or even three.

For now, Lyst has disclosed that investors in this latest injection include funds managed by Fidelity International, Novator Capital, Giano Capital and C4 Ventures, as well as a mix of financial and strategic previous backers Draper Esprit, 14W, Accel, Balderton Capital, Venrex and LVMH. Carmen Busquets — a strategic advisor to the company who co-founded Net-a-Porter, one of Lyst’s competitors in the space — also increased her investment in the company with this round, the company said.

Lyst is not disclosing its valuation but PitchBook notes that with this round, it is $500 million post-money. (We’ve also asked the company to confirm whether this is an accurate figure.) Sky News, where the funding news was leaked last night, did not have a valuation figure.

For some further comparison and context, though, Farfetch, another competitor in the same space as Lyst, listed publicly some years ago and currently has a market cap of $14.4 billion. And more generally, there is a lot to play for here online, not just against other pure-play fashion portals, but also standalone retailers, marketplaces like Amazon, and increasingly social media apps like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, which are all looking at how they can better capitalize on how their platforms are already being used quite aggressively and widely for social commerce.

Social media sites would be an ironic but perhaps very unsurprising competitor for Lyst, which started life as a pioneer in the concept, creating a way for people to follow influential high fashion brands and influencers on its platform — who were not actually called “influencers” at the time, but curators and bloggers (the more things change, eh?) — and get alerts when items would be posted by them for sale.

People might have originally been very skeptical about how well high fahion (read: expensive, sometimes esoteric) might play over screens, but over time Lyst and the others in the same proved it all out in spades, raising successive rounds over time to back up its premise. Balenciaga, Balmain, Bottega Veneta, Burberry, Fendi, Gucci, Moncler, Off-White, Prada, Saint Laurent and Valentino are among the brands that appear on Lyst today.

Over the years, more variations and competitors have presented themselves, but the salient fact remains that high fashion has a huge target audience delivered in the right way, and that is something that investors, brands, influencers, and these marketplaces themselves have all doubled down on in the pandemic.

It’s been a time when people who have not found themselves outright struggling financially (and there are lot of those, unfortunately), have instead found themselves with more disposable income since they went out and travelled significantly less than before. Fashion and buying goods for ourselves has become a form of escapism, and for those who get a lift out of the tree falling in the forest and being there to hear the sound, we can still put on the outfits, snap ourselves for our Stories, and exposure will still be ours.

“Lyst has made huge progress over the past year with its industry leading app for the fast- growing online luxury fashion market – a trend which looks set to continue as consumers retain their newfound digital habits, and demand for fashion rises further post-pandemic. In recent years we have seen other high-growth fashion tech businesses taking the next step, and we believe Lyst is well positioned to capitalise on this market momentum. Draper Esprit has backed Lyst since Series A and we believe this latest round sets the business up for an exciting next phase,” said Nicola McClafferty, a partner, Draper Esprit, in a statement.

Lyst also announced a few appointments to firm up its executive bench in the lead-up to its next steps as a company. Mateo Rando previously at Spotify, is joining as chief product officer to focus largely on Lyst’s popular mobile app. And Emma McFerran, formerly general counsel and chief people officer, is stepping up as COO and a new board member.

Swarmia, a B2B SaaS company for software development teams dealing with data, has raised a €5.7 M Seed round and a previously unannounced 1M€ pre-seed round, taking its raise to €6.7M ($8M). The Seed round was led by Alven Capital and joined by Jigsaw VC, Irena Goldenberg, Alex Algard, Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, Jonathan Benhamou and Romain Huet. Lifeline Ventures, the sole investor in a previously unannounced 1M€ pre-seed round, also participated. The cash wil be used to scale to the US.

Founder Otto Hilska is a serial entrepreneur who started Flowdock (team collaboration product, acquired by Rally Software) and was Smartly.io’s Chief Product Officer.

Hilska says many software development organizations could be much more successful if they had a “better visibility to their work and a systematic approach for continuous improvement”.

Swarmia integrates with development tools such as GitHub, Jira, Linear and various CI tools to “create a holistic view to the engineering teams’ inner workings.”

Competitors include Pluralsight Flow (raised $192.5M) and CodeClimate Velocity ($15M).

However, Hilska says: “We’re the only product in the market that’s actually used by developers themselves. We don’t build features for stalking individual developers, but rather focus on how the team can improve. We’ve built the product together with our pilot customers (with shared Slack channels and daily iteration) to make sure that it actually scales with them. Every team is different, and our product adapts to these different ways of working by letting teams define their Working Agreements. That leads to much better data quality, since we actually understand how the teams work – while competitors are happy to plot any incorrect data. Our Slack bot also helps teams drive the behavioral change when teams choose to adopt a working agreement.”

Thomas Cuvelier, Partner at Alven commented: “Software is eating the world but software engineering, the largest cost center of the modern organization, is still a black box. Swarmia solves a considerable pain point by bringing visibility to engineering work and helping executives make the right business decisions based on data rather than anecdotal evidence. What Otto and his team have achieved so far is impressive and they’re well on their way to drive better working habits for the world’s 27m developers.”

Quix, a platform for Python developers working on streaming data, has secured a £2.3 Million ($3.2M)Seed funding round led by Project A Ventures in Germany, with participation from London’s Passion Capital and angel investors. The Quix Portal is also providing developers with a free subscription to a real-time data engineering platform.

Quix attracted angel investors including Frank Sagnier (CEO, Codemasters), Ian Hogarth (Co-author, State of AI Report), Chris Schagen (CMO, Contentful), and Michael Schrezenmaier (COO, Pipedrive).

Quix wants to change the way data is handled and processed from a database-centric approach to a ‘stream-centric’ approach, connecting machine learning models to real-time data streams. This is arguably the next paradigm in computing.

Use cases for Quix, it says, include developing electric vehicles, and fraud prevention in financial services. Some of its early customers are the NHS, Deloitte and McLaren.

Indeed, the founding team consists of former McLaren F1 engineers who are used to processing real-time data streams from the systems used by most Formula 1 teams.

Co-founder and CEO Michael Rosam said: “At Quix, we believe that it will soon be essential for every organization to automatically action data within milliseconds of it being created. Whether it’s personalizing digital experiences, developing electric vehicles, automating industrial machinery, deploying smart wearables in healthcare, or detecting financial fraud faster, the ability to run machine learning models on live data streams and immediately respond to rapidly changing environments is critical to delivering better experiences and outcomes to people.”

Over email he told me that Quix’s main advantage is that it allows developers to build streaming applications on Kafka without investing in cloud infrastructure first: “Uniquely, our API & SDK connects any Python code directly to the broker so that teams can run real-time machine learning models in-memory, reducing latency and cost compared to database-centric architectures.”

Quix is entering the data ecosystem alongside batch data processing platforms like Snowflake and Databricks, and event streaming platforms like Confluent, Materialize, and DBT. However, this ecosystem is very complementary with organizations usually combining multiple products into a production infrastructure based on the strengths of each proposition.

Sam Cash of Project A Ventures said: “Data streaming is the next paradigm in data architecture, given end-users accelerating demand for live, on-demand and personalized applications. The Quix team are leading the way in this market, by democratizing access to data streaming infrastructure, which until now has been the reserve of the largest companies.”

Malin Posern, Partner at Passion Capital commented: “The world today is generating unimaginable amounts of data from digital and physical activities. Businesses of all types and sizes will want to make use of their data in real-time in order to be competitive.”

The circular economy — where consumers themselves are both the suppliers and buyers of goods and services — has come into its own in the last year of lockdown living as a popular and trusted way to buy and sell things. Now one of the larger players in that system — the clothes and home goods marketplace Vinted — is circling in on some very big money of its own. The European startup is today announcing that it has closed an all-equity round of €250 million ($303 million at today’s rates), funding that values the company pre-money at €3.5 billion ($4.2 billion, or $4.5 billion post-money).

The funding is being led by EQT Growth, with participation Accel, Burda Principal Investments, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sprints Capital — all previous backers — also participating. This is a big jump for Vinted, which was valued at $1 billion in its round at the end of 2019. That, of course, was just before the pandemic hit — a sign of how much the last year has positively impacted both Vinted and that business model as a whole.

It’s a huge deal for the company as well as the country that’s produced the startup. Founded out of Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2008, Vinted has operations across 13 markets — France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Luxembourg, UK and the U.S. — and will be using the funding to double down on that while moving deeper into markets further afield, like its U.S. operation.

Altogether across that footprint, Vinted currently has some 45 million users (which is a neat number in this case: 45 million=$4.5 billion valuation), who upload their own items of clothes or home goods to sell or buy those uploaded by others. Users pay no fees for listing, but Vinted takes a “buyer protection” rate that is either between 3% and 8% of the cost of an item, or a direct cut (in the UK – between £0.03 and £0.08), depending on the value of the good.

(Note: buyer protection also actually is buyer protection, and the terms of that are set out here.)

The circular economy is often thought of as a useful system that not only helps get more life out of things in a sustainable way, but gives people a better deal by cutting out some of the others from the retail chain. That’s been a very compelling concept in the last year, where people have been spending more time at home and looking to declutter those spaces, or out of work and looking to make extra money or save some money, or simply rethinking how the world is working and how we got to where we are today, and trying to do their small part in engaging with their communities in a different way.

It’s also one of the oldest and most primitive kinds of selling techniques. Pre-dating shopping malls and Amazon and the like, you could say being more circular is just in our bones.

However, in less prosaic terms, that has also injected a lot of actual money into the circular economy concept. Back in 2015, researchers estimated that the wider circular economy was a $4.5 trillion opportunity (this includes the many services as well as goods sold between people). Last November, it was estimated that fashion alone was a $5 trillion circular economy opportunity — a sign of just what an impact Covid-19 has had on the concept. Some have even posited that the role of the circular economy might even help some of the most impacted communities pull themselves out from under the negative economic effects of this virus.

Vinted is not the only company that is capitalizing on this. Wallapop, another second-hand swapping marketplace out of Spain, recently raised $191 million. The question will be which of these circular economy players will, ironically, be the most sustainable in and of themselves. eBay, which also saw a big boost in sales in the last year (and was something of a circular economy pioneer online) last quarter started to give some signs that its uplift might be fading.

Indeed, maybe in keeping with the practicality of what it has built — no use throwing out perfectly good things! — Vinted itself is very no-nonsense and does not talk up its business even when it appears to be going really well.

“The last 18 months have been challenging,” CEO Thomas Plantenga said in an interview. The company actually halted operations altogether for around the first two months of the pandemic emerging to figure out how to proceed with its marketplace while keeping people Covid-safe and not violating any rules imposed on activities in different markets. Things bounced back pretty quickly after that, he conceded, but it’s also a sign of how quick the switch can be between feast and famine in this business. Plantegna himself was brought into the company some years ago to help it with its turnaround strategy, one indication that simply being a second-hand marketplace isn’t necessarily as turnkey as it sounds.

Part of the company’s power has been in its focus. Plantenga said that the company is pretty strict on enforcing that the marketplace is only used for fashion and home goods (which are adjacent to fashion): no cars, no large furniture, no pets, no meal kits. And no channel for brands or retailers to resell seconds on the platform, which seem like an obvious category to add to a marketplace where people are looking for fashion bargains, but is not in keeping with the company’s ethos, he said.

“Yes, it could be a big opportunity, but we have purposely said no to that,” Pantenga said. He acknowledged that overproduction was one of the many issues in the fashion industry, but not one it’s going to address itself. “We don’t feel it’s our job to solve that problem. We want more to fix the consumer trends. All those issues around fashion industry and production, there are many of them. We are focused on second hand being your first choice. Yes, it could be a great way to grow GMV, but that’s not how we strategize.”

Longer term, the company also plans to create an avenue to make it easier for people to upload and sell goods on the platform for charity. In countries like the UK, charity shops are a significant channel for used goods, where people don’t offload the items to make money but to help organizations like Oxfam or the British Heart Foundation to sell them to raise much-needed funds for their activities. Plantenga said that Vinted is working on a way right now to give sellers the option to upload to sell for a charity of their choice, or for those buying to donate their fee to charity. This is currently being tested in Vinted’s French operations, he said.

“Vinted is transforming the second-hand fashion market across Europe through their customer-centric approach and extraordinary execution,” said EQT Growth Partner Carolina Brochado, in a statement. “Vinted is the perfect example of EQT Growth’s strategy of backing fast-growing European tech champions that tap into several macro trends, such as the increasing consumer demand for sustainability and continued penetration of online channels within fashion. We’re immensely proud and excited to be supporting Thomas and the Vinted team and we cannot wait to work together to further unlock the market for circular fashion.” She is also joining the board with this round.