Blippar intends to use the capital to reinforce its position as a leader in the AR space by further developing its technology and accelerating its growth in the US, Europe, and Asia.

“We are very excited to have attracted investors of this calibre to Blippar. Not only is this a solid vote of confidence in Blippar’s technology from some of the most highly regarded industry veterans and business minds, but it also demonstrates sustained validation of the UK tech sector post-Brexit,” said Faisal Galaria, Blippar CEO.

The original incarnation of Blippar fell into administration at the end of 2018, prior to which it had managed to raise more than $150m. The company was ‘saved’ a month after going into administration when its intellectual property assets were acquired by property tycoon Nick Candy’s Candy Ventures, which was one of the biggest investors in the first coming of Blippar.

Blippar officially made its return in June 2019 with the launch of a web-based AR solution, enabling anybody to create AR experiences for the web. Since then, the company saw revenue increase by 200 per cent quarter-over-quarter in 2020 and has worked on AR campaigns with the likes of Kellogg’s, OnePlus, Corona, and Lavazza, among others.

“We have leveraged our 10 years of investment, provenance, and technology leadership in the AR space to come back leaner, more focussed and better than ever before,” said Galaria.

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The investment will enable the Latin America-focused platform to introduce new solutions for payments and logistics management in order to make the process of selling and shipping easier. Nuvemshop will also use the capital to grow its ecosystem and boost its presence in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, while expanding into markets including Colombia, Chile, and Peru.

“Latin America is a vast market, filled with talented entrepreneurs, yet many lack the tools and resources needed to thrive,” said Santiago Sosa, CEO and co-founder of Nuvemshop. “Our purpose with Nuvemshop is to reduce these barriers to entry for entrepreneurs, and we’re proud to be the e-commerce platform of choice for businesses looking to build, launch and promote their online presence.”

Further investment in the round came from eCommerce leaders including Mike Micucci, former CEO of Salesforce CommerceCloud; Mark Lavelle and Mark Lenhard, former CEO and SVP of Strategy at Magento, respectively; Jamie Sutton, former Head of Tech Partnerships at Shopify; and Minesh Shah, COO of Stitchfix.

The capital injection will see Accel Partner Andrew Braccia join the Nuvemshop board.

“Over the past decade, direct-to-consumer has become one of the most important drivers of entrepreneurship globally,” said Braccia. “Latin America is no exception to this trend, and we believe that Nuvemshop is uniquely positioned to help merchants in this region build direct relationships with their customers. We’re thrilled to support them in their next stage of growth as Nuvemshop becomes the de-facto eCommerce platform of Latin America during this unprecedented time of e-commerce adoption.”

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London-based SumUp will use the capital to accelerate its growth and continue to acquire and support merchants in the 33 markets it operates in. It will also look to expand its product suite through a combination of organic developments and mergers and acquisitions, while refinancing existing debt facilities.

“Each day I continue to be impressed by how the SumUp team has faced down the challenges of the past year and continued to deliver the vital, payments technology that empowers small businesses all over the world; helping them to continue to be successful doing what they love best,” said Marc-Alexander Christ, Co-founder of SumUp. “As one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world, this cash injection – in addition to having the built-in option to expand the financing – will significantly accelerate the growth of our customer base, enhance SumUp’s technology leadership position, and drive the development of new services to support our merchants globally.”

The company recently broadened its product portfolio within the point-of-service space with the acquisitions of Goodtill and Tiller. It also recently purchased core banking system provider Paysolut.

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Flutterwave, an African payments technology company, has become the industry’s latest unicorn, picking up a valuation of over $1bn during its most recent funding round. The Series C round saw Flutterwave pick up an investment of $170m.

The round, led by Avenir Growth Capital and Tiger Global Management, brings the total investment in the company to $225m.

Flutterwave – founded in 2016 by entrepreneur Olugbenga Agboola – will the capital in the acceleration of customer acquisition in existing and international markets, as well as the development of complementary and innovative products such as the newly launched Flutterwave Mobile, an app which aims to help accelerate eCommerce growth.

“When Flutterwave was founded in 2016, the payments landscape in Africa was highly fragmented so the goal was to build a pan-African platform that simplified payments for everyone. However our successes would not be possible without (1) Our amazing team of 300+ employees that work tirelessly to achieve our goals (2) The trust and support we have received from our investors and customers and (3) Regulatory bodies like the Central Bank of Nigeria… This humbling support has created the backbone upon which companies like Flutterwave have been able to thrive,” said Agboola.

“As we look to the future, our focus remains the same which is to stand by our 290,000 merchants across Africa every day as they strive to build their mom-and-pop stores into global businesses. We look forward to increasing our investments across the continent and deepening the impact our platform has on lives and livelihoods as we take more businesses in Africa to the World, and at the same time continue to bring more of the World to Africa.”

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The four times oversubscribed funding round comes ahead of the Swedish company’s likely public listing later this year. It included a combination of new and existing investors, though Klarna has not disclosed who they are. Some of Klarna’s current investors include Macy’s, Snoop Dogg, Sequoia Capital, Visa, BlackRock, Ant Group, TCV, and Silver Lake, among others.

Klarna intends to use one per cent of the capital raised for an initiative focusing on key global sustainability challenges. The initiative will launch on April 22’s World Earth Day.

“At Klarna, we solve problems – that is the heart of what we do for both consumers and retailers,” said Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Co-founder and CEO of Klarna. “Consumers want transparent products to help them bank, shop and pay that reflect the way they live their lives, not just outdated traditional models. Each and every one of us at Klarna will continue to work hard on this, but it is also time for us, with our culture of change, disruption and innovation, to focus on tackling bigger, more complex issues. I believe our industry has a responsibility to help in some way solve global sustainability issues and I hope others will join Klarna in our ambition.”

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VidMob will use the round – which takes the total it has raised across rounds to almost $100m – to support its global expansion, new eCommerce initiatives, ongoing investment into advanced technology, and data science.

“Every other area of enterprise operations has been positively impacted by software platforms – increasing efficiency and using data to bring intelligence to decision-making,” said Alex Collmer, Founder and CEO of VidMob. “This financing and these new relationships will be a powerful accelerant in our commitment to build and deploy a platform that helps marketers transform for the needs of the future, while respecting the irreplaceable role of human creativity and never losing sight of our mission to evolve creativity for the better.”

The round includes participation from Adobe; Shutterstock; Drive by DraftKings, the sports betting company’s venture capital firm; the Spruce House Partnership; Prefix Capital; BuildGroup; Interlock Partners; Macanta; and industry and tech leaders such as Michael Kassan, Nick Brien, and Thomas Tull.

César Melo, former president at Mondelez and PepsiCo, CEO at Foster Grant, and VP at Colgate-Palmolive, has also invested in VidMob and will join the company’s Board as an Advisor.

“As a commercial leader, I was always looking to create a more efficient content ecosystem in which faster, smarter, data-informed and more cost-effective content could be created to surround the consumer around the world and build brands differently,” said Melo. “When I discovered VidMob while trying to do this at PepsiCo, I was blown away by the combination of talented human creativity and technology.  And the more I see, the more I like.  VidMob is creating a new category, ‘Intelligent Creative’.”

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Through the partnership, Cruise will leverage Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform to commercialise its autonomous vehicle solutions at scale. Microsoft will benefit from Cruise’s industry expertise to drive its own product innovation and to continue serving other transportation companies around the world.

“Our mission to bring safer, better, and more affordable transportation to everyone isn’t just a tech race – it’s also a trust race,” said Dan Ammann, Cruise CEO. “Microsoft, as the gold standard in the trustworthy democratisation of technology, will be a force multiplier for us as we commercialise our fleet of self-driving, all-electric, shared vehicles.”  

The GM corporation will also work with Microsoft to drive digitisation initiatives and explore opportunities to streamline its operations.

“Advances in digital technology are redefining every aspect of our work and life, including how we move people and goods,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO. “As Cruise and GMs preferred cloud, we will apply the power of Azure to help them scale and make autonomous transportation mainstream.”

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The Series H round, led by Durable Capital Partners LP and Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, comes ahead of the company’s plans to go public later this year.

The London-based startup will look to use the funding to help it expand its ‘Editions’ delivery-only kitchen sites around the world; expand its on-demand grocery service; expand its ‘Plus’ subscription offering; offer restaurants its ‘Signature’ service, which enables customers to order via a restaurant’s own website; and launch new initiatives for riders.

“At Deliveroo we are always focused on developing the best proposition for consumers, riders and restaurants,” said Will Shu, Founder and CEO of Deliveroo. “This investment will help us to continue to innovate, developing new tech tools to support restaurants, to provide riders with more work and to extend choice for customers, bringing them the food they love from more restaurants than ever before. We are really pleased our shareholders see the opportunity and growth potential ahead of us.”

The post Deliveroo valued at $7bn in $180m funding round appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The tech giant has invested in Glance, which serves news, movies, travel, sports, food, and games content on the lock screens of people’s smartphones, and VerSe Innovation, the parent company of content and news aggregator app Dailyhunt.

Glance secured $145m in investment from Google and existing investor Mithril Capital. The platform, which is part of the InMobi Group and owner of video-sharing platform Roposo, delivers AI-driven personalised content in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bahasa on Android lock screens, boasting 115m daily active users.

It says it will use the Google-led investment to deepen its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, expand its technology team, launch new services, strengthen its brand, and drive expansion into more markets.

“Glance is a great example of innovation solving for mobile-first and mobile-only consumption, serving content across many of India’s local languages,” said Caesar Sengupta, VP, Google. “Still too many Indians have trouble finding content to read or services they can use confidently, in their own language. And this significantly limits the value of the internet for them, particularly at a time like this when the internet is the lifeline of so many people. This investment underlines our strong belief in working with India’s innovative startups towards the shared goal of building a truly inclusive digital economy that will benefit everyone.”

Google’s investment in VerSe is part of a round of over $100m, which valued the company at over $1bn. The round also included investment from Microsoft and AlphaWave, among others. The company’s Dailyhunt platform provides local language content in 14 Indian languages and it recently launched a short-video app called ‘Josh’.

The company will seek to use the capital injection to scale up its new app, expand its content offerings, and leverage AI.

The money invested in the startups by Google comes from the tech giant’s India Digitization Fund. The fund, launched earlier this year, includes a $10bn commitment by Google to India’s digital economy. This investment will take place over the next five to seven years and be done through a mixture of equity investments, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure, and ecosystem investments.  

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The series D round, which put AppsFlyer at a valuation of $1.6bn, was led by General Atlantic earlier this year and included participation from existing investors Qumra Capital, Goldman Sachs Growth, Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners, Pitango Venture Capital, and Magma Venture Partners. Now, Salesforce Ventures – the software company’s strategic venture arm – can be added to that list.

“We’re incredibly excited to deepen our integration with Salesforce and Salesforce Ventures, as we take another step towards ensuring that marketers, app developers, and the entire ecosystem is armed with the best marketing tech stack for the challenges of tomorrow.” said Oren Kaniel, CEO and Co-founder of AppsFlyer. “The secret sauce for our success over the last nine years has been prioritising our customers and their end-users, putting them at the centre of every decision we make.”

AppsFlyer has secured more than $300m in funding since 2011, now exceeds $200m in annual recurring revenue, and recently reached 1,000 employees globally. It works with thousands of brands and partners including Macy’s, Minecraft, Nike, NBCUniversal, Tencent, US Bank, Wayfair, StitchFix, Facebook, Google, Apple Search Ads, Twitter, TikTok Ads, Pinterest, Snap, Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle.

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