Life is sweet in London and Edinburgh with Multiverse, Codat, Looping One and Zumo getting tech funding.
Edtech entity Multiverse – co-founded by Tony Blair’s son Euan – has closed $220 million (£175 million) of Series D funding. The tech company is now valued at $1.7 billion (£1.3 billion) – double what it was worth eight months ago.
Codat, which offers an API for small business data, has raised $100 million (£80 million) in a series C investment round led by JP Morgan Growth Equity Partners.
There’s some Anglo-Dutch action as KYC and payments platform LoopingOne has secured an €800,000 (£684,000) investment from Ebury, who also takes a stake in the firm.
Crypto platform Zumo has completed its Zero Hero pilot project, a trial to buy renewable energy certificates, and received funding from Innovate UK for its crypto decarbonisation aspirations.
Multiverse and the Rich Blair Project
With a name that conjures up memories of Michael Moorcock’s science fiction and fantasy novels, Multiverse provides corporate training.
Multiverse apprenticeships offer tuition-free programs in areas like software engineering, digital marketing and data analysis.
The London-based firm was founded in 2016. It has some notable clients, such as Cisco, Verizon and Visa.
Multiverse comments: “We’re proud to announce another record-breaking round of funding, making Multiverse the UK’s first ever edtech unicorn. More importantly, it will allow us to open up professional apprenticeship opportunities on an even greater scale.”
The latest round of funding was co-led by StepStone Group, Lightspeed Venture Partners and General Catalyst.
The investment will be used to expand its suite of learning programs and for US expansion plans.
Of the apprentices it has placed, 56% are people of colour, more than half are women, and 34% hail from economically underserved communities.
Codat Moment
According to London-based Codat, Canapi Ventures and Shopify also participated in the round and Plaid has been publicly named as an investor for the first time. Existing investors Index Ventures and PayPal Ventures also participated in the round. The company has raised over $160 million to date from investors.
Codat’s API is used by SaaS, lending and payments companies to build products for their SME customers.
For example, it could be a neobank building a cashflow forecast in its app, or a payment provider enabling merchants to sync transactions with their accounting software.
Life’s cool for Codat right now as it has over 200 clients – such as Brex, Jeeves, Pipe and Clover. It has a team of 250 people across the UK, North America and Australia. The fintech firm was founded in 2017.
Codat will use the funds to build out its infrastructure.
By the way, last year Codat threw itself into the Australian SME market via an alliance with Judo Bank.
Dutch Treat for LoopingOne
LoopingOne’s HQ is in Amsterdam, while Ebury is a London-based fintech company.
The exact size of the stake is not disclosed, but SME-focused Ebury is keen on such things. Last month it had the Brazilian market in its sights with its intention to acquire São Paulo-based Bexs for an undisclosed sum.
“Ebury has offices in 20 countries around the world offering cash management and foreign currency solutions to companies trading internationally. It’s the ideal partner for LoopingOne that shares the same global ambitions”, says Freek Dix, Co-Founder of LoopingOne.
The investment will be used to develop the LoopingOne product and start an electronic money institution (EMI) application process at the Dutch Central Bank (DNB).
An integration with Ebury will also give LoopingOne the capability to offer multi currency services to its marketplace customers.
Zero Hero Zumo
Edinburgh-based Zumo didn’t reveal the funding amount, but it has a lot to say on the trial.
The idea of renewable energy certificates (RECs, where 1 REC equals 1 MWh of green electricity), is to compensate for the electricity usage of Bitcoin bought via the Zumo app.
Over the pilot period, Bitcoin to the value of £1.5 million has been covered by Zero Hero REC purchases, with a total of 850 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity compensated via the programme – enough energy to drive an electric vehicle for over three million miles.
The issue of environmental sustainability in crypto does come up a lot. For instance, earlier this year, Viktor Kochetov, CEO of Kyrrex, had ideas on how to solve the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining.
Zumo argues that REC markets must increase in “sophistication and in efficiency” if they are to meet the current requirements of net zero strategies.
For the next stage of its work, Zumo and its partner, Zero Labs, will use the Innovate UK grant to further fund research into the decarbonisation of crypto. This RenewableCrypto project will kick off later this month.
Zumo was featured in our ‘Fintech Companies in Edinburgh to Watch’ feature here.
It has been one to keep an eye on. In February the fintech firm appointed two advisors as it hunted for action in the competitive Web3 arena.
eWeek UK also published an ‘Inspiring Women in Fintech’ interview with Amélie Arras, Marketing Director at Zumo. She discussed travels via Bitcoin, superb jugglers, mentorship programmes and more.
