From London to Liverpool, Raycast, Cerbos and Margin Guardian have got tech funding for their diverse set of ambitions.
Raycast, a provider of productivity tools, has raised $15 million (£11.2 million) in Series A funding led by Accel and Coatue. At the same time, it’s making its Extensions API and Store generally available and opening up early access to team features.
Cerbos, which provides access management for cloud-native applications, has secured £2.63 million Seed investment led by Crane Ventures.
Maven Equity Finance has invested a “six-figure funding package” in Margin Guardian (MG), a platform that provides fashion retailers with data insight and targeting services.
Raycast is Radiant
Raycast says Accel doubled down on its Seed investment. In addition, Koen Bok (CEO, Framer), Karri Saarinen (CEO, Linear) and David Cramer (CEO, Sentry) invested in Raycast.
The London-based firm says its community has built more than 100 extensions, including Figma file search, home automation and GitLab integration. Its React and TypeScript API lets users build extensions and share it with the community via its store.
Raycast explains: “Companies rely on an ever-growing jungle of SaaS tools, leaving teams drowning in inefficient workflows. Our team features allow co-workers to build and share productivity tools that suit their setup and save entire departments time.”
The company has had a busy year and released new features for developers and designers.
Quicklinks lets users navigate the web and their computers. Snippets is for writing and can insert frequently used text. Clipboard History makes copied content searchable. Window management is for desktop tidiness.
Cerbos Displays Dogged Determination
Open source software startup Cerbos was founded this year by Emre Baran, an ex-Googler, and co-founder of Yonja and Qubit; and Charith Ellawala, a software engineer who spent many years at Ocado, Elastic and Qubit.
London-based Cerbos says it helps software companies, and organisations that build or use a wide-ranging software stack, to streamline user permissions.
Scott Sage, Co-Founder and Partner of Crane Venture Partners, explains: “It is well understood that user permission requirements get more complex as enterprise clients get bigger, and serve users in different roles, with a complex number of permission exceptions. To save companies from building this from scratch, Cerbos’ open-source approach radically simplifies user and role permissions by abstracting away the complexity.”
Investment in the funding round included support from Earlybird Digital East, Seedcamp, 8-Bit Capital, Connect Ventures, OSS Capital, Acequia Capital, HelloWorld, Tiny, and many angel investors.
The funding will be used for recruitment and unspecified international expansion.
Margin Guardian Looking Good
Headquartered in Liverpool, MG says the funds will allow the business to invest in its platform, commercialise and develop an Android version of its app, in addition to the iOS version, as well as fuel its marketing activities.
The firm has built a platform that provides retailers with data insights – such as price, viewed products and saved products – direct from the consumer. These insights can then be used to make decisions on markdowns of stock.
Data provided to the retailers is generated through the Squished app, a platform that enables consumers to browse, track and monitor high street fashion items on a single app.
MG explains: “Factors driving growth of data analytics and business intelligence in the retail sector include growth of the e-commerce sector, increased retailer spend on data insights and revenue optimisation.”
The company reckons this market was valued at c. $5.29 billion (£4 billion) in 2019 and is expected to reach c. $15 billion (£11.2 billion) by 2025.
MG was co-founded in 2018 by Richard Blanchard, Stephen Goodheart and Stewart Cox. Collectively, they have previously worked for retail organisations including Matalan, Harvey Nichols, Pets at Home and Robinsons.
Headquartered in Glasgow, and with offices throughout the UK, Maven has over 90 investment and support staff. It has over £700 million funds under management and ready to invest.
