Zoovu, Mast Technologies and BirdsEyeView Bag Tech Funding

A discovery experience provider, a cloud-native mortgage origination platform and an insurtech startup are moving in the right direction.

London dominates this report with Zoovu, Mast Technologies and BirdsEyeView picking up tech funding. 

Zoovu, an AI-powered discovery experience platform for B2B and B2C e-commerce, has raised $169 million (£137 million) led by FTV Capital.

Following a product launch in November 2021, Mast Technologies has raised £1.2 million for the development of its cloud-native mortgage origination platform.

Insurtech startup BirdsEyeView has closed an undisclosed seed funding round led by SFC Capital, with the funds matched by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Zoovu’s US Focus

Zoovu’s HQ is in Boston in the US, but the firm also has offices in London and Berlin.

The tech company will use the new funding to build out its team, particularly in the US. Zoovu has 209 employees listed on LinkedIn.

The firm’s AI-driven platform structures product content and offers such things as visual configurators, semantic search and conversational assistants. Clients include 3M, Amazon, BSH and Microsoft, who use Zoovu’s no-code platform for their customers.

Brad Bernstein, Managing Partner at FTV Capital, explains: “By offering an intuitive, guided shopping experience, Zoovu’s platform delivers tangible ROI to brands by boosting conversion rates, average order value and customer satisfaction, ultimately driving meaningful increases in revenue.”

Zoovu seems to be doing well. The company says it saw 85% growth in 2020 followed by 70% growth in 2021. Zoovu is currently generating over $25 billion (£20.3 billion) in annual sales for its customers.

Up the Mast

London-based fintech firm Mast says the funding round was led by Antler VC, with additional participation of angel investors including founders of Booking.com, Monzo, ThirdFort, and senior executives from Pivotal, VMWare, Jones Lang Lasalle, Thought Machine (a notable cloud lover) and Airwallex.

Joy Abisaab, Mast Co-Founder and CEO, comments: “This funding will enable us to accelerate the product roadmap and engineering velocity considerably.”

The startup was founded in 2020 and has four employees listed on LinkedIn.

Mast has built a platform that has helped process over £50 million of mortgage applications since inception. It provides real-time feedback on the quality of applications upfront, so the data and documents used in an application meet the lender’s requirements to “prevent the cumbersome back and forth process seen today”.

Get a BirdsEyeView 

BirdsEyeView is based in London and as its name suggests uses satellite data to structure insurance solutions for severe weather. The funding will be used to grow the team and develop BirdsEyeView’s technology.

The startup was established in 2019 and has five employees listed on LinkedIn. Its website says it’s in stealth mode with a new site coming soon. Other backers or partners (it doesn’t say which) listed on its site include the UK Space Agency, Lloyd’s Lab, Plug and Play Tech Center and the University of Edinburgh.

BirdsEyeView states: “Extreme and volatile weather changes brought about by climate change are increasing in both frequency and severity, with global economic losses from natural catastrophes reaching $190 billion [£154.4 billion] in 2020, out of which $101 billion [£82 billion] were uninsured.”

With this unhappy scenario to contemplate, the company structures weather-based events insurance products using its proprietary algorithmic underwriting engine, RAPTOR, with the objective of providing SMEs access to these products.

This technology uses meteorological data gathered by the likes of ESA and NASA, and this is then processed to structure parametric products.

Antony Peyton
Antony Peyton
Antony Peyton is the Editor of eWeek UK. He has 18 years' journalism and writing experience. His career has taken him to China, Japan and the UK - covering tech, fintech and business. Follow on Twitter @TonyFintech.
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