World Of News

On the heels of Deliveroo raising more than $2 billion ahead of its debut on the London Stock Exchange this week, another hopeful in the food delivery sector has closed a super-sized round. Glovo , a startup out of Spain with 10 million users that delivers restaurant take-out, groceries and other items in partnership with brick-and-mortar businesses, has picked up a Series F of $528 million (€450 million). Glovo aims to become the market leader in the 20 markets in Europe where it is live today, in part by expanding its “q-commerce” service — the delivery of items to urban consumers in 30 minutes or less — and it will be using the money to double down on that strategy. This is a milestone funding round not just for the company, but its home country: it marks the largest-ever round raised by a Spanish startup. “We started in Spain, where you have access to far less capital than other countries in Europe. We do more with less and that’s made us leaner,” said Sacha Michaud, the co-fo...

Before you can improve a workflow, you have to understand how work advances through a business, which is more complex than you might imagine inside a large enterprise. That’s where Celonis comes in. It uses software to identify how work moves through an organization and suggests more efficient ways of getting the same work done, also known as process mining Today, the company announced a significant partnership with IBM where IBM Global Services will train 10,000 consultants worldwide on Celonis. The deal gives Celonis, a company with around 1200 employees access to the massive selling and consulting unit, while IBM gets a deep understanding of a piece of technology that is at the front end of the workflow automation trend . Miguel Milano, chief revenue officer at Celonis says that digitizing processes has been a trend for several years. It has sped up due to COVID, and it’s partly why the two companies have decided to work together. “Intelligent workflows, or more broadly spoken w...

Following years of backlash over its algorithms and their ability to push people to more extreme content, which Facebook continues to deny, the company today announced it would give its users new tools to more easily switch over to non-algorithmic views of their News Feed. This includes the recently launched “Favorites,” which shows you posts from up to 30 of your favorite friends and Pages, as well as the “Most Recent” view, which shows posts in chronological order. It also introduced new controls for adjusting who can comment on your posts, and other changes. The features themselves aren’t entirely new, in some cases, but they’ve been made easier to get to with the addition of a Feed Filter Bar on mobile for changing the view of the News Feed, and an option menu on your posts to control who can comment. The “Most Recent” view of the News Feed has long existed but has been buried in the extended “more” menu (the three-bar hamburger icon) on the Facebook mobile app. It’s not as usef...

At the age of 14, Jacklyn Rome saw firsthand how divorce can impact families, and how arguing about finances both during and after the process can impact children. The experience stuck with her. As an adult, after leading new product launches at Uber and Blue Apron,  Rome came up with the concept behind her startup, Ensemble . The expense tracking app quietly launched in the App Store in 2020 with the mission of reducing tension among co-parents and making sure kids’ needs aren’t negatively impacted by a divorce. Today, Ensemble is coming out of stealth with $3 million in seed funding from TTV Capital, Lerer Hippeau and Citi Ventures. Put simply, Ensemble’s mission is to improve the lives of co-parents and their children by giving parents a streamlined way to track shared expenses. “Most co-parents either figure out finances on their own ad hoc or rely on child support payments — however, child support only covers food, shelter and clothing, which is only half of the cost of r...

Harlem Capital is announcing that it has raised $134 million for its second fund — well above its target of $100 million and its initial cap of $125 million. The firm was founded in 2015 by managing partners Henri Pierre-Jacques and Jarrid Tingle. It started out as an angel syndicate with the goal of investing in founders from diverse backgrounds, then announced its first VC fund of $40 million at the end of 2019. The firm’s investments include e-commerce companies  Pangaea, CashDrop, Malomo and Repeat, as well as wellness startups, Wellory, Expectful, Wagmo and Shine.  It hasn’t invested all of that initial $40 million yet — the firm says it’s aiming to make five more investments from Fund I. Apparently 61% of Harlem Capital’s Fund I portfolio companies are led by Black or Latinx executives, while 43% are led exclusively by women. While the firm was founded in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood — where I live and am typing these words — it invests in startups across...

When investors gave Moveworks a hefty $75 million Series B at the end of 2019, they were investing in a chatbot startup that to that point had been tuned to answer IT help question in an automated way. Today, the company announced it had used that money to expand the platform to encompass employee questions across all lines of business. At the time of that funding, nobody could have anticipated a pandemic either, but throughout last year as companies moved to work from home, having an automated systems in place like Moveworks became even more crucial, says CEO and company co-founder Bhavin Shah. “It was a tragic year on a variety of fronts, but what it did was it coalesced a lot of energy around people’s need for support, people’s need for speed and help,” Shah said. It helps that employees typically access the Moveworks chatbot inside collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, and people have been spending more time in these tools while working at home. “We definitely saw...

Zapp , one of a number of startups currently battling it out in London and beyond by promising to let you order everyday items on-demand from its own delivery-only stores, has quietly raised a new round of funding from leading VCs, TechCrunch has learned. According to multiple sources, Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed and Europe’s Atomico (the VC firm started by Skype founder Niklas Zennström ) have invested in Zapp’s unannounced Series A. Those same sources have also confirmed that Zapp has raised around $100 million in total, including via an earlier seed round. In addition to Lightspeed and Atomico, other investors in Zapp include 468 Capital, and Burda, alongside notable angels such as Mato Peric, Christopher North (former Amazon UK CEO), and Stefan Smalla (Westwing CEO). One source tells me that the startup’s Series A is the first deal that consumer-focused partner, Sasha Astafyeva, has led on Atomico’s behalf since joining the London-headquartered VC firm. “We’re relentlessly foc...