Fintech 

European fintechs head to Asia 

European fintechs are finally eyeing rapid expansion into Asia as part of their mission to dominate the world.

Revolut announced its launch into Japan this week, building on an earlier expansion into Singapore. Other large European fintechs have also made their way east in the past year.

Just don't talk about Wirecard, which collapsed after some questionable accounting practices in its Asian offices. 

Can the fintechs crack this tough market?

💡 Wanted: hospitality tech pioneers 💡

Looking to internationalise your hospitality solution? Boost your business development with the METRO Xcel scaleup programme, with one-on-one training, access to METRO’s partner network including corporates like P&G, investment opportunities and more.

Find out more and apply here. [Sponsored post]

 Amsterdam 

Europe's greatest startup city

Technology companies in Amsterdam are now worth a combined €73bn, a seven-fold increase on five years ago, in a sign of how the city’s tech ecosystem has taken off in recent years.

Perhaps more remarkably, the city also has more startups per person (1.1 per 1,000 inhabitants) than any other city in Europe.

Sifted's Freya Pratty finds out more.

🤔 Does anyone really want video consultations with doctors? 🤔

... Or is a good old-fashioned phone call just as effective?

We'll find out just how much impact the healthcare innovations which have been adopted as a result of Covid have had at our virtual panel next week.

Join us next Tuesday at 12pm BST. Sign up here.

 Healthtech 

Happily, some healthtech is failing

The sheer pace of innovation in healthcare thanks to the coronavirus crisis means that some initiatives are failing.

But that is great, argues Dr Lydia Yarlott, cofounder of healthtech startup Pando and an NHS paediatrician. 

It means progress is finally being made.

🤸‍♀️ Share the fun 🤸‍♀️

If you like our newsletter, please forward it on to somebody else who might like it too. It really helps us grow our audience. Thanks!

 Mobility 

Lilium finds its first flying taxi hubs

Flying taxi company Lilium has been promising to get services up and running by 2025 but hasn’t been specific about exactly where passengers might be able to catch a flight.

Until now...

Find out where you will be able to hop on one of these crazy machines.

News that matters

🗞️ Very cool startup alert! Curio, an audio platform, has closed a $9m Series A funding round. It offers a library of journalism translated into and presented as audio, letting listeners get their daily fix of news and analysis. Over 50 publications are curated on the app including the likes of The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the Financial Times.

🤷‍♀️ UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's top adviser, Dominic Cummings, is claiming that Britain leaving the EU without a trade deal will allow the country to fund its own "trillionaire" tech champion. A cynical person might question how good the UK government really would be at picking tech winners (remember when they tripped over their own feet trying to build a track and trace app?). But it will probably be fine...

🏘️ Global investment firm EQT has agreed to acquire the majority of Spanish online real estate classifieds platform provider idealista for €1.3bn. This is, we should add, a shockingly big number for a property classifieds site. The valuation is 25 times the classifieds group’s €50m in earnings in the year to December 2019 (a very big multiple by buyout standards). 

⚽ An e-sports company in which David Beckham owns a significant stake is seeking to raise £20m by listing its shares on the London Stock Exchange. Guild Esports will be the first in the UK to offer fans the chance to put money into backing its teams of gamers.

📉 Swedish consumer lending firm Lendify had to put a planned capital raise of around €65m on hold after a setback involving the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, according to Swedish startup news site Di. The site also reported that this raises questions about the company's mooted plans to list on the public markets next year.

💤 Belgian startup Oncomfort specialises in something called ‘digital sedation’ – a novel method for relieving patients’ pain and anxiety through treatment with therapeutic Virtual Reality. Sounds pretty crazy, but it's just raised €10m in Series A funding. “We are at a tipping point in our digital therapy,” said Mario Huyghe, the chief executive. 

🐦 Starling Bank is planning to launch its so-called Kite debit card, which can be used by children under the age of 16 for spending online, in store and withdrawing cash from ATMs. For more on how fintech companies are targeting the youth market, read our pieces here and here.

🤔 ThoughtRiver, a London-based legaltech startup that’s applying AI to speed up contract pre-screening, has announced a $10m Series A led by Octopus Ventures. Legaltech may not sound that interesting, but's its a huge area ripe for disruption. 

🛴 Scooter company Tier has won its first exclusive tender to trial scooters in the UK — in York. The first scooters will pop up around the university. It will cost £1 to unlock a scooter and 15p per minute travelled — so a 15-minute ride would set you back £3.25.

If you're a fan of our 'News that matters' and 'Sifted Suggests' sections, check out our newsfeed here, where we collect all of these gems — and more.

Sifted Suggests 

🅰️ Observations from raising a Series A in 2020, from the founder of GRID, a SaaS startup founded in Iceland that lets you turn spreadsheets into visual “narratives”. A useful read.

📈 The last six months have accentuated a secular re-allocation of assets towards tech and software around the world. But what does that mean for European SaaS, asks Laura Connell at VC firm Balderton.