Property 

European startups battling Airbnb for digital nomad market

With an increasing number of people working away from the office — and a rise in digital nomads — the mid-term rental market is expected to boom. 

Last week, Flatio and NomadX, two of Europe’s largest rental platforms focused on letting properties for anything from one month to a year, announced they were merging. 

But do they have what it takes to fend off Airbnb?

Tim Smith and Kit Gillet find out.

📱 The state of social media today 📱

Lockdown has propelled people’s lives further into the void of social media to connect with one another. Goldman Sachs’ new podcast miniseries discovers to what extent consumers’ social media habits have changed during the pandemic.
 

Listen to “Exchanges at Goldman Sachs: The Battle for our Screens” now. [Sponsored post]

 Gaming 

Huuuge potential in mobile gaming

Mobile gaming has, unsurprisingly, kept a lot of people entertained over the past few months. 

Some analysts even predict that the market could be bigger than the music market within the next two years — and get close to the size of the home entertainment market. 

Great news for Polish gaming company Huuuge, which recently announced plans to IPO.

Kit Gillet goes under the bonnet of a booming area for European tech.

✨ How to raise a Series B ✨

If you thought that landing your seed or Series A round was painful, think again. Securing a Series B is often harder.

Luckily, Sifted's spoken to some top VCs from Draper Esprit to Eight Roads Ventures to find out how your startup can stand out.

Read their tips here. [Sponsored post]

 Micromobility 

€15m for e-bike subscription startup DANCE

DANCE, the e-bike subscription service started by the founders of SoundCloud, has secured €15m in new funding — just three months after launch. 

The raise is testament to how speedily serial founders can get hold of capital — and is more proof, if any was needed, that e-bikes are hot stuff in 2020. 

Freya Pratty learns more.

News that matters

😏 A 'tell-all' account of the Monzo-Starling fallout, finally! Fintech fans will know that the founders of digital bank Monzo once worked at competitor Starling — and their departure to start their own company did not go down well. Anne Boden, Starling CEO, is set reveal a little more of what went on in a new book coming out in November. Juicy.

💰 Swedish fintech Lendify has raised $115m in debt to expand across Europe. It wants to become the consumer loans provider and now has an estimated loan book of $300m.

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.

🤷 Fintechs, where should you spend your money? 🤷

In tricky times, which investments are worth making to keep your company growing, without frittering away capital which is hard to come by?

Join Sifted's fintech correspondent Isabel Woodford and an expert panel from Notion Capital, Oracle NetSuite and Currencycloud to find out.

Grab your (virtual) seat here.

Sifted Suggests 

🤔 Angel scout programmes: more problematic than you'd think? An interesting discussion has kicked off in the comment section of this piece on an angel scheme aiming to back more underrepresented founders. "Isn’t there something faintly colonial about two young white general partners sending off mostly BAME angel scouts (4 of the 5 are BAME) with tiny tickets to invest in pre-seed companies?" said one Sifted reader in a long and thoughtful comment. What do you think?

🐶 Poor pooch sitters. Lockdowns have been bad news for pet sitters — and the pandemic hasn't been brilliant for pet-sharing startups like BorrowMyDoggy either. Serena Tarling finds out more for Sifted.

🛡️ Disinformation that kills: The expanding battlefield of digital warfare. Interesting piece from CBInsights looking at deep fakes, propaganda and algorithmic abuse.

🤸‍♀️ Share the fun 🤸‍♀️

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