Fintech 

A fintech unicorn goes — surprisingly — into venture

Are you a fintech looking for investment? Well now you have a new option in the form of Checkout.com, which has revealed to Sifted that it's on the hunt for deals.

So what is it looking to invest in? And why?

CEO Guillaume Pousaz reveals all to Isabel Woodford.

🕺 Top talent fundamentals 💃

The ‘People & Culture Scaleup Guide’ by Techleap.nl is a goldmine of tips and tricks to building top talent.

Hear what scaleups like Sendcloud have learned about leadership and what successful startups like Messagebird say about organisational structure.

Sign up for free for the latest updates. [Sponsored post]

 Startup Life 

The best newsletters on European tech

So you want to know what is going on in the magical world of European startups?

You have already done well by signing up to the Sifted newsletter, but there are some other great ones as well.

Our expert team of reporters have picked out the must-reads so you can keep yourself up to speed.

What are they?

🌩️ Adapting to change 🌩️

From dealing with more customer demand than expected to dealing with less, from having to ramp up hiring to scaling it back, we spoke to six startups from Google for Startups’ programmes to hear how they weathered the storms of 2020.

What could you learn from them? [Sponsored post]

 Impact 

Making impact investing a breeze

There's $90,000bn worth of capital signed up to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment.

But there's a problem — how do these money managers know that what they are investing in meets these standards?

That's where Net Purpose, a data provider, comes in with a plan to make impact investing simple for 1m investment professionals by 2025.

How? 

 Impact 

Meet this new "tech-for-wood" startup

Construction is a dirty business — and a big one at that. The building industry is estimated to make up 13% of global GDP (around €8,300bn), and is responsible for 39% of global carbon emissions.

Now, Spanish startup 011h believes it can help solve this problem, by building high-tech, wooden “smart buildings” that are carbon neutral to produce, and energy-saving to run.

How does it work?

🤖 Rent-A-Robot (don't buy one) 🤖

The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) revolution is well and truly underway, with companies getting in these computer "robots" to automate repetitive back-office tasks.

But the truth is that RPAs can be a giant pain to set up and manage, which is where Polish rent-a-robot startup Digital Teammates comes in to oversee them for you. 

Tell me more [Sponsored content]

News that matters

🍔 Stockholm-based dark kitchen startup Curb has just raised €3.2m from EQT Ventures, getting in on the craze for "virtual food brands". The company's mission is essentially to create new food brands designed especially for delivery. This makes sense because it's harder than it looks to get a burger and chips from a traditional restaurant to someone's house in a decent state. It's not an easy market though; Germany’s Keatz, which had raised €19.4m, ceased its dark kitchen operations after failing to get to grips with its unit economics.

🔮 Move over Alexa. Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC), a startup founded in 2014, says it has built “meaning-aware” natural language processing on a quantum computer. The system understands both grammatical structure and the meaning of words, in a way that classical computers cannot. “This is quantum native, it cannot be done with a classical computer with a reasonable amount of resources,” CEO Ilyas Khan tells Sifted. There has been some debate about what this all means though in the AI community.

📱 Samsung has just announced a partnership with Grover that will allow consumers to rent smartphones from its S20 range directly from Samsung’s own online shop. Grover is a pretty cool company in the "sharing economy" allowing users to rent phones rather than buy them. It has so far recirculated some 150,000 devices, each being used by 3-5 customers on average. Others in this world are France’s Back Market and US-based fashion company Rent the Runway. 

📳 Cleo, the London-founded financial advice app, announced that it has raised $44m in Series B funding led by EQT Ventures. Earlier investors in the company are big names such as Entrepreneur First, Taavet Hinrikus, Matt Robinson, Errol Damelin, Niklas Zennstrom, Alex Chesterman and Ian Hogarth. The company basically gives you chatty Gen Z-friendly advice on your finances when you connect up your accounts. Its main market is the US.

🤳 Legendary US VC firm Andreessen Horowitz has put money into a $5.5m seed round for Ukraine's Reface, a popular app that puts your face onto celebrities and famous video clips. It sounds dumb, but it has been downloaded 70m times and is actually clever stuff. The 7-strong Ukrainian cofounding team has for nearly a decade been working on a specific version of machine learning known as generative adversarial networks (GANs). The idea is that it generates a new animated face using the selfie and the target video rather than just laying one on top of the other. In the future the company wants to work more closely with the movie industry. 

🚀 Isar Aerospace, a kind of European SpaceX which is building a micro-satellite launcher to send lighter payloads into low-earth orbit, has picked up €75m in funding. It plans to use the money to continue its research, development and production ahead of its first commercial launch planned for 2022. European VC firm Lakestar led the round with participation from Earlybird, Vsquared Ventures and existing investors. For more about European space companies taking on SpaceX, see here. 

💊 Pint of milk and some drugs, please. The Swedish food delivery service Mathem, which is a bit like Amazon Fresh delivering food to your door, has started to cooperate with the pharmacy chain Kronans Apotek. That means that people will be able to get prescription drugs with their food deliveries in the future. Mathem is also cooperating with the hardware store Clas Ohlson.

🚘 Insurtech firm Zego has acquired Drivit in a move to offer Zego customers more tailored insurance policies. Portugal-based Drivit has a mobile platform that turns a smartphone into a "telematics" device that captures driving data, such as GPS and gyroscope and accelerometer data. UK-based Zego did not disclose the sum it paid for Drivit, but told Verdict it was a combination of cash and equity.

🍖 Mosa Meat — the Dutch company which made the world’s first lab-grown meat burger back in 2013 — has added another €16.5m to its Series B round taking it to €62m. The funding will be used to expand Mosa Meat’s facility in Maastricht into an industrial-sized production line, as well as getting European licences for the products. For more on Mosa Meat, see here and here. 

💸 VC firm Ada Ventures, which says it is on a mission to make the industry more accessible and diverse, announces that it has closed its first fund at $50m. Cornerstone LPs in the fund include Big Society Capital and the British Business Bank. Sifted first wrote about the fund here. 

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.

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Sifted Suggests 

🇫🇷 French president Emmanuel Macron sat down with Atomico's Niklas Zennström for an interview on the European tech ecosystem. There was nothing super-new to be honest, but Macron gave a whole list of broad-brush areas of improvement that are needed to create European tech giants, like more finance support and better visa rules. He also had a good line about how the US had GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) when Europe had the GDPR regulation. "Now, when you look at the map, we have what we call the GAFA in the US, the BATX in China and GDPR in Europe,” he said.

👩‍💻 How to find a new job in the middle of a pandemic. Thousands of people lost their jobs during the crisis. The lucky ones who managed to secure a new role have found that technical skills are in high demand, writes Wired. 

📈 Europe’s biggest home-grown tech upstarts are still choosing the US for their IPOs. This is a great piece from Quartz saying that while Europe produces a lot of tech IPOs, the ones in the US are around 20x bigger. This ties into the basic problem of Europe, which is that its capital markets mean that it still struggles to scale tech companies and keep the biggest ones close to home. 

In case you missed it 

📦 Amazon is a minor ecommerce player across much of Europe — here’s why.

🦄 The state of European tech 2020: 20 things you should know.

👩‍⚕️ HealthHero: the new healthtech startup buying its way to the top.