Welcome to your Week in Tech – your roundup of the week’s top tech news. In this week’s roundup, we bring you UK tech investment news, Theresa May’s desire to regulate the internet, Delivery Hero’s €450m IPO and much more.
This episode was hosted by Haus, a company that transforms bars and restaurants that are closed during the day into daytime coworking spaces. We filmed in their first location – Haus at Sway – in London’s Holborn.
Haus charges members £150 per person, per month and there’s a special offer at the moment: you can currently try it for free for one week and the first 50 members to sign up get £50 off the first month.
Kaniyet Rayev, founder and CEO of Haus, told us a bit more about what’s on offer: “Haus is about bringing together early-stage startups and freelancers who currently work from coffee shops or homes. We provide them with free coffee, tea, wifi, a lot of power outlets, but most importantly we want to create this kind of supportive community where people can come to Haus, make new connections and most importantly make new friends.”
Now let’s take a look at this week’s top tech news.
Oxford Genetics’ £500,000
In UK investment news, BioTech firm Oxford Genetics raised £500,000 from Mercia Technologies. The company specialises in synthetic biology and DNA design, and raised £1m back in October last year.
Smart Pension’s £15m
Smart Pension closed a £15m Series B, bringing its valuation to £65m. Tom Valentine and William Reeve, the co-founders of Secret Escapes, participated in the round.
EVR Holdings’ £5m
EVR Holdings raised £5m through the placing of shares on AIM, a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange. The firm, which specialises in creating virtual reality content, acquired VR startup Melody in May last year and previously raised £3.4m on AIM.
Trint’s $3.1m
Trint, a London-based transcription service co-founded by award-winning journalist Jeff Kofman, raised $3.1m (£2.4m) in a pre-Series A round led by Horizon Labs.
Horizon Lab’s – the Hong Kong-based Seed fund operated by the managers of Horizons Ventures – investment was led by Bart Swanson, a serial technology entrepreneur; Andy Prozes, former global CEO of LexisNexis; Mark Opzoomer, co-founder of Bond Capital Partners and former regional vice president of Yahoo Europe.
May’s desire to regulate the internet
In a speech delivered in the aftermath of the London Bridge attacks Theresa May emphasised her desire to enforce some kind of internet regulation. May said she wanted to regulate technology companies in order to crackdown on extremist content posted online.
Critics say this shows just how clueless May is about the way the internet is structured.
Delivery Hero’s €450m IPO
Over in Germany, Delivery Hero officially announced plans to raise as much as €450m (£390m) from a public listing on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in “the coming months”.
The European food delivery company reached an agreement last year to offload its UK business to rival Just Eat, although the deal is still under review by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.
Pinterest raises $150m
Pinterest raised $150m (£116m) from existing investors at a $12.3bn valuation. Before this funding round, the visual discovery and planning tool had raised a total of around $1.3bn.
A Pinterest spokesperson said the company plans to use this latest round to invest in its recently-announced “Lens” feature, which can recognise objects through a phone’s camera and show related photos.
Download of the Week
Our Download of the Week is Acasa. Formerly known as Splittable, the app enables users to set up, manage and pay for utilities and on-demand services. It also features a peer-to-peer money transfer service.
And Finally
Ever accidentally sent a message to the wrong person and wished you could stop them from seeing it? Rumour has it WhatsApp is introducing a feature that will save you from this very embarrassing scenario.
According to WABetaInfo, a fan site that tests new WhatsApp features before they are rolled out, the ‘Recall’ feature will enable users to delete their text, image and video messages within a five-minute window. Phew!
