A $550m acquisition, two new tech funds, self-tying shoelaces and more in The Week in Tech
Channel: UKTN
Date: 2017-02-10

Welcome to The Week in Tech – your roundup of the week's top technology news. We filmed this episode from the office of technology firm Ve Interactive. This week, we bring you funding rounds topping £10m, a $550m acquisition, two new tech funds, plus shoes with laces that fasten themselves.

INVESTMENT

VoxSmart, a London-based telecommunications software provider, closed a $7m Series A round led by Deepbridge Capital. The firm’s proprietary software, VSmart, helps businesses achieve regulatory compliance by recording their mobile communications.

London-based Airbnb management platform Airsorted closed a £1.5m round led by Concentric, with support from 500 Startups and Pi Labs. Founded in February 2015, the company employs 50 people and claims to now manage 1,000 Airbnb-listed properties in London, Edinburgh and Dublin.

HeadBox, an online marketplace for booking offsite meeting spaces, raised £1.4m. The firm is currently live in Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool, but hopes to use the funding to introduce the platform in other cities across the globe.

Other investments this week include the £1m Seed raised by Free Postcode Lottery and the £700,000 Seed secured by Manchester’s DigitalBridge.

ACQUISITION

London-based Momondo Group was acquired by US travel company Priceline for $550m.

Founded in 1996, Momondo Group operates a European search engine for flights, hotels and car rentals.

TECH FUNDS

Frontline Ventures closed a €60m fund to invest in early-stage tech startups. The venture capital firm, which has offices in Dublin and London, invests in B2B software companies at the pre-seed and seed stages.

Overseas, Berlin-based VC firm Rocket Internet raised a new $1bn fund. Called The Rocket Internet Capital Partners fund, it will focus both on early and later stage investments. Some of the fund will also be spent on the firm's existing portfolio companies, which include the likes of Funding Circle.

DOWNLOAD

This episode’s download of the week isn’t a mobile app, it’s a Slack app. PayPal has created its very first bot for transferring money on Slack’s messaging platform.

Those with a PayPal account in the UK, Australia, Canada and the US can send and request money by typing a quick command into the Slack messaging app.

SELF-LACING TRAINERS

And finally, here’s one for Back to the Future fans – a Denmark-based designer has created a pair of self-lacing trainers. Vimal Patel, who works for Lego, used an old pair of Nike trainers and products from Lego’s Technic and Power Functions ranges to create the self-lacing shoes.

That‘s it for this week’s episode, for more tech news strait to your inbox subscribe at visit techcitynews.com/subscribe and follow us on Twitter.