Paris, London, Berlin — a start-up per capital
3 innovation and digital news in 1 minute. Every Monday. Episode 288
News 1. London — Omnipresent is omnipresent
The London startup is specialised in employment from 160 countries. It bets on the expansion of ‘Work From Everywhere’. It even takes over the full employment, as well as on and off boarding, compliance etc.. With a new funding of $120 million to expand the business. And high profile investors like Swedish Kinnevik and Chinese Tencent. Opinion: Indeed a market is ahead: managing employment in any country. The main use case is employing tech developers. And they can work from everywhere. Opinion? Omnipresent is the factual employer, it finally takes out the responsibility of the company the person works in.
This is popping up everywhere, understandably. Sceptical though
News 2. Berlin — a16z dares a German fintech
Andreessen Horowitz (shortened in a16z) has made a first move into European fintechs, namely into Payrails in Berlin. A small but symbolic ticket of $6.4m for a small team of less than 20 people, but three former shareholders at Delivery Hero. A central payment solution for e-commerce merchants based in the cloud. Opinion: We remember the very large investments for Checkout.com, Rapyd and Mollie — all of them overpassing 2 billion. Now comes a “new kid on the block” Payrails, claiming “developed by merchants for merchants”. Not really sure if they were merchants. The USP is not clear — an advantage is a distribution of accounts, payments by third parties, ledgers.
If a16z invests into this start-up in this geography for the first time, there are some very good promising reasons.
News 3. Paris — Doctolib needs to encrypt
Doctolib is crowned as the number one unicorn with a new €500m fundings. The pandemic has catapulted Doctolib to the top with appointments for vaccine. Appointments, reminders, mailbox, telemedicine and health cards management. The new funding will support a next growth step in the 3 main countries France, Italy and Germany. And a focus number one encryption. Opinion: Encryption is key for the development of platforms like Doctolib. They offer appointments, patient/doctor interaction and telemedicine — well, these offers are growing, but the potential is in the whole management of health histories (for care givers and patients). And key is encryption, Doctolib recently bought a specialist called Tanker.
A huge growth potential, but tricky in the acceptance of intermediaries in health.
Author is the research team (10 trend scouters) at specialist Space and Lemon Innovations (Hamburg, Berlin) — scouting innovations in main tech geographies, AI development, virtual worlds and e-commerce. Excerpts of research are gathered here in original weekly news since 2016, always with an opinion — no re-write of TechCrunch.
Come back next Monday and share your opinion.
