Ingrid Lunden
Managing Editor, Global
The Latest from Ingrid Lunden
YuLife picks up $120M at an $800M valuation for gamified, wellness-focused life insurance
YuLife originally made a name for itself in its home market of the U.K. for its new approach to the provisioning of life insurance: Yes, sell a policy that provides financial security to your people i
UK launches antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s $69B proposed Activision acquisition
One more hurdle up ahead for Activision Blizzard, the games giant behind Call of Duty that Microsoft is looking to acquire for $68.7 billion. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has ann
Amazon takes a Prime step back into restaurant delivery in the US with big Grubhub investment and partnership
Amazon tried but then ultimately stepped away from building its own cost-intensive Grubhub and DoorDash competitor in the U.S. back in 2019. Now three years on, it’s taking a different approach
UK signs its first data sharing deal post-Brexit, with South Korea
Six years on from the referendum where the United Kingdom voted to leave the EU, and in the midst of an apparent government meltdown, the country is announcing its first international data sharing dea
UK’s Oxford Quantum Circuits snaps up $47M Series A for ‘QaaS’
Quantum computing has been making quantum leaps of progress in the last several years — going from theoretical concept to multiple testing environments, to help organizations prep for a time whe
Entrepreneur First raises $158M at a $560M valuation, adding Stripe’s Collison brothers to its list of backers
Entrepreneur First made a name for itself a decade ago in its home base of London, and then further afield, for the novel approach it takes to tech investing: Rather than seek out interesting, scaling
Speechmatics raises $62M for its inclusive approach to speech-to-text AI
Last week I wrote about an AI startup that’s building technology that can alter, in real time, the accent of someone’s speech. But what if the AI goal instead is to make it possible for pe
Incredibuild powers up with $35M to boost its distributed, faster approach to games and software development
Incredibuild, an Israeli startup that has picked up a lot of traction in the worlds of gaming and software development for a platform that drastically speeds up (and reduces the cost of) the shipment
JobGet raises $52M with ambitions to be the LinkedIn for shift workers
LinkedIn, now with more than 830 million users, has carved out a place for itself as a hub for the world of professional workers: a social network optimized for people in knowledge and related industr
SumUp raises $624M at $8.5B valuation, with its payments and business tech now used by 4M SMBs
A decade ago, SumUp was one of the army of fintechs that made names for themselves with dongles that turned basic smartphones into card payment terminals. Today, the London-based company has expanded
Shopify breaks out of the website with 100+ new features including NFTs, local shopping and more
Shopify made a name for itself in its early days with a platform for providing retailers keen to establish their own online shops an easy and quick way to build and run those services on their own web
That agent who sounds like they’re from Paris, Texas? Try Paris, France
Our daily lives are more linked into a globalized grid than ever before. Products are sourced and shipped from afar; traveling to a place 3,000 miles away can be easier than getting across a big city
Personio nabs $200M at a $8.5B valuation as its HR for small businesses hits the big time
Personio — a startup out of Munich, Germany that styles itself as a Workday and ServiceNow focused on the small and medium businesses of the world — went on a funding tear through the COVI
Validio, a data quality platform based out of Sweden, emerges from stealth with $15M
Data quality has been shaping up as a salient and increasingly critical part of the world of data science: Enterprises are sitting on growing troves of information, but it’s only useful if we ca
Echobot and Leadfeeder merge, raise $190M in Euro sales tech consolidation play
Sales and marketing has seen a huge boom in the last several years, fueled by developments in user experience and design, innovations around how companies can parse and leverage big data analytics to
Rohlik bags $231M despite the market cooling on food delivery startups
The salad days are over for many startups in the online food delivery sector. Following a long period of cash injections, splashy and high-profile promotions, and interesting experiments toying with t
Able.ai exits stealth with $20M to help big lenders speed up making high-value loans
Large banks are stepping up their game when it comes to new services and the technology that underpins them, and in many cases they are borrowing straight from the tech world’s playbook: Instead
AlphaSense, an analysis and business intel search engine, finds $225M at a $1.7B valuation
Google showed the way when it came to the world understanding and valuing the importance of a good search engine to unlock all the information you could find on the internet. The next iteration of tha
PayCargo, a fintech for the freight industry, raises $130M
Shipping and cargo services is one of the more fragmented and analogue verticals in the world of industry, with hundreds of thousands of businesses involved in myriad aspects of a process that is fund
TestGorilla scores $70M for skills tests aiming to replace the recruitment resume dump
Sending in a resume is the main way a person hopes to get noticed for a job. But a startup out of Amsterdam called TestGorilla is today announcing $70 million in funding for a very different kind of a