Startup Monday #28: Latest tech trends and news happening in the global startup ecosystem!

Startups / Cyrptocurrency / BioTechnology / Singapore/ Robinhood

Startups in the U.S.

Robinhood’s decision Thursday to restrict trading on volatile, surging stocks including GameStop GME, +67.87% touched off a wave of fury from people using the popular trading app, as well several class-action lawsuits where users alleged the platform wrongly stood in their way. Arbitration is a controversial form of conflict resolution that happens outside of court, without publicly filed documents and without a jury of one’s peers. Some consumer advocates say the process favors business and management, but business advocates say it’s fair and efficient. Read more

A national-security panel on the hunt for Chinese involvement in U.S. technology companies is scrutinizing startup investments that are months or even years old. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or Cfius, that reviews foreign investment in U.S. companies and real estate for potential national-security risks, is positioned to become a linchpin in President Biden’s strategy to curb China’s technology ambitions. Read more on Wall street

The online trading app Robinhood became a cultural phenomenon and a Silicon Valley darling with a promise to wrest the stock market away from Wall Street’s traditional gatekeepers and “let the people trade” — making it as easy to put millions of dollars at risk as it is to summon an Uber. The frenzy morphed into a crisis when legions of armchair investors on Robinhood, who had been buying up options and shares of GameStop, a video game retailer, enlarged those bets and also began making big trades in other stocks, including AMC Entertainment. Read more — NY Times

Digital signage startup Raydiant has raised $13 million in a Series A round from investors including 8VC, Atomic and actor Mark Wahlberg. Retail businesses and restaurants use Raydiant’s cloud-based digital signage technology to display messaging to customers including photos, social media feeds, check-in instructions and video support. Read more

San Francisco-based Fast announced a $102 million funding round on Tuesday, just a few months after launching its first checkout product. The Series B was led by Stripe and Addition, with participation from Index Ventures and other existing investors. Read more

Veteran Seattle tech entrepreneur Todd Hooper has raised investment for a stealthy new startup, a Seattle-area company called Aardvark Labs has raised $3.5 million. Read more

Biotechnology

Sana Biotechnology, a preclinical biotech developing engineered cell therapies for multiple indications, announced terms for its IPO on Thursday. The Seattle, WA-based company plans to raise $323 million by offering 15 million shares at a price range of $20 to $23. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Sana Biotechnology would command a fully diluted market value of $4.0 billion. Read more

Technvaio forecast the global agricultural biotechnology market is expected to grow by USD 25.30 billion during 2021–2025. This marks a significant market slow down compared to the 2019 growth estimates due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the first half of 2020. However, healthy growth is expected to continue throughout the forecast period, and the market is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 10%. Read more

Talaris Therapeutics, Inc., a privately held biotechnology company developing transformative cell therapies that have the potential to induce durable immune tolerance across a range of indications, today announced the appointment of Sapna Srivastava, Ph.D., and Gaurav Shah, M.D., as independent representatives to its Board of Directors. Read more

Blockchain

Bitcoin surged early on Friday after Elon Musk tagged the cryptocurrency in his Twitter biography. The price of bitcoin BTCUSD, -5.21% was last up 12.3% at $37,351, according to CoinDesk prices, after the Tesla TSLA, -5.02% chief executive appeared to express support for the cryptocurrency. After changing his Twitter TWTR, -2.02% bio to #bitcoin, he then tweeted “In retrospect, it was inevitable.” Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey — a vocal supporter of bitcoin — had the same bio as Musk early on Friday but it’s unclear when the platform’s founder made the change. Read more

India may be the next country to clamp down on existing cryptocurrencies in favor of its own. As TechCrunch reports, India’s lower house of parliament has revealed plans to introduce a law that would ban “all private cryptocurrencies” in the country, including popular ones like Bitcoin. Instead, parliament would establish a “facilitative framework” for creating an official digital money format issued through the Reserve Bank of India. Read more

Startups in Europe

Germany is one of Europe’s leading startup powerhouses, attracting $5.4bn in venture capital funding in 2020, more than double four years ago. Sifted have chosen a list of 100 exciting companies to watch in 2021. Read more

LAUNCHub Ventures, a leading early-stage European venture capital firm, has completed the first closing of its new fund at €44 million, aiming to read a target size of €70 million. Founded in 2012, LAUNCHub Ventures invests in technology startups at Seed and Series A stages, focusing on companies in South Eastern Europe (SEE), the broader Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, as well as startups with SEE co-founders worldwide. Read more

The French fund Lauxera Capital Partners, which was launched last year in Paris and San Francisco, announces a €100 million fund to support European healthtech startups. Read more

With a population of under two million, Latvia’s tech scene might be smaller than comparative centres in Europe, however, the country is already proud of some home-grown global successes in the likes of Printful and Infogram. Latvia is also one of the first countries in the world to pass a Startup Law, and without a doubt, it will emerge as an entrepreneurial hotspot with lots of potentials to grow in the future. Here are 10 promising Latvia-based startups to watch in 2021. Read more

Copenhagen ranks in 11th place of Europe’s biggest startup hubs. Despite a rather small population of just 5.8 million people, Denmark is counting a quite impressive number of funding rounds each year and has a higher investment ratio in startups per capita than many other European countries. Here are 10 Danish startups to look out for in 2021 and beyond. Read more

Swedish the subscription management software tool Minna Technologies has raised €15.5 million in Series B fundraising led by Element Ventures, with support from MiddleGame Ventures, Nineyards Equity, and Visa, to expand its innovative open banking technology to banks across the world. Read more

Startups around the globe

Uisee, a Beijing-based company founded by a group of tech veterans including the former head of Intel Labs China, Wu Gansha, closed a funding round north of 1 billion yuan ($150 million) from investors including the National Manufacturing Transformation and Upgrade Fund, a $21 billion state-backed fund set up in 2019 to promote and upgrade the manufacturing value chain in China, with the Ministry of Finance as the biggest shareholder. Read more

Israeli venture capital firm FinTLV raised $120 million for a new fund investing in global growth-stage insurance and financial technology companies. Investors include Japan’s MS&AD Insurance Group, FWD Ltd. of Hong Kong and a few of Israel’s biggest investment houses. Read more

While the pandemic has left some startups strapped for cash, the aptly-named Brazilian neobank Nubank is swimming in it. Last week, the company announced that it has raised a $400 million Series G round, putting their total funding to date at $1.2 billion. But even more remarkable, in addition to their new $25 billion valuation (up from $10 billion in 2019), is their customer base of 34 million users, which they’ve built up since the fintech’s launch in 2013. Read more

Israeli startups soldiered through the weird year that has been 2020, closing out December with $768 million in funding. One of the most interesting things from the past month is the fact that early-stage startups surpassed growth-stage startups not only in the amount of transactions but also in total funded capital. Read more

Indian startups are estimated to have received $10.14 billion in funding across more than 1,200 deals in 2020 despite the COVID crisis, a report by consulting firm HexGn said. Even though the total investment received in 2020 is lower than that of 2019 ($14.5 billion), the number of deals was higher by 20%, the report said. Read more

According to The Singapore Fintech Report 2021, Fintech investment in Singapore reached US$346 million in 2020, representing 6.2% of all that was raised in Asia. Read more

Enterprise Singapore’s Seeds Capital is calling for 10 to 15 “private-sector partners” to co-invest in deep tech startups and plow SG$150 million ($112 million) into these early-stage companies, focusing on three key sectors including health and biomedical sciences. Read more

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