This month we welcomed urban farming leaders Infarm to the Balderton portfolio. Only 2 years after introducing the concept of in-store farming to the world, Infarm has built a network of farms all over Europe — and now operates more than 50 farms in supermarket aisles, restaurant kitchens, and distribution warehouses.

Read more about the investment on Balderton's blog, and read Daniel's insights into his decision-making on this investment. Plus, this week Infarm founder Erez shared the inspiring genesis of the team's farming vision on Medium.

Balderton welcomes Peakon

Peakon co-founders Phil Chambers, Kasper Hulthin, Dan Rogers and Christian Holm

Peakon also joined the Balderton portfolio this month. Peakon is a SaaS platform company focused on employee engagement and retention. The service collects and analyses employee feedback from web and mobile apps, then uses machine learning to understand what motivates employees, what problems they have, and how those problems can be fixed.

The team is growing fast, with offices in the UK, Denmark, US, Germany and New Zealand, and expects to double its headcount over the next 12 months to more than 180 people. The team has seen its client base expand rapidly over the past year with leading brands Trinity Mirror, Secret Escapes, LHH Penna (part of the Adecco group), World First, Lombard Risk, Delivery Hero, BMW, Urban Airship, and Capgemini all signing up to the service.

Read more on Balderton's newsfeed, in Techcrunch and in leading Danish business paper Børsen, which quotes Peakon co-founder Kasper Hulthin: "we want to go from being the market leader in Europe to being a global market leader."

Vivino raises $20M

Vivino co-founders Heini Zachariassen and Theis Søndergaard

Vivino, the world's most downloaded mobile wine app, and largest online wine marketplace, announced their $20M Series C this month, led by SCP Neptune International. Vivino's marketplace sales have gone from strength to strength, clocking four times growth in December 2017 compared to December 2016. The platform hosts information on over 9 million wines from 3,157 wine regions and 204,154 wineries, and the app has over 29 million reviews and more than 87 million ratings.

In other portfolio news this month

Revolut continues to beat the news drum, this month announcing they've reached 1.5M users, adding 6,000–8,000 users a day, with a 700% growth over the last year in transaction volume, to $1.2B in monthly transaction volume. Read more on Reuters. Nikolay also spoke to the FT about the challenges of work/life balance, and the team announced they are opening up to cryptocurrencies.

Citymapper shared their vision for city transportation: “we believe in the future of shared transportation in cities, there is no way we’re going to solve for congestion and pollution otherwise.” They announced their ridesharing smart bus, which appeared in a three-part story on Medium.

SOPHiA Genetics was recognised this month by Fast Company as one of the "Most Innovative" biotech companies of 2018. In an incredibly competitive market, this is terrific recognition, so many congratulations to the team.

Ross Bailey of Appear Here sat down with Business Insider to talk about how he left school at 16 to now building "the Airbnb of retail."

(Fairly) new portfolio company Zego got the nod from Oxbow Partners as being one of Insurtech's "Impact 25" — the top 25 companies well-placed to have a positive impact on the industry in 2018.

Qubit was recognised as one of the top ten machine learning companies globally. Others on the list? Google, IBM, Baidu, Microsoft, Twitter, Intel, Apple and Salesforce. Good company to be in.

Balderton: news

Lars sat down with the London Evening Standard to talk about his love of travel, his biggest career break, and the challenge of saying 'No.'

Rob participated in the Insurtech Insider podcast on the sharing economy and changing insurance models.

Nicolas did the 'Debrief of the Week' with FrenchWeb.FR, covering recent news in French tech and what we're looking at in the French market these days.

Suranga talked to Forbes about the dangers of AI bias in data based decision-making in an article that looks at potential racist, sexist pitfalls of AI.

Balderton: events

Here are upcoming events where you can catch the Balderton team:

Mar 1 - James is hosting an event "The Future of Artificial Intelligence" with Demos think tank, Christ Church Oxford and Balderton.

Mar 2 - Colin is attending Blockstack Berlin, at the Axica Convention Center in Berlin.

Mar 10 - Lars is speaking at the Sparks Conference, part of the London School of Economics.

Mar 19 - All Balderton Partners will be at Station F in Paris for an "Ask Me Anything" session for Station F startups, followed by an event for French startups.

Apr 13 - Lars is keynoting the London Business School PE/VC Club, which seeks to connect students and startups with the European investment community.

Balderton Capital's Career Portal

This month also saw the opening of our Balderton Portfolio Career Portal — an aggregation of hundreds of open positions at Balderton. Candidates can apply on the portal, or send us a CV so we can match them with a position.

And ... we are hiring at Balderton!

We have an open position for a PR & Community Manager at Balderton. Please share any great candidates with us!