Wayve raises $20M and starts self-driving car trials in London

Autonomous mobility startup, Wayve, raised $20M to launch a pilot fleet of self-driving cars in central London.

Wayve believes the complexity of self-driving cars will be solved by better artificial intelligence “brains,” rather than physical sensors and hand-coded rules.

Read Suranga's Medium post on our investment - From dorm room to Series A: How and why Balderton invested in Wayve. You can also read more on Wayve here.

Dream Games secures $7.5M to build high-quality puzzle games

Dream Games, founded by five former employees of Peak Games, the developer of hit puzzle games Toy Blast and Toon Blast, raised a $7.5M seed round. The investment will help the company find new talent in Istanbul as it looks to increase its team five-fold over the next two years.

"Our thesis in mobile games is very simple, to invest in the very best teams. We were blown away by the intensity, ability and cohesiveness of the Dream Games founding team."

Rob Moffat, Partner, Balderton

Read more about Dream Games here. If you're interested in joining their team - click here.

Detectify secures €21.5M to bring world-class cyber security to everyone

Detectify was founded by a group of elite Swedish ethical hackers who set out to give all companies the same level of security as the world’s largest software firms and Government security services.

They do this through ‘Detectify Crowdsource’, an invite-only ethical hacker network, which allows top-ranked security researchers to submit vulnerabilities which are then built into the firm's automation platform.

The funding will be used to continue to hire more world-class talent to accelerate the company’s growth. You can read more here.

Toucan Toco raises €12M to bring data storytelling to a global audience

The previously bootstrapped firm raised its first round, led by us, to accelerate product development and growth in the US and Europe.

Toucan Toco offers a unique data storytelling solution which helps organisations provide actionable insights to non-technical users.

The company already has 100+ Fortune 500 clients and is used by +50% of CAC 40 enterprises in France. Read more here.

We welcomed four new staff members to our team

From L-R, Luzana Costa, Toby Kelly, Georgia Forbes and Francesco Corea

We were delighted to welcome new members of the Balderton team, joining investment, platform and investor relations. Our latest additions are:

Luzana Costa, Platform Manager
Toby Kelly, IR Analyst
Georgia Forbes, Associate
Francesco Corea, Research Lead

If you'd like to find out more about them - you can read our blog post here.

If you're interested in joining us, you can find our job openings here, or our portfolio job portal here.

We announced our 7th early-stage fund

We were also incredibly excited to announce our new $400M fund to support Europe's best founders at Series A. If you missed it - you can read Suranga's post here on why we chose to continue focusing on Series A.

You can also read more about the news on our site, or in Bloomberg or Forbes.

More news highlights this month

Frontier Car Group announced $400M investment from OLX

OLX Group announced it would increase its ownership in online car marketplace Frontier Car Group with a $400M investment.

Balderton first invested in Berlin-based Frontier Car Group in 2016 at Seed stage. We went on to lead the company's Series A in late 2016, and followed on in the $41M Series B round in 2018.

Read Balderton Partner Daniel Waterhouse's Medium post about our investment in Frontier Car Group here. Read more on the OLX investment here.

VOI raised $85M Series B

VOI, Europe’s leading home-grown e-scooter operator, has raised $85M to continue building its presence in existing and new cities.

The new capital will also enable greater investment in R&D of VOI’s in-house developed technology platform and vehicle lineup, leading to better customer experience, unit economics, operations and sustainability performance.

Events

If you missed us at SLUSH...

You can watch Bernard in conversation with Jessica Schultz, Partner at Northzone and SLUSH CEO Andreas Saari, discussing why operational experience is crucial for investors.

You can also catch his fireside with Recorded Future CEO Christopher Ahlberg and Parmy Olson of the WSJ on the next chapter of European exits.

If you missed us at WebSummit...

You can watch Lars' session on the metrics that really matter when evaluating emerging startups.

Catch Balderton at the following events next month

2nd Dec - Rob will be speaking at the Forbes 30 under 30 Summit in Berlin
11th Dec - Colin will be speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin

Highlights from the news

From our portfolio

The Times explained how Kaia Health's personal trainer fitness app can make sure you're exercising correctly to help prevent injury.

TechCrunch reported that GoCardless is partnering with TransferWise to bring low-cost currency conversion to recurring payments. Hiroki Takeuchi, founder of GoCardless was also featured in 'Brunch with Sifted'.

Fast Company reported that supermarket chain QFC had become the first in the U.S. to launch Infarm's units in store so customers could buy fresh greens.

Vestiaire Collective launched its first permanent store at London's Selfridges. You can read more in Forbes.

City AM reported that Zego has become the first insurtech firm in the UK to secure an insurance licence. Zego CEO, Sten Saar, also spoke to Sifted about the books that have motivated him through his journey as an entrepreneur.

Contentful announced the appointment of Steve Sloan as its Chief Executive Officer. You can read the announcement in Bloomberg.

Virtuo's Karim Kaddoura wrote a LinkedIn post examining why our views on car ownership are changing and how it's benefiting our over-saturated cities

From our team

James was featured in an article in The Times discussing US investment into UK tech.

Caye wrote a Medium post explaining why she is so excited to be a more permanent part of the Paris tech ecosystem.

Laura wrote about our Liquidity I fund and the opportunities it presents for the UK Business Angels Association.

Magda spoke to TechCrunch about the investment trends we are excited about in the Nordics.

Colin wrote a blog post on what we learnt from the Quantum Computing event we hosted at Balderton HQ alongside the UK's National Physical Laboratory,

Suranga was named one of the most influential BAME leaders in UK Tech by Inclusive Boards. The list was featured in the Financial Times.

Rob spoke to TechCrunch about where he sees opportunity in the fintech sector.

Back catalogue

We have new subscribers joining us all the time, so if this is your first newsletter, you can catch up on previous issues here: Nov 19 (Balderton VII) | Oct 19 | Sep 19 | Jul 19 | Jun 19 | May 19 (Recorded Future acquisition) | May 19 | Apr 19 |

You can register for the newsletter here.