This month we welcomed Tessian to the Balderton portfolio, having led their $13M Series A investment round.

Tessian’s founders, Tom Adams, Ed Bishop and Tim Sadler, met as engineering students at Imperial College before they started their careers in investment banking for some of the world’s largest financial institutions. It was while working in finance that they saw a gap in the market to protect companies against the problem of highly sensitive information being sent to the wrong person on email, which can have severe business consequences and cause lasting reputational damage.

The genius of their solution, in Suranga's view, is that while Tessian's product focus today is on email — by far the most used communication channel in the corporate enterprise — their technology can be applied to all communication channels.Read Suranga's post 'The challenge of securing humans (or why Balderton just invested in Tessian).'

Read more behind the news in our Newsfeed, in Venturebeat and in Techcrunch.

Frontier Car Group raises $89M Series C

Sujay Tyle, Founder & CEO, Frontier Car Group

Berlin-based Frontier Car Group announced their Series C raise this month, securing $89M from Naspers’ Classifieds business, OLX Group, through its investment arm OLX Ventures. FCG operates in six countries, and will use the funds, as well as access to OLX Group’s global footprint in high-growth markets, to fuel its expansion into new territories and enhance its instant cash services for users.

FCG's announced their Series B funding in May of this year with a raise of $41M from Balderton, TPG Growth, automotive funds Fraser McCombs Capital, and AutoTech Ventures.

Balderton led FCG's Series A funding in May of 2017.

Memrise raises $15.5M Series B

The Memrise Management Team

Congratulations to the team at Memrise who have secured $15.5m in Series B funding. The investment was led by Octopus Ventures and Korelya Capital, and supported by follow-on investments from Avalon Ventures and Balderton.

Underpinned by scientific methodology, Memrise helps more than 35 million adults worldwide effectively learn languages. They support more than 22 languages, including Mandarin, French, Arabic and Spanish, and were voted overall Best App in the 2017 Google Play Awards. Read more about the news on the Balderton Newsfeed. Balderton first invested in Memrise in 2010.

Lyst secures investment from LVMH

Chris Morton, CEO, Lyst

London-based Lyst announced their investment by LVMH this past month. Lyst's digital shopping platform allows consumers to search and shop over 11,000 designers and stores in one place, and has seen revenues grow over 400 per cent in the past three years since it last raised funds. Balderton first invested in Lyst in 2013.

Read more about the story on Balderton's newsfeed, in the Financial Times (FT) and in The Business of Fashion.

In other portfolio news this month

The Times highlighted The Hut Group's ambitions in their article 'The Hut Group: Northwich’s answer to Estée Lauder.'

The Telegraph also ran an interview with CEO Matthew Moulding, who talked about his plans to recruit 2,000 more staff to keep up with demand and growth.

The Sunday Times also wrote about Depop this month, advising parents that selling products on the site is a good way to teach teens about personal finance. 

Prodigy Finance announced the appointment of Dr Judith Rodin as their new Chair. Dr Rodin was formerly President of the Rockefeller Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania.

“I’ve staked my career on the belief that educational opportunity can transform lives and whole communities, and I’ve seen first-hand that social purpose finance can be a disruptive force for good ...This made joining the [Prodigy Finance] board and working with the talented management team an easy decision and an exciting opportunity.”

Read more on Fintech Finance.

Recorded Future was awarded Best Threat Intelligence Technology at SC Media's SC Awards 2018, which took place. Read more about the awards here.

Congratulations to the London-based ROLI team, who added Sony as an investor as they plan an expanded range of hardware and software. Read more in Techcrunch.

Revolut kicked off services in Russia with a partnership announcement with QIWI. Read more on the newswire here. The team also announced plans to launch a commission-free trading service. Read about the announcement in the Financial Times (FT).

SOPHiA GENETICS announced their acquisition of French-based tech company Interactive Biosoftware (IBS), creator of Alamut, the most used decision support software for clinical genomic data interpretation. The acquisition underscores SOPHiA GENETICS' continuing mission to drive growth and accelerate data-driven medicine adoption around the world. Read more on the newswire.

The Curious AI Company announced a partnership with Neste Engineering Solutions, to develop advanced industry artificial intelligence. The collaboration aims to add to the existing AI capabilities of the NAPCON products currently serving process industry. Read about the partnership here.

Empty storefronts? Ross Bailey of Appear Here considers them half full. Read the interview with Ross when he joined Fast Company's list of The 100 Most Creative People in Business, 2018.

Balderton: in the news

Bernard sat down the Bloomberg's Brad Stone and IDInvest Partner Benoit Grossman at Bloomberg's Sooner Than You Think summit, to talk about venture capital and the search for a post-Brexit tech hub. Watch the full video here.

Bernard was on the Main Stage at Founders Forum in London this year, along with Peter Fenton of Benchmark, talking about when, and how, a $100BN technology company will be created in Europe.

Bernard sat down with Emmanuelle Duten, Editor in Chief of Les Echos and Accel Partner Philippe Botteri to talk about how VCs are growing tomorrow's European unicorns. Watch the full video here.

James shared his thoughts on how investing in artificial intelligence could help the NHS pay for itself. Read the full article in the Telegraph here.

Rob was on stage at Vivatech this past month, tackling when, and how, startups should tackle their first overseas market.Watch the full video here. Rob's article on the topic also appeared in Venturebeat.

Rob and Suranga sat down with Jens Begemann, CEO of Wooga and Sascha Konietzke, CEO of Contentful at the NOAH Conference in Berlin this month to talk about how they've grown a global footprint from Berlin. Watch the full video here.

We said a fond goodbye this month to Nicolas Debock, who announced his new role on the investment team of IDInvest. We'll miss Nicolas at Balderton, but we all wish him many congratulations on his excellent new role.

Balderton: events

The whole partnership team headed to Berlin this month, to host an 'AMA' at Wooga's offices, meet startups, have lunch at the Infarm cafe, and host friends on the Dalia Research boat. Our Berlin portfolio together employs 1,200 people, did over $100M in net revenue last year and raised over $150M in the last 18 months. Great to be there — see some of the photos.

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

Jul 6 - Colin will be at TC Sessions: Blockchain 2018.

Jul 25 - Kiana will be hosting an event with Peakon, Workable and Nutmeg at Balderton HQ with an interactive question-and-answer discussion on how People processes are built and scaled in startups. If you'd like to attend, please RSVP here.

An invitation to participate: EU Startup Heatmap Research

If you're part of the European tech startup ecosystem, we invite you to take the European Startup Initiative 2018 survey — we, and they, want to hear from you! Five mins of your time, and we'll all learn a great deal. Thanks in advance.http://survey.startupheatmap.eu/