Berlin’s Razor Group has acquired U.S.-based Perch, and on top of this it has raised just over $100 million led by Presight Capital with other undisclosed investors participating.
The news is the latest development in a wider consolidation and reordering taking place in the world of e-commerce aggregation.
Perch, we have heard from multiple sources, had been looking for a buyer for the better part of a year.
Perch and Razor do happen to have some investors in common, such as Victory Park Capital, which may well have been central to the negotiations between the two.
He claims that this deal solidifies Razor as the “market leader”, and that it is on track for $1 billion in revenues in the next four to eight quarters.
Mews, one of the startups building tools to help hotels manage IT better is announcing a growth round of $110 million to capture more business.
The funding — led by Kinnevik — is coming in at a $1.2 billion valuation post-money.
That is a slight up-round on the Series C that Amsterdam-based Mews announced at the end of 2022, when Mews raised $185 million on an $865 million valuation.
It said it now has more than 5,000 hotel customers, compared to 3,253 hotels a year ago.
Mews nominally looks after hotels and hospitality, but that could be hostels or Airbnbs or services for people in mixed-use real estate.
Will we reach AGI before Stripe goes public?
This is our Friday episode, when we dig back through the most critical stories and themes from the week.
Here’s what Mary Ann and Alex got into:Stripe’s valuation recovers: As part of a tender offer, Stripe is now worth $65 billion.
As part of a tender offer, Stripe is now worth $65 billion.
AI and the law: Microsoft’s move to invest in French AI company Mistral is not a bad way to spread its bets.
If Reddit prices too high out the gate, it loses out on potential buyer interest and could trade down from its IPO valuation instead of building momentum.
Reddit’s most recent primary round in 2021 raised $410 million at a $10 billion valuation from investors, including Fidelity, Quiet Capital and Montauk Ventures, among others.
The market has obviously changed since then, and going out at that $10 billion valuation wouldn’t be smart.
What happens nextThe $5 billion valuation that Reddit may pursue is not risk-free.
Reddit offering shares to its top users is likely a ploy to avoid the stock entering meme-trading territory, Martin said.
It did so, however, with the ambitious goal of creating a walking bipedal robot in a year’s time.
Humanoid robots are having a moment.
The goal of the deal is to “develop next generation AI models for humanoid robots,” according to Figure.
“We are excited to collaborate with Figure and work towards accelerating AI breakthroughs,” says Microsoft Corporate VP, Jon Tinter.
Mechatronics are easier to judge in a short video than AI and autonomy, and from that perspective, the Figure 01 robot appears quite dexterous.
Payments infrastructure giant Stripe said today it has inked deals with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer at a $65 billion valuation.
Notably, the valuation represents a 30% increase compared to what Stripe was valued at last March when it raised $6.5 billion in Series I funding at a $50 billion valuation.
But it is also still lower than the $95 billion valuation achieved in March of 2021.
A Stripe IPO has been long anticipated and was widely expected to happen in 2024.
But with this deal, it appears that an initial public offering may not take place until next year.
At the time, it looked like it would be more than $50 million; in the end it ended up a little lower.
This latest round brings the total raised by the company, which was founded about four years ago, to $64 million.
Photoroom plans to use the funding to hire more people and to continue investing in its R&D and infrastructure.
Other features it offers includes AI-generated backgrounds, scene expansions, AI-generated images, and a plethora of image editing tools.
“Photoroom’s generative AI capabilities are unparalleled, and we have no doubt that they will continue to lead the way in this rapidly evolving landscape.”
But Microsoft and Mistral AI buried the news — or at least an important part.
At the time, the company raised €385 million (around $415 million) with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) leading the investment round.
Unlike previous Mistral AI releases, Mistral Large isn’t open source.
With this investment, Microsoft is now an investor in OpenAI’s capped profit subsidiary and Mistral AI.
As for Mistral AI, the so-called European AI champion looks more and more like its American competitors with a closed-source approach and a long list of American backers.
If accurate, this latest injection of capital would value Moonshot AI at $2.5 billion – the largest single funding round for Chinese LLM developers on public record.
Co-leading the round are e-commerce giant Alibaba and HongShan – the VC firm formerly known as Sequoia China, according to South China Morning Post.
Other in the round included Chinese “super app” Meituan and Xiaohongshu (sometimes called China’s answer to Instagram), according to Chinese tech blog LatePost.
Pink Floyd Fan turned AI trailblazerYang Zhilin had a long list of achievements to his credit even before starting Moonshot.
The total amount raised by China’s AI firms amounted to roughly $2 billion, 70% less than the year before.
Byju’s cut the pre-money valuation ask in the rights issue to about $20 million to $25 million, TechCrunch earlier reported.
If they don’t participate in the rights issue, they risk losing nearly all their stake in Byju’s.
“Our rights issue is fully subscribed and my gratitude to my shareholders remains strong,” founder and chief executive Byju Raveendran wrote in a letter to shareholders Tuesday.
“But my benchmark of success is the participation of all shareholders in the rights issue.
“I understand that participating in this rights issue may seem like a Hobson’s choice.
