Latest Stories
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Cambridge's AlertMe Raises £8M For Home Energy Savings Offer
Estonia's United Dogs and Cats Raises €480K
UK's Wonga Raises $22.5M For Short Term Loans
Football Social Net Footbo Raises $1M
Czech Startup Good Data Raises $2.5M For Cloud Business Analytics
Berlin's SoundCloud Raises €2.5M
June 11, 2009
Cambridge's AlertMe Raises £8M For Home Energy Savings Offer
We have posted previously on startups that seek to tip off home owners where they are wasting energy and racking up a bill. It seems like a lay-up given the combination of high costs, home-owners who are hurting financially, and green guilt. Just yesterday, VantagePoint led a $30M round in Boulder, CO-based Tendril Networks, which sells technology that provides 2-way dialogue between utilities or retailers and customers.
Now Europe is getting into the action as Cambridge-based AlertMe has raised £8M ($13M) in Series B funding from Good Energies, Index Ventures, SET Venture Partners and VantagePoint Venture Partners.
Alertme throws some snappy stats at us, like home energy accounts for a full 1/4 of energy usage in Europe and that AlertMe users can save up to 1/4 of their monthly home energy expense, paying for itself within a year.
Alertme says that it now has sold 15K units to customers and he no real competitors in Europe. It sells through channel partners such as utilities.
The URL is strong enough to be worth something - in fact the company was founded back in 2006 and appears to have gotten started with more of a home security angle.
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Estonia's United Dogs and Cats Raises €480K
Estonia's United Dogs and Cats has raised €480K in VC funding from individual investor Raivo Hein (buyer and seller of various businesses), the state-owned Estonian Development Fund and Ambient Sound Investments (co-founders of Skype who had previously seeded the startup with €170,000 of funding in 2008.) The company says they have 200K registered users, which does not sound like much for a site that is localized in 10+ languages but these things can grow quickly if they have an enthusiastic base.
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June 08, 2009
UK's Wonga Raises $22.5M For Short Term Loans
London-based Wonga has raised $22.25M led by Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, with existing investor, Balderton Capital. Wonga offers small, short-term cash advances to UK consumers. They plan to use the money to expand beyond the UK.
They boast "our automated, real-time processing systems leaves traditional lenders eating dust." Wonga says it has done 100K cash advances of up to 30 days since it launched 11 months ago.
Wonga says traditional sources of short term loans are rigid, slow and non-transparent. Wonga appears to be faster, however, they charge the same harsh rates as traditional providers - roughly one percent per day.
Prior to creating Wonga, the startup's founder and CEO Errol Damelin was CEO of hosted supply chain firm Connect Ltd.
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