French startup Manty, which is helping public officials use data to make better decisions, has raised €2.4 million from la Banque des Territoires and Axeleo Capital, to accelerate the deployment of its platform and reach 100 local administrations by the end of the year. 

The public sector has often had the image of a technophobic sector, difficult for startups to break into. Despite this, innovation is sorely needed. Local governments are often lacking in resources to analyse their data, leaving decision-makers forced to make complex decisions without seeing the whole picture. 

Launched in 2017 by Mathieu Nohet, Lucas Gaillard and Joseph-Marie Valleix, Manty offers a new solution to make local government decision-making more efficient and informed. Built by a 15-person team, it connects to every data source within the administration, centralises it, and shows decision makers a dashboard and visualizations. With a simple interface that does not require any technical knowledge, it brings the right information, to the right person, at the right time.

Manty has already been deployed in more than 50 local administrations, among which Rambouillet, Biarritz or Clermont Auvergne Métropole. The main use cases for the platform are related to monitoring budget and spending, and human resources management. Cities can also use the platform to analyse the pricing of municipal activities (which can be done in seconds, compared to weeks or months), or re-build their school map. For a city of 30,000 inhabitants, the extractions and harmonisation tasks automated by the platform represent the full-time job for a controller.

Marianne Louradour, regional director Île-de-France at the Banque des Territoires indicates: “La Banque des Territoires invest in Manty to leverage on an innovative solution helping more inclusive and more connected cities to appear. Thanks to Many, any local administration, regardless of its size, can use a simple decision-making tool that allows easy monitoring of its public policies”.

Eric Burdier, founding partner at Axeleo Capital said: “Until today, the public sector has always been at a disadvantage regarding digitalisation, and has greatly suffered from a lack of innovation from the historical leaders of the market. In the era of cloud and data-oriented solutions, Manty brings a new impulse to the sector, with cutting edge technologies and a user-centric approach that will quickly position them as a reference in the european govtech ecosystem”.

XYZ Reality, the UK startup we featured on our list of European startups shaping the future of the construction industry, has today announced the closing of an approximate €5.7 million Series A round, led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Hoxton Ventures, with participation from Adara Ventures and J Coffey Construction.

Named a top five Construction Technology Firm by Techworld and the winner of Innovate UK 2018 & 2019 grants, XYZ Reality is aims at revolutionising construction with its vision of building from holograms. The company has developed the world’s first Engineering Grade Augmented Reality device, HoloSite, that allows construction workers to view Building Information Models on-site to 5 millimeter accuracy.

In construction today, buildings are designed in 3D and then converted into 2D drawings. This conversion creates significant inefficiencies with up to 80% of construction works being “out-of-tolerance”. This results in 7-11% of project costs being wasted and in mega-projects, this amounts to an average of €80.3 million.

XYZ Reality’s HoloSite solves this by improving the feedback loop between site and design by 92% as construction workers are now able to make real-time informed decisions in the field.

David Mitchell, founder, CEO and builder, commented: “2D is an unnatural language for humans; we see everything in 3D, yet tradespeople are being asked to interpret 2D drawings, conceptualise the 3D asset and then build the asset on-site to within construction “tolerances”. Works are currently validated after the fact through laser scanning. 80% of the time the construction fails to meet acceptable tolerances. With HoloSite, we can prevent errors happening in the first place.”

Mitchell, who took his first steps on a building site, has spent his career in the industry, with experience spanning digital construction and architecture. It was when the recession hit in 2008 that Mitchell started looking for a way to transform the industry. In 2016, he had his ‘Eureka moment’ – eliminate 2D in its entirety.

The new funding will enable the company to further improve the user experience by doubling the size of the technology team, expand its development team across all verticals and build its sales and marketing operation.

Nick Kingsbury, Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners said, “Construction is a sector that’s ripe for radical innovation. This technology has the potential to revolutionise how the construction industry sets out and validates its work, reducing costs and the chance of project slippage from mistakes. This funding from Amadeus and Hoxton Ventures will enable XYZ Reality to develop its AR cloud and software platform, build its team to serve the EU market and expand to US and Asia, where it has received significant interest.”

Today French startup MWM, a new kind of music app publisher, has announced a new Series B funding round of €50 million led by blisce/, Idinvest Partners, Bpifrance via its Large Venture fund, Aglaé Ventures, plus participation from French billionaire businessman Xavier Niel who also joined the round. 

Founded in 2012, MWM develops music apps. In only a few years, MWM has created numerous popular apps on the AppStore and the Play Store such as edjing Mix, the world’s most downloaded DJ app. Ranked the #1 worldwide music apps publisher, MWM has registered more than 400 million downloads across 15 apps covering the main music segments (Production, Gaming, Learning and Utilities). 

With this latest round, MWM has raised €60 million in total funding since the company’s creation. The MWM team intends to take full advantage of the fresh finance to extend its app portfolio beyond music to digital creative practices in general. The startup also currently has 70 employees in Paris and Bordeaux and plans to also use the funds to double its workforce by the end of the year. In general, it’s larger mission is to become the Adobe of mobile creativity apps – no small feat.

“Unleashing people’s creativity has always been close to our heart. In only a few years, we have become a key player in the music app market,which is without a doubt one of the fundamental pillars of the creative industry”, said Jean-Baptiste Hironde. ​“Today, we aim to go one step further and position ourselves as the leading provider of the first creative apps suite for all. Creativity is a basic need and we want to share with the world this means of self-expression and foundation of personal development”.        

Chloé Giard, Idinvest Partners, said: “With more than 400 million downloads around the world, MWM already represents an amazing entrepreneurial success story. The team is now looking for greater challenges with the ambitious goals to become the world’s leader in creative apps. We are delighted to back them up in this new stage”. 

Dutch startup TerraPay, which is making it easier and cheaper to send and receive money to and from emerging countries, announced today that a consortium of investors, including Prime Ventures, Partech Africa and management acquired the company for an undisclosed sum. In addition, the same investors, joined by IFC, invested €8.3 million in TerraPay to fund the company’s expansion.

TerraPay, founded in 2015, provides unique services that help more people around the world to transfer money quickly, safely, and affordably. The company does this by enabling payment service providers such as banks, mobile money operators, money transfer operators or other payment providers to instantly connect to each other at a low cost. Since its founding, TerraPay has acquired more than 25 licenses to operate in over 60 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe and is expanding globally.

TerraPay was developed to address the pain points people in many countries experience when trying to make payments across different channels. The cost of sending money to and from emerging countries, especially in Africa and Asia, are some of the highest globally, averaging 9.3 percent compared to the global average of 7 percent, yet remittances are a major contributor to the GDP of recipient countries. A large portion of the remittance cost is related to cash handling at the sending and receiving end. At the same time, the digital payment ecosystem is fragmented with many mobile money providers developing their own network alongside financial institutions with no real interoperability solution.

TerraPay is a game-changer because it connects MTOs, mobile money networks and financial institutions to a simple, central platform where all payment players can reliably connect to any financial network, facilitating a seamless end-to-end customer payment experience.

TerraPay’s Payments Infrastructure opens up the possibility of including merchants traditionally excluded from credit card systems, allow companies to pay salaries through mobile money accounts and help banks to settle remittances in real-time.

Pieter Welten, a partner at Prime Ventures said: “We identified TerraPay as an attractive investment opportunity. Led by a strong and experienced management team, TerraPay has a unique market position and strong economic moat comprising of licenses and regulatory approvals, a world-class digital payments platform and global network of partners. Our investment should allow the company to further expand and scale its operations.”

Paulo de Bolle, IFC’s Global Director, Financial Institutions Group, said: “By adding TerraPay to IFC’s growing fintech investment portfolio, we are supporting the company to grow and expand, while helping to lower the costs and streamline the process to send money home. Fintechs like TerraPay play a vital role in increasing financial inclusion in emerging markets.”

“We are excited to join efforts with an outstanding group of investors and a superb team for the next part of TerraPay’s journey,” said Cyril Collon, General Partner at Partech Africa. “We have been impressed by the cutting-edge platform TerraPay’s teams have developed. This platform will play a key role in reaching the interoperability goals necessary for true financial inclusion. The impact for end-customers is already massive in terms of quality of service, reliability and speed.”

Today RTP Global, the venture capital firm focused on early-stage technology investments, is launching a new fund of approximately €580.8 million to support tech founders across Europe, North America, India and South-East Asia.

RTP Global is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage technology investments, supporting young companies from various industries with strategic know-how and a broad global network. It was founded in 2000 under the name ru-Net by serial entrepreneur Leonid Boguslavsky, who has a PhD in Computer Science, and has offices in New York, Moscow and Bangalore.

This new fund is more than three times the size of RTP’s Global Fund II, which launched in December 2017. The previous fund successfully deployed half of its capital, investing in 34 companies across the globe with 13 in Europe, 11 in the USA and 10 in India and South East Asia. Investments include Smarter Sorting (USA), Cuvva (UK), CoachHub (Germany), Cred (India), and Zenyum (Singapore). The rest of the fund is allocated into follow-on investments. 

RTP Global III will build on this success, and will be managed by an investment team from offices in New York, Moscow, and Bangalore, as well as the new expanded team in Europe and Singapore. 

So who is the fund looking for? The team behind RTG Global III is on the lookout for companies with cutting-edge tech and founding teams that have exhibited consistent growth and momentum. The fund will invest in early-stage companies in verticals such as mobility, AI, SaaS, fintech, foodtech, healthtech, proptech, insurtech and sporttech.

Leonid Boguslavsky, founder and CEO of RTP Global, said: “Following the success of our previous funds we are thrilled to deploy more capital than ever, using our unique global position to invest in nascent business models across the world.

“We are a founders driven firm and the strategy for RTP remains the same. After starting my career as a computer scientist I became a serial entrepreneur, so I understand the unexpected challenges, the ups and downs, and the need for hard work, especially in the early stage of a company’s life. Along with great tech and a driven founding team, we will look to invest in companies that share our values and beliefs.”

German startup, Lanes & Planes, the business travel and expense solution provider, has announced the completion of their Series A funding of approximately €8.9 million. The round was led by Battery Ventures, a global technology investment firm, with participation from DN Capital and current investor Connect Ventures.

The Munich-based software company, founded in 2017 by Veit Blumschein and Daniel Nolte, is one of the first 100% digital end-to-end travel management solutions that covers all aspects of business travel – from booking, to expenses, to billing. The startup serves primarily medium to large-sized companies (from 10 regular travellers or more), and consolidates all the business trip information for the accounting department to easily provide final sign-off, as well as complete VAT indication, audit trail archiving and automated sync with the company’s ERP system. By using the service, companies can save up to 30% of their direct and indirect travel spend. 

While Lanes & Planes is a globally available solution, the current target market is Germany, which represents approximately a €40 billion annual opportunity. The fresh funds will be used primarily to continue strong customer growth in this market, as well as improve the product offering.

Itzik Parnafes, General Partner at Battery Ventures, said: “We have been screening the market for quite some time now and know how difficult it is to develop software that meets the high expectations of both companies on the one hand and business travelers on the other. Businesspeople today expect a consumer-like experience when booking travel for work. Veit and Daniel have achieved this impressively with Lanes & Planes’ holistic solution and they continue to push the envelope in online, corporate travel”.  

Nenad Marovac, Managing Partner at DN Capital adds: “We quickly realized that this experienced founding team possesses a vast and at the same time unique domain knowledge, with a product-market strategy that matches our own management philosophy: one market at a time. This has been backed up by reference calls by customers using Lanes & Planes who have been strong advocates for the product. And we are very satisfied users for our German operations ourselves ” .