Welcome to your Week in Tech – a roundup of the week’s top technology news. In this episode, we have Big Health’s £9.15m funding round, Hailo’s merger with MyTaxi, Yahoo’s acquisition and an app to make clearing up after your dog a hands-free process. Watch the video, or read on for all this and more!
Investments
London-based tech firm Big Health landed £9.15m in a round led by Octopus Ventures. The company, which was founded in 2010, creates automated and personalised behavioural programs to help those with mental health issues.
Retail app startup Poq landed $4m in a Series A round led by growth and venture investor Beringea. The company, which enables retailers to offer customer-facing shopping apps, also drew support from existing investors Seedcamp and Venrex.
Best of British
UK cab firm Hailo announced it is in the process of merging with Hamburg-based MyTaxi in an attempt to create Europe’s largest taxi e-hailing service. Multi-national corporation Daimler, which owns the likes of Mercedez-Benz, bought MyTaxi in 2014. Following this latest deal, Daimler will own around 60% of Hailo. Founded in 2011, Hailo has raised $100.6m to-date. Its investors include Accel, Richard Branson and Forward Partners.
International story
Overseas, American telecoms giant Verizon Communications acquired Yahoo for nearly $5bn. Yahoo is to be combined with AOL, which Verizon bought last year. The price tag is way below the $44bn Microsoft offer Yahoo turned down in 2008 and follows net losses of $4.4bn in 2015. At Yahoo’s peak, it was worth $125bn.
Download
Our download of the week is Zeek. It’s a gift card marketplace that allows you to sell your unwanted gift cards for cash, or buy gift cards at a discount. There are gift cards from more than 300 brands on the platform across a number of categories, including fashion, electronics and restaurants. Just this week, the company raised $9.5m.
And Finally…
And finally, dog lovers, this one’s for you. It’s an app called Pooper and is a bit like Uber for dog mess. Your dog does its business, then you summon someone via the subscription-based app to come and clean it up. With the general premise and the tagline ‘Your dog’s poop in someone else’s hands’, it sounds to me like one big joke, but co-founder Ben Becker insists it’s legit. For now, while we wait and see, I’m afraid you’re going to have to continue doing your own dirty work.
That’s all for your Week in Tech. For more technology news, take a look at our home page, and follow us on Twitter.