Welcome to The Week in Tech, your roundup of the latest top tech news. This week, we have more than £64m of investment into UK tech companies, bad news for Apple, Angry Birds maker Rovio Entertainment’s IPO plans and much more.
Investments
Cubic Motion’s £20m
Computer vision technology firm Cubic Motion received £20m in investment from private equity firm NorthEdge.
Founded in 2009, the Manchester-based firm has created a range of proprietary technology, including software used for precise tracking in markerless video, stereo, and depth data.
Habito’s £18.5m
PropTech startup Habito secured an £18.5m Series B funding round led by Atomico.
This brings the total amount raised by the London-based digital mortgage broker to over £27.5m.
FiveAI’s £14m Series A
FiveAI secured a £14m Series A from lead investor Lakestar Capital, plus existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Notion Capital and Kindred.
This funding adds to a £12.8m government grant the Cambridge-based startup received for the StreetWise driverless vehicle project.
PROWLER.io’s £10m
Artificial intelligence startup PROWLER.io raised £10m in Series A funding from Cambridge Innovation Capital and Atlantic Bridge Capital.
The Cambridge startup has created a principled AI decision-making platform that makes it possible to perceive and affect the ways the likes of vehicles, drones, robots, characters in games and even people interact in complex environments.
Other investments
Other investment rounds announced in the past week by UK tech companies include PropTech startup Arthur’s £1.1m Series A, fact-checking service Factmata’s $750,000 (£575,000) Seed, and AI startup SentiSum’s $700,000 (£540,000) Seed.
Huawei overtakes Apple
Huawei has overtaken Apple as the world’s second-biggest smartphone maker by sales, according to figures from Counterpoint Research.
The data showed Huawei’s market share surpassed Apple’s in June and July, relegating Apple to third place for the first time since Blackberry and Nokia ruled the market.
The sales dip is likely to be temporary, however, as Apple is due to announce its new range of iPhones next week, which will no doubt invigorate sales.
Rovio reveals IPO plans
Angry Birds maker Rovio Entertainment announced it is moving ahead with plans for an initial share offering.
The Finnish mobile games and animation studio intends to list its shares in Helsinki to raise at least €30m.
Rovio said earlier this month that its revenue increased 94% in the Q2, year on year, to €86.2m.
Turo raises $92m
Peer-to-peer carsharing marketplace Turo has raised $92m in funding from investors including Daimler, SK Holdings, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Founders Circle Capital.
Turo has also acquired Croove, Daimler’s own Turo-like subsidiary that launched in December last year
Download of the week
Our download of the week is one for the high fliers among us (unfortunately that’s not me). Velocity Black is a digital concierge service aimed at affluent, internationally-focused millennials.
The app allows members to book all their global travel and hospitality needs, plus experiences such as flying a jet to the edge of space, diving around the wreckage of the Titanic, or swimming with orca whales in the Arctic.
With an annual membership fee of £2,000 and a joining fee of £700, it may not be for everyone, but the firm behind it seems to be gaining great traction, having raised £30m in Series A & B funding last year and reporting a revenue increase of 105% over the past quarter.
And finally
Next time you find yourself lacking creative inspiration, turn off your dreary tunes and turn on something a little more lively. That’s because research has shown upbeat songs can help you come up with original and useful solutions to tasks by making you see things from a different perspective.
Simone Ritter from Radboud University, the Netherlands, and Sam Ferguson from the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, found listening to happy music could promote creative thinking in school, workplaces and other organisational settings.
That’s all for this week’s roundup. For more top tech news, make sure you follow us on Twitter and Facebook, plus subscribe to our newsletter.