Welcome to your Week in Tech – a roundup of the week’s top technology news.
In this episode, we bring you Deliveroo’s $275m funding round, Walmart’s acquisition of Jet.com, a home services app and a robot that does your hoovering!
Watch the video, or read on for all this and more.
Investments
Software provider Adthena landed £2m in funding from Mel Morris, the entrepreneur behind the game Candy Crush. The Shoreditch-based firm said it’ll use the funds to accelerate growth in the UK and Australia, plus expand to the US, Germany and France.
The Centre for Acceleration of Social Technology, also known as CAST, received £1.12m from the Big Lottery Fund to spread the use of digital technology among UK charities.
Low carbon investment strategy specialist ET Index Research raised £1.13m, and Edinburgh-based ad analytics firm TVSquared secured $3m.
Best of British
By far the largest funding round of the week, and the year so far, was the Series E raised by Deliveroo. The on-demand food delivery service received $275m in a round led by Bridgepoint.
This brings the London-based firm’s total funding to over $474.59m. Founded in 2013, Deliveroo now operates in 84 cities across 12 countries, and plans to expand further.
International story
Overseas, American retail giant Walmart announced its acquisition of e-commerce site Jet.com. Walmart will hand over more than $3bn as part of the deal, plus up to $300m in shares.
This is Walmart’s biggest step yet in its bid to compete against Amazon in the world of digital commerce.
Download
Our download of the week is the GoFantastic app by Fantastic Services.
Offering everything from domestic cleaning to pest control and rubbish removal to pet care, the app claims to enable users to book their desired service in under 30 seconds. Simply select the service you want, fill in a few details, check the price and book a slot that suits you.
And Finally…
And finally, your days of tiresome hoovering may be over. Dyson’s Eye robot vacuum cleaner has launched in the UK, after extensive trials in Japan.
Retailing at £800, the vacuum will do all the hard work while you put your feet up and relax.
That’s it for this episode of The Week in Tech. For more technology news, take a look at our home page, and follow us on Twitter.