Gresham House Ventures invests £5M into leading travel technology business Branchspace
Gresham House Ventures, a growth equity investor specialising in software and digitally driven businesses, has completed a £5M investment into Branchspace, a leading technology consultancy and software provider working with airlines to enhance and transform their digital retailing capabilities.
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in London, Branchspace allows clients to create and manage personalised, data-driven digital commerce experiences to increase direct distribution and take greater ownership of the end-to-end customer journey. Branchspace provides solutions across the entire tech stack including solutions architecture, digital performance reviews and UX/UI experience design, alongside a proprietary booking and conversion engine and dynamic retailing software platform, Triplake, which has gained significant traction since launching in 2021.
Branchspace was founded with a mission to provide disruptive online retailing solutions to aviation and travel suppliers, including airlines, and to make future proof commercial and technological concepts and commercial agility a reality. Innovation and flexibility for everything we do are part of their DNA.
Jitty raises £1.57M
Jitty, a London, UK-based provider of an AI-powered property search engine, raised £1.57M in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI fund, with participation from True., Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company, Angel Invest, Ventures Together, Mozza Angels, Unwritten Capital, Macks Managed Investments, and Sequoia Capital and Atomico scout programs, as well some angels.
Jitty was founded this year by CEO Graham Paterson, CPO James Storer and CTO Daniel Cooper, a team of former early-stage Deliveroo employees. The founders say they are launching the company after negative experiences purchasing a home. The UK startup is using large language models – the same type of technology underpinning chatbot ChatGPT – to understand home descriptions. It is using computer vision, another subset of AI, to interpret floor plans and pull this data onto its property search engine. The platform, which is targeting a mid-September launch, will also cross-reference information with publicly available data.
As buying a home is highly stressful, and very risky, Jitty helps people to find and buy their perfect home. After spending their working lives building fantastic digital user experiences, they couldn’t understand why the biggest purchase of people’s lives was stuck in the dark ages. They now help buyers to see every thing about every home, and then give them a suite of tools to go through the buying process.
UK-based FruitCast raises £2.8M to enhance soft fruit farming with AI-backed data analytics
Lincolnshire, UK-based FruitCast, which has been trialled on leading soft fruit farms in the UK over the last two years, will launch in 2024 thanks to the £2.8M capital raised from private investors, Ceres Agritech and Innovate UK through its investor partnership programme.
FruitCast, which has been trialled on leading soft fruit farms in the UK over the last two years, will launch in 2024 thanks to the capital raised from private investors. The startup has been created in response to the demand from growers to more precisely forecast fruit growth development to help plan labour and market supply and protect margins.
FruitCast’s system uses a moving camera – which could be a GoPro on a moving trolley or handheld – to take thousands of photographs of crops, which are counted and analysed by AI to precisely forecast growth and predict yields. In the past, yield forecasting relied on skilled labourers manually counting plants and extrapolating to estimate quantities and harvest schedules. This is where FruitCast looks to make a difference.
“The AI capability is driven by one of the largest databases in the world, which gives it a firm foundation for accurate forecasting ahead of other competitors. This combined with the depth of understanding of practical agriculture and proven capability has made FruitCast attractive to agritech investors in what is a competitive and noisy marketplace.” said Richard Williamson, CEO at FruitCast.
OneID’s quick and secure digital identity verification raises £1M and can become a cornerstone of the UK’s digital infrastructure
OneID, the UK’s only provider of bank-verified digital identification services, has secured £1M in new funding from ACF Investors. The investment will be used to further develop its product and bolster its mission to make the world a safer place by helping people prove who they are online easily and securely.
The startup was founded in 2020 to enable more UK citizens to have a safe and smooth digital experience by enabling banks to provide an ID service for customers. With digital interactions and transactions becoming a daily staple, OneID’s solution eliminates the need for physical identification documents, enabling businesses and individuals to digitally prove their identity instantly and anywhere.
OneID was built to make it easier for people to prove who they are online without their personal information being at risk. By creating absolute certainty between a business and a customer, they try to make the world a safer place. Their goal is to achieve social and economic inclusion by making a bank-verified digital identity affordable and available to everyone.
