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A startup from Europe is joining the race to become the first big provider of lab grown fish.

Bluu Biosciences has raised €7 million in a round of financing from investors including Manta Ray Ventures, Norrsken VC, Be8, CPT Capital and Lever VC to compete with a host of startups like BluNalu, Wild Type, and Shiok Meats in a bid to market with a lab-grown fish replacement.

The market for sustainable fish is huge and growing. Already, concerns over the effects of overfishing and industrial fish farming are mounting as demand for fish increases. It’s the same problem that other animal-based sources of protein face. The amount of demand for high quality sources of protein from the Earth’s several billion people cannot sustainably keep up with the available supply.

That’s why a number of cellular meat companies are focusing on fish instead of other meats like beef, pork, or chicken.

“There is a lot of talent in Europe and very little companies built in this space. If you compare it t0 the mammalian space there are a lot fewer companies,” said Simon Fabich, co-founder and managing director of Bluu.  

At Berlin-based Bluu, the focus is on salmon, trout, and carp (the most popular fish in China). Other companies are tackling tuna, salmon, and shrimp, but Bluu sees carp as an especially attractive target, given its popularity in one of the world’s most populous companies.

One advantage for Bluu, its founders argue, is the deep experience that co-founder Sebastian Rakers has in the wild world of cultivated fish cells.

A marine and cell biologist who was working for several years at the Munich-based Fraunhofer Institute, one of Europe’s most celebrated research institutes, Rakers led a task force that looked at potential commercial viability of cell-based meat, after conducting research on the viability of using fish cells as a component for viral production for the pharmaceutical industry.

Bluu Biotechnologies co-founder Sebastian Rakers. Image Credit: Bluu Biosciences

During his research Rakers cultivated 80 different cell cultures for more than 20 different species of fish. What’s more, he was able to make these cell lines immortal.

Before envisioning an endless, ever-producing mass of fish cells that could overwhelm the world, it might be worth explaining what immortal cell lines mean… Actually… the endless, ever-producing mass of self-reproducing fish cells comes pretty close.

Most cell lines tend to die off after reprodcuing a certain number of times, which means that to manufacture meat at scale can require several biopsies of the same animal to cultivate multiple cell lines at a time. Rakers said that Bluu could avoid that step, thanks to the work that had already been done to develop these “immortal” salmon, trout, and carp cell cultivars.

“It’s such a strong competitive advantage,” said Fabich. “If you have normal cells that are not immortalized you can only proliferate 20 to 25 times and then you need to start again from another biopsy. With immortalized cells you can grow up to 100,000 times and we can double it every day.” 

With this technology in hand, Rakers said he was thinking about what could come next in his own career and met up with Gary Lin, an impact investor and the founder of Purple Orange Ventures.

Lin connected Rakers with Fabich and the two men set off to commercialize Rakers’ research as Bluu. And even though there are several companies that have a head start in the market (and in funding), Rakers said that there are certain advantages to coming in late.

“Five years ago there was hardly any company looking into media development, hardly any companies focused on bioreactor technologies at a very large scale and there was no company looking for scaffolding alternatives for cell-based meat,” he said. Now there are. 

The company is picking up speed quickly thanks to those other technology providers that are coming to market and will look to have a prototype product out by the end of 2022.

The company is also pushing for regulation, which both Fabich and Rakers said were one of the last remaining obstacles to commercialization. Ultimately, the company has its eye firmly on the Asian market. “That’s the one that moves the needle,” in terms of sustainability, Fabich said. “We can have the biggest impact if we change production behavior there.”

Bluu Biosciences co-founders Sebastian Rakers and Simon Fabich. Image Credit: Bluu Biosciences

Holberton, the education startup that started out as a coding school in San Francisco and today works with partners to run schools in the U.S., Europe, LatAm and Europe, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B funding round led by Redpoint eventures. Existing investors Daphni, Imaginable Futures, Pearson Ventures, Reach Capital and Trinity Ventures also participated in this round, which brings Holberton’s total funding to $33 million.

Today’s announcement comes after a messy 2020 for Holberton, and not only because the pandemic put a stop to in-person learning.

The original promise of Holberton was that it provided students — which it selects through a blind admissions process — with a well-rounded software development education akin to a college education for free. In return, students provide a set amount of their salary for the next few years to the school as part of a deferred tuition agreement, up to a maximum of $85,000.

But early last year, California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE) directed the school to immediately cease operation, in part because the agency found that Holberton had started offering a new, unapproved program. This program, a nine-month training program augmented by six months of employment, required students to pay the full $85,000 cost of its approved programs. After a hearing, the BPPE allowed Holberton to continue to operate its other programs. A number of students also accused the school of not giving them the education it had promised.

Throughout this period, Holberton continued expanding, though. It opened campuses in Mexico and Peru, for example. Indeed, it doubled the number of schools in its system from nine to 18 in 2020.

But on December 17, 2020, Holberton voluntarily surrendered its operating license in California. The day before, Holberton announced that it would not re-open its campus in San Francisco, which had been shut down since March because of the pandemic. Holberton co-founder Sylvain Kalache argued that the school would be best positioned to achieve its mission by “working with amazing local partners who operate the campuses and deeply understand their markets’ unique needs” and not by operating its own campuses.

It now thinks of itself more as an “OS of Education” that offers franchised campuses and education tools.

In January, California’s attorney general struck down the fraud allegations against the school. “California was the only market in which Holberton faced any regulatory challenges,” Kalache wrote in the company’s first public acknowledgment of the lawsuits. “With this now behind us, we are excited to move forward with our original mission of providing affordable and accessible education to prospective software engineers around the world.”

Clearly, that’s how Holberton’s funders feel about this, too.

“They’ve proven successful in breaking down barriers of cost and access while delivering a world-class curriculum,” said Manoel Lemos, managing partner at Redpoint eventures. “With the concept of ‘OS of Education’ as a service, they provide customers with all the tools they need for success. Customers can be nonprofit impact investors who want to improve local economies, education institutions who want to fill gaps in how they teach in a post-COVID learning environment, or corporations who want to provide the best training possible as education providers themselves or as employee development programs.”

Holberton founder and CEO Julien Barbier tells me that, today, “for the first time since our creation, we have started working with universities to help them create a better experience and add hands-on education on top of their traditional methodology. Everyone’s happy: the school, the students, and the teachers — because they prefer to focus on teaching and not spend huge amounts of time correcting projects.”

He expects to see 5,000 students join this year, up from 500 in 2019, and see the network expand with new schools in the U.S., Europe, LatAm and Africa. He also noted that the company already has customers for its “OS of Education” tools for auto-grading projects and its online programs. Just this week, Holberton Tulsa announced plans to more than double its physical campus in the city.

“Raising funds is helping us support and accelerate our vision of creating this ‘OS of education.’ Many educational entities need help and tools to better support their students and their staff. It is now that they need our help. Again, COVID has accelerated the digital transformation, and clearly, there are a lot of gaps that need to be filled,” he said. “[…] We are now a SaaS company which charges other businesses, universities or non-profits to use our tools and/or contents so that they can run their education/training programs at scale, with a better experience, while increasing the quality of education.”

Gorillas, the Berlin-HQ’d startup that promises to let you order groceries and other “every day” items for delivery in as little as ten minutes, has raised $290 million in Series B funding, at a valuation that surpasses $1 billion.

The round is led by Coatue Management, DST Global, and Tencent, with participation from Green Oaks, and Dragoneer. Previous backer Atlantic Food Labs also followed on.

Noteworthy, Gorillas CEO and co-founder Kağan Sümer tells TechCrunch the round is “100% equity” (i.e. without a debt component). Asked if it includes any secondary funding — seeing existing shareholders liquidate a portion of their shares — Gorillas declined to comment.

Having become one of the fastest European startups to have achieved so-called “unicorn” status — a valuation of $1 billion or more — Gorillas says it will reward its rider crew and warehouse staff with $1 million in bonuses. However, the company isn’t disclosing how this one-off bonus breaks down per worker, and it isn’t clear if the bonus is cash or stock or a mixture of both.

“In contrast to established gig economy models, we employ more than a thousand riders directly,” says Sümer. “Therefore, we invest in a strong career development program, rider security and a healthy working environment. Beyond that, all riders will receive a once-off payment”.

Founded last May by Kağan Sümer and Jörg Kattner in Berlin, Gorillas has already expanded to more than 12 cities, including Amsterdam, London and Munich. The company lets you order groceries and other household items on-demand with average delivery time of ten minutes.

To do this, it operates a vertical or “dark store” model, seeing it set up its own micro fulfillment centers, which currently total 40, spread across Germany, U.K., and the Netherlands. Customers are charged just over $2 per delivery and can order from “more than 2,000 essential items at retail prices”.

“We believe that the weekly grocery run is outdated because people’s lives are increasingly spontaneous and shopping habits change accordingly,” says Sümer, noting that while access to supermarkets has increased, the space we have to store goods has decreased as people in cities are living in smaller spaces.

“Additionally, this pandemic has accelerated the need for grocery deliveries. If we can order clothes and trinkets and have them delivered to our door, the same should be said for our essential needs. Gorillas helps customers get what they need when they need it, whether this is their weekly grocery list or the tomatoes they forgot for tonight’s pasta recipe”.

Sümer says that the service initially attracted typical early adopters because it was a radically new experience and the app was only available in English. He claims that Gorillas has since gained a “very broad” base of users that are “extremely loyal”. “With geographical expansion and the rapid increase of word-of-mouth, we now cater to pretty much anyone you’d meet in a supermarket,” he says.

Asked to share what a typical basket looks like, and therefore what kind of existing grocery habits Gorillas is displacing, Sümer says that users increase their basket size over time as they gain trust in the service and its products. “Simultaneously, customers are integrating an increasing share of their typical supermarket purchases within their Gorillas orders. This includes fresh goods like fruit and vegetables, as well as products of local suppliers”.

Meanwhile, dark store competition in cities like London — where Gorillas recently expanded and counts as a key market — continues to ramp up. This is seeing operators issue vouchers and offer sizeable discounts in a bid to acquire customers fast, while VCs are pumping huge amounts of early-stage cash into a space where unit economics aren’t yet definitively proven.

Earlier this month, Berlin-based Flink announced that it had raised $52 million in seed financing in a mixture of equity and debt. The company didn’t break out the equity-debt split, though one source told me the equity component was roughly half and half.

Others in the space include London’s Jiffy, Dija, and Weezy, and France’s Cajoo. There’s also London-based Zapp, which remains in stealth, and heavily backed Getir, which started in Turkey but recently also came to London.

Meanwhile, U.S.-founded goPuff — which this week raised another $1.15 billion in funding at a whopping $8.9 billion valuation (compared to $3.9 billion in October) — is also looking to expand into Europe and has held talks to acquire or invest in the U.K.’s Fancy.

In January, localized payments provider PPRO became the latest fintech-as-a-service startup to hit a billion-dollar valuation when it closed $180 million in funding. As a mark of how payments and e-commerce continue to be major areas of focus in the global economy, today PPRO is extending that round by another $90 million and adding in two new investors to its cap table.

The financing is coming by way of strategic backing from JPMorgan Chase, and Eldridge (which is the second time this week the PE firm has been in the news for making a major investment in an enterprise tech company: earlier this week Eldridge was one of the leads on a $475 million round for real-time intelligence provider Dataminr).

The enlarged $270 million round — the January tranche was from Eurazeo Growth, Sprints Capital and Wellington Management — includes both primary and secondary capital, and this latest tranche is part of the secondary element, PPRO CEO Simon Black confirmed to me. Prior to this, London-based PPRO (pronounced ‘P-pro’) raised $50 million in August 2020 from Sprints, Citi and HPE Growth; and in 2018 it raised $50 million led by strategic investor PayPal.

PPRO’s core product is a set of APIs that e-commerce companies can integrate into their check-outs to accept payments in whatever local methods and currencies consumers prefer, removing the need for PPRO customers to build those complex and messy integrations themselves. Its business has boomed in the last year as one of the bigger providers of that localized payment technology, with transaction volumes up 60% in 2020 to $11 billion in processed payments.

JPMorgan Chase, meanwhile, is one of the world’s financial giants, providing banking and credit cards among its many other services. The idea is that it wants to build more payment services around its existing relationships and to expand its payment business globally, working more closely with PPRO as part of that. There are two main areas where PPRO could figure: to help its credit card business gain more ubiquity as a payment method in more parts of the globe; and to be a service provider for its business banking customers to help them expand in more markets with more flexible, localized payments.

“We are extending into payments and we are looking to double down on addressing the needs of our clients and their clients, which can be consumers, suppliers or marketplace sellers,” said Sanjay Saraf, MD and Global Head of the Integrated Payments Group at JPMorgan Chase, in an interview. “That last mile becomes important from a customer service perspective.”

In particular, the US company is hoping to double down on its business and footprint in Latin America and Asia Pacific, two emerging markets still seeing a lot of growth in e-commerce, in particular compared to more developed, penetrated and mature markets like the U.S.

This latest round of financing underscores two trends of the moment in fintech.

First, it points to how active the e-commerce market has become — a trend fueled not in small part by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the resulting shift people have made to carrying out everyday tasks online. Second, it’s a sign of how global financial services companies are looking for ways to remain relevant in every market, tapping into more innovations from fintech startups to get there.

The problem, as it exists, is that payments remains a very fragmented business.

The standard methods that a person might use to pay for goods or services online in one country — for example a credit card in the U.S. — might differ drastically from the preferred methods when selling in another — for example, in Belguim one popular format is Bancontact (where you visit a new screen to authorize a transfer from directly from your bank checking account).

As with other payments and fintech-as-a-service startups, the attraction of using PPRO is that it has built a lot of those integrations at the backend and packaged them up as a service, taking away a lot of the complexity, in its case of identifying and integrating each of those payment methods manually, and making it something that can be done seamlessly and quickly.

JPMorgan is now one of several other partners. Those relationships work in both directions, providing partners a way to expand their consumer-facing products, and to help them work with more businesses in more markets. (Similar, I suspect to how JPMorgan will work with it, too.)

Others in PPRO’s network of 100 large global customers include PayPal, Citi, Mastercard Payment Gateway Services, Mollie and Worldpay, which use PPRO’s APIs for a variety of functions, including localised gateway, processing and merchant acquirer services.

It is also not the only one that has identified the opportunity to simplify this part of the payment process and of other complex financial transactions that rely on localized approaches. Others in the same area include Rapyd, Mambu, Thought Machine, Temenos, Edera, Adyen, Stripe and newer players like Unit, with many of these raising very large amounts of money in recent times to double down on what is currently a rapidly expanding market.

The past year has been “an acceleration of a trend, where behaviors are being reinforced,” said Black in an interview. “At the consumer level, we are buying so many more products and services online, and we value convenience more than ever, which translates to a real strengthening of more demand for local payments.”

And while emerging technologies like cryptocurrency continue to see a lot of buzz, this is not at all where mass-market activity is for now. “The big trend is mobile wallets, not bitcoin,” Black said.

The latest in a string of space tech SPACs announced this year is Redwire, an entity created by a PE firm in 2020, which has acquired a number of smaller companies including Adcole Space, Roccor, Made in Space, LoadPath, Oakman Aerospace, Deployable Space Systems and more — all within the last year or so. Redwire announced that it will go public through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Genesis Park Acquisition Crop., and the combined company will list on the NYSE.

The deal puts Redwire’s pro forma enterprise value at %615 million, and is expected to provide an additional $170 million to Redwire’s coffers post-merger, including a PIPE valued at over $100 million. Unsurprisingly, one of the uses of the proceeds that Redwire intends to pursue is continued M&A activity to build out its list of service offering in the space domain.

Redwire’s mandate isn’t specifically to go after new space companies, and instead its targets share in common expertise in a particular, rather narrow slice of the severally space market. It’s capabilities include on-orbit manufacturing and servicing; satellite design, manufacture and assembly; payload integration; sensor design and development, and more. The idea appears to be to build a full-stack infrastructure company that can offer tip-to-tail space technology services, exclusive really only of launch and ground station components (for now).

It’s a smart approach for a bourgeoning new space economy where increasingly, technology companies who want to operate in space would rather focus on their unique value proposition, and outsource the complex, but mostly settled business of actually getting to, and operating in, space. Other companies are addressing the market in similar ways, with launchers bringing more of that part of the process in-house so their payload customers basically only have to show up with the sensor or communication device they want to send to space, and the launcher providing everything else — including even the satellite, in the relatively near future.

Redwire has proven revenue-generating power, with projected 2021 revenue of $163 million, and many of the companies now operating under its umbrella are fairly mature and have been operating cash flow positive for many years. Accordingly, a SPAC as a path to public markets likely does make sense in this particular instance, but the increasing frequency and volume of space companies choosing this route, is, on the whole, a trend to watch with healthy skepticism.