Fusion's Insights - 2022/02/11

Greetings and welcome back to another issue of Fusion's Insights!
Within our role to help our clients build the future of their business, through impactful and sustainable technology-driven solutions, our team is constantly exposed to insightful content.
Fusion’s Insights is meant to provide our Ecosystem with a curated content selection, linked to innovation initiatives, on a bi-monthly basis.

What’s on this week 🚀

Funding

European Unicorns Raise Funding At Incredible Pace

An unprecedented number of European companies - 86 total - joined the Crunchbase Unicorn Board in 2021. This is more than 5x the count of new unicorns in 2020 from Europe, and more than 3x the previous record in 2019, when there were 23 new unicorns.
Amounts invested in European unicorn companies also grew, more than quadrupling year over year, with $49.6 billion invested across 185 funding rounds, up from $11.8 billion in 2020.

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Fintech

This fintech has quietly been taking on $11bn+ payment rivals - and is finally out of stealth

Payments giants like Stripe and Adyen power online shopping, but they’re yet to fix the faff of typing in your card or shipping details over and over again.
That’s left a vacuum for “one-click checkout” solutions like Simpler, a one-year-old fintech that’s today coming out of stealth. With just €1m in pre-seed funding, the company says it’s already coded a Europe-friendly product to help online shoppers pay for their baskets quickly.

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Proptech

Blockchain and real estate - Barnes signs its 1st cryptocurrency sale in Miami

Three months ago, two luxury properties were sold for 4 million euros in cryptocurrency in Portugal. At the beginning of 2022, the luxury real estate sector is once again involved in such transactions. Except this time, it's Barnes who is behind it. The real estate brand has signed its first sale with the currency Ethers (ETH), which comes to $6.9 million. What to take away from this transaction and what impact for real estate professionals?

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Insurtech

Insify is modernizing insurance, but this time for SMEs

Meet Insify, an insurtech startup that raised a $17 million (€15 million) Series A round led by Accel. The company wants to modernize the insurance market. Instead of focusing on the consumer market like many insurtech startups, Insify has picked a different path. It’s a pure B2B play as Insify focuses on Europe’s small and medium companies.

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