1. Cleo financial adviser platform raised $44 million in Series B

The developers of the British application named Cleo, which is a financial assistant based on artificial intelligence, announced that they have raised $44 million in the second round. The declared goal is to continue the struggle for “financial health around the world”. 4 million users (Gen Z and Millennials) receive recommendations from Cleo based on their finances.

The previous round of investments amounted $10 million. At that time, the financial assistant had more than 600 thousand users, 94% of them were under the age of 35. In the spring of 2018, it also became available for the countries of North America, where 350 thousand people registered in four months. Cleo’s creators report impressive 400% revenue growth over the past year. And although, according to them, the application does not yet bring direct profit (ARR $10M +), high capitalization rapidly reduces the project payback time.

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2. Facebook released Collab collaboration app

Facebook released Collab, an app that lets you create short music videos by stacking music tracks on top of each other. The beta version of the Collab service was presented this spring. Recently, Facebook announced the public launch of the platform. The idea behind this experimental music service is to enable remote music co-creation.

Clips are the foundation of Collab. In fact, everything is tailored for short music videos (15 seconds), created by gluing together several materials from different authors. All finished clips will go to the Collab feed for everyone to see. Finished clips can be exported to Instagram and TikTok. The app can already be downloaded for iOS. In fact, TikTok set the trend for short, fast videos, and now TikTok-like apps will begin to appear, as was the case with Uber.
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3. Lyra Health startup raised $110 million estimated at $1.1 billion

Lyra Health allows you receive comprehensive psychological assistance through videoconferencing with psychologists, as well as through the implementation of special tasks and exercises in the application based on the principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy.

David Ebersman left Facebook CFO in 2014 and created Lyra Health with partners. Interestingly, 2 out of 3 founders are partners of venture funds. Lyra Health’s clients include eBay, Pinterest, Starbucks and others.

In 2020, the number of users increased by 800 thousand to 1.5 million people, and the number of consultations held approached 1 million.

Lyra’s success is attributed not only to its interesting combination of telemedicine and smart assignments, but also to the promise of the behavioral health market, which is projected to reach $ 240 billion by 2026. However, a recent study found that 83% of US employees have mental health problems.

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4. Parsec streaming startup raised $25 million of investments

Parsec, a startup that has developed streaming technology for both remote work and gaming applications, is announcing a $ 25 million raise in Series B funding. Parsec’s total funding has reached $ 33 million, according to Crunchbase. Andreessen Horowitz, and its general partner Martin Casado joined the board of directors of Parsec.

Parsec CEO has already sold one of his startup, Atma Links.

The global remote access software market was $1.596 billion in 2019 with a CAGR of 15.71%. And the cloud gaming market was $ 1.15 billion in 2019 with a CAGR of 15.3%. It turns out that Parsec has niches in two large and fast-growing markets. 

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5. Bumble dating app reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO

Dating service Bumble has privately applied for an IPO, sources told Bloomberg. During the IPO, the startup expects to receive an estimate of $ 6 billion to $ 8 billion. Preparing for the IPO, the company is working with consultants Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley.

The Bumble app was created in 2014 by Whitney Wolf Heard, who was previously co-founder and co-founder of Tinder and the creator of the dating site Badoo, Andrey Andreev. The main difference between Bumble and other dating services is that only girls can be the first to write messages in the application.

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6. Walmart to pilot livestreamed shopping on Tiktok

While streaming Walmart, users will be able to shop without leaving the TikTok app. Fashionable shopping items will be featured in ten popular TikTokers, led by MC Michael Le (who has 43 million followers).

Vine, the original short video champion, was eventually shut down after struggling to provide monetization tools for its top creators, who were increasingly realizing their potential to make money on other platforms like YouTube and Instagram.

Indeed, many of the Vine stars have become millionaires thanks to the popularity of their content on other sites. Short videos are difficult to monetize due to the nature of the content. You cannot insert ads at the beginning or in the middle of a video, and inserting ads between videos is not as effective. As a result, TikTok came to the conclusion that it is enough to display clickable Pins with a product, which, when clicked, take the user away to buy.