Berlin-based startup Number26 just raised a $40 million Series B round led by Horizons Ventures. With 200,000 clients, Number26 wants to become a major consumer-facing bank in Europe providing all the services you’d expect from your bank. And this funding round is an important milestone in order to reach this goal.
Battery Ventures, Robert Gentz, David Schneider and Rubin Ritteralso also participated in today’s round. Existing investors Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Earlybird Ventures and Redalpine Ventures re-invested as well.
The competition among Siri, Cortana, Google Now, Alexa, and Facebook’s M (still in its early stages), has kept the spotlight on virtual assistants for the last couple of years. The assistants and the AI technologies that power them have piqued the interest of venture capitalists as well.
“Having written a bad version of ELIZA [an early-stage natural language processing program] as one of my earliest programs, I have been excited about the prospect of conversing with machines for a long time. So I will be watching this development closely…” Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger wrote in his blog.
500 Startups’ 16th demo day just wrapped up, and the firm is already turning its eyes to its next batch of companies. More than 40 startups are participating in this batch of companies.
From softer baby products to tools for creating and distributing vertical videos (a big focus given the shift on many mobile platforms), there’s something that might pique pretty much anyone’s interest. 500 Startups often has a bunch of companies that are doing things that are perpendicular to the typical software startup you might expect coming out of Silicon Valley.
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