Real estate company Purplebricks has appointed Vic Darvey as Group Chief Operating Officer. Vic is the former Managing Director at MoneySuperMarket.
Based in London and New York, Octopus Ventures is one of the Europe’s largest Venture Capital firms with £1bn under management. Its portfolio includes a number of exciting online and technology brands such as Zoopla, Graze and Secret Escapes. Venture capital firms are increasingly looking to advice their portfolio companies on how to identify, attract and retain talent. With this in mind, Octopus Ventures hosted a masterclass for its portfolio company CEOs to examine the importance and differences between three different recruitment approaches. The three discussed approaches were – executive search, in-house recruitment, and an embedded 3rd party recruiter.
eBay has hired Jan Pedersen as its Vice President and Chief Scientist for Artificial Intelligence. Prior to eBay, Pedersen served as VP of Data Science at Twitter leading investment in data analytics and machine learning infrastructure.
UK’s digital banking unicorn Revolut has been making headlines since raising its first funding. For a company that is just four years old, the success of the digital challenger bank is astonishing. To date the company has raised $344 million, with a $1.7 billion post-money valuation. Co-founded by CEO Nikolay Storonsky, the company operates in 28 European countries and handles $4 billion in monthly payment transactions. Read More
Staffing platform Catapult has appointed Hemal Joshi for the role of Chief Revenue Officer. Hemal is the former Head of Inside Sales at Onfido and Sales Team Leader at Tristpilot. Read More
Peter Molyneux is a legendary British game designer and programmer, who became one of the most prolific and well-known game designer on the planet during the 1990s and 2000s. Known for his creativity in devising and building new game genres, some of his games are amongst the most influential and beloved in the history of the industry. Read More
Internet
Uber has poached former Amazon director Jamie Heywood and made him Regional General Manager for Northern and Eastern Europe. Heywood will be responsible for Uber’s operations in 70 cities. He worked for 15 years in telecommunications, including stints at Virgin Mobile and Orange, before joining Amazon in 2014.
ASOS has appointed former Britvic CFO Mathew Dunn for the role of Chief Financial Officer. Read More
Freeletics raised $45 million for its AI-powered mobile fitness coach
Freeletics is a fitness application headquartered in Munich, Germany, that operates its mobile fitness coaching app on a model with pricing beginning at $11.99 for one month. The app offers fitness connect and AI-powered training plans tailored to individual users.
It has announced its first round of private capital after raising $45 million in Series A from FitLab, Causeway Media Partners, JAZZ Venture Partners and others.
Freeletics now has 31 million users in over 160 countries and will use its first bit of VC backing to grow its American user base.