Female-led startup, Woola, closes €2.5M seed round. 1 other thing and a trivia

This line-up of stories will help you discover the latest happenings around the tech world, today.

1. Female-led startup, Woola, closes €2.5M seed round

Woola, a female-led Estonia-based tech-enabled startup, has closed a €2.5M Seed round.

The raiser, according to the startup, was led by Future Ventures, an investment company in Los Altos, California.

The new investment will see Woola replace bubble wrap with wool.

Woola opened a production facility in Estonia and launched its first product in December 2020.

The €2.5M Seed round saw the participation of Kaarel Kotkas (CEO at Veriff), Janer Gorohhov (Co-founder at Veriff), Kristina Lilleõis (VP of People at Veriff), Zem Joaquin (founder of Near Future Summit), Bryan Meehan (executive chair of Blue Bottle Coffee).

Commenting on the development, Woola’s CEO and co-founder Anna-Liisa Palatu, noted that the decline of bubble in the packaging industry was inevitable.

She said: “Bubble wrap has been dominating the packaging industry for ages – but its decline is inevitable.

“The industry is broken for two reasons: fossil fuel reliance and single-use mindset. We need to get rid of both to make packaging more sustainable.”

She is joined by co-founders Jevgeni Sirai and Katrin Kabun.

Steve Jurvetson from Future Ventures commented: “While e-commerce is booming, single-use plastic packaging is out of control. Woola can replace it all with beautiful envelopes made from scrap wool that would otherwise be burned or buried. The world needs sustainable alternatives to the petrochemical economy for a healthier future.”

Sheep wool is an unused resource – more than 200,000 tonnes of wool is thrown away in Europe yearly. Woola says this is enough to fulfill 120% of the global bubble wrap demand.

The startup will compete with whitelabel plastic bubble wrap and alternatives like Ranpak and S-Packaging.

Tech Trivia: Localhost is synonymous with what phrase?

A This computer
B My ISP
C MAC address
D Port 1
Answer: See end of post

READ ALSO: Nigeria’s edtech startup, Edukoya, secures $3.5m pre-seed round. 2 other things and a trivia

2. Kenyan e-health startup Zuri launches operations in Senegal

Zuri Health, a Kenyan startup, has announced expanding its operations into Senegal.

The development comes as the startup signed a partnership deal with telecoms firm Expresso Senegal.

The startup, which is less than a year old, launched in January, allowing users to book appointments instantly with any medical professional or hospital within their region.

With Zuri, users can equally book laboratory tests, talk to practitioners via message or video, and request for home visits.

In the Pharmacy section of the app, users can get their prescription and over the counter medication online, and have it delivered to their doorstep.

The app comes with an SMS functionality, designed to reach a wide range of individuals or users who may not have access to WAP or internet enabled devices.

Trivia Answer: This Computer

“Localhost” refers to the local computer that a program is running on. For example, if you are running a Web browser on your computer, your computer is considered to be the “localhost.”

While this does not need to be specified when using a single computer, the localhost does need to be defined when running programs from multiple computers. For example, a network administrator might use his local machine to start a Web server on one system and use a remote access program on another. These programs would run from computers other than the localhost.

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