Fish sticks, intracranial ultrasounds, a new Gen AI friend to have real conversations, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #144
Welcome to our 144th newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Justin Sylvestre, Justine Pelisson and Angèle Sahraoui
In 2023, baby vc is proudly sponsored by OneRagtime which will fund enrolment fees for the 2023 VC bootcamps participants, to promote diversity and inclusivity in the VC ecosystem — giving everyone the opportunity to succeed, regardless of their background.
OneRagtime is a European Seed & Series A venture capital fund with 40+ portfolio companies like Jellysmack, Homa Games and Zenly.
Follow OneRagtime on LinkedIn and check their website!
Fundraisings from last week with Bluu Seafood, Carthera, and Inflection AI
News from last week with the British Government and the Wagon School
Internship & Job offers of the week
And before we dive into this week’ edition, we wanted to remind you that the team is preparing for its yearly summer break 🏝 — which means that the next time you’ll be reading us will be in early September. 📆
Enjoy these hot summer months, and be prepared for even more tech content in a couple weeks! 🤓
Now, wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
🐟 Bluu Seafood raised $17.5M to launch its first cultivated seafood products (🇩🇪)
The Berlin & Hamburg-based food tech startup Bluu Seafood has just secured $17.5M in series A led by Sparkfood and LBBW VC, joined by Delivery Hero, SeaX Ventures, Manta Ray Ventures, Norreken VC, Hamburgische Investitions-und Förderbank and Dr. Oetker. 🔥
Bluu Seafood has been working on cultivated (« lab grown ») fish products leveraging fish stem-cells to produce fish sticks (or « fish fingers ») as well as fish balls.
The funding will be used to expand its research work, start pilot production, and focus on obtaining regulatory approvals in various markets (starting with Singapore and the US). 🎉
Bluu Seafood reels in $17.5M to bring cultivated fish products to market
🧠 Carthera raised €37.5M to accelerate on clinical development of its SonoCloud technology (🇫🇷)
The French MedTech startup Carthera - a spin-off of the Assistance Publique Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP, French hospitals) and the Sorbonne University - has just announced its series B round of €37.5M, including the European Innovation Council Fund (EICF), Panakès Partners, Relyens Innovation Santé, Supernova Invest as well as various Business Angels. Carthera is specialized in therapeutic ultrasounds and designs very innovative medical devices to treat brain pathologies. 🧠
Its intracranial ultrasound implant, SonoCloud, temporarily opens the Hemato-Encephalic Barrier (HEB or BBB - Brain Blood Barrier) in order to increase the penetration of therapeutic molecules into the brain. This unique approach should have a real impact on patients with brain pathologies (a study under review is showing how the SonoCloud increases the efficacy of chemotherapy in patients with brain tumors). 😲
The funds raised through this latest series should help CarThera launch a pivotal multi center clinical trial for its SonoCloud technology, as well as to increase and develop the company’s clinical pipeline. 🤩
🤖 Inflection AI Launches Generative AI Chatbot Pi (🇺🇸)
Inflection AI, a startup focused on developing "personal AI for everyone," has secured a $1.3B investment in a funding round led by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and new investor Nvidia. The funding brings the company's total raised to $1.525B and values Inflection at $4B. 💰
The CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind, stated that the capital will support the development of their first product, an AI-powered assistant called Pi. Inflection launched Pi in May, aiming to provide a supportive and friendly companion that offers advice and information tailored to individual interests and needs. Suleyman thinks of “Pi as a digital companion on hand when you need a sounding board to talk through a tricky moment in your day” for example. 🔍
When quizzed about it’s differences with GPT it responds: “ChatGPT is a language model, while I am an AI chatbot. This means that I’m designed to have conversations with humans. ChatGPT, on the other hand, was developed to generate text.”
With this recent funding, Inflection ranks as the second best-funded generative AI startup, trailing behind OpenAI, which has raised $11.3B. The investment in generative AI startups remains robust, with approximately $1.7B generated across 46 deals in Q1 2023 and an additional $10.68B worth of announced deals pending completion, according to PitchBook data. 👀
👀 UK GOV enable and encourage pension funds to invest in venture
In a bid to increase investment in UK tech, the British government recently removed regulations to facilitate pension funds to invest in venture capital funds. Beforehand UK pension funds were practically unable to invest in venture. 🔍
This comes as a push to allow Britons to benefit more from British tech innovation and encourage more companies to be listed in the UK. In fact, former prime minister Tony Blair and former conservative party leader William Hague’s report ‘A New National Purpose’ states that ‘overseas pension funds invest 16 times more in venture capital and private equity in the UK’ than public and private pensions in the UK themselves—causing much value created in the UK to go elsewhere. 😕
Why didn’t UK pension funds invest in venture beforehand? Well, since 2014 regulation in place had dictated that pension funds were capped to paying 0.75% in fees. Given most VCs funds charge a 2% fee plus performance fees this made it difficult for pensions to invest in venture. This in addition to other strict regulations discouraged pensions to invest in forward-looking industries, as they ultimately invested mostly in gilts (government bonds) and bonds. This regulation was revised in April 2023, enabling pension funds to now invest in venture capital funds. 📈
Furthermore, pension funds in the UK are very fragmented. With over 5,000 pension funds, each fund is left with a small capital allocation. This means that investors aren’t able to diversify as much as they would have otherwise wanted, causing them to be rather risk-averse. To tackle this, Blair and Hague’s report suggests consolidating pension funds from 5,000 to 100 or less. It argues this would be a better investment mechanism through which the UK can maintain its status as a tech superpower. 🦸♂️
In its recent spring budget, the UK also laid out a roadmap encouraging pension funds to invest in fast-growing companies in the UK. They proposed a mandatory 5% contribution by every pension to a separate fund specially designed to invest in fast-growing companies.
The revision of the 2014 regulation coupled with further plans to encourage pension fund investment in ventures is likely to have a boosting effect on the UK’s status as a tech superpower. 🏆
🤖 Le Wagon School partners with Google to train future talent in Artificial Intelligence and Data
Big announcement in the Generative AI field during the Viva Technology Conference 2023 in Paris ! Tech giant Google and world leader in tech bootcamps Le Wagon are partnering to launch Le Wagon’s future “Digital AI Bootcamp”. Starting next fall, trainees will be able to acquire the key skills needed to enter the Artificial Intelligence and Data professions, thanks to 3 training courses: Data Analytics, Data Science & AI, and Data Engineering & AI. 🤓
Google will be giving Masterclasses and driving a mentorship program for the trainees; as key sponsor Vincent Simonet, Engineering Director at Google, says: “At Google, we believe that technological advances in the field of artificial intelligence and data have incredible potential to improve our products and the lives of our users. We're delighted to be able to share our expertise in this field with as many people as possible, and enable other professionals to move in the same direction.”🙌
The courses offered during the bootcamp will be entirely free to encourage as many diverse profiles as possible - diversity in the AI sector being a key point to tackle, according to Le Wagon’s co-founder Romain Paillard: "Diversity is a real element of wealth. We see it in our promotions: the more people who come with different backgrounds, the richer, more varied and more intelligent the projects. But above all, it ensures that these subjects are not monopolized by a small caste of experts".
IA Générative : Le Wagon annonce un partenariat avec un géant de la tech mondiale
Internships
Visiting Analyst - Redalpine (Berlin/Zürich)
Visiting Analyst Deep Tech - Speedinvest (London)
Jobs
Investor VC - Cherry Ventures (London)
Visiting Investment Analyst - Iberia - Antler (Madrid)
👉 If you’d like to discover more offers… you can check our job board just here. And if you want to submit a new job offer, you can fill in this form (or share it)!
Also, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at joinbabyvc@gmail.com. We’d be super happy to have you sharing job/internship offers, events or feedback with us! 🤝
You can also read about us on our website and follow what we do on LinkedIn.
Take care, and see you next week,
The whole baby vc crew 🖤