A bank crash, a new Sequoia-backed French start-up, communication optimization for SMBs, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #128
Welcome to our 128th newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Diane de la Raudière, Jean Nadreau, Angèle Sahraoui
Fundraisings from last week with Elyn and Unipile
News from last week with the downfall of Silicon Valley Bank
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
🛍️ Elyn, pioneer of e-commerce Try-Before-You-Buy raised a €2,5m pre-seed round led by Sequoia and Headline (🇫🇷)
E-commerce giants such as Amazon and Zalando have realized the potential of letting customers try their items before deciding what to purchase. It helps them drive significant revenues to their already massive earnings. But they only provide this payment method to their customers. 👀
How to offer this service to all e-retailers? Elyn is a Paris-based startup that develops digital tools empowering e-retailers to offer a try-before-you-buy (TBYB) service. 🤝
Customers no longer need to advance money to make their online purchases and then wait for a refund. The customers using TBYB only pay for what they decide to keep. By default, Elyn gives you 5 days to decide whether you want to keep something or not. 👖
Indeed, TBYB is intrinsically connected with returns, so Elyn handles also a return management system for their merchants.
After PayPal, or Klarna with BNPL payment option, Elyn adds another logo at the checkout step to give more options for the consumer and improve the conversion rate. 💳
This round of financing has already enabled Elyn to grow its team. After having focused on Shopify merchants in France, the company is now expanding to other CMSs. 📈
Sequoia backs ecommerce try-before-you-buy startup Elyn in €2.5m raise
📨 Communication optimization tool Unipile sets its first fundraising (🇫🇷)
Let's get out of Paris and talk about the young Roannaise startup Unipile which has just raised €1.5m from 25 Business Angels and Bpifrance.
Created in 2020, Unipile is a messaging application that optimizes the processing of multi-channel information for SMEs. For example, Unipile users will be able to reply to a message received via Twitter from their WhatsApp messaging system. 📢
What is Unipile’s secret sauce? Optimization for sure! Unipile offers: a centralization of the main communication channels (1), a connection of the agendas with the different messaging systems (2) and a setting of automatic responses boosted by the artificial intelligence of... drum roll, Chat GPT. 🤯
With this fundraising, Unipile wishes to continuously improve its product and strengthen its team with a dozen of recruitments.
🏦 SVB failed in what is now the largest bank failure since 2008
The likelihood you heard/read the SVB 3 letters over the past few days is quite high. Silicon Valley Bank, lender to a very large pool of US start-ups and businesses, has failed last week in what has already become the largest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis. Over the weekend, US regulators have shut down NY-based Signature Bank to prevent a further contagion and failure of the banking system. 🛑
The remaining question being: how did all of that happen?
Everything started to take an unhappy turn last Wednesday when the bank revealed huge losses that led customers/start-ups to pull out their money, resulting in a bank run. By late last week, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) announced it would take over SVB after the bank and its financial advisers had tried — and failed — to find a buyer to step in. All of a sudden, the $175B customer deposits were under the control of the FDIC, and only deposits up to $250,000 fell under government protection (these making less than 10% of SVB deposits).
Regulators gave a partial saga conclusion on Sunday as they announced that SVB depositors would be made whole regardless of how much they held in their accounts and also guaranteed full access to deposits by Monday. Yesterday, we also learned than the UK branch of SVB had been acquired by HSBC for a nominal £1, the latter ensuring “business as usual” for SVB’s UK customers. Despite these highly welcomed decisions, it is clear that tech has lost last week what has been a critical pillar for the ecosystem. ‼️
Internships
VC Analyst - Newfund (Paris)
Chief of Staff - Marble (Paris)
VC Analyst - Partech (Paris)
👉 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 🖤