A big week for FrenchTech, Bankman-Fried is now back on Substack, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #120
Welcome to our 120th newsletter. It was written with 💛 by Victor Pajot, Saish Rane, Medina Sinani and Angèle Sahraoui
Fundraisings from last week with Qarnot Computing and Amolyt Pharma
News from last week with Sam Bankman-Fried and Apple’s upcoming headset
Our content of the week with JP Morgan’s Q4 2022 Report on alternatives
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 💛
🌐 Qarnot Computing raised €35M to develop new data centers (🇫🇷)
The French startup founded in France in 2010 and which develops IT infrastructure leveraging heat reuse announced last week that it had raised €35M in a round led by investors including la Banque des Territoires and Colam Impact (its historical investors). These €35M are split into a €12.5M funding round and a €22.5M credit line portion. 🏦
For the record, Qarnot is building the next generation of sustainable data centers. How? By connecting them to heating networks or swimming pools—hence saving up to 95% of the heat emitted by data servers. This round will help Qarnot build data centers at a larger scale, and grow its team (the target being +50 new employees by the end of 2023). 📈
🏥 Amolyt Pharma completes €130M Series C co-led by Soffinova Partners and ICG (🇫🇷)
After a €68M round in 2021, Amolyt Pharma has just completed a €130M round co-led by Soffinova Partners and Intermediate Capital Group. 💸
Various investors also participated in this round: Andera Partners, Novo Holdings, Kurma Partners, EQT Life Science, Bpifrance Investissement, Tekla Capital Investment LLC, and CTI Life Sciences. 🤯
The money raised will essentially enable Amolyt Pharma to develop potential treatments for rare endocrine diseases such as hypoparathyroidism (a disease affecting areas around the thyroid gland). 💊
French pharma Amolyt nets €130 million series C co-led by Sofinnova Partners
📝 Sam Bankman-Fried is back… this time on Substack
Last week, FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) launched his very own Substack newsletter in which he started to share his “pre-mortem overview” on the whole FTX drama. 😅
Quick reminder: Bankman-Fried is currently facing eight counts of U.S. criminal charges including conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to misuse customer funds.
But according to his own writing: I didn’t steal funds, and I certainly didn’t stash billions away. Nearly all of my assets were and still are utilizable to backstop FTX customers.
SMF is still under house arrest at his parents’ home in Palo Alto at the moment while his trial date has been set for October. So it’s likely it won’t be his last Substack piece. 🙃
👀 Apple's VR/AR headset is launching in 2023
According to reports, Apple has put other products on hold for the Reality Pro (the name of its upcoming headset), and it will probably launch it in the second half of 2023. Apple’s Reality Pro is expected to deliver many of the similar features as current headsets but may contain more advanced features. 🔥
But in spite of a few comments by Apple's top executives, it seems there needs to be more solid evidence that the headset exists. Indeed, Apple has yet to confirm the existence of the headset. As for tech analysts, they have been keeping an eye on Apple's activities and claim to have found out about the headset’ specifications. 👀
Ultimately, it's not a huge surprise Apple wants to be involved in the headset space as well, as VR headsets are the cutting edge of consumer technology right now, and that Google, Meta, and other tech giants have been eyeing the space for years as well. But now, the question is whether the market for (and consumer interest in) VR and AR headsets has reached a point that will match Apple’s expectations. 🤔
📉 JP Morgan Asset Management — Guide to Alternatives 4Q22: VCs give their insights
Here’s a summary of the few points mentioned in the above tweets. Investors, such as pension funds, endowments & family offices, often have large pools of money to invest and are held to strict performance standards. As a result, they often focus on investing in the top performing VC and PE firms. These GPs have a proven track record of generating high returns, which aligns with the institutional investors' goals of maximising returns while minimising risk. 🤝
Investing in an extremely wide range of PE and VC firms, known as portfolio dispersion, will risk to dilute returns and potentially decrease overall performance in 2023. Therefore, they will have to select & invest in the crème de la crème of GPs in order to meet their performance objectives. 🔍
As we can read in the report, VC was the top performing asset class over the majority of the last 10 years—but in the last few quarters, it was far from it. This only means that institutional investors have to invest constantly across vintages to ensure they’ve picked the good ones as it takes a good amount of time to realise the returns. Secondly, by committing capital to multiple vintages, they are able to spread their investments across different stages of the investment cycle and different sectors, which can reduce risk and improve returns. 🧠
Lastly, the worsening macroeconomic headwinds are likely to lead to negative returns for VC firms in 2022. This is due to the fact that these headwinds can create a more challenging environment for startups to raise capital, grow their businesses, and achieve exits, all of which have been severely impacted, especially IPOs as the exit pathway of choice for companies. When you compare it to the dry powder to be deployed in the upcoming quarters, it averages out to a low-exit year as IPO listings dry up and PE acquisitions are only reserved to top targets & buildups. 😬
For more, read on:
Internships
Visiting Analyst - Climate Tech - Planet A Ventures (Remote)
Jobs
VC Analyst - Frst (Paris)
👉 And if you’d like to discover more offers… you can check our job board just here!
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 💛