A cold week for big tech, a hot one for German startups, all-electric air taxis, and more...
What's Up Tech? #111
Welcome to our 111th newsletter. It was written with 💛 by Samuel Pfisterer, Clément Favre, Saish Rane, Medina Sinani and Angèle Sahraoui
The latest episode of “Dans la tête d’un CEO” with Alexandre Louisy, co-founder & CEO of Upflow
Fundraisings from last week with Fintecture, Smartex, Volocopter and Constellr
News from last week with massive hiring freezes & layoffs, and Privilège Ventures
Our content of the week with a piece written by Rex Woodbury (Index) about what’s next for social networks
Our dessert of the week
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 💛
In this new episode, Yacine welcomed Alexandre Louisy, co-founder & CEO of Upflow! Upflow in one sentence: a software that helps companies to get paid, with a great experience — as simple as that. 🤓
Founded in 2018, Upflow has more than 70 employees, hundreds of users worldwide (including Front, Aircall, Lattice, and Productboard), processed €1.5B in Q1, and raised €20M so far from leading investors (Y Combinator, eFounders). 📈
Alex and Yacine sat down to discuss how Upflow was founded, what is the pain it tackles, and why it is a product-led company. They also discussed fundraising, company culture, long-term ambitions, and various other topics. 🎙
“The driver since the early days is: what's going to be the impact on our society?”
So, sit tight, and definitely go check it out! 🎧
💳 Fintecture raised €26M to pursue its disruption of B2B payments (🇫🇷)
Fintecture, a Paris-based startup has raised €26M in a Series A round. The capital was provided by Eurazeo, RTP Global, HEC Ventures and Allianz Trade, alongside previous investors (Samaipata, Société Générale, Target Global) and angel investors including Olivier Pomel, founder and CEO of Datadog, and Huey Lin, former PayPal director and founding COO of Affirm. 🤝
Fintecture is a new-generation B2B payment platform that aims at improving the B2B transaction market by eliminating intermediaries. Through a series of APIs that integrate with banks, it creates a direct link between merchants. The platform also helps the latter digitizing their payments and synchronizing billing and accounting information. The team has already enabled 7,000+ companies to collect payments and 250,000 buyers have paid through its platform. 📈
Fintecture closes €26M Series A round after landing in Spain backed by Samaipata
👚 Smartex raises €24.7M to address environmental challenges in the textile industry (🇵🇹)
Smartex, a Porto-based startup and 2021 winner of the Web Summit's PITCH competition, is a connected platform that helps make supply chains more transparent, reduce waste and improve product quality in the textile industry. Its technology detects defects during production and thus identifies waste at its origin. ♻️
According to the World Economic Forum, the textile industry is the third most polluting industry in the world. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Build Collective led the round. The team seems now well-equipped and well-accompanied to make this industry more sustainable. 🚀
Portugal's Smartex stitches up $24.7 million to modernise textile production
🚁 Volocopter raised €182M in series E funding (🇩🇪)
GLy Capital Management and Neom (a planned city projected by the government of Saudi Arabia) are investing €182M in Volocopter. The German-based startup revolutionizes the air transport and aviation industry with all-electric air taxis which sets to be a real game-changer as they bring emission-free urban air mobility finally to life. 🥇
What makes them a leader in this field? Two reasons: Their sophisticated eVTOL aircraft are imbued with superior drone technology and the ecosystem they have created for them. Soon, everyone will be able to book a flight in one of their VoloCities over the phone and get to the desired location within minutes — with no emissions to speak of. 🌿
The money will be used to certify the electric air cab Volocity and for opening the first commercial routes. These are expected to fly in cities such as Singapore, Rome, Paris and Neom by 2024. 🌎
Volocopter raises $182M to bring air taxi closer to certification
Constellr raises $10M to fight food insecurity (🇩🇪)
Food security is on the way to becoming one of humanity's biggest problems. Increasing water prices and growing water scarcity make agriculture more expensive and, in many areas, even unprofitable. At the same time, 60 % of the water used in agriculture is wasted, and wasted water is estimated to cost a frightening €2 trillion by 2030. 😕
Constellr, a NewSpace startup from Freiburg, tackles this problem by developing specific microsatellites. These satellites will be equipped with thermal cameras to measure the surface temperature of fields and, soon, the chemical composition of the soil. 🔍
With these data, Constellr can compute the water and fertilizer needs and potential disease infestation, and ultimately help reducing the amount of wasted water by 40%. The startup anticipates saving 180 gigatons of water by 2026, which translates into 94 megatons of saved CO2 emissions. For perspective, this is almost a sixth of Germany's yearly CO2 emissions (644 megatons). 😳
😰 Massive hiring freezes and layoffs across multiple tech comps
Several tech behemoths announced hiring freezes last Thursday, starting with Apple and Amazon. The latter is targeting a pause on its corporate hiring specifically, and mentions the “uncertain place” in which the economy finds itself as the main rationale behind its decision. This comes only a month after the e-commerce giant announced it was halting corporate and technology hiring until the end of 2022 in its retail business. 🚨
On an even more alarming note, another set of tech companies announced layoffs with Stripe readying to cut 14% of its headcount, and Lyft announcing a 16% cut. Real estate platform Opendoor and NFT creator Dapper Labs also announced they would trim 18% and 22% of their staff respectively. 😳
As underscored by the NYT, what’s special here is the fact that rarely have so many job cuts and hiring freezes in the industry been disclosed on the same day.
A Host of Tech Companies Announce Hiring Freezes and Job Cuts
🙍♀️ Privilège Ventures launches a new fund targetting female founders
The Swiss investment fund Privilège Ventures has just announced it was launching its fourth fund with the aim of investing $20M in European early stage startups founded or co-founded by women. 🤝
The investment thesis is encouraged by the fact the team believes women are better than men in leadership positions. And according to Jacqueline Ruedin Rüsch, founding GP at Privilège Ventures, women-led startups would bring better returns on investment. The team foresees to invest in about 15-20 early-stage startups with tickets around $250k. 💵
Privilège Ventures launches $20M fund investing in women-led startups
This week we wanted to share with you some of the main takeaways we noted from our reading of a recent edition of Digital Native, a weekly newsletter written by Rex Woodbury who’s a partner at Index Ventures. 📝
Consumer Social Is Dead. Long Live Consumer Social.
The piece starts from the observation that different platforms/social networks enable us to connect with different people — or should we say, with people who are more or less part of our inner circle. 📱
Let’s take Messenger and WhatsApp for example: the likelihood we use them to connect with family and friends is much higher than for TikTok. In fact, it’s possible to draw the following concentric circles/rings and to allocate most well-known platforms based on the personas of the people they enable us to connect with:
Rex then goes on to highlight how Meta’s two most valuable apps (Instagram and Facebook) are right in the no-man’s-land (in rings 2 and 3) and have underwent attacks stemming from both remaining rings. He also uses this framework to explain how Meta has conceived Instagram’s recent developments in such a way as to expand into rings 1 and 4, esp. with reels which were aimed at getting deeper into ring 4! 🎯
Then, the piece deep dives into several areas that seem particularly ripe for innovation when it comes to social networks. Among those are to be found:
1. Photo sharing 📸
Here, Rex mentions BeReal and its super impressive trajectory as both an evidence and example (the company was founded in 2020 and already has ~25-30M MAUs as of today). But he also shares some thoughts regarding what could be important challenges for the company:
The difficult monetization,
The limits (by design) to engagement which is limited to only a few minutes per day (making monetization further difficult),
The fact it constitutes a feature innovation that lends itself quite well to replication,
Rex’ final thought: we’ll have to follow whether the team @ BeReal manages to build on its momentum and keep innovating. As he notes: The best consumer social companies quickly move beyond their initial hook: Snap started with disappearing photos, but expanded into a robust suite of features; Instagram started with filtered photos, but soon became much more than that. 🤺
2. AI & VTubing 🧝♀️
Wondering what VTubing is? VTubing (and VTuber, short for Virtual YouTuber) consists of live streaming where you use motion capture to control a 2D or 3D virtual avatar instead of your real-life face and body. In fact, it seems that there are many people who feel more comfortable using an avatar form in order to socialize. Add the fact that AI is now ready to unleash a new wave of imagination and creativity (think generative AI) and it seems that the next big thing is just around the corner for social networks. In fact, Rex invites us to reflect upon the possibility to combine both VTubing and AI. For example, imagine live streaming during which you could switch from one avatar to another just by saying: “Turn me into Iron Man” or “Give me purple hair”. 👀
If you want to dive into the whole piece, we can only recommend you to do so! 👇
Internships
VC Analyst - Karot Capital (Paris)
VC Analyst - TechFounders (Munich)
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Take care, and see you next week,
The whole baby vc crew 💛