A letter urging to pause AI experiments, VC money for immigrant founders, rocket launches, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #131
Welcome to our 131st newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Francisco Fidalgo, 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 Isar Aerospace and Connect Earth
News from last week with tech giants calling for a pause on AI experiments, No Label Ventures and Twitter
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
🚀 Isar Aerospace raised €155M and targets up to 40 yearly launches (🇩🇪)
Isar Aerospace, a pioneering European low-cost launch solution for satellite constellations, announced a €155M Series C funding round last week. Having raised €305M in five years, they are now Europe's best-capitalised private space tech. 💸
The fresh round was led by 7-Industries Holding, with participation from Bayern Kapital, Earlybird Venture Capital, HV Capital, Lakestar, Lombard Odier Investment Managers, Porsche, UVC Partners and Vsquared Ventures… quite a hefty list indeed.
The company builds its rockets and will offer satellite launch services starting later this year with the launch of its inaugural rocket, Spectrum. Isar plans to use the fresh capital to improve its production line and reach its goal of 30-40 launches annually. Companies already signed up to launch include French satellite start-up Exotrail and space logistics company D-Orbit. 🛰
Despite the fact Isar may not be developing re-usable rockets like space-giant SpaceX or Bavarian rival 'The Exploration company', deemed to be a far cheaper model, CEO Daniel Metzler believes it is the "high degree of automation" and "vertically integrated" business model that will give Isar the edge over competitors. 🏭
In the context of the European space tech scene, the failure of recent launches (Virgin Orbit, Vega C), lack of satellite launchers in Europe and calls for European sovereign launch capability for geopolitical reasons provides plenty of potential for Isar to tap into with fresh capital! 🇪🇺
Isar Aerospace raises $165 million to bring more sovereign launch to Europe
🌱 Connect Earth raised £4.5M to help financial institutions keep track of their environmental impact (🇬🇧)
London-based startup Connect Earth has created a platform for financial firms to give their customers access to granular carbon data through their APIs. This level of access to carbon data allows end users to track their carbon footprint and monitor their environmental impact like never before. Their products are used by KBC Bank, community banks and FinTech firms across Europe and the US. 🇪🇺🇺🇸
The £4.5M round was led by Gresham House Ventures with the participation from Love Ventures, Global Brain Corporation, Portfolio Ventures and Super Capital and previous investors Market One Capital, MSM Fund, and Venista Ventures. 🤝
Connect Earth has provided carbon data for 500M financial transactions since the beginning of 2022, a number expected to increase exponentially as they diversify their product offering with the new funding. 👀
Connect Earth raises £4.5m to track climate sustainability in finance
🤖 An Open Letter from Tech Giants calling for a pause on AI Experiments
Last Wednesday, an open-letter issued by the non-profit Future of Life Institute and signed by more than 2,800 petitioners (including Tech Giants like Elon Musk, Stability AI's CEO, cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, as well as engineers from Amazon, DeepMind, Google, Meta and Microsoft) has called all AI labs to put on pause for six-month the development of systems that are "more powerful" than that of GPT-4. ✋
As the quest for advanced generative AI models accelerates — turning into what appears to be an out of control race led by powerful tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google — real ethical, regulatory and safety concerns are arising which must imperatively be addressed through clear protocols to control and monitor AI development. As the letter emphasizes, this call doesn't ask for a pause on all AI development, but rather urges to see AI research and development refocused on "making today's powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal." 🔍
Unsurprisingly, the letter is already sparking controversy — from fake signatures to misused researchers' work-leading many endorsers to already back out from their support. Worth noting is also the fact that leading signatories are direct competitors to OpenAI...👀
😇 No Label Ventures launching a VC fund dedicated to Non-European immigrant founders
No Label Ventures, a UK-based VC fund, just launched last week a $15M fund dedicated to early stage ventures (seed and pre-seed) founded by a first or second generation non-EU immigrant. As numbers show, immigrant founders have created a significant portion of global unicorns (55% of US unicorns were founded by immigrants, 36% in the UK, and 25% in Europe…) — a trend that is expected to accelerate, as the NLV research predicts that as the European tech ecosystem matures, 2 out of 3 unicorns in Europe will be founded by an immigrant within the next decade. 🦄
Created by Ramzi Rafih (ex KKR and Silver Lake investor, ex JP Morgan M&A) — originally from Lebanon and born himself from immigrant parents — No Label Venture claims itself to be a "very-biased" investor, and will provide European startups $100K- $250K tickets, support with immigration efforts, and key business introductions to its network of clients and partners. As Ramzi Rafih says, "themes of resilience and over performance can be seen in immigrants and diverse teams", explaining their bias and commitment to these entrepreneurs, who tend to "start their journeys underfunded, but frequently go on to win big". 🚀
🔥 Public Reveal: Discovering Twitter's recommendation algorithm
As promised by Elon Musk over the past weeks, Twitter has finally published on GitHub two repositories of its source code following its ambition to become more transparent and an open source operating system. Interestingly, the open source release doesn't include the code behind Twitter's ad recommendation and seems to be extremely developer-focused, also excluding "any code that would compromise user safety and privacy or the ability to protect our platform from bad actors".
Ironically, this release happened a few weeks after Twitter fired a majority of its ethical AI and trust safety staff — in charge of content moderation and user security…🤔
Internships
Investment Analyst - Virgil (Paris)
VC Analyst - Serena (Paris)
Analyst - RAISE (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 🖤