Agtech revolution with Agriconomie, EQT raising a new venture fund, the FTX saga, and more...
What's Up Tech? #112
Welcome to our 112nd newsletter. It was written with 💛 by Clara Journoud, Raphaël Wat, Saish Rane, Medina Sinani and Angèle Sahraoui
The latest episode of “Dans la tête d’un CEO” with Amadou Ba (Booska-P)
Fundraising from last week with Agriconomie and Airly
News from last week with FTX filing for bankruptcy & EQT’s new venture fund
Our content of the week with How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 💛
In this new episode, Yacine welcomed Amadou Ba, aka Hamad, who is the co-founder of Booska-P, the first urban media in France (2.2M followers on Instagram, 500K monthly views on TikTok and 12M on Youtube, etc.). 🔥
Together, they discussed how Booska-P evolved from an association to a huge media platform, how the team ended up monetizing its work, how Amadou accomplished (and dreamt) a lot, even with very limited means, and many more fascinating topics! 🚀
So, if you’re a French speaker (and listener!), definitely check it out! 🎧
🌱 Agriconomie raises €60M with Treïs, Temasek, Aliment & Eurazeo (🇫🇷)
Agriconomie, a France-based online agritech marketplace, closed a €60M Series B round, co-led by Treïs Group, Aliment Capital and Temasek, with participation from Eurazeo. 🤝
Founded in 2014, Agriconomie’s original goal was to become the “Amazon of farm supplies”. The e-commerce platform sells agricultural tools to European farmers, such as fertilizers, animal feed, seeds and other equipment. It also assists them in the transition to sustainable agriculture, by giving purchasing support, personalized advice, or information source sharing. 📚
Present in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium, Agriconomie plans to use the capital to expand geographically and pursue its ambition to “become the European leader in the organics and regenerative inputs market”. Sustainable agriculture currently represents 10% of the company’s revenue, and its environmental action plan includes promoting new organic products. 📈
The agtech boom: Even though agriculture is one of the oldest practices in human civilization, its relevance today cannot be ignored, especially due to climate change. While most industries have recently taken a nosedive, losing the trust of investors, the Agtech sector has seen a steady rise for the last seven years. So far in 2022, companies have raised more than $7 billion in funding (e.g. Soli Organic raising $125M in October). 💰
Agriconomie lands €60 million to help Europe’s farmers to regen ag
🌬 Airly raised a $5.5M Series A to improve our air quality (🇬🇧)
Airly, a London and Krakow-based startup that wants to improve our air quality by providing communities with a sensor and software-based solution announced last week it had raised a $5.5M round led by firstminute and Pi Labs. 💵
The solution developed by Airly is already used in 40+ countries and notably features an online map that lets communities check the air quality around them. The data provided has the advantage of being near real-time as Airly’s sensor network sends data to the app every five minutes. Plus, these insights are also leveraged to suggest concrete actions communities could implement, e.g implementing low-emission zones, solid fuel bans and green school streets. 🤝
The three cofounders told TechCrunch that they had the idea to found Airly when they were preparing for a marathon: “During the course of our training, we found it hard to cope with the intensity and realized it was down to air pollution, […] So we devised a system using our own air quality sensors to tell us where the cleanest air was and we used those spaces for our training.”. Long live clean air! ☁
Airly fights air pollution with a network of affordable sensors
📉 FTX: Dotcom bubble 2.0 or a new beast?
In what’s already been called crypto’s dot-com moment, FTX, the second largest crypto exchange in the world, filed for bankruptcy last week. It was first reported by CoinDesk that the majority of funds held by trading firm Alameda Research are FTTs — the token of the FTX platform. 👀
You might ask: “What’s the problem?”. Well, the thing is that FTX and Alameda Research are both owned by Sam Bankman-Fried. And as noted by Cory Klippsten, CEO of investment platform Swan Bitcoin, what was seen as fascinating was that “the majority of the net equity in the Alameda business is actually FTX’s own centrally controlled and printed-out-of-thin-air token,”. 😐
Thus, and shortly after this initial discovery, it was announced that the trading company may be insolvent in the event of a decline in FTT price. Following these insolvency rumors, Binance sold $2.1B worth of FTT, leading to a sharp decrease in FTT’s price. 📉
This event led to a huge decline in FTX’s net worth, and Binance proposed to acquire the company to avoid the bankruptcy scenario. After further due diligence, Binance declared that they would not pursue its purchase of the FTX platform, citing "out-of-control issues" and "mismanaged customer funds". As of today, all seems to indicate that the story is only getting started. 😅
💵 EQT Ventures raises €1.1B setting a high bench for early-stage startups
Stockholm-based EQT Ventures, committed to early-stage tech startups, closed EQT Ventures III at €1.1B. This brings the total funds raised to €2.3B since inception in 2016. 🚀
EQT Ventures III will make investments of €1M to 50M in founder-led startups using technology to try solving some of the biggest challenges faced by society in sectors such as climate tech, food tech, the creator economy, energy, fintech, software, data & IT infrastructure, deep tech, and more. 📚
The Fund includes participation from several European, North American, and Asian institutional investors, foundations, and endowments. All in all, the team has already backed and supported 13 companies as lead investor. 🤝
🌿 Simplifying climate jargon to foster & catalyse change
The world currently emits 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually and we must get it to zero. 📉
This doesn’t mean getting close to zero or halving the amount as any excess amount can have potentially devastating, cascading effects on environment. It may sound impossible but it is indeed a task that we have to undertake if we are to restore the Earth to its pre-industrial era emissions and have a chance to avoid butterfly effects on climate change affect the global south. 🌍
Bill Gates puts this into perspective as he elucidates just how hard it will be to get to Net Zero by making us grasp the scale of our emissions and the grip that petrochemical industry has on everyday life. We can’t do without it as it is the most energy-dense material known to man that is stable enough to be used in daily life.
He also provides frameworks to ask thoughtful questions to seek out the truth in statistics, news, and other sources when it comes to calculating energy demands. Once we understand the idea of energy, how it works and what a “Green Premium” that we can afford to pay is, the picture becomes clearer on the progress to be made and the technologies that may have some of the answers to our acute energy problems. 🔍
In addition to fighting climate change, we must also realise that the effects are already being felt by the vast majority of people who are at nature’s edge to eke out a livelihood and thus pushes the point of climate adaptation as another tool in our inventory to catalyse positive change.
Last but not least, there are quite a few mentions of how each person starting from an individual level all the way to corporations and governments can play a role in getting down to net zero GHG emissions. Read more about the technologies capable of helping get us to net zero here 👇
Internships
Visiting Investment Analyst - Pelion Green Future (Munich)
Jobs
VC Analyst - 360 Capital (Paris)
Fundraising Associate - Quantum Light (London)
👉 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 💛