Back-to-school tech & VC news - everything you need to know, and our new website look...
What’s Up Tech? #146
Hello fellow baby vc friends,
On behalf of the whole baby vc crew, welcome back to school or to work for what should be an exciting new year in the VC and Tech world - especially by our side!🌞⚡️
Thank you again for taking the time to answer our poll in last week’s special NL edition (still open for those of you who’d still like to contribute to it 😏), we can’t wait to share these insights in our regular edition next week!
To keep our usual tradition alive, we’re excited to share with you some of the key events that happened across the world’s tech scene this summer so that you are somehow up-to-date when catching up over coffee with your boss and colleagues! 😉
What happened during the summer 2023❓
Big acquisitions 🤝
Thalès acquired the US-based cybersecurity company Imperva in a $3.6B deal to accelerate its cybersecurity business and expand its target market to application and data security offerings
OVH Cloud, the leading European cloud provider, has announced its intention to acquire the german company Gridscale - leader in Edge Computing - to reinforce OVH’s on-premise cloud offerings (amount not disclosed yet, the acquisition should close by early 2024)
Fintech-as-a-service startup Rapyd acquired PayU’s Global Payment Organization for $610M to offer emerging and developed markets a fully integrated payment platform - while getting ready for its IPO
Trustly, the Swedish open-banking fintech, acquired French direct debit platform SlimPay for $70M. The synergy of both actors should set a new standard for recurring payments for merchants and customers across Europe and the UK
Big fundraisings 💸
Berlin-based energy startup NeXtWind secured $750M for sustainable energy expansion in Germany to revamp ageing wind turbines and repower Germany’s energy supply
French AI startup Hugging Face raised $235M in series D at a valuation of $4.5B to accelerate on the democratization of open-source machine learning and become the “GitHub for machine learning”
Indian instant food delivery startup Zepto raised $200M at $1.4B valuation to keep expanding in India and grow its dark stores’ network. This fundraising makes of Zepto India’s first unicorn of 2023! 🦄
Israeli Generative AI startup AI21Labs specialized in Natural Language Processing (NLP), backed by Google and Nvidia , raised $155M in Series C after being valued at $1.4B to double down on its text-based Gen AI services for enterprises
US AI Startup Poolside AI, referred to as the “OpenAI of software development”, raised a $126M seed round from top investors to keep working on its foundational AI model to generate code from natural language queries (ie allowing non-programmers to become software creators) and announced its plan to relocate to France
Vienna-based EdTech tutor marketplace GoStudent raised $95M to expand its hybrid VR and AI-enhanced learning to the DACH region
London-based music ticketing platform DICE secured $65M to fuel new partnerships and grow in the US and Europe
Scottish startup Enough raised €40M to scale up on the production of meat, fish, and dairy products derived from its mushroom-based mycoprotein
Dublin-based led and solar-provider UrbanVolt raised €26M to fund its European expansion and remain the leader of the “solar-as-a-service” market
Big updates 🎉
NATO has announced a $1B fund raised from member nations to invest in innovative startups that support ‘‘safety, freedom and human empowerment’
OpenAI announced its biggest news since the release of ChatGPT: the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise targeted at businesses, which has been under development for almost a year! It also released its GPT- 3.5 turbo to allow businesses to fine-tune their chat GPT experience
Meta launched its own Twitter competitor, Threads, as “a new way to share with text” (which initially appeared as a success but slowly declined to about 50M active users…), as well as its own AI-code writing tool to generate code more easily leveraging its Llama 2 large language model (LLM).
Youtube and Universal Music have announced the launch of a Generative AI incubator - Youtube Music AI Incubator - to help inform Youtube’s approach to generative AI music; Youtube has also published its ever set of AI music principles to enhance creativity but also to protect the platform’s artists
Google unveiled a new tool to detect AI-generated images leveraging imperceptible watermarks to fight misinformation and fake images
Microsoft introduced the integration of Python natively in Excel to take its spreadsheets analytics to the next level
British chip designer Arm, one of today’s most important tech companies in the chip industry owned by SoftBank, filed for its Initial Public Offering (IPO) in the US - for what should be USA’s biggest IPO of 2023!
Big flops 👎🏻
Babylon, the London-based tele-health startup that used to be valued at $2B, went bankrupt
Getir, the Turkish instant food delivery service that had exploded thanks to the pandemic, has announced that it would let go 10% of its employees across 5 locations
Fitbit, the fitness company owned by Google, has been accused of illegally exporting EU user data thus violating GDPR violations and may face $11B fine
Revolut stopped its cryptocurrency services in the US due to challenging regulatory environment
With its NYSE shares at its lowest ($14 cents), WeWork has filed a 1-for-40 reverse stock split as a last attempt to save its catastrophic listing
Oh and… have you noticed yet youtube.com’s new rounded edges on its main video player? This new feature is still being rolled out but you may already be one of the first few to experience it… ! 😏
💯 Lastly, we’re extremely proud to reveal our new website’s look…😎 ! A huge shoutout to the team (especially Henry) for making this happen. We hope you will like it as much as we do👌 (PS- don’t hesitate to send us your feedbacks!)
And that is it for our brief summer recap, we hope you enjoyed the read! 😎
See you next week for our traditional weekly NL where we will share the top tech and VC fundraising news from the ecosystem, as well as job and internship offers!
Justine and the whole baby vc crew
xx