Welcome to our 134th newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Anas El Aissaoui, Léna Meyniel, 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 Ynsect, Primo, OSO-AI, Bitstack and Swaap Finance
News from last week with layoffs impacting Meta’s employees and Starship exploding mid-flight
Internship & Job offers of the week
And before we dive in this week’ edition, the Closing Session of our Deep-Dive Series about Impact is happening tonight — and for the first time, it is open to the public! 🌱♻️
Don’t hesitate if you wish to get a solid understanding of how regulations might shape the industry as well as promising future trends from experts in the fields. 📝
Register here! 📅
Now, wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
🐜 Insect protein startup Ynsect raised €160M from undisclosed backers (🇫🇷)
It previously raised over €360M from firms like Upfront Ventures and FootPrint Coalition. The French insect farming startup Ÿnsect has secured €160M ($190M) in equity investment from both established and new investors. However, the organization is laying off 70 employees, or 20% of its employment, as part of a strategy to speed its transition to profitability.
Closing its Dutch production site, concentrating on more lucrative insect goods, and constructing more compact, less software-intensive facilities are all part of the startup's strategy to generate money more quickly. Ynsect, has announced that it will refocus its strategy on high-margin markets. Increased joint ventures and partnerships, mainly outside of Europe, are also part of the updated strategy. 👀
French insect farming scaleup Ÿnsect raises €160m and cuts 20% of staff
IT-as-a-service startup Primo raised $3.4M in seed funding led by Headline (🇫🇷)
Primo, a French startup, has been developing since October 2022 the IT tool for companies that are too small for an IT manager. 🤝
It has just raised $3.4M in seed fund led by Headline and Global Founders Capital with several business angels also participating.
Primo aims to be the companion SaaS for small companies. It currently has four different modules that should speed up and streamline IT tasks. The fact remains that small companies usually don’t have a dedicated IT team. They tend to hire their first IT manager when they reach 200 or 300 employees. Before that… it’s a mess. For heavy-duty tasks, companies often rely on outsourced IT. Primo keeps track of your fleet of devices and can then help you manage it without a dedicated IT manager. 👨💻
With this recent fundraising, Primo appears to be a new type of competitor in the market. Essentially, Primo is part of this new trend of SaaS startups that bundle a bunch of products in the same platform. The idea is that things should be easy and simple for small companies. They don’t want to deal with four different vendors if a company can already cover 95% of their needs.
Primo is the IT tool for companies that are too small for an IT manager
Ambient intelligence startup OSO-AI raised a €10M Series A (🇫🇷)
OSO-AI, a deeptech company based in Brest, France, has become since 2018 a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence for vulnerable people and medical staff. It announced on the 20th of April a €10M Series A funding led by its historical shareholders Innovacom, Novinvest Partners and Breizh-up joined by Cemag Invest Partners. It follows a first €4M round completed in September 2020. 👀
OSO-AI designs artificial intelligence solutions that identify and understand sounds and noises in the environment. The company's objective is to deploy a new range of services in medical-social and healthcare establishments, ranging from personal care to diagnostic support. Through this new fundraising, OSO-AI intends to keep going into its active phase of development and commercialization, they nearly have 1,000 devices installed in France and 3,000 expected by the end of the year.
⛓ French web3 ecosystem is still raising money with Bitstack and Swaap Finance (🇫🇷)
The paradox of the "Bear Market '': while some web startups are struggling to attract investors, others, such as Swaap Finance and Bitstack, have no trouble raising funds. The start-ups Bitstack and Swaap Finance have just raised €2M and €4.1M respectively, from several investment funds. 💰
Swaap Finance is a French decentralized finance startup (DeFi), co-founded by Cyrille Pastour and David Bouba, which finds its added value in transparent market making and efficient investment strategies. Swaap Labs aims to democratize DeFi by creating an AMM (Automated Market Maker) that natively reduces Impermanent Loss and creates a more efficient environment for liquidity providers. "We now have all the weapons to get through this complicated period and grow" explains co-founder Cyrille Pastour of Swap Labs. 💬
Bitstack is a French startup specializing in Bitcoin savings. This round of funding will allow Bistack to continue working in the development of new services to democratize savings in Bitcoin (BTC). For example, Bitstack users will now have a virtual IBAN allowing them to deposit their salary and automate their investment in Bitcoin. 👀
Why this is important: These operations show that despite the difficult market context, some web3 startups still manage to raise money from rather cautious investors.
Swaap Closes $4.5M Seed Round and Announces Upcoming v2 Launch
Bitstack (Founders Program) raises €2M to democratize Bitcoin in France
😕 Meta plan to cut 10% of UK workforce
In order to streamline its operations, Facebook's parent company Meta is laying off almost 10% of its employees in the UK and closing Instagram's new London base.
The reorganization happened only a few months after Meta started constructing a new center. Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, relocated to London in a bid to build up the platform's scale to rival TikTok, but the hub will soon cease to exist, according to a memo sent to staff.
The layoffs follow Meta's previous announcement that it will be eliminating roughly 20,000 workers internationally. While up more than 70% in 2023, Meta's share price is still below its 2021 pandemic top. Along with disruptive changes brought on by Apple's privacy policies, the company has been struggling with inflation and other macroeconomic issues. Investors are concerned about these elements as well as Zuckerberg's long-term aim to construct an expensive avatar-filled metaverse that won't be lucrative for many years. 👾
Meta plans to cut 10% of UK workforce in retreat from London
🚀 Space X starship exploded mi-flight.
You might think that a rocket exploding before it reaches orbit would be a bad thing. This is what happened this Thursday 20th April at 8:33 a.m. CT in Boca Chica Beach, as SpaceX's huge Starship rocket, the most powerful ever built, blasted off on an unpiloted maiden flight just after four minutes into its inaugural test flight. 💥
"Despite the mission ending in a 'rapid unscheduled disassembly' as the company refers to the outcome, the broader space community sees the launch as a success, and rightfully so in our view," Bank of America analyst Ronald Epstein wrote in a note on Friday. 👀
Elon Musk said that this was a development test, the first test flight of Starship, and the goal was to gather data, clear the pad and get ready to go again. SpaceX failed to fully meet those objectives on Thursday, but just getting the Super Heavy off the ground and out of the dense lower atmosphere marked a major milestone for the California rocket builder. 📈
NASA, which is paying SpaceX billions to build a variant of the Starship upper stage to carry astronauts down to the lunar surface in the next two to three years was also very positive.
The ultimate goals of Starship are to deliver satellites into Earth's orbit, travel to the Moon, and make interplanetary voyages to Mars a reality. 🪐
SpaceX Starship rocket launches in historic test but explodes mid-flight
Internships
Investment Analyst - Cherry Ventures (London)
VC Analyst - Redstone (Berlin)
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Chief of Staff - Cherry Ventures (Berlin)
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Take care, and see you next week,
The whole baby vc crew 🖤