Welcome to our 109th newsletter. It was written with 💛 by Saish Rane, Medina Sinani and Angèle Sahraoui
The latest episode of “Dans la tête d’un CEO” with Mathieu Gallet
Fundraisings from last week with Holidu, Aqemia, Stability AI, and Hoxton Farms
News from last week with Nuri and Instacart
Our content of the week proposed by Eldorado about the concept of leverage — and why it can be so useful for founders
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 💛
In this new episode, Yacine welcomed Mathieu Gallet, former president of Radio France and cofounder of majelan, a startup focused on audio content such as podcasts and audio books (but also €10M and an acq. by ETX Studio last summer). 🎙
“I got in through the back door”
Among the topics that Yacine and Mathieu discussed: how he started jis career in the audiovisual industry (Pathé, Canal+) and then ended up working as a political advisor under Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy (if you’re not into politics, no worries, Yacine and him barely talk about politics), a
Sébastien’s first steps as a journalist when he was only 15, his involvement in the creation of a TV show focused on tech in 2015 (when he did not know anything about tech yet...), why now working on Teampact and what does the team mean by its focus on “people first”, etc. 🚀
“When you can’t enter through the front door, try the window!”.
🏖 Holidu raised 104M€ in Series E funding (🇩🇪)
Holidu, a Munich-based startup, has raised 75 million euros in a Series E financing round which was led by London-based VC 83North. They also list the two Unicorns Celonis and Wolt, in their portfolio. Northzone, HV Capital, Vintage Investment Partners and Communfund Capital also invested in Holidu. According to the Munich-based company, it raised a further 25 million Euros in the form of venture debt, which they need to repay with a fixed interest rate. 💰
The startup operates a search engine for vacation homes and apartments and compares listed offers with each other. Over the last 12 months alone, more than 110 million people have searched for vacation homes on the platform. 🏝
The newly raised capital will flow primarily into product development. In addition, a part of the money will be used to open further branches in Europe. 🧳
Holidu pockets $102M to keep growing its vacation rental business in Europe
🧠 Aqemia raised €30M with Eurazeo, Bpifrance & historic investor Elaia (🇫🇷)
Aqemia, a deep tech startup specialising in in-silico drug discovery, raised a €30 million Series A round led by Bpifrance Large Venture & Eurazeo with participation from their historic investor, Elaia. This funding round comes on the backs of an astounding success of their innovation engine, Launchpad, 🚀 that has led to several disclosed and undisclosed partnerships worth millions of euros with leading pharmaceuticals like Sanofi, Janssen and Servier. 💊
This technology has led to the launch of a proprietary pipeline of several drug discovery projects in oncology & immuno-oncology. Aqemia’s algorithms are also the result of 12 years of research with leading universities & research centers 🎓 across the world like University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure (PSL) and the CNRS (National Scientific Research Center) resulting in a whopping 10,000x faster performance than standard methods! 🤯
Aqemia Raises €30M to Scale its Deep Physics and AI Enabled Drug Discovery Pipeline
🖼 Stability AI raised $101M to “democratize” generative artificial intelligence (🇬🇧)
Stability AI, the world's first community-driven open source artificial intelligence (AI) company, announced $101M in funding. The oversubscribed funding round was led by Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners and O'Shaughnessy Ventures LLC. Stability AI will use the funding to accelerate the development of open AI models for image, voice, audio, video, 3D and more for consumer and enterprise applications around the world.
The London-based company developed Stable Diffusion, a powerful, free and open-source text-to-image generator that launched in August. Since its launch, Stable Diffusion has been downloaded and licensed by more than 200,000 developers worldwide. Stability AI's consumer product DreamStudio quickly grew to well over one million registered users from more than 50 countries who have collectively created more than 170 million images.
Stability AI Announces $101 Million in Funding for Open-Source Artificial Intelligence
🍗 Hoxton Farms raised $22M in series A funding (🇬🇧)
As an ever-growing number of people are looking to cut their consumption of traditional meat, still many culinary enthusiasts reproach missing the flavour and juicy texture of traditional meat in plant-based alternatives. This is where Hoxton Farms comes in!
Cultivating real animal fat in bioreactors, with the help of a computational platform that uses machine learning and mathematical modelling, these cultivated fats can then be used in combination with plant-based protein. By packing in cell-cultured and plant-based products, the London-based startup is adding a new layer to our dietary evolution.
After closing a seed round of $3.6 million in 2021, last Thursday Hoxton Farms’ co-founders, Max Jamilly and Ed Steele announced closing a $22 million in its Series A funding round.
The round was led by Collaborative Fund and Fine Structure Ventures, and the funding to expand its headcount and to scale up its manufacturing capacity, it will indeed build a 13,000-square-foot cultivated fat pilot facility in Shoreditch, East London.
🏦 Nuri filed for bankruptcy this week
The German crypto-startup was founded in 2015 under the name Bitwala to make Bitcoin spendable. Over the years, the business has undergone several transformations and re-positionings until it has become Nuri, the bank account to grow your money. 💰
Due to the challenging economic & political environment, it was difficult to find new investors or an acquirer. That´s why the business needed to end 🥶. Read more about the insolvency in the recent letter from the CEO:
📉 Instacart cut its valuation (again) and is postponing its IPO plans
The past few days have been hectic at Instacart. Not only did The Information and Bloomberg reported the company was cutting its valuation for a 3rd time this year from $15B to about $13B, and after a notable 40% cut in March.
But after having filed confidentially for its IPO last spring, it seems that the American grocery delivery company is now not expecting to IPO before 2023 anymore. The main reason? According to what two sources told Reuters, it seems that the current level of market uncertainty has left investors worried about growing volatility in capital markets.
Our content of the week is brought to you by our partner Eldorado. Massive thanks to Hugo Debrabandere for having written the piece below!
💶 Using leverage to better finance your start-up
In these times of increasing funding scarcity and disarray of the entire financial ecosystem, it is all the more important to master the essential financial concepts that will allow founders to finance their start-ups optimally.
In this article, we will discuss the concept of leverage with a focus on how it can help entrepreneurs!
Back to basics: Leverage, what are we talking about?
The notion of leverage is used in corporate finance to refer, as the name suggests, to a leverage effect or any optimization of the capital structure by contracting debt.
In practical terms, a company achieves leverage when it uses debt to finance its needs – with the expectations that the debt’s interest costs will be outstripped by the company’s future profits.
What are the risks associated with leverage?
As we have seen, leverage is essentially based on the contraction of debt, so it is essential to ask the question of solvency: money lenders must take a close look at the profitability of the project in which they are going to invest the funds to make sure the cash flows will allow them to repay the interest.
Logically, the higher the leverage, the more interest the company has to pay, which can suffocate it or put its back to the wall if a complicated situation arises as it would no longer be able to borrow to gain time. It is therefore a double-edged sword that needs to be used on a sound basis. Therefore, the ability to repay is a leverage limit.
Before resorting to leverage, it is necessary to assess its impact to ensure that leverage is beneficial to the borrower.
Negative leverage is referred to as the "sledgehammer effect" or "boomerang effect". The higher the leverage, the greater the effect, and just as positive leverage boosts profits, it also multiplies losses.
What are the concrete benefits of leverage for founders?
The entrepreneur benefits from a greater investment capacity to develop his company.
The entrepreneur limits the dilution of his shares in the company's capital by carrying out a capital increase that is less than he needs since he can rely on debt (non-dilutive).
The investor knows that the capital he has injected not only allows the company to grow but is boosted by having allowed the company to have a greater investment capacity thanks to the debt. In short, an increase in ROI for investors.
If you have been interested in this topic, we invite you to read this article (in 🇫🇷 ) which goes further into details.
Internships
VC Analyst - 50 Partners Impact (Paris)
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Senior Associate - XAnge (Paris)
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Take care, and see you next week,
The whole baby vc crew 💛