Welcome to our 139th newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Anas El Aissaoui, 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 sekoia.io and Laced
News from last week with Copilot, Meta, a16z, and climate tech
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
👨💻 Cybersecurity startup sekoia.io secures €35M (🇫🇷)
Sekoia.io, a startup based in Paris, and with an headcount already north or 100 people, has recently announced a new €35M round of fundraising with new investors including Banque des Territoires and European investor Bright Pixel, as well as its historical investors Omnes Capital, Seventure, and BNP Paribas Développement who committed again. 🤝
Sekoia.io is now well-known for its cybersecurity platform named Sekoia.io XDR (eXtended Detection & Response) which enables real time cyber-attack detection. The team has already put 5 years of R&D efforts into Sekoia.io XDR (which went live in 2020) and which aims at preventing increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. 🧠
The team has also been working a lot on interoperability, thereby empowering its customers to get access to a unified control tower that partly relies on their existing cyber solutions. Among sekoia’s existing customers, one can find the security teams of major CAC40 companies, large European and French administrations, as well as major players in managed security services. Next step for the team is becoming the leader in cyber detection and response in Europe. 🇪🇺
👟 Sneakers resale marketplace Laced raised $12M (🇬🇧)
London-based resale marketplace for premium sneakers Laced raised a $12M Series A round led by Tali’s Capital with participation from H&M Group Ventures, B&Y Venture Partners and Truesight Ventures.
The sneakers resale market is poised to reach $30M by 2030, with limited-edition sneakers getting often traded at a highly inflated price. To streamline this market, Laced connects sellers and buyers while keeping all parties fully anonymous, and uses in-house authenticators to counterattack the growing counterfeit sneaker market — and ultimately takes a 15% cut on transactions. 👀
With this fresh funding, Laced is now planing to double down on its technology, product and data science.
Laced, a UK-based resale marketplace for authenticated premium sneakers, raises $12M
🛠 An AI to build your startup website?
Microsoft has unveiled Copilot, an AI-powered assistant for Power Pages, a tool for creating low-code corporate websites. 👀
Based on user input, Copilot creates text, forms, chatbots, web page layouts, and picture and site design themes. It can also create and edit back-end database tables for forms. Copilot in Power Pages is marketed as a flexible solution that enables users to naturally express their wants and obtain ideas for designing web pages, producing content, and developing intricate business data forms. 👨💻
Microsoft emphasized that Copilot is an assistant, not an automatic website generator, giving users control over implementing suggestions or customizing them further.
👀 Meta in a turmoil
It was a tumultuous week for Meta. The social media behemoth faced a series of setbacks, including significant layoffs, a suspension order from the European Union (EU), and a forced sale of one of its acquired companies. 😶
As part of its "Year of Efficiency" restructuring plan, Meta initiated another round of layoffs, impacting approximately 6,000 employees. This move is aimed at streamlining operations, reducing costs, and flattening the organization's structure. These cuts add to the previous layoffs, resulting in a total reduction of over 21,000 employees since November. 🔍
Adding to Meta's woes, the EU issued a formal suspension order, demanding the company cease exporting user data from the EU to the United States for processing. Furthermore, the European Data Protection Board imposed a record-breaking fine of €1.2B (around $1.3B) on Meta. This fine, the largest ever under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), reflects the severity of the violation and emphasizes the EU's commitment to protecting user data privacy. 👮♀️
In a forced divestiture, Meta was also compelled to sell Giphy, the popular animated GIF search engine it had acquired for $400M three years ago. The U.K.'s antitrust authority mandated the sale, citing concerns that the merger had diminished competition in the market.
These recent developments pose significant challenges for Meta, which has been in the spotlight due to its dominant position in the tech industry. The company has been grappling with various regulatory and legal hurdles, and these latest setbacks add to its ongoing woes. As Meta continues to make headlines, industry observers and stakeholders will be closely watching how the company adapts to these new realities and whether it can regain stability and regain public trust. 👀
Meta Commences Latest Round Of Layoffs As Employees Hope It’s The Last
📝 AI Canon: an a16z post to follow genAI trends
AI is moving fast, and it can be hard to keep up with several breakthroughs. In their recent post, a16z broke down the basics and gives a list of resources of papers, blog posts, courses, and guides that have had an outsized impact on the field over the past several years. 🔍
♻️ Climate tech = software for hardware
In the investment sector, we saw a huge growth of software in the renewable energy and sustainability industries. These models are overlooked compared to hardware solutions due to the traditional focus on software-as-a-service (SaaS) models. By keeping this philosophy, few investments in climate tech generated significant returns and made substantial positive impact.
Indeed, the software-hardware interplay is a key factor in addressing climate change and achieving sustainability goals. There still is a lack in the recognition and funding of software solutions that enable the deployment and efficient operation of hardware at scale. Software solutions have to support and optimize existing hardware technologies, making them financially viable for instance. In fact, more significant progress can be made in addressing climate change for a sustainable future, by optimizing existing hardware solutions to avoid the mistakes of the previous investment era.
SaaS won’t save the planet, but a hardware-software duo just might
Internships
Analyst - 115K (Paris)
Visiting Analyst - SquareOne (Berlin)
Visiting Analyst HealthTech - Redalpine (Zurich)
👉 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 🖤