Digital Hospitality, Battery Recycling, Google's new Bard Assistant, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #151
Welcome to our 151st newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Justine Pelisson.
Fundraisings from last week with NUMA Group, Mecaware, Atomico, and HCVC
News from last week with the American campaign launched against AI-generated Art and Google’s Pixel Event 2023
Internships & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 🌞
🏨 NUMA Group raised $59M to continue its European expansion (🇩🇪)
NUMA Group, the German Digital Hospitality Platform, has just secured a $59M in series C funding to improve its proprietary technology and unlock key new locations across Europe. 🛏️
Known as the “German Airbnb”, NUMA Group leverages technology to optimize hotel operating processes and offer a more user-friendly platform for customers, creating a “new category in hospitality that meets the needs of modern consumers”.🫶
♻️ Mecaware raised €40M to scale its battery recycling activities (🇫🇷)
Mecaware, the Lyon-based Greentech startup, has just secured a €40M Series A from a pool of investors including the French government to scale its recycling battery and metal production activities. It will use the funding to deploy a pre-industrial pilot with its partner Verkor, one of Europe’s best funded gigafactories (remember our NL #148? 😏).
As emphasized by Arnaud Villers d'Arbouet, Co-Founder and CEO of Mecaware, the company is "deploying a ground-breaking and scalable industrial solution […]. It makes it possible to secure supplies of raw materials, enabling the strategic independence of our territories to bolster the energy transition, all in compliance with EU Regulations. Our technological solution addresses the current problems caused by traditional processes."🤯
🙏 Atomico raised $1.1 billion to support innovative tech companies (🇬🇧)
Atomico, the European Venture Capital firm “built by founders for founders” (ie. built and driven by Niklas Zennström, Skype’s founder & a serial entrepreneur…) with impressive companies in its portfolio like Klarna, Deepl, Lime, Wolt, or Sorare, just announced the closing of its 5th fund despite tough market conditions.👏
This successful fundraising sends a very positive signal to the tech sector, highlighting the industry’s resilience as well as investors’ confidence.💪
European Venture Capital Firm Atomico Raises $1.1bn to Defy Tech Slowdown
😎 HCVC announced a new $75M deep tech fund (🇫🇷)
Paris-based VC firm HCVC just raised $75M for its second fund, “Fund II”. This new fund will be dedicated to deep tech pre-seed and seed companies across Europe and North America - and should allow the VC to invest in about 40 startups.🤝
The investment scope should cover key societal issues today, as expressed by Alexis Houssou, HCVC founder & managing director: “We want to back founders that create a future with more clean energy, more powerful computing, more context-aware robots, better defense tools for democracies and biomanufacturing that enables us to decarbonize food production”. 🎯
😩 Taking on AI-Generated Art: the cry for action from artists against AI-produced content
With the rising and uncontrolled use of AI across several artistic industries, a coalition of artists together with digital rights organizations have initiated a campaign - #AIdayofaction - calling the American Congress to block corporations from obtaining copyrights on music and art made with AI. ❌
The campaign aims to raise awareness about the danger of AI potentially excluding artists from the creative process, and to reinstate that AI should be used as a tool to empower artists in their art production and creativity, but never to replace them. 📢
Artists across Industries are Strategizing Together around AI Concerns
🤖 Google Pixel Event: showing off on latest tech innovations
What an eventful week for Google! While the tech giant just launched its latest flagship Pixel phones and watches (the Google Pixel 8, the Pixel Watch 2, as well as the earphones Pixel Buds Pro), it also revealed during its Made by Google event a new generative-AI enhanced version of Assistant called “Assistant with Bard”. 🔗
This new assistant will integrate seamlessly with other Google apps (Gmail, Google Docs,…) to apply gen-AI tasks to it (such as finding key info, interacting through voice or text with the assistant, summarizing information, sending a message…). The tool is today being rolled out to early testers and should arrive in a few months to the broader public.🥳
Internships
VC Analyst Digital Venture - Elaia (Paris)
VC Research Analyst Intern - Eurazeo (Paris)
VC Analyst Interns Program - Eurazeo (Paris & London)
Climate-Focused VC Visiting Analyst - Visionaries Tomorrow (Berlin or Remote)
Are you a student in the UK or in France interested in VC, startups, and entrepreneurship and willing to get actively involved during your studies? Initiator VC, the first VC dedicated to Europe’s best student-founders, is looking for its new lead. Learn more & apply here.
Jobs
VC Associate - 50Partners (Paris)
Associate - Ascension (London)
VC Associate - Signals VC (Germany and Europe, hybrid work possible)
👉 If you’d like to discover more offers, you can check our job board just here or fill this form to submit a new one.
You can also read more about baby vc on our website and follow our updates on LinkedIn, or directly reach out to us at hello@baby-vc.co! 🤝
Have a wonderful week and see you next Tuesday!
The whole baby vc crew 🖤