Discussing with GPT-3, travelling with Le Collectionist, quantum physics, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #115
Welcome to our 115th newsletter. It was written with 💛 by Agathe de Raphélis, Arnaud Savouré, Saish Rane, Medina Sinani and Angèle Sahraoui
Fundraisings from last week with Le Collectionist and Modern Milkman
News from last week with GPT-3, Peak Capital, and multiple CEOs resigning
Our content of the week with the last episode of GDIY with Théau Peronnin, cofounder of Alice&Bob
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 💛
🏝 Luxury Travel Tech Start-Up Le Collectionist Seals €60M Funding (🇫🇷)
Le Collectionist, a vacation rental start-up for luxury properties, has raised €60M in a funding round led by Highland Europe along with other luxury investors such as OLMA, Famille C venture office, Swiss banks Pictet and Lombard Odier.
Founded in 2014 by Max Aniort, Eliott Cohen Skalli and Olivier Cahané, Le Collectionist was built to meet a growing demand for highly personalized, exclusive and incomparable holiday experiences. The French start-up targets the luxury holiday market by partnering with property owners to list their apartments and houses on the platform with concierge services and on-the-ground support like guides (exclusive contract with owners and 20% commission).
Le Collectionist's property portfolio spans 1,800 residences in 30 destinations; across the French Riviera and the Portuguese Algarve, and further afield into Morocco, the Caribbean, Costa Rica and South Africa. ☀️
With this new funding, the firm is opening more than 120 positions in 2023 to develop both its central office in Paris and existing local offices in the South-East and South-West of France, Barcelona, Ibiza and Switzerland, as well as to open new local offices in London and NYC. 🚀
Luxury holidays brand Le Collectionist rakes in €60 million to spur business growth
🥓 🚚 Modern Milkman raised £50M from Insight Partners, ETF Partners and Praetura Ventures(🇬🇧)
Founded in October 2018 by Simon Mellin and three friends, Modern Milkmann is a return-and-reuse grocery delivery startup. The Manchester-based company delivers fresh milk, groceries and household products in reusable containers and bottles with an app and a subscription model. They aim at reducing plastic waste and claim having saved over 55 million plastic bottles. ♻️
The £50M will be used to increase R&D into product innovation, pionneering technologies and support their global expansion strategy. Combining technology with sustainability, they plan to use radio frequency identification inlays and tags (RFID tags) to monitor and track the journey of their reusable glass bottles. 🍶
They are currently crowdfunding on Crowdcube to increase their online customer experience and accelerate the expansion of their plastic free, return-and-reuse range. They have a £500 000 target against 0,2% equity. 💸
🤖 OpenAI rolled out GPT-3.5
OpenAI (which has raised over $1B from Microsoft) just released an improved version of GPT-3. But you may ask: what’s GPT-3? Well, it’s a text-generating AI: an AI that reproduces human writing (and thinking). The public can now test GPT-3 through ChatGPT, a general-purpose chatbot that debuted in a public demo last week and that will answer any question you may have. ❓
Hence, it did not take long before Twitter got flooded with hundreds of screenshots of some of ChatGPT’s funniest answers — for your own enjoyment, we included one of our favs below. Lastly, let’s also note that OpenAI is busy working on GPT-4! 👀
While anticipation builds for GPT-4, OpenAI quietly releases GPT-3.5
💰 Peak Capital closed new €150M seed fund
The 5th seed fund of Peak Capital, a Dutch seed-stage venture capital firm, has closed with €150M of fresh capital. The latest fund has raised over 50% of its commitments from European founders. 🙌🏼
Due to the transformation of the tech ecosystem over the last few years, the team is optimistic about the fund's future growth. Additionally, more capital, knowledge, and talent have become available due to successful entrepreneurial stories in the recent past. 🚀
Peak was founded in 2017 by Hein Siemerink, Heleen Dura-van Oord, Johan van Mil, and Menno Kenter. The company focuses on SaaS, marketplaces, and platforms. Its offices are based in Amsterdam, Berlin and Stockholm. 📍
🚶♀️ CEO’s Great Resignation?
Over the past few days, we learned that Bret Taylor (co-CEO of Salesforce), Eric Wu (CEO of Opendoor) and Stewart Butterfield (CEO of Slack, part of Salesforce) were all stepping down as CEOs. Taylor mentioned in a statement his willingness to “return to [his] entrepreneurial roots” while Eric Wu will take on the position of Head of Marketplace at Opendoor. As for Butterfield, he stated that he was “not going to do anything entrepreneurial,”. 🔍
Maybe the good news in all of this is that the number of female CEOs is going to get a boost: Slack’s CEO will be succeeded by Lidiane Jones (Executive VP at Salesforce) and Eric Wu will be replaced by Carrie Wheeler (Opendoor's CFO since 2020). 🤝
Confirmed: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield stepping down in January
🐱 Building a quantum computer: Théau Peronnin & Alice&Bob
Have you ever had any questions concerning quantum physics? 🧠
Parallel universes and the all-powerful supercomputer that will one day bring us all to our knees were formerly used to summarize quantum mechanics. As difficult to define as it is, it really signals a precipitous acceleration of our systems and continues to confound specialists. 😳
Alice & Bob have been in the technological race towards quantum superiority since February 2020. Théau Peronnin, one of the brains behind this innovative startup, who raised $30M in March (with investors like Elaia & Supernova among others) to bring quantum computers to market appeared on the Génération Do It Yourself podcast to come and separate myths from facts in order to provide some clarity on this difficult and confusing topic for many. 📝
Théau, a physicist by training and by vocation, said that:
Quantum mechanics is only a depiction of the laws of nature; it is not mystical in any way.
Coffee stains will never be viewed in the same way as he takes us through his first physics challenges as a high school student.
The optimization of computations, linear algebra, simulating molecules or atoms to make chemistry an accurate science, and factorization of big numbers into prime numbers, which would decrypt communications, are some of the axes of quantum physics.
Economic sovereignty is a significant concern for governments, business owners, and the general public.
We can go beyond the realm of quantum physics' capabilities through the collective.
To learn more about cat qubits, quantum computers and coffee stains, listen to the podcast (in 🇫🇷) here 👇
Internships
VC Analyst - Coparion (Cologne)
Jobs
Associate Marketplace & Consumer - Speedinvest (Berlin or Vienna)
Investment Associate - Antler (Lisbon)
👉 And if you’d like to discover more offers… you can check our job board just here!
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 💛