Guilt-free chocolate, climate tech infrastructures, a new tech roadmap for the UK, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #127
Welcome to our 127th newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Guillaume Laheurte, Victoire Gendre, Saish Rane, Julia Bartsch 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 WNWN Food Labs and N2F
News from last week with Klarna and the British government’ novel tech roadmap
Our content of the week with start-ups building climate tech infrastructures
Internship & Job offers of the week
Oh, and before we dive into this week’ edition, we’d love to introduce you to our new job board! We changed things up a little to make the job submission process much smoother. So, if there is any job/internship offer you’d like us to add on the job board, you can simply fill this form (or share it)! 🚀
Wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
🍫 Guilt-free chocolate with WNWN Food Labs! (🇬🇧)
London-based WNWN Food Labs recently raised more than $5M to finance its scale up, with the aim of bringing its cocoa-free chocolate to market in the UK. Funding mainly came from PeakBridge, a constituent member of EIT Food, and was supplemented by investments from Germany-based FoodLabs and Martin Braun-Gruppe (Geschwister Oetker Beteiligungen Group) as well as from Mustard Seed Maze, PINC, Investbridge Capital's AgriTech fund, and HackCapital. 🤝
Due to cocoa's "dark side" with is mostly tied to potential human exploitation in the production chain and abysmal environmental impacts, WNWN has brought change to the chocolate market. Instead of farmed cocoa beans, WNWN relies on the fermentation of plant-based ingredients to produce its signature cocoa-free chocolate. 🍩
Their product not only has the taste, feel and look of "regular" chocolate, but it is also dog-safe, vegan, palm-oil free and produces a whooping 80% fewer carbon emissions than conventional chocolate! 👀
💵 N2F raised €24M to expand its expense management platform (🇫🇷)
Soon not just available in France, the international expansion plans by Lyon-based fintech startup N2F have been given wings through its new €24M fundraising. Led by PSG Equity, the fintech startup is looking to expand and bring its business expense management software to the European and North American markets. 🌍
Building on its success of servicing over 10k client companies across 86 countries, N2F is now looking to expand its entirely digitized process of managing expenses to a wider market.
Through use of their expenditure management software in the form of a web and app-platform, it reduces the time-consuming and manual process of processing expenses and offers significantly faster processing abilities including digitalized logging, approval and archiving of expense reports. 📔
French fintech N2F lands €24 million to expand its expense management platform
📉 Klarna reports $1B 2022 loss. What path to profitability?
The once top-valued startup in Europe has seen its valuation drop by 85% from $46B in 2021 to $6.7B in June 2022. 😕
The market-leading fractional payment solution had benefited from the boom in online shopping during the Covid-19 pandemic, before facing the decline in tech valuations.
CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski announced a new strategy with a 22% year-on-year increase in gross merchandise volume, which he said should ensure a path to profitability by 2023. 📈
Yet, these "buy now pay later" players, which have broken fundraising and valuation records have already drawn the attention of some European authorities regarding potential impacts on the financial situation of households. In 2021, a movement called "Stop the Klarnage" (originating from British Labour MPs) accused the sector of lying behind compulsive spending and over-indebtedness phenomenons.
Klarna faces its largest losses since inception (article in 🇫🇷)
🇬🇧 UK government is giving innovation a boost!
Yesterday, the British government unveiled a plan named Science and Technology Framework which sets out 10 main actions to be achieved by 2030 to ensure the country’s competitiveness in tech. 🚀
Citing how France and Germany have been moving fast when it comes to tech, the initial press release is making clear that the UK now gets “to do the same”. For that, the government plans to put a strong emphasis on increasing the country’s talent pool as well as tech investments. It had notably identified 5 key innovations for which it wants to move faster: AI, engineering biology, future telecommunications, semiconductors, and quantum technologies. 👀
The plan also includes:
£250M to “sustain UK’s global leadership” in AI, quantum and biotech,
£9M to develop a quantum computing research centre,
£50M to help universities and research institutes improve their lab facilities.
UK government unveils £360m plan to become ‘tech superpower’
🏭 Can the climate challenge be tackled with software solutions alone? The rise of infrastructure startups!
A new kind of startup, called "infrastructure startups", has emerged in the Climate Tech space, as highlighted by Sifted this week. In the past decades, climate solutions were primarily focused on software or trendy topics such as mobility, but this approach alone is insufficient to combat climate change. 😕
Infrastructure startups are booming as the need for new solutions increases. The common aspect of these startups is that they have to build tangible products. This can range from breakthrough technology, such as nuclear fusion or carbon capture, to scaling up the production of existing key technologies for the energy transition, such as batteries, recycling, and new materials. 🏗
The article highlights a few good examples of infrastructure startups, such as Fairmat (recycling composite materials), Storegga (carbon capture), Northvolt (batteries), and Heart Aerospace (electric planes). It also sheds light on the different types of investors interested in financing these startups, from VCs to sovereign funds. 👀
Internships
VC Analyst - Eutopia (Paris)
VC Analyst (VIE) - EDF Pulse Ventures (London)
VC Analyst - Bpifrance (Paris)
Jobs
Analyst - Octopus Ventures (London)
Associate - Speedinvest (Paris, Berlin or London)
👉 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 any feedback! 🤝
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 🖤