Welcome to our 104th newsletter. It was written with 💛 by Victor Pajot, Maxence Garnier, Saish Rane and Medina Sinani
Fundraisings from last week with Devialet, Cuure and NeoCarbon
News from last week with Adobe and Ethereum
Our content of the week with @tszzl
Our dessert of the week
The latest episode of “Dans la tête d’un CEO”
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 💛
🔊 French audio tech engineering company Devialet raises €50M
Devialet raised €50M from Bpifrance’s Large Venture Fund and Crédit Mutuel Equity (historic investors) as well as from a new Chinese investor. This brings to more than €200M the funds raised to date by the company after three fundraisings. 💰
Specialist in acoustic engineering, Devialet is known for its speakers, sound bars and other high-end headphones. The company plans to become profitable within two years. 💸
The fundraising will enable Devialet to strengthen its international development, mainly in Asia (where three of its top five markets are), and to develop its licensing strategy in China. 🌏
💊 Personalized dietary supplements company Cuure raises €10M
Founded in 2019 by Hugo Facchin and Jules Macilhacy, Cuure is a French startup offering personalized dietary supplements produced based on a questionnaire filled by their clients. The company claims to have 100,000 unique subscribers today. 📈
With this fundraising, Cuure plans to increase it R&D investments but also to continue its expansion on the European market (the company makes about 40% of its revenues outside of France, including 20% in Italy). Cuure also hopes to develop its distribution channels in the long term by selling its products in pharmacies. 🏥
Five funds participated in this round: Bpifrance, Capagro, Verlinvest, JamJar and Newfund. 🤝
Cuure lève 10 millions d'euros pour se renforcer en Europe occidentale
🌿 Berlin-based climate tech startup NeoCarbon raises €1.25M
NeoCarbon has received €1.25M in funding from PropTech1 and Speedinvest. Their idea is to provide industries cooling towers to capture CO₂ directly from the air. 🌬
The only way to address climate change is first by reducing emissions, and second, by capturing back most of the carbon we, humans, have already released. Concretely, we need to remove over 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually. 😳
That is where NeoCarbon comes to its place. Their cooling towers perform Direct Air Capture (DAC) at up to 10x the costs and time, which is much more efficient for the mass market. Instead of only releasing heat, the cooling towers can also remove carbon dioxide from all this heated air. 🚀
Several billion tons of CO₂ could be captured this way annually, which would be a massive milestone on our path towards addressing climate change. 🙏🏼
NeoCarbon wants industrial cooling towers to join the climate fight
🖼️ Adobe agreed to acquire Figma for $20B
Last Thursday, Adobe agreed to buy software design startup Figma in a deal valued at about $20 billion in a bid to expand its suite of creative tools for professionals. 🚀
Figma, founded in 2012, creates cloud-based design software that allows teams to collaborate in real-time. The company managed to amass over 4 million users to date thanks to its innovative design and prototyping solutions targeted at both individuals and teams. The startup has seen its revenue skyrocketing over the last few years, with an expected $400M annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2022. This means that this $20B acquisition is 50 times Figma’s reported ARR, and it happens when sales multiples for cloud software are contracting dramatically from their record highs reached last year. 😳
This deal can be seen as a way for Adobe to take out one of its major competitors from the market. Over the past several years, Figma has built its name as an easy-to-use collaborative design platform and as one growing competitor to Adobe. The goal for Adobe is now to integrate some of the features from its other products, such as illustration, photography, and video technology, into Figma’s platform. 🤓
This deal is also an interesting one for Figma’s investors. $20B is twice the company’s valuation from its last funding round in June 2021. In comparison to existing shareholders, Adobe is paying ~$40.20 per share, that’s ~8x times more than a16z ($4.619 per share), 36x times more than Sequoia ($1.098 per share) and 456x (!) more than Index Ventures ($0.088 per share), only that! 📈
Adobe snaps up Figma for $20B, taking out one of its biggest rivals in digital design
🌱 Ethereum enters a new Era after a successful merge
Ethereum, the blockchain network behind the world’s second-largest crypto token ether, just completed a major software upgrade. The upgrade, called “the Merge” by crypto enthusiasts, promises to lower Ethereum's energy consumption, attract more users and potentially more investors. 🧐
Crypto-production's high energy consumption is due to “proof of work” which is the way transactions are verified and more digital assets are produced. By upgrading its software, Ethereum is changing the process to “proof of stake” which will lower energy consumption, attract more users, and speed up transactions. 🏎
Climate activists have long criticized digital assets because producing them uses enormous amounts of electricity and generates large CO2 emissions. According to some estimates, Ethereum’s shift to proof of stake will reduce its energy consumption by more than 99 percent. 📉
The Merge not only could help the environment, but it will also result in renewed interest from institutional investors. According to a report by Bank of America, this event can lure more money to Ethereum from ESG investors – who only invest in businesses that achieve certain environmental, social and corporate-governance goals.
The Ethereum Merge Is Done, Opening a New Era for the Second-Biggest Blockchain
🧠 LLMs & Text being a Universal Interface
This article by Roon (on twitter as @tszzl), well-known Twitter poaster and AI researcher begins by harkening back to a saying of Unix co-creator, Doug McIlroy:
“This is the Unix philosophy: write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.” 💭
FYI: “Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969.” (source: our good old Wikipedia). 📺
It goes to say that using letters and words that made sense as an initial interface between machines and computers is powerful. The founders of Unix noted this power that came from creating composable tools that operated on streams of text. 📚
These programs could then be used by nearly anyone without worrying about undoing others’ work and could then continue on building in unison.
In 2019, Alex Radford came out with a seminal paper that unleashed the era of language modelling and that the first software created through this paper was too dangerous and powerful to be released into the wild. This ushered in the age of large language models with OpenAI releasing GPT-2 (an open-source artificial intelligence that generates synthetic text samples). 💬
Previously, researchers obsessed with entering pristinely labelled, clean datasets to ensure the learning process of the billions of parameters in the models but now, in the era of LLMs (Large Language Models), they tend to dump whole mountains of raw data into the jaws of an ever-hungry model. 🤤
This results in models displaying shocking signs of general intelligence. For example, GPT-3, the successor to the first open LLM and one of the world’s most known models out there can sufficiently reason and perform tasks like summarising documents & so on. 😳
This also leads to some notions of prompt engineering where by entering the right keywords in the right order, you can create results that would have otherwise taken hours if not days of manual work. Models like DALL-E & Stable Diffusion are also attacking one of the previously heralded bastions of human intelligence & creativity: art. 🖼
Suddenly, we begin to see an extension of what Doug might have imagined. Read more below!👇
In this new episode, Yacine welcomed Quentin Sannié, co-founder of Devialet and now CEO of Genesis, a company inventing the first rating of soil health integrating biodiversity, carbon and pollution diagnosis so that farmers can know the impact of their practices on the environment and their links with yields. 🌱
Among the topics that both of them cover in this episode: how Quentin discovered entrepreneurship when he was still a student, how he borrowed some money in 1985 to buy his first Mac, the one skill any entrepreneur must have according to him, and many more. 💡
"Just because no one swims there doesn't mean you can't do it."
So, if you’re a French speaker (and listener), go check it out!
InternshipsAnalyst - Direction Fonds de Fonds - Bpifrance (Paris)
VC Analyst - Serena (Paris)
JobsVC Associate - 50 Partners Impact (Paris)
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Take care, and see you next week,
The whole baby vc crew 💛
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