Improving pilot training, Citron, Bedrock, Twitter taking the crypto route, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #133
Welcome to our 133rd newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Justine Pelisson, Ghita Benjelloun 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 Hinfact, Thynk and Citron
News from last week with Amazon joining the AI race and Twitter x eToro
Internship & Job offers of the week
And before we dive in this week’s edition:
This April, the team at baby vc kickstarted its first Deep Dive Series through which we receive investors, entrepreneurs and other experts every Tuesday during one month to talk about a specific vertical — and this first edition was dedicated to the Impact ecosystem. 🌎
The closing session will be next Tuesday, April 25th, on Zoom, and it will be open to the public!! 📣
So, join us for a session about Regulations and Trends. ⚖️
In particular, expect to hear about:
How impact investing is becoming the new standard.
Explore emerging trends and regulations (e.g. the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation) that will shape investors’ job.
You'll leave with the knowledge and tools to stay ahead of the curve in the industry and make a positive impact on the world.
The session will (of course) conclude with a Q&A session!
If you wonder what a session 🤔 looks like, this is your chance to join and hear from experts!
👉 Use this link to join the session on Tuesday 25th (7:00 pm CET)
Now, wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
✈️ Hinfact raised €4M to improve the training of airline pilots: taking Neuroscience & AI on a flight (🇫🇷)
Hinfact, a spin-off of the Neuroscience and artificial intelligence lab of ISAE-SUPAERO in Toulouse, has been developing since 2018 an eye-tracking technology and software to optimize the simulator training sessions for airline pilotes. It has just raised €4M last week with a mix of debt and equity in which Innovacom participated €1.5M. 💶
With its unique approach leveraging an eye tracking system to analyze the neural mechanisms of human error, Hinfact collects a lot of data during the simulator session (from flight parameters like speed, altitude, …to neural data like stress, eye movements, …to qualitative data entered by the instructor) in order to then derive an extensive debriefing with clear recommendations to airline companies on how to improve or enrich trainings offered to their pilotes.
The funds raised will allow Hinfact to accelerate its industrial development, expand the marketing of its solution, and to extend its technology to other sectors like the military, the nuclear industry and healthcare. 🚀
🏨 Thynk raised $13M Series A for its tailor-made CRM for the hospitality industry
Thynk is a data-driven hotel sales and operations management that empowers hoteliers “to do more with less, to adapt faster to market changes, and to focus on what leads to higher profit margins” to quote its CEO, Pascal Petit. Thynk notably focuses on hotel chains and other businesses in the hospitality industry that operate multiple properties. In particular, Thynk collects, cleans, centralizes and unifies customer data to create a unique ID for each client. Think of it as a turnkey information system for hotel groups! 📠
Thynk raised this round - notably led by Singular and with participation from returning investor Fly Ventures - while relying on an impressive revenue growth and a base of European, American and Middle Eastern customers. This Series A funding will enable the team to invest more in R&D and expand internationally. 🌎
Thynk wants to upgrade hotel stays with a vertical software platform
🍋 Citron raised €20M to expand its offering to meet the climatic and regulatory challenges of the energy transition (🇫🇷)
Great news from Citron, the reference SaaS platform in the field of energy transition for buildings, who has just announced a €20M round this week raised from Eiffel IG, BPI France Investissement and Entrepreneur Invest. Concretely, the company’s software collects all sorts of data related to the performance of real estate assets to analyze and monitor their energy efficiency. 🍀
Citron’s approach offers a unique response to multiple challenges (climate emergency, energy price explosion, decree of tertiary renovation, etc.), which has allowed them to be considered today as a leading actor in France with customers like Saint Gobain, Lagardère, LeBonCoin, Cégédim and others.
This latest round will help Citron develop more modules to expand its offering for customers throughout the entire energy transition value chain (such as air quality, renewable energy production, charging stations for EV, etc.) as well as penetrate new European markets beyond just France. 🚀
🐣 Amazon joins (late) the Generative AI race with latest platform launch: meet Amazon Bedrock
Remember how much we covered the generative AI topic over the past few weeks - from new players, promised features, to chat-GPT evolutions and the open letter around ethical concerns? Well, guess who just announced its own generative AI platform last week… 😎
Meet Bedrock, a new AWS cloud service that allows developers to build and scale generative AI models (such as chatbots, image generations using language prompts, and other applications) from pre-trained large language models (LLMs). These LLMs will be sourced from Anthropic, AI21Labs, Stability AI, as well as two other LLMs from Amazon’s own family. 👀
As companies today search to build new generative AI-driven models tailored to their own needs and goals, they don’t have the resources and expertise to develop their own large language models (at the core of any generative AI application). What Bedrock offers them is the ability to directly work off and build on a strong foundational model, already trained and experienced, to easily refine that model to respond to the company’s specificities. 🤓
Unsurprisingly, Amazon “had” to be a part of this race. As Gartner analyst Sid Nag pointed out, “the cloud providers are obviously the best suited to handle data-heavy generative AI, because they are the ones that have these hyper scale cloud computing storage offerings.”
Another key differentiating point on which Amazon hopes to leverage is its ability to provide a secure environment around the use of generative IA - at a time where most organizations really look to secure and guard their generative models. 🔑
😵 Twitter partners with eToro to allow users to trade stocks & cryptocurrencies: taking the blue social media bird to finance
Huge announcement last week from Twitter, who just partnered with the Israeli online trading platform eToro to allow Twitter users to directly access stocks, crypto and other financial assets from the platform. ⚡️
As of today, it is already possible for users to view real-time trading date through the recent “Cashtag” feature (basically you just search for a ticket symbol and insert the $ in front of it and the app shows you the price information from TradingView). Yet with the partnership, Twitter will expand its Cashback feature to many more instruments and asset classes, and users will seamlessly be redirected to eToro’s site to buy and sell assets directly there. 💵
According to Twitter, the platform has become a real active community for millions of “ordinary” investors, who turn to the social media to access financial news, share knowledge, and take part of investments-driven conversations. As eToro’s CEO Yoni Assia emphasizes too, “we’ve seen more and more of our users interact on Twitter and educate themselves about the markets”. ℹ️
The goal of the partnership is thus to provide a platform - if not THE platform - for young investors to easily access financial information and invest in stocks and cryptocurrencies. It is now clear that Twitter is quickly transforming into a “super app”, offering its users with financial services in addition of social media features… 🚀
Twitter partners with Israel-founded eToro to offer stocks and crypto on the platform
Internships
GPs Right-Hand Intern - Axeleo Capital (Paris)
Software Developer Working Student - Speedinvest (Munich, Berlin, or Vienna)
👉 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 🖤