MicroLEDs, electric aviation, a new Quantum-specific fund, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #150
Welcome to our 150th newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Justine Pelisson.
A huge congrats to our 66 new fellows who will be part of our upcoming bootcamps in France, the UK, and the DACH region! 👏 Thank you to everyone who applied and took the time to share their motivation to join baby vc. We hope to see you next batch💛
Fundraisings from last week with Aledia, H55, and Redstone VC
News from last week with Amazon and Anthropic’s gen AI partnership, Mistral AI’s first LLM model, and Spotify new voice-cloning feature
Internships & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 🌞
💡 Aledia raised €120M to scale its MicroLEDs (🇫🇷)
Grenoble-based startup Aledia has raised a further €120 million to accelerate production of its MicroLEDs for the next generation of flat screens. 🖥
Aledia has been developing a unique 3D LED technology; whereas traditional LEDs emit light at the surface, Aledia's LEDs emit light in 3D, thanks to nanowire emitters pushed onto the surface of a substrate like trees in a forest. This offers the advantage of a more efficient and cost-effective manufacturing, essential for scaling the production of new display technologies. 👌
🔌 H55 raised CH45M to support electric aviation (🇨🇭)
The Swiss company H55, revolutionizing the aviation industry with its electric propulsion and battery management systems to foster sustainable travel, has just closed its series C round at CH45M. ✈️
The fundings will be used to build a factory in Montreal, as well as towards automating its already- existing production facilities. It should also help H55 reach new certifications for its battery solutions. 🔋
🧨 Redstone VC announces new €52M Quantum Fund (🇩🇪)
Redstone, a German-based European VC fund following “selective” investment strategies, has just announced the first closing of its Quantum-specific fund - in partnership with the Swiss quantum accelerator QAI Ventures. 👏
Redstone will invest in seed and series A startups focusing on quantum computing technologies. The new fund already counts 4 startups from QAI’s 2023 summer batch. 🎉
😎 Amazon steps up in the AI race through a key partnership with Anthropic
Big week in the generative AI field! Amazon has just announced a very strategic alliance with the AI startup Anthropic, OpenAI’s direct competitor. This partnership, which is valued at $3B, will allow Anthropic to train its foundation models on the AWS cloud, while making these models accessible to all AWS customers - offering them unique benefits (early access, special features, fine-tuning of the models,…).😏
Amazon and Anthropic Announce Strategic Collaboration to Advance Generative AI
🤖 Mistral AI announces its first LLM model
Paris-based gen AI startup Mistral AI, who had managed to raise €105M four weeks after its creation without having any product, has just released its first LLM Model Mistral-7B in open source. The ‘small’ model (with 7 billion parameters) is already outperforming all other models in its category, as well as 13B parameters’ models (such as Meta’s Llama 2 13B). While also requiring half the computing power…💪
These first results confirm Mistral’s credo and ambition around the potential of open source software, competing today against proprietary models.👾
Mistral AI Makes its First Large Language Model Free for Everyone
🎙Spotify to translate podcasts through voice cloning
Huge news in the podcast scene! Spotify just announced its new AI-powered voice translation feature to allow podcasters to clone their own voices and automatically translate them to other languages (imagine being able to access a native-language version of your favorite American shows!). 💥
This new feature will rely on Open AI’s voice transcription tool Whisper. As Spotify’s VP of personalization emphasized, “by matching the creator’s own voice, Voice Translation gives listeners around the world the power to discover and be inspired by new podcasters in a more authentic way than ever before.” 🔓
Spotify is Going to Clone Podcasters’ Voices — and Translate Them to Other Languages
Internships
VC Analyst Intern - Educapital (Paris)
VC Analyst Intern - Serena (Paris)
Investment Analyst - Adara Ventures (Madrid)
Jobs
Ventures Associate - Plug and Play (Munich)
Valuations Manager - Octopus Ventures (London)
👉 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 🖤