Microsoft wants to make Google dance, AI trends for 2023, biochar, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #124
Welcome to our 124th newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Victoire Gendre, Guillaume Laheurte, Saish Rane, Medina Sinani and Angèle Sahraoui
Fundraisings from last week with NetZero and Exotrail
News from last week with Adam Neumann, Microsoft and Google
Our content of the week with Eldorado’s AI trends for 2023
Internship & Job offers of the week
And before we dive into this week’ edition, the whole baby vc team is absolutely thrilled to announce that registrations for our bootcamps in France, Germany… and in the UK will be opened this week! 🇫🇷🇩🇪🇬🇧
Bootcamps will simultaneously take place from March 16th to May 1st, and will be animated by leading European VCs. From the creation of a VC fund to the exit operations, each bootcamp will be composed of 9 sessions that will aim at providing you with a 360° vision of Venture Capital. We’ll keeping you posted on our website and LinkedIn! 👀
And now, wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
🌿 NetZero raises €11M in Series A (🇫🇷)
NetZero is one of the 15 or so GreenTech companies identified by Elon Musk's foundation as part of a competition for projects working towards decarbonization, and this €11M Series A is a record-breaking fundraising for a European climate tech.
NetZero's ambition? To reach 2M tons of CO2 stored per year by 2030.
How? By using biochar (short for 'bio-charcoal') which is "an organic material carbonised by heating in an oxygen-limited environment and used as a soil improver", and one of the only negative emission solutions recognized by the IPCC. 🏆
NetZero currently has two operational factories, one in Cameroon and one in Brazil. The objective behind this fundraising is to further improve the solution so that it can later be replicated on a large scale for greater impact. 📈
NetZero Biochar Carbon Removal Startup Raises €11M In Series A
🛰️ Exotrail raised $58M to boost its footprint in USA and Asia (🇫🇷)
The French SpaceTech start-up created in 2015, announced last week an impressive $58M Series B round led by BPI France, Eurazeo, and CELAD, a software engineering company - with participation from the existing investors. Another exciting SpaceTech round after The Exploration Company, earlier this month, with a €40M Series A. 👀
Exotrail has developed a space mobility and logistic service, offering a new way for satellite operators to manage their constellations. They offer two main products: a small satellite propulsion system and operating software for space activities. 👾
The next 12 months will be focused on growing the team from 90 people to 150+, and increasing its already impressive customer base that includes the European Space Agency, Airbus, Thales Alenia Space, or Eutelsat. 🪐
🎯 Adam Neumann reveals his vision for Flow
Adam Neumann, the co-founder of WeWork, has unveiled details about his new residential real-estate startup, Flow. The main financial backer, Andreessen Horowitz, has already invested $350M in the project — the largest investment the firm has made in a single company.
Concretely, Flow plans to combine the best elements of apartment renting and homeownership, and has already acquired a real estate investment trust with 3,000 units across multiple cities. The goal is to create a unique and community-driven living experience. ⚡️
Neumann explained that Flow would offer renters a sense of community and ownership by giving them a form of fractional ownership. He outlined the four pillars of Flow's business model:
A technology-focused property management company,
A real-estate asset management company,
A financial services company,
A "value-creating mechanism" that shares value with creators.
The fourth pillar may involve blockchain and crypto as Neumann has recently explored the space, and Flow's financial services arm is rumored to include a digital crypto wallet. 💸
⚔️ Microsoft and Google enter battle mode
As we wrote about it 2 weeks ago, Microsoft doubled down its commitment to OpenAI — the giant behind ChatGPT. Last week, Microsoft went further with its AI commitment by announcing a new version of its reach engine Bing that contains built-in ChatGPT support which you can try just here. 🚀
Just on the day before, Google announced the release of its own AI-powered chatbot called Bard which is still in private beta at the moment. That said, the announcement did not unfold exactly as planned as Google’s chatbot gave a wrong answer in its first demo.
The fact Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned about Google: “I want people to know that we made them dance” seems to indicate the two behemoths are just entering a new phase of their decades-long duel. 🤺
Google Announces Bard, Its Rival To Microsoft-Backed ChatGPT
Our content of the week is brought to you by our partner Eldorado. Massive thanks to Océane Guirao and Aude Delépine for having written the piece below!
Artificial Intelligence: trends for 2023
Artificial intelligence has been on the front stage since the end of 2022. The emergence of "Generative AI" has completely disrupted the market! How to explain this attractiveness and what are the trends for 2023?
🧠 Artificial Intelligence: What are we Talking About?
According to ChatGPT:
"Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science that aims to create computer systems that can simulate or mimic the reasoning and understanding capabilities of human intelligence. [...] These algorithms are trained on a large amount of big data so that they can perform specific tasks, such as speech recognition, machine translation, autonomous driving, etc."
In short, AI relies on data as well as computer programs and their training with the goal of mimicking human reasoning abilities.
♟️ The Players
Here is a (non-exhaustive) panorama of French investors and incubators active in Artificial Intelligence:
🚀 Startups in France and internationally
When we talk about Artificial Intelligence in France, we especially think of data or health startups. Here are some of the AI startups in FrenchTech (non-exhaustive):
Hugging Face (based in the United States): democratizes artificial intelligence through open source
Incepto: publishes a medical imaging solution based on artificial intelligence
PhotoRoom: facilitates product photo editing for e-tailers thanks to its deep learning algorithms
Owkin: uses AI to find the right treatment for each patient
Diabeloop: automates and personalizes diabetes treatment
yzr: automates data normalization with Artificial Intelligence
📊 The Figures
In the United States, the trend is also confirmed in 2022 as shown in this article from Pitchbook, which highlights how remarkable the performance is in a context of contraction of the Venture Capital market. Below the evolution of the number of rounds of financing and the total amount raised in the United States, Artificial Intelligence seems to be entering a new dimension.
To conclude, the global artificial intelligence market was estimated at $119B in 2022 and is projected to grow 38% annually to reach $1,597B by 2030. Similarly, the "Generative AI" market was estimated at $10.8B in 2022 and projections indicate a 10-fold increase by 2032 to reach $118B, or 27% annual growth.
If you want more information about this subject you can read our article 👀
Internships
VC Analyst - Raise Venture (Paris)
VC Analyst - 50 Partners (Paris)
Jobs
Associate - Speedinvest (Berlin)
👉 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 🖤