Welcome to our 108th newsletter. It was written with 💛 by Saish Rane, Medina Sinani and Angèle Sahraoui
Fundraisings from last week with Homa Games and Quantum Systems
News from last week with Resonance and TikTok (or Amazon 2.0?)
Our content of the week with Parachute Earth
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 💛
👾 Homa Games raises $100M to empower indie game devs
Quadrille Capital & Headline led this Series B round in Homa Games, a Paris-based game development studio that focuses on helping indie (i.e independent, small) game studios reach the top charts in app stores through their data & product testing tools — thus providing them better ammunition against well-established game development studios. 💪
Homa has helped build and release 80+ games with their platform including Merge Master, a mobile strategy game that has been on 🔝 top of the charts since the beginning of the year. In total these games have been downloaded more than a billion times. 🤯
Homa Games raises another $100 million for its data-driven mobile gaming tools - Techcrunch
🛰 Quantum Systems raised $17.5M with Peter Thiel and Project A
The Munich-based startup sells drones that can track and spy on groups, and then transfer the images in real-time and in an encrypted manner via mini-computers. 🎮
Project A and Peter Thiel invested $17.5 million in Quantum Systems and were joined by Munich-based VC firm Sonno Capital. Following some of their statements, investors in Quantum are quite optimistic to see the company reaching a 9-digit valuation soon. 💵
Lastly, the aircraft built by Quantum is a dual-use product. This means that all aircrafts have a dual purpose and can be used both for military and civilian purposes. That's why the devices can also be used in agriculture, for volume calculation in open-cast mining, to survey work on large construction sites, or for automated inspections of railroad tracks (yes, some of these use cases are slightly scary). 🛰
Peter Thiel invests in Quantum-Systems - Alstin Capital invests in Ancla - Climatiq raises 6 million
💵 French Tech has another (new) fund: Resonance!
After having written about Sista’s SISTAFUND last week, it’s now time to welcome Resonance, a new €150M Paris-based VC focused on European early-stage startups. 🚨
Behind Resonance: Pierre-Édouard Stérin and Otium Capital, his family office. In fact, Resonance will sit within Otium and will be led by Maxime Le Dantec, formerly working at Balderton, and Alban Oudin, formerly working at XAnge (and both former uni friends). 🎓
Two interesting elements to be noted: the fund was conceived to be evergreen (i.e it will have no end date) and a great part of its profits will be donated to Stérin’s charity, Le Fonds du Bien Commun. 🤝
French family office backs new €150m evergreen fund for early-stage European companies
📦 TikTok is planning to become the new Amazon!
Early last week, Axios reported that TikTok is planning to build its own product fulfillment centers in the U.S. — and therefore, a supply chain system that would become a challenger to Amazon’s. 🤺
How did Axios notice? By giving a closer look at job ads recently posted by TikTok on LinkedIn and by noticing many of them were concerned with a new set of warehousing and delivery services. In particular, the team’s attention was caught by the following statement in one of these job postings: “[TikTok’s] mission is to help sellers improve their operational capability and efficiency, provide buyers a satisfying shopping experience and ensure fast and sustainable growth of TikTok Shop.”.
This move can largely be explained by a willingness on the part of TikTok to turn e-commerce into its next major revenue stream — next to its massive ads business. 💰
After Facebook, Instagram, and Google, it seems that Amazon is next on TikTok’s list. We’ll see where that fight goes! ⚔️
Scoop: TikTok chases Amazon with plans for U.S. fulfillment centers
🌎 The Coming Age of Climate Industrialism
We have all heard about the invention of the steam-powered engine and its role in bringing about the Industrial Revolution, but with the multiplicity of investment in clean energy, green technologies, etc., we will witness the rise of a new form of Industrialism, one focused on Climate solutions. 🌍
During the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, up to 40% of the workforce was in factories. Thus, and if we’re to participate in bringing a new dynamism to cities & building/improving them for the future, the industrial sector will have to break its shackles and upgrade itself. And it is, with increasing government support, new talent, founders, funders, and innovators: we’re starting to see something promising. 🤩
Industries have to start off in cities to break away from the classic thinking of using “soft”ware to solve what is in essence, a “hard” problem. We can see such an example in Paris with the creation of the Paris Fonds Vert to back fast-growing companies and help them industrialise faster. If you’d like to learn more about how this affects us and how you can participate, we definitely recommend you read the article below. 👇
Internships
VC Analyst - Kerala (Paris)
VC Analyst - Partech (Paris)
👉 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 💛