Welcome to our 117th newsletter. It was written with 💛 by Margaux Le Brun, Mathilde Valin, Saish Rane, Medina Sinani and Angèle Sahraoui
Fundraisings from last week with Enpal and Giskard
News from last week with Nuclear Fusion and Picus Capital
Our content of the week about how to develop your skills with Marc Andreessen
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 💛
🏡 Enpal raises €855M in debt funding (🇩🇪)
The German Unicorn Enpal raised €855M in debt funding to further develop its solar systems. The funds were committed by Blackrock Alternatives, ING, Pricoa Private Capital, Unicredit, and Infranity. 💰
Founded in 2017 by Mario Kohle, Enpal develops the first all-inclusive package for a climate-neutral home. These kits include photovoltaic systems, electric vehicle chargers, energy storage, green electricity tariffs and smart energy managers. 🍀
The company is said to be among the fastest-growing energy companies in Europe. It currently has 30K customers and is installing approximately 2K solar energy systems monthly. It became a Unicorn in October 2021 after a Series-C financing round. 🦄
According to the company, this funding round is Europe's largest residential solar debt to date! It will allow the startup to install more than 30K solar systems, Electric Vehicle chargers and storage units. ♻️
German solar power systems provider Enpal locks down €855 million
🤖 Giskard raises €1.5M with Elaia and Bessemer Venture Partners to help companies ensure AI Quality (🇫🇷)
With OpenAI’s recent product releases (you might have seen people generating paintings with Dall-E and poems with ChatGPT here and there), the wider public got a bit crazy about AI and the possibilities opened by new models being launched. Yet, in reality, shipping algorithms that work is not that simple. Many companies use models (made in-house or open source) with flaws or biases that remain unnoticed, which can have a huge impact on their business decisions. Giskard notes for instance that “Since 2019, over 2,000 incidents related to Artificial Intelligence models have been reported on the public AI Incident Database. (...) In 2021, a U.S. company, Zillow, lost $569 million due to a robustness bias in its pricing model.”
Think of the implications biases in models used in healthcare to diagnose or produce drugs could have… 💀
The French company founded by Alex Combessie (CEO, ex software engineer at Dataïku), Jean-Marie John-Mathews (CPO, PhD in AI Ethics and ex Data scientist at Thales), and Andrei Avtomonov (CTO, ex software engineer at Dataïku as well) just raised its first round led by Elaia, along with Bessemer Venture Partners and Business Angels like Julien Chaumond (CTO of Hugging Face) or Oscar Salazar (Founding CTO of Uber). 💸
The company counts a dozen of clients, among which Webedia, CGI, Citibeats, Altaroad, or Unifai. 📈
Giskard closes its first financing round to expand Enterprise offering
🤖 Picus Capital launches new program to promote crypto and Web3
With a few clients already under its belt, Picus.xyz is launching with a few earlier Picus Capital investments like Nefta, which collaborates with game studios to incorporate Web3 features, and D2X, a pan-European digital derivatives exchange. 🚀
It is committed to supporting crypto and Web3 businesses and believes it can surprise those who expect a "crypto downfall". 🤭
Picus Capital has focused its efforts from day one on logistical challenges, including hiring the right talent, tailoring product design, and planning fundraising/ marketing. 🌋
The investments will be in the form of equity funding and digital tokens, targeting founders with ideas that challenge Web3's "complexity for consumers and developers”. ⚡️
VC Picus Capital unleashes a new vehicle with its eye on making crypto and Web3 wins post-FTX
☢️ A step closer towards accessing the most efficient source of energy ever found by humans — nuclear fusion
A week ago, on December 13th, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced that for the first time ever, it had managed to create more energy from a fusion reaction than the energy used to start it. Nuclear fusion is the reaction that powers the sun and stars. This is an important feat: one kilogram of fusion fuel could provide the same amount of energy as 10 million kilograms of fossil fuel. So building commercially-usable fusion reactors could just be humanity’s way out of non-renewable energy. 🔋
Even though commercial fusion is likely to still be decades off, the VC sphere entered the game already. Overall, according to Crunchbase, start-ups in nuclear energy have raised c. $3.4B over the past year:
TerraPower (🇺🇸), founded by Bill Gates 14 years ago, raised $750 million in August led by Gates and South Korea’s SK Group to build a demonstration site for its Natrium nuclear technology,
NuScale Power (🇺🇸), founded in 2007, develops small modular reactors and went public via a SPAC in May 2022,
The biggest VC fusion investment was in December 2021: Commonwealth Fusion Systems (🇺🇸) raised more than $1.8 billion with Tiger Global,
And in November, Helion Energy (🇺🇸) had closed a $500 million Series E with Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI and former CEO of the US-based start-up accelerator Y Combinator).
Governments have their part to play too. Earlier this year, the US Department of Energy unveiled a 10-year strategy for developing commercial fusion energy. Europe is also part of the race with the ITER project, launched in 2007 in Saint Paul-lez-Durance (in the South of France) as an international joint experiment between China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States. Member countries engaged in a 35-year collaboration to build a large scale fusion reactor. ☢️
How you should think about developing your skills according to Marc Andreessen
If you listen to Marc Andreessen (tech entrepreneur and co-founder of a16z), “one of the single best ways you can maximise the impact you will have on the world and the success you will have in your career is by continuously developing and broadening your base of skills.”
The basis of his reasoning is a blog post by American comics author Scott Adams:
If you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:
Become the best at one specific thing.
Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.
The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare.
Which means you can develop a unique skill set by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. 💡
Andreessen views this as the secret formula to becoming a CEO: for him CEOs are almost never the best product visionaries, sales, finance or marketing people, or even the best managers, but they are top 25% in some of these skills.
This can be applied to university choices. As Marc puts it: “about combining an engineering [and a business] degree (...) I’ll hire as many of those people as I possibly can.”
And after university, here are the five skills Andreessen recommends developing to maximise one’s potential:
Communication: as “most people are terrible at it, because they never take it seriously as a skill to develop.” And yet, communication is the tool that allows you to get a wide range of people to act in a certain way. So it is through good communication only that you can have a significant impact. 📣
Management: it is useful in almost every project involving several people. And the best way to learn is to have a great manager (so you can try to optimise on that while looking for your first job!). 📆
Sales: i.e. convincing people to do what you want, by showing them it’s in their best interest (even if they don’t realise it first). This can be done by spending 1 or 2 years in an actual salesforce for instance.
Finance: basic financial theory, financial statements, budgeting and planning, corporate structure, how equity and debt markets work… This is especially useful if you want to start your own company (and don’t want to get screwed along the way). And this can be learnt in books or specialised press (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.)
International: time spent in other countries and cultures usually allows one to think more broadly. Having a global perspective should be a sure way to maximise future opportunities.
Internships
Visiting Analyst Internship - Speedinvest (🇩🇪)
Growth Intern - Eurazeo (🇫🇷)
👉 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 💛