OpenAI rolling out plugins, lab-grown chicken getting FDA approval, BCG hoping for more impact unicorns, and many more...
What's Up Tech? #130
Welcome to our 130th newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Julia Bartsch, Arturo Ancira García, Noé Michas, 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 IntegrityNext and Rountable
News from last week with OpenAI rolling out ChatGPT Plugins and the US FDA approving lab-grown ‘GOOD Meat’ chicken product
Our content of the week with a report from BCG on the hoped-for rise of Impact Unicorns in France
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
🌱 IntegrityNext raised €100M to further deploy its supply chain software
Despite the recent turmoil in tech, let’s zoom in on some good news coming from Munich, where IntegrityNext has raised €100M for its cloud-based supply chain software. The company’s platform helps organizations automatically audit and monitor their supplier networks according to environmental and sustainability governance (ESG) rules. 📖
These ESG rules can either be defined by the company itself or can be adapted from the growing body of regulations. The startup's main objective is to enhance the sustainability of supply chains by improving transparency and compliance to ESG rules. 🤝
The funding round was led by EQT Growth and this fresh funding will be used to keep growing the platform and expand its customer base across the US and Europe. 🌍
IntegrityNext raises $109M for a platform to audit supply chains for ESG compliance
🤝 Roundtable raised $3.2M… on Roundtable
Paris-based startup Roundtable is building a platform aiming at easing the process of raising angel money for European startups. It notably takes care of the administrative, legal and financial aspects of the fundraising process (e.g. setting up a special purpose vehicle (SPV) when a startup is raising money), and has already worked with startups across France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. 🇪🇺
Thus, and without any surprise, Roundtable has used its very own platform to raise $3.2M from 100+ business angels. Among the business angels already well active on the platform, one can name-drop Roxanne Varza, Aircall co-founder Olivier Pailhes, Paul Lê and many more.
👀 OpenAI rolls out ChatGPT Plugins
ChatGPT is gradually rolling out plugins to study their real-world use, impact, safety and alignment challenges. This will allow for a vast range of use cases and create a community that shapes the future of human-AI interaction. 🤖
Plugins can give language models access to information that is too recent, too personal, or too specific to be included in the training data. They can also enable safe, constrained actions on behalf of the user, increasing the usefulness of the system overall. 🌐
OpenAI is working on safety systems to mitigate potential risks such as prompt injection, fraudulent or spam emails, and bypassing safety restrictions. 🔒
Plugins will likely have wide-ranging societal implications, with AI technologies having a big effect on job transformation, displacement, and creation. OpenAI is eager to collaborate with external researchers and customers to study these impacts. 🚀
Browsing is also being introduced to allow language models to read information from the internet, expanding the amount of content they can discuss and opening up new possibilities for ChatGPT users. 🔍
We're gradually seeing LLMs (short for Large Language Models) bring the internet back to text-based User Interfaces – similar to how people used terminals but now with natural language. This means users can interact with computers in a more intuitive and flexible way, allowing for easier automation of complex tasks. It's an exciting development that's making computing more accessible and user-friendly than ever before, and brings us a step closer to an Operating System based on plain' old english. 💬
🍖 Alternative proteins — getting one step closer to commercialization
After writing in last week's edition about the complex regulatory process in Europe that alternative protein products have to undergo before approval gets possibly granted by the European Food Safety Authority, we’re now back with some good news from across the pond. 🇺🇸
The company GOOD Meat has received a "no questions" letter form the US Food and and Drug Administration (FDA), as part of its pre-market consultation. This letter gives clearance to GOOD Meat that its cultivated chicken meat is safe for human consumption. This paves the way for GOOD Meat's products to be sold to the US consumers. The last step is clearing the final hurdle with the US Department of Agriculture before starting production of cultivated chicken products in the company's 3,000+ liters bioreactor. 😳
FDA approves lab-grown ‘GOOD Meat’ chicken product, second such authorization in US
🌱/💲 The rise of Impact Unicorns ?
Other than being a legendary animal, unicorns are also startups that reached at least a 1-billion-dollar valuation in less than 10 years, usually thanks to disruptive innovations. 📈
In France, 29 unicorns have emerged over the last years and Emmanuel Macron’s goal is to reach 100 French unicorns by 2030. 👀
While some global challenges such as climate change needs to be tackled quickly to avoid dramatic consequences, a report by BCG and Mouvement Impact France claims that we should establish new measurements to promote “Impact Unicorns”. Indeed, the current startup valuation methods only rely on financial metrics. Therefore, in their report, they propose to include within the valuation method, all the costs avoided thanks to the activity of the impact startup. For instance, costs avoided by sparing CO2 emissions or by helping an unemployed person back in the workforce. 🤝
Moreover, as the billion-dollar valuation is usually equivalent to a €50M EBITDA, French impact startups could obtain the Unicorn status when their activities enable to avoid €50M of costs for the French society. 🤔
A proposed objective in the report is to have 10 impact unicorns out of the 100 French unicorns awaited for 2030. A possible solution to help that goal would be to allocate 10% of France 2030’s fund to impact startups. For more info, check the complete report. 👇
Internships
VC Analyst (Deep Tech) - Elaia (Paris)
VC Analyst (Digital Ventures) - Elaia (Paris)
Portfolio Finance Intern - APX (Berlin)
Jobs
Senior Associate - XAnge (Paris)
👉 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! 🤝
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Take care, and see you next week,
The whole baby vc crew 🖤