Welcome to our 132nd newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Justine Pelisson, Alma Meyer, 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 Zealy, AMSilk and HeatTransformers
News from last week with Samsung
Our content of the week with SISTA’s newest infographics on the state of the gender funding gap
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
😎 Zealy raised $3.5M to accelerate recruitment and become the operating system for community-led companies (🇫🇷)
Zealy - a French web3 community engagement platform originally known as Crew3 - has announced a pre-seed funding of $3.5M to grow its engineering, product, and design teams. The round was led by Redalpine and included globally known investors like Connect Ventures, Aglaé Ventured, Kima Ventures, Purple, Station F, Founders Future, Pareto Holdings, as well as Web3 expert Business Angels from the Sandbox, POAP, DFNS and others. 👏🏻
Initially known as Crew3, Zealy helps web2 and web3 companies better engage with their communities through gamified tasks that they can fulfill in order to win various rewards (e.g. creating user-generated content, boosting something on social networks, coding a page, etc.). As co-founder and CEO Mathis Grosjean said, “in the current market, every company in the world will potentially try to become a community-led company. […] At Zealy, we help companies onboard, educate, entertain, and grow their communities without spending too much money, and in a scalable manner”. 👥
🚀 AMSilk raised a €25M extension to accelerate its industrial scale-up and worldwide commercialization of complex proteins (🇩🇪)
AMSilk, the world’s first industrial supplier of bio-fabricated silk protein materials, has raised a €25M extension round to its initial €29M Series C, led by existing investors ATHOS, and joined by Novo Holdings, Cargill, and MIG Capital. 💶
The funds will be used to meet the increasing demand for AMSilk’s extremely innovative materials (we’re talking about a very unique silk polymer technology platform that reprograms microorganisms to make them produce silk proteins into several forms such as powders, hydrogens, fibers, and coatings… combined to a fermentation process to transform these into complex proteins) - today used in large quantities by various market segments such as textiles (e.g. for high performance sports clothing), medical use (e.g. as a gel or a spray for wound care), or consumer goods (e.g. cosmetic). 🧫
♨️ HeatTransformers raised €15M to accelerate European heat pump installation (🇳🇱)
Founded in 2018, Utrecht-based HeatTransformers is a one-stop shop for heat pumps installation, helping customer along their entire journey from initial enquiry to final heat pump installation and maintenance. Stijn Otten, co-founder of HeatTransformers phrases it better than us: “heat pumps […] are the essential key to unlocking the cost-efficient decarbonisation of heat in our homes,”. 📉
Climate tech enthusiasts among us will be happy to learn the team had raised a $15M Series A to expand its operations in Germany and the UK and scale up heat pump adoption across the continent. The round was notably led by Energy Impact Partners and participation from former investors including Fair Capital Partners’ Impact Fund and ENERGIIQ. 👀
😵 Worst profit for Samsung since 2009: the weight of memory chips
Tough first quarter for Samsung Electronics Co, the world’s largest maker of television, tablets smartphone and memory chips, who just announced a 96% drop in its operating profits (from £14T in 2022 to £600B this year…) due to the current economic conditions and decreasing post-Covid demand. As the demand for electronics at home exploded during the pandemic, accelerating significantly the demand for memory chips, the industry experienced a chip shortage. But as the overall economy has slowed down, so has the demand for chips (including by semiconductor manufacturers) - where most buyers are today selling through their remaining inventory…📱
Even though Samsung will cut its memory chips production on the shorter term while end markets work through their inventory - adjusting its production to a “meaningful level” - they will still “continue to invest in infrastructure to secure essential cleanrooms and to expand R&D investment to solidify tech leadership,”, waiting for the supply-demand situation to improve. 🚀
Unsurprisingly, Samsung had just announced last month its plan to invest $230.8B in South Korea’s mega chip-making plan of building 5 chip factories… 💾
Samsung to Cut Memory Chip Output After Worst Profit Since 2009
🔍 SISTA released its newest survey on the state of funding in female-led startups
SISTA is an NGO created in 2018 by Céline Lazorthes, Tatiana Jama, and Valentine de Lasteyrie, with Roxanne Varza quickly joining the team in 2020 following the merger with Start'Her. The SISTA VC Community was born. Finally, the team launched SISTAFUND last fall, its very own VC-arm. 💰
SISTA is conducting numerous awareness-raising actions to work towards reducing the funding gap between female and male entrepreneurs. These include the now viral video "What if we asked the same questions to women and men" and the publication of reports. The best known is the "barometer of women's funding in tech", published in 2019 in collaboration with BCG, and renewed every year since. 🌡
The latest infographics was published last week, co-produced with Eldorado.co, the start-up funding platform. The main results remain alarming:
Out of €15B raised by French start-ups in 2022 (VS €11.7B in 2021) for a total of 1103 deals, only 11% of this amount was raised by female or mixed founding teams. More precisely, it is only €126M or 0.81% of the total amount of investments.
There are many ways to reduce the gender gap funding. One of the first is to sign the SISTA charter, which can be viewed and signed here!
Internships
Analyst - 50 Partners Impact (Paris)
Analyst - Femmes Business Angels (Paris)
Jobs
Head of Investment - Femmes Business Angels (Paris)
Investment Analyst - CVX Ventures (London)
FoodTech Analyst Digital West - Earlybird (Berlin)
👉 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! 🤝
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 🖤