Welcome to our 119th newsletter. It was written with 💛 by Saish Rane, Medina Sinani and Angèle Sahraoui
Fundraisings from last week with Qvantum, Perspectum, and SpaceX
News from last week with twitter getting hacked
Our content of the week with Eldorado’s 2022 French Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Report
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 💛
♨️ Qvantum raises €41M with Ikeasfaren & Thomas von Koch
In order to make heat pumps ubiquitous in urban districts 🌇 across Europe, Qvantum wants to become the new-gen air sourced heat pump supplier for modern homes 🏡 as it raises €41M with Ikea’s VC arm Ikeasfaren and former CEO of EQT, Thomas von Koch. 🤝
Heat pumps are gaining significant traction in the Nordics as Helsinki looks to install a 500MW heat pump system that will pull water right from the Baltic Sea and looks to provide up to 40% of the city’s heat supply by 2029. 🤯
🧫 Perspectum completes Series C first close at $36M
UK-based precision medicine company Perspectum that develops medical imaging tools for multiorgan inflammatory conditions and oncology 🦀 recently closed the first tranche of its Series C round with Oppenheimer Holdings.
Using advanced imaging & genetics, it enables early detection of chronic metabolic diseases and provide diagnostics & analysis. They also recently announced a collaboration with Nuance, acquired by Microsoft early last year. 🤝
🚀 SpaceX is raising around $750M in new funding at a $137B valuation
CNBC reported last Monday that Elon’s rocket and satellite company was raising $750M in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, an amount that will add up to the $2.2B already raised by SpaceX last year. 💸
The valuation agreed on for this new fundraising is said to be set at $137B—the largest valuation for a U.S.-based private company. Such a strong valuation is however not fully surprising as SpaceX had offered to insiders to sell shares for $77 each last December, a price that valued it close to $140B.
🤯 Hackers publish data of 235M Twitter users
A dataset containing details of a huge number of Twitter accounts is freely available on the Internet right now. Alon Gal, the co-founder of the Israeli IT security company Hudson Rock, recently discovered that records of 235 million users of Twitter were published on an online hacker forum. 🆘
The dataset lists the email addresses or phone numbers, usernames, and the plain name of the Twitter accounts that were hacked. Politicians, journalists, and bankers are among those affected. 👀
Last July, hackers were uncovered trying to sell 5.4 million Twitter accounts along with the associated email addresses or phone numbers. The perpetrators are said to have used the same security hole as the one used in the current leak. 😱
Now, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has launched investigations into the short messaging service. 🔍
Twitter hacked, 200 million email addresses leaked: Researcher
Our content of the week is brought to you by our partner Eldorado. Massive thanks to Sacha Morel and Aude Delépine for having written the piece below!
French Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Report: 2022, a year like no other
A year full of ups and downs
Last May, the geopolitical and economic context was starting to seriously shake the Tech ecosystems around the world, and for the first time since 2020 we could observe a global contraction of Venture Capital. At that time, we therefore took the opportunity of our monthly fundraising report to discuss the likely scenarios for the year 2022 (the full article is retrievable here). 📝
"What can we say at this point and what is the outlook for H1 and 2022?"
In our opinion, 3 scenarios were possible:
- The first was unlikely (15-20%). It was a matter of projecting the average observed over these first 5 months (€1.5B/month) over the rest of the year, which would have made it possible to reach €9B for H1 and €18B raised by 2022.
- The second was optimistic (40-45%) but reasonable, assuming an average of €1B raised per month over the rest of the year. This would have brought us to €8.5B for H1 and €14.5B for the year 2022.
- The latter was more pessimistic (35-40%) and betted on a larger slowdown with an average of €600M raised per month which would have closed H1 at €8.1B and the year at €11.7B (the same amount as in 2021)."
Shortly afterwards, we published a half-yearly report noting the first consequences of the change in the international economic climate. And at the end of the summer, we proposed an analysis of the reasons and especially the consequences of the market contraction on our ecosystem. 👀
As these topics are now well known and have been widely covered in the media, we offer a quick summary below:
- The Covid-19 crisis is leaving its mark: economic measures, liquidity injections, the explosion of digital services, the situation in China, etc.
- The war in Ukraine complicates international relations: insecurity, uncertainty, difficulties in supplying raw materials and energy.
- The bubble that had formed in 2020 and 2021 had started to burst at the end of 2021 in the United States in reality, and 2022 and its geopolitical context came to accelerate this burst in the world. 📉
Consequences: inflation, decline in growth, change in investor behavior, drop in startup valuations.
Finally, in Q3, we benefited from the expertise and advice of Xavier Lazarus (Elaia) and Adrien Chaltiel (Eldorado) to help entrepreneurs manage this period of crisis, during the Webinar: Avis de Tempête sur la FrenchTech.
Now that we have all the data, a question arises:
What are the results of the French entrepreneurial ecosystem in 2022?
While Bruno Le Maire mentioned very ambitious and optimistic results during the summer of 2021: "The initial goal was to reach €20B in investments by the end of 2022, I propose as a new goal €30B."
Unfortunately, and despite its good performance, France was not immune to the consequences of the market paradigm shift.
Dive into Eldorado’s Full Annual Ecosystem Review to learn more! (in 🇫🇷)
Internships
VC Analyst - Eurazeo (London, ASAP)
VC Analyst - Rivus Capital (Munich)
Jobs
Associate - Entrepreneur First (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 💛