Stripe, sustainable underwear, a new alt-protein trade association, Chat GPT-4, and many more...

What's Up Tech? #129

Mar 21, 2023

Welcome to our 129th newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Jean Nadreau, Julia Bartsch, Clément Favre, 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 Kovalee, Stripe and Le Slip Français
News from last week with a new alt-protein trade association and Chat GPT-4
Internship & Job offers of the week

Wishing you a pleasant read 🖤

📱 Mobile app development platform, Kovalee, has just secured €8M to expand (🇫🇷)

Kovalee, a French mobile application editor, announces a €8M Series A round of financing. This round of financing, led by IRIS alongside Breega, Digital Ventures (BpiFrance) and several business angels, will enable the company to improve its tools and double its workforce by recruiting 15 employees this year. 📈

Founded in 2020, Kovalee leverages AI, ML and its proprietary predictive and automation technology to improve the creation of non-gaming mobile apps. The startup claims it can turn any app into a "world leader" in its respective category.
Its customers are application developers. They can focus on content and code while Kovalee takes over the UX (User Experience), UI (User Interface), ASO (App Store Optimization), marketing (user acquisition campaigns and associated content creation) and monetization. 🤝

The business model ? Revenues generated by the applications are collected by Kovalee, which then pays the developer a portion of the profits. The startup currently has 20 clients, mainly in the health and wellness sectors, although, the model is adapted to all sectors. They are located in the United States (its main market), Italy, Canada, Brazil and Japan. 🌍

Paris-based Kovalee secures €8 million to empower mobile app creators

💸 Stripe raises $6.5B funding and is now valued at $50B (🇮🇪/🇺🇸)

Irish-born payment processing platform Stripe has secured over $6.5B in a Series I funding round, at a valuation of $50 billion. Above all, this is a significant drop from its previous valuation of $95 billion in 2021. Earlier this year, Stripe announced that it had cut its internal valuation to $63 billion in January.

The fresh round was funded by existing Stripe shareholders: Andreessen Horowitz, Baillie Gifford, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, MSD Partners, and Thrive Capital. It also saw participation from new investors : GIC (Singapore), Goldman Sachs Asset and Wealth Management, and Temasek (Singapore). 👀

The funds will be used to provide liquidity to current and former employees and address employee withholding tax obligations related to equity awards, thereby resulting in the retirement of Stripe shares that will offset the issuance of new shares to Series I investors. Furthermore, it noted that it does not need this capital to run the business. 🤝

This move reflects the pullback in tech stocks last year. In addition to the cut in its valuation, Stripe laid off 14% of its staff in November. Down rounds can be an opportunity for founders to get their metrics and path to profitability in order. With this down round, Stripe can take a closer look at profitability and cash burn. As the company aims to go public after turning profitable, the IPO might not happen this year. 🏦

Stripe now valued at $50B following $6.5B raise

🩲 Le Slip Français raises €3.5M via Lita.co to help textile companies relocate their production (🇫🇷)

Le Slip Français, the brand specializing in underwear made in France, is now well-known for offering underwear made locally and sustainably. 🌱

To accelerate the development of its model and diversify its activity, Le Slip Français has raised funds via the participative financing platform LITA.co to finance the recently developed "Les Ateliers du Slip", a service to assist textile companies to relocate their production locally as well as a B2B activity of selling white label products.

In total, €3.58M have been raised from 2242 investors. It is, the fundraising with the largest number of investors ever recorded on the platform. 👀

🍖 The alternative protein scene in Europe has a new player...

Five startups specialising in precision fermentation have joined forces. Better Dairy, Formo, Those Vegan Cowboys, ImaginDairy, and Onego Bio formed the new trade association "Food Fermentation Europe" with the aim to combat the lack of transparency and communication that pervades the ecosystem. 🔍

In particular the current decision process for getting regulatory approval in the EU for their products is a major hurdle. As the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has yet to announce approval requirements under the EU Novel Foods Regulation, the regulatory pathway for the approval of novel foods is lengthy, unclear and uncertain. Food Fermentation Europe is looking to address this common issue, including other regulatory issues such as how to deal with labelling of products and how to improve capacity building. The long-term goal is to build a policy framework that will enable fair competition amongst companies. 🤝

Food Fermentation Europe's founding members are all using precision fermentation technology to produce animal-free protein and protein-based products.

Better Dairy is a London-based startup producing animal-free dairy (particularly, cheeses) using precision fermentation. Its cheese-focus is producing aged and hard cheese, which are more complex, in a more sustainable way. 🧀

Similarly, Germany-based Formo uses microorganisms and not animals to produce much-loved vegan soft cheeses. It is looking to produce vegan European dairy specialities such as mozzarella and ricotta. 🍕

Belgian startup Those Vegan Cowboys develops microbial casein, a crucial ingredient for cheese making. 🤠

Over in Israel, Imagindairy also produces dairy protein ingredients under its slogan "real milk. no cows." for the B2B market. It has a complete range of dairy-free proteins and its technology is based on 15 years on research at Tel Aviv University.

Lastly, Finnish Onego Bio is utilising precision fermentation to produce egg white without the chickens. Their focus lies on producing ovalbumin, the most abundant egg white protein, in a fungal-based system. 🐔

🤖 OpenAI released Chat GPT-4 only 4 months after GPT-3

Chat GPT-4 is an AI-powered chat-bot built by OpenAI that exhibits “human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks”, and which was released last week - only a few months after the previous GPT-3 version. GPT-4 has already made the case it is outperforming GPT-3 by a mile - notably as it showcased it could pass the US bar exam with a top 10% score, versus a bottom 10% score for GPT-3.5 (cf. bar chart below!), and is now available to OpenAI’s paying users. 👀

One of its distinctive aspects it that it can now understand texts and images compared to only texts for GPT-3. Microsoft already confirmed Bing Chat (its chat-bot co-developed with OpenAI) is running on Chat GPT-4 while Stripe, Duolingo and Morgan Stanley also disclosed they were already using GPT-4. 🤖

OpenAI releases GPT-4, a multimodal AI that it claims is state-of-the-art

Internships

Analyst/Associate Growth - HV Capital (Berlin)

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Jobs

Investment Associate/Principal, Future Tech - Atlantic Labs (Berlin)

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👉 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 🖤

baby vc