Hi everyone,
The whole baby vc crew hopes your summer was phenomenal and that you’re now ready for another year by our sides with a smile and a tan. 😉
This first post-summer break newsletter is a bit special as we have a few things to announce. We also wanted to provide you with a recap of the main tech events which took place this summer. Thus, in case you’re still on vacation: stick with us, because this first newsletter won’t be that long! 🤓
Sooo, the first (and quite obvious for now) piece of news we wanted to announce is the team’s decision to switch to English. The decision will make complete sense in a few days when we’ll be making an exciting announcement (stay tuned!!). But for now, what we can say is that, for a few months, the baby vc community has started to grow much beyond the borders of our dear French nation. Therefore, it was quite natural for us to make sure we would be welcoming juniors who demonstrated an interest in baby vc’s mission (democratizing venture capital and the broader tech ecosystem), no matter the countries they grew up in — which becomes much easier once we switched to English! 🌍
Another piece of news is that of our newsletter’s new name: What’s Up Tech?
Here again, we felt that by naming our NL “The Future VCs”, we were not really being inclusive with regards to those who much more identify as tech enthusiasts than aspiring VCs. Plus, and as most of you will have noticed, we tend to cover general tech news, and not so much news purely focused on VCs. So we hope that this second evolution will make sense to you as much as it does to us. 😊
With all that blabla, let’s now move on to a brief summer recap. The team listed some of the main events which took place on the world tech scene this summer so that, in case you completely disconnected this summer, you’ll still feel somewhat up-to-date when getting back to work (or school) in the upcoming days! 🧘
What’s been up? ☀️
The stock market meltdown continued (stay tuned for more content on this topic soon 👀) and many companies saw their valuations being slashed or started laying off employees:
Instacart, citing “market turbulence” last month slashed its valuation by 40% and slowed hiring,
Klarna’s valuation was also slashed by 85% (😳),
Many other tech companies announced massive layoffs, including GoPuff and Shopify which announced cutting around 10% of their respective workforces.
Flow, Adam Neumann’s new pre-launch residential real estate venture, raised $350M from a16z, the VC firm's largest ever single investment. The announcement led to some controversy, and it’s likely your LinkedIn feed has been flooded with people on both sides of the debate spectrum during your absence. The controversy that emerged can be partly explained through the controversial figure that Neumann embodies. For more context, we can only recommend you watch WeCrashed. 🍿
Amazon is intending to acquire One Medical, a San Francisco-based chain of primary healthcare clinics for $3.9B. This is not the first step Amazon makes in the healthcare space as the behemoth was already launching Amazon Pharmacy in 2020, a delivery service for prescription medications. On the other hand, Amazon just announced it was shutting down Amazon Care, its on-demand healthcare services platform. Maybe the team just finds buying more appealing than building after all. 🙃
Several funds announced new fundraisings, including XAnge with €220M of fresh funds for French and German early-stage startups, and Headline with a €932M fundraising that the team will deploy across 3 different funds (focused on different geographies) and targeting early-stage startups. Bernard Arnault also announced a €100M investment in crypto through a new vehicle in his fund Aglaé Ventures. 💰
On the startup fundraising side, Contentsquare raised a €400M round with an additional €200M in debt to expand to new markets and provide a greater impact. 📈
Netflix lost almost a million subscribers in Q2 2022, and the platform expects to lose hundreds of thousands more this year. That said, the streaming giant had initially expected to shed 2 millions subscribers, so don’t be surprised to learn that its stock increased after the announcement was made in mid-July.
U.S. President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, a $370B bill that will have a phenomenally large and positive impact on Climate Tech. In fact, the Time explains it better than us: “The tax incentives, loans, and grants at its center are all intended to nudge the private sector to go faster in deploying existing technologies like wind and solar while also advancing future technologies.” 🚀
YC cuts the size of its batch to 250 startups from the earlier 400. In addition, they also announced they would welcome Garry Tan, Founder & Managing Partner of Initialized Capital (early investors in Coinbase, Instacart & Flexport) as the next President & CEO in “early 2023”. 👨💼
Qonto, the French fintech unicorn expands to Germany by acquiring Penta, predicted to increase its client base by 20%. 📈
Serena Williams will retire in a few weeks and go into VC full time. Since founding Serena Ventures in 2014, the tennis champion has invested in companies like Impossible Foods, Daily Harvest, Billie, and MasterClass. All told, she’s invested in nearly 80 companies, including 16 unicorns. 🎾
French Tech DeepNum 20, what’s that? La French Tech unveiled a new program to boost the strategic deep tech sector as they did with greentech as well as agritech. This ties in quite well with the France 2030 plan of industrial & digital sovereignty.
Last but definitely not least: Merlin Égalité (fellow on our bootcamp #1) and his cofounders at Morpho Labs raised $18m from a16z Crypto and Variant, with participation from 80 additional investors. The team has been busy working on building a new decentralized lending protocol with the objective to bring “the most efficient, unbiased, and secure lending services to anyone who needs them”. Massive congrats to the team! 🙌
And that is it for our brief summer recap, we hope you enjoyed the read!
See you next week for our traditional weekly NL, and good luck to those of you who are on their way back to work/school!
Saish, Angèle, and the whole baby vc crew
xx
Congrats on the new name and expanded international audience. Have been following from Canada since a couple years!
Looking forward to read your next piece guys 🙏😊