Welcome to our 122nd newsletter. It was written with 🖤 by Saish Rane, Medina Sinani and Angèle Sahraoui
Fundraisings from last week with Kittl and Welcome to the Jungle
News from last week with Microsoft extending its partnership with OpenAI
Our content of the week with Eldorado’s 2022 French Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Report Part 2
Internship & Job offers of the week
Wishing you a pleasant read 🖤
👨💼 Welcome to the Jungle raised $54M
You’re likely to have already browsed WTTJ’s website once, probably during a job search. And it seems you won’t be the last: last week, the Paris-based job platform announced it had raised a $54M Series C with Xange, Revaia and Bpifrance among others. 💵
Now that the company is able to attract more than 3M monthly visitors and reached a €30M ARR milestone, it has another country in its sight: the U.S. 🇺🇸
Indeed, this new round should help WTTJ further its International expansion—which had already started in Europe with Spain and the Czech Republic. 🌍
🎨 Kittl raised €10.8M with Left Lane Capital
A Berlin-based design platform, Kittl, that rivals Canva and Adobe, has secured €10.8M in funding. The team plans to expand its offerings and make it easier for even more creatives to achieve their design goals. The round was led by Left Lane Capital with participation from Speedinvest. 🖼
Kittl offers web-based tools that simplify the process of creating distinctive logos, t-shirts, posters, labels, and cards. Users can start by selecting from a vast collection of pre-made templates and then customize them with intuitive tools to achieve a one-of-a-kind outcome. 🚀
The young company aims to expand its team and create tools to turn users' design aspirations into reality with these fresh funds. Building these tools demands exceptional skill, and the funding will aid in assembling a team capable of delivering these imaginative capabilities. 💪🏼
Berlin-based Kittl draws up plans to expand its design platform with €10.8 million cash boost
🤝 Microsoft announced an extended partnership with OpenAI
Although Microsoft had first invested in OpenAI — the AI behemoth behind ChatGPT — in 2019 and also in 2021, it seems that it now wants a large piece. 🍰
Indeed, Microsoft confirmed last week an extension of its partnership with OpenAI with the objective to quickly integrate some of OpenAI’ products within its own suite of products. That said, Microsoft did not confirm the rumored ~$10B figure that has been circulating these past few weeks. 👀
Part of the partnership will also involve keeping Microsoft Azure as the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI to train all of its models.
Our content of the week is brought to you by our partner Eldorado. Massive thanks to Océane Guirao and Aude Delépine for having written the piece below!
2022 French Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Report n°2.
You can read Eldorado’s annual ecosystem review just here.
After the first 2022 report on the French entrepreneurial ecosystem, here's the rest of the report on this year full of ups and downs!
1. Monitoring of French Fundraising.
Finally, and perhaps counter-intuitively, the year 2022 represents a new record for FrenchTech, with €15.5B raised in 1144 rounds of financing. While many would have expected a stagnation or even a decline in the number of fundraisings and the total amount raised, the French ecosystem has shown its momentum is outpacing macroeconomic constraints for the time being. 👀
Despite this record result, the year was not uniform. It started off on a high note, in the continuity of 2021, followed by a long period of decline. Indeed, while we recorded 5 new unicorns in January (Payfit, Ankostore, Qonto, Spendesk, Exotec) with record valuations, we had to wait 5 months before having a new unicorn (Ecovadis).
But again, the year 2022 remains impressive. The 1,144 rounds represent an increase of 27% compared to 2021, and the €15.5 billion raised, an increase of 32.5%. In light of these figures, the momentum created by the various players in the ecosystem and the government seems unstoppable. However, only 2023 will confirm the resilience of the French ecosystem.
2. Slowdown and return of the early-stage.
If we simply compare the year 2022 with the year 2021 (see below), we could quickly believe that there is some form of continuity and that there are no major changes. However, the more granular approach that we proposed in this report allows us to identify the changes that are taking place in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Inevitably, the year 2022 marks a certain slowdown for the global entrepreneurial ecosystem that was running amok in 2021. But beyond a Manichean vision, many changes are hidden. Moreover, we will see throughout this report that France is behaving in a rather singular way compared to the rest of the world.
To see this more clearly, let us compare H1 with H2 2022 in France.
We notice that the number of fundraisings has decreased very slightly, but not significantly. The most striking elements are the decreases in the total amount raised between H1 and H2, and in the average amount raised, -42% and -33% respectively. This confirms that the late stage has suffered and that investors have refocused on smaller deals with a longer time horizon and less risk. A new equilibrium seems to be created after the April/May trough.
If you want to go further, we had traced the evolution of the distribution of rounds since 2017 at the time of the review of the year 2021.
Internships
VC & ESG Analyst - Ankaa Ventures (Paris)
Jobs
Associate - Nucleus Capital (London)
Analyst/Associate - Eurazeo (Paris)
👉 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 🖤