Newsletter #9
Lydia becomes a unicorn, It's a match between Tinder and Shopify, Mambu raises a Series E...
Hi everyone and welcome to vc family!
The inclusive way to break into Venture Capital. We are Junior VCs sharing what they learn on the go. Our goal is simple: Open the doors to Venture Capital.
Every Friday, you will find us in your email box with the news of the week in Venture Capital, the latest fundraisings and acquisitions, internship and position offers, the portrait of a VC and many others. For more information about us, visit vcfamily.co
“Don’t worry about being successful but work toward being significant and the success will naturally follow.” - Oprah Winfrey
On the agenda:
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
😍 VC of the week: Jean de la Rochebrochard
🔎 Internship and job offers
🎁 The Gift
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🦄 Lydia becomes a unicorn! The French ‘super-app’ joins France’s unicorns squad. Lydia, famous for its peer-to-peer payment service, is now one of the 22 french unicorns. By 2025, the fintech wants to reach 10 million users and has just launched a trading offer to its customers.
🤑 Ledger announces the lauch of its own debit card. During it’s Op3n conference, the company revealed the Crypto Life card which will be able to convert instantly your cryptocurrencies into the correspondant fiat amount.
🖤 BlackOps Ventures chooses to invest in Black founders. A new US-based VC fund decided to change things and only invests in them. The numbers speak for themselves, even if today Black founders are raising more money than ever, they are still representing a small share of the total investments.
🔥 Tinder x Spotify, it’s a match! The famous dating app announces a partnership with Spotify so users can share on their profil their cult track. What’s better to grasp a personnality than music?
⚖ Italy’s competition authority fines Amazon. Italy announced that it had fined Amazon €1.129bn for abusing its dominant market position to favour the adoption of its own logistics services (Fulfilment by Amazon). Amazon disagrees with the charges and would like to appeal.
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
👨💻 Mambu (Series E) raises $266M : The SaaS cloud banking platform reaches $5.5B valuation. The company which already has built a set of APIs to power lending, deposit and other banking products, says that one logical area to target now could be property insurance, since it already offers mortgage APIs and works with those already active in property finance.
💙 Lydia (Series C) raises $103M : The FinTech with 5.5 million users exceeds $1 billion in valuation and becomes the 23rd French unicorn. The mobile application, which had just announced an imminent trading feature, intends to hire 800 people over the next three years. As a next step, an IPO is now clearly envisaged, according to co-founder Antoine Porte.
🚘 Mnemonic (Seed) raises $4M : The six-month-old NFT platform powering blockchain applications completed its funding led by Kenetic. “We have built a Google-like crawling system that not only ingests what's available on chain, but also indexes all pieces of the metadata associated with every NFT” said CEO Andrii Yasinetsky.
✨ Find all the fundraising of the week from 500k€ on this Airtable!
😍 VC of the week: Jean de la Rochebrochard
This week we present you Jean de la Rochebrochard.
While we talk more and more about VC, the name of Jean often comes out and for obvious reasons: the ambition he has and his impressive work capacity. That’s also why, Xavier Niel trusts him to manage Kima Ventures since 2015.
In this regard, he is known to have invested in startups like Pumpkin, Payfit or Alan.
Even if he describes himself as having been a “crancre” in his youth, it should be mentioned that he has a master's degree in strategic management from Sorbonne University. Not having gone through a top business school did not prevent him from doing M&A during his early experiences.
He joined the startup incubator The Family in 2013 and it was only afterwards in 2015 that he joined Kima. All roads lead to Rome!
For the more curious who want to learn more about Jean's background and boost their motivation, don't hesitate to listen to this interview he gave to Pauline Laigneau in 2018, and if you want to reach out to him, Jean prefers emails: jean@2lr.com !
🔎 Internship and job offers
Soon you will find a complete section to find job and internship offers in Venture Capital, automatically scrapped and available directly on our website.
OneRagtime - Analyst Internship (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Paladin Capital Group - Analyst Internship (London) 👉 Apply here
Revaia (formerly Gaia Capital Partners) - Analyst Internship (Paris) 👉 Apply here
TotalEnergies Ventures - Analyst Internship (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Société Générale Ventures- VC and innovation analyst (Paris) 👉 Apply here
🎁 The Gift
💻 Browsing the web while being paid in crypto currency: yes, it does exist!
💡 Brave Browser is a browser (like Chrome and Firefox) that pays its users in crypto currency in exchange for displaying ads in the form of notifications. Brave has its own crypto called $BAT: the price has increased by 458% since one year! You can download the browser 👉here!
Thank you for reading the vc family newsletter to the end. See you next week directly in your email box!
If you have any questions or ideas, send them to contact@vcfamily.co!