vc family - Newsletter #14
Coinbase and Mastercard's partnership, a 26th unicorn in France and Pauline Laigneau as the founder of the week!
Hi everyone and welcome to vc family!
✒️
Alice Bardon Catineau
,
Kenza Yahyaoui
,
Baptiste Durand
and
Maxime Poignonec
.
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.
Get to read your weekly vc newsletter along with your Sunday morning coffee ☕️ : News of the week in Venture Capital, fundraisings and acquisitions, internships and job offers in the vc ecosystem and many others.
“The future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow.” - Robert Kiyosaki
On the agenda:
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
😍 Founder of the week: Pauline Laigneau
🔎 Internship and job offers
🎁 The Gift
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
👾 Coinbase teams up with Mastercard for NFTs purchases. After the crypto platform launched its NFT marketplace in October, it announced on Tuesday that you won’t need cryptos anymore to buy an NFT on Coinbase’s marketplace but simply a Mastercard debit or credit card.
🕹️ Video games giant Activision Blizzard joins the ranks of Microsoft for $69B. The "Call of Duty" and "World of Warcraft" editor's stock soared more than 37 percent on Wall Street after the announcement. Until then, the most expensive acquisition in the video game industry was $12.7B.
⚖️ Inequality is growing according to Oxfam's new report, and the covid-19 pandemic seems to have something to do with it. Indeed, the wealth of the world's billionaires has increased more in the 19 months of the pandemic than in the last decade, while 160 million people have fallen into poverty.
📈 Chime should go public. According to Reuters, the US neo-bank has called on Goldman Sachs to prepare for an upcoming IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Estimated at 25 billion dollars during its last round of financing last August, Chime could be valued at 50 billion dollars with an IPO. For its part, the American company prefers to remain discreet on the subject.
🤳 Instagram will launch paid subscriptions. Meta's social network has announced the arrival of subscriptions allowing access to exclusive content on Instagram, ranging from $0.99 to $99. The aim is to allow content creators to make a better living from their work and to avoid the flight of some of them to other sites such as OnlyFans which offer this kind of functionality. These subscriptions will first be tested with a handful of celebrities such as Sedona Prince, Jordan Chiles or Aliza Kelly, before being extended to the public.
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
⚙️ Exotec (Series D) raises $335M: Valued at around 2 billion dollars, Exotec just joined the now growing group of French unicorns. Exotec is an industrial start up that offers robots to ease order preparation for e-commerce companies. The company is known for its Skypods : small robots that help prepare orders in warehouses. This round was led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Large Venture and 83North (bpifrance). It will allow the company to extend its business in more countries notably the US where it is already present.
🏠 PlanRadar (series B) raises 69M$ : The Austrian company offers a way to ease real estate projects by digitizing construction documents. Both existing investors like Berliner Volksbank Ventures, Headline, Cavalry Venutres and aws Gründerfonds and new investors Proptech1, Russmedia and GR Capital took part in this round. This is one of the most important raises in Vienna and for B2B businesses. This round will allow the company to extend its business by opening offices in the United States, the CGC region and South Asia.
💸 Spendesk (Series C) raises $100M: Yet another French unicorn is born this week (fifth one juts this month in France !) . Spendesk offers a software to manage corporate spending. It is designed for finance teams and employees allowing them to ease administrative tasks and payments. It features online virtual cards, invoice management and much more. The fintech’s new raise was lead by Tiger Global an American VC fund.
🚗 Wayve (series B) raises 200M$ : The London-based startup is developing self-driving technology for cars. Unlike its competitors, Wayve is basing its technology on computer vision and machine learning. The round was led by Eclipse Ventures but other funds joined in including D1 Capital Partners, Microsoft, Virgin, Compound and Balderton Capital.
🖥 Stoïk (Seed Series) raises $3.8M: Stoïk has raised funds from investors such as Alven, Anthemis, Kima Ventures, Business Angels. The startup combines cyber insurance products with active security monitoring. It is now the first cyber-insurtech in Europe.
🩺 Doctolib acquires Tanker: The healthcare unicorn Doctolib acquires encryption startup Tanker to secure its data. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed.
😍 Founder of the week:
This week we present you Pauline Laigneau.
Pauline Laigneau is a key figure in the French entrepreneurial scene. Between her successful podcast and her startup Gemmyo which disrupted the jewellery industry, we often hear about her but what is her story?
Born in Paris to a family of entrepreneurs, she realised after 5 years of studying at the ENS that she too was cut out for entrepreneurship. She then decided to enter HEC Paris. She did her internship in the high-end pastry industry at Hugo & Victor. She was the CEO's right-hand woman: she carried out various missions in sales, HR and marketing.
In 2011, she co-founded the jewellery brand Gemmyo with her husband Charif Debs after noticing the gap in the French jewellery market, which she considered too intimidating. They decided to break the codes and they succeeded.
In 2013, Gemmyo managed to raise nearly 3.1 million euros from three investors: Justin Ziegler, co-founder of Rakuten, Cyril Vermeulen, co-founder of aufeminin.com and Alven. This was the last round of financing for the company, which raised a total of 5.4 million euros in two years. Gemmyo quickly became a key player in the European luxury goods market.
In 2018, Pauline launched her podcast, which she called first "La crème de la crème", then "Le gratin" and now called "Le podcast de Pauline Laigneau". It is a conversation about success. She and her guests discuss their career paths, mistakes, successes, tips and ambitions. The podcast has 300K listeners per month and it’s definitely a must watch!
🔎 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.
ENGIE New Ventures - VC Analyst internship (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Revaia - Investment Intern (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Plug and Play - Ventures Analyst Crypto (Paris) 👉 Apply here
🎁 The Gift
😳 Are you curious to learn more on the story of your favorite startups and how they got there first 1000 customers?
👉 First 1000 is a newsletter which shows you How Founders Got Their Very First 1000 Users.
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