vc family - Newsletter #19
Elon Musk's new announcement, Italy's first unicorn & Nicolas Julia, CEO of Sorare as the Founder of the week!
✒️
Alice Bardon Catineau
,
Kenza Yahyaoui
,
Sara Idrissi
,
Baptiste Durand
and
Loup Audouy
.
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. For more information about vc family, visit vc family.
“Never be limited by other people’s limited imagination” - Mae Jemison
On the agenda:
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
😍 Founder of the week: Nicolas Julia (Sorare)
🔎 Internship and job offers
🎁 The Gift
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
📱 Big Tech companies have taken action against Russia. Apple Pay is no longer available in the country and Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have blocked advertisements from Russian state media. Conversely, Russia has already restricted access to these two social networks in some areas of the country. For its part, Ukraine is calling for stronger sanctions, such as blocking the App Store and stopping the sale of iPhones in Russia
🎮 Valve unveils its Steam Deck video game console. Originally known for its comprehensive and rich video game platform, Steam is diversifying by unveiling its physical console offering. Although strongly similar to the Nintendo Switch, Valve is counting on its range of available games to attract gamers.
🛰 Elon Musk announces that Starlink is available in Ukraine. On Twitter the Space X boss responded to the call of the Ukrainian vice president by announcing that his Starlink internet network, which works through thousands of satellites in space, is now available in Ukraine. This system will allow the country to still have Internet despite a cut in the local network.
📹 Instagram Reels are coming to Facebook. In line with Meta's plan to eventually merge its three main services, FB, IG and WhatsApp, the company has now integrated Instagram Reels on Facebook. This new feature illustrates the success of these mini videos popularised by TikTok.
🔔 Tumblr launches a paid subscription. After several years of decline and multiple takeovers, first by Yahoo, then Verizon, and finally Automattic, Tumblr continues to search for a business model. This week the micro blogging platform announced the launch of an Ad Free subscription for $4.99 per month.
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
💸 Finary (Series A) raises €10M: The startup Reinvents Private Banking hrough an aggregator enables investors to track their holdings — bank accounts, real estate, crypto, stocks — and get a thorough perspective of their wealth
🛒 Scalapay (Series B) raises €375M: BNPL start-up Scalapay becomes Italy’s first unicorn. Scalapay offers a platform focused on the online checkout experience, adding to its ‘buy now, pay later’ services.
🖼 Specify (Seed) raises €4M: The startup aims to build the first Data Design Platform. Specify serves as a kind of reference library for developing a site or an application for GitHub and Figma clients.
🚍Volta Trucks (Series C) raises €230M: The Sweden automative company offers electric trucks for sustainable cities.
✨ Find all the fundraising of the week from 500k€ on this Airtable!
😍 Founder of the week: Nicolas Julia
This week we present you Nicolas Julia, CEO & Co-founder of Sorare.
Sorare became the second most valuable French startup with a valuation of $4.3 billion after raising $680 million in September 2021, the largest fundraising in the history of French Tech. A dazzling success since the startup was only 3 years old at the time.
Its CEO and co-founder, Nicolas Julia, attended a preparatory class in economics at Lycée Saliège, in 2004. After that, he entered emlyon business school, where he followed an MSc in Management. He also did an academic exchange at Hanken School of Economics (Helsinki, Finland) in 2009.
Upon graduation in 2010, he joined the consulting firm Eurogroup Consulting Group as an intern and left in 2015 as a senior supervisor. He then co-founded La Javaness, a company that provides AI-powered solutions to public and private organizations in France and Europe to maximize their value and productivity.
In 2016, Nicolas Julia embarked on a new adventure and joined Stratumn, a solution designed for the Financial Departments of medium and large companies, as VP Operation. The company raised €8 million in June 2017 from Nasdaq Ventures, Open CNP, Cathay, Otium Venture and Digital Currency Group. During the two and a half years spent at Stratumn, Nicolas Julia had the opportunity to discover blockchain applications in depth, which will later help him in the creation of Sorare.
When the first NFTs (non-fungible tokens), secure digital certificates of ownership that authenticate a digital object, were released, Nicolas Julia saw the potential of this revolutionary technology. He explains to Forbes the origin of his idea mixing soccer and digital: "With my partner Adrien, we quickly became convinced that the characteristics of NFT technology, like digital scarcity or the issue of traceability, would lead to a technological change that would have the same impact on our lives as the arrival of the Internet or the smartphone. NFTs will reinvent certain industries and change the way we own digital assets."
Nicolas Julia launched Sorare, a fantasy soccer game in which virtual players, represented by NFT cards, can play matches. The unicorn is already profitable and is valued today at $4.3 billion. Nicolas Julia's ambitions are clear: to become the global leader in entertainment, continuing to build bridges between the digital and physical worlds and expanding into other sports.
🔎 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.
Axeleo Capital - VC Analyst intern (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Earlybird - VC Analyst intern (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Serena x Makesense (Racine2) - VC Analyst intern (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Axa Venture Partners - VC Analyst intern (Paris) 👉 Apply here
🎁 The Gift
⚙️ Do you have writer’s block ?
👉 Go take a look to Shortlyai and your page will no longer be blank ! 😉
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