vc family - Newsletter #21
Tesla continues to pay its Ukrainian employees, Alice&Bob's biggest fundraise in the French quantum ecosystem and Sébastien Borget, COO of the Sandbox 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.
“It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.” – Lou Holtz
On the agenda:
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
😍 Founder of the week: Sébastien Borget (The Sandbox)
🔎 Internship and job offers
🎁 The Gift
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
📈 Eurazeo wants to double the value of its assets. After announcing that it had reached 31 billion euros in assets under management, the company is aiming for a new objective: 60 billion within five years. With a particular focus on technology in recent years, Eurazeo has recently performed well with the exit of Planet, Orolia and Reden Solar.
🩺 Insurtech +Simple buys 3 companies. The company specialising in insurance for "small professionals" has acquired Alians (a French broker in the medical sector), Carl Rieck Assecuradeur (a company specialising in the self-employed and very small businesses), and Marintec, (an Italian broker in the medical sector). On the same occasion, the company announced a fundraising of 90 million euros, mainly in debt.
🚗 Tesla continues to pay its employees fighting in Ukraine. While multiple companies have decided to take a stand against Russia (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Airbnb, Facebook, etc.), Elon Musk's company is going one step further by directly supporting its Ukrainian employees by continuing to pay them, for at least three months, if they are called to fight.
🚲 Paris City Hall is attacking quick commerce. Over the past year, many quick commerce companies (Gorillas, Flink, Cajoo, Getir, etc.) have been set up in Europe, and some cities are starting to take action against them. Paris City Hall has summoned representatives of these companies to accuse them of not respecting the law that imposes strict rules on city centre warehouses. 45 of the 80 shops in the French capital are not in order. To be continued...
🎧 Tiktok is taking on the music market. After competing with Instagram and Facebook, the short video company is taking on the music giants by launching its SoundOn distribution platform. With this new tool, it will be possible to put your music directly on TikTok (without going through intermediaries) and receive royalties, 100% for the first, then 90% for the second. SoundOn should eventually become a major source of revenue for TikTok.
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
🎨 Convelio (Series B) raises $35M: Convelio is a Paris-based fine art shipping company, now located in Paris, London and New-York. This round is led by Forestay, Mundi Ventures and EIF as new investors and Acton Capital and GFC as already existing investors.
🖥 Alice&Bob (Series A) raises €27M: This French quantum computing startup removes barriers and complexity to quantum computers. This fundraise is the biggest one in the French quantum ecosystem with main investors such as Elaia, Bpifrance and Supernova Invest.
🛸 Interstellar Lab (Series A) raises €5M: here, we talk about SpaceTech! This startup is starting the launch of its own BioPod. For this raise we can count several European and American investors (Urania Ventures, Bpifrance, Auxxo among others), some of them related to NASA and SpaceX.
🧠 HelloBetter (Series A) raises €6M: This digital mentalhealth startup specialised has just closed this round with HealthCap, Expon Capital, and Sparrow Ventures. Its previous lead seed-investor, Hevella Capital, also joined this round.
✨ Find all the fundraising of the week from 500k€ on this Airtable!
😍 Founder of the week: Sébastien Borget
This week we present you Sébastien Borget, COO & Co-founder of The Sandbox.
Last week, I was at School 42 in Paris, at a Web 3.0 event where Sébastien Borget (among others) was invited to talk about The Sandbox.
The Sandbox is a virtual gaming world where players can build, own, and monetize gaming experiences in the metaverse. Currently based on the Ethereum blockchain, this decentralized 3D play-to-earn game was initially a classic 2D game founded by the french mobile video game studio (Pixowl) created by Arthur Madrid and Sebastien Borget in 2011. Acquired in 2018 by Animoca Brands, a Hong Kong-based mobile games company, The Sandbox has raised a $93 million Series B in November 2021 with Softbank, True Global Ventures, Samsung Next, Animoca Brands and others.
Sébastien Borget has been an entrepreneur for nearly 14 years now. After a Scientific Baccalaureate, he studied for 2 years in a preparatory class at the Lycée Thiers in Marseille (France) before joining Télécom SudParis, a French engineering school.
In his third year of engineering school, Sébastien spent four months at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Back in France, an internship in a start-up made him meet Arthur Madrid: "He is the one who gave me the taste for entrepreneurship", he says. Together, they succeeded in convincing Xavier Niel, the founder of Free, and others, to invest in their new company, Pixowl.
Today, The Sandbox is one of the most successful projects in the metaverse. It is also one of the 3 largest in the world in terms of number of users. It is estimated that there are nearly 20,000 virtual parcel owners and over 2 million users. It's also a great showcase for dozens of brands that have decided to join the adventure by buying a piece of land like Ubisoft, Warner Music, Adidas, or Gucci. The rapper Snoop Dogg is also present on the virtual world!
The Sandbox will definitely have its role to play in the future of the metaverse (if there is one) and it promises to be very exciting 🙈
Check this video if you want to know more
by Loup Audouy
🔎 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.
Inovexus - Acceleration Fund Analyst Internship (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Superlyst Ventures – Working student VC Analyst (Munich) 👉 Apply here
BACKED VC – VC Fellow (London) 👉 Apply here
🎁 The Gift
🎓 Are you dreaming of graduating from Berkeley? 😍
👉 It's not too late to make that dream come true, and for free, thanks to the edx.org platform, which offers courses from 160+ partner universities, including Berkeley and Harvard!
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