vc family - Newsletter #31
The end of Portugal's crypto-haven, Modulr raises impressive Series C and Frédéric Mazzella, CEO of BlaBlaCar as the Founder of the week!
✒️ Kenza Yahyaoui, Sara Idrissi, Loup Audouy and Baptiste Durand.
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.
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” – Oscar Wilde
On the agenda:
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
😍 Founder of the week: Frédéric Mazzella (BlaBlaCar)
🔎 Internship and job offers
🎁 The Gift
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🤵♂️ eFounders wants to enter Web3. The French-Belgian start-up studio is launching 3Founders, a start-up studio specialising in Web3. After launching numerous start-ups, including the unicorns Spendesk and Aircall, eFounders wants to get a foothold in the blockchain, crypto-currency, Web3 and other sectors.
💳 Meta registers the trademark Meta Pay. The American giant, ex-Facebook, has registered the trademark Meta Pay in the United States. The patent states "Online social network service for investors enabling financial transactions and exchange [...] of cryptocurrency", which suggests that Meta will develop a digital wallet. As a reminder, Facebook had already launched the Diem project, a digital wallet, before abandoning and selling it.
🎮 a16z launches a fund dedicated to video games. The famous American venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, has announced the launch of a $600 million fund to invest in the video game sector. The fund has already invested in the market by acquiring stakes in several companies such as Zynga, Roblox, Oculus and Sandbox VR.
🛒 Flink buys Cajoo. The quick commerce sector is still evolving, only 15 months after its launch in Paris, Cajoo is (already) bought by the German Flink for an estimated 93 million euros. This takeover comes in a very competitive context in the quick commerce sector, with several players having started to close down their activities in certain cities (Kol, Yango Deli, Bam Courses).
👩⚖️ Portugal to tax crypto currencies. While Portugal has been considered a tax haven for crypto-currency holders for several years, the finance minister announced this week that he wants to put an end to this legal uncertainty, without giving any further details on the tax rate. Until now, it was possible to sell a flat in bitcoin and not pay taxes on the capital gain.
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
💸 Modulr (Series C) raises €108M: The English startup is building embedded banking capabilities (including payments and account information services), physical and virtual card issuance for businesses. Revolut is already one their clients!
⛓ Treyd (Series A) raises €10.5M: This Swedish startup introduces BNPL services (Buy Now, Pay Later) for B2B businesses. After proving their idea in Sweden they are aiming to conquer The United Kingdom.
🚲 Bike Club (Series B) raises €20.16M: This London-based startup offers families the opportunity to subscribe online to new or refurbished bikes and scooters, then exchange them as their child grows.
💸 Housfy (Series B) raises €30M: Housfy is a Barcelona-based proptech that entered the market in 2017. The full-service tech platform for real estate offers all housing-related functions: real estate sales, mortgage and financial brokerage, residential rental and home services.
✨ Find all the fundraising of the week from 500k€ on this Airtable!
😍 Founder of the week: Frédéric Mazzella (BlaBlaCar)
This week we present you Frédéric Mazzella, CEO & founder of BlaBlaCar
Founder of one of the French unicorns, these startups valued at more than a billion dollars, Frédéric Mazzella has revolutionized the way French people, and part of the world's population, travel. With 100 million users worldwide, including 20 million in France by October 2021, BlaBlaCar is the world leader in carpooling.
We all know about the company, but few know about its founder's career and the difficult path he had to overcome to make his mark in the transportation sector...
Now 46 years old, Frédéric Mazzella was born in Nantes (France) in 1976 to a math teacher (his father) and a French teacher (his mother).
After high school, he entered the scientific preparatory classes at the Lycée Henri-IV as a scholarship student before being accepted at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in physics and then at Stanford University (USA) between 1999 and 2002. To pay for his tuition, Frédéric will work for three years in the robotics laboratory affiliated with the physics department of his university (which collaborates with NASA).
At the end of 2003, Frédéric Mazzella was forced to travel 500 kilometers by car with his sister to join his family for Christmas, due to a lack of available seats on the trains. During the following days, he thought about a solution that would allow him to find the empty seats in the cars making the same trip as him. In 2006, he bought the domain name covoiturage.fr, created in 2004 by Vincent Caron (a student at ISTIA in Angers, France). It is a carpooling platform that brings together drivers and passengers who want to share a car trip and the associated costs. He will work for more than two years with Nicolas Brusson and Francis Nappez to create the first carpooling service on covoiturage.fr, launched in 2006.
The beginnings were difficult (he borrowed 70,000 euros for his training at INSEAD, which he repaid in 2013) and he only received his first salary in 2009.
Covoiturage.fr started to raise funds: 600,000€ in 2009 followed by a first round of financing of more than one million with ISAI (represented by Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet) in 2010, the same year the site crosses the threshold of 500,000 members. To expand outside France, the startup decided to carry out a third round of financing in 2012 and raised 7.5 million euros.
In 2011, the website celebrates its first million members and launches the English version of its website: BlaBlaCar.com. In 2013, Covoiturage.fr officially changes its name to BlaBlaCar.
Today, BlaBlaCar is present in 22 countries, including Russia, Italy, Serbia, India, Mexico and Brazil. Among its members, Blablacar counts nearly 25 million travelers per quarter.
Frédéric Mazzella is also an investor in many companies such as Le Slip Français, Zenpark, Shapr, OnOff. He is also on the board of Trivago.
He is also co-president of France Digitale, an association that brings together 1,200 startups and numerous digital investors and whose goal is to attract young startups to France.
We should not forget that it is only in 2015, with his fundraising of 200 million euros and after long years of difficulties, that Frédéric Mazzella definitively entered the forefront of the French Tech scene, after more than 9 years of hard work to make BlaBlaCar a must-have. It is an example of perseverance and of those few startups that have profoundly changed the habits of the French people and many others around the world.
🔎 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.
Saviu Ventures - VC Analyst Internship (Paris) 👉 Apply here
APX - VC Valuation Modeling Internship (Berlin) 👉 Apply here
Anamcara Capital - VC Analyst Internship (London) 👉 Apply here
Alven - VC Analyst Internship (City) 👉 Apply here
🎁 The Gift
📚 This week's bonus is a reading recommendation for those who can't wait for January to reach new resolutions or start a new project.
👉 The book is called Atomic Habits. In it, author James Clear tells us how to achieve the changes we want to see in our lives. And It all comes down to establishing good habits that the person can maintain over time. That's the magic of the book.
Thank you for reading the vc family newsletter to the end. See you next week directly in your email box!