Hi everyone and welcome to the vc family!
The inclusive way to break into Venture Capital.
Our goal is simple: open the doors to Venture Capital.
Every Monday morning, you will find us in your email box with the news of the week in Venture Capital, the latest fundraisers and acquisitions, internship and position offers, the portrait of a VC and many others.
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"If something's important enough, you should try. Even if - the probable outcome is failure.”
Elon Musk"
Program of the day :
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
💡 Topic of the week
😍 VC of the week: Kinga Stanislawska
👋 High Five!
As part of the team is on vacation this week, today's newsletter will be slightly shortened . Back to normal next week!
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
💻 Zoom acquires the startup Kites to bring real-time translation to meetings.
Popular video conferencing app Zoom is all set to acquire Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions kites, a Germany-based start-up dedicated to developing real-time Machine Translation. The company also known as Kites, consists of a team of researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Zoom did not reveal the value of the deal but revealed that it will help the company’s engineering team improve meeting productivity and efficiency by providing multi-language translation capabilities for Zoom users.
👶🏻 Amazon announced a new feature that will turn Alexa into a reading companion for children.
Amazon has announced a new feature for its Kids Plus service on Fire tablets and Echo smart speakers called Reading Sidekick. Designed to help kids improve their reading skills and ability, the Reading Sidekick allows kids to read either physical or digital books along with Alexa by taking turns at reading the books aloud with the digital assistant.
Once a book is started, Alexa will listen to the child’s reading and automatically assist with pronunciations or other challenges while reading the book. It will provide encouragement through phrases like “good job!” when a child finishes a book or gets through a particularly tricky section.
💌 Facebook launches newsletters.
Facebook is getting into the subscription newsletter game. It’s launching a new service today, called Bulletin, that allows writers to publish free and paid newsletters that can be posted to the web, sent to subscribers’ inboxes, and shared across Facebook. Perhaps the biggest perk for now: Facebook says it won’t take a fee from writers “at launch,” and writers retain full ownership of their work and subscriber list.
🛩 Flying car completes first-ever test flight between airports in 35 minutes.
AirCar, described as a "dual-mode car-aircraft vehicle" in a news release, traveled in Slovakia from the international airport in Nitra to the airport in Bratislava on Monday.
According to the company that created it, Klein Vision, the flying car completed its 142nd successful landing and the flight marked a key development milestone. With a click of a button, the aircraft turned into a sports car in under three minutes – and it was driven by its inventor, professor Stefan Klein.
👾 GitHub previews new AI tool that makes coding suggestions.
GitHub has unveiled a new product that leverages artificial intelligence to help you write code more efficiently. Named GitHub Copilot, today’s new product can suggest lines of code and even sometimes entire functions.
GitHub has partnered with OpenAI to develop this tool. It doesn’t replace developers, it’s just a tool that should improve productivity and make it easier to learn how to code. GitHub frames this new tool as an AI pair programmer.
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
🇫🇷 ManoMano (Series F): the marketplace raises $355M for its home improvement e-commerce platform. More details
🇪🇬 MaxAB (Series A): the Egyptian B2B food and grocery delivery startup, raises $40M for expansion. More details
🇺🇸 Zipline (Series E): the american company delivering medical supplies across Africa has raised $250M in new funding. More details
🇵🇭 Locad (Seed): the e-commerce logistics startup got $4.9M seed round led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge. More details
🇮🇳 Licious (Series F): India’s Licious raises $192M for international expansion. More details
🇸🇪 PlaySimple (Acquisition): Swedish gaming firm MTG acquires India’s PlaySimple for $360M. More details
🇳🇬 FairMoney (Series B): Tiger Global leads $42M Series B in Nigerian credit-led neobank FairMoney. More details
🇺🇸 Karat Financial (Series A): A bank for the creator economy, Karat Financial raises $26M in Series A funding. More details
🇲🇽 Nowports (Series A): Nowports raises $16M to build the OS for LatAm’s shipping industry. More details
🇺🇸 Ghost (Series D): raises $100M Series D for autonomous driving and crash prevention tech. More details
😍 VC of the week: Kinga Stanislawska
The VC of the week is Kinga Stanislawska !
Kinga Stanislawska is a Polish VC and the Co-Founder of Experior Venture Fund.
She is a VC investor, senior finance professional, and the Founder of European Women in VC. Her fund invests in Central and Eastern European (CEE) data-driven startups with the ambition to expand internationally.
In 2018, Stanislawska was selected among Europe's Top 50 Women in Tech by Forbes.
She started her career in banking at Salomon Smith Barney (Citigroup, London) but at some point she followed on to become a Manager in Equity Capital Markets team of ING Barings, with responsibility for the EMEA region. She has been since working in investments, banking and finance for the past 17 years.
In fact, by chosing to become an entrepreneur she chose to take control of her own time !
In this very inspirational talk, she explains more in detail what led to this change !
👋 High Five!
5 ressources that WILL help your business, make you smarter or just showing off during a meal with friends or partners.
Twitter is giving away 140 free NFTs. More details : https://thenextweb.com/news/how-to-get-twitter-nfts-free
Instagram has a new plan to beat YouTube and TikTok
NYC is holding the first statue of Elon Musk
You can now download Windows 11 for testing
AI is unlocking the mysteries of the universe here are the reasons. More details : https://thenextweb.com/news/4-ways-ai-unlocking-astronomy-mysteries-universe-syndication
Thank you for reading the vc family newsletter to the end. See you next Monday!
If you have any questions, send them to contact@vcfamily.co !