vcfamily - Newsletter #23
Deliveroo in Court, Bigblue Series A, Adrien Roose, CEO of Cowboy as the Founder of the week.
✒️
Kenza Yahyaoui
,
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.
“If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.” – Katharine Hepburn
On the agenda:
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
😍 Founder of the week: Adrien Roose (Cowboy)
🔎 Internship and job offers
🎁 The Gift
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
⚽️ Blaise Matuidi launches an investment fund. After several years as a business angel, the Inter Miami footballer (after having played for PSG) is launching his own fund called Origins, specialising in Web3, video games and cryptocurrencies. For this new project, Matuidi has teamed up with three people: Ilan Abehassera, the head of Dots; Salomon Aiach, the head of the French branch of the Earlybird fund; and Yohan Benalouane, a footballer at Aris Salonika. Among the 50 or so limited partners are football stars such as N'Golo Kanté, Olivier Giroud, Kingsley Coman and Presnel Kimpembe. The VC fund has already invested in two start-ups (Ugami and Yumon) and intends to accelerate the pace in the coming months.
🌾 Start-up Agricool goes bankrupt. The company Agricool, which specialises in growing lettuce, strawberries and herbs in containers in the Paris suburbs, has been placed in receivership. This procedure aims to find a buyer for the agri tech project. Since its creation in 2015, the start-up has raised a total of €35 million, notably from Kima Ventures, XAnge and Bpifrance.
🩺 Google continues to invest in the medical sector. The American giant is in the process of signing partnerships with medical appointment booking platforms, hospitals and health centres to integrate their features into Google searches. Thus, it will be possible to see the available medical slots in one's area by searching the web. The feature will be available in the US later this year before expanding to others, potentially competing with platforms such as Doctolib.
📱 Spotify and Google team up for a pilot program. It' a small revolution in the online payments sector, Google has announced a test project with Spotify to open its Play Store (present on all Android phones) to alternative payments. As a result, some of the pilot apps in the Play Store will soon be able to bill their users themselves for purchases through the platforms of their choice, so they won't have to pay Google's commissions. This announcement comes after much criticism of Google and Apple for taking commissions on payments made from apps directly, including a lawsuit between Epic Games (developer of Fortnite) and Apple.
⚖️ The court requires Deliveroo to pay a 375,000 euro fine for a "dissimulated work" system. During the trial of the British platform on Wednesday, March 16, the prosecutor Céline Ducournau considered that Deliveroo was responsible for an instrumentalization of the regulation of work. The platform concealed several jobs of delivery drivers who should have been employees and not independent.
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
📦 Bigblue (Series A) raises €12M: The French startup is creating a unified tech platform for brands to build their logistics.
💳 Civitfun (Seed) raises €2M: This Spanish startup is building an online Check-in / Check-out software for hotels, hostels and vacation rentals integrated with PMS.
🌍 Omnipresent (Series B) raises €109M: Omnipresent is a UK startup aiming to make it fast and easy to employ remote talent in over 150 countries.
🕹 Unleash (Series B) raises €109M: The Norwegian startup is building a Saas platform which allows Tech teams to experiment and learn in a controlled and safe way.
✨ Find all the fundraising of the week from 500k€ on this Airtable!
😍 Founder of the week:
This week we present you Adrien Roose, CEO & Co-founder of Cowboy.
Adrien Roose is now 34 years old and Cowboy is not the first adventure of this Belgian entrepreneur.
Cowboy is a manufacturer of electric bikes active in 12 countries. They just completed, 2 months ago, its largest fundraising since its creation in 2017: $80 million. Its goal: to democratize this means of transportation in the United States and Europe. Among the investors are Tiger Global, Index Ventures, Eothen, Isomer Opportunities Fund, Future Positive Capital and Triple Point Capital. Their participation in the project is timely as Cowboy prepares to deliver the first models of its Cowboy 4 to the U.S. After the United States, Cowboy plans to take on Europe more seriously.
But Cowboy is not the first startup created by Adrien. Let's go back to the beginning...
After studying business in Leuven, Belgium, Adrien spent a year at BNP Paribas in M&A and Private Equity. A few months later, in 2012, he launched Take Eat Easy, a bike-based meal delivery startup. In 2012, the concept was innovative and Deliveroo or Uber Eats didn’t exist yet, but the market quickly became very competitive and in March 2016, after having been turned down 114 times by VCs and after signing an agreement in principle with a French public logistics group (GeoPost, now DPDgroup) for €30 million, which was finally rejected by their board, Take It Easy closed its doors.
But after 4 years of living surrounded by bike delivery people and living in Belgium, the country with the highest penetration rate of electric bikes in Europe (and probably in the world), the idea came to Adrien by itself. He joined forces with Karim Slaoui and Tanguy Goretti, who had already proven themselves at Take Eat Easy and Djump, to create Cowboy and reinvent the electric bike by being driven by a strong ambition: to popularize the urban electric bike thanks to a high-end finish and an ultra-competitive price.
Cowboy is evolving in a sector that is also becoming more and more competitive: we talked about Angel a few weeks ago, Marc Simoncini's electric bike startup, but there are many others like IWeech or VanMoof.
Therefore, in addition to selling bikes, Cowboy is launching new services to differentiate itself.
For example, they are developping their subscription service, launched in 2021. Because buying an electric bike is one thing but maintaining it is another.
Another major focus of the company's work is its offer of reconditioned bikes. To make its offer more accessible to the general public, Cowboy has launched the Circular platform on which it sells reconditioned bikes. The company buys back old models from its customers, refurbishes them and resells them at a more affordable price with a manufacturer's warranty.
The first European store is located in Brussels and new stores are planned in Berlin (opened in February) and Paris (in May). Then Cowboy intends to continue its conquest of Western Europe. 🚴
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.
Meta - Client Partner, Venture Capital & Start-Ups (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Axa Venture Partners - Working-student VC Analyst (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Société Générale - Innovation & Venture capital Analyst (Paris) 👉 Apply here
🎁 The Gift
🔋 Still looking for a good podcast to listen to?
👉 We have a great podcast to recommend: Generation Do It Your Self by Matthieu Stefani. He takes us on a journey to discover the most ambitious personalities for maximum motivation. In real life, Matthieu runs Cosavostra, an international digital agency that advises its clients to develop in the digital world. Enjoy! 😎
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