vcfamily - Newsletter #24
N26 leaves Italy, Deepki raises €150M and Benjamin Gaignault, the CEO of Ornikar 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.
“When written in Chinese the word “crisis” is composed of two characters – one represents danger and the other represents opportunity.” – John F Kennedy
On the agenda:
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
😍 Founder of the week: Benjamin Gaignault (Ornikar)
🔎 Internship and job offers
🎁 The Gift
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🏦 N26 can no longer have new Italian customers. Last Tuesday, the Bank of Italy made official the ban on the German neo-bank recruiting new customers. This decision follows an inspection at the end of 2021 which showed, according to the Bank of Italy, that N26 does not respect the anti-money laundering rule. The German regulator BaFin had already forced the neo bank to limit the number of new customers to 50,000 per month.
📱Gifs are coming to TikTok! The "google of gifs" Giphy has announced a partnership with the Chinese social network. It will now be possible to embed gifs in TikTok videos, which opens up new content creation possibilities for users.
👩⚖️ The United States wants to toughen up anti-trust law against GAFA. Six pieces of legislation are currently pending in the US Congress, aimed at banning tech giants from promoting their own products. Although the debate on the power of GAFA is not new, the particularity is that the Biden administration has given its support to the bill and that Democrats and Republicans have agreed on the subject.
🛒 Yango Deli is leaving France, and possibly the UK. The quick commerce start-up owned by Russian giant Yandex has announced that it is to end its activities in France. The spokesperson for Yango Deli justified the withdrawal by under-performance in relation to its objectives. The start-up is indeed facing other delivery giants such as Gorillas, Getir, Flink, etc. Yandex may sell its UK subsidiary to a competitor.
📺 CNN is going into streaming. The TV channel launched its own streaming service this week, called CNN+. Priced at $5.99, the channel will offer exclusive content as well as replays of its shows. The company has already signed agreements with Android, Amazon and Apple to be present on as many platforms as possible and to establish itself in the highly competitive streaming landscape.
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
🛋 Bluedigo (Seed) raises €1M: Founded in 2019, Bluedigo, a French company specializing in the sale of refurbished office furniture and new eco-designed furniture announces that it has raised €1 million. In addition to the sale of reconditioned furniture, Bluedigo offers on its website a dozen French companies that manufacture eco-designed furniture, from waste plastic, wood scraps etc..
👾 Composable (Series A) raises €29M: The German start-up specialising in cross-chain composability wants to make its technology an essential for Web3 and Decentralised Finance (DeFi).
🧫 Core Biogenesis (Series A) raises €10M: The French start-up Core Biogenesis, which was created as part of the Entrepreneur First program, is closing a €10 million Series A round to industrialize its production of growth factors, key molecules for manufacturing cell therapies. After focusing on artificial meat, it is now concentrating on treatments for cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.
🏘 Deepki (Series C) raises €150M: Founded in 2014, the French company, which measures the environmental performance of real estate parks in the tertiary sector, is raising €150 million to improve the energy efficiency of buildings.
✨ Find all the fundraising of the week from 500k€ on this Airtable!
😍 Founder of the week: Benjamin Gaignault
This week we present you Benjamin Gaignault, CEO & Co-founder of Ornikar.
In 2013, Benjamin Gaignault is 24 years old, he works as a sales for a fiber optic infrastructure operator and just got married. With Alexandre Chartier, a school friend, they make an observation (that could be done by everyone who has taken the driving test in their life): taking the driving test in France is too expensive, too long and too restrictive. The most taken exam in France, with 1 million candidates each year, is a nightmare from the beginning to the end.
Benjamin Gaignault and Alexandre Chartier met at the private high school La Salle-Passy-Buzenval in Rueil-Malmaison (France). Benjamin passed a BTS in international trade before joining Euromed (now Kedge business school), in Marseille while Alexandre attended Essca in Angers, a post-baccalaureate business school. The two met in the spring of 2013 to discuss launching a business project together. As the two friends say, "we didn't come up with the idea of the century, but we are responding to a poorly satisfied need in an existing market."
Inspired by a social and service model that was emerging in France, that of the use of freelancers and therefore of platform, they decide to exploit the possibility of taking the code and driving license as an independent candidate without going through a traditional driving school to offer cheaper courses, with qualified instructors.
Therefore, they decide to create Ornikar, proposing an alternative to traditional driving schools in France with a totally digitized offer, from code training to the booking of driving hours, by using independent driving teachers, while ensuring a high level of pedagogical requirements and the personalized follow-up of each student until the exam, all this at a very competitive price:
The Driving Theory Test for 29,90€ (10× cheaper than in a traditional driving school).
The Driving License from 749€ (30% cheaper than in a traditional driving school).
In 2014 and 2015, Ornikar found itself in the international spotlight as driving school unions attacked them for unfair competition. Yet the startup continued to grow and claimed to represent 20% of the driving license market (200,000 students) in 2018 and 420,000 in 2020 (for the driving theory test). They raised a Seed round in November 2014 with Elaia, a Series A in March 2018 with IdInvest (now Eurazeo). Today in Series C (April 2021), the startup has raised more than €157 million in total. It also includes the participation of well-known entrepreneurs such as Xavier Niel (Free), Marc Simoncini (Meetic) and Jacques-Antoine Granjon (Vente-Privée).
Today, Ornikar is no longer just an online driving school, since the startup has also launched into the car insurance business and wants to become a fully-fledged insurtech to become the world leader in road safety. On this new objective, Benjamin says he wants to go very fast and very far in the international deployment of Ornikar and in the development of their offer to overtake, as they have already done, the big traditional groups, by innovating.
🔎 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.
INCO - Financial Analyst Intern (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Adelie - VC Analyst Intern (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Asterion Impact - Junior Analyst (Paris) 👉 Apply here
🎁 The Gift
🏗 Do you want to learn more about the tools used in the vc world for deal sourcing, reporting and portfolio management?
👉 vcstack.io is the bible for vc stacks! It’s the world's largest directory of tools and resources for venture capital and angel investors. 😍
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