vcfamily - Newsletter #25
You can now buy Qonto's shares, Sweep's Series B, Delphine Groll COO of Nabla as the Founder of the week
✒️
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.
“Impossible is just an opinion.” – Paulo Coelho
On the agenda:
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
😍 Founder of the week: Delphine Groll (Nabla)
🔎 Internship and job offers
🎁 The Gift
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🛒 Carrefour to launch an investment fund. The French food group has teamed up with investment fund Daphni to launch Dastore, an €80 million fund specialising in e-commerce and logistics.
📈 Elon Musk has taken a stake in Twitter. The famous entrepreneur and founder of Tesla has taken a 9.2% stake in Twitter, equivalent to 73.5 million shares. Elon Musk now owns four times as many shares as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
🇷🇺 More big tech companies suspend their activities. After Google, Apple, Microsoft, Airbnb, etc, other American big tech companies have taken sanctions against Russia. This week, Netflix, Adobe, PayPal, Mastercard, Epic Games have announced to stop their services in the country.
💻 Twitter founder's first tweet is going through the roof. The popularity of NFTs does not seem to be slowing down: a year ago, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet was sold for $2.9 million; today it is being offered for $48 million. The seller, Sina Estavi, has promised to donate 50% of the profits from the sale to a charity that provides aid in Africa.
🏦 Qonto opens its capital to its customers. The French neobank Qonto has decided to open up its capital to its 220,000 customers by selling shares at 138 euros. The start-up had already raised €486 million earlier this year.
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
🥦 Umiami (Series A) raises €26,5M: Specialising in vegan meat, the start-up wants to move from the laboratory to the factory to accelerate its growth. The company wants to have an industrial side of 10,000 square metres and produce 15,000 tonnes of vegetable meat from 2023.
🌍 Sweep (Series B) raises €66,5M: The start-up created in 2020 offers its clients a carbon footprint management service. This new round of financing, which includes Balderton Capital, New Wave and La Famiglia, comes three months after a $22 million round of financing.
🩺 LimFlow (Series D) raises €36M : this french company focuses on the treatment of chronic limb-threatening ischemia. Limflow fixes blocked arteries by a minimally-invasive procedure performed on the leg. This system improves patient’s life and prevents imputation.
👚 The Fabricant (Series A) raises €12M : The Netherlands based company offers digital fashion experiences. It creates digital clothing for clients like Adidas and dived in the blockchain. This round was led by Greenfield One. The aim of this platform is to allow designers to create and sell their outfits while allowing customers to try them.
✨ Find all the fundraising of the week from 500k€ on this Airtable!
😍 Founder of the week: Delphine Groll
This week we present you Delphine Groll, COO & Co-founder of Nabla.
Delphine Groll is co-founder of Nabla, a company that works for women's health that has raised 17 million euros in April 2021.
After a childhood marked by sports and in particular ski competitions, Delphine first graduated from the Institute of Political Studies in Aix-en-Provence (France) and went on to study at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). She then prepared for the ENA exam, which she failed. This failure will be a driving force for her, as she says: "this first failure made me realize that I had to do it differently to stand out".
She started her career at the Elysée (the presidential palace in France), as a representative of President Nicolas Sarkozy in charge of sports. This experience, which she considers to have been quite hard, lasted two years. At the end of the mandate, she joined a lobbying firm (APc), where she worked with Marc Simoncini, among others.
In 2012, Delphine saw new players arrive, start-ups were shaking up their sector and did not always have the means to be heard, to lobby. That's how she launched APc Startup, her first experience as an intrapreneur. She did a lot of intrapreneurship at first, which she now identifies as a fear of fully launching herself.
Delphine Groll then became Director of Communications for aufeminin group, before taking over the head of Business Development at My Little Paris. She is also the founder of Gretel, a healthy food box belonging to aufeminin.
Shortly after, Delphine was put in touch with an entrepreneur who wanted to set up a new project after the sale of one of his start-ups to Facebook: Alexandre Lebrun, a man she found exceptional, brilliant and very humble with whom she exchanged ideas for a few months before deciding to work together. Delphine then met Martin Raison, her third partner and CTO. The three of them launched the company a little before summer 2018.
In April 2021, Nabla announced it had raised €17 million from business angels like Xavier Niel, Rachel Delacour or Marc Simoncini, as well as a family office (Artémis) and a fund (Firstminute Capital). At the same time, the health application on which Nabla's teams have been working for nearly three years is finally seeing the light of day. The startup has found a way to realize its initial wish to bring a new solution in personalized medicine, thanks to artificial intelligence.
Specifically, the idea of this application is to allow women to exchange live with practitioners and health professionals, to keep a diary in which they centralize their medical data and monitor it, and to consult a series of resources and content that could be useful to them. To begin with, the application has focused on contraception issues, and will later open up to other topics. Nabla will allow users to connect with a general practitioner, gynecologist, nutritionist, psychologist or physiotherapist. Nabla wants to offer solutions that are as close as possible to each woman's particular situation, with a response adapted to their needs.
By collecting as much data as possible, the start-up hopes to train its algorithms to be more and more efficient and to better meet the needs of its users in terms of diagnosis, prevention and treatment.
Nabla seemed to be the first complete and free application for women. But the startup's business model has yet to be defined... The startup seems to be planning to launch Premium features. To be continued.
🔎 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 - VC Associate (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Raise - Assistant Startup & Program Manager (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Afi Ventures - VC Analyst (Paris) 👉 Apply here
🎁 The Gift
🎬 Do you need to animate one of your videos for your business or for a school presentation? You’ll be able to level up your game with this tool…
👉 Synthesia.io allows you to generate AI videos with an animated face. Go and try it!😍
Thank you for reading the vc family newsletter to the end. See you next week directly in your email box!