vcfamily - Newsletter #27
Netflix in trouble, Elon Musk keeps digging tunnels, some jobs and gifts for you...
✒️ Alice Bardon Catineau, 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.
“The last mile is the least crowded” - David Reinecke, Author of Atomic habits
On the agenda:
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
😍 Founder of the week: Julia Bijaoui (Frichti)
🔎 Internship and job offers
🎁 The Gift
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🍕 Just Eat Takeaway wants to sell GrubHub. After record sales, linked to the covid crisis, the home food delivery giant is experiencing some difficulties, particularly in becoming profitable. Two years after the $7.3 billion takeover of Grubhub, which was used to enter the US market, the company has announced that it is "actively considering the introduction of a strategic partner in and/or the partial or total sale of Grubhub". In addition, Just Eat is considering laying off 300 employees in France, 270 delivery staff and 30 support staff.
🎥 Netflix is losing subscribers. For the first time since saying, the streaming giant has announced a net loss of subscribers, 200,000 for the first quarter. While the number is small compared to the 221 million total subscribers, the drop raises questions about the business model of the company, which has recently seen its revenue rise but its profit fall. Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings cited four factors for the loss of subscribers: "increasing competition, slowing adoption of smart TV, account sharing, and macroeconomic conditions (war in Ukraine, crises, etc.). NFLX shares have also lost 35% on the stock market this week.
📡 Sigfox to be bought by UnaBiz. A few weeks ago, we told you in this newsletter about the bankruptcy of Sigfox, which specialises in telecommunications and IoT, and which is 150 million euros in debt. While its future was uncertain, it is now official that the company will be taken over by UnaBiz, a Singaporean operator that operates in the same sector. UnaBiz is taking over the business, contracts and assets for €3.3 million and is committed to keeping 110 of the 168 employees still working for the company. Sigfox was founded in 2010 and raised a total of €277 million.
🌮 Chipotle launches venture capital fund. The American Mexican restaurant chain has announced the creation of the Cultivate Next fund, endowed with 50 million dollars, which will invest in start-ups from the seed to the series B stage. The aim is to find innovative companies in the food and logistics sector in particular.
📺 CNN's streaming service is (already) closing. Three weeks ago, we reported on the launch of CNN+, the new streaming service of the American channel, developed by WarnerMedia. Since then, AT&T and Discovery have bought the latter and decided that it was not strategic to keep CNN+ in service. This is a blow for the TV channel which has invested several million euros in its own streaming service.
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
🚗 The Boring Company (Series C) raises $675M: This round is led by Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital. The Boring Company is Elon Musk’s company which aims to solve traffic in urban areas thanks to tunnels.
💲 Helios (Series A) raises €9M : Helios is a fintech which aims to be a green European neobank, claiming for now 7 500 users. This round is led by Serena.
🥝 Hubcycle raises €3.5M : The Hubcycle announces a second fundraising from Citizen Capital, Bleu Capital and its historical shareholders - daphni and SWEN Capital Partners. The company identifies and transforms unused fruits parts and uses it as raw materials for the industry.
🎶 Deezer announces its IPO. The French music streaming app wants to accelerate its growth thanks to an IPO, to do so the company merged with a SPAC. This should allow a fundraise of €410M to €425M.
✨ Find all the fundraising of the week from 500k€ on this Airtable!
😍 Founder of the week: Julia Bijaoui (Frichti)
This week we present you Julia Bijaoui, Co-CEO & Co-founder of Frichti
Julia Bijaoui is co-founder of Frichti, a french meal delivery platform at home or at work. They raised about 52 million euros in total before being acquired last March by Gorillas, the German express delivery app that was born less than two years ago but has already raised $1.3B, for an amount still unknown to this day. Together, they become the French leader in the booming express food delivery market.
Julia Bijaoui was born in a family of entrepreneurs, creators of a biological analysis laboratory. At a young age, she attended a bilingual French-English school in Paris before obtaining her Baccalauréat Littéraire in 2006. She then joined a preparatory class for the Grandes Ecoles (CPGE) specialized in HEC (Hautes Etudes Commerciales) at the Madeleine Daniélou high school in Rueil-Malmaison (France). She specialized in economics and mathematics and joined HEC Paris in 2008.
After graduation in 2012, she began her career at JolieBox, a French specialist in subscription-based beauty boxes that merged with BirchBox the same year. She became Strategy and Operations Manager.
During here experience at JolieBox, she met Quentin Vacher who became her husband and with whom she partnered in June 2015 to found Frichti.
In 2018, she was named in the famous "Forbes Under 30" listing and was also named by Forbes the following year as one of the "40 French Women Who Matter In 2019".
Frichti raised its first €1 million in Seed in November 2015 with Alven. Its second fundraise, of 12 million euros in Series A, took place in March 2016 with Eurazeo (IdInvest back then), Alven, and recognized Business Angels like Celine Lazorthes (Leetchi) or Pierre Valade (Sunrise). In May 2017, Frichti raised 30 million euros in Series B with Alven, Eurazeo, Felix Capital and Verlinvest and then $7.9m in March 2019, in a post-Series-B bridge. Acquisition discussions with Gorillas were then initiated in January 2022 and concluded in March.
In 2020, in the middle of the covid crisis, Frichti found itself in controversy for illegally employing many workers through a subcontractor. These delivery workers would sometimes not be paid for weeks. Julia Bijaoui defended herself, assuring that she was signing contracts with her subcontractors including very precise clauses of respect of the law, to carry out regular controls on the ground, to control the identity of all her delivery men... She assured that the subcontractor was an exception and announced the creation of a new program to accompany the deliverymen in the preparation of their future.
After the mid-2021 takeover of the British company Dija by the American company GoPuff, the takeover of Frichti by Gorillas (the financial details of which have not been made public) is one of the first notable consolidation operations in the "quick delivery" market, or delivery of groceries and meals in a few minutes.
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.
Orange ventures - Investment Analyst (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Infravia - Analyst Intern (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Neumann - Fundraising Analyst Intern (Paris) 👉 Apply here
🎁 The Gift
🎙️ Are you always looking for good podcasts to listen to?
👉 At vc family we just discovered the Frenchdoers podcast, a podcast created by two people who are passionate about the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Jean de la Rochebrochard is their latest guest 😉
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An easy and quick reading, to get the last update of what's going on the market.
Thanks for the persistent effort 😊