vcfamily - Newsletter #28
Meta's first shop, The Boring company's Series C, Daniel Khachab, CEO of Choco as the Founder of the week!
✒️ Sara Idrissi, 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.
“Quoi que tu rêves d'entreprendre, commence-le. L'audace a du génie, du pouvoir, de la magie." - Goethe
On the agenda:
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
🚀 Fundraisings, acquisitions and IPOs of the week
😍 Founder of the week: Daniel Khachab (Choco)
🔎 Internship and job offers
🎁 The Gift
📰 Extra! Extra! Weekly news
👨💻 Elon Musk is buying Twitter. It's official, the board of directors of the American social network has validated the sale of the company to Musk for 44 billion dollars. The billionaire announced new features for Twitter, such as the transition of algorithms to open source and the fight against bots. To finance the deal, Elon Musk sold $4 billion worth of Tesla shares.
🤳 Snapchat unveils its drone. The American giant announced, on the occasion of the Snap Partner Summit, Pixy, a mini drone that allows you to take selfies. The latter will be fully automated and will not require any piloting skills. It will be sold at a price of 230 dollars.
🏬 Meta opens its first shop. The American giant Meta, formerly Facebook, will open its first physical shop on 9 May in Burlingame (California) to sell its augmented reality glasses and virtual reality headsets. This opening is in line with Meta's strategy to enter the virtual reality and metaverse market.
🎧 Apple continues to make a place for itself in the services market. The Apple company announced that it has reached 825 million customers and 19.8 billion dollars in revenue for its services, such as Apple Music, iCloud, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, etc. These figures illustrate the success of Tim Cook's strategy of offering more and more services to diversify its revenues, which originally came from hardware.
💼 Airbnb employees will be able to work from wherever they want. It's a small revolution in the Big Tech world, as the home rental company announced in an email to all of its 6,000 employees that they are "free to move anywhere in the country in which they work". Airbnb will still maintain offices in dozens of cities around the world.
🚀 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.
💰 Taxfix (Series D) raises $220M : The Berlin based Fintech helps people complete their tax filing systems through a chatbox that only asks relevant information. It is currently active in Germany, Italy and Spain. This round led by Teachers’ Venture Growth will help the unicorn expand to other countries.
🚗 Spotawheel (Series B) raises $100M : The company is in the used cars market and offers a platform to simply the transactions for the users. It helps people invest in a safe way in pre-owned cars. The Greek tech startup wants to use this investment led by Venture Friends to expand internationally.
💻 SonarSource (late VC) raises $412M : the swiss tech company offers a platform that helps developers code. It is both an open-source and commercial code analyzers for 29 programming languages. This round led by Advent international will help with the company’s salesforce. It already counts IBM, Microsoft and the Alphabet company as customers.
💊 OMass Therapeutics (Series B) raises $100M : The round led by Google Ventures and Sanofi Ventures will help the biotechnology company expand. The London based startup works on developing drugs for rare diseases. The drugs developed by OMass targets specific molecules in the body.
✨ Find all the fundraising of the week from 500k€ on this Airtable!
😍 Founder of the week: Daniel Khachab (Choco)
This week we present you Daniel Khachab, CEO & Co-founder of Choco
When working at Eurazeo, I worked on a deep-dive on “Vertical SaaS for Local Businesses”. Vertical SaaS for Local Businesses are SaaS designed to help local business owners/managers in a specific vertical better manage their operations, reduce costs and replace existing (often paper) processes... In this context, I was particularly interested in one of the sectors that I thought was very promising: the hospitality sector and especially the restaurant vertical.
Restaurant average margins are only about 3-5% per business. Thus, they're always looking for ways to improve their efficiency and run things smarter even though, for the same reason, the restaurant industry is the one spending less on technology. SaaS for restaurants are booming and have the potential to reshape the entire industry by providing restaurants of all sizes with access to innovative technology. These platforms are leading the industry’s transition to the cloud. Choco is one of the leaders of this transistion.
Choco is a Berlin-based foodtech making software to digitise ordering, supply chain and communications for restaurants and suppliers. They just raised $111m bringing its total valuation to $1.2bn which makes it Germany’s latest unicorn.
The fundraise is quite impressive as it doesn’t involve any new investors. It’s an extension of its $100m Series B (July 2021) and is led by the same US growth investors, G Squared and Insight Partners.
At the head of this new unicorn founded in 2018: a Frenchman, Gregoire Ambroselli, and two Germans, Julian Hammer and Daniel Khachab. After completing a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in International Business with a major in Finance at the University of Maastricht, Daniel launched his first startup in 2007, a social network with restaurant reservation & affiliate shopping features. The startup failed 2 years later but already announced Daniel's interest in the restaurant industry. He then joined Rocket Internet, the startup studio founded in Berlin in 2007 by the Samwer brothers, and became Global Venture Development Manager. He was part of the most competitive team within Rocket: the global pre-launch taskforce, building startups from scratch to market leadership. During that time he worked for a year at "Epic companies", an incubator led by rocket management, and built two e-com companies in 4 months each. He then became co-founder and CEO of one of Rocket Internet's startups, Vaniday.com, an online marketplace for beauty and wellness professionals. In 7 months he took the startup from 0 to 120+ people team across 4 continents, serving 14k salons worldwide, with €20m+ in funding. After 5 years, Daniel left Rocket Internet to create Choco in March 2018.
Today, Choco joins the ranks of European unicorns with this new funding, which will be used to further develop new features, accelerate growth in Europe and the United States, and open up new markets, with the goal of being present in the world's 50 largest capitals by 2023. The startup currently employs 400 people and has already convinced 15,000 restaurant owners and over 10,000 suppliers in France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Spain and the United States. More than 1.1 billion euros worth of orders were placed via the platform in March 2022 (figures provided by Choco). Choco's promise: simplification and time savings. In a sector that is still not very digitalized despite the weight of logistical challenges and economic hazards, the startup promises its users to save up to 3 hours per week thanks to its Whatsapp-inspired application that allows any restaurant owner to open a free communication channel with each supplier, in which orders will be collected and products referenced. Suppliers, whether wholesalers or small producers, can also use the application to inform customers of new products, stock shortages or promotions.
Billions of dollars of Venture Capital have flown into the Restaurant Tech sector in recent years and a great number of innovations have already taken place. Players are consolidating in the US but, as the case of Choco proves it, opportunities are still significant in 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.
Eldorado.co - Analyst VC / Relations Investisseurs (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Chausson Finance - Intern Analyst VC Fundraising (Paris) 👉 Apply here
Evolem - VC Intern (Paris) 👉 Apply here
🎁 The Gift
💌 Today's bonus is a bit special. If you find it difficult to keep track of your progress in life in any area, this site is for you!
👉 futureme.org allows you to write a letter to yourself that you will receive in the future. A nice way to see how much you have progressed! 😍
Thank you for reading the vc family newsletter to the end. See you next week directly in your email box!