Hello,
Welcome to a new edition of Sunday CET, where I managed not to mention at all the fact that Elon Musk changed his mind and intends to buy Twitter now, in a deal likely to close by the end of the month. This edition covers though some of the Euro investors backing YC startups, career moves and mid-life crisis dealings.
Enjoy,
Dragos
Euro startup intel
Interesting deals
🇨🇭 Exnaton, building a renewable energy marketplace, was seeded.
🇬🇷 Lambda Automata, which does autonomous systems for national security, was pre-seeded.
🇩🇰 Handyhand, home services marketplace w/ 100k users, raised angel funding.
🇩🇪 Jomigo, developing a B2B recruitment marketplace, was also seeded.
🇩🇪 zebrapass, building a no-code automation solution, was seeded too.
🇸🇪 Forloop, developing an easy-to-use no-code tool for scraping data, raised $800k seed.
🇪🇸 Indya, building a nutrition tracking app, raised $1 million.
🇸🇪 Buddywise, doing a SAAS using computer vision for safety monitoring and workplace injury mitigation, raised $1.2 million.
🇬🇧 Finteum, developing a trading platform for bank treasurers, raised $1.5 million.
🇬🇧 Lawhive, building a solicitors marketplace for consumers, raised $2.2 million seed.
🇧🇪 Easop, doing a SAAS used for Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP) for employees across multiple countries, raised $2.5 million seed.
🇬🇧 Solvemed, using ML to develop novel diagnostic-predictive digital biomarkers, raised $3.5 million.
🇫🇷 DeepLife, biotech doing a SaaS platform for Digital Twin of cells, raised $6 million.
intel extracted from N9
Also notable
These weeks a few YC alums from Europe announced raising capital - i.e. Humaans, Masref, Gigs, Lightdash - and this made me curious what European investors backed Y Combinator startups this year. Some quick names:
Moonfire (4 deals), SNÖ Ventures (2 deals), GFC, XAnge, Octopus, Calm/Storm, 7Percent, Omnes, Redalpine
A special note about Moonfire, which has consistently been backing YC startups ever since it started building its portfolio a couple of years ago (in anti-thesis to the negative YC effect claimed by other Euro VCs) - they have at least 7-8 such startups in portfolio. For who doesn't already know, Moonfire is an indie VC launched pre-covid by Mattias Ljungman (part of Niklas Zennström’s team when he launched Atomico in 2006) and which formally closed a $60 million seed-stage fund in 2021.
More intel bits
🇩🇪 LaunchHub Ventures (Bulgaria) and Inovo Venture (Poland) seeded Luka Ivicevic’s new startup, a telemedicine startup available in USA and operated out of Miami. In 2018, when he was 22, Ivicevic founded Penta, a German neo-bank that raised some 70 million and was flipped to Qonto this summer.
🇨🇭 Luca Schmid, a Swiss ex-investment banker who recently worked for Coatue in NYC, will join Guillaume Pousaz’s family office in Europe.
🇫🇷 Philip Chopin, a French ex-management consultant who recently worked for 83 North in London, joined US-based NEA as their first European partner in the UK.
🇳🇴 Telenor, the Norwegian telecom company, spun off a fibre infrastructure unit and sold a 30% stake in it for 1 billion to KKR and a local pension fund.
🇪🇸 Norrsken from Sweden made a real estate announcement for creating a co-working space in Barcelona that should accommodate 800 people. That’s likely about 50 mid-sized startups (a big number for Barcelona) + there’s a lot of Swedes living in Spain or having a second home there. The Barcelona startup market is rather small, with less than a couple of hundred startup deals closed every year, mostly backed by local accelerators, which now will compete directly with Norrsken’s deep pockets. The Swedes run another office space in Stockholm and also do startup deals in Europe out of a 125 million fund (have a Barcelona-based portfolio company too).
🇩🇪 Porsche, which went public last month in the year's largest European IPO, already overtook parent company Volkswagen as Europe's most valuable automaker.
🇨🇳 TikTok's turnover in Europe surged almost six-fold in 2021, to record revenues of more than $990 million.
🇺🇸 CRV raised $1 billion for its 14th flagship VC fund, and $500 million for its second growth-stage fund.
🇺🇸 Tiger Global is targeting $6 billion for its next fund to invest in privately held tech companies, while its long term partner, John Curtius, will leave to start his own firm, which will concentrate investments from Series A to Series C. Curtius will stay with Tiger until June.
🇺🇸 Amazon launched a $150 million fund-of-funds for VC firms that back underrepresented founders.
How do you find investors for your startup?
Tomorrow evening we’re doing a lil’ workshop helping startup founders find investors and evaluate who is right or not for them. We still have a few spots open, email me if you want in, first come first served.
Other notes
🇪🇺 Are the Euro banks on the brink of a systemic crisis? A non-emotional, data-driven assessment of the situation hardly calls for a widespread collapse moment.
💩 France vs the UK By most measures, the French budget situation could be considered worse than that of the UK, and furthermore France has less room to raise taxes in the future. And across those two countries, which way is the migration flow for skilled labor? And yet it is the current UK government that is taking such a PR whacking … good thread
🤖 Google did an AI tool that can generate videos based on text prompts. Content farm creators will be delighted, which in turn will make Google happy coz that would lead to a larger inventory to sell ads against. Yeah, there’s always an evil angle with Google.
Btw, why does Google launch many products and then abandons them - that’s how their employees get promoted.
💦 The crazy economics of comic conventions link
🧬 Living in Switzerland versus in Sweden - I have plenty opinions on it, but this is not the right place for them.
🇩🇪 A German dude - Lars Windhorst - hired an Israeli private intelligence company that orchestrated a clandestine campaign aimed at ousting the then-president of Hertha Berlin, the Bundesliga football club.
🇫🇷 Iconic Paris metro tickets (the punch cards) are being phased out.
🇭🇰 Virgin Atlantic is permanently ditching its Hong Kong-London flights, partly because it's no longer able to fly over Russia.
♟️ Wikipedia, Amazon and BBC are on the top most visited websites, other than a search engine - here’s a breakdown by country.
🤷♂️ How different do you think you really are? - the problem of travel at this particular moment is not too many people traveling in general, it is too many people wanting to experience the exact same thing because they all went to the same websites and read the same reviews. link
Related: the rise of sleep tourism.
🔫 How to deal with mid-life crisis after divorcing: you go after the VC that’s backed your ex and ballistic on your business partners. Dude deleted the social media trails, probably after sobering up.
🇬🇧 Briton almost died as he attempted Mont Blanc climb wearing tracksuit.
💭 San Francisco now has a fine-dining restaurant for dogs with $75 tasting menu. Locals think this is a sign of a city in collapse - but SF is already a ghost city anyways.
Thanks for reading 🙌
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