Hello and happy Sunday - it’s still Sunday, right? :-)
Here’s what I have this week.
Euro strat
❄️ Powder:
🇳🇴 Verdane
🇬🇧 Octopus Ventures
🇫🇷 Lauxera
🇧🇪 efounders
🔥 Interesting deals:
food: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
digital wellbeing: 1, 2
no code tools: 1, 2
🇸🇪 clothing rental service
🇩🇪 emissions management platform for freight operators
🇩🇰 social learning platform
🇸🇪 electric delivery trucks
🇨🇭 drones
🇳🇴 marketplace for bank deposits
… oh yeah, and Wolt with half a billion, not too bad of a challenge for a multi-culturally fragmented European market. The money is in the bank, let’s see some execution now - interesting to see the strategy coming from the Nordics, where the food culture is so different than in the rest of the continent.
Speaking of which, Getir, which only raised a hundred mill or so the other week, started to put the money to work, expands aggressively in London. Hyper-competitive space, I have my money on them tbh, I always bet on the hungry outsiders.
The food space is really hot all over the value chain (see all the other deals from the top of the list), and the home delivery vertical is getting really crowded now, all of them still betting on the upside from the offline shops losing business due to Covid. However, there’s so many logistic chains a market can support, and an inflection point will be reached soon.
🤓 Observations:
🇪🇺 The top 60 most active VCs, angel investors, corporate venture investors from Sweden in 2020.
🇬🇧 Ben Evans made public the 2021 presentation about his view on the tech world. Nothing new if you follow Ben’s work, give yourself 15 minutes to chew it on though.
🇳🇴 Schibsted Future Report 2021
🇩🇪 Insider Inc., the parent of Business Insider and related properties, roared back in the second half of the year, posting 30% revenue growth for 2020 while turning a profit. A person familiar with the matter said the company generated over $150 million in revenue.
All this while most of the media companies bled.
🇬🇧 The BBC dominates the English-language online news properties - brings in more traffic than CNN (#2) and NYTimes (#3) combined.
🇪🇺 Some dudes who prefer to remain un-named are substacking Euro funding deals. Not a bad effort - so many internet lists and media announcements, if only there was a digital product where you could find them all searchable by country or by industry. :D
🇫🇷 HysetCo, which in 2019 made a lot of fanfare with a Toyota JV in order to launch 600 hydrogen taxis in Paris by the end of 2020, raised €80 million from outside investors and blamed the delay on covid.
🇸🇪 Ikea is doing a product line for gamers & esports players in China. Super interesting. Last year Ikea did a similar co-op with Sonos iirc.
🇭🇷 Croatia is the latest Euro country to offer digital nomad visas. Attractive for non-Europeans (that would include Brits too now) - Covid affected the country’s tourism pretty bad.
🇪🇺 GDPR fines accelerate to top €158 million in 2020
Other stuff
Zuck calls Apple ‘significant’ future competitor. Tim says that technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed.
None of them is neither right nor wrong, that’s just PR covering that for some reason Apple got really pissed at Facebook and wants to crush it.
I don’t sympathize with FB for a second, this was bound to happen and they deserve it, but this is what also happens when the richest guys on the planet get mad at you, that is why everybody is afraid to speak badly of Apple in public.
Jane Street: the top Wall Street firm ‘no one’s heard of’
A profile of John Gray, #2 @Blackstone.
Great insights on the story of the week (GameStop, duh). Here’s an aggregator of some good readings on the topic, if you’re so inclined.
Nextdoor is quietly replacing the small-town paper.
The stack behind a $10 million fund.
Peak Bay Area was seven years ago in 2014.
More than 1,100 students at Columbia University have begun a tuition strike.
You’re clubhouse, how do you monetize?
Why hardware is hard, a cost decomposition.
Happy Sunday!
Thanks for reading 🙌
Created every Sunday by @drnovac.
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