The one with scooters, Parker points and sustainable urinals.
#44
Hello and welcome to a new edition of Sunday CET!
It’s the last summer week, ppl are still mostly holidaying in Europe. The S&P 500 had its best August since 1986 and yet it doesn’t really feel like it, au contraire, we’re living in a trifecta. Many startups go bust and/or lay off people and we’re fully getting into the second pandemic wave.
This is also the week I usually book the snowboarding holidays, it looks a bit like a gamble this year tbh.
Anyways, hope all is well with you and still enjoying the last warm days before the fall. Here’s what caught my attention this week.
More money and early stage market bets
🇩🇰 Seed Capital
🇩🇪 Bitkraft Ventures
🇧🇬 Movens Capital
🇬🇧 mobile app for nutrition advice based on blood sugar data (made by two Russians)
🇩🇪 Germans solving the same problem
🇬🇧 fintech product to help renters finance their rental deposits
🇨🇭 environment-independent, drone-based, end-to-end data acquisition platform
🇩🇪 AI-based software solution for pathology
🇨🇭 mobile-based neo bank
🇩🇪 video-based social network
🇺🇸 a loyalty platform on top of game activity data
Observations, research, data
First things first - there was a wrong link in the last edition about non-local investments made in local companies, thanks for letting me know. This is the right one.
🇪🇺 The growth investors from the Nordics
Even though the Nordics is a small overall market, startups can have interesting options when looking to scale up companies with local investment partners.
🇪🇸 Afterpay acquired Pagantis from Spain for €50 million and will become active in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Exactly where its European competitor Klarna is not active.
The numbers:
Afterpay (Australia-based) had 30k merchants and $250M in net revenue in 2019.
Klarna (Sweden-based) had 200k merchants and $750M operating revenue in 2019.
There’s plenty more willing to eat Klarna’s lunch.
🇪🇸 Bird is leaving the Spanish scooter market, specifically Barcelona, where it operated under the Scoot brand name and which they acquired just a year ago. It looks like they will kill off the Scoot brand entirely.
🇪🇸 Delivery Hero acquired a minority share of €13 million in Movo and invested into further minority shareholdings with a total amount of €10.5 million.
Movo is owned by Cabify (Spanish ridesharing company) and local VCs - it’s a 2017 Cabify spinoff providing on demand scooters, e-bikes and motorcycles in Madrid, Barcelona (only motorcycles), Malaga (only scooters) and Valencia (only scooters), as well as active in Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Argentina.
🇬🇷 Also Delivery Hero and again about the on-demand grocery business - InstaShop is Greece’s first notable startup exit at $360 million.
Founded five years ago, InstaShop raised just $7 million before being acquired by Delivery Hero.
Also interesting, InstaShop was incorporated in Greece, headquartered in Dubai and operates in the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Egypt and Bahrain, besides the home country. So not too much Euro strategic positioning with this deal.
🇩🇰 More early stage DTC: Heartcore invested €1.7 million in a startup launched by a couple of ex-management consulting ladies aiming to build an online jewellery store.
🇩🇪 Earlybird started a six months startup program dedicated to the first-generation immigrants in Germany. Smart move.
🇸🇪 Spotify is developing a ‘virtual events’ feature.
Interesting to follow up on this also because Facebook was complaining about Apple’s 30% cut on their virtual events the other week.
🇸🇪 The fastest early stage growing startup from Sweden increased sales from $3M in 2018 to $16.7M in 2019. ($)
🇪🇺 The market capitalization of U.S. tech stocks is now greater than the value of the entire European stock market, according to Bank of America.
🇪🇺 Why can’t UK and Europe create big tech companies to rival Google, Apple, Amazon etc?
Best answer? Culture.
🇳🇴 Norwegian had first-half 2020 losses of $610 million.
🇫🇷 Time to think differently about France.
🇫🇷 American students are now eligible for exemptions from travel restrictions to France. Elegant and decent.
🇬🇧 Saku launched a startup accelerator. Because why not. Or, as she rightly points out, it’s better than writing on Substack.
🇬🇧 A live event means nothing in an empty stadium. The Premier League edition.
🇬🇧 Bristol-based Vertical Aerospace said that commuters will be travelling between London and Brighton by air taxi as soon as 2024. The five-seater prototype will be completed by September 2021.
Vertical Aerospace has been funded by founder Stephen Fitzpatrick who also founded the energy firm Ovo with plans to bring up-front customer deposits.
🇳🇱 Meanwhile in the Netherlands: Amsterdam installs sustainable urinals to combat "wild peeing".
🇫🇷 In France, the typical person thinks that 31% of the population is Muslim. Actual share: 7.5%.
In the US, the typical person thinks that 17% of the population is Muslim. Actual share: 1%.
Other stuff
A side comment and one of Ev’s points that I really like: they have steadily grown over a long period of time without the typical trade-off that internet publishing and platforms make — that is, without advertising.
Any media asset you find on the internet today is a horrendous user experience due to useless popups and trackers and all the crap that ad suppliers get them to force down the consumers’ throat.
An absolutely terrible experience, part of the tradeoff of getting your media fix for free. But the bigger point is that the people managing media businesses don’t really understand the potential of content, tech and users combo. Never did and, frankly, they will never get it unless they change the assumption that they need to sell advertising in order to build a media business.
Other than that, it is a great read into Medium’s strategy. I still think Substack is after eating their lunch and they will ultimately either collide (when they will have the same KPIs) or merge (they have the same investors).
Speaking of which, some pitch trends from YC S20 Demo Day:
• Superhuman for X
• Shopify for X
• Figma for X
• Lambda School for X
• Plaid for X
• Zoom for X
• Brex for X
• Zapier for X
• Impossible Foods for XRetailers are more and more actual media companies, creating content and selling ads - CVS Pharmacy is the last one to launch an ad network for in-store, online campaigns.
If you’re in DTC and if you’re not doing earned media, you’re at competitive disadvantage. Some of my favs: 1, 2
If you like wine (like I do) you may know about the Parker ratings.
What you may not know (I didn’t) is that Parker used to have a newsletter back in the 70s that made his wine ratings famous.
Pinterest paid $89M to break the lease on their new office space because the future is WFH.
Elon Musk on his brain-machine interface company Neuralink.
Everybody hates digital calendars, so everybody’s trying to build a better one
Weekend read: This Plane Is Not Going to Land in Cairo”: Saudi Prince Sultan Boarded a Flight in Paris. Then, He Disappeared
Energy, attitude and personality cannot be “remoted” through even the best fiber optic lines. That’s the whole reason many of us moved to New York in the first place.
You ever wonder why Silicon Valley even exists? I have always wondered, why do these people all live and work in that location? They have all this insane technology; why don’t they all just spread out wherever they want to be and connect with their devices? Because it doesn’t work, that’s why.
Real, live, inspiring human energy exists when we coagulate together in crazy places like New York City. Feeling sorry for yourself because you can’t go to the theater for a while is not the essential element of character that made New York the brilliant diamond of activity it will one day be again.
Happy Sunday!
Thanks for reading 🙌
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