France Newsletter
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Skello raises $6.9 million for its staff management service
French startup Skello just raised a $6.9 million funding round (€6 million) from Aglaé Ventures, XAnge, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle and existing investors Thomas Landais, Guillaume le Dieu de Ville and Gilles Blanchard.
The startup is helping bar, restaurant and hotel managers keep track of all the shifts and staffing issues. Skello uses a software-as-a-service approach to help you save time on pesky admin tasks.
After setting up your rules, you can easily generate shifts. Waiters, receptionists and other staff members receive their schedule via email and SMS. Employees can also request shift changes, say when they’re unavailable and make sure everything is taken into account.
At the end of the month, Skello can generate detailed reports with bonuses, leaves, etc. Everything is then exported to payroll solutions. And of course, Skello helps you visualize how much you’re spending on staff, if you’re keeping costs under control and more.
There are many companies trying to do the same thing. But in reality many bars and restaurants still rely on Excel. Chances are it works quite well if you’re running a small business. But it doesn’t scale well. 30,000 employees are now using Skello every day. Alain Ducasse, Planet Sushi and AccorHotels’ Ibis are using Skello.
With today’s funding round, the company first wants to expand to new categories, such as retail and healthcare. Skello then plans to expand to other European countries.
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Emmanuel Macron meets with the French tech community
French President Emmanuel Macron came to France’s ginormous startup campus Station F to talk to the French tech community. The event is organized by La French Tech, the government initiative to promote and foster the startup community in France.
Station F director Roxanne Varza first took the stage to introduce the event. She announced that there will be more startups in the Fighters Program. Station F has created this program so that entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds get a chance to relocate to Station F.
La French Tech new director Kat Borlongan then talked for a few minutes about the public initiative. “My firm belief is that La French Tech should operate just like all the startups in this room today,” she said.
According to her, it means that La French Tech should think about its users first, have a data-driven approach, and test and iterate.
Macron gave a very short speech and then held a Q&A sessions with tech entrepreneurs. This is a surprising format for Macron.
He mostly reassured entrepreneurs that things are changing and France is on the right path. He announced that the French Tech Visa would be simplified by March 2019.
Some entrepreneurs said there were paying too many taxes to hire talent in France. Macron refuted that. “I like to compare a researcher in Harvard with a researcher in France,” he said. “[In France], school is free and excellent, healthcare is free, there’s a retirement system. On the other side, there’s nothing.”
He also promised stronger antitrust rules at the European level. Tech giants sometimes dominate in Europe living no room for competition.
Macron finished by saying that tech companies also need to promote France’s system. They need to pay fair taxes, they need to think about tech’s effect on society. “I know one thing, the system will implode if you’re not responsible enough,” he said.
Things have changed in just over a year. When Macron first came to Station F for its grand opening, it was shortly after the elections. He was a popular President.
Now, most people dislike him, just like his predecessors François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy when they were in office. According to a source, he even thought about canceling today’s event given that he’s about to appoint some new faces in his government.
But Macron built his reputation on the so-called startup nation. He first became a public figure thanks to a grassroots approach built on top of the startup community. That’s why the startup community is still overwhelmingly in favor of Macron’s policies. And yet, there’s now a clear divide between the startup nation and the middle class at large, who think the President is out of touch and doesn’t care about them.
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Relike lets you turn a Facebook page into a newsletter
French startup Ownpage has recently released a new product called Relike. Relike is one of the easiest ways to get started with email newsletters. You enter the web address of your Facebook page and that’s about it.
The company automatically pulls your most recent posts from your Facebook page and lets you set up an emailing campaign in a few clicks. You can either automatically pick your most popular Facebook posts or manually select a few posts.
Just like any emailing service, you can choose between multiple templates, decide the day of the week and time of the day, import a database of email addresses and more. If you’ve used Mailchimp in the past, you’ll feel right at home.
But the idea isn’t to compete directly with newsletter services. Many social media managers, media organizations, small companies, nonprofits and sports teams already have a Facebook page but aren’t doing anything on the email front.
Relike is free if you send less than 2,000 emails per month and don’t need advanced features. If you want to get open rates, click-through rates and other features, you’ll need to pay €5 per month and €0.50 every time you send 1,000 emails.
The company’s other product Ownpage is a bit different. Ownpage has been working with media organizations to optimize their email newsletters. The company is tracking reading habits on a news site and sending personalized email newsletters.
This way, readers will get tailored news and will more likely come back to your site. Many big French news sites use Ownpage for their newsletters, such as Les Echos, L’Express, 20 Minutes, BFM TV, Le Parisien, etc.
Ownpage founder and CEO Stéphane Cambon told me that Relike was the obvious second act. Using browsing data for customized newsletters is one thing, but many talented social media managers know how to contextualize stories and maximize clicks (even if it means clickbait, sure).
The startup was looking at a way to get this data, and ended up creating Relike, which could appeal to customers beyond news organizations. For now, both products will stick around. In the future, the company plans to add Twitter and Instagram integrations as well as better signup flows for newsletter subscribers.
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Doctolib to open up telemedicine appointments
French startup Doctolib will take advantage of recent legal changes that will make telemedicine legal in France. Starting on January 1st, you’ll be able to book face-to-face appointments on Doctolib as well as remote appointments.
Doctolib is a marketplace with 60,000 practitioners using the platform to manage their calendars and let people book appointments through Doctolib’s website. Millions of people then browse Doctolib’s website and app to find practitioners and book appointments. Doctors pay a monthly fee to access Doctolib’s service.
While it’s still unclear how it’s going to work, Doctolib plans to tap its existing community of doctors to let them accept remote appointments too.
Doctolib is already testing the service with 500 practitioners. According to the legal framework, you won’t be able to hop on Doctolib, find an available doctor and start a video call with them.
The idea is that you don’t have to show up in person every time you need to see your doctor. Once in a while, a remote appointment is enough. That’s why you’ll only be able to book remote appointments with practitioners who know you already.
But the good news is that remote appointments will be reimbursed by the national healthcare system, just like any appointment. Details are still thin when it comes to the payment system and the communication platform.
In order to work on that new service, Doctolib plans to hire 150 engineers and open up a big office — the Health Tech Center. It’s not going to be limited to the Doctolib team as the company plans to invite officials, practitioners and more.
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BlaBlaCar is on the path to profitability
French startup BlaBlaCar just released some interesting metrics. The company has reached profitability if you look at revenue between January 2018 and today.
BlaBlaCar forecasts that 50 million people will book a ride on BlaBlaCar in 2018, which represents a 40 percent increase compared to 2017.
BlaBlaCar is a marketplace for long-distance rides. People driving from point A to point B can find riders willing to go in the same direction to share the cost of the ride.
A few years ago, when BlaBlaCar raised multiple megarounds, co-founder and now president Frédéric Mazzella told me that the company was at a crossroad and had to choose between growth first then profitability, or profitability then growth. It looks like the company has now completed its growth-then-profitability journey.
There are now 65 million registered users on the platform, including 15 million users in France. The service is currently live in 22 countries.
In France in particular, 40 percent of people aged between 18 and 35 are using BlaBlaCar. While the company is reaching market saturation on this segment, elderly people currently represent a growth opportunity.
It is the fastest growing segment and the user base has doubled in six years when you look at this part of the user base in particular — I know, these are some soft metrics so it’s hard to understand if it’s going to impact the company’s bottom line.
Foreign countries now represent 75 percent of BlaBlaCar’s activity.
When it comes to features, BlaBlaCar finally started automatically matching people who are departing or arriving from a small city. Drivers don’t have to manually input a list of cities on the way. 20 percent of departure or arrival cities surface thanks to this new algorithm.
One way of reaching profitability is by reducing costs. And it’s true that BlaBlaCar faced some growth pains and is now a leaner company.
Now, BlaBlaCar is in great shape for an acquisition or an IPO. But the company says that it’ll keep investing to innovate, diversify and open new markets. So all options are still on the table.
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Qonto raises $23 million to improve business banking
French startup Qonto has raised a $23 million funding round for its fintech product. The company is trying to make business banking cheaper, faster and more efficient.
Existing investors Valar Ventures and Alven are once again leading the round. The European Investment Bank Group is also participating.
If you are running a small company or work as a freelancer, Qonto wants to replace your professional bank account. When you sign up, you get a French IBAN, one or multiple debit cards and the ability to send and receive money.
And then, it works pretty much like any challenger bank. You can create virtual cards, order more cards for your team, get real time notifications and freeze cards. This is a breath of fresh air compared to traditional business banks and their time-consuming processes.
You can then sync your transactions with accounting and invoicing services, and grant access to your accountant. Premium plans let you select multiple administrators and create a validation workflow to approve expensive transfers for instance.
With today’s funding round, the company plans to double the size of the team and create its own payment infrastructure. Qonto currently relies heavily on Treezor for the back end. The startup also plans to expand to Germany, Italy and Spain in 2019.
Qonto now has 90 employees and 25,000 clients. The company has managed $2 billion in total transaction volume so far. The fact that the same VC funds keep investing more money into Qonto is a great vote of confidence.
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Mynewsdesk acquires web monitoring service Mention
Communications workflow company Mynewsdesk is acquiring French startup Mention for an undisclosed sum. Norwegian business media group NHST currently owns Mynewsdesk.
Mention lets you monitor keywords around the web. It’s a good way to hear what customers are saying about your brand on their blog, on Twitter, on Facebook or anywhere public.
You can also use Mention to generate reports, study competitors to see if people are talking about them and find influencers who use your products. It can be a useful tool for PR and marketing companies for instance.
Mynewsdesk wants to be an all-in-one tool for PR agencies. It can also help you track media coverage, but it goes a bit further than that. You can organize your media contacts in the service and segment your distribution list, write and distribute press releases and measure your campaigns.
It’s clear that Mention fits well with Mynewsdesk. Mention will stick around as a standalone product for now. But it feels like the monitoring feature of Mynewsdesk could benefit from Mention’s expertise in this area.
Mention currently has 750,000 users, including 4,000 customers. It generates $6 million in annual recurring revenue with a 35 percent growth rate year-over-year. Investors include eFounders, Alven and Point Nine Capital. Mention co-founder and CEO Matthieu Vaxelaire is becoming COO at Mynewsdesk.
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Shadow announces a new box for its cloud gaming service
French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is updating its physical box that lets you connect to your cloud computer instance. Shadow Ghost is a tiny device that provides all the ports and wireless technologies that you need to plug in to a TV or a monitor and start playing.
Shadow has been building a cloud computing service for gamers. For $35 per month, you get a gaming PC in a data center near you. Shadow gives you 8 threads on an Intel Xeon 2620 processor, an Nvidia Quadro P5000 GPU that performs more or less as well as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It’s a full Windows 10 instance and you can do whatever you want with it.
The company started with a dedicated box from day one. The first Shadow box was an oddly-shaped black box with a few USB ports and DisplayPorts. This way, you could replace your PC at home with this box and use the same peripherals.
When you turn it on, it feels like you’re booting up your gaming PC, but you’re actually just starting a computer with a low-powered CPU that connects to your gaming PC in the cloud.
Over the past few months, Shadow has slowly decorrelated the service from the physical device in your home. When you subscribe, you don’t get a box by default. You can install the Shadow app on your existing computer, phone or tablet and start playing.
If you still want the box to connect to your Shadow instance without an existing PC, you can rent it for $10 per month or purchase it for $140. It could be particularly useful for a TV for instance.
Compared to the previous generation, Shadow Ghost is completely silent as the fan is gone — that was my main complaint with the first Shadow box. You won’t need as many dongles either as there’s an HDMI port by default (instead of a DisplayPort) and it supports both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It’s also much more energy-efficient as it should consume three times less power than the existing Shadow device.
Shadow Ghost will be available for the same price at some point during the last quarter of 2018. The service itself is currently available in France, Germany, the U.K., Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. In the U.S., the company has a data center near San Francisco and another one on the East Coast.
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Tempow’s Bluetooth stack can improve your TV setup
French startup Tempow has been working on improving the Bluetooth protocol at a low level to make it more versatile. The company is introducing a new audio profile for your TV or set-top box.
TV and set-top box manufacturers can license Tempow’s software and integrate new features in their devices. It works with regular Bluetooth chips, but it opens up new possibilities.
In particular, Tempow has been working on a one-to-many pairing model. You can pair multiple Bluetooth speakers with your TV to create a wireless surround system using good old Bluetooth speakers.
The reason why soundbars slowly replaced 5.1 systems is that you don’t have to run cables on the floor to the back speakers. Tempow solves that, and Bluetooth speakers are much cheaper than a bunch of Sonos speakers.
With Tempow’s stack, you can also stream different audio tracks to different devices. In other words, you could pair multiple headphones with your TV and watch a movie in different languages. If your kid is too young to read subtitles, you no longer need to make compromises.
You can also configure each speaker individually so that you can reproduce the same sound profile across the board, even if you’re using speakers from different brands.
The startup first worked on an audio profile for smartphones. For instance, if you have a Moto X4 phone, you can pair it with multiple Bluetooth speakers at once. With today’s news, the company is expanding beyond smartphones. But it’s still about Bluetooth.
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Alan introduces Alan Blue, a high-end health insurance product
French startup Alan has been mostly focused on its main health insurance product — a standard package for companies of all sizes and shapes. The company is launching a second offering on this market with Alan Blue.
Companies can now choose between two levels of insurance — Alan Green and Alan Blue. Alan Green is the existing health insurance product with a new name. It still costs the same and offers the same level of coverage. Alan Blue is a higher-end product with better coverage for companies who want to retain talent using better benefits.
French employees automatically get basic coverage from the national healthcare system. But companies also need to provide a health insurance from a private company to pay for part of the health expenses. It’s a hybrid system with a strong legal framework.
This is where Alan comes along as your employer signs a deal with an insurance company to cover all their employees. Usually, insurance companies provide multiple offerings. But Alan has historically focused on a single plan.
With Alan Green, you get good coverage starting at $59 (€50) per month per employee if you’re under 36 years old. It gets more expensive if you’re over 36, and then over 45, and then over 56 years old. Plans for employees over 56 cost $100 per month (€85).
Companies have to pay at least 50 percent of those plans. The rest is deducted from your pay. Some companies also choose to pay 100 percent of everyone’s health insurance to show that they really care about their employees.
Employees can also choose to cover their spouse and kids with Alan. Plans for a second adult cost the same as plans for employees. And you can cover all your kids for a $47 flat monthly fee (€40).
While you won’t pay anything if you see a normal medial practitioner, Alan Green couldn’t necessarily cover an expensive pair of glasses or extensive dental work.
Alan Blue is a second option for companies looking for a premium health insurance product. Companies now have to decide between the two plans for the entire staff. You can’t let employees decide between one plan or the other.
Alan Blue starts at $82 per month (€70) for young employees and also gets more expensive depending on the age of the employee. While there’s only a €20 difference between the two offerings for employees under 36 years old, the price difference is higher the older you get. Similarly, you can cover all your kids for a slightly more expensive $64 flat monthly fee (€55).
For companies that choose to fully pay for health insurance, it depends if you’re willing to spend more to provide better insurance. But some companies only pay part of the health insurance package. Employees will end up paying more if their companies switch from Alan Green to Alan Blue.
“Overall, companies that are growing rapidly tend to invest a lot for their employees and switch to Alan Blue,” co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian told me. “We already noticed that with companies in our existing clients. Some companies are also switching to Alan because they wanted something very high end before switching.”
Alan still plans to target small companies. The startup thinks that small companies are underserved by big insurance companies and tend to pay more for health insurance.
Alan Green is not going away anytime soon. Samuelian thinks you can combine Alan Green with Alan Map to find the perfect doctor around you and get fully reimbursed.
Alan Blue is already available to selected Alan customers. All companies will be able to sign up in September. You can already view all pricing and insurance details on Alan’s website.
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