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Bird plans to hire 1,000 people in Paris

Published July 10, 2019

Scooter startup Bird is betting on the French market in a significant way. The company plans to open up its biggest European office in Paris. Eventually, Bird wants to hire 1,000 people by mid-2021, which is a meaningful number for a company that has been around for a couple of years.

Paris is an important market for Bird, and all scooter startups in general. It’s a relatively small city — when it comes to footprint, Paris is smaller than San Francisco. But it’s also a dense city. And of course, there are a ton of tourists who come to Paris just for a few days.

That’s why 12 different companies launched a scooter-sharing service in Paris (yes, twelve). But Les Échos recently reported that many of them have already left the city. Lime, Bird, Circ, Dott, Jump and B-Mobility are still around.

It’s a capital-intensive industry, and Bird has already raised a ton of money to outlive the competition. But money is just one thing.

Opening an office in Paris is also important to show city officials that Bird is serious about this market. Last month, the City of Paris announced that it would limit the number of scooter companies in Paris. They will hand out two or three licenses to operate. And Bird certainly wants to be one of them.

Bird will also use its Paris hub to educate users about safety. The company plans to hand out free helmets if you attend a safety training session.

Karamel is an app to find activities for your kids

Published July 5, 2019

French startup Karamel wants to help you find things to do for your kids. The company is launching a mobile app that lets you find and book kid-friendly activities around you.

The startup also just raised a $560,000 round (€500,000) from Kima Ventures, Roxanne Varza, Thibaud Elzière and Oleg Tscheltzoff. Varza participates in the Atomico Angel Programme, which means that Atomico handed out $100,000 to invest in multiple early-stage companies. Atomico and Varza both see returns if the company eventually succeeds.

Karamel wants to become a one-stop shop for things your kids can do. When you open the app, you get a curated selection of activities around you so that you can find something to do this weekend, for instance.

If you’re looking for something specific, you can search for activities based on multiple criteria, such as the age of your child, an activity category, price, distance and day of the week.

You also can find recurring activities in case your child really wants to learn a new instrument or start a new sport, for instance.

On the other side of the marketplace, there are many different organizations in charge of activities. It’s a fragmented market, and those organizations don’t always know how to reach parents efficiently.

Thanks to Karamel, those organizations should get more traffic and could focus more on activities themselves. The startup doesn’t charge any monthly subscription fee. Instead, Karamel is taking a cut on transactions. Parents pay the same price if they book directly or though Karamel.

The service is currently live in Paris. And if you live in Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux or Montpellier, you can search for activities but can’t book through the app just yet.

In the U.S., KidPass provides something vaguely similar, but with a monthly subscription fee. KidPass opted for a credit-based system like Audible or ClassPass.

Clever Cloud launches GPU-based instances

Published July 5, 2019

French startup Clever Cloud is a cloud-hosting company that operates a Platform-as-a-Service (or PaaS). The company just launched GPU-based instances for machine learning purposes under a new brand, Clever Grid.

Behind the scene, the company uses Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. You get billed by the minute and the most basic instance costs €0.42 per hour, €10 per day or €300 per month. For this price, you get 6GB of RAM, an 8-core CPU, a one GPU and 250GB of storage.

Of course, you can pay more to access beefier machines. If you max out your GPU instance, you get 60GB of RAM, 32 CPU cores and 4 GPUs on the same instance. It can cost as much as €1,200.

If you’re a data scientist and don’t know much about cloud infrastructure, Clever Cloud tries to abstract infrastructure management as much as possible. You can run your Python code directly on your cloud instance using a web interface.

Those instances also support TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, CUDA, Keras and PyTorch. You also can run Docker containers on those GPU instances.

One of the advantages of Clever Cloud is that it integrates directly with a GitHub repository. You can connect to your GitHub account and start a cloud instance based on a repository. The company then deploys and runs your code on a server.

In addition to seamless deployments, Clever Cloud has additional features to make sure your service runs smoothly, such as monitoring, backups and security updates.

Clever Cloud clients include Airbus, MAIF, Compte Nickel, Sogeti and the South African Ministry of Health.

Ornikar raises $40 million for its driving school marketplace

Published June 27, 2019

French startup Ornikar is raising a $40 million Series B round (€35 million) from Idinvest and Bpifrance. The company competes with traditional driving schools in Europe with an online marketplace of students and teachers.

And Ornikar has been a massive success in France. Overall, 35 percent of driving school registrations in 2019 are handled by Ornikar.

There are many advantages in choosing Ornikar. For driver students, Ornikar is much more flexible than a traditional driving school. Driving schools in France are usually pretty small with only a handful of employees. It’s sometimes hard to book lessons, especially if you have a full-time work.

When you sign up to Ornikar, you can connect to your Ornikar account and book an hour or two from there. Ornikar works with a pool of 650 instructors so that you get to study at your own pace.

Ornikar is also cheaper than a traditional driving school. By automating the administration work as much as possible, the startup says that it is 35 percent cheaper than a traditional driving school. It currently costs €750 for 20 hours of lessons.

“We’ve been profitable in 2018 and very profitable in 2019 for the French market,” Ornikar co-founder and CEO Benjamin Gaignault told me.

Here are some numbers. Every month, 30,000 people sign up to Ornikar in France. The startup manages 70,000 hours of lessons per month on its marketplace.

Ornikar works with qualified instructors who got a license to work in a driving school. They get paid €15 per hour, which is theoretically more than in a normal driving school.

With today’s funding round, the startup wants to expand to more countries. Ornikar is already live in Germany and Spain, but the company wants to grow the product there. Eventually, the company will also expand to Italy and the U.K.

In addition to new countries, Ornikar wants to sell other car-related products. The company is partnering with third-party companies for car insurance products, and there will be more products down the road.

Ornikar had previously raised an $11.3 million Series A (€10 million) and a $1.3 million seed round (€1 million). Existing investors include Brighteye, Partech, Elaia, Xavier Niel, Jacques-Antoine Granjon and Marc Simoncini.

Fairjungle is a modern take on corporate travel management

Published June 18, 2019

French startup Fairjungle wants to make it easier to book a flight or a hotel room for corporate purposes. The company just raised a $2 million funding round (€1.8 million) from Thibaud Elzière, Eduardo Ronzano, Bertrand Mabille and Whitestones Ventures.

If you work for a big company, chances are you book corporate flights through GBT, CWT or BCD Travel. And let’s be honest, the web interface usually sucks. It’s often hard to compare flights, change dates or even get a fair price.

Fairjungle is betting on a modern user experience and a software-as-a-service business model to change this industry. The idea is to make it feel more like you’re using a flight comparison service instead of a travel agency with a website.

“The value proposition [of legacy competitors] was historically around finding the best travel options for the business traveler, which has become obsolete today when you have tools like Skyscanner and Google Flights,” co-founder and CEO Saad Berrada told me.

In order to modernize that industry, the startup is leveraging the inventory of Skyscanner, Booking.com, Amadeus, Travelfusion and Hotelbeds. This way, you can book flights on 400 airlines and reserve hotel rooms in one million hotels.

After searching for a flight or a hotel room, you can book directly from Fairjungle. This way, employees don’t have to download invoices and file expense reports on a separate platform every time they travel. Companies can set up different rules to keep costs down. For instance, a flight that is unusually expensive requires approval from a manager.

Instead of charging per transaction, Fairjungle has opted for a SaaS model with a subscription of €5 per monthly active user.

Fairjungle currently focuses on small and mid-sized companies. The company has attracted 20 clients so far, including OVH. And it expects to generate $3.4 million (€3 million) in gross bookings by the end of the year.

PayFit raises $79 million for its payroll service

Published June 17, 2019

French startup PayFit is raising a new $79 million funding round (€70 million) from Eurazeo and Bpifrance. The company first started with a payroll service for small and medium companies in France. It has evolved into a full-fledged HR solution for multiple European countries.

PayFit uses a software-as-a-service approach so that small companies can easily manage payroll and HR information from a web browser. Everything stays up-to-date and compliant with labor regulation.

After you enter information about your employees, PayFit automatically generates pay slips every month. Your employees receive an email when their pay slips are ready. If somebody is getting a raise, you can connect to your PayFit account and modify an amount for all pay slips going forward.

When it comes to payroll taxes, the service automatically reminds you when you have to pay them and how much you’re supposed to pay. You also can generate exports for your accountant, see reports about your staff, etc.

And PayFit doesn’t want to stop at payrolls. You also can manage absences and leaves, expense reports and shifts. It makes sense to build those tools in-house as they have a direct effect on your payroll.

In order to approve expense reports and vacation days, you also can build an organizational chart in PayFit and decide who’s managing who.

While it’s easy to build an HR giant in the U.S., it’s a bit more complicated in Europe, as labor laws vary so much from one country to another. But the startup has managed to launch its service in France, Spain, Germany and the U.K. — Italy is coming soon.

The company says that it has developed its own programming language called Jetlang in order to transform labor code into computer code.

There are 3,000 companies relying on PayFit and 300 people working for the company. With today’s funding round, PayFit plans to double its workforce by 2020.

Reminiz automatically indexes and tags videos in real time

Published May 27, 2019

Meet French startup Reminiz, a computer vision company that can index any type of video — it’s a sort of Googlebot, but for video content. Reminiz can add tags of people, logos or emotions on live streams and on-demand videos.

“The web is designed so that you can search for text — not video. We are making it possible to search within videos,” co-founder and CEO Jack Habra told me.

There are a few different use cases for Reminiz. First, the company works with broadcasters and telecom companies. For instance, Reminiz has a partnership with Orange so that you can learn more about who’s on the screen right now. It could potentially be leveraged for recommendations or contextual ads for external content.

Reminiz streams live channels on its servers directly, scans images and adds tags. Users then download metadata from the servers.

Second, you can use Reminiz to promote your brand on relevant videos. For instance, Hyundai sponsors Lyon’s soccer team. It wants to distribute Hyundai ads before soccer footage with the team playing. But YouTube keywords aren’t that good when it comes to targeting such a specific audience — a video might talk about the soccer team without showing any actual footage.

Brands can then whitelist videos to distribute ads on those videos in particular. You get charged based on minutes of video footage processed by Reminiz.

The company competes with AWS Rekognition and other generic video analysis APIs from cloud providers. What makes Reminiz stand out is that the company builds its own database of faces, people, brands and tags. It’s also probably easier to implement Reminiz compared to a more generic solution.

“With GDPR, everybody is contacting us to focus more on contextual data instead of personal data,” Habra said.

EFounders backs Yousign to build a European e-signature company

Published May 23, 2019

French startup Yousign is partnering with startup studio eFounders. While eFounders usually builds software-as-a-service startups from scratch, the company is trying something new with this partnership.

Indeed, eFounders wants to create all the tools you need to make your work more efficient. The startup studio is behind many respectable SaaS successes, such as Front, Aircall and Spendesk. And electronic signatures are a must if you want to speed up your workflow.

Sure, there are a ton of well-established players in the space — DocuSign, SignNow, Adobe Sign, HelloSign, etc. But nobody has really cracked the European market in a similar way.

Yousign has been around for a while in France. When it comes to features, it has everything you’d expect. You can upload a document and set up automated emails and notifications so that everybody signs the document.

Signatures are legally binding and Yousign archives your documents. You also can create document templates and send contract proposals using an API.

The main challenge for Yousign is that Europe is still quite fragmented. The company will need to convince users in different countries that they need to switch to an e-signature solution. Starting today, Yousign is now available in France, Germany, the U.K. and Spain.

Yousign had only raised some money; eFounders is cleaning the cap table by buying out existing investors and replacing them.

“We can’t really communicate on the details of the investment, but what I can tell you is that we bought out existing funds for several millions of euros in order to replace them — founders still have the majority of shares,” eFounders co-founder and CEO Thibaud Elzière told me.

In a blog post, Elzière writes that eFounders has acquired around 50% of the company through an SPV (Single Purpose Vehicle) that it controls. The startup studio holds 25% directly, and investors in the eFounders eClub hold 25%.

Yousign now looks pretty much like any other eFounders company when they start. Of course, founders and eFounders might get diluted further down the road if Yousign ends up raising more money.

ProcessOut improves payment data visualization

Published April 19, 2019

ProcessOut has grown quite a lot since I first covered the startup. The company now has a ton of small and big clients, from Glovo to Vente-Privée and Dashlane. The company has become an expert on payment providers and payment analytics.

The core of the product remains the same. Clients sign up to get an overview on the performance of their payment systems. After setting up ProcessOut Telescope, you can monitor payments with expensive fees, failed payments and disappointing payment service providers.

And this product is quite successful. Back in October 2018, the company had monitored $7 billion in transactions since its inception — last month, that number grew to $13 billion.

The company is adding new features to make it easier to get insights from your payment data. You can now customize your data visualization dashboards with a custom scripting language called ProcessOut Lang. This way, if you have an internal payment team, they can spot issues more easily.

ProcessOut can also help you when it comes to generating reports. The company can match transactions on your bank account with transactions on different payment providers.

If you’re a smaller company and can’t optimize your payment module yourself, ProcessOut also builds a smart-routing checkout widget. When a customer pays something, the startup automatically matches card information with the best payment service provider for that transaction in particular.

Some providers are quite good at accepting all legit transactions, such as Stripe or Braintree. But they are also more expensive than more traditional payment service providers. ProcessOut can predict if a payment service provider is going to reject this customer before handing the transaction to that partner. It leads to lower fees and a lower rejection rate.

The company recently added support for more payment service providers in Latin America, such as Truevo, AllPago and Mercadopago. And ProcessOut now routes more transactions in one day compared to the entire month of October 2018.

As you can see, the startup is scaling nicely. It will be interesting to keep an eye on it.

ReachFive manages logins and accounts for e-commerce platforms

Published April 11, 2019

French startup ReachFive wants to become Stripe for account management. The company just raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by CapHorn Invest, with Dawn Capital and Ventech also participating — investment bank Avolta Partners handled the fundraising process.

When you buy something on an e-commerce website or app, chances are those companies asked you to create an account before entering your address and payment information. ReachFive creates the login module for dozens of e-commerce and transactional companies.

This isn’t just about storing an email and password. ReachFive lets you do interesting things with your customer database. For instance, ReachFive works across different channels.

If you shop on L’Occitane’s website and then purchase cosmetics in a store, they can find your account. This way, you get accurate information about your customers. ReachFive complies with GDPR.

ReachFive also supports social logins, such as Facebook Connect or “Sign in with Google.” The company also supports two-factor authentication. And, of course, you can integrate ReachFive with other services, such as a CRM, a CMS, a recommendation engine, etc.

If you’re creating a brand from scratch, you might rely heavily on newsletters and content. You can let people sign up to the newsletter without creating a full-fledged account. They can create an account when they make their first purchase later down the road — ReachFive will reconcile profiles.

Forty companies are using ReachFive, including Boulanger, Etam Group, L’Occitane, Hachette Group, Engie and La Redoute. The startup manages 40 million user accounts overall. The company uses a software-as-a-service pricing model, and you can be sure that each contract must be quite valuable.

ReachFive proves that an omnichannel strategy doesn’t just mean that you should merge your inventories and catalogs across your online and offline platforms. It also means that you should be able to provide a unified customer experience by understanding a customer from start to finish.

Big retail companies have already unified their user accounts — when you buy an Apple product in an Apple store, you can see the receipt in your online account. But ReachFive could become an essential widget for all mid-tier e-commerce platforms.