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Café helps hybrid organizations schedule in-office time
Meet Café, a new French startup founded by two brothers that wants to help companies switch to a hybrid remote-and-office workplace model. Café isn’t a traditional desk-booking tool. Instead, the company helps you see when people in your team are coming to the office so that you can plan when you should go to the office as well.
Instead of focusing on workspace, Café focuses on people first. “We decided that we wouldn’t let you book a desk directly,” co-founder and CTO Arthur Lorotte de Banes told me.
When you open the app, you get a simplified calendar view. For each day, you can see your team members divided by groups — people coming to the office, people working from home, etc.
In just a few taps, you can tell your other co-workers what you plan to do. This way, it becomes much easier to schedule meetings, have in-person conversation and more generally hang out with your co-workers. It also makes it easier to find a common day with a specific co-worker if you’re working on the same project.
“We interviewed 150 companies and we realized companies faced the same issue after interviewing the first five companies. They all use spreadsheets,” co-founder and CEO Tom Nguyen told me.
Image Credits: Café
Using a tool like Café also gives you insights about your office. For instance, you can see the average number of persons in your office depending on the day of the week or the day of the month. Admins can configure a weekly reminder to make sure that everybody fills out information.
In addition to its mobile app and web app, Café integrates with your existing tools. For instance, you can connect your Café account with Slack so that your status on Slack reflects your status in Café. Teammates can hover over your name to know that you’re in the office or you’re at home.
The company is also working on integrations with human resource information systems, such as PayFit, so that your vacation is automatically synchronized with Café.
Image Credits: Café
As companies start hashing out a plan to return to the office, Café arrives on the market at the right time. Companies can create custom statuses to fit their specific needs. For instance, a Café customer has created a status so that they know who has the office keys to make sure that the office remains open.
The company raised a $1 million seed round from 122West, Kima Ventures, Jonathan Widawski, Guillaume Lestrade, Jacques-Edouard Sabatier and various business angels who work or have worked for WeWork, Dropbox, Github, Snapchat, Intercom, Stripe, Alan and PayFit.
Like Typeform, Doodle or Slido, Café has chosen a freemium strategy. Teams can sign up for free and start using the product with their immediate co-workers. You don’t need to enter card information to sign up.
If you want to roll it out across the organization with more users, you have to start paying — existing clients include Livestorm, Jellysmack and Yubo. The startup believes employees will become product advocates for the entire organization. And it seems like the right strategy for a product that is supposed to make employees happier at work.
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Finary wants to create the wealth management dashboard for the next generation
Meet Finary, a new French startup that wants to change how you manage your savings, investments, mortgage, real estate assets and cryptocurrencies. The company lets you aggregate all your accounts across various banks and financial institutions so you can track your wealth comprehensively over time.
After attending Y Combinator, the startup has just closed a $2.7 million (€2.2 million) seed round led by Speedinvest, with Kima Ventures and angel investors such as Raphaël Vullierme also participating.
If you know people who have a ton of money, chances are they tend to be at least 40 or 50 years old — you don’t become rich overnight, after all. And they tend to manage their investment portfolio through a wealth management service with tailor-made services.
“There’s very little tech in wealth management. Advisors are also incentivized to sell you some financial products in particular,” co-founder and CEO Mounir Laggoune told me. In that situation, the company in charge of the financial product is generating revenue for the advisor — not the client.
At the same time, a new generation of investors is starting to accumulate a lot of wealth. And yet, they don’t have the right tools to allocate it properly. Younger people want to see information directly. They want a way to track information in real time, or near real time. And they want to be able to take some actions based on that data.
Finary wants to build that service based on those principles. It starts with an API-based aggregator. When you create a Finary account, you can connect it with all your other accounts — bank accounts, brokerage accounts, mortgage and real estate, gold, cryptocurrencies, etc.
The startup leverages various open banking APIs to be as exhaustive as possible. For instance, “you can connect a Robinhood account and a Crédit Mutuel de Bretagne account,” Laggoune said. Behind the scenes, Finary uses Plaid and Budget Insight, runs its own bitcoin and Ethereum nodes to track wallet addresses, and estimates the value of your home through public data and a proprietary algorithm.
After that, you can see how much money you have, how it is divided between your investment pools, the current value of your gold and cryptocurrency assets and more.
“Our long-term vision is that we want to build a virtual wealth manager for Europe,” Laggoune said.
That’s why Finary recently launched its premium subscription called Finary+. With a premium account, you can see how much you’re paying in fees and track your performance — more features will get added over time.
A few months after launching its platform, Finary already tracks €2 billion in assets across thousands of users. With today’s funding round, the startup will roll out its service to more countries and more financial institutions in France, Europe and the U.S. The company is also working on mobile apps.
This is an interesting take on wealth management, as Finary doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Legacy players want you to use a single bank for all your financial needs. But you end up paying a lot of fees and you have to use old and clunky interfaces.
Finary isn’t yet another wealth management service. It’s a holistic service that lets you use multiple banks and services while remaining on top of your assets.
Image Credits: Finary
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Pinterest introduces Idea Pins, a video-first feature aimed at creators
Pinterest is expanding further into the creator community with today’s launch of a video-first feature called “Idea Pins,” aimed at creators who want to tell their stories using video, music, creative editing tools and more. The feature feels a lot like Pinterest’s own take on TikTok, mixed with Stories, as the new Pins allow creators to record and edit creative videos with up to 20 pages of content, using tools like voiceover recording, background music, transitions and other interactive elements.
The company says Idea Pins evolved out of its tests with Story Pins, launched into beta in September 2020, after various stages of development beginning the year prior. At the time, Pinterest explained that Story Pins were different from the Stories you’d find on other social networks, like Snapchat or Instagram, because they focused on what people were doing — like trying new ideas or new products, not giving you snapshots of a creator’s personal life.
Another notable differentiator was that Story Pins weren’t ephemeral. That is, they didn’t disappear after a certain amount of time, but rather could be surfaced through search and other discovery mechanisms.
Over the past eight months since their debut, Pinterest has worked with Story Pin creators on the experience. That’s led to the new concept of the Idea Pin — essentially a rebranded Story Pin, which now offers a broader suite of editing tools than what was previously available.
Video is a key element in Idea Pins, as the Pins target the increased consumer demand for short-form video content of a creative nature — like what’s being delivered through TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and elsewhere. The videos in the Pins can be up to 60 seconds on iOS, Android and web for each page, with up to 20 total pages per Pin.
Image Credits: Pinterest
Creators can edit their videos by adding their own voiceover or using a “ghost mode” transition tool to better showcase their before-and-afters by overlaying one part of a video on another. And they can save drafts of their work in progress.
But Idea Pins still include a number of features common to Stories, like adding stickers or tagging other creators with an @username, for instance. Pinterest says it will start with over 100 stickers featuring hand-drawn illustrations focused on top categories and behaviors it expects to see, like food-themed illustrations, stickers for before-and-afters, seasonal moments, and more.
Pinterest is also working with the royalty-free music database Epidemic Sound to offer a catalog of free tracks for use in Idea Pins.
And because many creators will use Idea Pins to inspire people to try a recipe or project of some sort, they can include “detail pages” where viewers can find the ingredient list or instructions, which is handy.
Image Credits: Pinterest
Pins are shared to Pinterest, where the company says they help the creator build an audience by being distributed in several places across its platform, including in some markets, by locating Pins for creators you follow right at the top of the home page.
Creators can also apply topic tags when publishing to ensure they’re surfaced when people are seeking that sort of content. Each Idea Pin can have up to 10 topic tags, which help to distribute the content in a targeted way to users via the home feed and search, the company says.
While Pins can help creators build an audience on Pinterest, they can use Idea Pins to grow their audience on other platforms, too. The company says it will offer export options that let people share their Pins across the web and social media. To do so, they download their Pin as a video, which includes a Pinterest watermark and profile name — a trick learned from TikTok. This can then be reshared elsewhere.
Image Credits: Pinterest
Pinterest users, meanwhile, can save Idea Pins like any other Pin on the platform.
“We believe the best inspiration comes from people who are fueled by their passions and want to bring positivity and creativity into the world,” said Pinterest co-founder and Chief Design and Creative Officer Evan Sharp, in a statement about the launch. “On Pinterest, anyone can inspire. From creators to hobbyists to publishers, Pinterest is a place where anyone can publish great ideas and discover inspiring content. We have creators with extraordinary ideas on Pinterest, and with Idea Pins, creators are empowered to share their passions and inspire their audiences,” he added.
The new Idea Pin format is rolling out today to all creators (users with a business account) in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Image Credits: Pinterest
Pinterest says, during tests, it found that Idea Pins were more engaging than standard Pins, with 9x the average comment rate. The number of Idea Pins (previously known as Story Pins) has also grown by 4x since January, as more creators adopted the format.
To help creators track how well Pins are performing, Pinterest is expanding its Analytics feature to include a new followers and profile-visits-driven metric to show creators how their Idea Pins have driven deeper engagement with their account.
The company says the next step is to make Idea Pins more shoppable, which it’s doing now with tests of product tagging underway.
Pinterest has been increasing its investment in the creator community in recent months, with the launch of its first-ever Creator Fund last month, and this month’s test of livestreamed events with 21 creators. It’s also now testing creator and brand collaborations with a select number of creators, including Domonique Panton, Peter Som and GrossyPelosi, it says.
Image Credits: Pinterest
While Idea Pins seem like a natural pivot from Pinterest’s founding as an inspiration and idea board, it will face serious competition when it comes to wooing the professional creator community to its platform. Other Big Tech companies are outspending Pinterest, whose new Creator Fund of $500,000 falls short of the $1 million per day Snap paid creators or the $100 million fund for YouTube Shorts creators, TikTok’s $200 million fund or the deals Instagram has been making to lure Reels creators. These platforms, as well as a host of startups, are also giving creators a way to directly monetize their efforts through features like tips, donations, subscriptions and more.
What Pinterest may have in its favor, though, is its reach. The company claims 475 million users, which makes it a destination some creators may not want to overlook in their bid for growth, and later, e-commerce.
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Ankorstore raises another $102 million for its wholesale marketplace
French startup Ankorstore has raised a $102 million Series B funding round (€84 million). Tiger Global and Bain Capital Ventures are leading today’s funding round with existing investors Index Ventures, GFC, Alven and Aglaé also participating. This is a significant funding round, as it comes just a few months after the company raised €25 million.
If you’re not familiar with Ankorstore, the company is building a wholesale marketplace for independent shop owners. You may have noticed some highly Instagrammable shops with a selection of random items, such as household supplies, maple syrup, candles, headbands, bath salts and stationery items.
Essentially, Ankorstore helps you source those items for shop owners. It lets you buy a ton of cutesy stuff and act as a curator for your customers. Even if you’re already working with brands directly, the startup offers some advantageous terms. In addition to buying from several brands at once, Ankorstore withdraws the money from your bank account 60 days after placing an order.
On the other side of the marketplace, brands get paid upon delivery. Even if you’re just getting started, the minimum first order is €100 per brand.
And metrics have been going up and to the right. There are now 5,000 brands on Ankorstore, and 50,000 shops are buying stuff through the platform. And the best is likely ahead, as stores begin to re-open across Europe and tourism picks up again.
Ankorstore is now live across 14 different markets. The majority of the company’s revenue comes from international markets — not its home market France. The company’s co-founder Nicolas Cohen mentions the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden as growth markets.
The total addressable market is huge, as the company has identified 800,000 independent shops across Europe that could potentially work with Ankorstore. And the success of other wholesale marketplaces, such as Faire, proves that this relatively new market is still largely untapped.
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Direct-to-consumer orthodontic startup Impress raises $50M to scale across Europe
As the famous phrase goes, “software is eating the world” — and now software is eating dentistry. Or, perhaps more accurately, the arena of orthodontics — the specialty of dentistry that deals with things like braces — is slowly but surely being digitalized.
To whit, Impress, a Southern European player in direct-to-consumer orthodontics, has raised a $50 million Series A funding round led by CareCapital (a dental division of Hillhouse Capital in Asia), along with Nickleby Capital, UNIQA Ventures and investors including Michael Linse, Valentin Pitarque, Peter Schiff, Elliot Dornbusch and others. All existing shareholders, such as TA Ventures and Bynd VC, also participated.
Impress is an homage to the direct-to-consumer startups in this area in the U.S., such as SmileDirect, and now plans to scale across Europe from its existing bases in Spain, Italy, Portugal, the U.K. and France.
The company was founded in 2019 in Barcelona by orthodontist Dr. Khaled Kasem and serial entrepreneurs Diliara and Vladimir Lupenko.
Speaking from Barcelona, Lupenko told me that the idea was to “combine the best orthodontic tradition with the most innovative technology in the sector.”
As things stand, most of the time, consumers can usually only access cosmetic teeth alignment treatments or orthodontic medical treatments in conventional clinics. The new wave of clinics employs 3D scans and panoramic X-rays to check nerve and bone health.
Impress’s model is to offer these high-quality medical treatments directly to consumers, by developing its own chain of orthodontic clinics, which also put an emphasis on design and a “modern” patient experience, it says.
As Diliara Lupenko says: “We didn’t copy what other companies in the space were doing and approached the market from a different angle from the get-go. We doubled down on the doctor-led digital model which brought us way better conversion rates and treatment quality even though on paper it looked complex in the beginning. It’s still very complex but we were able to crack it and scale exponentially.”
Impress now has 75 clinics in Spain, Italy, the U.K., France and Portugal, which optimize costs and automate key parts of the value chain.
It now says it’s approaching €50 million in annual run-rate and is projected to grow to €150 million of revenue in 12 months.
Andreas Nemeth, managing partner of UNIQA Ventures GmbH commented: “Impress’s customer-centric focus, as well as its demonstrated ability to blitzscale, attracted us to the business. Vladimir and his team leverage technology to create a seamless customer journey for invisible orthodontics and optimized their cost structure in a unique way using software.”
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BlaBlaCar raises $115 million to build all-in-one travel app
French startup BlaBlaCar has raised a new $115 million funding round (€97 million). While the company is better known for its long distance carpooling marketplace, BlaBlaCar has also added a bus marketplace with the acquisition of Ouibus and an online bus ticketing platform with the acquisition of Busfor.
Existing investor VNV Global is leading the round. Two new investors are also participating — Otiva J/F AB and FMZ Ventures. Otiva J/F AB is a fund created by Avito founders Jonas Nordlander and Filip Engelbert. If you’re not familiar with Avito, they specialize in classified ads for the Russian market. Classified giant and global tech investor Naspers acquired Avito. As for FMZ Ventures, it’s a growth fund created by Michael Zeisser, who previously led investments for Alibaba and was a board member at Lyft and Tripadvisor.
It’s a convertible note, which means that the valuation will depend on the next financial event, such as another fundraising round or an initial public offering. But BlaBlaCar co-founder and CEO Nicolas Brusson consider it as a “pre-IPO convertible” round as BlaBlaCar still has a ton of cash on its bank account.
“We already had a lot of cash before this round and we still have more than €200 million in cash following this funding round,” Brusson told me.
Even if BlaBlaCar doesn’t go public right away (or doesn’t raise), there’s a clause with a time frame. After a while, those $115 million will convert into BlaBlaCar shares at a $2 billion valuation in case there’s no financial event.
BlaBlaCar’s strategy and goal with today’s funding round could be summed up with three pillars — carpooling, buses and aggregation.
Let’s start with carpooling, BlaBlaCar’s core business. The company started 15 years ago with a simple goal — matching empty car seats with passengers going in the same direction. While last year’s lockdown has impacted carpooling, it shouldn’t be compared with trains or flights.
“With our carpooling network, there’s no fixed costs,” Brusson said. So BlaBlaCar isn’t paying to put empty cars on the road as everything is community-powered. But, of course, as BlaBlaCar takes a cut from each transaction, revenue took a hit during last year’s lockdown.
Activity bounced back last summer and it’s been up and down ever since depending on current restrictions. “Car is and will be the universal connector that doesn’t rely on train stations or bus stops,” Brusson said.
The carpooling marketplace will always remain a strong revenue generator. In 2020 alone, BlaBlaCar had 50 million passengers across 22 markets overall. In other words, never bet against carpooling.
For the past few years, BlaBlaCar’s second pillar has been buses. In particular, buses represent a huge opportunity in emerging markets and Eastern Europe.
There are already a ton of buses on the road, you simply can’t buy tickets online. BlaBlaCar’s total addressable market in this category is huge and the company is mostly focused on moving offline supply to its online marketplace.
That’s why the company is also acquiring Octobus, a Ukrainian company working on an inventory management system for bus supply. “It consolidates our tech stack in the region,” Brusson said.
Finally, BlaBlaCar’s third pillar is all about creating loyal users that keep coming back to the platform. The company wants to build a multimodal app where you can find all shared travel — carpooling, buses and soon trains.
The startup will add train operators on its marketplace by the end of 2021 or early 2022. I asked Brusson whether he wanted to build an Omio competitor. Formerly known as GoEuro, Omio lets you book train tickets, bus tickets and flights on a single platform.
BlaBlaCar wants to follow a different strategy. It wants to focus first on a handful of countries so that it can sell everything a local would expect.
Eventually, you could imagine opening the BlaBlaCar app to find the best way to go from A to B. It could involve a train ticket followed by a carpooling ride to reach a tiny town. Or it could mix carpooling with bus rides. Thanks to BlaBlaCar’s reach, the French startup is uniquely positioned to connect two small cities through shared transportation.
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Alan raises $220 million for its health insurance and healthcare superapp
French startup Alan has raised a $220 million funding round at a $1.67 billion valuation (€185 million and €1.4 billion respectively). Coatue is leading the round with Dragoneer, Exor, and existing investors Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital and Temasek also participating.
Alan has been building health insurance products from scratch. When I first covered the company back in 2016, the startup had just managed to get approval from regulators to become an official health insurance company.
Since then, it’s been a not-so-slow-and-steady growth story as the company now covers 160,000 people. Overall, Alan generates over €100 million in annualized revenue. While most of that revenue is spent back on claims, it’s an impressive revenue trajectory.
Like other insurance companies, Alan has some capital requirements to comply with health insurance regulation. Alan has to raise more if it wants to insure more people. But that’s just part of the story as the startup still had enough cash on its bank account for the next 12 to 18 months.
“The context is that we managed to end the year 2020 very strong, finally — and I say finally because it’s been stressful until the last minute,” co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve told me.
Alan managed to meet its goals and international expansion finally started to take off. Many startups try to raise when they’re in a strong position. You shouldn’t wait until you have your back against the wall and that’s exactly what’s happening here.
“We thought it was the right time and we had multiple term sheets. Even though valuation is really good we first looked at a partner that has a really long-term vision,” Samuelian-Werve said.
With today’s funding round, the company can iterate on its core product — health insurance — and everything that makes Alan a superapp — a single app that lets you access several services. In France, employees are covered by both the national healthcare system and private insurance companies. Alan sells its products to other companies so that their employees are automatically covered by Alan contracts. It’s a sort of B2B2C play.
9,400 companies have opted for Alan in France, Belgium and Spain — the company’s home market remains its main market. Clients include WeWork, Deliveroo, JustEat, Vitaliance and Big Mamma. By 2023, Alan wants to reach 1 million members.
In order to gain more customers, Alan is betting on three pillars — product innovation, customer satisfaction through additional services, and expansions to new verticals and markets.
When it comes to product innovation, Alan has designed a modular insurance builder. Small companies can subscribe to Alan in a few clicks. Big companies can tweak every single parameter to build the right insurance package for them.
After that, the company tries to make it easy to manage your health insurance. You’ll soon be able to automatically manage sick leaves, change the employee affiliation status, etc. As for employees, the company has always promoted a transparent offering. For instance, you should know how much you’re going to pay out of pocket when you see a doctor. You can see a map of doctors around you and how much they charge on average. This way, there’s no surprise.
Alan also tries to reimburse you as quickly as possible. If it’s a straightforward claim, the startup tries to analyze and categorize your claim as quickly as possible and then issue an instant SEPA transfer. Seventy-five percent of claims are reimbursed and available on your bank account in less than an hour.
These core product features definitely contributes to customer satisfaction. But Alan is expanding beyond insurance products with several additional services that should increase retention. For instance, you can chat with a doctor, get medical advice for your baby’s health, get a free meditation app subscription, start a telehealth appointment via a partner, talk with someone about your mental health, etc.
Those services contribute to turning Alan into a superapp for your health. Essentially, as soon as you’re insured by Alan, you become a member and can access all those services without additional charges.
Eventually, Alan plans to launch a personal care guidance service to help you contact the right healthcare professional based on your health issue. In Spain, Alan can already book appointments for you.
Finally, Alan plans to reach new customers through aggressive expansion goals. The company plans to hire 400 people within the next three years and expand to other industries with tailor-made insurance products, such as retail, wholesale and manufacturing.
While the company is still going to focus on France, Belgium and Spain in the near future, it is looking at opportunities across Europe. So let’s see where Alan is going to expand next.
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Feels is a new dating app with profiles that look more personal
Meet Feels, a new French startup that wants to change how dating apps work. According to the company, scrolling through photos and reading descriptions tend to be boring experiences. Feels want to improve profiles so that navigating the app feels more like watching TikTok videos or browsing stories.
“For the past 10 years, there’s been little innovation in the industry,” co-founder and CEO Daniel Cheaib told me. “The reason why many people uninstall dating apps is that it’s boring. Profiles all look the same and we feel like we’re browsing a catalog.”
In that case, Cheaib is thinking about Tinder, but also other dating apps that feel like Tinder but aren’t exactly Tinder, such as Bumble, Happn, etc.
Feels’ founding team has spent two years iterating on the app to find out what works and what doesn’t. Now that retention metrics are where they’re supposed to be, the company is ready to launch more widely.
Image Credits: Feels
If you want to show interesting content to your users in a dating app, you have to rethink profiles. Arguably, this has been the most difficult part of the development phase. When you install the app, it takes around 15 minutes to create your profile.
At first, only 30% of new users finished the onboarding process. Now, around 75% of new users reach the end of the signup flow.
So what makes a profile on Feels different? In many ways, a profile looks more like a story, or TikTok posts. Users can record videos, add text and stickers, share photos, answer questions and more.
“When you’re done with the onboarding process, you have consistent profiles with people sharing content about them,” Cheaib said.
Like other dating apps, there are many options when it comes to gender identity — you’re not limited to woman or man. You can then say that you want to see all profiles or just some profiles based on various criteria.
After that, you can look at other profiles. Once again, Feels tries to change the basic interaction of dating apps. Most dating apps require you to swipe left or right, or give a thumbs up or a thumbs down. When you think about it, it’s a binary choice that requires a ton of micro decisions.
Sometimes, you don’t have any strong feelings about someone. Or maybe you just want to go to the next profile. And the fact that you have to triage profiles like this leads to a lot negativity, whether it’s conscious or subconscious — you keep rejecting people, after all.
When you’re looking at a profile on Feels, it fills up your entire screen. Videos start playing, you can see what the person likes and who they are in front of a camera. You can react on some content or you can simply move on by swiping up. There’s no heart or like button.
When the startup thought they finally were going somewhere, they raised a $1.3 million funding round (€1.1 million) from a long list of business angels, such as somebody in Atomico’s business angel program, Blaise Matuidi, Eric Besson, René Ricol, Ricardo Pereira, Yohan Benalouane, Nampalys Mendy, Julien Radic and Jean Michel Chami.
Now, Feels plans to attract new users with organic TikTok posts, some TV ads and more. The company wants to reach one million users by the end of the year with a big focus on France for now. There are 100,000 users right now.
When it comes to monetization, Feels started offering a premium subscription to unlock more features. The company is still iterating on that part.
Feels is just getting started in a crowded and competitive industry. Unlike other companies, Feels has invested heavily in its own product before working on user acquisition and paid installs. It’s an ambitious strategy but it has a lot of potential as it could lead to a truly different dating app.
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Singular is a new Paris-based VC firm with $265 million
Meet Singular, a new VC firm based in Paris that just finished raising its initial fund. The firm was founded by two former Alven partners — Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan. They have some ambitious goals and an interesting investment model that could help them remain involved even during late-stage rounds. Overall, the firm raised €225 million, or $265 million at today’s exchange rate.
If you browse Singular’s website, you’re not going to find a lot of information. Here’s what it looked like last week before the team added a list of portfolio companies:
Image Credits: Singular
The Singular team doesn’t want to be secretive. But they don’t like talking about themselves. That’s why you may have seen Singular’s name in a few articles I wrote over the past few months. But now it’s time to talk a bit about what the firm has in mind when it comes to startup investment.
Jérémy Uzan and Raffi Kamber spent 11 and eight years at Alven, respectively. They’ve been behind some of the firm’s most successful investments, such as Dataiku (with Nicolas Celier, who sourced the deal then handed over Alven’s board seat to Raffi Kamber) and OpenClassrooms. “But every time you raise another fund, you sign up for a long time,” Uzan told me.
The duo left Alven quite naturally as they felt it was time in their careers to take their destiny in their own hands. There’s no hard feeling with their previous fund.
It was the right timing personally, but also the right timing for the tech ecosystem. While Singular is based in Paris, the firm plans to build a true European VC firm with its headquarters in Paris. Singular doesn’t think London should be the center of gravity for European tech investment.
Singular started fundraising in late 2019 and early 2020. Kamber and Uzan didn’t know anything about raising a fund and didn’t work with an external financial firm to handle the fundraising effort.
When asked about the coronavirus pandemic and the impact on the process, they both said the lockdown actually helped, as everyone was stuck at home. Around two-thirds of the limited partners that invested in Singular are based outside of France.
“These are historic VC investors. They really believe in tech — and Europe too. They have seen that Europe has been taking off for the past two or three years,” Kamber told me.
Just like a startup, Singular wanted to be backed by some well-known investors. And some of those investors are injecting money in a French VC fund for the first time. Limited partners include a mix of pension funds, funds of funds, sovereign funds and family offices.
Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Bpifrance, Vintage Investment Partners, Axa Venture Partners, Sofina, MACSF and Mubadala Capital are some of Singular’s backers. Unless you’ve raised a VC fund in the past, you may discover some of those names for the first time. And yet, these investors are significant. For instance, while you might not be familiar with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, they have over $200 billion in net assets.
Singular started closing investment deals around October 2020. So far, the company has invested in six different startups:
- A Series B round in Gtmhub, an OKR management service
- A Series B round in Indy, an accounting automation software suite
- A Series A round in Soda, an enterprise-grade data monitoring platform
- A seed round in Moka.care, a mental health solution for employees
- A seed round in Resilience, a full-stack software approach to improve cancer treatment
- Another undisclosed Series A round
It’s hard to find some common trends around this list of investments, but I’m going to help you. First, let’s start with the average check size.
“We are mostly focused on Series A/B because we think there’s a lot of room to grow at that stage,” Kamber said. And Singular can invest as much as €20 million in a single round ($23.6 million at today’s exchange rate).
When it comes to verticals, Singular openly says that it doesn’t want to focus on a specific area in particular. “We are a generalist fund and we are quite opportunistic,” Uzan said. Singular doesn’t want to choose between B2B and consumer, between AI and e-commerce, etc.
Where Singular stands out is that it has a unique approach to late-stage rounds. When a portfolio company reaches the Series C or Series D stage, Singular might not have enough money under management for infinite follow-on investments.
The VC firm didn’t want to raise its own late-stage fund. So Singular will be able to structure special-purpose investment vehicles with its limited partners. A few limited partners could put some money in this investment vehicle directly and the startup could accept to raise a new round with this new investment vehicle instead of a late-stage fund.
This way, Singular remains very much involved with the portfolio company in question. It could keep a board seat and have a say when it comes to the startup’s next phases.
It’s still too early to see how it would work in real life and it’s going to happen on a case-by-case basis. But the fact that Singular can offer that kind of investment is significant — it could be appealing for some entrepreneurs. You don’t have to accept it and you’re not tied with Singular forever, but the offer is on the table.
So that’s Singular — Eva Mayoud, Alexandre Flamant and Sonia Pélisson also joined the team. It’s not that often that a French VC firm starts from zero and raises a €225 million fund in a year. It’s going to be interesting to track the firm’s upcoming investments. In the meantime, here’s some TechCrunch coverage of Singular’s past deals:
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These are the most promising French startups according to the French government
The French government and the government-backed initiative La French Tech unveiled the new indexes that identify the most promising French startups. The 40 top-performing startups are called the Next40, and the top 120 startups are grouped into the French Tech 120.
The Next40 and French Tech 120 are somewhat new as this is only the second version of those indexes. Out of the 120 startups that were in last year’s French Tech 120, 90 of them are still in this year’s index — 30 are newcomers as there were 123 startups in last year’s French Tech 120.
Combined, they generate close to €9 billion in revenue and provide a job to 37,500 people. Revenue in particular is up 55% compared to last year’s French Tech 120.
Here’s a list of the French Tech 120 — the red logos are part of the Next40:
Image Credits: La French Tech
There are two ways to get accepted in the Next40:
- You have raised more than €100 million over the past three years ($120 million at today’s rate) or you are a unicorn, which means your company’s valuation has reached $1 billion or more.
- You generate more than €5 million in revenue with a year-over-year growth rate of 30% or more for the past three years.
As for the remaining 80 startups in the French Tech 120:
- 40 of them have raised more than €20 million in a funding round over the past three years.
- 40 of them are selected based on the annual turnover and growth rate.
Of course, those indexes are limited to private French companies. For the French Tech 120, there are at least two startups per administrative region.
Based on those metrics, only a handful of the startups in the French Tech 120 have a female CEO and the French government thinks tech startups should do more when it comes to diversity and inclusion. That’s why a small group of people are going to work on a roadmap and some recommendations to improve those numbers.
Representatives of six different startups in the French Tech 120, as well as people from Sista, Tech Your Place and Future Positive Capital, will get together to work on those topics.
In addition to a cool logo for your website, being part of the French Tech 120 comes with some perks. Those companies can access a network of French Tech representatives in different public administrations.
For instance, it’s easier for your company if you want to get visas for foreign employees, obtain a certification or a patent, if you want to sell your product to a public administration, etc.
There are two new additions to the French Tech network. Someone from the Conseil d’État can help you when it comes to legal compliance. The government has also signed a partnership with Euronext to educate entrepreneurs about going public.
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