Slite, a Paris, France-based startup that provides a workspace collaboration platform, raised $11m in Series A funding.
The round was led by Spark capital, with participation from existing investors (which include Index Ventures, Y Combinator and eFounders, as well as individuals).
The company intends to use the funds to expand operations, and increase its development efforts and business reach.
Founded in 2016 by Christophe Pasquier, CEO, and Pierre Renaudin, CTO, Slite provides a collaborative documentation tool that allows businesses to write and centralize docs and organized. The company says the tool is used by teams at approx. 4,000 companies worldwide, including Airbnb, Spotify and WeTransfer, among others.
A graduate in Winter 2018 Y Combinator batch, the company has a team of 18.
Source. FinSMEs, April 19, 2020
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Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.
Digital media startup Brut
is announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding. The
money will be used, in part, to finance its launch in the United States.
CEO
Guillaume Lacroix said that he and his co-founders all come from the
French TV industry, where they were all “frustrated not to be able to
follow up the conversation” on social media. So they created Brut
as a way to deliver video news that felt conversational and authentic,
hoping to spark viewer conversation, then take advantage of that
commentary to find future stories.
“We always say to journalists,
‘Forget the audience, think about your two best friends,’ ” Lacroix told
me. “Would you be excited to have this conversation tonight with your
friends? If yes, let’s do it.”
The publisher focuses on topics like social good and social impact — for example, it published the first viral video
featuring climate change activist Greta Thunberg. Lacroix argued that
Brut’s audience is looking for solutions, not just problems, in contrast
to the “negative news cycle” that they see on traditional media.
“People
are not waiting anymore — they don’t wait for institutions to do it,
they don’t wait for the collectivity to do it,” he said. “It’s very
inspiring to see someone who takes even a small action.”
At the
same time, he doesn’t want Brut’s journalists to veer too heavily into
advocacy or activism themselves: “We don’t do a call to action, we’re
not activists, we don’t point a finger. We just shine a light on people
who are trying to do something to change the world.”
In many ways, Brut seems to check off the same boxes (it aims to
reach a millennial/Gen Z audience with short videos on Facebook,
Instagram and Snapchat) that many U.S. digital media startups did before
they started to struggle and consolidate over the past few years.
But
Lacroix said the startup’s approach is working — not just in terms of
reaching an audience, but also building a real business. Brut is already
profitable in France, and it plans to be profitable in the U.S. within
three years.
Asked whether he’s worried about relying on social
platforms to reach his audience, Lacroix argued that even if you focus
on publishing on your own website, you’re reliant on Google for traffic.
myCareBase™ is a platform for seniors and their families to find, evaluate, hire and manage home support services, to improve the seniors’ ability to remain living safely in their current home for as long as possible. The caregiver marketplace currently offers candidates in Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver. To compliment this platform the company also offers an innovative care management app that centralizes communication and task management among family members and the caregiver, along with a Care Concierge service to help family members with administrative, navigational or organizational tasks.
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“For
me, it’s not a problem of distribution, if you’re diversified enough,”
he said. “It’s a problem of: What’s your business model? Why did Spotify
explode from day one? They have a global DNA. It’s exactly the same for
us.”
For example, Lacroix said that Brut’s audience is concerned
about many of the same issues no matter what country they’re in. And the
company is able to produce content for them in a relatively low-cost
way, because it can shoot a video in French or English, then add
subtitles in a variety of languages — most audiences won’t even notice
because they’re watching on their phones, with the sound off.
To
be clear, Brut hasn’t exactly been ignoring the U.S. market before this.
The company said it has an audience of 30 million daily active viewers
across the globe, including in the United States, and it opened an
office in New York City a couple of years ago. By “launching” here, Brut
means it’s hiring an advertising sales force to start monetizing that
audience.
The company previously raised €10 million (approximately $11.1 million) from Kima Ventures, according to Crunchbase. The new funding was led by Red River West and blisce, with participation from Aryeh Bourkoff, Eric Zinterhofer and others.
“When
deciding where to invest, we look for mission-driven companies whose
values are aligned with our own,” said blisce founder and CEO Alexandre
Mars in a statement. “Like blisce’s previous investments in Spotify,
Pinterest and Bird, we believe that Brut’s unique global approach
represents a special competitive advantage, as well as an understanding
that business success and positive social impact are inextricably
linked.”
Source. TechCrunch, Anthony Ha, October 30, 2019
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This post was brought to you by WoewodaCommunications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.
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Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.
French startup MadBox is raising a $16.5 million (€15 million) Series A funding round from Alven.
The company is developing mobile games and handles everything from
start to finish, from game design to publishing and user acquisition.
MadBox
is a young player in the mobile game space. The company is the result
of the merger of two tiny Paris-based game studios in July 2018. After a
couple of months, the startup released its first game, Dash Valley. And the game quickly ended up trending in the top 50 of top free game downloads in the App Store in the U.S.
The
company has released a handful of games since then. At some point,
MadBox had three games in the top 10 charts in the U.S. (once again,
free game downloads) — StickMan Hook, Sausage Flip and Idle Ball Race.
Overall, MadBox has generated 100 million game downloads.
myCareBase™ is a platform for seniors and their families to find, evaluate, hire and manage home support services, to improve the seniors’ ability to remain living safely in their current home for as long as possible. The caregiver marketplace currently offers candidates in Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver.
To compliment this platform the company also offers an innovative care management app that centralizes communication and task management among family members and the caregiver, along with a Care Concierge service to help family members with administrative, navigational or organizational tasks.
“The
core method at MadBox is that we internalize everything,” co-founder and
CEO Jean-Nicolas Vernin told me. “We try to automate as many thing as
possible.”
In
addition to reusing assets from one game to another, MadBox also tries
to apply the same method when it comes to user acquisition and
marketing. “People often tell us that we have a data-driven culture that
is disproportionately developed in our company,” Vernin said.
MadBox has a careful approach when it comes to growth. The company hires slowly and doesn’t release dozens of games in a year.
With
30 to 40 employees and a business model mostly based on ads, the
company is currently profitable. MadBox now wants to tackle a wider
range of mobile games, from hyper casual to idle games and less casual
games. The startup is also opening a second office in Barcelona.
“We
are a generation of friends who have worked for well-known casual game
studios. And we all think that big game productions will have to become
simpler so that people can play them like casual games — and vice
versa,” Vernin said. And MadBox wants to be there when these two worlds
collide.
Source. TechCrunch, Romain Dillet , October 18, 2019
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This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics. Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.
Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.
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. Source. TechCrunch, Romain Dillet, June 17, 2019
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This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.
Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.
Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.
London-based startup Wheely has raised a $15 million Series B round led by Concentric, with Oleg Tscheltzoff, Misha Sokolov and other investors also participating. The company wants to build an Uber competitor focused on the luxury market.
It’s a bit ironic when you think about it, as Uber started as a luxury company. But everybody knows someone with horrific Uber stories. That’s why Wheely is building a reliable and predictable ride-hailing experience.
The company is currently live in London, Moscow and St. Petersburg — Paris is coming this summer. It works with 3,500 drivers and currently has a run rate of $80 million in gross bookings.
Wheely doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, as the company works with third-party partners and doesn’t employ its drivers. Similarly, the company takes a 20 percent cut on each ride.
But the startup insists on its strict recruitment process. For instance, you can’t become a Wheely driver from day one. The company requires at least three years of previous chauffeur driving experience. You also need to pass multiple tests, including driving tests and etiquette tests. Only one in four UberBlack drivers pass the exam.
There are currently three different classes — a normal one with Mercedes-Benz E-Class cars, a fancy one with Mercedes-Benz S-Class cars and a van category with Mercedes-Benz V-Class vehicles.
Minimum rides cost £12 with the entry-level class, £16 in an S-Class and at least £40 for a van. You then pay more depending on distance traveled and time spent in the vehicle.
And it’s been working well, as Wheely now represents around 11 percent of gross bookings in London. Given that each ride is more expensive than a traditional ride-hailing ride, it makes sense that Wheely already captured a good chunk of the money pie. Now let’s see if the company can find enough cities with affluent people to scale its business.
Source. Techcrunch, Romain Dillet, April 25, 2019,
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This post was brought to you by WoewodaCommunications, your
partner in the Canadian private equity and startup markets; offering
strategic communications, public relations & investor relation
services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family
Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life
sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and
robotics.
Are you a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call!
One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically
design, and then systematically layer each of our communication
platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients.
WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our
client's message to their target audience. Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa, and Halifax.
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