Hello from New York, where we have a beautiful, sunny autumn weekend, with most of Manhattan messed up by the today’s marathon.

Welcome to the new people on the list! Many interesting stories today, let’s get right at it.

Top intel

Cheat sheets

• The most active angels and their deals in Q3 - link

• Startups raising consecutive series - 2023

• Overpriced Euro seed deals - link

• AI deals in Q3 - link + who invested in AI - link

• Investors who slowed down this year - link

Deal highlights from this week 

🇩🇪 ​tupu​, alternative food developer producing mushroom-based food products, raised $3.2 million seed co-led by FoodLabs and Zubi Capital, joined by Clear Current Capital, FoodHack, IT-Farm, Coast Cap. 

🇪🇸 ​Shakers​, developing a digital recruiting marketplace, raised a $6.4 million seed round from Brighteye Ventures, Adevinta Ventures and Athos Capital.

🇬🇧 ​Sprout​, insurance company developing an advanced claims automation solution, raised $6.4 million series A extension led by Amadeus Capital and Praetura Ventures.

🇳🇴 ​Vespa​, developing a fully featured search engine and vector database used for search, online personalization recommendation and ad serving, raises $31 million series A from Blossom Capital.

• The deal is in top 10 largest series A from this year → a closer look on that on tomorrow’s intel over at Monday CET.

Also on tomorrow’s intel:

• Early stage profitable Nordic startup with 200k MAUs and marginal marketing spend raised seed.

• Another Nordic startup that pivoted from pharma into fashion raised series A.

• Russian VC company managing 5 funds out of London announced a new one.

Monday CET is a free intel service for the Nordic 9 subscribers and also available as a stand alone product which you can sign up for from here.

Market talk

🗣️ Our view is uncertainty is here to stay, both in the public and private markets.

In the U.S. private markets, seed to Series A is down to a record low and back to 2012 levels. European venture funding halved in the second quarter of 2023 compared to a year earlier, and was down two-thirds from its peak two years ago.

The portfolios of the later stage funds in the ecosystem are a mess, and until that washes out, it will be tough times for the venture industry.

Our feeling is unless you’re a startup in a hot space, and until the exuberance of the last few years has washed out of the system, raising follow-on capital will be extremely challenging.

If you’re interested in the buy side, you should read the whole thing.

🇩🇰 Danish investors don’t use SAFEs for tax reasons.

🤘 European investors made a blueprint out of copycatting American tech startups - Euro VC funding innovation in 2023 ftw.

🇸🇪 Klarna has averted a strike this week - it was a big deal as in Sweden you don’t mess with the unions. Alas, that also shows that Klarna is not a startup anymore, nor can it be managed as such.

Other stories

🇩🇪 Volkswagen’s software unit Cariad delayed the launch of its new software architecture yet again as it deals with a large round of layoffs.

• VW has created Cariad three years ago. Six months ago it reshuffled management, and now plans to cut 2,000 jobs - this will further delay the launch of VW’s software architecture by 16 to 18 months.

• It’s a classic position from the innovator’s dilemma playbook - are car companies software companies or the other way around? Tesla certainly is the latter, as it started everything from the OS of the car and then built the hardware around it. And has different other tech-related competitive advantages on top of that - i.e. Starlink, open source charging network, data-based insurance etc - very hard to catch up for an incumbent that at its core only knows how to assemble cars and has software as an after thought.

• Tech wise, Tesla is still years away from traditional car manufacturers - strategy wise, VW remains just a producer marginally innovating and mainly competing on costs, while Tesla is still a high end (status) player that often goes mid-market with aggressive pricing cuts for strategic short term gains and gaming the public markets.

• Also notably, in SAAS years a 1-2 year GTM delay is a competitive disadvantage and the car business is already going through major market pressures as is - when it gets tough you focus on what you know best and cut off what is not important, hence the Cariad news from above.

🇬🇧 This week, the Brits brought together a bunch of politicians and King Charles himself for chiming in opinions on AI.

• After two days of talking, they concluded it’s an important matter and that they need to meet more to talk about this important matter

• It’s politicians doing politicians things, even without the consensus the PR put out, and which was labeled as tech bros and politicians who get to shape the future of AI.

• They even brought a rather distracted and polite Elon Musk to talk to the British prime minister → earned media for the government.

• Fwiw, the American counterparts also have made decisions towards regulating AI this week.

• All those top down initiatives of aiming to regulate a still incipient domain with clear development paths are by default a flawed, anti-market movement - instead of focusing on creating premises for innovation nurturing, they focus on preventing the innovation find its way into the market in an organic way. And looking at the big picture, the heavy regulation shuts down competition in the AI market, and benefits only big tech incumbents - there’s a framework for that.

• If you want to understand why all these political-driven efforts, also involving some fine people in good faith btw, are not only mostly noise but also can be destructive - read this.

🇪🇺 Meta will offer an ad-free subscription version of Facebook and Instagram in the EU.

• They’re doing it because the European legislation forced Meta so - charging on a ‘you either pay or get tracked’ approach is a way of getting explicit consent from users for serving them tracked-based advertising.

• It’s a benefit in disguise, as Meta can quantify demand for a paid social network service - if it works, it can be the start of a bigger market trend and reconfiguration.

Signals

🇩🇰 Orsted, the Danish wind developer, wrote off $2.3 billion on US projects that are worth less than they had been - financing the operation became unsustainable due to higher interest rates and supply chain delays.

🇩🇰 Maersk, the (also Danish) shipping company, posted a 92% drop in profits and will cut its workforce below 100,000, from 110,000 at the start of 2024 - will result in savings of $600 million.

🇷🇺 Rusal, a Russian aluminum maker, paid $260 million for a 30% stake in a Chinese alumina plant owned by Hebei Wenfeng.

• All those are part of the whole global supply chain reconfiguration, accentuated by Russia’s war against Ukraine and by the Gaza events.

🇬🇧 Barclays is looking to buy a payment business - Stripe, Adyen? Or Klarna, perhaps?

🇸🇪 795 companies went bankrupt in Sweden in October - by far the highest figure for the month of October since 1999.

• In total, the ecosystem has currently 757,000 active limited liability companies in Sweden.

🇬🇧 The British government wants to launch an AI chatbot on top of ChatGPT to help the public pay taxes and access pensions.

🇨🇭 Rolex trolls Omega with deal to buy home of arch-rival's flagship store.

🇷🇺 Russians as a brand - Carlsberg says Moscow stole its Russian business.

📈 Amazon implemented its BNPL solution by partnering with US-based Affirm.

✈️ If JetBlue’s $3.8 billion takeover of Spirit Airlines for creating America's fifth-largest airline doesn’t work, its long-term survival becomes an open question.

📉 Wework is planning to file for bankruptcy. Two tidbits:

1. WeWork still has 1,500 people working in software engineering, product, and design roles.

2. WeWork had 777 locations in 39 countries as of the end of June.

Simple capital efficiency math tells us that they employ two tech guys for each location - for a company managing co-working space venues, no less.

💊 Google AdSense will quit the CPC model as it is moving to per-impression payments in 2024.

• What will happen to all those SEO specialists now?

👁️‍🗨️ A group of veteran US financial journalists is teaming up with investors to launch a trading firm designed to trade on market-moving news covered by its own investigative reporting, based on publicly available material.

• The fund would place trades before articles were published, and then publish its research and trading thesis

Mo’ Sundaying

🇩🇪 Many Berliners are considering leaving the city.

🇰🇪 Small businesses in Kenya are increasingly rejecting mobile money payments in favor of cash as they look to sidestep aggressive tax compliance measures.

🇨🇳 A sad story about what Hong Kong is like since the Chinese government crushed the city.

💪🏼 Here’s an interesting product approach for solving an edge case of a huge market.

💲 Analysts are predicting that the price of Bitcoin will surge to $150,000 by the middle of 2025.

🥕 The culture that is the USA: DoorDash has added a pop-up in its app this week warning customers that orders with no tip might take longer to get delivered.

👀 Students from the UK and Norway leave college with more student debt than American students.

😎 Kids dreaming to make money from becoming social media influencers have gotten competition from granfluencers - seniors finding success by sharing their expertise on specific subjects like cooking, auto repair, or fashion.

• The market is more fragmented than that - blue-collar workers sharing what they do in a day, like farming, fishing for lobsters, and trucking take home quite a nice paycheck as well.

🤔 Can politicians block you on social media? It’s a debate happening on American courts.

🤘 Guide for navigating corporate speak.

🇬🇧 Speaking of which, the Brits are the masters at avoiding to say directly what they really mean.

🖖🏻 Jeff Bezos has moved from Seattle to Miami, like all senior people do in America when they age.

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