Good morning,

Mid January, cold and snowy in most of Europe, just like proper winter should be, right? How are you guys handling the beginning of the year - ready for Blue Monday tomorrow? I feel like I need another holiday already - 8 more weeks till spring, hang in there!

Big welcome to the new people on the list. As always, ping me with comments, questions, rants, gossips and whatnot, I try to answer each and every one of you. And thanks for reading!

PS - I’m in Copenhagen Monday-Tuesday, hit me up if you want to have a cup of coffee.

Top intel

Deal highlights from this week 

🇬🇧 ​Hyperexponential​, developing pricing tools for the insurance industry, raised $73 million series B led by Battery Ventures, joined by a16z and Highland Europe.

🇳🇴 ​1x​, producing androids capable of human-like movements and behaviors, announced a $100 million series B transaction with EQT Ventures, Sandwater, Samsung NEXT, Skagerak Capital and the Nistad group.

🇩🇪 ​Finn​, doing ecommerce for cars, raised $110 million Series C in a round led by Planet First Partners, w/ HV Capital, Korelya Capital, UVC Partners, White Star Capital and Picus Capital.

🇳🇱 ​Picnic​, operator of an online grocery e-commerce business, raised $390 million in a round backed by existing investors The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust and German supermarket group Edeka.

Tomorrow’s intel includes both later stage and (pre)seed rounds, including:

• 🇳🇴 AI for commercial real estate

• 🇸🇪 AI-enabled SAAS for vertical ESG data

• 🇩🇰 neobank

• 🇬🇧 private equity secondaries market for LPs

and

• a French guy in London was promoted to the top of a leading investor.

• (a lot) more fresh powder and buyout funds popping out

• exits, market consolidation moves and exits

• and more.

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Market talk

🇬🇧 What is needed to have a $100b UK based tech company?

• A miracle. 😃 

• The question is rather - what are the incentives of a 100b company to be based in the UK? Or - can the UK accommodate the needs of a 100b company in the first place?

• Any way you look at it, a 100b company needs to stay close to its customers and investors, and have a large talent pool available for business support. The UK cannot score acceptable in either field, that’s a fact.

• The local capital markets are poor and illiquid. Even earlier on in the life of fast growing startups, there’s hardly enough investors equipped to cover the growth needs fundamentals - and the ones that can are mostly Americans which will take startups overseas anyways. That’s where the business is - the British market is small in the grand scheme of things. The tech talent availability is scarce and difficult to access for outsiders. The education system’s output is still mainly about becoming a banker or having a safe, well-paid job in the City. Not least, the attitude is a downer too.

• There’s many other arguments and they can turn into a super long discussion, rather moot and philosophical, particularly in the context of the downward importance trajectory London has seen post-Brexit in Europe.

• And I know Brits have it hard to admit it, but papa Macron has been consistently kicking their assess in terms of making Paris cooler than London for startup attractiveness.

• Still, miracles can happen, but hard to believe the Brits will make a case for one soon. London still is a financial hub and is business-oriented, at least trying a few things here and there - but it’s more PR than substance and is more apparent that it lives off from inertia of the past decades, slowly and surely turning its positioning from ‘the place to be’ into a ‘has been’.

🤔 Deleted social media wisdom is the best

Also notable 

🇪🇺 Will Apple out-lawyer the EU?

• Apple is pushing back against European rules that designate its five App Stores as one core platform service subject to regulation.

• It also disputed the characterisation of its operating system iOS as an important gateway for business users to reach end users and the interoperability obligation that goes with that label.

🇪🇺 Now that Margrethe Vestager didn’t get the job to head the European Investment Bank, she will resume playing god with American tech CEOs and will line them up in a meeting next week.

🚙 Hertz is selling off a third of its electric vehicle fleet, which is predominantly made up of Teslas, and will buy gas cars with some of the money it makes from the sales.

• The company cited lower demand for EVs and higher-than-expected repair costs as reasons for the decision.

• Meanwhile, in Germany Volkswagen is planning on installing ChatGPT in cars, rolling them out first in Europe then in the US.

• Amazing to see Open AI’s GTM unravel mere 18 months after opening for business.

💰 OpenAI’s store for custom AI-powered chatbots is now open for business.

• This is a big deal, I’d bet that in 10 years time it will have bigger distribution power than Apple Store has now.

💌 The dating MSM market has become competitive and crowded - both Tinder and Hinge are increasing prices.

• Another way to look at it is that there’s likely interesting startup opportunities at the edge.

🇺🇸 The US passed a legislation change making bootstrapped software businesses completely unsustainable.

🚀 SpaceX’s finally gotten competition - Boeing and Lockheed Martin's United Launch Alliance sent Vulcan into space for the first time on Monday.

🦆 Apple asks people to call its VR device a spatial computing device. If it quacks and walks like a duck, it most certainly is just a duck VR device.

Mo’ Sundaying 

🇪🇪 I had a couple of people reach out to me pointing to an Estonian company that actually paid substantial employee bonuses on exit - a total of €13 million distributed to 263 people netting around €30,000 after taxes. Great story!

🧊 Greenland startup sells glacier ice to cocktail bars in the United Arab Emirates as a rare, pure product. If there’s demand, there’ll always be supply.

🇳🇴 In Oslo the city’s fleet of electric buses was canceled again from running due to cold weather, which is severely affecting the vehicles’ range and battery life.

🇸🇪 In other news, over in Sweden we’re told to be prepared for war. Not the worst of advice, Trump’s 11 months away from taking office after all and that dude is trouble for everybody.

🇬🇧 Since a drama about one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in UK history aired last week, more than a million people have signed a petition and the British government have announced a new law.

• That TV show is Mr Bates vs The Post Office, a four-part drama that is a semi-fictionalised account of the Post Office Horizon scandal, in which post office branch managers across the UK were wrongly accused of theft and false accounting for almost 20 years from 1999, with more than 700 being prosecuted.

🇫🇷 France's government says it wants foreign investment but some companies find their plans derailed by Sisse, the national agency with an outsized reach that’s frustrating business deals in the name of national security.

🐰 Rabbit looks like a cool toy - arguably a bit useless as it likely falls in the ‘excited for five minutes then forget about it’ category, but makes for a good case of experimenting with new AI-enabled gadgets at reasonable entry price points.

• Raised 30 million from Khosla a few months ago.

• The hardware is made by Teenage Engineering, Swedish startup that raised from Seven Seven Six two years ago.

🇺🇸 More Americans in Europe - Esther Duflo, who is a 2019 Nobel Prize winner in economics, to lead Paris School of Economics.

• Also notable, Paul of Lightspeed moved from London to Madrid - fwiw, I did the same in 2019, Madrid is awesome, better weather, better food, nicer people, closer to the beach. Summers are insanely hot though.

🦾 Neo from 1X serving coffee in Oslo - creepy or cool?

🤭 The Brits have had a bit of a situation at Eton, which is a boarding school for the rich - flooding and a sewer backup have delayed the start of the new term. Classes at the school, which has educated princes and prime ministers, will move online.

💪 Emerging markets - six African countries are among the world’s highest growth economies in 2024.

🐶 Humanity at its best - in Poland, people arrived in droves, waited in lines for hours and took home 120 pups to temporarily shelter until the dangerous cold weather passed.

🇸🇪 A party of 35 ate and drank their way through the dinner in a restaurant in Malmö, on Christmas Day - and left without paying the SEK 82k bill ($8k).

🤔 The over 150-year mystery of why urine is yellow has finally been cracked: study.

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