When you’re looking for a startup idea that could slow climate change, you might become an expert at home energy assessments. At least, that’s what happened to the founders of Kelvin, a French startup that is using computer vision and machine learning to make it easier to audit homes for energy efficiency.
After the Wirecard scandal, Germany’s financial regulator BaFin started to look more closely at young fintech startups that wanted to grow at a rapid pace — it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Ledger, a French startup mostly known for its secure crypto hardware wallets, has started shipping new wallets nearly 18 months after announcing the latest Ledger Stax devices.
AniML, the French startup behind a new 3D capture app called Doly, wants to create the PhotoRoom of product videos, sort of. If you’re selling sneakers on an online marketplace or need to create Instagram ads for your direct-to-consumer wares, Doly helps you generate 3D models with your phone and turn them into professional-looking product videos.
A few years ago, you couldn’t go to a fintech meetup without ending up in a conversation about embedded finance. In 2020, we even wrote that embedded finance might represent fintech’s future.
The distribution strategy lets fintech companies integrate their services into other products and services, which in turn gives users access to new features without having to sign up to a new service. It’s proven an especially attractive approach for fintechs as it gives them a new layer of products to offer to bigger banks and financial services providers.
Ember, a British startup working on an embedded tax offering, is proving that the strategy is still a valid one in 2024. The small company has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts. Ember could potentially gain 400,000 customers with a single partnership.
Ember’s service fetches companies’ recent banking transactions and automatically categorizes them. After that, customers can track expenses, add receipts, create invoices and do basic accounting.
Ember then provides an overview of your company’s revenue and expenditure, estimates how much you’re going to pay in taxes, and tells you how much money is available to withdraw as dividends for the owners.
Bigger companies will likely work with chartered accountants directly or even hire in-house accountants. But freelancers and small companies with less than 10 employees could at least simplify their accounting processes with Ember’s self-serve product.
“The likes of Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent are all built for accountants and not end business owners. And we saw a huge opportunity to build a transformative experience for an end business owner to look after their entire suite of tax obligations,” Ember’s co-founder and COO, Daniel Hogan, told TechCrunch.
However, the issue is that this market is extremely fragmented. There are hundreds of thousands of small companies in the U.K. alone, meaning that it’s hard to get customers.
“We were going up against the likes of Xero and QuickBooks on advertising spend, and that was tricky to acquire customers directly because of that exact reason — it was expensive,” Hogan said.
That’s why Ember has started negotiating with big banks like HSBC UK to offer an embedded solution. HSBC pays Ember for each of its customers who chooses to use Ember’s features, and if they want to access more features, such as the ability to add other bank accounts from other financial institutions, they can pay Ember to do that.
Ember also has a team of in-house accountants who can take care of complex tasks for paid customers, such as end-of-year annual accounting and corporation tax management. Ember’s free-to-use version that you get on HSBC’s online banking portal acts as the top of the funnel for the startup to acquire paying clients.
Ember isn’t going to work exclusively with HSBC going forward. Contracts with big banks take a long time to negotiate, but hopefully the company will have another partner bank to announce soon.
With upcoming regulatory changes in the U.K. (“making tax digital”), accounting software will likely receive increased interest from small businesses. By 2026, around 1.75 million business owners in the country will have to change the way they file their taxes. The vast majority of them don’t use any accounting service to help them with this process.
“[The bank] has essentially made the decision to be an API-first organisation. So rather than building it themselves, they’re relying on the software providers, such as ourselves, to actually build all of that experience. They’re just being the API layer,” Hogan said.
“They’re relying on us to build better user experiences to help customers report both more frequently as well as more accurately.”
In addition to this initial partnership with HSBC, the regulatory opportunity is also part of the reason why Ember recently raised a £5 million funding round ($6.3 million at today’s exchange rate) from Valar Ventures, Viola Fintech and Shapers.
If you live in the U.S., chances are you use apps like Venmo and Cash App to pay back your friends or split the bills with your roommates. Lydia is a French startup that also turned payments into a mobile consumer app and service.
Now, after reaching 8 million users, the company finds itself in an interesting position. Does it want to add more financial services to grow its average revenue per user? Or does it want to simplify its app to make sure that as many people as possible use Lydia to send and receive money from their phones?
The company has essentially decided that it doesn’t want to pick one option over the other. That’s why Lydia is launching a challenger bank, Sumeria, and splitting itself into two apps — Lydia for peer-to-peer payments and Sumeria for people who are looking for a mobile-first bank account.
“We’re proud to announce the launch of our European banking project, Sumeria. It’s the same company, Lydia Solutions, that is launching a banking project,” Lydia’s co-founder and general manager, Antoine Porte, told TechCrunch.
The decision makes sense if you’ve been using Lydia for more than a couple of years. After raising €235 million ($255 million at today’s exchange rate) and focusing on growth, the company decided to refocus on monetization in late 2022 and 2023.
The result has been a mixed bag as Lydia grew larger and its app became more complicated. While most users had been using Lydia for quick mobile payments, the company kept telling its users that they could also use it as a bank account with a dedicated account number and a Visa debit card. The company also offers stock and crypto trading, small loans, savings accounts, cashback and more.
Two million users are now using those advanced features, and some of them even started paying for a monthly subscription — the company says that this part of the company is profitable. But during that process, Lydia inadvertently alienated part of its user base — it was no longer as simple to use as it used to be.
That’s why Lydia is trying to bring clarity to its offerings. A few weeks ago, the company launched a second app, simply (and confusingly) called Lydia, dedicated to peer-to-peer payments. Existing Lydia users who just want to send money with their phone and create money pots should switch to this new app. Hopefully, this will be the last confusing move.
As for Lydia’s original app, the company is completely changing its approach to mobile banking and launching Sumeria, a European challenger bank. It’s a new name and a new start.
This move comes a few months after communications expert and influencer Anne Boistard gathered complaints from former Lydia employees for her Instagram account, Balance Ton Agency.
Porte and Lydia’s co-founder and president, Cyril Chiche, admitted that they made mistakes in the past. “Nothing new was released. These are things that we’d already processed internally,” Chiche said. Now, the company wants to move on and the new brand is part of this process.
“We already had this idea [of rebranding] in mind. It was already in the works. But all that of course helped us move on to something more serious. We were criticized for the way we acted as a scrappy startup,” Porte said.
All of Lydia’s banking features have been carried over to Sumeria. Users get a bank account with a dedicated IBAN to receive money and make SEPA payments, as well as a debit card that they can control from their phone. The company believes it can make a better bank account than traditional banking institutions. This pitch is reminiscent of the previous wave of European and British challenger banks, such as N26, Monzo and Starling Bank.
“Banks work for their own interests before those of their customers. It doesn’t use technology in an efficient manner,” Chiche told TechCrunch. “Online banking is a software front-end for processes and organizations that are clearly outdated and therefore very expensive to run.”
Sumeria brings a new logo, some new card designs and a complete mobile app redesign with a simpler main screen. You’ll see your card in a customizable digital wallet on the app home screen, your main account and its balance at the top, and your most recent transactions at the bottom.
You can scroll down to see all your accounts or scroll up to dig a bit more in your transaction history. There’s no menu at the bottom of the screen to switch from one tab to another. Sumeria is also launching a web interface so you can see your balance and transactions without having to install the app, or if you want to use a computer.
What’s different from other challenger banks is that Sumeria wants to simplify the way you manage money. People will earn 2% on their cash balance (4% for the first three months) as long as they use their Sumeria card at least 15 times per month — your money doesn’t have to be segregated to a separate savings account.
“We generate interest for all your accounts. You don’t have to put money in this or that account,” Porte said. “There are currently €500 billion of deposits that don’t generate any interest in personal current accounts in France,” Chiche said.
Unlike Revolut, Sumeria will focus exclusively on the European market so that people who live in France, Germany or Spain feel like they’re using a French, German or Spanish bank account. “Their vision was international, not European. The valuation required to raise so much money made them promise too much,” Porte said.
With this new name, the company hopes people will take Sumeria more seriously and consider using it as their main bank account — that’s the other reason for the rebranding. That’s also why the company will open a store in Paris this summer where people will be able to talk to Sumeria experts.
It will be a sort of bank branch, but without the usual offices that you can find in bank branches. It will work more like the genius bar in Apple stores.
Lydia has set ambitious goals with Sumeria. The company plans to invest €100 million in its new venture and hire 400 people over the next three years. Sumeria wants to reach 5 million customers by 2027.
If you’re an electricity nerd, chances are you’ve already spent quite a few hours looking at Electricity Maps and its mesmerizing export flow animations. This open-source data visualization project has been around since 2016. But companies like Google and Samsung are increasingly relying on this rich data set to hit their sustainability goals and empower their own users.
There are currently 20 people working for Electricity Maps and the company has been profitable for a few years. But TechCrunch has exclusively learned it recently raised a $5.4 million (€5M) funding round from Transition and Revent, to take things up a notch by investing in the product and the business. Electricity Maps is now both a data visualization tool and an enterprise API for data-driven decarbonization — and one wouldn’t work without the other.
Founded by Olivier Corradi, a French and Danish entrepreneur and data scientist who previously worked for voice assistant startup Snips, Electricity Maps started from an itch to know more about electricity production and consumption. “There were articles in the press saying that Denmark ran on 100% renewable energy for a day. So I was wondering whether this was true and how long it lasted — how many hours in the day,” Corradi told TechCrunch.
Image Credits: Electricity Maps
Electricity Maps aggregates real-time data for electricity production in more than 50 countries around the world. While the company uses open-data sources, employees and community contributors had to build dozens of parsers to standardize this data.
As renewable energy depends on weather conditions (for wind and solar energy in particular), the mix of energy sources constantly evolves. It means that the carbon intensity of the energy produced also changes with the time of the day and the current conditions. And, as you may have guessed, as electricity works a bit like tap water flowing through a vast network of tubes, the CO2 emissions related to the electricity you consume can vary greatly.
Calculating the CO2 emissions can be complicated as there are also a lot of cross-border flows for electricity — some countries produce more electricity than they actually consume while others have larger electricity needs than production capacity. Electricity Maps has designed its own flow-tracing model to understand which power plant contributes to the electricity you’re consuming right now.
“We’re going to process all this in our system with what we call a flow-tracing algorithm, which lets us tell you where the electricity is coming from depending on where you are. It can be produced locally, but it can also come from Germany. But Germany imports from Poland, so it could potentially come from Poland, etc. So we need to perform some modelling,” Corradi said.
The company also stores historical data and uses machine learning algorithms to provide 24-hour forecasts. Just like weather APIs are now a big industry, electricity forecasting APIs could become essential business tools in the future.
Electricity Maps founder and CEO Olivier Corradi (Image Credits: Electricity Maps)
The reason why the open-source data visualization project is an essential part of the company is because Electricity Maps wants to achieve as much consensus as possible. Calculating the lifecycle emissions for electricity generation requires peer reviewed studies.
The company shares all its sources for emission factors. It also means that these calculation methods can evolve over time as researchers release new studies with more accurate results. The community can discuss and submit potential changes that will be reflected in Electricity Maps’ data.
As for the commercial part, being able to know the carbon intensity of the electricity that is available at a specific place and a specific time can be a sort of super power.
“With all the renewable energy installation goals, we’re going to find ourselves in a world where the quantity of intermittent renewable energy will triple by 2030,” Corradi said.
“The good thing is that this demand is flexible because it’s going to be electric cars and you can change the time at which they charge. It’s going to be AI training and you can choose the time at which you’re going to train these big models,” he added.
Image Credits: Electricity Maps
Google, one of Electricity Maps’ most important clients, partnered with the European startup to calculate the carbon intensity of the electricity powering its data centers.
For some tasks, such as indexing the web or training a new AI model, Google can use Electricity Maps’ data for load shifting. When there’s more wind, it’s time to boot up additional servers. Or when it’s nighttime in the U.S., Google can move some compute-intensive operations to European data centers.
But Google’s own clients will also benefit from the company’s partnership with Electricity Maps. With the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, many companies will soon have to publish carbon accounting reports. As many companies rely on Google Cloud for their hosting needs, they will need data to calculate their scope 3 emissions. Thanks to Electricity Maps’ historical data, that carbon data will be more accurate.
Samsung, another client for Electricity Maps, uses the startup’s data to show users the electricity usage and carbon footprint of their Samsung devices. In that case, this is more about educating users.
But Electricity Maps is much more than an educational tool. It can act as the information layer that decides whether it’s a good time to turn on millions of electric devices — or, at least, if it’s a good time to have as little impact as possible on the planet.
Why is a profitable company raising? The funding injection is aimed at dialling up Electricity Maps’ own impact by stepping on the gas so it can meet rising demand for smarter climate tools, per Corradi. “The reason we raised is simply that the amount of renewable energy now in the system is starting to be so significant that you’re starting to have an opportunity to activate the flexibility of the appliances you have at home, or in the industrial sector.”
In 2024, it’s hard to wake up without reading about yet another large funding round in an enterprise AI company. Intuition, a new VC firm based in Paris, is doing something radical and betting on consumer tech exclusively.
Behind the scenes, Hugo Amsellem (pictured left) and Etienne Boutan (pictured right) will be the general partners of this new fund. Hugo Amsellem has worked for Jellysmack and written about consumer tech and influencers for the past few years — including this very interesting piece on loneliness and how it affects consumer tech and culture.
Amsellem is also better known as one of the first employees of The Family, which was an iconic startup accelerator based in Paris. More recently, people have been talking about The Family because of the ongoing lawsuits against its co-founder Oussama Ammar. He has supposedly diverted millions of euros for his own profit.
Amsellem left The Family in 2019. When we talked about this part of his career, he’s both disappointed to see how things ended and wants to move on.
As for Etienne Boutan, he started his career as a professional basketball player. Before founding Intuition, he co-founded AI startup Heex Technologies.
The duo teamed up to raise an initial fund of €15 million ($16 million at today’s exchange rate). They have already invested in a handful of consumer startups in Europe and the U.S. after a first closing but they’re still actively raising for the fund.
They also recruited Axel Toupane (NBA champion), Eliott Kessas (co-founder of Daring) and Erika Batista (General Partner at On Deck Runway Fund) as venture partners.
“Hugo and I were amongst some of the most active early-stage investors in consumer startups in Europe and with the addition of Axel, Eliott and Erika as venture partners we wanted to make sure we could expand our coverage in the U.S. at the heart of consumer tech in San Francisco and culture in Los Angeles,” Etienne Boutan said.
The investment thesis for Intuition is quite simple. There’s a lack of consumer tech investment right now. That’s because investing in consumer and culture has historically been a bit risky for two reasons.
First, it’s hard to generate revenue when you’re working on a fun mobile app or the next big social network. It sometimes feels like you’re either working on the next unicorn or you’ll end up in the deadpool.
Second, there are a handful of consumer-focused tech companies that are simply dominating — Meta, ByteDance, Snap… Sure, some big tech companies like Meta, Google and Amazon acquired consumer companies to turn them into major consumer platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Twitch. But it feels like this acquisition window has closed.
“Working on consumer is really not cool these days because it’s been 5 to 7 years of failures in the consumer vertical, and there hasn’t been a lot of liquidity,” Amsellem told me.
“All the funds that have seen these under-performances and have had a huge amount of money to deploy because they’ve raised gigantic funds, they still say ‘yes, I’m doing consumer deals’, but they don’t say it too loud,” he added. “In fact, this is our opportunity.”
At the same time, many smart people are still working on consumer products — think about BeReal, Amo, Retro, The Browser Company, etc. Innovation hasn’t stopped and some of these companies will succeed.
And with the current pace of innovation in artificial intelligence, Intuition expects to see new interesting things happening in the space.
That’s why Intuition wants to help the next wave of consumer companies. The VC firm plans to invest anything between €100,000 and €500,000 at the pre-seed or seed stage. It will invest in more than 40 companies with its initial fund.
“There’s only one subject I want to work on, and that’s consumer and everything adjacent to consumer – everything that changes culture,” Amsellem said.
“I don’t think there’s room for a €30 million consumer fund focused solely on consumer products,” Amsellem said. Adding events on top of investment will grow Intuition’s revenue, which should help the firm when it comes to hiring a bigger team and making smarter bets.
So the company wants to create a community of people working on consumer and culture so that they can learn from each other and find the next big thing together.
Intuition is launching a series of events co-hosted with other key VC firms, such as Felix Capital (in London), a16z (in New York), Greylock (in Los Angeles) and General Catalyst (in San Francisco). Later this year, this tour will culminate with Intuition’s flagship event at Station F in Paris on September 20th.
This event strategy reminds me of Jason Lemkin’s SaaStr conferences. While SaaStr attracts 15,000 people for its main conference, Intuition is still at the start of its journey. The new firm plans to invite a few hundreds people for its first events. But it’s interesting to see that a VC firm is taking consumer tech seriously again.
French startup Carbonfact believes that the best carbon accounting solutions will focus on one vertical. That’s why the company has decided to provide a carbon management and reporting tool for the fashion industry exclusively.
And Carbonfact recently raised a $15 million funding round led by Alven, the French VC firm that led Carbonfact’s seed round in 2022 already. Other investors in the round include Headline and a follow-on investment from Y Combinator.
Big companies in the fashion industry (and other industries) need to come up with a carbon accounting strategy as regulation is changing in Europe and the U.S. with the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), California’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act and the NY Fashion Act.
That’s why there has been a boom in carbon accounting platforms. The biggest ones like Watershed, Persefoni, Sweep or Greenly have an industry-agnostic approach. They help you track your carbon emissions and create reports in a more or less automated way.
Just like Carbon Maps focuses exclusively on the food industry, Carbonfact is focusing on the fashion industry so that its product can be more granular and more specific.
“For these industries – food is a very good example, fashion is a very good example – you need to be accurate in your calculations and you need industry-specific tools to model virtual products and improve your product offering in the future,” Carbonfact co-founder and CEO Marc Laurent told me.
In more practical details, Carbonfact retrieves your existing data from your ERP and other internal systems. It then calculates the footprints for each product using a lifecycle assessment engine that is specifically designed for clothing items.
“[Clients] also have data in what they call PLM [Product Lifecycle Management software ] — that’s the software in which they put all the product data. This is where you’ll find the product recipe sheets. And they sometimes have data in traceability platforms, such as Retraced, Trustrace, Fairly Made in France, etc. And finally, they sometimes have data in Excel files,” Laurent said.
After centralizing and normalizing all data in a single platform, as the fashion industry relies on a cascade of suppliers, Carbonfact wants to help you calculate your scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions — scope 3 emissions in particular encompass indirect emissions from third-party suppliers.
The startup first gives you a broad idea of your main emission hotspots with an uncertainty range. It then helps you prioritize data collection with your suppliers to refine your data and improve your carbon reporting.
After that, Carbonfact can become your carbon footprint dashboard. You can generate broad reports and drill down at an SKU-based level to see the environmental cost of each product. The platform can then be used to run what-if scenarios to see if you should change a material, move to a new country of manufacturing or change your transport methods.
Image Credits: Carbonfact
While many companies will focus first on CO2-equivalent metrics, Carbonfact can also be used to track other metrics, such as water consumption, French eco-labels and other environmental indicators — in the carbon accounting industry, they call these indicators the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules, or PEFCR for short.
And Carbonfact has already onboarded over 150 apparel and footwear brands, including New Balance, Columbia, Carhartt and Allbirds. “We track 100% of their subsidiaries, 100% of their suppliers, 100% of their products,” Laurent said.
Each client pays tens of thousands of dollars per year to use Carbonfact. With a little back-of-the-envelope calculation, if we consider that a client pays around $20,000 per year on average, it means that the French startup already generates at least $3 million in annual recurring revenue.
It’s clear that sustainability management software is a growing segment in the world of enterprise software. But it’s also a young sector. So it’s going to be interesting to see if several industry-specific platforms can become large companies or if there will be some consolidation down the road.
Global Founders Capital, the Berlin-based early stage VC firm with close ties to the German startup factory Rocket Internet, is going to become the venture arm of Rocket Internet.
The VC previously raised two $1 billion funds and, just a few years ago, its name appeared in dozens of deals per year. But then, things quietened down. Now we know why: Going forward, it’ll exclusively invest from Rocket Internet’s balance sheet.
Last year the Financial Times reported that Global Founders Capital was in the middle of a big strategic shift. A couple of weeks ago the VC firm reached out to TechCrunch to confirm the pivot and discuss the reasons behind the shift.
“To be transparent, there have been quite a few changes at Global Founders Capital in recent years — in terms of the structure of the fund and the composition of the team,” Global Founders Capital Partner David Sainteff (pictured above) told us.
Sainteff said the firm decided it’s not the right time to raise another fund because it’s not a great time to invest as they do not believe there are that many good opportunities that meet the firm’s criteria and that they don’t need more capital to remain competitive against other investors for deals.
Global Founders Capital was originally structured as a traditional VC firm with several limited partners participating in funds. With its first fund, it backed then-future unicorns such as Personio, Revolut and SumUp. With its second fund, the firm invested in several companies TechCrunch has also covered, such as Pennylane, Ankorstore and Seyna.
Prior to joining Global Founders Capital, seven years ago, Sainteff worked for Rocket Internet which was an investor in Global Founders Capital from the beginning. So there have been close ties between them since the beginning.
“Following the deployment of this second fund, we decided not to raise another fund. Instead, we’ll use Rocket Internet’s capital,” he confirmed. “We have €300 million to deploy for venture investments on the balance sheet. We don’t have any fundraising planned.”
Frankly, this is a bit odd as the firm’s past performance seems quite good. According to Sainteff, the first fund is going to generate returns between 3x and 4x. “For the second fund, it’s far too early [to say],” he continued. “But we have a few clear winners like Pennylane. We entered at the pre-seed stage and the company is worth over €1 billion.”
The new strategy means Global Founders Capital is now much smaller than it used to be, with only five partners left: Fabricio Pettena, Don Stalter, Cedric Asselman, Sainteff and of course Rocket Internet co-founder and CEO Oliver Samwer.
The new version of the firm will also only focus on early stage investments, plus the ability for follow-on investments in later rounds (Series A, B, C, etc).
Did Global Founders Capital choose not to raise a third fund because it didn’t get enough support from potential limited partners or because of the current tech downturn compared to 2021 (with the exception of the boom in artificial intelligence)? Probably the decision hinged on a bit of both.
“It wasn’t the best moment to raise funds with [limited partners],” Sainteff told us. “We think it was difficult to have the imperative to deploy capital.”
“It’s an easy decision to make when you have €300 million in the bank,” he added. “If other VC firms were in the same boat, they would have made the same decision. We don’t rule out the possibility to raise a fund when the conditions are right and favorable.”
For now, the pivot reverses much of the fund’s earlier expansion, when it scaled into more geographies, tech areas and funding stages and the Global Founders Capital name was attached to a bunch of deals.
@2025 – All Right Reserved. Designed and Developed Startupnews