Business Wave "need to know" #2

What happened last week that you need to know?

Nov 13, 2023

Hi all,

before we dive into what happened last week, just one quick announcement!

This Wednesday we will have a very special post that marks a new chapter for “Business Wave” so stay tuned 😉

Ok, now that we got that out of the way, let’s continue!

Startup news and funding

Big deals

Quandela secures €50M Series B

Quandela, the French photonic quantum computing company, successfully secured over €50 million from investors and delivered its first quantum computer to an industrial client.

Quandela develops full-stack optical quantum computers, available both on cloud and on-premises. It became the first player in the European Union, and one of the few globally, to make its quantum computers accessible via the cloud.

More info HERE

Photonic raised a $100 million round

Quantum computing and networking startup Photonic raised a $100 million round that included an investment from Microsoft.

The deal includes a strategic collaboration that will pair the Vancouver-based startup’s scalable and unified quantum computing and networking with the tech giant’s Azure cloud platform.

More info HERE

Stash raises $40 million in funding

Stash, a NYC-based provider of an investing app, raised $40M in funding. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate growth and its business reach.

Led by CEO Liza Landsman, Stash provides an app that allows people to invest in fractional shares of companies and ETFs they know with any dollar amount. In the past year, the company surpassed $100M in annual revenue, and counts 2M active subscribers.

More info HERE

Smaller deals

Eilla AI raises $1.5m in Seed funding

The platform assists M&A, venture capital, and private equity professionals with financial research, analysis, and document creation, making it easier to make money.

Eilla AI's technology automates these processes by mirroring industry professionals using generative AI.

More info HERE

Performativ raises €5.5 million in Seed funding

Performativ, a Copenhagen-based fintech startup specialising in wealth management technologies, has raised €5.5 million in a Seed funding round.

Performativ helps financial service players, both large and small, offering a suite of front, middle, and back office tools and optimisations including to ensure a future-forward scalable infrastructure.

More info HERE

Fyma closes a $2.1 million investment round

Fyma seeks to turn every urban camera into a GDPR compliant sensor and every piece of footage into actionable data.” Any new and legacy outdoor and CCTV camera will do. The SaaS platform extracts and analyses data from live footage, enabling clients to understand the patterns of movement in individuals, such as pedestrians and shoppers, as well as objects like vehicles and machinery.

More info HERE

Thank you for reading Business Wave . This post is public so feel free to share it.

Hyperloop travel by 2030 in Europe?

If you still haven’t heard of Zeleros…they want to become a future of hyperloop transport in Europe by 2030!

Hyperloop transport is designed to carry people or cargo in pods or capsules travelling through low-pressure tubes at high speeds raised by magnetic levitation to reduce friction. The idea is to create a near-vacuum environment inside the tubes to minimise air resistance, allowing the pods to travel at high speeds (faster than maglev trains, between 800 to 1200 kmph).

For comparison, using a hyperloop, the 439-kilometre journey from Frankfurt to Amsterdam would take a mere 50 minutes — currently around 4 hours 26 minutes by car.

More on Zaleros and hyperloop travel in Europe HERE

ChatGPT on your clothes?

Humane, a company started by former Apple employees, has created its first product – the AI Pin.

The AI Pin is a screenless device, smaller than a smartphone, with a laser-projected display. It can project smartphone-like interfaces onto any surface.

One of the main attractions of the AI Pin is its integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, making it an AI assistant that you can wear. It also includes features like a daily summary of emails, translation of languages, and even identifying the nutritional value of foods.

Nvidia is winning the AI race…again?

Nvidia announced its new H200 Tensor Core GPU. The chip incorporates 141 gigabytes of memory and offers up to 60% to 90% performance improvements versus its current H100 model when used for inference, or generating answers from popular AI models.

This is not good news for Nvidia’s competiton because the current state of affairs is as follows 👇

Raising VC money to buy companies that are running out of VC money?

A little bit of irony never hurts, right? 😅

Curious, a Seattle-based investment firm raised $16 million in funding it will use to buy struggling startups.

Curious is targeting software companies producing annual recurring revenue between $500,000 to $5 million that are running out of cash or not meeting growth expectations for a future investment round.