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SEPTEMBER 28, 2022

Hello Sifted reader,

It's been a busy couple of days for climate tech startups that are speeding up laggardly processes — the Netherlands' Timberhub raised a €5.8m seed for its digital timber marketplace and the Czech Republic's Woltair bagged €16.3m in Series A funding to solve one of the biggest pain points for consumers installing solar panels and heat pumps.

And after we reported on Innovafeed becoming the world's biggest bug business with its $260m raise last week, VCs are again dipping their toes into the world of insects. Austria's LIVIN farms has just sealed a €6m Series A to expand its “plug-and-play factory” offering for industrial food producers.

Also from the Sifted newsroom:

• Xavier Niel's Iliad launches payments subsidiary
• Point Nine's new €180m seed fund
• UK founders respond to Barclays taking Tech Nation's grant money
• How to stop Web3 becoming another Web2 
  

🤝 Sequoia hires its fifth partner in Europe. Cornelius Menke is joining the firm from Boston Consulting Group and will be based in the London office. It's a further sign the US VC giant — whose portfolio includes Stripe, YouTube, Airbnb and WhatsApp — means business on the continent. 

🪳 LIVIN farms grabs €6m Series A to turn grubs into protein. The startup has designed a remotely monitored bug factory to sell to farmers and other industrial food producers, which allows them to turn food waste into protein. CEO and founder Katharina Unger says customers will be able to pay off the cost of the factory and start making money on production within three years.

🦠 Phagos raises €2.4m to target antibiotic resistance in animals. Livestock are among the biggest consumers of antibiotics, and so are at the forefront of the war against bacterial resistance. The Paris-based startup is looking to fight that, and is building tech that develops phages — viruses that kill certain types of bacteria. Its funding came from Agfunder and Entrepreneur First.

🧠 Tiimo gets backing for neurodivergent time planning app. With an estimated 20% of the global population being neurodivergent, the Danish startup is targeting a global market of around 1.5bn people. And it's just raised a €3m seed round — co-led by Iceland’s Crowberry Capital and Denmark’s People Ventures — to expand its team, roll out new features and grow its presence in the UK, US and Canada.

💳 Xavier Niel's Iliad finally launches its payments provider Stancer. The French billionaire's telecoms giant set up the fintech in 2018 to build a payments product aimed at small businesses. It launched officially yesterday, and is hoping to eliminate the need for fees on small payments and get rid of minimum card spends. 

🥄 Italy's Bending Spoons raises $340m. The round — which included investors like Ryan Reynolds' Maximum Effort Holdings, Diego Piacentini and Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo — was split $40m equity and $300m debt. The Milan-based startup's suite of content creator tools, which includes mobile apps Remini and Splice, has clocked up 500m downloads after nearly 10 years of bootstrapping.

🚗 Wayve claims big self-driving car breakthrough. The British startup reckons it's made a big step towards "generalising" the tech — where car computers can drive any vehicle anywhere — after software trained on an SUV was later able to drive a van. Wayve has raised $258m since it was founded in 2017, and hopes to be the first autonomous driving company to roll out self-driving cars in 100 cities.

🪓 Timberhub raises €5.8m seed round to keep chopping wood. Buying and selling timber for construction is still mostly done by email and fax, making prices opaque and inconsistent. Enter Timberhub, a platform connecting sellers and buyers across 15 EU countries so far. It's landed HV Capital, Creandum and Speedinvest on its cap table.

☀️ Renewable energy installation platform Woltair bags €16.3m Series A. The Czech startup has put together software that helps people installing solar panels or heat pumps in their homes find the technicians to get it done. This is a big pain point — in Poland, one of the two markets Woltair is active in, it can take six months to get a heat pump installed. Canadian climate tech VC ArcTern Ventures led the round.

💰 Point Nine raises €180m seed fund for B2B startups. The Berlin-based VC's sixth fund will, like its previous pots of cash, back B2B SaaS and marketplace startups the world over, building on the success of previous investments like Contentful and DocPlanner. Despite the B2B market slowing down this year, Point Nine says it won't be any more cautious than it was before.

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Why UK founders are worried about Barclays taking Tech Nation's grant money. The bank is set to win a £12m contract to provide legal and practical help to startups, a role the non-profit has played for more than a decade. Given Barclays' reluctance to play ball with open banking requirements, some investors are worried that its heart isn't in innovation.

Web3 builders need to fight to keep the metaverse open. VCs and CEOs talk the talk on breaking down barriers and making the metaverse free for all, but their actions tell a different story — one of total control by a single company to maximise profits. Metanomic founder Theo Priestley says action is needed to stop Web3 becoming another Web2.

SIFTED TALKS

Crucial security practices need to be in place in order to grow beyond borders. Early-stage startups often have limited resources — so how can you ensure your compliance framework is ready to overcome the obstacles and achieve your next scaling milestone?

Hear from the experts on October 19.

We’re a week out from the Sifted Summit and we have a host of great speakers from across Europe warming their vocal cords ahead of two jam-packed days discussing all things European tech.

And some of them have already given us a taste of what’s in store:

🇺🇸 Lewis Z Liu, cofounder and CEO of Eigen Technologies, on why his company moved its headquarters from London to New York.

❌ Johannes Lenhard, of the Max Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy and Social Change, on why VCs need to stop financing the servant economy.

🩸 Marie Krebs, people experience design lead at Learnerbly, on why it’s time we started speaking about menstruating at work.

Haven’t got your ticket yet? Use code TOMSENTME10 for 10% off.

Elsewhere on Sifted:

💳 The payments tech changing how we pay back loans. (In partnership with TrueLayer.)

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Alex Oscroft

Writer

Get in touch with him at

alex@sifted.eu 

He tweets from

@alex_oscroft

Tom Nugent

Digital editor

Get in touch with him at

tom@sifted.eu

He tweets from

@TJNugent92

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