Sifted - The year of RIP posts

Good morning there,

Founder posts on LinkedIn can be a pretty good indication of where we're at in startupland. While 2021 was all about rocket ship and fire emojis, 2022 saw founder feeds quieten as they battened down the hatches and adapted to a new, altogether harsher existence. Today, we’re looking into a trend already emerging as a contender for 2024’s LinkedIn mood music: the “RIP” post.

Elsewhere, Berlin-based presentation software startup Pitch is laying off two-thirds of its employees and CEO Christian Reber is stepping down, Swedish battery maker Northvolt has secured approval for €902m to build a production plant in northern Germany and the experts pitch in with their fintech predictions for 2024. 

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2024: the year of the "RIP" post

There’s notoriously very little data in the world of startups, something we struggle with at Sifted daily. So I’m always looking for clever numbers or indicators of what the next big thing in tech is or where we are in the cycle. 

My favourite indicator this week is LinkedIn posts. 

If 2021 was all about rocket ship and fire emoji posts (“We’re a unicorn!”), 2022 was defined by the crying CEO meme, when everything came back down to Earth. Last year, anyone seriously building, cutting burn and navigating this new reality wasn’t posting on LinkedIn, so that left us with AI influencers and founders posting about their newfound use cases for ChatGPT. 

We’re not even two weeks into January and it seems that the LinkedIn flavour of the year has already been decided. What I’d like to call “RIP” posts — the difficult post a founder writes when they announce they're shutting up shop. 

In the last week alone, closures include a four-year-old sustainability consulting tech platform and a no-code commerce platform that had raised a $3.5m pre-seed round. One Web3 founder also shared their lessons after not being able to find product-market fit and closing their startup. Another founder shared the agonising experience of being just days away from a potential acquisition before having to declare bankruptcy. Spanish startup RIP Foods announced that it is now… RIP.  

Good posts share the update — with the most important news clearly up top — and then thank employees and other supporters of the startup’s journey. There’s also a good team pic. My feeling is that founders should share a quick update now and wait for the longer post-mortems later (if they want to share, though it’s not necessary). 

The fact that we’re seeing lots of these now means that we’re really in that part of the cycle where runways are starting to run out. It is really the end of the road for companies that can’t raise again. 

The next indicator I’ll be looking for is what these founders do next. Hopefully, they (and their teams) can take a well-deserved break first. But do they go on to found again? Do they become operators? Do they go into a corporate position? 

There is conflicting data about serial founders performing over first-time founders. Some surveys indicate past experience doesn’t give them an edge, while others found they have higher sales and productivity. We do know, anecdotally, that European VCs at least in these tough times have a little serial founder bias. 

What we should remember is that all of these company closures represent important lessons for European tech — they’re only making our founder and operator talent pool stronger. If you’re a founder who wants to share lessons from shutting up shop with us, reach out: eleanor@sifted.eu. 

 — Eleanor Warnock, deputy editor

🇩🇪 Berlin-based presentation software startup Pitch is laying off roughly two-thirds of its employees and longstanding CEO Christian Reber is also stepping down.

• Reber, who’s been at the helm for six years, announced on LinkedIn that “going forward, we’ll be a significantly smaller team focused on creating maximum value for our customers and driving sustainable growth [...] I am very sorry that this happened and I take full responsibility for leading Pitch up to this point.”
• He will remain at the company as a board member, while the company’s cofounder and CTO Adam Renklint will take over the chief executive job immediately. 

🔋 Swedish startup Northvolt, Europe’s best-funded battery manufacturer, has secured approval from the European Commission for €902m in state aid from Germany to build a production plant in the north of the country.

• The package was announced last year but was put in jeopardy in November after Germany announced a budget freeze. Northvolt was then granted an exception, but the deal still awaited approval from the EU, which it secured yesterday.

🤔 What’s going on with Carta? In case you missed it, late on Friday Finnish founder Karri Saarinen, CEO of San Francisco-based software startup Linear, posted a screenshot of an email from equity management platform Carta showing the company approached one of Linear’s angel investors about selling secondary shares of the startup. 

• In a thread under his post on X, Saarinen claimed this outreach — which he alleged used private information about Linear’s cap table — had been going on since December. 
• Carta CEO Henry Ward responded in a blog post on Sunday, saying that the company “had an internal policy violation that affected three companies. I’ve been in touch with the founders and I’m appalled we made that mistake and it should never have happened.” He added that Carta had “dealt with the violation" on Saturday and is continuing to investigate. 
• The company has had other struggles, including lawsuits and recent layoffs.

🎧 The music streaming platform SoundCloud is up for sale, according to Sky News. Investors Raine Group and Temasek Holdings, the Singaporean state investment fund, invested in the Berlin-based music startup in 2017, and according to Sky, have now begun interviewing investment banks about a prospective auction of the company that could exceed $1bn.

Join us virtually on January 30, when we’ll be showcasing five early-stage startups in VCs’ new favourite vertical: climate tech. RSVP.

Or if you're an early-stage climate tech startup that is currently fundraising, please share your pitch deck with us by January 11.

 🔫 What startup founders can learn from Die Hard.

🔮 What’s in store for European fintech in 2024? The experts give their predictions.

For weekly analysis, news and data from the world of European fintech, sign up to Sifted's fintech newsletter, out every Tuesday.

Swiss university ETH Zurich created 43 spinouts in the last year, a record for the institution, which has spun out more companies than any other university in Europe.  

• Of the 43 spinouts, 12 have links to AI, including Quazel, an app for learning languages. 
• Biotech and pharma also feature heavily, with eight of the spinouts focused in those areas. 
• The university also increased the proportion of female founders among its spinouts in the past year. Women were cofounders of 11 of the 43 companies.

Riga-based Aerones, which provides robotics maintenance for wind turbines, raised €4.4m from the EIC Fund.

Oslo-based We Are Learning, which allows users to create interactive learning simulations and 3D animations for soft skill development, raised €3m. Dreamcraft Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Skyfall Ventures and Sondo Capital.

London-based Patchworks, which offers an integrated platform for ecommerce retailers to combine things like their shopfront, CRM and warehouse management tools, raised £2m in funding from Gresham House Ventures.

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