Sifted - Speedinvest’s management shakeup

Good morning there,

Every now and then, VC teams go through a big old shakeup. HV Capital announced its succession plan and made several major promotions in October, while London-based Atomico cycled through a handful of partners between its latest funds.

Austrian VC Speedinvest is the latest firm to rejig its management. The firm, which has been largely run by CEO and managing partner Oliver Holle for the past 14 years — with help along the way from various cofounders and partners — is bringing in some reinforcements.

Today, I speak to Holle about what prompted the move — and how he’s thinking about talent at his now 85-person firm. 

Elsewhere today:

• Galp scraps joint venture with Northvolt to build Europe’s largest lithium refinery
• Inside Revolut’s bid to be the bank for big businesses
• Sifted’s 101 on digital lending startups

— Miriam Partington, senior reporter

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😬 Galp scraps joint venture with Northvolt to build Europe’s largest lithium refinery. The Portuguese oil and gas giant has shelved its lithium plant project — initially conceived as a 50/50 joint venture with Northvolt — after the Swedish gigafactory manufacturer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US last week.

• “The current context and the inability to count on an international partner make it impossible to continue with the project,” Galp said in a statement.

🤝 Meet Speedinvest’s new management team. CEO Oliver Holle will run the Austrian early-stage VC with longstanding GP Marie-Helene Ametsreiter and newly promoted GPs Markus Lang and Andreas Schwarzenbrunner. Nora Frizberg, the firm’s operating partner and general counsel, will also join the management team as COO.

• Two of Speedinvest’s long-time partners — Mathias Ockenfels and Julian Blessin — stepped down this year. Blessin, who was previously one of the founders of mobility startup Tier, has returned to founder-dom. Yesterday he unveiled his new company, AllRide, a B2B multi-modal mobility app. 

💰 BlackForest Labs, a German AI image generation startup, is in talks to raise as much as $200m from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, reports Bloomberg. Its story follows a now-familiar pattern in the world of AI; its founders formerly worked on image generation at another AI company, Stability AI, and raised a $31m seed within months of starting the business. Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has used its software. 

👋 Just Eat Takeaway is delisting from the London Stock Exchange. It’s the latest in a growing list of tech companies to leave — or avoid — the LSE: cybersecurity unicorn Darktrace quit the exchange in September, and was taken private by private equity group Thoma Bravo. Meanwhile,  Cambridge, UK-based chip designer Arm opted to re-list in New York instead of London last year. 

• Just Eat said: “[The decision was taken] to reduce the administrative burden, complexity and costs associated with the disclosure and regulatory requirements of maintaining the LSE listing, and in the context of low liquidity and trading volumes of the shares on the LSE.” The food delivery giant will remain listed on the Amsterdam stock market, where it’s HQd. 

👀 Revolut’s business banking unit is making a bid to capture big enterprise clients. It’s launching new products in payments hardware, credit and savings to catch their eye. 

• The UK neobank established its B2B unit in 2017 to provide banking services for freelancers and small companies. Since then, it’s attracted hundreds of thousands of customers and now accounts for around 20% of the wider group’s topline, James Gibson, head of Revolut business, tells Sifted. In September, it exceeded revenues of $500m — and is onboarding 20k customers a month.
• It will be going up against far bigger, more established players — and will need to reassure customers they won’t be any more at risk of fraud on its platform than any other.

🔏 How AI could make a designer out of any employee. (Sponsored by Canva)

• Uncertainty over the long-term viability of fintech lenders may have translated into lower levels of VC funding for the subsector, writes our fintech reporter Tom Matsuda in this week’s briefing. European digital lending startups have raised $549.3m so far in 2024 — a close to 50% drop on 2023’s level of funding. 
• A huge chunk of VC financing this year was for consumer lender Abound, which raised a £400m Series B in May. 
• Other banner deals in 2024 include climate fintech Cloover’s €105m seed round in May and January’s $48m Series B round for UK-based Bumper, which helps drivers split repair costs into interest-free payments. 
• Europe’s challenger banks’ shift into lending may also be putting off new entrants. Sifted identified 65 pre-seed to Series A startups in Europe building in the vertical. In comparison, there were 104 early-stage companies in the CFO tech stack and 76 in the digital banking sector. 

Get right on the money by reading our Pro digital lending briefing (🔐) here.

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Darmstadt, Germany-based Etalytics, an energy management and intelligence platform, raised €8m in Series A funding. Alstin Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Ebm-papst, TF H IV Technologiefonds Hessen and Beteiligungs-Managementgesellschaft Hessen.

Milan, Italy-based Volta, which uses AI tools to automate B2B commerce processes, raised €6m in pre-seed funding. Emblem led the round.

Paris-based Argil, which develops video content with humanlike AI avatars, raised €4.9m in funding. 

• It raised €3.9m in seed funding led by EQT Ventures who was joined by investors including Kwebblekop (Youtuber) and Charles Gorintin (Alan cofounder).
• It also raised €1m in pre-seed funding. Seedcamp and Axeleo led that round. 

Riga-based Origin, which develops airborne precision-guided weapon systems, raised €4.5m in grant funding from the European Defence Fund.

London-based OpenTrade, a platform for real world asset-backed stablecoin yield products, raised $4m in seed extension funding. AlbionVC led the round and was joined by investors including a16z Crypto and CMCC Global.

Harpenden, UK-based Barton Blakeley, which has developed a chemical process to convert CO2 emissions into clean energy and synthetic silica, raised £2.4m in funding. Elbow Beach Capital led the round.

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