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 Covonavirus 

94% of VC-backed startups are going to survive Covid

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News that matters

🌱 Looking for seed investment? A new remote pitching event called Debut Sessions is launching this month with some of Europe's best-known investors like Check Warner at Ada Ventures and Harry Stebbings at Stride. Check out how to apply here.

📛 Digital bank Monzo is cutting up to 120 jobs, according to an internal note, as the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on its business begins to bite.

🔥 Revolut staff have been told to quit their jobs or be fired, according to this devastating story by Wired. These (mostly non-Polish) employees in the challenger bank's Krakow office have been left stranded in a foreign country without a job or health insurance in the middle of a pandemic, according to the report.

🛴 Bird has scrapped 10,000 scooters and shut down scooter sharing in several cities in the Middle East, an operation that was managed by Circ, the micromobility startup it acquired in January, according to Techcrunch. About 100 Circ employees have been laid off and the scooters have been sent to a third-party UAE-based company for recycling.

◼️ Legendary American VC firm Andreessen Horowitz is launching a fund designed to invest in underrepresented and underserved founders. Not quite European news, but maybe some of the big European firms will do the same?

🤖 Nanox, a startup out of Israel that has developed a small, low-cost scanning system and “medical screening as a service” to replace the costly X-rays, CAT scans and PET scans announced a $20m raise.

🇬🇧 Danish HRtech startup Good Monday raised around €3.5m in a round led by Firstminute Capital. The fresh funds will be used to expand to London.

☁️ France's Saagie announced a $28m fundraising round. The startup is notable not so much for its business, which is tough-to-really-understand B2B SaaS, but the poetic way it describes itself as a "hybrid cloud orchestrator".

🤦 CORRECTION: Wrong billionaire, too many unicorns. Pascal Cagni was Steve Jobs' 'guy in Europe' (not Jeff Bezos') — and his VC firm C4 has backed 5 unicorns to date (not 30, as we wrote in our previous newsletter). Sorry!

If you're a fan of our 'News that matters' and 'Sifted Suggests' sections, check out our newsfeed here, where we collect all of these gems — and more.

Sifted Suggests 

⏳ EIT Digital Challenge 2020 | Last chance to scale your deeptech venture globally. Grow your tech startup, whether it’s in AI, mobility, logistics, health or banking with a powerhouse of growth support worth €350,000. Apply now. [Sponsored post]

◼️ A powerful piece by Gary Stewart, with four concrete steps for investors to take to make changes and fund more black founders. A gritty-but-compelling headline as well: "Knee On The Neck: What Investors Can Learn From ‘Black Lives Matter’."

In case you missed it

😟 The European startup layoff list. A regularly updated list of layoffs and furloughs at European startups resulting from Covid-19.

👩 Spain’s top women investors. Sifted asked some of Spain’s leading women in the investment sector about their track record on diversity.

☀️ If everyone’s working remotely, will Europe’s tech capitals lose to smaller hubs with lifestyle perks? Marseille for one is making a push to shine.