Fintech 

How not to start a bank

Gurhan Kiziloz, the bombastic entrepreneur and founder of the new fintech Lanistar, had been doing a lot right. He had secured a deal with Mastercard, raised £15m and won some nice press coverage.

But the company seemingly failed to update the regulators about their plans, meaning the UK's Financial Conduct Authority issued a warning this week that they were unauthorised and could even be a scam.

Yikes, not a great start. What does this teach us?

🤩 Meet Google’s star Black entrepreneurs 🤩

The Google for Startups Immersion: Black Founders is a 12-week programme designed for high-potential startups from across Europe.

Meet the programme’s 11 Black-led startups tackling challenges in healthcare, energy, beauty and more.

Get your free ticket here. [Sponsored post]

 Ecommerce 

A €100m SEED round! Yes I said seed.

Everyone is getting very excited about this new business model where companies raise masses of money to buy mid-sized ecommerce businesses selling on Amazon and scale them up.

So excited, in fact, that one of them Seller X was able to raise a €100m seed round after launching in August. Sure, this was a mixture of debt and equity, but still it a big number.

Are they crazy or brilliant?

 Venture Capital 

Meet Europe newest (and biggest) agritech fund

Eric Archambeau and George Coelho launched leading VC firm Balderton Capital in Europe in the early 2000s — and were early investors in success-stories like Spotify.

Now they have raised a $325m agritech fund from their VC firm Astanor Ventures — the largest fund of its kind in Europe to date — in a sign the sector is coming of age.

Sifted meets Archambeau and talks about the future of impact.

🌱 Join Sifted's Tech for Good webinar (TODAY at 1pm CET!) 🌱

Tech for Good (or "impact") is one of the hottest topics in Europe at the moment, with more people wanting tech to have a positive impact on the world.

But is the trend here to stay? What counts as impact? And what is next? 

Join Sifted and the BMW Foundation for a webinar with a panel of experts from PlanA.Earth, Maze Impact, Nesta and BMW's RESPOND program to find out.

Sign up for free here.

 France 

What Station F’s future unicorns say about Europe

Paris startups campus Station F has just picked out 40 names of startups it thinks will be "future unicorns" — and its choices say a lot about the broader trends in France and Europe’s startups ecosystems.

What's the bigger picture?

 Pettech 

Even pets are learning online over lockdown

Just as humans have learned to work, learn and socialise over video calls during the pandemic, pet services are also going online.

News that matters

🟨 Satispay, a Milan-based digital payment company, raised a €93m round with participation from Jack Dorsey’s company Square. “Our goal is to become the leading payment network in Europe," said Satispay CEO Alberto Dalmasso, adding that the backing of leading mobile payments companies Square as well as Tencent (which also invested) means they are on the right track. 

🐱 The Swedish vet-on-demand app FirstVet has raised an additional €30m, just one year after its €20m Series B round. The goal is to go big in the US. FirstVet was founded by David Prien and Joakim Widigs in 2016 and has since expanded to Finland, Norway, Denmark, the UK and recently to Germany. The startup is similar to telemedicine startups like Kry or Babylon Health, however, it only deals with pets.

👩‍💻 Despite being in the midst of a second lockdown since early November, France’s startups continue to hire in a further sign of how the coronavirus failed to halt the digital economy. The latest data from France Digitale, an industry group representing around 1,800 startups, shows some 140 companies are hiring, with a total of 2,150 vacancies open.

💉 The third-largest telemedicine startup in Sweden, Min Doktor, has raised €27m from investors including one of Scandinavia's largest asset managers, Swedbank Robur. Why does this matter? Well, according to Sifted's healthtech correspondent Mimi Billing, it is a further sign that an IPO might soon be on the cards. 

🍒 European investor Sophia Bendz has backed what appears to be her first startup as partner at her new firm, Cherry Ventures (she was at Atomico before). It's called Juni, and it has raised €2m to develop an online banking platform for e-commerce and online marketing professionals.

🥦 Alphagreen, a marketplace for CBD and alternative healthcare products, has raised around €1.2m in seed funding to help finance products and expansion to the US. This is the largest amount raised to date in Europe for a CBD marketplace.

💸 Marathon Venture Capital in Athens, Greece has completed the first closing of its second fund at €40m. It plans to invest in seed-stage startups with €1m-€1.5m tickets for 15-20% equity.

💰 Portuguese VC Faber hit the first close of its Faber Tech II fund at €20.5m. The fund will focus on early-stage data-driven startups starting from Southern Europe and the Iberian peninsula, with the aim of reaching a final close of €30m in the coming months.

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.

🤸‍♀️ Share the fun 🤸‍♀️

If you like our newsletter, please forward it on to somebody else who might like it too. It really helps us grow our audience. Thanks!

Sifted Suggests 

🌱 What's going on in European tech for good? Check out these key findings from our Sifted report handily distilled for you on Twitter here. And you can download the full report here ahead of our webinar today at 1pm CET here. 

🎫 Virtual events are the future: they just need a rebrand, writes Vincent Touati-Tomas at Northzone. 

📶 6 counterintuitive rules for being a better manager — Advice from Lambda School, Quip & Facebook.

✈️ Amazing fact in the FT: If everyone in the UK sent one fewer email it would save as much in carbon emissions as 80,000 people flying from London to Madrid. Given that the 10 most “unnecessary” emails included messages saying only “thank you”, “appreciated”, “cheers” and “LOL” this might be pretty easy to do. 

In case you missed it 

Pablo Escobar’s brother is suing Klarna for millions

The “Fin-influencer” boom: Why Instagram and TikTok are the new battlegrounds for digital banks

Brunch with Sifted: psychedelic investor Christian Angermayer