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Happy Wednesday 🌞

Here for a foray into the forward-looking world of startups? You've come to the right place.

🌏 Fleur Pellerin: an interview with the French minister turned VC
💸 Fintechs set to IPO this year
🚀 Freetrade's filthy-rich early investors
🌮 Foodtech's 2020: in data

\Venture Capital

Founders: look east, not west

Former French minister turned VC investor Fleur Pellerin thinks European entrepreneurs are missing a trick.

Asian markets are full of untapped opportunities for European startups, she argues — and her VC firm Korelya (an investor in Wallapop, Vestiaire Collective, Glovo and Bolt) knows just how to navigate them.

Chris O'Brien interviews her here.

\A message from our sponsor Huckletree

From climate tech bros to making plastic disappear

On May 19, Huckletree is hosting Earthrise, a global virtual festival which will bring innovators and sustainability leaders together for a full day of discussion.

The 60-speaker lineup includes award-winning filmmaker Jimmy Chin; author, model and environmental entrepreneur Lily Cole; and food waste expert Tristram Stuart.

Get your tickets now!

\For Members Fintech

The fintechs set to IPO this year: a closer look

2021 is set to be a stellar year for European startup IPOs. 40 companies, with a combined valuation of €115bn, are due to list — but it's likely to be the fintechs among them that steal the show.

Klarna, Checkout.com, Wise, Allfunds, Trustly and WorldRemit are all looking to list and have a huge combined valuation of €50bn.

But which investors are set to cash in when they go public?

Sifted members can find out here.

If you're not yet a Sifted member, subscribe here for as little as £19 per month.

\Fintech

The Freetrade-made kergillionaires

Since 2016, low-cost trading app Freetrade has hit the mainstream — serving 600k customers and recently reaching a valuation of £265m.

As a result, it's made a handful of the crowdfunders who made a risky bet on the company in its early days into millionaires.

Isabel Woodford reports.

\Foodtech

In data: what happened to Europe's foodtech ecosystem in 2020?

Food delivery investment dipped, agtech investment boomed, two new unicorns were born, big corporates got hungry for foodtech acquisitions and investment in the sector plateaued at €2.7bn, finds a new report from DigitalFoodLab.

Cecile Bussy details more key findings here.

\Sponsored by Google for Startups

Neatebox is building apps to empower disabled people

There are 14m disabled people in the UK, and yet the tech sector is severely underserving the diverse community.

Neatebox is tackling the problem head on — developing apps that not only aid and empower disabled people to live the way they want, but help businesses to be more inclusive from the outset.

Last year the Scottish company was named one of Tech Nation's 10 Rising Stars, subsequently joining the Google for Startups UK Immersion accelerator programme.

Read about their story here.

News that Matters

🤖 A robot for every warehouse. London-based Seyo, which aims to make robotics accessible to "more than just the Amazons of the world", has just raised £1.53m in a seed round. Currently just 0.2% of warehouses have any automation in place.

📦 SoftBank's now holding a 40% stake in AutoStore, a Norwegian warehouse automation company — a $2.8bn deal that values the latter at $7.7bn.

⛱️ Brighton wins big. MPB, a reseller of photo and video equipment, has scored £49.8m in its Series D — the largest ever funding round for a Brighton-based company. It'll use the funds to further expand into US and European markets.

⏰ Conflict of interest o'clock. UK government minister Lord Agnew has shares in Public, a startup which helps companies bid for government contracts — and Labour thinks that is not ok.

🎧 Clubhouse goes commercial. Now valued at $1bn, the audio-only social app has launched Clubhouse Payments via payment processor Stripe, allowing creators to receive money from their audience. According to the company "100% of the payment will go to the creator."

🌐 Darktrace: the new Deliveroo? The cybersecurity company is set to IPO sometime this month, and after Deliveroo's shoddy performance on the LSE last week, expect extra scrutiny.

🏥 Fresh on the healthtech scene, London-based triage company Anima has raised $2.5m in a seed round after launching last year.

Sifted Suggests

🐦 Twitter feed in need of a refresh? Our social media journalist Cecile Bussy has curated a list of the VCs in the UK and Germany you need to follow.

💰 March 2021 investment roundup. From Glovo to Gorillas, here are the top European startup funding rounds from last month.

🌎 Transatlantic funds. This tweet from Creandum investor Beata Klein (and its subsequent replies) detail some of the US VC funds with an office or partner(s) in Europe.