Female Foundry Week 114: The Big Handover. Hedge your go-to-market bets. The Lingering Light. Sessions: Breakfast with Ashurst.
Welcome to The Week 114, 2024 Edition of the Female Foundry newsletter!
Female Foundry - where investors and female founders meet.
In the news
UK-based Tendertec, co-founded by Dr Afroditi Konidari, secures a £440k funding round led by The Development Bank of Wales for its AI platform unlocking healthy ageing and stress-free caregiving at home; London-based Slip, founded by Tash Grossman, raises a £2.5m Seed round led by Ajuvo for its digitised receipt system; Barcelona-based Alinia AI, co-founded by Ariadna Font Llitjos, picks up a €2.2m Pre-Seed round led by Speed Invest and Precursor, to enable safe deployment of Generative AI; Maria Rotilu, a solo GP from OpenseedVC, announces the first close of her new £10m fund focused on backing operator-led startups in Europe and Africa; London-based construction tech startup Dataform Lab, founded by Eva Magnisali fetches a £1.1m Seed round led by Marathon Venture Capital; Paris-based Decade Energy, co-founded by Mariela Atanasova, raises a €3.6m Seed round led by Ananda Impact Ventures and Contrarian Ventures to help businesses electrify their truck fleets.
Spotlight
The Big Handover.
On Thursday this week, Bernard Arnault, the French billionaire and CEO of luxury conglomerate LVMH, overtook Elon Musk to become the world’s richest person after shares in his company surged 1.5% in morning trading in Europe. And this is just one piece of news from what looks like an eventful week for the group. In 2022, Arnault raised the retirement age for LVMH's chairman and CEO to 80, and also on Thursday, Frederic, the youngest son of Bernard Arnault, was named the managing director of family holding Financière Agache, and Cécile Cabanis was named as its future CFO. Even though the succession plans for Bernard Arnault, now 75, still remain unclear, many see a wider executive reshuffle as a visible sign of it.
The news about the Arnault family this week is part of a larger narrative. A study released just two weeks ago indicates that a staggering 40% of all family offices worldwide will undergo generational succession over the next 10 years. Additionally, the same study revealed that since 2021, the average proportion of capital that family offices dedicate to direct deals rose from 12% to 17% in North America, single family offices are particularly active. Amid turbulent fundraising conditions for VCs, new opportunities arising from the generational transfer of wealth, and a growing need for patient capital in the raise of the deeptech era, it appears that multi-generational wealth will play an increasingly significant role in shaping the future of innovation in the coming years.
Fundraising
Hedge your go-to-market bets.
I am still physically recovering from a fantastic few days at SuperVenture in Berlin earlier this week, but on Friday, I managed to have a call with a few founders.
Today, I want to talk about a subject that is very close to the heart of all early-stage founders: finding a product-market fit. Achieving product-market fit will not only bring cash into your business and create opportunities to make more, but it will also allow you to raise more capital to maximise those opportunities.
One of the crucial steps to achieving product-market fit is how you navigate your go-to-market strategy and even more precisely, who is your go-to-market customer. While you should definitely have a clear understanding of who your ideal customer profile is and how you will aim to acquire them, you still need a go-to-market hedging strategy! I see too many founders having an all-or-nothing go-to-market approach.
To put this into a more vivid example: if, as a B2B startup, you decide to first start selling your product to multinational giants, this should not stop you from also speaking with smaller companies. Your target customers might have long sales cycles, complex corporate structures, opaque approval processes in place and so, while they might be your ideal customers, if possible, you also need to engage with mid-size companies to hedge against failure and the associated risks, being able to generate smaller revenue streams from other players.
I've seen it happen before—when a ‘not-so-ideal’ customer group transforms into a money-making machine simply because a startup diverted a bit more attention from its 'ideal customer profile' only to avoid going bust. Of course, it's a fine balance, doubling down on what works, while allowing for this possibility.
Who is your hedge in your go-to-market strategy?
Analysis
The Lingering Light.
It’s been a tough fundraising period for venture capital fund managers for some time now. I already wrote about the rise of ‘zombie funds’ in February last year (see: Week 53), and the freshly released data now sheds more light on just how much worse the situation has become.
According to the data, 13% of venture capital GPs don’t plan to raise another fund due to the LP pullback, doubling from 6% in H1 2023. For context, back in mid-2023, 44% of venture firms stated they had delayed fundraising as institutional investors grew wary of overexposure. Many of those who delayed fundraising were emerging managers who entered the market between 2019 and 2020. But with the slow exit environment of 2024 (and a lack of significant cash distributions), the same fund managers are now struggling even more to raise their second funds, with 25% of GPs becoming more active in the secondaries market. Due to tough fundraising conditions, some firms have decided to shut down altogether or not making new deals—38% of VC firms in the US did not make more than two investments in 2023 (!). However, those fund managers who have managed to raise fresh dry powder in the past 12 months have high conviction that the 2023 and 2024 vintages will be the strongest since the COVID era.
Community
Introducing the Female Foundry Sessions:
‘Unveiling the Opportunity’ - a breakfast with Ashurst.
Join me on Tuesday this week in Central London for a breakfast event in partnership with Ashurst, a multinational law firm and one of the sponsors of our State of Gender Diversity in European Venture 2024 report. In a 1.5-hour session, I will dive deeper into the data, explore the opportunities for funding female entrepreneurs, and discuss the key areas of female innovation. Everyone is welcome!
This event is the first of the Female Foundry Sessions, a new series of events for the Female Foundry community (in-person and online), where we will explore a number of topics, from fundraising to company building, to news and the latest data.
Hiring
This week hiring:
DOMMA ➯ Operations & Customer Success | Aegir Insights ➯ Head of Europe | watttron ➯ Key Account Manager.
Founder & Investor Meetups
Monday, June 10, London ➯ Impact VC Social | Tuesday, June 11, Berlin ➯ BBQ by BERLIN QUANTUM, London ➯ Supernode Lunch & Learn | Wednesday, June 12, Paris ➯ Environmental Accelerator Demo Day, London ➯ Future Worlds Demo Day 2024, London ➯ Emerging Tech & Networking Party | Thursday, June 13, Paris ➯ Demo Day Accélérateur Edlv, ➯ Festival des Entrepreneurs 2024 | Saturday, June 15, Paris ➯ Founders Running Club, London ➯ Breakfast with tech entrepreneurs.
Meet me
This week, I will be speaking at the ➯ Breakfast with Ashurst (see above) and ➯ Navigating the Journey of High-Growth Tech Scaleups.
That’s all for this week. Have a great week ahead and see you here next Sunday!
Agata
Written by Agata Leliwa Nowicka, an investor, a startup adviser, a two-time entrepreneur, and a founder of Female Foundry based in London.
Suggestions? Drop me an email.
♡
Thank you to Alice for the fundraising research!
Check femalefoundry.co for more fundraising tools and investor content. View other Female Foundry articles.