Meet Revyze, a French startup that is developing a mobile app for iOS and Android at the intersection of education and social. In many ways, Revyze looks just like TikTok. But it is focused specifically on educational content for teenagers.

“We talked with kids attending 30 or 35 different high schools,” co-founder Florent Sciberras told me. “We asked them: ‘What do you think about school and what’s the best way to learn?’ And they told us that nobody had ever asked them those questions.”

In hindsight, the answer was quite simple and obvious. They said that they would rather learn from their friends than their teachers. “They said ‘because they talk like us and they are like us,’” Sciberras said.

And that’s probably the reason why educational videos are so popular on YouTube and TikTok — the hashtag #LearnOnTikTok is massively popular for instance.

But there is an issue with mainstream social platforms. They aren’t designed specifically for education. If you watch an interesting video on TikTok, the social app might recommend something completely different when you skip to the next video. You end up jumping from math to dancing cat to physics to magic tricks…

Revyze aims to be the TikTok of education — a commmunity-powered app with a sharp focus on high school education. Essentially, Revyze wants to unbundle education videos from TikTok — a very large social platform — so that they get the attention they deserve.

At first, the Revyze team focused on France’s baccalauréat, the exam that you have to pass at the end of high school. They built a quick version of the app, put together a Discord community to spread the word and shared a few videos on TikTok and Instagram.

In just a few weeks, Revyze managed to attract 35,000 downloads. They reached the #2 spot in the top free apps of the App Store — right behind Doctolib.

Image Credits: Revyze

This summer, Revyze raised a $2 million pre-seed round (€2 million) from more than a hundred business angels, such as Nate Blecharczyk, Jean-Charles Samuelian, Charles Gorintin, Mathilde Collin, Lenny Rachitzky, Thomas France, Julia Bijaoui, Roxanne Varza, Arion (Jacques Attali’s fund), Olivier Dacourt, Varsha Rao and others. firstminute Capital, Kima Ventures, AirAngels, Nomad Capital and Ligature VC also invested.

Now, the company wants to turn this small experiment into a massive social/education app. “Our goal is to reach 500,000 users by the end of the year and to expand to the U.S. within 6 to 12 months,” co-founder Guillaume Perrot told me.

Building the community behind the app

So what does Revyze feel like? When you open the app, you get a TikTok-like feed of videos. These videos fill the entire screen and you can skip to the next video with a simple swiping gesture. There’s a three-minute limit on video length.

On the second tab, you can explore the video library more granularly. You can select a topic, such as math or literature, and even select a chapter in the syllabus. Revyze started with French high school students in their final year and is progressively expanding to other grades.

And because we are talking about educational content, Revyze is paying close attention to the videos that are uploaded to the app. When a user submits a video, it isn’t instantly live on the platform.

“Videos are validated by us and by the community,” Perrot said. “We want to make sure that it’s high-quality content, that it’s accurate and that it isn’t off-topic. Eventually, there will be a peer moderation system and after that we will add a bit of machine learning.”

What do you get when you post on Revyze? A warm fuzzy feeling. In more technical term, you amass reward points just like on Stack Overflow. These reward points are called EDU. You get 20 points when you post a video, and you get one point when someone thanks you for the video.

Some teens post videos because explaining a concept is the best way to know for sure that they understand it perfectly well. Others want to climb the leaderboard.

In the long-term, if web3 is more than just a fad, Revyze could also turn EDU into a currency to reward the community for their contributions. But that’s not the next item on the roadmap.

Up next, Revyze is going to expand to more countries and more educational systems. There are also a ton of opportunities when it comes to personalizing the app for each user.

Revyze plans to algorithmically sort videos so that they are relevant to your level and your way of learning — an algorithm with a focus on learning outcomes instead of watch time. This way, users should waste less time skipping videos to they find relevant content.

“We aren’t a social network,” Sciberras said. “Our goal is that you should spend as little time as possible in the app to learn as much as possible.”

Image Credits: Revyze

Revyze is building the TikTok of educational videos by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

The Family co-founder and CEO Alice Zagury has announced in a blog post that the French startup accelerator is suing Oussama Ammar for multiple claims — breach of trust, forgery and use of forgery.

More specifically, Capital first reported that The Family suspects Ammar of diverting €3 million that were supposed to be invested in several startups through syndicates. TechCrunch has separately seen an email that confirms ongoing charges against Oussama Ammar. It that was sent to people who transferred money in order to become shareholders in Stripe through a special purpose vehicle. The SPV was supposed to acquire Stripe shares through a secondary offering.

“Oussama transfers funds to his personal holding companies and tells us after the fact, saying that it’s the only way to take advantage of investment opportunities in question,” Zagury wrote in her blog post.

According to her, other people working for The Family have asked several times to see documents that proved that investments went through. In November 2021, Ammar announced on LinkedIn that he was moving on and leaving The Family.

“On Friday, my resignation was published on the Companies House website. From now on I am no longer a director of The Family and I will gradually leave this ecosystem,” Ammar wrote on LinkedIn at the time.

“The ecosystem has changed a lot and raising money is not as difficult as it used to be. It has become normal to raise funds long before you have a product/market fit, and this poses challenges to entrepreneurs that are of a very different nature than those the ecosystem has faced in the past years,“ he added back in November 2021.

Zagury now says that The Family asked him to leave the company in September 2021. “We bring in a mediator then several law firms as well as an independent auditing firm (PwC),” Zagury wrote.

According to our information, The Family is working with several law firms across several jurisdictions. Capital talked with one of the company’s lawyer Elsa Sammari. She said that there are multiple ongoing cases — they are examined by criminal and commercial courts. “The Family has initiated two proceedings to freeze Oussama Ammar’s assets and the assets of his personal holding companies,” Sammari told Capital.

It’s not going to be a straightforward case as Ammar’s holding companies are spread all over the world, including in the Cayman Islands and Hong Kong. Ammar also recently edited his LinkedIn profile saying that he is based in Dubai.

Yesterday, Ammar has reacted to Capital’s report in another LinkedIn post. “This is a legal proceeding between partners with some lingering resentment. Splitting up like this is a shame but it’s frequent. Entrepreneurs know this well. Since 2020, we have been trying to find an amicable solution. But we haven’t reached an agreement despite long hours of negotiation,” Ammar wrote.

In 2018, Ammar was given a four-month suspended sentence for a separate case. Back in 2011, Ammar used to work for a company called Be Sport. The company filed a lawsuit for breach of trust, forgery and use of forgery. At the time, Be Sport claimed that Ammar had been using some of the company’s funds for non-corporate expenses.

The Family was originally founded in 2012 with three co-founders — Alice Zagury, Oussama Ammar and Nicolas Colin. They teamed up to build a different kind of startup accelerators without any batch or demo day. Instead, startups could apply and join the community of startups backed by The Family.

In exchange for a stake, they could get some advice from The Family’s team and network with other people in the community. The Family has also helped some of the startups in its community when it comes to fundraising.

Zagury listed some of The Family’s portfolio companies in her blog post. They include Heetch, Algolia, Payfit, Spacefill, Trusk, Northflank, Jow, Joone, Jinka, Doctrine, Merci Handy, So Shape, Side, Vybe, Dark, Unai, WeMaintain, Flat, Fempo, Shipix, MyDiabby, Bellman, Fairmint, Artsper, Cabaïa, Plume, Alma and Kymono.

A few years ago, The Family was a cornerstone of the French tech ecosystem. The Family’s office building was as a physical representation for a new wave of French startups with global ambitions.

Over time, The Family diversified its activities with an education business and a digital transformation business. In total, The Family has raised €22 million ($24 million at today’s exchange rate).

French startup Doctolib has announced that is has raised a new funding round. With this round, the company has reached a valuation of €5.8 billion, or $6.4 billion at today’s exchange rate. That makes Doctolib the highest valued French startup.

The startup says it has raised $549 million (€500 million) in both equity and debt. Doctolib doesn’t name those investors. Eurazeo, General Atlantic, Bpifrance and Accel have invested in the company in the past.

In case you’re not familiar with Doctolib, the company’s main product is a software-as-a-service platform for doctors and medical workers. The company wants to help them tackle admin tasks. In particular, Doctolib acts as a booking platform that connects doctors with patients; 60 million people have used it in France, Germany and Italy.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to grow from 2,500 employees to 6,000 employees over the next five years. Doctolib relies on a vast network of offices in major and mid-sized European cities so that they can talk with doctors all around France, Germany and Italy. Doctolib plans to operate across 30 cities.

In January, Doctolib talked about its roadmap for 2022 and beyond. The company plans to create a suite of products and expand beyond appointment booking.

And the company has already added some new SaaS products, just like Salesforce is always iterating on its suite of products. In addition to a telehealth add-on, the startup has a product called Doctolib Médecin that can help you centralize documents, see a patient’s history, take notes and issue invoices.

With Doctolib Team, the company is creating an instant messaging service for health professionals. They could use the service to securely talk about patients and send documents.

As Doctolib operates in a highly sensitive industry, the company has also been investing in security and privacy. Doctolib acquired Tanker, as I first reported. Tanker is a turnkey solution that helps you enable end-to-end encryption in a medical application.

Overall, 300,000 healthcare workers are using Doctolib — not all of them pay for a monthly subscription. The startup also works with 250 public hospitals. And if you’re living in France, you know that Doctolib has become ubiquitous.

Just a few weeks after announcing stock and crypto trading, French fintech startup Lydia is announcing that it has raised a $100 million Series C round. With this funding round, the startup has reached a unicorn valuation, which means that it is currently valued at more than $1 billion.

Dragoneer and Echo Street are investing in the startup for the first time, and many of Lydia’s existing investors are putting more money on the table, such as Tencent, Accel and Founders Future.

“What’s really impressive with this round is that it is primarily financed by existing investors,” Lydia co-founder and CEO Cyril Chiche told me.

Times are changing. A few years ago, when a startup chose to raise from its existing investors, it usually meant that the team couldn’t find new investors. So existing investors would accept to put more money in the company in exchange for a lower valuation.

But now, many VC firms have raised huge funds. Hedge funds are now investing in venture rounds. Investing in the most competitive startups have become harder. If a portfolio company is doing well, VC firms now usually want to double down on their previous investment.

And Chiche confirmed that Lydia’s valuation has increased starkly compared to last year’s round.

At first, Lydia was a peer-to-peer payment app. After adding your debit card and your bank details, you could send and receive mobile payments with other Lydia users. It progressively became the dominant mobile payment app in France.

Over the last few years, the app has evolved quite a lot to become a financial super app with a wide range of features and financial products. Users can get a virtual or physical debit card that works on the Visa network. They can also manage their money more easily by creating sub-accounts that they can share with other Lydia users.

Image Credits: Lydia

In addition to daily payments, Lydia also offers small loans from €100 to €3,000, savings accounts, and now trading. In particular, the new crypto and stock trading partnership with Bitpanda makes it much easier to invest small amounts of money whenever you want.

Lydia and Bitpanda are offering fractional shares so that you can buy, for example, €10 worth of Apple share 24/7 — it’s something quite new for the French market. And given the success of trading in Robinhood and Cash App in the U.S., the new trading feature could represent a big opportunity for the future of the French startup.

By adding more products on top of peer-to-peer payments, Lydia wants to drive engagement. The business model is quite clear. When you’re sending and receiving a handful of payments with the app, everything is free. If you want to go further, the company offers premium subscriptions.

Lydia has attracted 5.5 million users so far. Even more important, a third of French people who are 18 to 35 years old have a Lydia account. In other words, things are going well in France. And the startup now wants to go down the same road in other European countries.

Lydia plans to hire 800 people over the coming three years, including 160 people in 2022 alone. By 2025, the company hopes that 10 million customers in Europe will use Lydia as their primary account.

“What we’re experiencing is the reinvention of the banking industry,” Cyril Chiche told me. According to him, people are not going to manage money the same way in a few years. Some companies will get it while others won’t change.

He doesn’t think it’s a duel between neobanks and incumbents. Some legacy players may have what it takes to stay relevant in the future. But, of course, he truly belies that Lydia can simplify retail banking so that it becomes more accessible to more users.

Image Credits: Lydia

Riding a scooter in Paris will soon feel incredibly… slow. The City of Paris has announced that scooter sharing services should restrict the maximum top speed to 10km/h (that’s 6.2mph). That decision comes following a number of pedestrian injuries that involved a scooter.

Paris has been an important market for scooter sharing companies. It’s a dense city with an important network of bike lanes. There are also a lot of tourists looking for different ways to explore the city.

For those reasons, the situation used to be a bit out of control. At some point, 16 different scooter startups wanted to operate a fleet of scooters in Paris. Paris ended up selecting three companies and implementing a set of rules. Dott, Lime and Tier won permits to operate shared electric scooters for two years.

Since then, things have been going well for those three companies. This year alone, Dott raised $85 million in a mix of equity and asset-backed debt financing, Tier recently raised $200 million in debt and equity, and Lime closed a $523 million raise in convertible debt and term loan financing. Except that scooters became a public safety issues for riders, but also for people just walking down the street. According to the AFP, scooters have been involved in 298 accidents in 2021 alone. 329 people have been injured and two persons died.

In particular, a dramatic event occurred back in June 2021. Two women were riding a scooter near the Seine at night. They hit a pedestrian and left her there. A couple of days later, she passed away at the hospital.

The relationship between the City of Paris and scooter startups never really went back to normal following the accident. On July 1st, Paris listed a dozen areas with a high density of pedestrians, such as the Tuileries and Palais Royal gardens or the Bastille and République squares. Scooter sharing companies agreed to limit the maximum speed to 10km/h in these areas using real-time geolocation.

In September, the City of Paris asked each arrondissement administration to list areas where the top speed of scooters should be limited to 10km/h. The result was a patchwork of 700 slow zones. And scooter startups agreed to implement those zones in their respective service.

But the City of Paris wants to go even further than that. The entire city is now a slow zone for scooter startups, except a couple of streets that have wide lanes for bikes, scooters and other micromobility vehicles. Of couse, if you have your own scooter, those restrictions won’t apply to your personal device. The new restrictions on scooter sharing services will be implemented during the first half of December.

The only good news is that the scooter tender has been extended by six months. Dott, Lime and Tier will keep their scooter permits until February 2023. But today’s new rules could have some significant consequences on usage in Paris.

Regulating mopeds

In other news, the City of Paris is also going to regulate free-floating electric mopeds. There are currently five companies operating in Paris — Cityscoot, Cooltra, Lime, Yego and Troopy. Other companies are also working on a launch in Paris.

Paris wants to regulate mopeds with permits. It’ll work a bit like scooter permits, except that those permits will last five years. Only two or three companies will be able to operate a fleet of mopeds in Paris. The new system will start on September 1st, 2022.

Meet Pyxo, a French startup that has been thinking a lot about single-use plastic food packaging for the past three years. The company wants to offer a service that makes it as easy and as cost-efficient to use reusable food storage containers at scale.

The idea behind Pyxo comes from a fair at the Tuileries gardens in Paris. Right next to the food stands, waste bins were overflowing with soda cups, clamshell burger containers and various single-use food packaging.

At first, the company started working with French corporate catering service company Sodexo. They worked with them to replace plastic cups and make everything reusable. Due to the coronavirus pandemic and the switch to remote work, Pyxo started looking for other potential clients.

They have started working with Foodles, Popchef and other foodtech companies that offer connected fridges with packed lunches and snacks.

But Pyxo’s biggest market opportunity comes from a regulatory change. In July 2020, France’s parliament passed an anti-waste law with some drastic changes. Restaurants have to switch to reusable food containers by January 2023.

It means that fast food restaurant chains won’t be able to use paper-and-plastic cups, disposable clamshell boxes, etc. Pyxo is already working with an unnamed fast food chain in France to help them switch to reusable packaging.

The startup has created a sort of marketplace of reusable food containers that connect every company in the industry. When a fast food restaurant buy a batch of containers, they all come with a QR code or NFC chip to track them everywhere.

Restaurants can outsource cleaning to specialized companies who can give you a batch of clean containers when they come and pick up the containers of the day. These contracting companies also scan containers, cups and whatever they are cleaning.

In addition to that, customers could also order take-out food and bring it home in reusable containers. They could use an app to find the nearest collection point — it doesn’t necessarily have to be the restaurant where you originally ordered your food. Pyxo is thinking about gamification and small deposits to incentivize returns.

“Our vision is that it’s an infrastructure industry,” co-founder and CEO Benjamin Peri told me. Pyxo thinks it is building a network that works just like the electrical grid. Down the road, the startup believes there will be a dense network of restaurants, collection points and cleaning centers.

Fast food chains could help kickstart the industry because a single client has a ton of restaurants around the country. They could incentivize other actors to participate in the network with Pyxo acting as the network operator.

The company is just getting started as there are only a few restaurants actively using Pyxo right now. But the startup has raised a $7.9 million (€7 million) funding round from Eurazeo, FiveSeasons Ventures and others.

On January 1st, 2023, the startup expects to work with 2,000 points of sales in the restaurant industry alone. Pyxo still expects to work with foodtech companies and corporate catering services, but they would represent a smaller part of the business. With today’s funding round, the company expects to recruit 70 additional employees.

Image Credits: Pyxo

French startup Leocare has raised a big Series B funding round led by Eight Roads. Overall, the company has raised $116 million. It’s an equity and debt round, which means that part of this amount is a cash-for-equity transaction, while the rest is a credit line.

The company is raising today’s Series B less than a year after raising its Series A. And some of Leocare’s existing investors are putting more money on the table with the Series B, such as Felix Capital, Ventech and Daphni.

Leocare wants to handle all your insurance needs under a single roof. The startup can insure your home, your car, your motorbike and your smartphone. And it believes consumers want to subscribe to new insurance product using a mobile app because it’s more convenient and it opens up new features.

For instance, the company is working on a new feature called TakeCare. “It’s like Waze, it tells you when you’re entering a high-risk area,” co-founder and CEO Christophe Dandois told me.

But TakeCare doesn’t warn you about speed traps. Instead, the Leocare app tells you if people often end up in a car incident in the area. Leocare is leveraging road safety open data for that feature. Similarly, if your neighbor is using your car for the weekend, you can add a second driver in a few taps and remove them on Monday.

The startup also uses data to adjust pricing where it makes sense. For instance, Leocare tracks the channel you’re using to subscribe, looks at the smartphone model you’re using, checks the time of the session, etc. In other words, expect some dynamic pricing.

When you want your insurance to step in, once again, Leocare wants you to use the mobile app. You can still call a phone number, but most clients are already using the app.

The long-term vision is quite clear as Leocare wants to create a single contract that covers everything you own and everything you regularly do. And you should be able to tweak your insurance options whenever you need to. The company wants to add more products, such as bike insurance — as long as they are not one-off insurance products, such as travel insurance, it could potentially be covered by Leocare.

And it makes sense to aggregate everything as many customers end up paying twice for the same thing. For instance, home insurance usually cover against theft. That’s why a bike insurance could cover theft outside of the home as your Leocare home insurance is already taking care of theft at home.

The company currently acts as a managing general agent and partners with several insurance companies. It sells its insurance products under its own brand.

“With this funding round, we’ll still follow the same model but we’ll also add the ability to use our own risk carrier,” Dandois said. Depending on the insurance product, Leocare could end up managing the insurance product from start to finish.

In addition to new insurance products, the company wants to expand to new markets, starting with Southern Europe, such as Spain. Right now, Leocare has 65,000 active customers and aims to generate €100 million in revenue next year.

Image Credits: Leocare

Meet Defacto, a new French startup that wants to improve the credit infrastructure for small and medium companies. The startup wants to offer credit products using an API. It automatically analyzes your revenue to give you an answer in real-time.

Defacto is an embedded finance product, meaning that it doesn’t distribute its credit offering directly to small companies. Instead, other companies are embedding Defacto within their own products so that their customers can access Defacto’s products. It’s a B2B2B strategy, and embedded finance has been an important trend in fintech over the past couple of years.

The three founders, Jordane Giuly, Morgan O’hana and Marc-Henri Gires, started working on the company in May 2021. They think that it’s still too complicated to get some cash quickly so that you still have money to pay your employees or your suppliers. In France, big clients usually pay an invoice 30 to 60 days after the initial signature.

Instead of reinventing the bank from scratch, Defacto is trying to reach potential clients where they already are. For instance, the company has signed a deal with StaffMe, a French marketplace for short-term freelancing jobs. Instead of waiting a month or two to get paid, you can open a credit line with Defacto and get paid right now.

The fintech startup is already thinking about other potential partnerships with marketplaces for contractors, freelancers, logistics, freight and more.

In addition to this strategy, Defacto thinks there are other potential distribution channels. If you work for an SME, chances are you already use a fintech product for accounting, accounts receivable and accounts payable, such as Pennylane, Libeo or Agicap.

“All these companies want to become the financial dashboard of SMEs. They will all want to offer credit,” Jordane Giuly told me.

And companies using these products can see that they’re supposed to receive a big check in a few weeks. So they could click on a button and start applying for a Defacto loan.

You could also imagine a deep integration with e-commerce clients. As e-commerce companies acquire goods, they could use Defacto to pay their suppliers directly. With each sale, Defacto could get a cut to repay outstanding loans.

This strategy reminds me of Square’s loan offering. Customers can repay loans with a percentage of daily card sales through Square.

Defacto recently raised a $3.4 million (€3 million) pre-seed round from Global Founders Capital, Headline as well as various business angels, such as Thibaud Elzière, Rodolphe Ardant and Arthur Waller. In addition to that traditional equity round, Defacto also raised $3.4 million (€3 million) in debt.

“We’re starting by lending from our balance sheet — that’s why we had to raise a first funding round in debt and equity,” Giuly said.

And because Defacto wants to give you an answer as quickly as possible, the company is starting with small, short-term loans. Eventually, as the product gets better and as the company improves its risk scoring engine, Defacto expects to finance €100 million in transactions by the end of 2022.

French startup Lifen has raised a $58 million (€50 million) funding round. The startup has been working on digital infrastructure for the healthcare industry, starting with medical reports. 600 healthcare facilities are using the product to send and receive medical documents.

And each customer is using Lifen intensively as it represents 2 million medical documents sent to 240,000 doctors each month. Patients can also retrieve documents from Lifen directly as well.

Creadev and Lauxera Capital Partners led today’s Series C round. Existing investors Serena and Partech participated in the funding round once again.

Lifen started with messaging in the healthcare industry as the company saw an opportunity for an upgrade. Many stakeholders in the industry used to rely on good old physical letters to send medical documents. And hospitals were stuck as they couldn’t just switch to email due to data privacy.

The startup built a document platform that works with several electronic messaging protocols designed for medical records. It makes it much easier to go paperless and send reports automatically.

Lifen has also added some machine learning on top of its document product. The company tries to detect key information automatically to turn documents into structured data. For instance, the startup tries to automatically identify the name of the patient as well as sender information.

And now, the company wants to go beyond messaging with a full-fledged digital platform for the healthcare industry. Healthcare facilities can use Lifen to start using other e-health apps.

Lifen has its own app store that references all apps that work with Lifen’s user management system and connect with Lifen. This strategy has worked particularly well for Salesforce.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to hire more than 200 employees over the next 18 months. By 2025, the startup wants to work with 1,500 hospitals and 200 e-health solutions.

Meet Hera, a new calendar app that wants to turn the calendar into the main work interface. Hera helps you schedule meetings more easily with natural language processing and lets you share availabilities in an email or any messaging app. The startup is also going to build integrations with your other work tools so that you can surface important information before a meeting and extract information after a meeting.

So far, Hera has raised a $465,000 (€400,000) pre-seed round led by Eurazeo (under the Idinvest brand at the time) and several business angels. It has then joined Y Combinator’s S21 batch and raised a $1.7 million seed round led by Eurazeo.

Business angels who invested in the company include Alexis Bonillo, Thibaud Elzière, Kyle Parrish, Calvin French-Owen, John Gabaix and Karthik Puvvada. Notion Capital and Kima Ventures also invested.

Hera first started as a calendar app focused on note-taking during meetings. Since attending Y Combinator, the product has evolved quite a lot. It is now focused on managing the entire lifecycle of an event for busy people who manage a lot of (virtual) meetings.

First, Hera can help you schedule a meeting and get ready for a meeting. In just a few clicks, you can select multiple slots. Hera then generates a friendly text that you can copy and paste in an email thread, in a WhatsApp conversation or wherever you’re talking about your next meeting.

This is a much friendlier interface for the person receiving the message compared to traditional meeting scheduling tools. You don’t have to generate a link, and the person on the other end doesn’t have to click on a link to find out when this meeting could take place.

Image Credits: Hera

Second, Hera is going to pull context about your upcoming meetings. Chances are you already have a ton of info about people you’re meeting with. You send and receive emails, you may use a CRM and you may be meeting several times a year.

“We’re not going to become a project management platform, we’re going to integrate with tools that you already use,” co-founder and CEO Bruno Vegreville told me.

Hera lets you take some notes before the meeting so that you don’t forget about something. During the meeting, you can add more notes and then export this data to your favorite note-taking app, such as Notion.

Image Credits: Hera

Right now, Hera works best for users who want to take Google Calendar to the next level. Up next, the company wants to add some multiplayer components. For instance, you can imagine better scheduling if both people are currently using Hera. You could also imagine mentioning other Hera users directly in your calendar to get feedback on a meeting.

Hera has been in private beta for the past few months. The startup’s vision is quite clear. Some productivity tools, such as Superhuman, have made people more efficient when it comes to sorting threads and acting on incoming emails. If you consider meetings as threads, Hera could become the Superhuman of calendars.

Image Credits: Hera

Station F, the big startup campus located in Paris, is launching an online component called Launch by Station F. With this new program, entrepreneurs from anywhere can get started and learn all the basics to start a company.

Launched in 2017, Station F is a massive building that used to be a rail freight depot. It has become a flagship entity for the tech community in France with hundreds of startups working from there.

“From day one, Station F has always been about making life easier for entrepreneurs,” Station F director Roxanne Varza said at the launch event earlier today.

There are many ways to join the Station F community. And yet, Station F still has to turn down most applications. Right now, around 9% of entrepreneurs applying to a Station F program get accepted. That’s why Station F is launching Launch.

“Launch is a new way to become an entrepreneur. It’s a fully online program, which means you can access it from anywhere in the world,” Varza said. “It’s literally all the basics to start a company. By the time you finish this program, you should understand all that crazy jargon.”

Image Credits: Station F

There are three basic building bricks behind Launch — content, tools and community.

The Station F team has created a ton of videos and articles by talking with some well-known entrepreneurs and investors in the startup community in France. This content will help you understand the tech industry.

People joining the Launch program will also be able to access a collection of essential tools to build a startups with free trials and free tiers. Tools include Notion, Asana, Shopify, Bubble and Qonto.

Finally, the program is based on peer-to-peer feedback. Members can talk to each other in a Slack community, browse a directory of people and more. But the most powerful peer-to-peer component is that you have to give feedback to people when you’re going through the program.

“Throughout the program, you’ll be going through the steps of building a pitch deck. It’s really about asking yourself the right questions about the business,” Varza said. And other members will give you feedback on your pitchdeck.

Launch costs €9.90 per month and users can cancel whenever they want. Station F hopes it can attract 5,000 to 10,000 members.

And Station F’s diversity partners, such as Singa, Les Déterminés, La French Tech Tremplin and the Fighters Program, will be able to access the service for free.

With this new online program, Station F is focusing on online education. While a ton of people want to start a startup, there’s still a steep learning curve to get started.

People who complete the Launch program won’t necessarily create a startup. But at least they’ll be able to have a conversation about the business model of a startup, product-market fit and more.

Image Credits: Station F

An update on Station F

Station F currently hosts dozens of different startup programs. Some programs are managed by partners, while others are managed by the Station F team directly.

Current partners include Ubisoft, Microsoft, Facebook and HEC Paris. Each program selects a batch of startups that can come and work from Station F. In addition to office space, they can network and get some perks from both partners and Station F. Today, Station F announced two new partners — Ecole 42 and CentraleSupélec.

“We also manage our own in-house programs and we have three of them,” Station F head of startup programs Marwan Elfitesse said.

There’s the Founders Program, which was announced back in 2016 when Varza unveiled Station F at TechCrunch Disrupt. With this program, pre-seed and seed startups working across any vertical can apply.

“It’s a program designed by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs, from day one. The whole selection process is managed by entrepreneurs,” Elfitesse said. There are 130 well-known entrepreneurs who currently participate in the selection process.

Station F also runs the Fighters Program. It is designed specifically for entrepreneurs coming from underprivileged backgrounds. “Good and great entrepreneurs can come from any background,” Elfitesse said.

So far, four cohorts of startups have participated in the Fighters Program. Station F is currently working on the fifth batch. For the first time, Station F is adding a sponsor to this program. TikTok is going to sponsor the Fighters Program’s next batch.

Finally, Station F recently unveiled a third in-house program, the FemTech Program. As the name suggests, this program is going to be focused on companies working on female health, women’s sexual health and more.

“When we looked at the topic, we thought it was both an opportunity and that startups urgently needed some help,” Varza told me at the time. “It’s still a little-known category, it’s still a taboo subject.”

The first batch of companies in the FemTech program will join the campus next month.

360Learning has raised a $200 million funding round from Sumeru, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 and Silver Lake Waterman. And this time, the name of the startup describes quite well what it does. 360Learning lets you learn from your peers with an easy-to-use platform that lets you create and share courses with your peers.

Existing investors Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, XAnge and Educapital are also participating in today’s funding round.

When it comes to content creation, 360Learning lets you mix different kinds of media and work on a course with multiple people in your team. For instance, you can capture video, add questions and give feedback in case someone doesn’t pick the right answer. You can also upload your own files, add YouTube videos and more. The interface is supposed to be easy enough that you don’t have to be an e-learning expert to create a course. As long as you’re an expert in your field, you can share knowledge with coworkers.

Over time, companies end up building their own collection of courses that they can hand out to new employees. It can also be a good opportunity for employees looking for a new job within the same big company.

After that, companies can distribute the course to all employees or a group of employees specifically. Admins can track feedback from employees who completed a course and see completion rates, which can be particularly useful for mandatory compliance trainings.

The company also says that it uses artificial intelligence to identify courses that can be improved because there are some missing information. It can also help when it comes to matching the right course with the right employee at the right time.

1,500 companies are currently using 360Learning, such as LVMH, Aircall, Toyota and Appen. They use the platform for employee onboarding, software training and various courses that help you get better at sales, leadership and soft skills in general.

Today’s funding round is a significant one as the company had only raised $40 million before that. The company plans to hire more people, expand to new markets and make some acquisitions.

Image Credits: Alexandre Lenoble / 360Learning