A group of 200 startup founders, investors, associations and government members are backing a manifesto and a set of recommendations in order to create the next wave of tech giants in Europe. Today, French President Emmanuel Macron is hosting an event in Paris with some of the members of this group called Scale-Up Europe.

Companies, investors and associations that signed the manifesto include Alan, Axel Springer, Bpifrance, Darktrace, Deutsche Startups, Doctolib, Eurazeo, Flixbus, France Digitale, Glovo, La French Tech, N26, OVHcloud, Shift Technology, Stripe, UiPath and Wise.

“To achieve all that, I’ll follow your ambition — 10 technology companies that are worth €100 billion or more by 2030,” Macron said.

That’s an ambitious goal — that’s why Scale-Up Europe has laid out a roadmap and is issuing a report. While it is backed by both private actors and public institutions, it could be considered as a sort of lobbying effort for the European Commission and European governments.

There are a handful of key topics in those recommendations. And it starts with funding. In particular, the group thinks Europe is still lagging behind when it comes to late-stage investments. The biggest VC funds aren’t as big as the biggest VC funds in the U.S. or in China.

The French government has been working on a way to foster late-stage funds and investments in public tech companies in France. “On funding, we’ve seen the success of the Tibi initiative at the French level. We think we should follow that model at the European level,” a source close to Macron told me.

It means that Europe should consider using public funding as a multiplier effect for VC funds. The European Investment Fund is already pouring a lot of money in VC funds. But Scale-Up Europe recommends associating private funds of funds, sharing risk and pooling public investment banks for increased collaboration.

The second topic is foreign talent. Some countries already have a tech worker visa. The group thinks it should be standardized across the European Union with some level of portability for social rights.

A couple of years ago, an open letter called ’Not Optional’ also highlighted some discrepancies with stock option schemes. Today’s report states once again that some governments should adopt more favorable rules with stock options.

The third topic revolves around deep tech startups. According to the report, Europe isn’t doing enough to foster more deep tech startups and investors. Recommendations include standardizing patent transfer frameworks. Those schemes are important if you want to turn a research project into a company. It also says that the European Innovation Council could also take on a larger role in defining a deep tech roadmap.

Scale-Up Europe then highlights some recommendations to improve relationships between big corporations and startups. These are mostly tax breaks, R&D tax benefits and other fiscal incentives. (I’m personally not convinced there will be more European tech giants if we incentivize acquisitions with tax breaks.)

Finally, the group of investors, founders and government members behind Scale-Up Europe think there should be a European tech mission that works a bit like La French Tech in France. This tech mission could clear regulatory hurdles, promote startups and more.

Overall, those recommendations are mostly focused on making it easier to create — and grow — a startup in Europe. Investors as well as startup employees who hold stock options will be quite pleased to see that it’ll be easier to make money quickly. It’ll be interesting to see whether the European Commission reuses some of these recommendations.

To be fair, those are actionable recommendations. And yet, building a tech giants is a complicated task. Tech giants tend to control a large chunk of their tech stack, including in areas such as cloud hosting, payments, analytics, advertising and artificial intelligence.

Many European startups are currently built on APIs, frameworks and platforms that are built in the U.S. or in China. Scale-Up Europe misses the point on this front. Scaling European startups isn’t a gold rush. It’s a long process that requires continuous investments that start from the bottom of the tech stack and moves upward.

French startup Klaxoon is announcing a product update for its whiteboard collaboration platform as well as a new hardware product. With Hybridity, the company is going to sell ready-to-use conference rooms that optimize hybrid meetings between people currently in the office and people on the go.

Let’s start with the software update. Last year, the company unveiled Board, a visual interface that lets you work together during a video call. It lets you share ideas and collaborate using a whiteboard interface. You can create sticky notes, add text, insert images, move things around and start a video call from there.

Other people on the calls are represented through tiny thumbnails so that you can remain focused on the digital whiteboard. You can also connect Board with your existing video-conferencing tool.

This week, the company is updating Board and renaming it to Board Hybrid. “It’s the new version of Board that isn’t only designed for remote work, but also for hybrid work,” founder and CEO Matthieu Beucher said in a press conference.

Board Hybrid users can now add any type of file to their whiteboard. This way, they don’t have to upload files to a shared drive, create a link and paste the link in the whiteboard. Users can preview PowerPoint presentations, Word files, spreadsheets and more directly from Klaxoon’s interface.

There are some new drawing tools including some new connectors. For instance, you can create mindmaps from there. You can now also share your screen from Klaxoon’s own video-conferencing solution.

Image Credits: Klaxoon

The new product is something quite different — it’s a meeting room called Hybridity. It looks like a hexagon-shaped space capsule. There’s no window and it feels like a black box from the outside.

Inside, you’ll find three seats, three screens, three cameras and three Klaxoon Box devices. “Everyone can see everyone perfectly well and everybody can immerse themselves in content,” Beucher said.

If you’ve joined a hybrid meeting from your home, you’re well aware of the issues involved with that setup. Part of the team is sitting in the same room. They look like tiny action figures and you can’t figure out who’s talking.

With this setup, Klaxoon hopes it’ll be easier to run meetings with people in the office and people at home. A Klaxoon Hybridity conference room requires 5 square meters. You can put it down in a corner and move it to another location a couple of years later. It’s not secured in the ground.

Pre-orders will start this week. The company expects to sell Hybridity with a subscription model with prices starting at €2,000 per month. It’s going to be interesting to see whether Klaxoon has found a new revenue stream of it it’s just a fun experiment. But it could replace those tiny phone booths in your office.

Image Credits: Klaxoon

French startup Upflow has raised a $15 million Series A round. The company wants to help you chase late payments. It optimizes how you collect payments from your customers in order to improve your cash-cycle.

Investors in today’s funding round include 9yards Capital, existing investor eFounders, as well as N26 co-founder Maximilian Tayenthal, Uber SVP of Delivery Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, auxmoney co-founder and CEO Raffael Johnen.

People who run a business often tell you that getting paid is a consuming task. When you create an invoice, chances are your customer will wait a few weeks before paying you. Most companies end up with a backlog of outstanding invoices sitting in an Excel spreadsheet.

They keep an eye on their bank account to manually reconcile those payments. And, of course, they often have to send an email or call a customer to tell them that now is the time.

Upflow acts as the central repository to see all your invoices, track payments, communicate with your team and send reminders. But Upflow doesn’t want to replace your existing tools. Instead, the company has built integrations with popular business tools that you’re already using.

For instance, you can connect your Upflow account with QuickBooks, Xero, Netsuite, Chargebee and Stripe Billing. You can charge your clients from your existing invoicing platform. Upflow imports your invoices, clients and payments. When Upflow notices a late payment, you receive a notification and can start sending automated or personalized emails.

The startup also thinks current B2B payment methods are outdated. In the U.S., too many companies still rely on paper checks. In France, copying IBAN information from an email to your bank account can be cumbersome.

When you send an invoice using Upflow, customers get a link with several payment methods. You can connect your Upflow account with Stripe Payments to enable card payments for instance. And the startup is slowly building a network of companies that have used Upflow at some point. 1.5 million companies have interacted with the product — it represents over $1 billion in payments.

“We are on a mission to revolutionize the way that companies get paid. At Upflow, we provide a solution that adds connectivity and clarity to a company's payment and invoicing stack. Where systems were previously closed and disconnected, Upflow's platform enables smooth and clear processes,” co-founder and CEO Alexandre Louisy said in a statement.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to expand to the U.S. Upflow already has a few customers there, such as Lattice, Front and Adikteev, but it’s just a start. The startup will open an office in New York.

French startup Lydia is better known as the dominant app for peer-to-peer payments. But the company has been adding more features, such as a debit card, account aggregation, donations, money pots and more. This week, the company is adding savings accounts thanks to a partnership with French fintech startup Cashbee.

If you aren’t familiar with Cashbee, the company lets you open savings accounts through a mobile app. After connecting your bank account with Cashbee, you can transfer money back and forth between your bank account and a savings account.

Right now, Cashbee partners with My Money Bank for the savings accounts. Cashbee doesn’t keep your money, it just acts as a middle person between your bank account and My Money Bank. With those savings accounts, users can expect an interest rate of 0.6% after an introductory rate of 2% for a few months.

Lydia basically offers the same terms and conditions with a few differences. Instead of earning 2% interest for the first three months, Lydia users only earn more interests during the first two months.

The other big difference is that Lydia asks you to put at least €1,000 on your savings account when you open it. If you go through Cashbee’s app, you only have to put €10 or more. But users can do whatever they want after that when it comes to putting some money aside and withdrawing money from the savings account.

But the fact that Cashbee is seamlessly integrated in Lydia is interesting. It’s going to expose Cashbee to a lot more users as Lydia has more than 5 million users. It’s also an important features if Lydia wants to become a financial super app.

This savings feature competes with Livret A, the most prevailing savings account in France. Everybody can open a Livret A in a retail bank. You get an interest rate of 0.5% net of taxes. On paper, 0.6% is better than 0.5%. But Cashbee’s savings accounts aren’t net of taxes.

If you’re a student and don’t pay any taxes, that’s a better deal. But many people pay 30% in taxes on accrued interests, which means that you end up earning 0.42% in interests net of taxes with a Cashbee account.

But it’s hard to beat the simplicity of Lydia’s solution here. For instance, you can save up to €1,000,000 on your savings account while the Livret A is limited to €22,950. In other words, if you’re already using Lydia to send, receive and spend money, you might want to check out those savings accounts.

French startup Yousign has raised a $36.6 million Series A funding round (€30 million). Lead Edge Capital is leading the round and eFounders is investing once again in the company. Yousign, as the name suggests, is an e-signature provider that complies with European regulation on digital signatures.

While the company was originally founded in 2013, Yousign teamed up with startup studio eFounders in 2019. Following this deal, eFounders has become a key shareholders and a strategic partner.

Things have changed quite a lot since then as the e-signature market has grown tremendously. You may be familiar with DocuSign, Adobe Sign, SignNow, HelloSign and a bunch of other players. But none of them have been designed for the European market from the ground up.

Yousign wants to become the European alternative to these American companies. More specifically, the startup thinks it can convince small and medium companies that aren’t using an e-signature solution yet. Instead of asking DocuSign customers to switch, Yousign wants to convert new customers to e-signatures.

“Faced with American giants with large scopes and complex products, we have built a solution that is accessible and easy to use, allowing SMBs to sign their first documents within the hour, and not a month” Yousign co-founder and CEO Luc Pallavidino said in a statement.

Yousign is a certification authority and complies with eIDAS — a European framework for e-signatures. It means that signatures are legally binding and the service archives your documents in partnership with Arkhineo.

Like other e-signature services, you can create document templates, approval workflows and reminders. Yousign makes sure the right person is signing the document with strong authentication processes and all events are timestamped. It’s a SaaS product, which means you have to pay a subscription fee to access the service.

With today’s funding round, Yousign wants to reach 50,000 European SMBs by 2024 — it has 6,000 clients today. That would represent an annual recurring revenue of $85 million (€70 million). In 2020 alone, the company grew drastically from 35 to 120 employees. The startup now plans to hire 150 additional employees over the next 18 months.

Kabuto, the French startup that designs and sells smart suitcases, is releasing a new suitcase today. Called the Kabuto Trunk, this is the company’s biggest suitcase to date. Unlike smart suitcases from other brands, this isn’t just a suitcase with a battery in it.

In particular, there’s a fingerprint reader located at the top of the suitcase. You can save up to 10 different fingerprints. After that, it works pretty much like a fingerprint reader on a smartphone — you put your finger on the reader and it unlocks your suitcase.

In that case, it unlocks the zippers. If somebody else is using your suitcase or the battery is dead, you can also open the suitcase with a traditional key.

The Kabuto Trunk features a hard-shell design with a capacity of 95 liters. It has metal bearing wheels and real tires. Users can choose between two batteries — a 10,000mAh battery and a bigger 20,000mAh battery. Basically you have to choose between weight and battery capacity as bigger batteries tend to be heavier.

Customers can also choose to buy a backpack that magnetically attaches to the suitcase. Designed with travel in mind, that backpack is expandable and can double in thickness from 9 liters to 18 liters.

Image Credits: Kabuto

The suitcase currently costs $629 and the backpack $299 — the company plans to raise prices once the Kickstarter campaign is over.

As always with Kabuto products, this isn’t a product for everyone. They tend to be more expensive than what you’d normally pay for a suitcase. But some people like to pack things in a very specific way so that important items remain available. The startup has previously raised $1 million (€900,000) from Frédéric Mazzella, Michel & Augustin, Bpifrance, Fabien Pierlot and others.

Image Credits: Kabuto

Meet June, a new startup that wants to make it easier to create analytics dashboards and generate reports even if you’re not a product analytics expert. June is built on top of your Segment data. Like many no-code startups, it uses templates and a graphical interface so that non-technical profiles can start using it.

“What we do today is instant analytics and that’s why we’re building it on top of Segment,” co-founder and CEO Enzo Avigo told me. “It lets you access data much more quickly.”

Segment acts as the data collection and data repository for your analytics. After that, you can start playing with your data in June. Eventually, June plans to diversify its data sources.

“Our long-term vision is to become the Airtable of analytics,” Avigo said.

If you’re familiar with Airtable, June may look familiar. The company has built a template library to help you get started. For instance, June helps you track user retention, active users, your acquisition funnel, engagement, feature usage, etc.

Image Credits: June

Once you pick a template, you can start building a report by matching data sources with templates. June automatically generates charts, sorts your user base into cohorts and shows you important metrics. You can create goals so that you receive alerts in Slack whenever something good or bad is happening.

Advanced users can also use June so that everyone in the team is using the same tool. They can create custom SQL queries and build a template based on those queries.

The company raised a seed round of $1.85 million led by Point Nine. Y Combinator, Speedinvest, Kima Ventures, eFounders and Base Case also participated, as well as several business angels.

Prior to June, the startup’s two co-founders worked for Intercom. They noticed that the analytics tool was too hard to use for many people. They didn’t rely on analytics to make educated decisions.

There are hundreds of companies using June every week and that number is growing by 10% per week. Right now, the product is free but the company plans to charge based on usage.

Image Credits: June

Meet Café, a new French startup founded by two brothers that wants to help companies switch to a hybrid remote-and-office workplace model. Café isn’t a traditional desk-booking tool. Instead, the company helps you see when people in your team are coming to the office so that you can plan when you should go to the office as well.

Instead of focusing on workspace, Café focuses on people first. “We decided that we wouldn’t let you book a desk directly,” co-founder and CTO Arthur Lorotte de Banes told me.

When you open the app, you get a simplified calendar view. For each day, you can see your team members divided by groups — people coming to the office, people working from home, etc.

In just a few taps, you can tell your other coworkers what you plan to do. This way, it becomes much easier to schedule meetings, have in-person conversation and more generally hang out with your coworkers. It also makes it easier to find a common day with a specific coworker if you’re working on the same project.

“We interviewed 150 companies and we realized companies faced the same issue after interviewing the first five companies. They all use spreadsheets,” co-founder and CEO Tom Nguyen told me.

Image Credits: Café

Using a tool like Café also gives you insights about your office. For instance, you can see the average number of persons in your office depending on the day of the week or the day of the month. Admins can configure a weekly reminder to make sure that everybody fills out information.

In addition to its mobile app and web app, Café integrates with your existing tools. For instance, you can connect your Café account with Slack so that your status on Slack reflects your status in Café. Teammates can hover over your name to know that you’re in the office or you’re at home.

The company is also working on integrations with human resource information systems, such as PayFit, so that your vacation is automatically synchronized with Café.

Image Credits: Café

As companies start hashing out a plan to return to the office, Café arrives on the market at the right time. Companies can create custom statuses to fit their specific needs. For instance, a Café customer has created a status so that they know who has the office keys to make sure that the office remains open.

The company raised a $1 million seed round from 122West, Kima Ventures, Jonathan Widawski, Guillaume Lestrade, Jacques-Edouard Sabatier and various business angels who work or have worked for WeWork, Dropbox, Github, Snapchat, Intercom, Stripe, Alan and PayFit.

Like Typeform, Doodle or Slido, Café has chosen a freemium strategy. Teams can sign up for free and start using the product with their immediate coworkers. You don’t need to enter card information to sign up.

If you want to roll it out across the organization with more users, you have to start paying. The startup believes employees will become product advocates for the entire organization. And it seems like the right strategy for a product that is supposed to make employees happier at work.

French startup Agicap has raised a new $100 million funding round led by Greenoaks. With today’s funding round, the company has reached a valuation of more than $500 million (€415 million). Agicap is building a service that lets you track your cash flow in real time, build reports and get forecasts.

In addition to Greenoaks, existing investors BlackFin Capital Partners and Partech are also participating in the round. It represents a big jump from last year’s $18 million Series A round from last year.

The basic premise of Agicap is quite simple. Many small companies rely on Microsoft Excel to figure out their cash position every week or every month. Instead of exporting .csv files from your bank accounts, you can connect your bank accounts to Agicap for real-time monitoring. Similarly, Agicap has developed integrations with accounting software and invoicing tools.

When you want to see how you’re doing when it comes to cash, you can connect to your Agicap account just like you’d connect to a web analytics service. Agicap tries to break down how much you’re spending by category and branch. After that, you can run projections and make decisions based on forecasts.

Designed specifically for small and medium companies, Agicap has managed to convince 3,500 companies to use its service. They pay a monthly subscription fee. Clients include Cityscoot, Meero, Merci Handy, Ornikar and Blend Burger.

Agicap is currently live in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. France still generates 50% of the company’s revenue but other markets are growing rapidly.

“This Series B comes at a key moment in our development,” co-founder and CEO Sébastien Beyet said in a statement. “It demonstrates our will to make Agicap the European leader in our market and will allow us to further accelerate our international presence, launching in 10 new countries in the coming months.”

Following today’s funding round, the company has some ambitious expansion plans. The company’s team has already grown from 30 employees to 200 employees over the last 12 months. Now, it plans to build a team of 1,000 employees within the next couple of years.

Prismic, a company building a content management system, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. While the startup has been profitable since 2016, it wants to unlock the full potential of its headless CMS by iterating more quickly on its product. Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo are co-leading today’s funding round.

Headless content management systems are a bit different from traditional content management systems. The backend and the frontend of your website operate totally separately. You write content in the backend where it is safely stored. The frontend of your application fetches content from the backend using an API and display it to your customers and readers.

Dissociating those two key parts of your content management system provides many advantages. It is more secure, it scales much better and it gives you a ton of flexibility when it comes to frontend framework and hosting.

In addition to iterating on its CMS, Prismic manages the infrastructure for you. When you sign up, you don’t have to deploy the backend on your own server. You can connect to the admin interface and start building.

After that, your content is accessible through an API. It means that you can build your own website and fetch content from Prismic. You can also build a mobile app and use Prismic as your content backend for the news section.

You can pick your own framework and build your site through that framework. Prismic supports Gatsby, React.js, Next.js, Vue.js and more.

Prismic is also trying to popularize something called slices. Traditional content management systems let you create pages or posts. Each page uses the same header and footer. It’s just a unit of content enclosed in your website.

Slices are vertical sections of your websites, such as a banner at the top, a section with featured content, some related content, recent reviews, a newsletter sign-up form, etc. Developers can create their own custom slices using React.js, Vue.js and others.

After that, the content marketing team can mix and match slices as well as customize them whenever they’re creating a new page. It unlocks more potential and lets non-technical people create dynamic content for a website. Essentially, Prismic is adding some no-code features to its CMS with those slices.

“Prismic becomes a page builder for the marketing team. From there, they can access all sections of the site and can compose new pages by piecing together those slices and by adding content,” co-founder and CEO Sadek Drobi told me.

That concept in particular seems to have some potential. That’s why the company is raising some money. The startup generates revenue from subscriptions and targets small clients, such as web agencies, as well as big companies that subscribe to enterprise plans.

French startup Matera has announced that is has raised a new $43 million (€35 million) Series B funding round led by Mubadala Capital. Bpifrance, Burda Principal Investments as well as existing investors Index Ventures and Samaipata are also participating.

The company is building a vertical SaaS for residential property management. In France, co-owners of the common space of a building can decide to ditch the company that handles residential building management for them and do it themselves.

And it could work particularly well for small buildings with 10 or 15 apartments. There are fewer relationships to manage, fewer bills to pay and less work in general.

When co-owners vote to switch to Matera, they get a web-based platform and a mobile app to view information and see all the contracts with various partners — think about elevator maintenance, heating maintenance, water, electricity, etc.

If something feels odd, you can contact a residential building expert on Matera. They can help you make sure you comply with the law and file paperwork for you.

The platform also guides you when it comes to leading an annual co-owner meeting. It can help you communicate with all co-owners with a forum, an on-demand letter service, etc. Essentially, all co-owners get their own login information.

In October 2020, the company launched a new service to tackle a bigger chunk of the building management stack. Matera clients can now decide to manage their building’s bank account through the platform. This way, co-owners pay directly on Matera and everybody can keep track of the budget over time.

With today’s funding round, Matera plans to expand to Germany. The startup has been growing rapidly as it now manages 3,000 buildings, representing a 300% year-over-year jump. Overall, 60,000 owners use Matera.

“This past year gave us the opportunity to prove the relevance of our model and our value proposition, showing why Matera is the perfect solution for our times. The crisis sped up the digital transformation of our market, while at the same time increasing the attachment to our homes and buildings,” co-founder and CEO Raphaël di Meglio said in a statement. “Our clients wanted more transparency, and to save money and that’s exactly what we can bring them.”

By the end of 2021, Matera wants to manage 6,000 buildings including 40 in Germany. The company currently has 200 employees and plans to hire another 50 employees.

European startup studio eFounders has now been around for 10 years. And because a birthday sounds like a good opportunity to share some metrics, the portfolio companies have reached a valuation of $2 billion together — only 18 months after reaching $1 billion.

eFounders says it is focused on building the future of work. In practical terms, it means the company is building B2B SaaS startups with a focus on productivity and workflows. For instance, Front, Aircall and Spendesk all started with eFounders.

There have been a few exits, such as TextMaster, Mention, Mailjet, Hivy and Briq. Those exits are included in the total valuation of eFounders companies —  exit values are freezed as of date of exit. But Front, Aircall and Spendesk could represent even more massive successes down the road.

“When we started in 2011, there was an existing model that was Rocket Internet. We liked the entrepreneurship spirit but we didn’t like the philosophy,” co-founder and CEO Thibaud Elzière told me.

Instead of copying Rocket Internet altogether, they altered the business model quite drastically on three different aspects:

• They try to come up with original startup ideas, not copycats;
• They want to work with entrepreneurs, not consultants-turned-entrepreneurs;
• Their portfolio companies should be able to operate on their own after 12 to 18 months.

When eFounders come up with a new project, they act as a sort of third co-founder. The startup studio tries to find a CEO and a CTO. In exchange for a third of equity, the eFounders core team helps take the project off the ground. When the startup raises a seed round, eFounders moves on from day-to-day activities and focuses on new projects.

And it’s been working well. With 30 portfolio companies, there are now 1,500 people working for an eFounders-backed company. Combined, they generate $131 million in annual recurring revenue.

As for the next 10 years, Elzière doesn’t think eFounders can simply increase the cadence and launch more and more projects. “It’s a model that isn’t scalable — it’s hand crafted,” he said.

There are two ways to expand. First, eFounders is going to focus on more verticals. That’s why the startup studio partnered with Camille Tyan so that he would be in charge of fintech projects. You can imagine another studio for blockchain startups, another one for AI startups, etc.

“We want to remain focused on software with a B2B angle — not enterprise but long-tail B2B. We don’t pretend to be a general-purpose studio, but we can acquire specific skills and knowledge on specific topics,” Elzière said.

If there are some liquidity events with some of the most successful eFounders companies, the startup studio is also going to use part of its cash to invest in other companies. This eFounders fund would focus on seed investments in SaaS companies with a hands-on approach.

But having more money isn’t necessarily a bad thing as SaaS products today don’t look like SaaS products from ten years ago.

“Creating a SaaS company today is a lot more complicated and more expensive,” Elzière said. “People who use Notion tell you that Notion is slow because it takes more than 100 milliseconds to load a page. People expect the same thing in consumer apps and in SaaS when it comes to performance, design and experience.”

“Companies raise more and more money because there’s a lot of money available, but also because it takes more and more time and skills in order to build a product,” he added.