Meet Leeway, a French startup that is building an end-to-end software-as-a-service solution for your contracts. Leeway lets you centralize all your contracts in a single repository, go through multiple negotiation steps and trigger a DocuSign event for the signature.

The company raised a $4.2 million seed round from HenQ, Kima Ventures as well as several business angels, such as the founders of Algolia, Eventbrite, Spendesk, MeilleursAgents, Livestorm and Luko.

If you’re working for the legal department of your company, you’re probably working with multiple tools. Chances are you’re using Microsoft Word to write a contract, a cloud service to store and share the contract with your teammates and business partners, an e-signature and archival service.

Leeway is optimizing this worklfow at every step. First, you can store all your contracts on Leeway. In addition to making it easier to find a contract later down the road, you can get reminders when a contract is about to expire so that you can renew a contract.

Second, you can edit your contract from Leeway directly. For instance, a manager can review a contract and write changes in Leeway’s interface. The employee can then start a revision and save a new version of the contract.

After that, you can send the contract from the same interface. Administrators can set up approval workflows so that several people need to approve a contract before it is signed. As everything is centralized, you can get an overview of all your contracts that are currently in the pipeline.

Image Credits: Leeway

Up next, Leeway is thinking about integrating conditional clauses within the product. Usually, big companies have several versions of the same clause — very favorable, favorable, not so favorable, etc. When a client is negotiating, Leeway customers could switch the clause from very favorable to favorable for instance.

Right now, around 30 companies are using Leeway to manage their contracts. Clients include Voodoo, Evaneos, Ifop and Fitness Park. “We have a very specific customer base — the legal department of companies with 100 to 500 employees,” co-founder and CEO Antoine Fabre told me.

It doesn’t mean that smaller and bigger companies shouldn’t be using Leeway. But companies with less than 100 employees don’t necessarily have a full-fledged legal department. The sales team or the finance department could act as the legal-ish team. But Leeway still has a lot of room to grow.

Image Credits: Leeway

Meet Stockly, a French startup that keeps the inventory of various e-commerce websites in sync. When you see an out-of-stock item on an e-commerce website, chances are you leave that website and try to find the same item on another site.

If you operate an e-commerce website, Stockly lets you sell items even when they’re currently out of stock. The startup automatically finds a third-party Stockly supplier with that specific item.

The order will go through and be sent by that supplier directly. Stockly tells its partners to use neutral packaging so that the end consumer isn’t confused.

This could be particularly useful for small scale e-commerce companies that don’t have a healthy marketplace of third-party retailers. For instance, Amazon can already sell you an out-of-stock item if a supplier has listed that specific item on Amazon’s own marketplace. But that’s not the case for most e-commerce websites.

The main challenge for Stockly is that it has to sort through various catalog formats and match the different inventories of different retailers. It is focusing on clothing items at first. When an order is routed through Stockly, it selects a specific supplier based on different criteria, such as logistics, delivery time and historical data.

So far, Stockly has been working with Galeries Lafayette, Go Sport, Foot Shop and others. The startup has recently raised a $6 million (€5.1 million) funding round from Idinvest Partners, Daphni, Techstars, Checkout.com CEO Guillaume Pousaz and various business angels.

With this funding round, the company plans to expand its team to 20 people, add new clients and iterate on its product.

Breega, a VC firm based in Paris, has announced the final closing of its third fund. The firm has managed to raise $130 million (€110 million).

This is Breega’s third fund and is officially called Breega Capital Venture 3. The firm’s previous fund launched in 2015 with €45 million ($53 million at today’s exchange rate).

Breega doesn’t focus on a vertical in particular. It says it can invest across many different categories, such as marketplaces, SaaS, agtech, HR tech, robotics, etc.

The investment team has already deployed some of the capital of Breega’s new fund. Portfolio startups include Stations-e, Trustpair, IoTerop, BeOp, Otodo, Humanity, Alice&Bob, Neobrain, Didomi, Ubble, Ponicode and reciTAL. They all have received some funding at the seed or Series A stage.

Breega believes it can support its portfolio companies with some operational help. The firm has its own team of experts when it comes to HR, business development, communications, legal and finance.

Some of the fund’s limited partners include entrepreneurs-turned-business-angles. For instance, Patrick Asdaghi, the co-founder of FoodChéri, has invested in the new fund. FoodChéri received some funding from Breega before getting acquired by Sodexo.

Other limited partners include Bpifrance, the European Investment Fund, Isomer Capital, several banks and insurance companies.

French startup PayFit has raised a $107 million series D funding round (€90 million). Eurazeo Growth and Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund are leading today’s round. Existing investors Accel, Frst and Xavier Niel are participating once again.

PayFit has been building a payroll and HR software-as-a-service platform. It lets you manage your payroll from a web browser and automate as many steps as possible. For instance, you can configure automate payslip generation, export your payroll data to your accounting software and get a list of payments you need to make when it comes to pensions, health insurance, etc.

Given that it’s a software-as-a-service platform, everything remains up to date. For instance, if there are some regulatory changes that require some adjustments, PayFit can update its platform so that you remain compliant from day one without having to think about it.

Over time, the startup has expanded beyond payroll to tackle a bigger chunk of the HR stack. Each employee gets its own PayFit login to access their payslips. But the company doesn’t stop there as you can request time off and enter how much time you’ve worked this week if you’re paid on an hourly basis. PayFit automatically notifies the manager for approval.

PayFit can also become your central repository for expenses and receipts. The company already has everyone’s bank information, which makes it easier to transfer money back to an employee for a cash expense.

Employees can also view the company’s directory and management chain from PayFit. The HR department can set up an onboarding flow in PayFit so that employees can request a computer, a badge, and enter personal information as soon as they join the company.

If you work for a big company that uses something like Workday, all of this probably sounds familiar. But PayFit targets small and medium companies that don’t want to sign expensive contracts with enterprise companies. It has attracted 5,000 clients that employ 100,000 employees overall — that’s an average of 20 employees per company. Some of the biggest clients include Revolut, Starling Bank and Treatwell.

The company is currently live in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the U.K. It currently has 550 employees and it plans to hire another 250 employees in 2021 to support its growth.

Vestiaire Collective announced a new funding round. The company has raised $216 million, or €178 million — it has reached a valuation above $1 billion, making it a unicorn. French fashion and luxury group Kering is leading the round with Tiger Global Management. Kering now owns 5% of Vestiaire Collective.

The startup operates an online marketplace where you can find pre-owned luxury and fashion items. And it’s a complicated industry as you don’t want to buy a damaged item or a cheap knockoff. The company controls and authenticate some items before they reach the buyer. If you opt for direct shipping, you can get reimbursed if there’s something wrong with what you ordered.

In addition to the two lead investors, many of the company’s existing shareholders are investing once again, such as Vestiaire Collective’s own CEO Max Bittner, Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, Condé Nast, Eurazeo through Eurazeo Growth and Idinvest Venture, Fidelity International, Korelya Capital, Luxury Tech Fund and Vitruvian Partner.

As you may have noticed, it’s been a bit harder to travel and buy fashion items in store. Many fashion e-commerce companies have been thriving during the coronavirus outbreak, and Vestiaire Collective is one of them. Transaction volume doubled in 2020 compared to 2019. There are 140,000 new listings every week.

In addition to the current pandemic, many consumers are concerned about the impact of fashion on the environment. At the lower end of the spectrum, retailers and fast fashion brands encourage you to buy more and more stuff as trends change with each season. At the higher end of the spectrum, luxury brands don’t want to undermine the value of their goods by putting items on sale to clear room for a new collection.

That’s why Vestiaire Collective is particularly well positioned to find new customers who are looking for quality goods that are going to last for a while and that haven’t been specifically produced for them. Similarly, people can sell their stuff instead of throwing them away.

While Vestiaire Collective originally started in Europe, the company is now growing rapidly in the U.S. and Asia. “As of January 2021, local sellers in those regions had increased their items sold by more than 250% year-over-year,” Tiger Global partner Griffin Schroeder said in the release.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to further develop partnerships with brands through buy-back circular solutions. The company also wants to encourage more people to sell something every time they buy something. Vestiaire Collective aims to be carbon neutral by 2026 and get the B Corp certification. The startup will also hire 155 people in the technology team.

French startup Lengow has a new landlord as Marlin Equity Partners has acquired a majority stake in the company. Lengow operates a softare-as-a-service platform to optimize e-commerce listings. Terms of the deal are undisclosed.

In particular, many sellers now list their items on multiple e-commerce websites at once. For instance, a company could have its own e-commerce website and also sell products on Amazon, eBay, etc. And you may have noticed the same third-party sellers on different marketplaces.

Manually listing items across multiple e-commerce platforms would be extremely tedious. Behind the scenes, Lengow tries to automate as many steps as possible. First, you can import your products by connecting Lengow with your product information management system (PIM) or your e-commerce back end — it can run on Akeneo, Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, etc.

You can then publish your products on multiple sales channels at once. It can be a marketplace, a price comparison website, a social network or an adtech platform. Examples include Amazon, Google Shopping, Criteo, Instagram, etc.

Lengow also helps you track orders, create rules when you’re running low on stock and manage your advertising strategy. Essentially, it’s the glue that makes all the moving parts of e-commerce stick together. There are 4,600 merchants using Lengow globally.

Marlin describes the deal as a growth investment. The firm plans to increase the value of Lengow in the coming years as it hasn’t reached its full potential yet. “We are looking forward to leveraging our operational and financial resources to support Lengow’s growth trajectory and continued international expansion,” Marlin principal Roland Pezzutto said in a statement.

Meet Powder, a French startup that helps you share video clips of your favorite games, follow people with the same interests and interact with them. The company has raised a $14 million Series A round led by Serena.

Powder wants to build the video infrastructure for social gaming. While many communities of gamers already share content on Twitch, Discord and Reddit, there isn’t a dominant mobile app focused on gaming.

You could call it an Instagram or Snapchat for gamers, but the startup has built specific tools that make it similar and yet different from those mainstream social platforms.

Powder can capture video content from any platform. You can record with your console and access your footage by connecting your account with Powder. You can capture videos on your PC using the company’s desktop app. You can also capture videos of mobile games.

The company tries to identify the most relevant events in your favorite game — it can be when you score a goal on Rocket League, when you are the last person standing in Fortnite, etc.

You can then trim your video, add filters, music and stickers and share a video with your followers. Other users can share reactions, add comments and send messages.

Image Credits: Powder

Overall, the company has raised $18 million and is pretty transparent about its funding story. In August 2018, the company raised a $400,000 pre-seed round with Kima Ventures and the co-founders of Zenly Antoine Martin and Alexis Bonillo. In March 2019, General Catalyst, Slow Ventures, Dream Machine, SV Angel, Brian Pokorny, Florian Kahn and Guillaume Luccisano invested $1.5 million.

Around May 2020, the company had to raise a $1.3 million seed extension with Alven Capital, Seraam Invest, Farmers, Maxime Demeure, Jean-Nicolas Vernin and some existing investors. Bpifrance and CNC also put some money in the company. And now, Serena is leading the $14 million Series A round with General Catalyst, Slow Ventures, Alven Capital, Bpifrance’s Digital Venture fund, Secocha Ventures, Turner Novak and Kevin Hartz also participating in today’s round.

As you can see, it’s been a long and winding road. That’s because Powder didn’t come up with its social app for gamers overnight. The company tried many different consumer apps. It would iterate on an idea for a few weeks and then kill the concept if it didn’t pan out. With Powder, the company seems to have found a great distribution mechanism to attract more downloads, leading to more users.

“The idea behind Powder started in December 2019. We had already worked on several projects and none of them really took off. We thought we would create a community first and then a product,” co-founder and CEO Stanislas Coppin told me. He previously co-founded Mindie, a music video app.

Powder started as a Discord server with tens of thousands of members. The team then developed an app that would appeal to that community, the “metaverse camera” as Coppin says. Overall, 1.5 million people have downloaded the iOS app since its launch.

There are three other co-founders, Barthélémy Kiss, Yannis Mangematin and Christian Navelot. There are 18 employees and the company just launched on Android.

Image Credits: Powder

French startup Homa Games has raised a $15 million seed round led by e.ventures and Idinvest Partners. The company has built several in-house technologies that can take a game from a prototype to an App Store success. It partners with third-party game studios and has a few in-house game studios as well.

OneRagtime, Jean-Marie Messier, Vladimir Lasocki, John Cheng and Alexis Bonillo are also participating in today’s funding round. This is quite a big funding round, but Homa Games already has some impressive metrics.

For instance, the startup’s games have been downloaded 250 million times overall since the creation of the company in 2018. It has signed an IP partnership with Hasbro to launch a Nerf-themed game that has been working quite well. Other games include Sky Roller, Idle World and Tower Color.

Home Games has developed three products in particular to optimize mobile game creation. Homa Lab helps you learn more about the competitive landscape with market intelligence and testing tools. Homa Belly is an SDK that helps you iterate and manage your game. And Homa Data optimizes monetization using data for both in-app purchases and ads.

Third-party developers can submit their games and choose Homa Games as their publisher. Both companies agree on a revenue-sharing model.

In addition to third-party games, Homa Games has also acquired IRL Team in Toulouse and has in-house game development teams in Skopje, Lisbon and Paris. Overall, there are 80 people working for Homa Games.

Benoist Grossmann from Idinvest Partners and Jonathan Userovici from e.ventures are both joining the board of the company.

It’s been a year since I covered ManoMano, the French e-commerce platform focused on DIY, home improvement and gardening products. And 2020 has been a successful years as the company’s gross merchandise volume doubled to €1.2 billion ($1.45 billion at today’s rate).

ManoMano’s sales are also accelerating as the company reported a 50% increase in 2019 gross merchandise volume compared to 2018.

When it comes to “softer” metrics, the company now attracts 50 million unique visitors per month, which represents a 70% year-over-year increase. There are 7 million active clients on the platform — that’s a 100% increase.

In addition to France, ManoMano is operating in Spain, Italy, Germany, the U.K. and Belgium. In 2021, the company plans to double down on Northern Europe (Germany and the U.K.) and improve the experience for both merchants and customers.

France still represents 60% of the company’s sales volume. And the company is currently profitable on this market if you look at this segment independently from the rest of the company.

While ManoMano operates a marketplace, it also offers a fulfillment service for third-party retailers. The company is also growing nicely on the professional segment with its ManoManoPro vertical.

The startup has raised $125 million in 2019 and $139 million in 2020. It is still actively hiring and growing the team. There are currently 650 employees and the company could work with 1,000 people at the end of 2021.

Meet Cajoo, a new French startup that has raised a $7.3 million (€6 million) funding round. The company wants to make it easier to order groceries from your phone and receive them 15 minutes later. It is launching in Paris today.

“I left Bolt around mid-August and I’m launching a company with two co-founders focused on 15-minute deliveries,” co-founder and CEO Henri Capoul told me. Thanks to his experience at Bolt, he probably knows a thing or two about logistics and operating a marketplace at scale. Guillaume Luscan and Jeremy Gotteland are the two other co-founders.

What makes Cajoo different from what’s out there? In France, there’s no Instacart or pure player in the grocery delivering space. Instead, many supermarket chains already offer deliveries. You can order from their website or app and get your groceries the next day or two days later.

Some retailers are trying to speed things up a bit, such as Carrefour with its Livraison Express service and Monoprix with Monoprix Plus. Amazon can also deliver some groceries through its Amazon Prime Now sub-service. It can take 30 minutes, an hour or even two hours before receiving your order though.

But people want things now, as the success of Deliveroo, Uber Eats and others has shown. I think impatience is unsustainable because of unit economics, labor laws, the impact on small shops and cities. And yet, it seems likely that there’s enough demand for Cajoo.

The startup wants to differentiate itself with a full-stack approach. Cajoo operates its own micro-fulfillment centers. It has its own inventory of products. It manages the fleet of delivery people as much as possible. And, of course, it sells directly to customers.

Glovo offered grocery deliveries from your local grocery store. But the company pulled back from the French market a few weeks ago. It seems like it couldn’t generate big enough margins by buying from stores directly.

On Cajoo, you’ll find anything you could find in a local grocery store — pasta, shampoo, candies, you name it. You’ll be able to order wine, beer and snack — Uber proved that it can be a lucrative segment with its acquisition of Drizly for $1.1 billion.

And it is launching today in Paris in the 9th arrondissement and around. Overall, Cajoo thinks it’ll require ten micro-fulfillment centers to cover Paris and it’s going to take a few months.

Cajoo is also benefiting from the current economic crisis as there are a ton of empty stores, empty garages, small warehouses that are currently waiting for a new owner.

“The differentiating factor of our model is that we offer products at market price. It’s the same price as a Monoprix or Carrefour Express store with delivery fees under €2,” Capoul said.

The company doesn’t plan to generate most of its revenue from delivery fees. Those are minimum fees so that you don’t order one item at a time. Instead, the company will get margins from products themselves, like any retailer.

Frst and XAnge are leading the seed round with the two co-founders of Chauffeur-Privé (later rebranded as Kapten) also participating.

I asked about the company’s plans when it comes to delivery staff. As Gurvan Kristanadjaja reported for Libération last year, there are some serious issues with contractors working for food delivery companies in France. For instance, a significant portion of Frichti’s delivery people were illegal immigrants. Some riders on Deliveroo or Uber Eats also rent their accounts to illegal immigrants.

Capoul told me that it is going to hire some employees to handle deliveries and give them electric bikes. But the company will also work with partners — both contracting companies and freelancers.

“We don’t want to have the same standards as Deliveroo or Uber Eats. Recruiting the right delivery people, making sure that they have work permits are important topics,” Capoul said. Each micro-fulfillment centers will also have a restroom and a place to wait for the next order.

It’s going to be important to see whether Cajoo manages to keep high standards over the long run as the service gets more popular. At least, the service is starting with the right mindset.

Image Credits: Cajoo

Beam has raised a $9.5 million Series A round. The company is working on a new web browser that completely rethinks the way you start a web session and browse the web. The startup is founded by Dom Leca and Sébastien Métrot. Dom Leca previously worked on Sparrow, an email app with an opinionated design.

Pace Capital is leading today’s funding round. Several business angels are also participating, such as Christan Reber, Harry Stebbings and Albert Wenger. Existing investors Spark, Amaranthine, C4V and Alven are also investing once again.

Beam is also announcing that it is acquiring RadBlock, an ad blocker for Safari.

If you’re not familiar with Beam, I encourage you to read my previous article on the company — I describe how the product is going to work and the reasoning behind it.

In short, Beam is a web browser focused on knowledge. Many people spend a ton of time mindlessly browsing the web. When you close the last tab, you realize that you didn’t learn much and you don’t have any note.

You can bookmark stuff, but chances are you either don’t use bookmarks or you never check them. And if you want to find something again, you often end up entering a Google query and starting from scratch.

With Beam, every time you search for something, it creates a new session. Each session is represented by a note card. When you’re done browsing, the note card summarizes your findings. Your search query is the title of the card, the most important sites appear near the top of the note. Irrelevant content is listed at the end of the note.

You can then add text, remove links, reorganize stuff and create a full-fledged note. Basically, you end up creating comprehensive notes without even realizing it.

Beam is an ambitious project and the company will have to iterate on that initial idea. But it sounds like a great way to start using the web as a kid. You get to learn more about your passions based on what you do on the web.

Right now, there are seven people working for Beam. The company is going to hire machine learning and natural language processing experts as well as more developers.

French startup Seyna is getting a new CEO. Stephen Leguillon is joining the company as chief executive while Philippe Mangematin is stepping back from day-to-day activities for personal reasons — he’ll become honorary chairman.

If you’re not familiar with the company, Seyna is an insurtech startup that has obtained an insurance license focused on property and casualty. This is a significant move as the French regulator (ACPR) hasn’t handed out a new license in this category since 1983.

The company’s go-to-market strategy is also interesting as it doesn’t sell insurance products to consumers directly. Instead, the company is building out insurance-as-a-service products. It partners with other companies that offer Seyna’s insurance products under their own brands.

Behind the scenes, Seyna offers an API to generate insurance contracts on demand — an API is a programming interface that lets two services interact with each other. You can also connect directly to Seyna’s interface to manage contracts.

Seyna has created its own core insurance system, which is an important differentiating factor compared to legacy players. The startup can generate many different variants that cover around 20 different insurance products — pet insurance, ticket cancelation, rent guarantee, etc. Clients include Garantme and Decathlon.

The company’s new CEO Stephen Leguillon previous co-founded La Belle Assiette, a company that lets you hire a chef for a dinner at home and that I covered on TechCrunch. He added a second product called GoCater, a corporate catering service — GoCater was letter spun out from La Belle Assiette and acquired by ezCater.

Seyna has raised a €14 million seed round ($17 million at today’s rate) from Global Founders Capital, Allianz France, Financière Saint James and several business angels. Insurance companies require a ton of capital to operate, that’s why the seed round seems quite big for the French market.