French startup Chefclub announced earlier this week that it has raised a $17 million funding round led by First Bridge Ventures. SEB Alliance, the venture arm of kitchen appliance maker Groupe SEB, Korelya Capital and Algaé Ventures are also participating.

Chefclub has been building a major media brand on social media platforms. It has attracted a huge audience that doesn’t look bad next to well-funded media brands Tastemade and Tasty.

I already covered the company at length, so I encourage you to read my previous profile of the company:

Chefclub is an interesting lesson in sales funnel. It has a huge top of the funnel with 100 million followers YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok. Overall, they generate over 1 billion views per month.

The company leverages that audience to create new products. It starts with cooking books, obviously. Chefclub has sold 700,000 books so far. As those books are self-published, the company gets to keep a good chunk of the revenue.

More recently, the startup has launched cooking kits for kids with colorful measuring cups, cooking accessories and easy-to-understand recipes. 150,000 people have bought a product for children.

Chefclub now wants to display its brands in stores thanks to partnerships. That’s why having Groupe SEB as an investor makes sense. You can imagine co-branded items boosted by promotion on Chefclub’s accounts.

Finally, the startup plans to enter a new market — consumer-packaged goods. That’s the same thinking behind it, except that we’re talking about food. It’s interesting to see that Chefclub doesn’t think online ads represent the future of the company. And it seems like a smart decision during the current economic crisis.

French startup Mooncard is partnering with Flying Blue to offer Air France miles to its customers. This is the first time you can earn miles with a payment card in France that isn’t an American Express card.

Mooncard provides corporate payment cards to streamline your expenses. Most companies in France don’t use corporate cards. But fintech startups have created corporate cards that can help you streamline expenses.

In addition to Visa cards, Mooncard lets you easily take a photo of your receipts, add details and submit expenses to your accounting team. You can set up different limits and validation processes.

Today’s news is interesting as American Express has been in a monopolistic position for decades with its partnership with Flying Blue. In France, companies had to choose American Express if they wanted miles as perks.

When it comes to pricing, it looks pretty similar to what American Express offers:

There’s one big difference — Mooncard relies on the Visa network. As many restaurants and shops don’t support American Express, it could be enough to lure customers away from American Express. Employees can use their miles for personal trips.

There are 3,000 companies using Mooncard as well as many public institutions.

eFounders is expanding its focus by creating a second startup studio called Logic Founders. This time, Logic Founders is going to focus on fintech startups exclusively. Camille Tyan (pictured above) is going to lead the new studio.

Over the past ten years, eFounders has launched dozens of software-as-a-service companies trying to improve the way we work. Portfolio companies include Front, Aircall and Spendesk.

Camille Tyan previously co-founded PayPlug, a payments company that was acquired by Natixis (Groupe BPCE). He plans to follow the eFounders model centered around a new vertical. Logic Founders will come up with ideas for new startups. It’ll recruit two co-founders and start working on the product for the first 12 to 18 months of the company.

Ideally, the startup finds product-market fit and raises a seed round after this initial phase. The startup studio keeps a stake in the startup but it moves on so that it can focus on new projects.

If you’ve been following eFounders closely, the startup studio has already worked on several fintech companies, such as Spendesk, Upflow, Multis and Swan. New fintech projects will likely fall under the Logic Founders umbrella.

The studio says it will launch API-first financial products. It is riding the embedded finance trend — many believe financial products will be distributed by platforms that aren’t primarily focused on finance but could benefit from fintech features. You can expect companies working on payments orchestration, asset securitization, lending APIs, crypto and B2B identity.

French startup Alma is raising a $59.4 million Series B funding round (€49 million). The company has been building a new payment option for expensive good. You can choose to pay over three or four installments. This product sounds familiar if you’ve used Klarna in the past. But Klarna isn’t available in France.

Cathay Innovation, Idinvest, Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, Seaya Ventures and Picus Capital are participating in today’s funding round. In addition to today’s equity round, Alma is raising a credit line of $25.5 million (€21 million) to finance merchant payments.

What makes Alma attractive to merchants is that the startup is handling 100% of the risk involved with a payment over multiple installments. When a customer buys a bike over four installments, they’ll get charged over several months. But the merchant gets paid on day one.

Since I first covered Alma, the startup has launched the ability to pay later. You enter your card information right now but you get charged 15 days or a month later. It can be particularly useful if you’re unsure about something you’re buying and if you think there’s a chance you’ll send it back.

And it’s an attractive option in France where debit cards are the norm — not credit cards. Alma also plans to offer longer plans, such as the ability to buy now and pay over 6, 10 or 12 installments.

Thanks to the new influx of cash, the startup plans to triple the size of its team and reach €1 billion in annual payment volume within two years. It’s also going to expand to other countries, but with a specific focus on helping French merchants reach European customers living in other European countries.

If you’re somewhat famous on various social networks, chances are you are exposed to hate speech in your replies or in your comments. French startup Bodyguard recently launched its app and service in English so that it can hide toxic content from your eyes. It has been available in French for a few years and the company has attracted 50,000 users so far.

“We have developed a technology that detects hate speech on the internet with a 90 to 95% accuracy and only 2% of false positive,” founder and CEO Charles Cohen told me.

The company has started with a mobile app that anyone can use. After you download the app and connect the app with your favorite social networks, you choose the level of moderation. There are several categories, such as insults, body shaming, moral harassment, sexual harassment, racism and homophobia. You can select whether it’s a low priority or a top priority for each category.

After that, you don’t have to open the app again. Bodyguard scans replies and comments from its servers and makes a decision whether something is OK or not OK. For instance, it can hide comments, mute users, block users, etc. When you open Instagram or Twitter again, it’s like those hateful comments never existed.

The app currently supports Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Twitch. Unfortunately, it can’t process content on Snapchat and TikTok due to API limitations.

Behind the scenes, most moderation services rely heavily on machine learning or keyword-based moderation. Bodyguard has chosen a different approach. It algorithmically cleans up a comment and tries to analyze the content of a comment contextually. It can determine whether a comment is offensive to you, to a third-party person, to a group of persons, etc.

More recently, the startup has launched a B2B product. Other companies can use a Bodyguard-powered API to moderate comments in real time on their social platforms or in their own apps. The company charges its customers using a traditional software-as-a-service approach.

French startup Georges — or Georges.tech — is raising a new round of funding of $42.4 million (€35 million). The company is also getting a new name and will be called Indy going forward. The startup has been building an accounting automation application for freelancers and small companies.

Singular is leading today’s funding round. You might not be familiar with Singular, but it makes a ton of sense to see the VC firm on the cap table. Former Alven partners Jeremy Uzan and Raffi Kamber left the Paris-based VC firm to raise their own fund. Uzan previously invested in Indy when he was at Alven and he’s following up with Singular.

Existing investors Alven and Kerala are also investing once again. Overall, Indy has managed to attract 40,000 clients who pay a monthly subscription fee to access the service.

Indy first started with a product specifically designed for freelancers, self-employed people, doctors, architects, lawyers, etc. It can help you replace your accountant altogether. You first connect the service to your bank account. Indy then imports all your transactions and tries to tag and categorize as many transactions as possible.

You can go back and add missing data. You can also add receipts or invoices right next to your transactions. Once this is done, you know how much VAT you’re supposed to get back at the end of the year.

Indy then automatically fills out administrative forms based on your data. You can then download your tax documents or send them directly from Indy.

You can also use the platform to get an overview of your business. You can see your corporate revenue, track your expenses, and see how much you earn per year based on personal expenses and your own pay.

Over time, Indy has expanded its service so that it supports more types of companies. In addition to freelancers, Indy supports EURL, SARL, SAS and SASU. In 2020, the startup has tripled its revenue.

And the company plans to improve its product to support even more self-employed people, including people selling stuff under the BIC status in France. Indy plans to hire 100 people in 2021 in Lyon.

Indy has even bigger plans as it has been evaluating the U.S. as a potential market. There are a ton of self-employed people in the U.S. and that’s why it represents an interesting opportunity.

French startup Alan is generating 100% of its revenue from health insurance products — and that isn’t going to change. But the company wants to start a conversation with a bigger use base. Alan is going to launch multiple mobile apps that let you learn more about health topics, contact a doctor and chat with the community.

“We are proud to announce today that we’re launching free medical apps for everyone,” co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve said in a virtual press conference. “We’re going to develop services for specific groups of people who are facing specific issues or questions.”

And the company is starting with Alan Baby. As you can guess from the name, Alan Baby helps you stay on top of your baby’s health. The company has chosen to focus on that segment as your baby’s health can be a great source of mental stress.

When you first open the app, you get a feed of articles on specific topics, from sleep to nutrition and child development. You can get relevant articles by entering the birthdate of your child as you often don’t have the same questions at day one and day 100.

While parents usually have 10 pediatrician appointments in the first year, you may have a burning question that cannot wait that long. From Alan Baby, you can start a text discussion with a doctor. The company says users should expect an answer within 24 hours.

Alan had already hired doctors for a similar messaging feature for its users who are covered under the health insurance products. The company is opening up that feature to more users beyond its paid customers.

Finally, people who install Alan Baby can interact with each other in the community section. It works a bit like an online forum on health topics, except that it’s mobile-first and Alan wants to moderate it with some help from its doctors.

“Thanks to what we’re setting up for parents, we will be able to extend it to other topics soon,” Samuelian-Werve said. He names fertility, mental health or diabetes as potential topics for other free apps.

While the apps are going to be free, the company expects to attract new clients for its health insurance thanks to those new apps. Essentially, Alan is broadening the top of its sales funnel with free apps.

Alan Baby is rolling out progressively in France. There’s a waitlist and the iOS app is available to pre-order (for free) in the App Store.

An update on the health insurance products

Back in October, Samuelian-Werve told me that 100,000 were covered through Alan. A few months later, 139,000 people are covered through one Alan insurance product or another. Overall, 8,300 companies have chosen the company as their health insurance provider. Basically, Alan’s user base has more than doubled in 2020.

In France, employees are covered by both the national healthcare system and private insurance companies. So Alan convinces other companies to use its product for its employees. The company has obtained its own health insurance license, which means that it can customize its health insurance products completely depending on the segment and client.

The company is also operating in Spain and Belgium. But it’s been a slow start with 300 members in Spain and 500 members in Belgium. Alan is going to focus on those two markets before launching new countries in the future.

French startup Iziwork has raised a $43 million funding round. Cathay Innovation and Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund are participating in this funding round. The company has been building a platform focused on improving temporary employment.

While it’s a relatively large funding round, the startup is quite young. It was founded in September 2018 and it has raised $68 million overall.

Iziwork manages a marketplace of temporary work. 2,000 companies are using the platform in France and Italy. 800,000 candidates have used the app to access job opportunities. You can consider it as a tech-enabled version of the good old employment agency.

Candidates can onboard directly from the mobile app. You then get personalized recommendations based on your profile. 95% of assignments are filled in less than 4 hours. And of course, all your documents are managed from the app.

Iziwork tries to add some benefits to compensate the fact that temporary workers often jump from one company to another. For instance, you get a time savings account, you can request a down payment on your pay every week, etc.

The startup has realized that it can’t open offices in every big and intermediate city. That’s why third-party companies can join the Iziwork network. As a partner, you find new clients and new job opportunities. You can then leverage Iziwork’s app, service and pool of candidates.

This is an interesting strategy as it greatly increases supply on the Iziwork marketplace. Partners get a revenue sharing deal with Iziwork.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to expand to new countries and improve its tech product. There are still some growth opportunities in its existing markets as well.

Jobandtalent, another company in this space, has attracted some headlines as it has raised $108 million last week. Founded in 2009 and based in Madrid, it has generated €500 million in revenue last year.

But, let’s be honest, the temporary work market is huge. Adecco, Randstad and other legacy players still represent a bigger threat for this recent wave of temp staffing startups. Let’s see how it plays out in the coming years.

French startup Molotov provides an OTT TV streaming service in France with live TV, premium channels, a cloud DVR and on-demand content. While the service has managed to attract 13 million users in France, it has yet to expand to other countries.

Molotov is starting its international expansion this year with a dozen countries on the roadmap. First, the service will be available in seven African countries, starting with Ivory Coast where it’s already live, Senegal in January, Cameroon in February, Burkina Faso in March, Tunisia in April, Guinea and Democratic Republic of Congo after that.

“When it comes to features, the service is more or less the same but content is different,” co-founder and CEO Jean-David Blanc told me. Molotov is betting on local partnerships to launch its service in new countries.

In today’s case, Molotov is partnering with Digital Virgo, a mobile payments company available in 40 countries. Digital Virgo is handling the relationships with local content owners. Molotov is taking care of operations and the tech stack.

There will be 15 channels at launch, such as Nina TV, Passions TV, Trace Urban, Trace Africa, Trace Urban Africa, Savannah TV, Gametoon, Africanews, Euronews, France24, Trace Sport Stars and DocuBox. Molotov will also grant access to its ad-supported on-demand streaming service Mango.

Image Credits: Molotov

In order to support its international expansion plans, the startup had to rework its infrastructure so that it’s more robust — it relies more on cloud hosting and it is partnering with more CDN companies. For instance, the service should work better if you don’t have as much bandwidth as before.

And this is just a start as Molotov is already talking with different B2B partners in Asia, South America and Europe. “Our strategy is that we lean on local players to launch Molotov in new countries,” Blanc said. So you can expect more news on the international front with new countries and new partners.

French startup PhotoRoom is launching its app on Android today. The company has been working on a utility photography app that lets you remove the background from a photo, swaps it for another background and tweaks your photo.

And it’s been working well on iOS already as the company attended Y Combinator, doubled its annual recurring revenue to $2 million and raised a $1.2 million seed round.

In particular, influencers and people reselling clothes and fashion items have been relying on PhotoRoom . They use their phone as their main creativity platform. Like other professional photography apps, the startup relies on subscriptions to generate revenue ($9.49 per month or $46.99 per year).

PhotoRoom relies on machine learning to identify objects and separate them from the rest of the photo. This way, you can manipulate a specific part of your photo.

Image Credits: PhotoRoom

When the startup raised its seed round after Y Combinator, it chose to raise from Nicolas Wittenborn’s Adjacent fund, Liquid2 Ventures as well as two groups:

• A group of business angels focused on machine learning, such as Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist at Facebook), Zehan Wang (Head of Twitter Machine Learning Cortex, co-founder of Magic Poney), Nicolas Pinto (Perceptio founder), etc.
• And another group of business angels focused on mobile subscriptions, such as Holger Seim (Blinkist), Jacob Eiting (RevenueCat), John Bonten (advisor for Calm and Spotify) and Eric Setton (Tango).

With this funding round, the company plans to grow the team from 3 to 8 persons and work on its deep learning algorithm. If you want to learn more about PhotoRoom, feel free to read my take on the product:

French fintech startup Lydia has extended its Series B round. Accel is leading the extension with all major existing shareholders also participating. Lydia first raised $45 million in January 2020 — Tencent led that investment. The startup is now raising another $86 million, which means that Lydia has raised $131 million in total as part of its Series B round.

While Lydia wouldn’t discuss the valuation of the round, its co-founder and CEO gave me a hint. “The value of the company has really significantly increased between the two parts of the B round,” he told me.

Interestingly, Amit Jhawar is heading this investment for Accel. He joined Accel as a venture partner in July and he’s going to join Lydia’s board of directors.

Jhawar joined payments company Braintree in 2011 as COO and CFO. Shortly after, Braintree acquired peer-to-peer payment app Venmo. “When we acquired Venmo it was only 15 people. They had just released their mobile app in April of 2012,” Jhawar told me in a phone interview.

PayPal later acquired Braintree and Venmo — Jhawar stuck around until early 2020 to scale Venmo to the huge fintech consumer app that 52 million people use in the U.S. Jhawar believes that peer-to-peer payments represent the beginning of a long-term consumer relationship.

“You know that P2P is successful when they leave money in their account because they’re going to come back,” he said.

Back in 2014, when I first covered Lydia, I called it the Venmo for France — they had only raised €600,000 back then. It seems like Jhawar agrees with that take. Since then, Lydia has grown quite a lot and has expanded beyond peer-to-peer payments in various different ways.

With Lydia, you can send money to another user in just a few seconds. You don’t have to enter an account number in your banking app — as long as you know their phone number, they’ll receive your payment.

If you have money in your account, you can choose to spend it directly using a Visa debit card. Lydia lets you generate a virtual card that works with Apple Pay and Google Pay — you can also order a plastic card.

Lydia also supports direct deposit as you get your own IBAN in the app. You can also create money pots and send a link to other users, view your bank accounts in Lydia, donate money to hospitals and charities, get a credit line, etc.

But there’s one killer feature that stands out over the rest. Bank accounts tend to be monolithic and don’t reflect how you use money. “If you look at banks today, they call the main account a checking account. It’s outdated by design,” Chiche said.

Lydia has created flexible sub-accounts that you can use in many different ways. You can create a second sub-account and set some money aside for your bills. You can create a third one and share it with a few friends because you’re going on a vacation together.

You can move money from one account to another by swiping your finger across the account grid. As you can have multiple contributors and you can change the account associated with your debit card, it means that money flows more naturally. It feels like using a messaging app, not a financial app.

And it’s been working well in France. The company now has over 4 million users. Transactions have doubled over the past year, which means that usage is accelerating.

“Lydia has the largest P2P network in Europe outside of PayPal and has the potential to grow all across Europe with a mobile-first, customer-focused solution. This will bring demand for incremental consumer financial products and high merchant interest to accept the payment,” Jhawar told me in an email.

And 2020 has been a busy year for Lydia. The company has just released a complete redesign to better position the app as a super app for financial services. All the interactions and all the main tabs have been changed.

Lydia also re-launched its premium offering with two new premium plans that offer you higher limits over the free plan and an insurance package for the most expensive offer. Those plans are more in line with what the app offers today and should contribute to the company’s bottom line. “The next step is bringing Lydia to profitability and it’s something that has always been important for us,” Chiche said in a recent interview.

Behind the scenes, Lydia has also upgraded many core features, such as migrating cards to a new infrastructure, adding alerts to account aggregation, supporting instant SEPA transfers to bank accounts, etc.

In 2021, the company plans to build on top of that new foundation with more financial products. “We’re going to try every single product — credit, savings, investment,” Chiche said.

The company is also slowly expanding to more countries. But it wants to offer a product that feels like a local product with a local card and a local IBAN to increase acceptance rates. Lydia is starting with Portugal.

French startup In&motion has raised a $12 million (€10 million) funding round led by Upfront Ventures with 360 Capital also participating. The company has been working on wearable airbag systems for motorbikes.

Integrated in a vest, the airbag is completely autonomous and can detect crashes in 60 milliseconds. The company has worked on a device called the In&box that analyzes movements in real time. Thanks to different sensors, the device can determine when it’s time to activate the airbag.

In&motion has worked on different profiles for different types of activities. For instance, if you’re riding a motorcycle on a MotoGP track, chances are you’re going to move faster and change your trajectory quite often. You can choose between traditional motorcycle riding, track and off-road.

Professional racers are also increasingly using airbag systems. In addition to MotoGP racers, participants in the 2021 Dakar Rallye will have to use airbags.

The go-to-market strategy is interesting as the startup isn’t selling its system directly to end users. In&motion has partnered with existing motorcycle brands so that they can integrate the system in some vests. This way, In&motion doesn’t have to build out a network of resellers from scratch. So far, the company has sold tens of thousands of systems.

There’s also a subscription component with unlimited warranty and the ability to replace the In&box device with a new model after three years.

With today’s funding round, the company wants to expand beyond its home country with a focus on Germany and the U.S. The company plans to double the size of its team.

Image Credits: In&motion