French startup Spendesk has added $18 million to its Series B round. The company already raised $38.4 million as part of its Series B last year, which means that it raised $56.4 million as part of this round. Eight Roads Ventures is investing in today’s extension round.

Spendesk, as the name suggests, focuses on all things related to spend management. The company issues virtual and physical cards for employees, lets you set up an approval workflow and manages expense reimbursements. It can also centralize all your invoices and receipts on the platform.

By centralizing everything on the same platform, it lets you control your spending in real time and save time on accounting tasks. Reconciliation is easier if you combine transactions and receipts on Spendesk. Clients can also export data to Xero, Datev, Netsuite or Sage.

Image Credits: Spendesk

For big expenses, you can send a request to your manager. If they approve your request, you receive a single-use virtual card for that expense.

Similarly, if your company gives you a physical debit card, you get a pre-defined budget. Your manager can top up your card for big expenses, block ATM withdrawals, block weekend transactions and more. Employees can check their payments from the mobile app, see their card balance and add receipts.

Spendesk is a software-as-a-service product with a monthly subscription fee. While transactions have probably slowed down due to the economic crisis, the company says that its subscription revenue has doubled year-over-year. In just a year, the company grew from 100 to 200 people.

It remains focused on small and medium companies across Europe. There are 40,000 people using Spendesk through their companies. Clients include Algolia, Curve, Doctolib, Raisin and Wefox. The company has hired Joseph Smith as Chief Revenue Officer, pictured left above with the company’s CEO Rodolphe Ardant (pictured right).

Image Credits: Spendesk

High-end speaker manufacturer Devialet is launching its first pair of earbuds called Devialet Gemini. The in-ear earbuds feature active noise canceling and cost £279 in the U.K. — they will be available in the coming weeks.

The Devialet Gemini are completely wireless, which means that there’s no cord between each earbud, like on Apple’s AirPods. The company has developed three new patents for the product.

They feature cascading decompression chambers, which means that they should stick in your ears and provide adequate pressure. In-ear earbuds require a good seal.

Image Credits: Devialet

There are two microphones in each earbud for the active noise cancelation feature and a dedicated microphone for calls and other voice interactions. Like on the AirPods Pro, there are multiple ANC modes. You can remove background noise altogether or activate transparency modes so that you can hear what’s happening around you.

You can choose between three levels of ANC and two levels of transparency mode. The company is releasing a mobile app so that you can control those settings. There’s also a touch button at the rear of the earbuds that you can use to control music playback, noise cancelation or voice assistants.

The earbuds automatically adjusts the audio signal when the earbud moves. It uses a microphone to detect a change in frequency. The app can also tell you if you’re using the right tip for your ear.

The company promises 8 hours of battery life without ANC and 6 hours with ANC activated. The case provides 3.5 charges and works with wireless chargers using the Qi standard or a USB-C cable.

Image Credits: Devialet

High-end speaker manufacturer Devialet is launching its first pair of earbuds called Devialet Gemini. The in-ear earbuds feature active noise canceling and cost £279 in the U.K. — they will be available in the coming weeks.

The Devialet Gemini are completely wireless, which means that there’s no cord between each earbud, like on Apple’s AirPods. The company has developed three new patents for the product.

They feature cascading decompression chambers, which means that they should stick in your ears and provide adequate pressure. In-ear earbuds require a good seal.

Image Credits: Devialet

There are two microphones in each earbud for the active noise cancelation feature and a dedicated microphone for calls and other voice interactions. Like on the AirPods Pro, there are multiple ANC modes. You can remove background noise altogether or activate transparency modes so that you can hear what’s happening around you.

You can choose between three levels of ANC and two levels of transparency mode. The company is releasing a mobile app so that you can control those settings. There’s also a touch button at the rear of the earbuds that you can use to control music playback, noise cancelation or voice assistants.

The earbuds automatically adjusts the audio signal when the earbud moves. It uses a microphone to detect a change in frequency. The app can also tell you if you’re using the right tip for your ear.

The company promises 8 hours of battery life without ANC and 6 hours with ANC activated. The case provides 3.5 charges and works with wireless chargers using the Qi standard or a USB-C cable.

Image Credits: Devialet

Ÿnsect, the startup building the world’s most high tech bug colony, have added $224 million in equity and debt to an already impressive $148 million cash haul as it looks to commercialize its business.

Investors backing the company include the Los Angeles-based investment firm Upfront Ventures and the FootPrint Coalition, an investment vehicle financed by celebrity superhero Robert Downey Jr.

The financing, which includes $139 million in debt and another $65 million in equity will be used to fund the construction of the world’s largest insect farm in Amiens, France — set to open in early 2022.

Why invest a total of $372 million in equity and debt into bug farms? For Ÿnsect, it’s all about protein… and fish. Lots of fish.

See fish farming is an exploding industry even as the numbers of wild caught fish dwindle thanks to rising consumer demand and declining supplies thanks to ocean acidification and warming waters caused by climate change.

Industrial fish farming requires a lot of protein — and the sources of that protein are not good enough to keep industrial farmed fish healthy.

Ÿnsect hopes to change that by providing insect protein for things like fish food and fertilizer — and eventually pet food and (farther down the road) even food for people.

“Ÿnsect isn’t just about insect farming: With climate change and increasing populations worldwide, we need to produce more food with less available land and fewer resources, so that we’re not clearing forests and emptying our oceans. We believe Ÿnsect can play a pivotal role in this global solution,” co-founder and CEO Antoine Hubert said in a statement.

The company’s high-tech, vertical insect farms (primarily raising mealworms) are perfect proteins for the fish and can replace the limited sources of protein the industry currently relies on, according to investors like Upfront Ventures’ Yves Sisteron.

“Oceans are emptying and fish farms are taking over. We’re approaching 50 percent of fish coming from fish farms,” said Sisteron. “One of the main ingredients of fish feed comes from fish. These are from trawlers that rake the bottom of the ocean for anchovies that are combined with a protein paste that is fed to fish for fish farms. And that is basically not sustainable. The amounts in question are gigantic. Globally there’s about 44 million tons of fishfeed per year that is fed to farmed fish.”

Ÿnsect’s mealworms actually provide the fish with a lower-cost, higher quality protein, Sisteron said. “What Ÿnsect is solving is: Can we feed those fish a different kind of protein that will be scalable and also nutrient rich for the fish,” he said.

Ÿnsect transforms insects (and mealworms in particular) into proteins for animals and plants. The company is building full-stack factories that are fully automated, from insect reproduction to sterilization, sorting and packaging.

When the Amiens-based farm is open for business, the company expects to produce 100,000 tons of insect products annually. 500 people will work directly and indirectly on the project.

For the Downey Jr.-backed FootPrint Coalition Ventures, Ÿnsect’s combination of sustainable protein cultivation and massive end markets represented a compelling investment opportunity and a chance to back another company doing its part to combat climate change, according to founding partner Jonathan Schulhof.

It’s the firm’s second publicly disclosed investment after the bamboo-based toilet paper company Cloud Paper.

“We find the aquaculture industry to be absolutely fascinating and we think what they’re doing in that industry is vital,” Schulhof said.

Upfront and FootPrint are joining previous investors like Astanor Ventures along with other financial backers including Happiness Capital, Supernova Invest and Armat Group.

Caisse des Dépôts, Crédit Agricole Brie Picard and Caisse d’Epargne Hauts-de-France are the top banks contributing to today’s financing by providing a credit line. Some of them are taking some equity and other banks are also participating. Overall, Ÿnsect has raised $425 million since 2011.

Companies have already committed $105 million worth of contracts. Clients include wine growing company Torres, fish feed company Skretting and plant fertilizer company Compo Group.

In the future, Ÿnsect also plans to expand to the U.S. and manufacture new products, such as wet pet food.

Since 2011, European startup studio eFounders has launched 27 companies with a focus on software-as-a-service companies trying to improve the way we work. Some of them have been quite successful, such as Front and Aircall.

And the company is working on its next batch of startups. “We're particularly inspired by the new wave of productivity tools, that is ever more collaborative and flexible,” eFounders co-founder Thibaud Elziere said in a statement

In exchange for financial and human resources, eFounders keeps a significant stake in its startups. Ideally, startups raise a seed round and take off on their own after a year or two.

Here’s what’s coming up from eFounders.

Canyon

Canyon is a product for legal teams that want to ditch Word, PDF documents and emails. It starts with a central hub to hold all your drafts and documents. This way, you can track progress, get the latest document version and see the context around a document. Given that it is tailored for legal teams, it should work a bit better than a shared Dropbox folder.

You can create templates to reuse them later, see related emails directly in Canyon’s interface and invite other people so that they can have a look at what you’ve been working on.

Image Credits: Canyon

Kairn

Kairn is a task manager that tries to get out of the way as much as possible. When you’re working on your computer, you can add tasks directly from the app that you’re already using.

For instance, you can imagine adding a task by starring an email conversation in Gmail, forwarding a message to a WhatsApp bot or starring a message in Slack. There’s also a quick add window that you can trigger with a keyboard shortcut.

Read my full article on Kairn:

Image Credits: Kairn

Crew

Crew is focused on new hires and job applications. Given that many companies are actively looking for interesting candidates, Crew isn’t just a way to passively collect applications.

It lets you create automated workflows and handle everything you’d expect from a recruitment platform.

Image Credits: Crew

Collective

Collective is a product for freelancers who want to work together and form groups. It should make it easier to send a contract to a client that involves multiple freelancers working on the contract. Collective will make it easier to remain legally compliant.

French startup Memo Bank has unveiled three different plans for its new customers. The company is building a business bank for small and medium companies that generate between €2 million and €50 million in annual turnover.

Earlier this year, Memo Bank obtained licenses from the French regulator (ACPR) and the European Central Bank to become a credit institution. It can provide all the services you’d expect from a business bank, from current accounts to credit lines.

On paper, Memo Bank’s current accounts look a lot like a software-as-a-service product. There are three different plans. For €49 per month, you get one user account and each additional account costs €10 per month. You get 20 transactions in and out per month, each additional transaction costs €0.40 per transaction.

For €149 per month, you can create as many user accounts as you want and you get 200 transactions per month. Once again, additional transactions cost €0.40 per transaction.

And if you handle a lot of transactions, you get unlimited transactions for €399 per month. The mid-tier plan also lets you access an authorized overdraft.

Interestingly, companies on the top two tiers will earn interests on their deposits — 0.15% up to €100,000 and 0.30% up to €200,000 for the top two plans respectively. Memo Bank isn’t mentioning checks or payment cards for now.

Image Credits: Memo Bank

The startup is also saying that its web platform should work better than your average banking site. The search feature works as expected, you can issue grouped transfers to pay your employees and you can set up an approval workflow for big transactions.

More importantly, Memo Bank is open for business to issue loans. Companies can apply to get a €20,000 to €200,000 loan and pay back over 1 to 7 years. With this product, the startup is competing with online lending platforms, such as October.

French startup Exotec has raised a $90 million Series C round led by 83North, with existing investors Iris Capital and Breega also participating. Other existing investors include 360 Capital. The company has been working on semi-automated warehouses for e-commerce clients.

The system is based on tiny robots called Skypods. They roam the floor and go up and down racks to pick up standardized bins of products.

The company also provides logistics software to coordinate all those robots through the warehouse. As you scale, you can add more robots and more racks without any downtime.

It’s not going to replace humans altogether as you still have to pick up goods from the bin and pack stuff. But human operators can stay at a workstation while robots take care of all the roaming.

You can use a workstation to pick up goods but also to replenish bins. The idea is that you never have to enter the Exotec area. It’s a robot-only zone.

In addition to productivity gains, you can also increase your storage capacity by switching to Exotec thanks to tall racks and narrow aisles.

The company now has teams in Atlanta and Tokyo — it plans to produce 4,000 robots per year by 2021. Everything is manufactured in Lille, France in a 6,000 square-meter plant. The company currently has fourteen running systems around the world. Clients include Carrefour, Leclerc, Cdiscount and Fast Retailing (Uniqlo).

Exotec has previously raised $17.7 million in 2018 and $3.8 million (€3.3 million) in 2016.

Image Credits: Exotec

A few weeks after teasing its new product, French startup Klaxoon is launching Board, a visual interface that lets you work together during a video call. Instead of staring at other people’s faces, you get a shared canvas that you can use for presentations and to suggest ideas.

Klaxoon is well aware that many companies have strong opinions about video conferencing services. Some companies are already using Microsoft Teams for everything, others are using Zoom or Google Meet. That’s why the company is trying to make it as easy as possible to use Board while you’re on a call using Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet.

Given that you’re already in Board when you’re generating a Zoom link, you can also use Klaxoon’s own video-conferencing service called Live.

“Video represents less than 10% of your screen real estate. Our goal isn’t to compete with other services when it comes to pixels, high definition or the number of thumbnails,” Klaxoon co-founder and CEO Matthieu Beucher told me.

Instead, when you use Live, you accept multiple constraints that could help you remain focused on your meeting. For instance, you can only have 15 people in your meeting. The person organizing the meeting can set a limit — it can be 5 minutes, 15 minutes or 30 minutes. But you can’t use Live for a meeting that lasts longer than 30 minutes.

And finally, other people on the calls are represented through tiny thumbnails on the right side of the screen. Most of the screen is filled with a sort of digital whiteboard that you can use to write text, insert images or videos. You can work on your board before starting the meeting or you can add a table from a template library.

People joining your meeting can submit ideas through digital sticky notes. You can also switch from the freeform view to a more structured column view to move ideas from one category to another.

Klaxoon has been working on interactive whiteboards and meeting tools for quite a few years now. Board combines some of the stuff that the company is already providing to its clients, but with a focus on remote meetings. The service is launching today for €9.90 per month.

Image Credits: Klaxoon

French startup Mirakl has raised a $300 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation — the company is now a unicorn. Mirakl helps you launch and manage a marketplace on your e-commerce website. Many customers also rely on Mirakl-powered marketplaces for B2B transactions.

Permira Advisers is leading the round, with existing investors 83North, Bain Capital Ventures, Elaia Partners and Felix Capital also participating.

“We’ve closed this round in 43 days,” co-founder and U.S. CEO Adrien Nussenbaum told me. But the due diligence process has been intense. “[Permira Advisers] made 250 calls to clients, leads, partners and former employees.”

Many e-commerce companies rely on third-party sellers to increase their offering. Instead of having one seller selling to many customers, marketplaces let you sell products from many sellers to many customers. Mirakl has built a solution to manage the marketplace of your e-commerce platform.

300 companies have been working with Mirakl for their marketplace, such as Best Buy Canada, Carrefour, Darty and Office Depot. More recently, Mirakl has been increasingly working with B2B clients as well.

These industry-specific marketplaces can be used for procurement or bulk selling of parts. In this category, clients include Airbus Helicopters, Toyota Material Handling and Accor’s Astore. 60% of Mirakl’s marketplace are still consumer-facing marketplaces, but the company is adding as many B2B and B2C marketplaces these days.

“We’ve developed a lot of features that enable platform business models that go further than simple marketplaces,” co-founder and CEO Philippe Corrot told me. “For instance, we’ve invested in services — it lets our clients develop service platforms.”

In France, Conforama can upsell customers with different services when they buy some furniture for instance. Mirakl has also launched its own catalog manager so that you can merge listings, add information, etc.

The company is using artificial intelligence to do the heavy-lifting on this front. There are other AI-enabled features, such as fraud detection.

Given that Mirakl is a marketplace expert, it’s not surprising that the company has also created a sort of marketplace of marketplaces with Mirakl Connect.

“Mirakl Connect is a platform that is going to be the single entry point for everybody in the marketplace ecosystem, from sellers to operators and partners,” Corrot said.

For sellers, it’s quite obvious. You can create a company profile and promote products on multiple marketplaces at once. But the company is also starting to work with payment service providers, fulfillment companies, feed aggregators and other partners. The company wants to become a one-stop shop on marketplaces with those partners.

Overall, Mirakl-powered marketplaces have generated $1.2 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) during the first half of 2020. It represents a 111% year-over-year increase, despite the economic crisis.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to expand across all areas — same features, same business model, but with more resources. It plans to hire 500 engineers and scale its sales and customer success teams.

Meet PowerZ, a new French startup founded by Emmanuel Freund, the founder of popular cloud gaming service Shadow, as well as former Shadow employees. The company wants to develop a video game that is as engaging as Fortnite, but with a focus on education. It is both an edtech startup and a video game studio.

PowerZ has raised a $3.5 million (€3 million) seed round from Educapital, Hachette Livre and various business angels, such as Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet, Michaël Benabou and Octave Klaba.

After turning Shadow into one of the most valuable French startup, Freund stepped back and took some time to think about his second act. He spent some time with his two children aged 5 and 8 years old.

“I realized that code learning tools for children are very lacking. So I turned to math because you don’t need any support material. There are 40,000 apps but they all look like holiday workbooks,” Freund told me.

From his experience, most education apps are focused on one knowledge area in particular and are somewhat basic. According to him, education hasn’t changed that much in the past 100 years. When you walk into a classroom, it still looks like a classroom.

At the same time, when you see a kid playing on Fortnite or Minecraft, chances are they’re hooked. You tell them to come for dinner and they ask you for five more minutes of playtime.

“What if we could build a sort of Ready Player One for education. An open world in which a child could learn new things,” Freund said.

Here’s what you can expect from PowerZ. First, it’s not going to focus on one area in particular. You can learn history, geography, math, but also botanical knowledge, astronomy and poetry.

Second, content isn’t going to be gamified to motivate you to learn more to do more in the game. You’ll be able to unlock some customizations but PowerZ is taking it easy with gamification.

Third, the game will evolve depending on what you’re doing. Some children will be better at math, others will be better at grammar. Some children like to learn new things in short sessions, others can remain focused for a while. This way, parents can get reports on what their children have been doing.

PowerZ wants to develop its game with a community of parents, teachers and children. There will be an alpha test in 2021, first in France and then in English-speaking countries. It’s still the early days of the company, but it’s going to be interesting to see how it evolves over time.

Image Credits: PowerZ

French startup Klaxoon is currently testing a new product called Board. The company expects to launch Board at some point during the second half of September. Board is a new visual interface that connects directly with video-conferencing services, such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet.

If you’re not familiar with Klaxoon, the startup wants to make meetings more engaging and little bit less boring. The startup has built a suite of tools tailored for different use cases. There are voting and brainstorming modules, multiple features that let you gather feedback through questions, surveys and more. Meeting organizers can also get feedback and see analytics their meetings.

While Klaxoon already offers interactive whiteboards for your meeting rooms, chances are your team isn’t in the meeting room right now. That’s why Klaxoon started working on Board during lockdown. It is accessible from your phone, tablet and computer.

Board brings together a set of interactive tools in a video call. It adds a blank canvas that you can use to write text, insert images or videos. You can also start with a template and fill it out during the call. Other people joining the call can react using likes, votes or questions.

And here’s what it’ll look like when it launches:

Image Credits: Klaxoon

Given that Klaxoon has been working hard to replace sticky notes and other low-tech solutions used during meetings, the startup seems particularly well-positioned right now. Many companies don’t plan to reopen their offices for the foreseeable future.

Klaxoon has raised around $55 million over the years and now has a team of 240 employees. 15% of Fortune 500 companies use the service.

Facebook France is going to pay $125 million (€106 million) in back taxes according to business magazine Capital — Facebook confirmed the agreement to both Capital and Reuters. French tax authorities raided Facebook’s offices in Paris in 2012 and later opened an investigation on unpaid taxes covering activities between 2009 and 2018.

According to the investigation, Facebook allegedly optimized its effective tax rate in France by funneling sales to other subsidiaries in different European countries.

It’s a grey area as funneling sales to a different country is legal. But you have to prove that there wasn’t any sales person based in France selling to a French customer. Those contracts can be reclassified as French contracts.

Many tech companies have had to pay back taxes in France for the same issue. For instance, Google agreed to pay a $549 million fine and $510 million in back taxes in 2019. Similarly, Apple settled a dispute covering $572 million in back taxes.

This is a new strategy for French authorities. Companies can avoid a public fight if they settle with tax authorities directly. This way, companies avoid some public backlash and it speeds up the process. Amazon was the first company to settle in 2018.

“We take our tax obligations seriously, pay the taxes we owe in all markets where we operate,” Facebook told Reuters. As a result, the company’s revenue in France has jumped from €56 million to €389 million between 2017 and 2018, representing a nearly 600% revenue increase in 12 months.

We’ve reached out to Facebook and will update this article if we learn more.