Layoffs in the technology and venture-backed worlds continued today, as 23andMe confirmed to CNBC that it laid off around 100 people, or about 14% of its formerly 700-person staff. The cuts would be notable by themselves, but given how many other reductions have recently been announced, they indicate that a rolling round of belt-tightening amongst well-funded private companies continues. (TechCrunch confirmed the numbers with the company.)

Mozilla, for example, cut 70 staffers earlier this year. As TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois reported earlier in January, the company’s revenue-generating products were taking longer to reach market than expected. And with less revenue coming in than expected, its human footprint had to be reduced.

23andMe and Mozilla are not alone, however. Playful Studios cut staff just this week, 2019 itself saw more than 300% more tech layoffs than in the preceding year and TechCrunch has covered a litany of layoffs at Vision Fund-backed companies over the past few months, including:

Staff cuts at Zume, the startup famous for considering making mobile pizza robotsPersonnel reductions at Rappi, an e-commerce companyCuts at Getaround, a car rental serviceLayoffs at Oyo, a budget hotel unicorn

Scooter unicorns Lime and Bird have also reduced staff this year. The for-profit drive is firing on all cylinders in the wake of the failed WeWork IPO attempt. WeWork was an outlier in terms of how bad its financial results were, but the fear it introduced to the market appears pretty damn mainstream by this point. (Forsake hope, alle ye whoe require a Series H.)

The money at risk, let alone the human cost, is high. Zume has raised more than $400 million. 23andMe has raised an even sharper $786.1 million. Rappi? How about $1.4 billion. And Oyo? $3.2 billion so far. Every company that loses money eventually dies. And every company that always makes money lives forever. It seems that lots of companies want to jump over the fence, make some money and rebuild investor confidence in their shares.

It’s just too bad that the rank-and-file are taking the brunt of the correction.

It’s one thing to develop a working machine learning model, it’s another to put it to work in an application. Cortex Labs is an early-stage startup with some open-source tooling designed to help data scientists take that last step.

The company’s founders were students at Berkeley when they observed that one of the problems around creating machine learning models was finding a way to deploy them. While there was a lot of open-source tooling available, data scientists are not experts in infrastructure.

CEO Omer Spillinger says that infrastructure was something the four members of the founding team — himself, CTO David Eliahu, head of engineering Vishal Bollu and head of growth Caleb Kaiser — understood well.

What the four founders did was take a set of open-source tools and combine them with AWS services to provide a way to deploy models more easily. “We take open-source tools like TensorFlow, Kubernetes and Docker and we combine them with AWS services like CloudWatch, EKS (Amazon’s flavor of Kubernetes) and S3 to basically give one API for developers to deploy their models,” Spillinger explained.

He says that a data scientist starts by uploading an exported model file to S3 cloud storage. “Then we pull it, containerize it and deploy it on Kubernetes behind the scenes. We automatically scale the workload, and let you switch to GPUs if it’s compute intensive. We stream logs and expose [the model] to the web. We help you manage security around that, stuff like that,” he said.

While he acknowledges this is not unlike Amazon SageMaker, the company’s long-term goal is to support all of the major cloud platforms. SageMaker, of course, only works on the Amazon cloud, while Cortex will eventually work on any cloud. In fact, Spillinger says the biggest feature request they’ve gotten to this point is to support Google Cloud. He says that and support for Microsoft Azure are on the road map.

The Cortex founders have been keeping their head above water while they wait for a commercial product with the help of an $888,888 seed round from Engineering Capital in 2018. If you’re wondering about that oddly specific number, it’s partly an inside joke — Spillinger’s birthday is August 8th — and partly a number arrived at to make the valuation work, he said.

For now, the company is offering the open-source tools, and building a community of developers and data scientists. Eventually, it wants to monetize by building a cloud service for companies that don’t want to manage clusters — but that is down the road, Spillinger said.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re digging into One Medical’s updated IPO filing released this week. The document contains directional pricing information that will help us understand where the tech-enabled medical care startup expects the market to value itself and also details its Q4 2019 Preliminary Estimated Unaudited Financial Results, which gives us a fuller picture of its financial health.

As we’ll see, One Medical’s expected valuation matches secondary-market transactions in the firm’s equity, and, at the upper-end of its proposed IPO range, represents a solid boost to its final private valuation. Afterwards, we’ll dig back through the company’s numbers, figure out its implied revenue multiple and make a bullish and bearish argument for the company’s hoped-for IPO valuation.

It’s going to be fun! (For a general dive into the company’s IPO filing, head here.)

Early Stage SF is sneaking up on us and there is plenty to be excited about. The one-day event, which brings together a wide variety of startup experts to host breakout sessions, is going down on April 28 and we have a handful of speakers to announce.

So without any further ado:

We’re thrilled to announce that Jeff Clavier, Sarah Guo, Caryn Marooney and Ali Partovi will be joining us at the event.

Jeff Clavier is managing partner and founder at Uncork Capital, with portfolio companies that include Eventbrite, SendGrid, Fitbit, Vungle and Mint.com. His current investments include Vidyard, Postmates, Molekule, Shippo and Front.

Seed Funding Tips and Tricks – Jeff Clavier

There are now a thousand micro-VCs entrepreneurs can raise capital from, creating confusing market dynamics. Learn tips and tricks on fund raising from Uncork Capital’s managing partner, Jeff Clavier.

Sarah Guo joined Greylock Partners in 2013 and led the firm’s investments in Cleo, Demisto, Sqreen and Utmost, and sits on the boards of several startups. Before Greylock, she was at Goldman Sachs, where she invested at the growth level in companies like Dropbox, and advised pre-IPO tech companies and public tech companies alike, including Workday (the former) and Netflix, Zynga and Nvidia (the latter).

SaaS Fundraising and Growth – Sarah Guo

Sarah Guo, partner at Greylock, is an early-stage investor in enterprise software, with over half a dozen investments made across cybersecurity, AI, HR and health. She’ll give a rundown on why strong storytelling, a focus on solving a single problem well and a thesis on defensibility are all essential in a pitch, and why making seed and Series A investments often comes down to betting on the founding team.

Ali Partovi runs Neo, a mentorship community and VC fund that brings together tech veterans with diverse startup leaders. Partovi has backed the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook and Uber, and also founded Code.org. Partovi also has experience as an entrepreneur, selling his first startup LinkExchange all the way back in 1998.

Hiring Your First 5 Engineers – Ali Partovi

The first few employees determine a startup’s trajectory. Learn the dos and don’ts of hiring your early engineers.

Caryn Marooney is a partner at Coatue Management, sitting on the boards of Zendesk and Elastic, with an advisory role at Airtable. Before Coatue, Caryn oversaw communications for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus for eight years. Marooney is also a co-founder of the OutCast Agency, where she worked with companies across a wide spectrum of industries and sizes, including Salesforce, Amazon, Netflix and VMware.

Why Should Anyone Care? (Making Your Brand Stand Out) – Caryn Marooney

Startups often struggle to create a narrative that stands out. As a general partner at Coatue, former head of Comms at Facebook and co-founder of the OutCast Agency, Caryn Marooney has seen it all. Come learn the brand and messaging framework that can help your company stand out (while staying true to yourself).

There will be about 50+ breakout sessions at the show, and attendees will have an opportunity to attend at least seven. The sessions will cover all the core topics confronting early-stage founders — up through Series A — as they build a company, from raising capital to building a team to growth. Each breakout session will be led by notables in the startup world on par with the folks we’ve announced today.

Don’t worry about missing a breakout session, because transcripts from each will be available to show attendees. And most of the folks leading the breakout sessions have agreed to hang at the show for at least half the day and participate in CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s great app to connect founders and investors based on shared interests.

Here’s the fine print. Each of the 50+ breakout sessions is limited to around 100 attendees. We expect a lot more attendees, of course, so signups for each session are on a first-come, first-serve basis. Buy your ticket today and you can sign up for the breakouts we are announcing today. Pass holders will also receive 24-hour advance notice before we announce the next batch. (And yes, you can “drop” a breakout session in favor of a new one, in the event there is a schedule conflict.)

We’re absolutely thrilled for this event, and we hope you are, too. Buy a pass to Early Stage SF 2020 right here!

Interested in sponsoring Early Stage? Hit us up here.

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Brooke Hammerling, the strategic communications veteran who brought us Brew PR, announced her new project today.

Dubbed The New New Thing, Hammerling’s new communications advisory wants to help startups bring more authenticity to brand messaging and comms through high-level partnerships with CEOs, founders and executive leadership teams.

There are a few critical pieces to The New New Thing:

First, Hammerling will not focus on the usual six-month press release strategy that drives communications at most tech startups. The New New Thing isn’t focused as much on an individual product or funding round announcement as much as the high-level strategy of storytelling across the entire brand, including the company and the founder. In fact, the only pre-launch clients Hammerling will be taking on must be female-led and mission-driven.

Second, she’ll be working directly with startup leadership teams to craft those narratives paying special attention to the stories in between the stories.

And finally, The New New Thing will have a huge focus on authenticity as a driver of relationships between its clients and the media.

One catalyst for the new project, according to Hammerling, was the evolution of the comms landscape as a whole. Not only is the media’s bullshit detector hyper-sensitive, but so is the end-reader. It’s no longer enough to send out the same robotic press release announcing funding.

“I’m bored of seeing the same picture of two male founders announcing their funding for some fintech product that’s going to change the world,” said Hammerling. “There needs to be a fostering of the relationships between CEOs and the people telling their story. Being authentic is really hard for larger organizations, or really any organization. And now, in 2020, there is no option but to be.”

Hammerling explained that getting into the weeds with founders and tackling a storytelling challenge is what she loves doing most. She admits that managing a large team and dealing with the nitty gritty of comms (writing up press releases, pitching speakers for tech conferences, etc.) aren’t her strong suits.

As you might imagine, the launch of The New New Thing means that Hammerling has officially left Brew PR, the firm she founded and sold to Freuds for $15 million.

The New New Thing is part of a newly expanded collective of service providers called Plan A, led by co-CEOs MT Carney and Andrew Essex. Plan A combines expert service providers from the fields of communications, branding, advertising, creative and social, among others.

Hammerling will be focusing on early and growth-stage startups in the tech industry, with a current client list that includes Lemonade, LiveNation, Framebridge, Splice and Eko.

One example of how The New New Thing works is made clear with Splice. The company is represented by a PR firm that manages the day-to-day news cycle and announcement schedule, while Hammerling works directly with founder and CEO Steve Martocci on the overall narrative that runs through all of that.

When asked about the greatest challenge moving forward, Hammerling’s answer offered a taste of the authenticity and relatability she’s trying to bring out of her clients.

“Can I do this? Do I have the right instincts and guidance for my clients?” said Hammerling. “I think I do and I’ve been successful at that, but how do I maintain that and communicate that to others?”

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Fintech startup Revolut lets you earn interest on your savings thanks to a new feature called savings vaults. That feature is currently only available to users living in the U.K. and paying taxes in the U.K.

The company has partnered with Flagstone for that feature. For now, the feature is limited to Revolut customers with a Metal subscription (£12.99 per month or £116 per year). But Revolut says that it will be available to Revolut Premium and Standard customers in the near future.

Savings vaults work pretty much like normal vaults. You can create sub-accounts in the Revolut app to put some money aside. And Revolut offers you multiple ways to save. You can round up all your card transactions to the nearest pound and save spare change in a vault.

You also can set up weekly or monthly transactions from your main account to a vault. And, of course, you can transfer money manually whenever you want.

Metal customers in the U.K. can now turn normal vaults into savings vaults. The only difference is that you’re going to earn interest — Revolut pays that interest daily. You can take money from your savings vault whenever you want.

Revolut promises 1.35% AER interest rate up to a certain limit. If you put a huge sum of money in your savings vault, you’ll get a lower interest rate above the limit. Your money is protected by the FSCS up to a value of £85,000 for eligible customers.

The food industry may be the biggest industry in the world, but it’s also one of the least efficient. BCG says 1.6 billions tons of food, worth $1.2 trillion, is wasted in food every year, and those numbers are only expected to go up.

A number of players have stepped up to try to solve their own portion of the problem, and one such solution is Crisp. The company, which received $14 million in Series A funding last year led by FirstMark Capital, is today going live with its platform (which has been in beta).

Crisp aims to solve the global food waste problem via demand forecasts. Founder and CEO Are Traasdahl, a serial founder, believes that a lack of communication and data flow between the many players in the supply chain is a main cause for all this waste, a great deal of which happens long before the food reaches the consumer.

Right now, forecasting demand is nowhere close to a perfect science for many of these players. From food brands to distributors to grocery stores, the problem is usually solved by looking at a spreadsheet from last year’s sales to try to determine the signals that played into this or that SKU’s sales performance.

And then there was Crisp.

Integrated with almost any ERP software a company might have, Crisp ingests historical data from these food brands and combines that data with signals around other demand drivers, such as seasonality, holidays, price sensitivity and other pricing information, marketing campaigns, competitive landscape, weather that might affect the sale or shipment of certain produce or other ingredients.

Using these data points, and historical sales data, Crisp believes it can give a much more accurate picture of demand over the next day, week, month or year.

But Crisp isn’t just for food brands, such as Nounós Creamery, a Crisp customer that says its reduced scrapped inventory by 80% since switching to the platform. Crisp serves almost every player in the food supply chain, from retailers to distributors to brands to brokers.

And the more customers it gets, the better it is at predicting demand on a very specific level. For instance, the demand forecasting Crisp offers for a particular grocery store, based on external data, will obviously get much better once that grocery store is a customer on the platform.

Traasdahl was initially concerned that his customers would be reluctant to hand over this type of sensitive sales data, and also that players within the industry might be anxious to hand over such data to a platform that’s aggregating everyone’s data, including their competitors’. Turns out, the food industry has more of a “better together” mentality.

“Other industries are not as dependent on each other,” said Traasdahl. “If I am a creamery and need to buy blueberries for my yogurt, I may have five different vendors for those blueberries. And if they don’t get delivered on the right day, Costco will yell at me for being late with the yogurt. Everyone in the supply chain is somewhat dependent on each other.”

For that reason, it’s been easier than expected to attract clients to the platform. The prospect of a collaborative demand forecast platform, which is pulling signals from across the entire industry, is going to be more accurate than siloed demand forecasts produced by a single vendor or brand.

During the beta program, which launched in October, Crisp brought on more than 30 companies to the platform, including Gilbert’s Craft Sausages, SunFed Perfect Produce, Nounós Creamery, Hofseth, REMA and Superior Farms.

IBM (Nasdaq: IBM) delivered a surprising performance for its fourth quarter. Not only did the company manage to surpass market expectations, but also delivered a y-o-y growth in revenue – a first for...

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Bounce, a Bangalore-based startup that operates more than 20,000 electric and gasoline dockless bikes and scooters in nearly three dozen cities in India, said today it has raised $105 million in a new funding round as it explores sustainable ways to expand within the nation and build its own electric vehicles.

The new financing round, a Series D, was co-led by existing investors Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital and Accel Partners, the startup said. The new round valued Bounce at a little over $500 million, up from about $200 million in June last year, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch reported in late November that Bounce was in advanced stages of talks to raise $150 million at over $500 million valuation. The new round pushes the startup’s total raise to $194 million.

Bounce, formerly known as Metro Bikes, allows customers to rent a scooter and pay as low as 1 Indian rupee (0.15 cents) for the first kilometer of the ride. The startup, which clocks 120,000 rides each day, allows users to leave the vehicle in any nearby docking station or partnered mom-and-pop store after the ride.

Bounce earlier deployed its own operations team in each city and flooded the market with its scooters, but in recent weeks it has started to explore a new strategy, said co-founder and chief executive Vivekananda Hallekere in an interview with TechCrunch.

“We realized that it was not the most efficient move to expand Bounce’s network on our own,” he said. The startup now works with mom-and-pop stores and local merchants in each city and they run their own operations.

Millions of mom-and-pop stores dot cities, towns and villages in India. In recent years, scores of startups and companies have started to work with them to address the last-mile challenge. Amazon said earlier this month that it has partnered with more than 20,000 mom-and-pop stores in the nation to use them to store and deliver packages.

To date, Bounce has replicated this model in six cities in India (including Vijayawada and Mangalore), and has partnered with more than 250,000 shops and merchants. “We launch in the cities with our own vehicles, but over time, these micro-entrepreneurs deploy their own bikes and scooters. They are still using our app, and are part of the Bounce platform, but they don’t have to be locked into our scooter ecosystem,” he explained.

The shift in strategy comes as Bounce looks to cut expenses and find a sustainable way to expand. “Otherwise, I would need a billion dollar of debt to launch a million vehicles in India,” he said. “We wanted a model that is scalable and profitable, and helps us create the most impact.”

Bounce is part of a small group of startups that is attempting to address a market that cab-hailing services Uber and Ola have been unable to tackle. The startup competes with Vogo, which is backed by Ola, and Yulu, which maintains a partnership with Uber.

Riding these bikes is more affordable than hailing a cab, and also two wheels are much faster in the crowded traffic of urban cities. These bikes have also proven useful in other ways. Hallekere said female passengers access more than 30% of rides on Bounce — a figure that beats the industry estimates, because women feel much safer with bikes, he said. “They don’t have to worry about how they would commute back from work,” he said.

Bounce is also working on building its own ecosystem of electric vehicles. The startup said it has already built a scooter with a metal chassis that can survive for at least 200,000 kilometers. The idea is to build electric scooters that work best for shared mobility, something Hallekere said the ecosystem is currently missing.

“In our tests, we found that even if you threw this bike from the first floor of a building, nothing happens to it. It is also more tech-enabled, so it can tell when the second seat of the bike is in use and can bill users accordingly, for instance,” he explained. The startup plans to deploy these vehicles in the coming months.

Kabir Narang, a partner at B Capital, told TechCrunch in an interview that he sees great potential in the shared mobility future in India, and Bounce team’s passion and commitment to solving these challenges made it easy for them to place their “long-term” bet on the startup.

If you’ve ever entered a company’s office as a visitor or contractor, you probably know the routine: check in with a receptionist, figure out who invited you, print out a badge and get on your merry way. Brussels, Belgium and New York-based Proxyclick aims to streamline this process, while also helping businesses keep their people and assets secure. As the company announced today, it has raised a $15 million Series B round led by Five Elms Capital, together with previous investor Join Capital.

In total, Proxyclick says its systems have now been used to register more than 30 million visitors in 7,000 locations around the world. In the U.K. alone, more than 1,000 locations use the company’s tools. Current customers include L’Oréal, Vodafone, Revolut, PepsiCo and Airbnb, as well as a number of other Fortune 500 firms.

Gregory Blondeau, founder and CEO of Proxyclick, stresses that the company believes that paper logbooks, which are still in use in many companies, are simply not an acceptable solution anymore, not in the least because that record is often permanent and visible to other visitors.

“We all agree it is not acceptable to have those paper logbooks at the entrance where everyone can see previous visitors,” he said. “It is also not normal for companies to store visitors’ digital data indefinitely. We already propose automatic data deletion in order to respect visitor privacy. In a few weeks, we’ll enable companies to delete sensitive data such as visitor photos sooner than other data. Security should not be an excuse to exploit or hold visitor data longer than required.”

What also makes Proxyclick stand out from similar solutions is that it integrates with a lot of existing systems for access control (including C-Cure and Lenel systems). With that, users can ensure that a visitor only has access to specific parts of a building, too.

In addition, though, it also supports existing meeting rooms, calendaring and parking systems, and integrates with Wi-Fi credentialing tools so your visitors don’t have to keep asking for the password to get online.

Like similar systems, Proxyclick provides businesses with a tablet-based sign-in service that also allows them to get consent and NDA signatures right during the sign-in process. If necessary, the system also can compare the photos it takes to print out badges with those on a government-issued ID to ensure your visitors are who they say they are.

Blondeau noted that the whole industry is changing, too. “Visitor management is becoming mainstream, it is transitioning from a local, office-related subject handled by facility managers to a global, security and privacy-driven priority handled by chief information security officers. Scope, decision drivers and key people involved are not the same as in the early days,” he said.

It’s no surprise then that the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its roadmap. Specifically, it’s looking to integrate its solution with more third-party systems with a focus on physical security features and facial recognition, as well as additional new enterprise features.

Memphis Meats, a developer of technologies to manufacture meat, seafood and poultry from animal cells, has raised $161 million in financing from investors, including Softbank Group, Norwest and Temasek, the investment fund backed by the government of Singapore.

The investment brings the company’s total financing to $180 million. Previous investors include individual and institutional investors like Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Threshold Ventures, Cargill, Tyson Foods, Finistere, Future Ventures, Kimbal Musk, Fifty Years and CPT Capital.

Other companies, including Future Meat Technologies, Aleph Farms, Higher Steaks, Mosa Meat and Meatable, are pursuing meat grown from cell cultures as a replacement for animal husbandry, whose environmental impact is a large contributor to deforestation and climate change around the world.

Innovations in computational biology, bio-engineering and materials science are creating new opportunities for companies to develop and commercialize technologies that could replace traditional farming with new ways to produce foods that have a much lower carbon footprint and bring about an age of superabundance, according to investors.

The race is on to see who will be the first to market with a product.

“For the entire industry, an investment of this size strengthens confidence that this technology is here today rather than some far-off future endeavor. Once there is a “proof of concept” for cultivated meat — a commercially available product at a reasonable price point — this should accelerate interest and investment in the industry,” said Bruce Friedrich, the executive director of the Good Food Institute, in an email. “This is still an industry that has sprung up almost overnight and it’s important to keep a sense of perspective here. While the idea of cultivated meat has been percolating for close to a century, the very first prototype was only produced six years ago.”

Back in September, Betaworks put out a call for startups to participate in its latest “camp,” this one focused on audio.

Danika Laszuk, the head of Betaworks Camp, told me at the time that the startup studio was looking for companies that are trying to build “audio-first” experiences for smart speakers and wireless headphones, or pursuing other audio-related opportunities like synthetic audio or social audio.

Now Betaworks is unveiling the six startups that it has selected to participate in the program, covering everything from game assistants to AI music production. Each startup receives a pre-seed investment from Betaworks, and will be working out of the firm’s New York City offices for the next three months.

Here are the companies:

Storm is working on a live audio platform that it says will allow your friends to ask you anything.Midgame is building voice-enabled gaming assistants, starting with a bot that answers questions to improve your gameplay in Stardew Valley.Scout FM is developing hands-free listening experiences such as podcast radio stations and voice assistants for Amazon Alexa, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.Never Before Heard Sounds is an AI-powered music production company, working to create new sounds and new musical data sets.SyncFloor is a marketplace of commercial music that can be used in movies, TV shows, ads, video games and elsewhere.The Next Big Idea Club offers a subscription for curated nonfiction books — you can buy the books themselves, but also read, watch or listen to condensed summaries.

Sramana Mitra: What is the preferred check size for your fund? Anand Rajaraman: We write about $2 million to $3 million checks, which means that we could co-lead in the US. In foreign geographies, we...

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According to an IDC research report, worldwide revenues for Big Data and business analytics solutions grew 12% to $189.1 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at 13% CAGR to $274.3 billion by 2022....

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Blossom Capital, the early-stage VC firm co-founded by ex-Index Ventures and LocalGlobe VC Ophelia Brown, is announcing a second fund, less than 12 months since fund one closed.

The new fund, which is described as “heavily oversubscribed,” sits at $185 million. That’s up from $85 million first time around.

Blossom’s remit remains broadly the same: to be the lead investor in European tech startups at Series A, along with doing some seed deals, too. In particular, the VC will continue to focus on finance, design, marketplaces, travel, developer-focused tools, infrastructure and “API-first” companies.

Its differentiator is pitched as so-called “high conviction” investing, which sees it back fewer companies by writing larger cheques, along with claiming to have close ties to U.S. top tier investors ready to back portfolio companies at the next stage.

And whilst a “bridge to the valley” is a well worn claim by multiple European VCs, Blossom’s track record so far bears this is out somewhat, even if it is nascent. Of the firm’s portfolio, travel booking platform Duffel has received two follow-on investment rounds led by Benchmark and Index Ventures; cybersecurity automation platform Tines received follow-on investment led by Accel Partners; and payments unicorn Checkout.com is also backed by Insight Partners.

In addition, I understand that about half of Blossom’s LPs are in the U.S., and that all of the firm’s original LPs invested in this second fund, which Brown concedes was a lot easier to raise than the first. That’s presumably down to the up round valuations Blossom is already able to tout.

Citing benchmark data from Cambridge Associates and Preqin, Blossom says it sits in the top 5% of funds of 2018/2019 vintage in the U.S. and EU. Although, less than two years old, I would stress that it is still very early days.

More broadly, Brown and Blossom’s other partners — Imran Gohry, Louise Samet and Mike Hudack — argue that the most successful European companies historically are those that were able to attract U.S. investors but that companies no longer need to relocate to the U.S. to seize the opportunity.

“When we looked at the data it was very clear at the growth stage that, outside of Index and Accel, the most successful European outcomes were driven by the combination of European early-stage investors and top-tier U.S. growth investors,” explained Blossom Capital partner, Imran Ghory, in a statement. “From day one we prioritised building those relationships, both to share knowledge but also provide a bridge for European founders to access the best growth capital as they scale”.

We updated this report with a correction; the original said the fund is less than a year old — in fact it’s less than two years old