(Disclaimer: we have highlighted our portfolio entrepreneurs because they are the ones we know best, but we know there are many initiatives from a lot of start-ups in that sense, and we’d like to thank them all too!)
We are all in this together. During the past couple of weeks, VCs have been focusing on portfolio startups and helping them with recommendations (here is the email we wrote to our portfolio entrepreneurs), actionnable documents (here is our playbook) and most of all: time. We like to call this part of our job Venture Caring.
If you were to remember one thing we told our portfolio entrepreneurs numerous times: “Cash is king”. This means prioritizing accordingly and focusing on “Money, Money, Money”.
But another question pops up: How can startups fight this virus and the crisis associated? How can they contribute to the global effort? Obviously, it varies according totheir sector, business and stage.
But in times of social distancing and work from home, startups — which by nature at the forefront of agility, innovation and digitalisation (capable of delivering value remotely, safely) - are likely to contribute. From deep tech startups that could help speed up the Research to combat the virus, to startups offering collaborative tools to help other Companies get swiftly organized during the crisis, yes, startups can help and they already are helping.
We are very proud to share initiatives of startups of our portfolio. Big up to you and your amazing teams and kudos to all who help and share good vibes in these harsh times! 🙏
📍Aqemia
Aqemia generates therapeutic molecules that have high affinity for a target. To generate the optimal molecule, they combine machine learning generative algorithms and proprietary stat mech algorithms that predict drug-target affinity 10'000x faster than competition. Elaia backed Emmanuelle & Maximilien last July.
🤜 Fighting Covid-19: Today, they want to contribute to repositioning of existing medicines to fight COVID-19 in coming weeks.They’re willing to screen all the approved and available molecules against COVID-19 target proteins with their disruptive algorithms.
The team is composed of theoretical physicists and mathematicians and they are seeking advices from biologists / infectiologists on which proteins to target. If you have ideas and want to contribute do not hesitate to contact them !maximilien.levesque@aqemia.com, emmanuelle.martiano@aqemia.com📍 Mirakl
Mirakl is the leading technology for marketplace, dropship and business ecosystems. We were “supporter of the first hour”. You can find more details here about their adventure since our investment back in 2012!
🤜 Fighting Covid-19: Yesterday, the Mirakl team launched a very critical marketplace StopCOVID19.fr. This platform allows manufacturers specializing in the manufacture of essential products and equipment, distributors and subcontractors to market them with health professionals and public institutions engaged in the fight against COVID-19.The French Government reached out to Mirakl and their wonderful teams launched the marketplace within 48h! Mirakl is operating and providing the marketplace on a pro-bono basis to support global virus combat efforts. This is a tribute to the marketplace model which will save retail, Mirakl’s great technology and above all the talent and passion of our people. Learn more here.
This platform provides solutions to 3 major problems:
👉 It resolves the shortage of essential products and materials
👉 It provides a secure platform
👉 It centralizes the supply and demand of essential commodities for professionals
If you represent a government and need a similar platform please reach out.📍Fab’Entech
Fab’entech develops passive immunotherapy treatments for emergency situations. Launched in 2009 on the basis of a immunotherapy process initially developed by Sanofi Pasteur for its own product and licensed to Fab’entech , Fab’entech treatments are targeting neutralization of a toxin or virus : it has already developed a first treatment against avian flu H5N1 and worked, in particular, on a treatment for Ebola . Fab’entech is currently developing a Counter-Measure-Treatment against bioterrorism threat, in collaboration with the French army which participated in the January fund raising of 8,5 M€ together with its historical investors, including ELAIA
🤜 Fighting Covid-19: is part of Fab’entech’s Public Health commitments which can bring all of its know-how demonstrated during the Ebola epidemic to develop a treatment in the coming months. Fab’entech is therefore logically working, in this spirit, with its partners to set up and finance a program to develop polyclonals against COVID-19 which could thus be available in 9 at 12 months.
📍 OpenIO
OpenIO offers high performance object storage for big data and AI. We backed them in October 2017. Laurent, Jean-François and the four other co-founders envision a data-centric world where OpenIO is recognized as the universal storage solution for unstructured data.
🤜 Fighting Covid-19: In order to ensure educational continuity during these times and to overcome the saturation of the tools available to teachers, OpenIO offers a Nextcloud space with 100 GB of storage per user for free. Teachers will be able to store and share their resources securely with their students, as well as collaborate remotely with your colleagues. They can also synchronize documents across all devices (computer, tablet, smartphone). And, last but not least, the data hosted in 🇫🇷 thanks to their partner OVH. Sign up here!
This initiative is part of the #Open_Solidarity initiative launched by OVHCloud — Kudos to them too! The objective is to unite all the goodwill to make available, free of charge and without obligation, technological solutions enabling remote cooperation during the health crisis that we are going through, caused by the COVID-19 epidemic.
📍 Pandacraft
Pandacraft develops creative and educational kits to help your children discovery the world. Every month, it offers children aged from 3 to 12 a unique experience with a manual activity & an educational magazine.
🤜 Fighting Covid-19: Pandacraft is not fighting exclusively the Covid-19 but it is working on making your life better by occupying your kids during these though times! Check out their blog where they regularly post tips of activities your children might enjoy!
📍 QantEv
QantEv provides network optimization for health insurers. Thanks to advanced health claims analytics, they are able to extract insight on scale never seen before.
🤜 Fighting Covid-19: QantEv is in the process of exploring how to adapt its solution to visualize hospital overload according to Covid-19 cases as well as “classical” disease. They are gathering the data which could be used for various use cases: anticipating the hospital overload, identifying medical deserts, patients movements, granularities in certain countries etc.
If you represent a hospital/health organisation/insurer that can partner & share with us data about medical service usage pre-Covid19 or currently don’t hesitate to reach out to tarik@qantev.com & hadrien@qantev.comThere are various other initiatives out there that should be highlighted too!
We are super proud of all the entrepreneurs out there and their initiatives to help us go through this crisis! Kudos to all of you!
