Q4 Update — News from SquareOne
Hi! 👋
2024 is already in full swing with two new AI investments: We’re excited to welcome SEMRON and Retorio to our portfolio!
DeepTech is becoming increasingly crowded, with numerous players in the space. To help founders and VCs connect, we’ve curated a list of DeepTech Investors in Europe. Take a look and share your feedback.
As this is a quarterly update, remember to follow us on LinkedIn to always catch the latest portfolio, industry, and team news.
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Cheers,
Team SquareOne
SquareOne News
Welcome to the squad, SEMRON! Based in Dresden, the team has secured EUR 7.3 million in seed funding for their 3D-scaled AI chips capable of powering billions of consumer electronic devices in the LLM era.
We’re joining the round led by Join Capital alongside OTB Ventures and Hermann Hauser (Onsight Ventures), with continued support from pre-seed investors, including Dr. Wolfram Drescher (BlueWonder), Andreas Werner & Sven Sieber (Gigahertz Ventures), and Hans Rohrer, former President at TSMC Europe.
💡 Don’t miss these: TechCrunch and VentureBeat have the whole story
“Computing resources will become the ‘oil’ of the 21st century. With infrastructure-hungry LLMs conquering the world and Moore’s law reaching the limits of physics, a massive bottleneck in computing resources will shape the years to come. SEMRON will be a key element in solving this problem. “ — Georg
We are excited to share the news of our investment in Retorio! We’re leading the EUR 9 million round, joined by Storm Ventures and Porsche Ventures!
Retorio is building an operating system for Learning & Development (L&D), enabling large enterprises to train their employees at scale by creating their own training workflows with video simulations. Large publicly listed companies in Germany as well as international enterprises already use Retorio’s platform. (Check out the case study with Nürnberger Versicherungen)
💡 Don’t miss these: EU-Startups covered this round. Also, Startup Insider sat down for a podcast interview with Retorio’s Co-Founder & Co-CEO Christoph (GER), discussing the product, future plans, and funding.
“Retorio’s AI technology unlocks new growth potential for companies that is hardly used today. Cost- and time-effective training, high scalability (companies create a workflow within minutes instead of train-the-trainer methods), direct L&D cost savings (no in-person trainers), and standard training quality across geographies.” — Charlotte
Portfolio News
Hot Off the Press
- The Leuna100 pilot plant is now officially open! A huge shoutout to Christian Vollmann and the entire C1 team. In 1923, the world’s first commercial methanol facility was built in Leuna. The Leuna100 project continues this success story by completely reinventing the methanol production process at the same location 100 years later. ZDF was at the opening (GER)
- Just a few weeks ago, German health minister Karl Lauterbach explained how Germany’s patient-data management system (ePA) is protected with Confidential Computing. We’re excited to share that Felix Schuster and his team at Edgeless Systems provide the Confidential Computing underpinnings for the ePA system.
What are the problems of sovereign cloud offerings and how can Confidential Computing help? Find out in Felix’s opinion piece for Tagesspiegel.
Success Stories
- By teaming up with Procuros, Flaconi reduced stockouts by a whopping 30%, making their processes more digital and seamless. Find the full case study here
- Today’s industrial spare parts supply chains are still largely fragmented, especially for SMEs. PartsCloud makes global spare parts supply chains more transparent, more agile, more efficient, and more profitable. Now, they partner with TIER, one of Europe’s leading providers of shared micro-mobility. Learn more about the collaboration
- Wellabe has been the employee health partner of Delivery Hero at their Berlin campus, providing over 1,000 personal consultations on health values and lifestyle. Check out the full story
- In an industry-first move, Glassfy is now providing its entire suite of app monetization tools completely free of charge. “Glassfy Foundation is our answer to the real challenges faced by app developers,” states Marco Pifferi, Founder of Glassfy. Also, Glassfy is now live on Product Hunt! Support the team or leave some feedback.
- Vue Storefront continues its rapid growth trajectory and announces two new key hires: After the initial period of working as a GTM consultant, Katie Cameron has agreed to a longer-term engagement, now as the new COO. Cesare Rinaldi joined in early January as the new VP for Global Marketing, setting the company on an exciting path in composable commerce and data orchestration. Onwards and upwards!
On top of the leadership updates, Vue Storefront is picking up the pace, offering loyal SAP customers to stay on the platform and modernize it with composable solutions at the same time. Read the full success story - With +12 years of B2B experience in Additive Manufacturing, Stephan Kuehr is joining xolo as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), leading the company into a new growth phase. Welcome on board!
This past year has marked a historic milestone for xolo, as the company achieved its first significant commercial success with THE XUBE, the first ever commercially available volumetric 3D printer. The team eagerly looks forward to 2024 as a pivotal year for expanding its presence in the academic and research markets. Additionally, xolo is poised to make its first steps into the industrial sector, developing its first large-scale AM applications. - Two experienced industry leaders have joined the Hygraph C-level: Dr. Mario Lenz as Chief Product Officer (CPO) and Edan Gottlib as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Read more
Squad Stories
DeepTech Investors Europe List
To allow DeepTech founders (and DeepTech co-investors alike) to keep an overview of the space, connect and engage, Georg and Pablo compiled an overview of the most influential DeepTech investors in Europe (Pre-Seed, Seed and Series A) and their focus areas, including
➡️ DeepTech Investors Europe List
The intention for this is to be a collaborative community project that evolves and grows over time. Please contact deeptech@squareone.vc if you have any additions or edits to the entries!
From SquareOne to Number One
Tobias joined SquareOne as a Visiting Analyst in August last year and is now back in London as a part of Eurazeo’s venture team. It was great having you onboard, Tobi!
BTW: We’re still looking for an Intern to join us in Berlin (starting April 2024) — sharing is caring.
Food for thought
While Slush is long gone, Pablo shared some highlights afterwards that are here to stay.
- Europe has fantastic talent in hidden places: Sequoia’s Luciana Lixandru talked about how innovation is concentrated in a few areas in the US. The beauty of Europe is that you can find great teams in unusual places. We couldn’t agree more: we back incredible founders in cities like Dresden (Wandelbots & SEMRON), Gießen (Hygraph), Bochum (Edgeless Systems), and many more.
- Too much AI governance hinders innovation: As highlighted in the discussion with Arthur Mensch (Mistral AI), AI governance is important, but rather than seeing AI as an existential threat, we should embrace it and see it as part of the solution for other existential threats (e.g., climate crisis).
- Open source is the New Normal: Two years ago, Federico highlighted this idea in a blog post, and it seems to align with the thesis of Peter Fenton from Benchmark, who’s a big believer in open source in AI. With open source (community), you can achieve much more than just with capital.
SquareOne 2023 Recap
2023, it’s a wrap. Looking back, even though it was a challenging year, there are still many highlights that we would like to share with you.
More than ever, we are dedicated to innovation. We facilitate, we connect, and we have our feet on the ground. Working in VC and collaborating with such exceptional talent is a privilege. We’re grateful that in 2024, we will be able to continue doing what we love most: supporting B2B tech founders who are obsessed with solving complex problems in huge markets.
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