🤔 Do cover letters matter? Plus jobs and news.

Issue #37 (30 Jan) – Munich lands a lot of VC monies, would you freeze yourself?, BS around Pepsi logo & children mortality.

Jan 30, 2023

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A Munich-heavy week. Schön!

🇩🇪 Berlin & Germany

Kittl, a Berlin-based Canva alternative, raised €10.8M. Careers.
tado°, a Munich-based smart thermostats maker, raised €43M. Careers.
Hawk Ai, a Munich-based AML company, raised €16.5M Series B. Careers.
Beatvest, a Munich-based investment educator, raised €1.3M seed. Careers.
42watt, a Munich-based CleanTech startup, raised several €M. Careers only on LinkedIn.
Here is an interesting profile of a Berlin-based cryopreservation company, Tomorrow Biostasis. They want to freeze you and then revive you when your terminal illness can be treated. I have so many questions; for example, how to deal with business continuity when the founders are gone? Their careers page here.
Vonovia, a beloved (😅) real estate developer with 1.5M units around Germany, is leading the €100M Series B in an Austrian homes developer Gropyus. Careers.
Related, according to the LinkedIn post of the founder of Hypofriend, Nick Mulder (not sure if related to the special agent Mulder), there is no relief in sight for Berlin’s real estate market.
🎬 Put this on your calendar! Berlinale tickets go on sale on the 13th of February at 10:00. I plan to buy two.
We will get the 9-Euro ticket back! But it will cost 49-Euro. (🇩🇪) Better 49 than nothing, no? Hold on, this doesn’t work! Better 49 than 249.
In short: EMnify wins 2023 Prize for the Best Cellular IoT Initiative; after Trade Republic (2%) now also Scalable Capital is offering deposit interest, 2.3%; Airbus wants to hire 13k; CATL (Chinese battery producer) wants to hire more than 2k in Thüringen; digital broker CLARK acquired British Anorak, Getsafe now also sells insurance in France.
Recent GPT chatbot hype produced good content:
luttig's learnings
has Is AI the new crypto?,
Gary Marcus
has AGI will not happen in your lifetime. Or will it? and Meta’s chief AI scientist says GPT is nothing special. Well, I can say ChatGPT helped me immensely to be able to deliver better content to you.
Yes, PepsiCo paid $1M for this new logo. An excellent story of marketing/logo development BS by
Conor MacNeil
.
layoffs.fyi & other sources: SAP (3k), Zenloop is insolvent (80 affected), Tier (80, 7%), Spin (20), Spotify.
Handelsblatt (🇩🇪, €) is speculating if German startups will, similar to FAANG, also need to let people go, but then only mentions that Celonis, Personio, Deepl, Staffbase, Scalable Capital and Enpal are hiring. You knew that if you read handpicked.
r/berlin choice of the week: why do people hate Wedding so much, and what do redditors do for a living
Founderland published a report on “An Intersectional Exploration of
The Experiences of Women of Colour Founders,” which is a pretty sad read and just proves that women always need to do at least as twice as much as men. The information-packed report also includes a lot of data on immigrant-founded companies. Worth a read and a save.

🇪🇺 Rest of Europe & UK (Top 5)

PASQAL, a Paris-based quantum computing startup, raised €100M. Careers.
Welcome to the Jungle, a Paris-based HR tech company, raised €50M Series C. Careers.
Supernormal, a remote-first generative (video to meeting minutes) AI company based on OpenAI, raised €10M. Careers.

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🤓 Timeless and useful

A couple of years ago, I started to write annual letters to myself. Highly recommended it because it is extremely interesting to read about your dreams and worries from a year ago. I use futureme.org, but you could also snooze a mail for a year in Gmail.

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This is a footer 👶🏼 fact for you. If you ever romanticised the pre-industrial era (probably you didn’t, but ok), check out this difference in the children mortality rates between 1800, 1950 and 2015. We made massive progress, if we hadn’t, 50% of us would likely not be here.