💫 Happy New Year to all our subscribers!
We are excited to ring in 2023, and with it, the 100th edition (!!!) of our newsletter. We don’t normally include portfolio news or updates in our bi-monthly newsletter, but we thought we’d combine our first ever yearly news round-up with our 100th edition, and share some milestones from 2022 with you.
We remember when we had under 200 initial followers back in 2020 - we now have a community of over 4,000 engaged subscribers! None of this would be possible without you, so thank you for sharing, clicking, and sending us such kind words about the content we put out. We promise to keep delivering great insights into your inbox every two weeks in 2023, and are excited for the year ahead!
If you missed our previous newsletters, you can catch up here. Now, let’s dive in!
2022 was a big year for us at Heartcore. We hit a monumental record in our 15-year history of distributions to our investors, despite incredibly difficult times in the market. This would never have been possible without the unwavering hard work of our founders and the resilience of our portfolio companies - we are both humbled and grateful.
It’s important to recognise that despite the highs, there were also many lows. We saw significant layoffs across the portfolio, a couple of forced shut-downs, and some of our founders failed our customers. It was a tough year for many of us in the ecosystem, and yet, we have a lot to be thankful for.
Some highlights (and good news…)
🤩 EXITS:
Tink 🏦 was acquired by Visa for $2.2 Billion - our biggest exit of 2022!
Weezy 🛵 was acquired by Getir in late 2021
Our portfolio companies raised a total of €620 Million in 2022 - one of our most impressive fundraising years, despite the challenging ongoing macro situation.
💸 FUNDRAISING:
TravelPerk 🛩️ raised a $115M Series D round
Finn 🚗 raised a $110 Million Series B round
Zolar ☀️ raised a €100 Million Series C round
Podimo 🎶 raised €58.6 Million in funding
Gourmey 🥩 raised a $48 Million Series A round
HeyJobs 👩💻 raised a $47 Million Series B round
Orbex 🚀 raised a $46 Million Series C round
Majority 🏧 raised a $37.5 Million Series B round
Ukio 🛌 raised a $28 Million Series A round
Zefir 🏠 raised a €20 Million Series A round
Fora 🌎 raised a $13.5 Million Series A round
We welcomed some amazing new companies to our portfolio…
Neoplants 🪴 raised $20 Million in funding from us, alongside with True Ventures, Collaborative Fund and Entrepreneur First.
Qlub 🍽 closed a $17 Million Seed Round led by Cherry Ventures & Point Nine Capital, with participation from us.
Kive 🎨 raised a $7 Million Seed Round led by us.
Luca ✏️ closed a $3 Million Pre-Seed funding round led by Shilling and us.
We saw them reach other sorts of milestones too…
Neoplants 🪴 launched the “P1” - its first generation of bioengineered plants.
Natural Cycles 💍 partnered with ŌURA - the company behind the smart ring that delivers personalized health data, insights, and daily guidance - marking a huge advancement in reproductive health.
Finn 🚗 reached €100 Million in ARR.
Taster 🍝 launched a new partnership with Jamie Oliver Restaurants in the UK and France.
Orbex 🚀 recently revealed its “Prime” rocket, making this the first full orbital micro-launcher to be unveiled in Europe.
Gourmey 🥩 unveiled their premium cell-based foie gras, and Bloomberg decided to try it for taste.
La Fourche 🥑 reached 70k members for organic grocery delivery in France and Belgium, and acquired Aurore Market.
Formel Skin 🧴 was named “one of the hottest startups in Berlin”
We also welcomed some fantastic people to our team 👏
Camilla Monteiro de Barros joined us in January 2022 as our Head of Marketing - prior to joining us she was completing her MBA at INSEAD, and before that she spent three years at Farfetch.
Torben Harder Søndergaard also joined us in January 2022 as our Finance Manager, based in Copenhagen. Prior to joining Heartcore, he was at Bjarke Ingels Group.
Kenza Zayani joined us in January 2022 as an Analyst, based in our Paris office. She was previously at Alven.
Mikkel Louekari Randsborg joined us as Senior Legal Counsel & Head of Transactions in June 2022. Before joining Heartcore, he served as an attorney-at-law at GN Group and Mazanti-Andersen.
Angelo Panumaht Goepel joined the Heartcore team full-time as an investor for web3 and crypto this December after interning with us for six months. Prior to joining Heartcore, he served as a visiting analyst at HV Capital.
And we celebrated some internal promotions!
Yohan Pereira, based in our Paris office and Paulina Koschitz, based in Berlin were both promoted to Principal 🎉.
We hosted some wonderful events with our founders and our team…
⛵️ In June, we hosted a boat party for our Berlin-based founders and our wider investment team.
❄️ We welcomed startup founders who attended Slush at a dinner we hosted with Left Lane Capital in Helsinki.
🇵🇹 The whole Heartcore team travelled to sunny Lisbon in August for our offsite summer strategy session, and we also got together a couple of weeks ago for our Christmas party outside of Copenhagen 🇩🇰.
Lastly, some other fund news…
⚡️ We published our 3rd annual Consumer Technology Trends Report - 150+ pages of content that zooms in on key industry trends in Web3, Gaming, Travel, Food, Health and other categories.
🏆 We won the “Venture Capital Fund of the Year” award at the annual summit of Aktive Ejere - Active Owners Denmark. It was an incredible honour to be recognised as such in our industry, especially among so many strong players.
We wish everyone a happy and healthy start to 2023 - we are excited to see what this New Year brings!
— The Heartcore Team 💛
