💫 We're wrapping up the year and kicking off 2024! In this edition, we are excited to share some key milestones from 2023 with you.
But firstly, we’re excited to announce that our community has grown to over 6,600 engaged subscribers! None of this would have been achievable without your support. We sincerely appreciate you for sharing, clicking, and expressing kind words about the content we produce. Rest assured, we will continue delivering valuable insights to your inbox every month throughout 2024. We are eager and optimistic about the exciting year that lies ahead.
If you missed our previous newsletters, you can catch up here. Now, let’s dive in!
As we celebrate many of our successes and wins this year, it’s important to remember how we were even able to achieve them - with the unwavering hard work of our founders and the resilience demonstrated by our portfolio companies. We are humbled and grateful for their commitment and vision, and we can’t wait to see what they and their teams do in 2024. “Investing in Happiness” is still very much at the core of everything we do, and will continue to guide how we operate as a fund for many years to come.
Despite 2023 being a challenging year for many within the ecosystem, there is still much for which we are grateful, including all of the below:
We saw some fantastic fundraising across the portfolio…
We achieved a €15M first close of our inaugural web3 fund 👾. This is an exciting new opportunity to dedicated to protocols and their native tokens. Sifted wrote up the news & our partner Yacine spoke about it on their podcast.
GetYourGuide 🗽raised a $194M Series F round in their journey to become the global leader in the $300 billion travel experiences market.
Corti 🏥 raised a €60M series B round and launched its new "AI Co-pilot" - an assistant designed to support healthcare clinicians with patient assessments in real time.
Finematter 💍 raised a €2.6M seed round to become the leading online platform for jewelry.
Majority 🏦 raised $9.75M in top-up funding to continue their US expansion in supporting migrants with their banking needs.
Podimo 🎤 has raised €44M to improve production tools, broaden its distribution network, both on its platform and externally, and delve further into localization efforts.
Nūmi 🍼 raised a €3M seed round to rec reate the magic of mammary glands in vitro to create next-gen nutrition with cultivated breast milk. We invested alongside HCVC, Kima Ventures and Kost Capital.
Likeminded 🫂 raised a €7.2 Seed Extension to expand its B2B digital mental health solutions enhancing access to professional mental health support.
Quesma 👨💻 raised a €2.3M pre-seed round to build a solution for companies to switch and orchestrate their databases, co-led by us and Inovo.vc.
…among several others who we haven’t yet announced as they focus on building! Stay tuned for these announcements in 2024.
We saw them reach other sorts of milestones too…
Neoplants 🪴 launched the “P1” - reached a waitlist of 42k+ people for the first generation of bioengineered plants, the “P1”. They were also a winner of Fast Company’s “Next Big Thing in Tech” and Wired’s “Hottest Startups in Paris”.
Natural Cycles ⏰ partnered with Apple Watch - this was one of most requested features ever! If you own an Apple Watch with temperature-sensing capabilities, you can now enjoy overnight measuring. Natural Cycles is FDA Cleared for Apple Watch in the U.S. and available in Europe and Australia too.
Taster 🍝 launched their first brick & mortar franchise stores this year, which are optimized to function as high-footfall fast-food restaurants, utilizing their proprietary ordering and payment systems alongside awesome branding.
Gourmey 🥩 was also named one of the “Hottest Startups in Paris” by Wired.
Fora 🌎 was featured in a CN Traveler article about how a growing number of people are turning their love of travel into a career. They were also named by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies of 2023!
Likeminded 🫂 was named as one of EU-Startup’s top 10 early-stage startups pioneering mental health advancements in Europe.
Neo4j 📈 launched a new stack for building GenAI-powered applications, alongside Docker, Inc, LangChain and Ollama. They were featured in Newsweek's "Global Top 100 Most Loved Workplace".
Orbex 🚀 had a story written about them on how the space industry is starting a green revolution. They also secured a €3.3M grant the UK Space Agency as part of the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) “Boost!” initiative.
Majority 🏦 launched their 4th physical meet-up space in the US which aids over 1,000 daily arriving migrants, offering connections, resources, and financial advisors.
We also welcomed some fantastic people to our team…
Björn Nilsen returned to Heartcore in March 2023 as Principal in our new Stockholm office!
Magnus Melau joined us in August 2023 as Financial Controller in the Copenhagen office. Prior to joining he spent some time at ByFounders and before that as a consultant Deloitte & KPMG.
Thor Hartvigsen Højer also came on board in August 2023 as an analyst on our Web3 team. He has been in crypto since 2020 and has built an online brand educating people on various aspects of decentralized finance which has grown to 110.000+ followers across Twitter and Youtube.
Tobias Meisner joined us also in Copenhagen in October 2023 as a Principal focusing on our growth investments - before joining Heartcore he worked at Permira, ADIA and Lazard.
We hosted some wonderful events with our founders and our team…
We hosted a big party during TechBBQ 🍗 where we welcomed investors & founders from all over the globe to a rooftop drinks in our hometown of Copenhagen.
We welcomed startup founders in the Investor Lounge at Slush ❄️ & hosted a dinner with Left Lane Capital in Helsinki.
Earlier in the year, we hosted a Web3 event 👾 in Berlin at Full Node.
The whole Heartcore team travelled to sunny Ericeira 🇵🇹 in August for our offsite summer strategy session, and Versailles in the spring for another team gathering. We also got together last week for our Christmas party in Denmark 🇩🇰.
We also took the stage / the mic and put out some thought pieces….
Christian was a keynote speaker at TechBBQ 📣 Angelo spoke at the Blockchain Festival of Europe, Jimmy spoke at IPEM in Paris and the Nordic LP Day in Copenhagen & Yacine spoke at w3.hub.
Jimmy was a guest on the Riding Unicorns Podcast 🎤 where he delved into the significance of embracing risk, fundraising from LPs during turbulent times, and how Heartcore sets itself apart from other VCs.
We published our first ever “AI & Productivity Report” ⚡️ - 40+ pages of content that zooms in on our investment thesis and why we are convinced that advancements in machine learning provide novel avenues for enhancing human capabilities in almost every profession, if not all.
Felix Becker wrote a piece on “Building the AI Orchestration Layer" 💪🏻 where he helps us understand the rise of professional LLM tooling and better navigate the Post-AI Gold Rush.
We wish everyone very happy holidays and a healthy start to 2024 - we are excited to see what this New Year brings!
— The Heartcore Team 💛
