Friends of FJ Labs,

We at FJ Labs continued to be active throughout the spring and early summer months and are excited about what’s to come this year in marketplaces, crypto, and tech writ large!

Fabrice was recently featured on Jack Farley’s Forward Guidance podcast where he shared his thoughts on subjects ranging from venture valuations in 2024, macro and the geopolitical climate, the current state of the AI VC market (and who will emerge as the biggest winners), as well as yield-bearing stablecoins. Watch here or find a transcript of this amazing conversation on Fabrice’s blog.

FJ Labs incubation company, Midas, announced the launch of mBASIS, a tokenized basis trading strategy. As a follow on to their first product, mTBILL, Fabrice and Dennis posited that they could create a safe and higher yielding product in a bull market by taking advantage of the basis trade: in other words, buying spot and shorting futures. (fabricegrinda.com)

Vinted, Europe’s largest second-hand marketplace, boasted its first profitable year in 2023 with over $600M in revenue (+60% YoY). The Baltic nation’s first unicorn, run by FJ Labs and OLX alum Thomas Plantenga, now counts 100 million users globally. (Forbes)

Formic, a provider of robots-as-a-service automation for U.S. manufacturers, raised another $27.4M Series A financing, bringing the total Series A round to more than $52M since 2022. The company also announced a joint commercial agreement with Mitsubishi who will source and finance the entire lifecycle of Formic’s RaaS model. (BusinessWire)

Zyod, an Indian B2B manufacturing company serving global fashion brands raised an $18M Series A to expand its presence to more than 40 countries worldwide. We at FJ are delighted to double-down in Zyod’s next phase of growth having initially invested at seed last year. (TechCrunch)

CuspAI, a search engine for materials in which users can input the properties they want materials to have and Cusp will generate the chemical composition needed to achieve it, emerged from stealth to raise a $30M seed round, one of Europe’s largest seed financings this year. (Sifted)

FirmPilot, a Miami-based AI marketing engine for law firms, raised $7M in Series A funding led by Blumberg Capital. (CityBiz)

Baxus, a Web3 marketplace for wine and spirits, raised a $5M seed round led by Multicoin Capital. (The Block)

NodaFi, a cloud-based facility operations platform, secured $3.5M in seed funding to transform the facility management software industry, led by Base10 Partners. (Venture Beat)

Digital Iron, a startup focused on the heavy machinery dealership industry, raised a £1.6M pre-seed round led by a consortium of early stage investors, including Seedcamp. (UK Tech News)

Jose spoke at this year’s South Summit 2024 in Madrid on a panel entitled “Unicorn Tales: Lessons For Founders”. He shared his thoughts on key learnings and common pitfalls encountered by founders around fundraising, finding product market fit, and scaling their businesses.

As one of the most active investors in the Canadian ecosystem (notable C$ investments include Figment, Clutch, Busbud, Neo Financial, and Onevest), Jeff Weinstein headed north to host an evening social for our Toronto founders and friends in partnership with Torys LLP and TD Bank.

The team hosted our first “Friends of FJ Labs” happy hour of 2024 at Fabrice’s home in NYC for a group of local investors, founders, and VCs (and a mentalist who blew all of our minds!). Stay tuned for more regional events and another NYC gathering which we will host later this year.

At this year’s OpenFinance event in Mexico City, Matias Barbero spoke on a panel about the current state of fintech in LatAm and judged a pitch competition alongside investors from QED, Kaszek, Conexo, and others.

At this year’s Founders Family Office Forum, Jose joined a roundtable on the opportunities and pitfalls of investing in AI. Founders Family Office Forum is a curated gathering of selected families and unicorn founders exploring the future of family office investing in tech.

At Beyond Summit 2024 by Allocate, Jeff Weinstein shared why the power of brand matters in VC and what this means for FJ Labs, namely domain expertise in all things marketplaces, velocity of execution, and curated introductions for future fundraising rounds.

Fabrice’s blog is now multilingual! Given its global readership, top posts are now available in the twenty-five most spoken languages. Fabrice is taking requests for new languages to be added, so please let us know if you would like to see yours represented.