Last Early Bird Tickets Available for the 2024 Marketplace Conference in Berlin, September 2024!
Hot off the press, this is the 55th edition of The Marketplace Snippet curated by Marc and Mathias on behalf of the Speedinvest Marketplaces & Consumer team đ„
In this edition:
- The 2024 Marketplace Conference: grab your final early bird tickets now!
- Deep dive on the successful raises from marketplace companies in jewelry and wind farms!
- Read more about our portfolio wins, including our pre-seed investment in Haz and Series A news on HarborLab!
If youâve missed past newsletters or simply canât get enough, catch up on recent editions here.
The Marketplace Conference: Tuesday Septâ 24 2024
We are thrilled to announce that our early bird tickets continue to sell apace our Tuesday September 24th, 2024 annual marketplace conference.
Hosted in downtown Berlin each fall, The Marketplace Conference is now the largest, dedicated European and US marketplace conference, drawing over 500 attendees, with a focus on the most selected and salient content from the past twelve months.
The 2024 Marketplace Conference Showcase
If youâve been following along for the last few editions, you will know that this yearâs conference theme is âUnraveling the Hype: Unveiling AIâs Evolution in the Marketplace.â
With an impressive lineup of speakers, the conference will host various sessions, including our keynote address, panel discussions, masterclasses, workshops and fireside chats.
In particular, the keynote speech, titled âThe Rise of AI-powered Marketplaces: Separating Fact from Fictionâ sets the stage for an engaging and insightful event. Among the confirmed speakers are Christian Miele (Headline), Nikolaus Volk (Founder and CEO of Kyte), and Stefan Batory (Founder and CEO of Booksy). Investors and operators from different backgrounds bring their knowledge and experience to the table, creating a vibrant atmosphere for learning and networking.
Application process
Due to exceptional demand last year for tickets, for our early bird tickets, we have opened an application process, which will be reviewed and approved within a few days.
To continue to apply for an early bird ticket, please go here! Note that early bird tickets stop in July before price hikes, so this is your penultimate month to grab a ticket!
Any questions, please reach out to Nora Herzog.
Notes & News From Marketplace Companies & Operators
- Andrew Rea, US-based founder and angel investor, shared a candid reflection on his experience raising a pre-seed round for his unnamed B2B tax and compliance platform, founded in April 2023.
- Read a step-by-step guide to how Andrew Rea (building a B2B tax and compliance platform) successfully fundraised over the last 12 months.
- Airbnb announced its best ever Q1 results, with 133 million nights and experiences booked in the first three months of 2024, along with double-digit supply growth across all regions.
- Skim the significant results of Airbnbâs Q1, in which revenue of $2.1bn increased 18% YoY and adjusted EBITDA increased 20% YoY to $424m. This is reflective of the company making significant progress in its strategic initiatives, including expanding hosting and perfecting core services.
- Casey Winters, the former Head of growth and product teams at Grubhub, Pinterest, and Eventbrite, recaps how he advised some of the biggest marketplace startups like Airbnb, Faire and Whatnot to effectively build and scale products.
- Listen to this excellent recap of how building and scaling marketplace startups requires striking a delciate balance between supply and demand.
Notes & News From Marketplace Venture firms & Investors
- Why has Uber, the worldâs leading ridesharing marketplace, allegedly withheld tips from drivers?
- Bill Ackman raises concerns about Uber's practices, claiming that drivers aren't receiving the tips promised to them through the app. Read more about this pressing issue.
- Read the latest book on venture, already highly reviewed, âThe Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth.â
- We are excited to pick up the latest âhotâ venture book, in which Stanford Professor, Ilya Strebulaev, puts his two decades of studying VC approaches to a thoughtful, scientific read.
- How are VCs using podcasts to lure founders? Venture capitalists are increasingly utilizing podcasts as a means to connect with founders.
- Discover how this shift in traditional courtship rituals is impacting the industry in this in-depth Vanity Fair article.
- Two of our favorite consumer and marketplace investors, Oliva Moore and Bryan Kim at a16z, outline their GenAI 100 list and what it takes for AI models (including those in marketplaces) to stand out and dominate the market.
- Listen to Olivia and Bryan discuss the impact of network effects in their GenAI 100 list. They go beyond the high level rankings and instead explore the pivotal benchmarks like D7 retention.
- Unpick this new set of benchmarks, published by software stalwart US investor Emergence.
- Emergence puts its three decades of enterprise investing (Salesforce, Zoom, Box) to work with a detailed report. Discover essential benchmarks to navigate the rapidly-changing landscape of AI innovation.
- Read about how our beliefs have been shaped towards AI-enabled marketplaces, written by our own Partner in the M&C team
- This month on the Speedinvest blog, Sameer Singh covers how an AI-enabled marketplace is built. He remarks that, although we are early in the AI game, AI in marketplaces is broadly utilized to eliminate friction in order to enable an entirely new transaction.
News From Our Portfolio
- We announce our $4m seed round in Exactly.ai, a generative AI platform
- We were thrilled to lead this $4.3m Seed Round of Exactly.ai. Our investment drew upon our belief that generative AI will help artists retain ownership of their art and give them the ability to reproduce their designs much faster and at scale.
- Exactly.ai represents a groundbreaking step forward for the creative sector and has already secured over 40,000 users!
- Congratulations to HarborLab on their impressive $16m Series A round led by Atomico!
- This Series A round comes just 1.5 years after our initial investment into the SaaS-enabled B2B marketplace that focuses on disbursement accounts (costs related to the shipsâ time in ports).
- This achievement showcases HarborLabâs strength and potential in the maritime software industry.
- We announce our pre-seed round in Haz, a London-based social commerce that creates live feeds of usersâ old and new purchases!
- We were incredibly excited to double down on our thesis on the global secondhand apparel market and its potential with proprietary AI with our âŹ1.2m investment of pre-seed funding in Haz.
- Haz already has thousands of users and the liquidity of supply on the app has increased by 1,163% in the last three months alone!
New Investments in Marketplaces Around the Globe
Explore the ever-changing marketplace landscape with our latest roundup of marketplace financing rounds in our dedicated deal overview, offering a snapshot of current trends.
Join Us!
We are always on the lookout for top-tier talent! Have a look at our open positions at Speedinvest and across our portfolio and check out our talent pool, ââan exclusive platform connecting top executives with over 300 dynamic companies in our portfolio - join now to gain access to a pool of 1000+ open positions across various industries.
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