Vote for entrepreneurs!
Dear reader,
Yesterday was a BIG day for The Family.
We hosted our very 1st Online Demo Day: 27 startups, pitching in front of hundreds of hand-picked investors from all over the world.
In his introduction to the event, my associate Balthazar said: “They’re not Hollywood actors. They’ve kept their own words, strong accents and style. We didn’t want standardized pitches. We encouraged them to fully be themselves.”
True. Our batch is made of entrepreneurs who are impressively authentic. But that originality didn’t prevent them from being convincing - quite the contrary.
Listening to their pitches, I felt inspired. They made me BELIEVE in their projects. They are tackling issues that impact our societies at scale. I was thinking,”If they were candidates running local campaigns, I’d vote for them!” They illustrate perfectly that idea: Entrepreneurship is the new politics.
Let me give you three examples:
Rize - Go greener, farmers!
Rize provides high quality carbon credits.
Etienne, William and Samuel want to accelerate the agricultural transition. To start, they’re focusing on the crux of the matter: money, and how it can incentivize farmers to go greener while making a decent living.
Rize is developing financing services for sustainable agriculture. Using AI, satellite imagery, and soil modelling, they’re scaling the supply of high quality carbon credits: local, impactful, traceable, and verified.
Hyvilo - The Mayor of your city, doing what made you vote for them.
Hyvilo allows any town to become a Smart City. The founding team gathers former members of the French Special Operation Forces, experts in cyber-security and geospatial intelligence. The CEO, Damien, is a former local councilor and Parliamentary Attaché. He knows what it takes to manage a city.
Since 2017, they’ve been managing the most complex Smart City environment in Europe, Paris’s la Défense Hypervisor.
It’s impossible to run a city without good central software. Hyvilo creates workflows for cities. It’s there for the necessary and the exceptional emergencies, like automatically opening a barrier when a fire truck passes by or notifying that it’s time to change the street lights on a road.
If the mayor of a town wants to focus on creating social benefits, then they need Hyvilo.
Cauri - Africans empowering Africans.
Cauri is the digital bank for the African diaspora.
“The financial services created by Westerners for non-Westerners has reached its limit. To serve people, you have to walk in their shoes,” said the CEO, Lamine, in his pitch.
Growing up in Senegal, Lamine and his 4 brothers left their homeland to study abroad, in France, Canada and the US. There, they struggled to send money to their family back home.
“Revolut has been a great fit for French folks in New York, but just left out Nigerians in London,” explained Lamine.
Lamine & his cofounder Ibrahima bonded through their hopes for Africa’s future development. Cauri makes it easy for expats from emerging countries to spend, send, save and invest their finances across regions.
80% of their transactions are executed in less than 30 seconds, and they have strong organic growth - on average every Cauri customer recommends it to 3 more people in their circle. And the conversion rate reaches nearly 80% with their prospects.
It’s easy to understand: their first customers being Senegalese expats in Europe, the customer service speaks in Wolof - Senegal’s most spoken language.
As soon as people feel truly heard, trust is instantaneous.
A few years ago, my cofounder Nicolas developed this idea about how Entrepreneurship Is the New Politics. You should read the article, seriously.
The point is this: earlier generations went into politics to make a difference; if you want to solve problems in today’s world, you become an entrepreneur.
LOVE,
Alice 💖