It would be easy for me to make hay about this week’s announcement of the decline of Sigfox. My previous fund in France passed up on the opportunity to invest in Sigfox back in the day. My former partner astutely determined that Sigfox’s “boil the ocean” approach to building out a broad-scale IoT network infrastructure […]
[Note: The Japanese version of this piece can be found here: 初のユニコーンを手にした日本、次に必要なのはユニコープス? ] Japan witnessed its first successful unicorn take flight this week in the IPO of Mercari. Since its launch in 2013, Mercari has become Japan’s leading online flea market platform, allowing people to buy and sell secondhand items on a smartphone app with […]
France allegedly crowned its first unicorn last week when BlaBlaCar raised a new funding round led by Insight Venture Partners of $160 million at a post-money valuation of $1.2 billion. Actually, there is some debate on whether BlaBlaCar represents France’s very first unicorn (some argue that Vente-Privée should hold that title, but that’s beside the […]