🍌 Bananas For Series C

In 2017 the basketball player Kevin Durant joined the first round of a company selling a chatbot for teenagers, €1m alongside Betaworks and SV Angel. You sent it a sad selfie and it told you it understood. On 3 September, Nvidia announced it was buying Hugging Face for €11.1bn.

Since then the story has been that European funds missed it because they employ no researchers and never understood the technology. Thomas Wolf had been publishing his code in the open since 2017. In November 2018 he ported BERT, the model Google had just released, and put it out. Developers took it, the chatbot was dropped. Lux led the Series A a year later at €13.5m, by which point the case for the company sat in a public repository with a visible following. Reading it took curiosity, not a doctorate.

Addition led the B, Lux came back for the C at €95m. A fund could have come in at any round, and the more obvious the outcome became, the more it cost. A euro put in at Series A comes back more than a hundred times, at C six times, at D under three. Pro rata, the right to top up in order to hold your percentage, buys nothing new. It keeps you on a register you could no longer afford to join.

Hummingbird 🇧🇪 and byFounders 🇩🇰 backed Lovable 🇸🇪 in October 2024, €6.8m, before there was a product, on a weekend project that 52,000 developers were already watching. Creandum 🇸🇪 came in four months later at €14m, byFounders topped up three times. The Americans took the big rounds, Accel then Menlo, but at the Series C on 12 August, €344m at €11.4bn, EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund 🇪🇺 co-led. European money was still on the register while the value was being made.

Hugging Face was at Station F 🇫🇷, the Paris campus, on its opening day in June 2017, ran three programmes there and still keeps a subsidiary of several dozen staff in the city. Paris housed it and never held a share. British readers know the shape of this: DeepMind 🇬🇧 was built in London and is owned in Mountain View. Nobody was robbed, you only had to buy. The map of where things are invented and the map of where they pay are two different documents, and only one of them gets published.

Wolf went on to angel Lovable, Delangue has written 39 cheques since. An exit turns founders into angels, but a personal cheque covers a seed, not the €14m that follows or the €95m after that, and that takes a fund. Hummingbird announced €690m in March, €520m of it for growth, and has yet to defend a single position with it. A fund that size has to be right about companies the market already agrees on, which is a thinner trade than being early, and nobody has shown yet that European LPs will pay for it twice. The next Hugging Face already exists as a product nobody takes seriously. In 2035 the only map that counts will be the share register.