Hi <<First Name>>,

This month we were very proud to see our own brother Louis, as well as Jonathan Levin (co-founder of Chainalysis), selected for the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in the beauty “finance” category. While this list is a great initiative, we think it’s unfair to discriminate against the more aged, ahem, I mean mature and experienced investors. So we decided to tackle this problem and create our own “Over 40” list. So far it’s a short list, consisting of the only two dinosaurs investors over 40 at Point Nine*, but if you fit the criteria don’t hesitate to let us know and we’ll consider adding you.

NEW INVESTMENTS

We’re super excited to unveil that Mason has joined the #p9family! Mason transforms the old way of building front-ends by providing you with features like user registration, news feeds, SSO, and much more. Mason lets you ship front-end features in minutes, not months, which is great news for Christoph and Pawel if you’re working on a project, as that gives them a realistic chance to live to see the project’s launch. 💀⚰️

Seeing the enthusiasm of the Product Hunt community, it looks like younger folks love Mason, too.

• It was a stellar month for the #p9family in terms of moving dough from the coffers of old people (VCs, LPs) into the hands of younger peeps. First, Chainalysis raised an impressive $30M Series B, led by the prestigious and almost 40-year-old firm Accel Partners.

• Second, the youngsters over at at Loom raised an awesome $11M Series A from Kleiner Perkins, a firm which was, hmm hmmm, founded over 47 years ago.

• And finally, we’re thrilled for Mambu, which raised $30M from Bessemer Venture Partners which is, I kid you not, more than one hundred years old. WE TOLD YOU, OLDER IS BETTER. #VCover40

• You know what else is well above 40? The number of Brainly users. They are actually more than 150M.

• Congratulations to Contactually, one of the oldest #p9family members, which is joining Compass! 🍾

• Great news for the crypto space as Bitbond just became the first-ever company in Germany to get approval for a security token offering (STO) by the BaFin (kind of like the German SEC). 🎉🍾 I don’t know exactly what this means, but I guess it’s like an ICO, just without the scam.

• Let’s not speak about the grey hairs of the Metalshub founders, but the team continues to deliver like crazy and earned great coverage in the Frankfurter Allgemeine and Gruenderszene.

• Revolut just launched its gorgeous new business app. And it’s great. Totally great.

• And Star of Service just launched its new new business model.

• As mentioned in the intro, we were super happy to see Louis listed in the European Finance Forbes Under 30 selection. Frenchies in Finance FTW. ;-)

• Christoph also made an appearance in Forbes. This time it was for real. Not a poorly photoshopped fake cover by yours truly. In his interview, Christoph explains why he still sees opportunities in old-ish business models like SaaS and marketplaces.

• It was prediction time in January, so the whole team took their 🔮 out to come up with our traditional team predictions for 2019 (don’t look for Christoph’s and Pawel’s predictions – at their age, you can’t expect them to look 12 months into the future).

• Our two fortune tellers Julia and Louis went further and shared in-depth predictions for crypto and machine learning.

• Our “content machine” Tilman shared his (strong) opinion against personal founder guarantees in a Medium post.

• Professor Dr Janz shared Point Nine’s Seed-to-A graduation rate.

• Robin explained how industrial startups can determine their funding strategy in a blog post as well as in the latest edition of Dynamo’s podcast.

• Busy month for #PapaClemenz who changed many diapers wrote about the rise of SaaS app stores in “A landscape of the major SaaS app stores” and covered the new Go-to-Market strategies that they enable.

• Clément also shared some lessons learned supporting portfolio companies in “Performance vs Brand Marketing” and in “A Simple Customer Discovery Plan”.

• Finally, he explained how he believes the AI wave could impact the B2B software industry in the next decade.

• After the poster, we have created the PlayPlay version of our “Five ways to build a $100M business” 🐝🐭🐰🐂🐘. What animal are you hunting?

• We’ve had a super busy month, we went to SaaStr Annual and even organized a CTO meetup in SF with some pretty awesome people - thanks everyone for joining us!

• Louis will fly to Israel to attend “Forbes Under 30 Global Women’s Summit” on March 31- April 4. Israeli ML founders and seed VCs: hit him up!

• Robin will be at Hannover Messe the 2nd and 3rd of April.

• The next stop on our #P9EUTour is Kiev, we’ll be in town on the 24th of April discussing how to raise money from international investors - ping us if you want to join!

See you next month! 

The Point Nine Crew

* The author of this newsletter found out, after writing it, that Pawel is going to turn forty later this year. However, he decided to give Pawel an early promotion for being a promising star member.